About the time that Jock McChesney began to carry a yellow walking-stick down to work each morning his mother noticed a growing tendency on his part to patronize her. Now Mrs. Emma McChesney, successful, capable business woman that she was, could afford to regard her young son\'s attitude with a quiet and deep amusement. In twelve years Emma McChesney had risen from the humble position of stenographer in the office of the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company to the secretaryship of the firm. So when her young son, backed by the profound business knowledge gained in his one year with the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company, hinted gently that her methods and training were archaic, ineffectual, and lacking in those twin condiments known to the twentieth century as pep and ginger, she would listen, eyebrows raised, lower lip caught between her teeth—a trick which gives a distorted expression to the features, calculated to hide any lurking tendency to grin. Besides, though Emma McChesney was forty she looked thirty-two (as business women do), and knew it. Her hard-working life had brought her in contact with people, and things, and events, and had kept her young.
\'Jock Mcchesney began to carry a yellow walking-stick down to work\'

"Thank fortune!" Mrs. McChesney often said, "that I wasn\'t cursed with a life of ease. These massage-at-ten-fitting-at-eleven-bridge-at-one women always look such hags at thirty-five."

But repetition will ruin the rarest of jokes. As the weeks went on and Jock\'s attitude persisted, the twinkle in Emma McChesney\'s eye died. The glow of growing resentment began to burn in its place. Now and then there crept into her eyes a little look of doubt and bewilderment. You sometimes see that same little shocked, dazed expression in the eyes of a woman whose husband has just said, "Isn\'t that hat too young for you?"

Then, one evening, Emma McChesney\'s resentment flared into open revolt. She had announced that she intended to rise half an hour earlier each morning in order that she might walk a brisk mile or so on her way down-town, before taking the subway.

"But won\'t it tire you too much, Mother?" Jock had asked with maddeningly tender solicitude.

His mother\'s color heightened. Her blue eyes glowed dark.

"Look here, Jock! Will you kindly stop this lean-on-me-grandma stuff! To hear you talk one would think I was ready for a wheel chair and gray woolen bedroom slippers."

"Why, I didn\'t mean—I only thought that perhaps overexertion in a woman of your—That is, you need your energy for—"

"Don\'t wallow around in it," snapped Emma McChesney. "You\'ll only sink in deeper in your efforts to crawl out. I merely want to warn you that if you persist in this pose of tender solicitude for your doddering old mother, I\'ll—I\'ll present you with a stepfather a year younger than you. Don\'t laugh. Perhaps you think I couldn\'t do it."

"Good Lord, Mother! Of course you don\'t mean it, but—"

"Mean it! Cleverer women than I have been driven by their children to marrying bell-boys in self-defense. I warn you!"
\'\'Good Lord, Mother! of course you don\'t mean it, but--\'\'

That stopped it—for a while. Jock ceased to bestow upon his mother judicious advice from the vast storehouse of his own experience. He refrained from breaking out with elaborate advertising schemes whereby the T.A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company might grind every other skirt concern to dust. He gave only a startled look when his mother mischievously suggested raspberry as the color for her new autumn suit. Then, quite suddenly, Circumstance caught Emma McChesney in the meshes and, before she had fought her way free, wrought trouble and change upon her.

Jock McChesney was seated in the window of his mother\'s office at noon of a brilliant autumn day. A little impatient frown was forming between his eyes. He wanted his luncheon. He had called around expressly to take his mother out to luncheon—always a festive occasion when taken together. But Mrs. McChesney, seated at her desk, was bent absorbedly over a sheet of paper whereon she was adding up two columns of figures at a time—a trick on which she rather prided herself. She was counting aloud, her mind leaping agilely, thus:

"Eleven, twenty-nine, forty-three, sixty, sixty-nine—" Her pencil came down on the desk with a thwack. "SIXTY-NINE!" she repeated in capital letters. She turned around to face Jock. "Sixty-nine!" Her voice bristled with indignation. "Now what do you think of that!"

"I think you\'d better make it an even seventy, whatever it is you\'re counting up, and come on out to luncheon. I\'ve an appointment at two-fifteen, you know."

"Luncheon!"—she waved the paper in the air—"with this outrage on my mind! Nectar would curdle in my system."

Jock rose and strolled lazily over to the desk. "What is it?" He glanced idly at the sheet of paper. "Sixty-nine what?"

Mrs. McChesney pressed a buzzer at the side of her desk. "Sixty-nine dollars, that\'s what! Representing two days\' expenses in the six weeks\' missionary trip that Fat Ed Meyers just made for us. And in Iowa, too."

