And, “Jock dear,” Emma McChesney said, “you’ve still to learn that plans and ambitions are like soap bubbles.  The harder you blow and the more you inflate them, the quicker they burst.  Plans and ambitions are things to be kept locked away in your heart, Son, with no one but yourself to take an occasional peep at them.”

Jock leaned over the table, with his charming smile.  “You’re a jealous blonde,” he laughed.  “Because I’m going to be a captain of finance—­an advertising wizard; you’re afraid I’ll grab the glory all away from you.”

  [Illustration:  “‘You’re a jealous blond,’ he said”]

Mrs. McChesney folded her napkin and rose.  She looked unbelievably young, and trim, and radiant, to be the mother of this boasting boy.

“I’m not afraid,” she drawled, a wicked little glint in her blue eyes.  “You see, they’ll only regard your feats and say, ’H’m, no wonder.  He ought to be able to sell ice to an Eskimo.  His mother was Emma McChesney.’”

And then, being a modern mother, she donned smart autumn hat and tailored suit coat and stood ready to reach her office by nine-thirty.  But because she was as motherly as she was modern she swung open the door between kitchen and dining-room to advise with Annie, the adept.

“Lamb chops to-night, eh, Annie?  And sweet potatoes.  Jock loves ’em.  And corn au gratin and some head lettuce.”  She glanced toward Jock in the hallway, then lowered her voice.  “Annie,” she teased, “just give us one of your peach cobblers, will you?  You see he—­he’s going to be awfully—­tired when he gets home.”

So they went stepping off to work together, mother and son.  A mother of twenty-five years before would have watched her son with tear-dimmed eyes from the vine-wreathed porch of a cottage.  There was no watching a son from the tenth floor of an up-town apartment house.  Besides, she had her work to do.  The subway swallowed both of them.  Together they jostled and swung their way down-town in the close packed train.  At the Twenty-third Street station Jock left her.

“You’ll have dinner to-night with a full-fledged professional gent,” he bragged, in his youth and exuberance and was off down the aisle and out on the platform.  Emma McChesney managed to turn in her nine-inch space of train seat so that she watched the slim, buoyant young figure from the window until the train drew away and he was lost in the stairway jam.  Just so Rachel had watched the boy Joseph go to meet the Persian caravans in the desert.

“Don’t let them buffalo you, Jock,” Emma had said, just before he left her.  “They’ll try it.  If they give you a broom and tell you to sweep down the back stairs, take it, and sweep, and don’t forget the corners.  And if, while you’re sweeping, you notice that that kind of broom isn’t suited to the stairs go in and suggest a new kind.  They’ll like it.”