“Piling it up!  Lord, no!  I wish they would.  That’s the trouble.  They don’t give me a chance.”

“A chance!  Why, that’s not true, son.  You’ve said yourself that there are men who have been in the office three times as long as you have, who never have had the opportunities that they’ve given you.”

It was as though she had touched a current that thrilled him to action.  He pushed back his chair and stood up, one hand thrust into his pocket, the other passing quickly over his head from brow to nape with a quick, nervous gesture that was new to him.

“And why!” he flung out.  “Why!  Not because they like the way I part my hair.  They don’t do business that way up there.  It’s because I’ve made good, and those other dubs haven’t.  That’s why.  They’ve let me sit in at the game.  But they won’t let me take any tricks.  I’ve been an apprentice hand for two years now.  I’m tired of it.  I want to be in on a killing.  I want to taste blood.  I want a chance at some of the money—­real money.”

Emma McChesney sat back in her chair and surveyed the angry figure before her with quiet, steady eyes.

“I might have known that only one thing could bring those lines into your face, son.”  She paused a moment.  “So you want money as badly as all that, do you?”

Jock’s hand came down with a thwack on the papers before him.

“Want it!  You just bet I want it.”

“Do I know her?” asked Emma McChesney quietly.

Jock stopped short in his excited pacing up and down the room.

“Do you know—­Why, I didn’t say there—­What makes you think that—?”

“When a youngster like you, whose greatest worry has been whether Harvard’ll hold ’em again this year, with Baxter out, begins to howl about not being appreciated in business, and to wear a late fall line of wrinkles where he has been smooth before, I feel justified in saying, ‘Do I know her?’”

“Well, it isn’t any one—­at least, it isn’t what you mean you think it is when you say you—­”

“Careful there!  You’ll trip.  Never you mind what I mean I think it is when I say.  Count ten, and then just tell me what you think you mean.”

Jock passed his hand over his head again with that nervous little gesture.  Then he sat down, a little wearily.  He stared moodily down at the pile of papers before him:  His mother faced him quietly across the table.

“Grace Galt’s getting twice as much as I am,” Jock broke out, with savage suddenness.  “The first year I didn’t mind.  A fellow gets accustomed, these days, to see women breaking into all the professions and getting away with men-size salaries.  But her pay check doubles mine—­more than doubles it.”

“It’s been my experience,” observed Emma McChesney, “that when a firm condescends to pay a woman twice as much as a man, that means she’s worth six times as much.”