But even as we listened, fascinated by his fluent verbiage there grew within us a certain resentment.  Familiarity with his glittering wares bred a contempt of them, so that he fell to speaking of them as necessities instead of luxuries.  He juggled figures, and thought nothing of four of them in a row.  We looked at our five-thousand-dollar salary, so strangely shrunken and thin now, and even as we looked we saw that the method of the unctuous, anxious stranger had become antiquated in its turn.

Then from his ashes emerged a new being.  Neither urger nor spellbinder he.  The twentieth century was stamped across his brow, and on his lips was ever the word “Service.”  Silent, courteous, watchful, alert, he listened, while you talked.  His method, in turn, made that of the silk-lined salesman sound like the hoarse hoots of the ballyhoo man at a county fair.  Blithely he accepted five hundred thousand dollars and gave in return—­a promise.  And when we would search our soul for a synonym to express all that was low-voiced, and suave, and judicious, and patient, and sure, we began to say, “As alert as an advertising expert.”

Jock McChesney, looking as fresh and clear-eyed as only twenty-one and a cold shower can make one look, stood in the doorway of his mother’s bedroom.  His toilette had halted abruptly at the bathrobe stage.  One of those bulky garments swathed his slim figure, while over his left arm hung a gray tweed Norfolk coat.  From his right hand dangled a pair of trousers, in pattern a modish black-and-white.

Jock regarded the gray garment on his arm with moody eyes.

“Well, I’d like to know what’s the matter with it!” he demanded, a trifle irritably.

Emma McChesney, in the act of surveying her back hair in the mirror, paused, hand glass poised half way, to regard her son.

“All right,” she answered cheerfully.  “I’ll tell you.  It’s too young.”

“Young!” He held it at arm’s length and stared at it.  “What d’you mean—­young?”

Emma McChesney came forward, wrapping the folds of her kimono about her.  She took the disputed garment in one hand and held it aloft.  “I know that you look like a man on a magazine cover in it.  But Norfolk suits spell tennis, and seashore, and elegant leisure.  And you’re going out this morning, Son, to interview business men.  You’re going to try to impress the advertising world with the fact that it needs your expert services.  You walk into a business office in a Norfolk suit, and everybody from the office boy to the president of the company will ask you what your score is.”

She tossed it back over his arm.

“I’ll wear the black and white,” said Jock resignedly, and turned toward his own room.  At his doorway he paused and raised his voice slightly:  “For that matter, they’re looking for young men.  Everybody’s young.  Why, the biggest men in the advertising game are just kids.”  He disappeared within his room, still talking.  “Look at McQuirk, advertising manager of the Combs Car Company.  He’s so young he has to disguise himself in bone-trimmed eye-glasses with a black ribbon to get away with it.  Look at Hopper, of the Berg, Shriner Company.  Pulls down ninety thousand a year, and if he’s thirty-five I’ll—­”