“But won’t it tire you too much, Mother?” Jock had asked with maddeningly tender solicitude.

His mother’s color heightened.  Her blue eyes glowed dark.

“Look here, Jock!  Will you kindly stop this lean-on-me-grandma stuff!  To hear you talk one would think I was ready for a wheel chair and gray woolen bedroom slippers.”

“Why, I didn’t mean—­I only thought that perhaps overexertion in a woman of your—­That is, you need your energy for—­”

“Don’t wallow around in it,” snapped Emma McChesney.  “You’ll only sink in deeper in your efforts to crawl out.  I merely want to warn you that if you persist in this pose of tender solicitude for your doddering old mother, I’ll—­I’ll present you with a stepfather a year younger than you.  Don’t laugh.  Perhaps you think I couldn’t do it.”

“Good Lord, Mother!  Of course you don’t mean it, but—­”

“Mean it!  Cleverer women than I have been driven by their children to marrying bell-boys in self-defense.  I warn you!”

  [Illustration:  “’Good Lord, Mother!  Of course you don’t
  mean it, but—­’”]

That stopped it—­for a while.  Jock ceased to bestow upon his mother judicious advice from the vast storehouse of his own experience.  He refrained from breaking out with elaborate advertising schemes whereby the T.A.  Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company might grind every other skirt concern to dust.  He gave only a startled look when his mother mischievously suggested raspberry as the color for her new autumn suit.  Then, quite suddenly, Circumstance caught Emma McChesney in the meshes and, before she had fought her way free, wrought trouble and change upon her.

Jock McChesney was seated in the window of his mother’s office at noon of a brilliant autumn day.  A little impatient frown was forming between his eyes.  He wanted his luncheon.  He had called around expressly to take his mother out to luncheon—­always a festive occasion when taken together.  But Mrs. McChesney, seated at her desk, was bent absorbedly over a sheet of paper whereon she was adding up two columns of figures at a time—­a trick on which she rather prided herself.  She was counting aloud, her mind leaping agilely, thus: 

“Eleven, twenty-nine, forty-three, sixty, sixty-nine—­” Her pencil came down on the desk with a thwack.  “Sixty-nine!” she repeated in capital letters.  She turned around to face Jock.  “Sixty-nine!” Her voice bristled with indignation.  “Now what do you think of that!”

“I think you’d better make it an even seventy, whatever it is you’re counting up, and come on out to luncheon.  I’ve an appointment at two-fifteen, you know.”

“Luncheon!”—­she waved the paper in the air—­“with this outrage on my mind!  Nectar would curdle in my system.”

Jock rose and strolled lazily over to the desk.  “What is it?” He glanced idly at the sheet of paper.  “Sixty-nine what?”

Mrs. McChesney pressed a buzzer at the side of her desk.  “Sixty-nine dollars, that’s what!  Representing two days’ expenses in the six weeks’ missionary trip that Fat Ed Meyers just made for us.  And in Iowa, too.”