A painful red crept into Jock’s face.  “Maybe.  Two years ago that would have sounded reasonable to me.  Two years ago, when I walked down Broadway at night, a fifty-foot electric sign at Forty-second was just an electric sign to me.  Just part of the town’s decoration like the chorus girls, and the midnight theater crowds.  Now—­well, now every blink of every red and yellow globe is crammed full of meaning.  I know the power that advertising has; how it influences our manners, and our morals, and our minds, and our health.  It regulates the food we eat, and the clothes we wear, and the books we read, and the entertainment we seek.  It’s colossal, that’s what it is!  It’s—­”

“Keep on like that for another two years, sonny, and no business banquet will be complete without you.  The next thing you know you’ll be addressing the Y.M.C.A. advertising classes on The Young Man in Business.”

Jock laughed a rueful little laugh.  “I didn’t mean to make a speech.  I was just trying to say that I’ve served my apprenticeship.  It hurts a fellow’s pride.  You can’t hold your head up before a girl when you know her salary’s twice yours, and you know that she knows it.  Why look at Mrs. Hoffman, who’s with the Dowd Agency.  Of course she’s a wonder, even if her face does look like the fifty-eighth variety.  She can write copy that lifts a campaign right out of the humdrum class, and makes it luminous.  Her husband works in a bank somewhere.  He earns about as much as Mrs. Hoffman pays the least of her department subordinates.  And he’s so subdued that he side-steps when he walks, and they call him the human jelly-fish.”

Emma McChesney was regarding her son with a little puzzled frown.  Suddenly she reached out and tapped the topmost of the scribbled sheets strewn the length of Jock’s side of the table.

“What’s all this?”

Jock tipped back his chair and surveyed the clutter before him.

“That,” said he, “is what is known on the stage as ‘the papers.’  And it’s the real plot of this piece.”

“M-m-m—­I thought so.  Just favor me with a scenario, will you?”

Half-grinning, half-serious, Jock stuck his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and began.

“Scene:  Offices of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company.  Time, the present.  Characters:  Jock McChesney, handsome, daring, brilliant—­”

“Suppose you—­er—­skip the characters, however fascinating, and get to the action.”

Jock McChesney brought the tipped chair down on all-fours with a thud, and stood up.  The grin was gone.  He was as serious as he had been in the midst of his tirade of five minutes before.