Two steps more, and he stood in the last doorway, right.  No matinee idol, nervously awaiting his cue in the wings, could have planned his entrance more carefully than Jock had planned this.  Ease was the thing; ease, bordering on nonchalance, mixed with a brisk and businesslike assurance.

The entrance was lost on the man at the desk.  He did not even look up.  If Jock had entered on all-fours, doing a double tango to vocal accompaniment, it is doubtful if the man at the desk would have looked up.  Pencil between his fingers, head held a trifle to one side in critical contemplation of the work before him, eyes narrowed judicially, lips pursed, he was the concentrated essence of do-it-now.

  [Illustration:  “He was the concentrated essence of do-it-now”]

Jock waited a moment, in silence.  The man at the desk worked on.  His head was semi-bald.  Jock knew him to be thirty.  Jock fixed his eye on the semi-bald spot and spoke.

“My name’s McChesney,” he began.  “I wrote you three days ago; you probably will remember.  You replied, asking me to call, and I—­”

“Minute,” exploded the man at the desk, still absorbed.

Jock faltered, stopped.  The man at the desk did not look up.  A moment of silence, except for the sound of the busy pencil traveling across the paper.  Jock, glaring at the semi-bald spot, spoke again.

“Of course, Mr. Hupp, if you’re too busy to see me—­”

“M-m-m-m,” a preoccupied hum, such as a busy man makes when he is trying to give attention to two interests.

“—­why I suppose there’s no sense in staying; but it seems to me that common courtesy—­”

The busy pencil paused, quivered in the making of a final period, enclosed the dot in a proofreader’s circle, and rolled away across the desk, its work done.

“Now,” said Sam Hupp, and swung around, smiling, to face the affronted Jock.  “I had to get that out.  They’re waiting for it.”  He pressed a desk button.  “What can I do for you?  Sit down, sit down.”

There was a certain abrupt geniality about him.  His tortoise-rimmed glasses gave him an oddly owlish look, like a small boy taking liberties with grandfather’s spectacles.

Jock found himself sitting down, his anger slipping from him.

“My name’s McChesney,” he began.  “I’m here because I want to work for this concern.”  He braced himself to present the convincing, reason-why arguments with which he had prepared himself.

Whereupon Sam Hupp, the brisk, proceeded to whisk his breath and arguments away with an unexpected: 

“All right.  What do you want to do?”

Jock’s mouth fell open.  “Do!” he stammered.  “Do!  Why—­anything—­”

Sam Hupp’s quick eye swept over the slim, attractive, radiant, correctly-garbed young figure before him.  Unconsciously he rubbed his bald spot with a rueful hand.

“Know anything about writing, or advertising?”