“Well, you asked my advice,” interrupted his mother’s voice with that muffled effect which is caused by a skirt being slipped over the head, “and I gave it.  Wear a white duck sailor suit with blue anchors and carry a red tin pail and a shovel, if you want to look young.  Only get into it in a jiffy, Son, because breakfast will be ready in ten minutes.  I can tell by the way Annie’s crashing the cups.  So step lively if you want to pay your lovely mother’s subway fare.”

Ten minutes later the slim young figure, in its English-fitting black and white, sat opposite Emma McChesney at the breakfast table and between excited gulps of coffee outlined a meteoric career in his chosen field.  And the more he talked and the rosier his figures of speech became, the more silent and thoughtful fell his mother.  She wondered if five o’clock would find a droop to the set of those young shoulders; if the springy young legs in their absurdly scant modish trousers would have lost some of their elasticity; if the buoyant step in the flat-heeled shoes would not drag a little.  Thirteen years of business experience had taught her to swallow smilingly the bitter pill of rebuff.  But this boy was to experience his first dose to-day.  She felt again that sensation of almost physical nausea—­that sickness of heart and spirit which had come over her when she had met her first sneer and intolerant shrug.  It had been her maiden trip on the road for the T.A.  Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company.  She was secretary of that company now, and moving spirit in its policy.  But the wound of that first insult still ached.  A word from her would have placed the boy and saved him from curt refusals.  She withheld that word.  He must fight his fight alone.

“I want to write the kind of ad,” Jock was saying excitedly, “that you see ’em staring at in the subways, and street cars and L-trains.  I want to sit across the aisle and watch their up-turned faces staring at that oblong, and reading it aloud to each other.”

“Isn’t that an awfully obvious necktie you’re wearing, Jock?” inquired his mother irrelevantly.

“This?  You ought to see some of them.  This is a Quaker stock in comparison.”  He glanced down complacently at the vivid-hued silken scarf that the season’s mode demanded.  Immediately he was off again.  “And the first thing you know, Mrs. McChesney, ma’am, we’ll have a motor truck backing up at the door once a month and six strong men carrying my salary to the freight elevator in sacks.”

Emma McChesney buttered her bit of toast, then looked up to remark quietly: 

“Hadn’t you better qualify for the trial heats, Jock, before you jump into the finals?”

“Trial heats!” sneered Jock.  “They’re poky.  I want real money.  Now!  It isn’t enough to be just well-to-do in these days.  It needs money.  I want to be rich!  Not just prosperous, but rich!  So rich that I can let the bath soap float around in the water without any pricks of conscience.  So successful that they’ll say, ’And he’s a mere boy, too.  Imagine!’”