Brooms and back stairways had no place in Jock McChesney’s mind as the mahogany and gold elevator shot him up to the fourteenth floor of the great office building that housed the Berg, Shriner Company.  Down the marble hallway he went and into the reception room.  A cruel test it was, that reception room, with the cruelty peculiar to the modern in business.  With its soft-shaded lamp, its two-toned rug, its Jacobean chairs, its magazine-laden cathedral oak table, its pot of bright flowers making a smart touch of color in the somber richness of the room, it was no place for the shabby, the down-and-out, the cringing, the rusty, or the mendicant.

Jock McChesney, from the tips of his twelve-dollar shoes to his radiant face, took the test and stood it triumphantly.  He had entered with an air in which was mingled the briskness of assurance with the languor of ease.  There were times when Jock McChesney was every inch the son of his mother.

There advanced toward Jock a large, plump, dignified personage, a personage courteous, yet reserved, inquiring, yet not offensively curious—­a very Machiavelli of reception-room ushers.  Even while his lips questioned, his eyes appraised clothes, character, conduct.

“Mr. Hupp, please,” said Jock, serene in the perfection of his shirt, tie, collar and scarf pin, upon which the appraising eye now rested.  “Mr. McChesney.”  He produced a card.

“Appointment?”

“No—­but he’ll see me.”

But Machiavelli had seen too many overconfident callers.  Their very confidence had taught him caution.

“If you will please state your—­ah—­business—­”

Jock smiled a little patient smile and brushed an imaginary fleck of dust from the sleeve of his very correct coat.

“I want to ask him for a job as office boy,” he jibed.

An answering grin overspread the fat features of the usher.  Even an usher likes his little joke.  The sense of humor dies hard.

“I have a letter from him, asking me to call,” said Jock, to clinch it.

“This way.”  The keeper of the door led Jock toward the sacred inner portal and held it open.  “Mr. Hupp’s is the last door to the right.”

The door closed behind him.  Jock found himself in the big, busy, light-flooded central office.  Down either side of the great room ran a row of tiny private offices, each partitioned off, each outfitted with desk, and chairs, and a big, bright window.  On his way to the last door at the right Jock glanced into each tiny office, glimpsing busy men bent absorbedly over papers, girls busy with dictation, here and there a door revealing two men, or three, deep in discussion of a problem, heads close together, voices low, faces earnest.  It came suddenly to the smartly modish, overconfident boy walking the length of the long room that the last person needed in this marvelously perfected and smooth-running organization was a somewhat awed young man named Jock McChesney.  There came to him that strange sensation which comes to every job-hunter; that feeling of having his spiritual legs carry him out of the room, past the door, down the hall and into the street, even as, in reality, they bore him on to the very presence which he dreaded and yet wished to see.