"When you gave that fellow the job," began Jock hotly, "I told you, and Buck told you, that—"

Mrs. McChesney interrupted wearily. "Yes, I know. You\'ll never have a grander chance to say \'I told you so.\' I hired him because he was out of a job and we needed a man who knew the Middle-Western trade, and then because—well, poor fellow, he begged so and promised to keep straight. As though I oughtn\'t to know that a pinochle-and-poker traveling man can never be anything but a pinochle-and-poker traveling man—"

The office door opened as there appeared in answer to the buzzer a very alert, very smiling, and very tidy office girl. Emma McChesney had tried office boys, and found them wanting.

"Tell Mr. Meyers I want to see him."

"Just going out to lunch,"—she turned like a race horse trembling to be off,—"putting on his overcoat in the front office. Shall I—"

"Catch him."

"Listen here," began Jock uncomfortably; "if you\'re going to call him perhaps I\'d better vanish."

"To save Ed Meyers\'s tender feelings! You don\'t know him. Fat Ed Meyers could be courtmartialed, tried, convicted, and publicly disgraced, with his epaulets torn off, and his sword broken, and likely as not he\'d stoop down, pick up a splinter of steel to use as a toothpick, and Castlewalk down the aisle to the tune with which they were drumming him out of the regiment. Stay right here. Meyers\'s explanation ought to be at least amusing, if not educating."

In the corridor outside could be heard some one blithely humming in the throaty tenor of the fat man. The humming ceased with a last high note as the door opened and there entered Fat Ed Meyers, rosy, cherubic, smiling, his huge frame looming mountainous in the rippling folds of a loose-hung London plaid topcoat.

"Greetings!" boomed this cheery vision, raising one hand, palm outward, in mystic salute. He beamed upon the frowning Jock. "How\'s the infant prodigy!" The fact that Jock\'s frown deepened to a scowl ruffled him not at all. "And what," went on he, crossing his feet and leaning negligently against Mrs. McChesney\'s desk, "and what can I do for thee, fair lady?"
\'Greetings!\'

"For me?" said Emma McChesney, looking up at him through narrowed eyelids. "I\'ll tell you what. You can explain to me, in what they call a few well-chosen words, just how you, or any other living creature, could manage to turn in an expense account like that on a six-weeks\' missionary trip through the Middle West."

"Dear lady,"—in the bland tones that one uses to an unreasonable child,—"you will need no explanation if you will just remember to lay the stress on the word missionary. I went forth through the Middle West to spread the light among the benighted skirt trade. This wasn\'t a selling trip, dear lady. It was a buying expedition. And I had to buy, didn\'t I? all the way from Michigan to Indiana."

He smiled down at her, calm, self-assured, impudent. A little flush grew in Emma McChesney\'s cheeks.

"I\'ve always said," she began, crisply, "that one could pretty well judge a man\'s character, temperament, morals, and physical make-up by just glancing at his expense account. The trouble with you is that you haven\'t learned the art of spending money wisely. It isn\'t always the man with the largest expense sheet that gets the most business. And it isn\'t the man who leaves the greatest number of circles on the table top in his hotel room, either." She paused a moment. Ed Meyers\'s smile had lost some of its heartiness. "Mr. Buck\'s out of town, as you know. He\'ll be back next week. He wasn\'t in favor of—"

"Now, Mrs. McChesney," interrupted Ed Meyers nervously, "you know there\'s always one live one in every firm, just like there\'s always one star in every family. You\'re the—"

"I\'m the one who wants to know how you could spend sixty-nine dollars for two days\' incidentals in Iowa. Iowa! Why, look here, Ed Meyers, I made Iowa for ten years when I was on the road. You know that. And you know, and I know, that in order to spend sixty-nine dollars for incidentals in two days in Iowa you have to call out the militia."

"Not when you\'re trying to win the love of every skirt buyer from Sioux City to Des Moines."

Emma McChesney rose impatiently. "Oh, that\'s nonsense! You don\'t need to do that these days. Those are old-fashioned methods. They\'re out of date. They—"

At that a little sound came from Jock. Emma heard it, glanced at him, turned away again in confusion.

"I was foolish enough in the first place to give you this job for old times\' sake," she continued hurriedly.

Fat Ed Meyers\' face drooped dolefully. He cocked his round head on one side fatuously. "For old times\' sake," he repeated, with tremulous pathos, and heaved a gusty sigh.

"Which goes to show that I need a guardian," finished Emma McChesney cruelly. "The only old times that I can remember are when I was selling Featherlooms, and you were out for the Sans-Silk Skirt Company, both covering the same territory, and both running a year-around race to see which could beat the other at his own game. The only difference was that I always played fair, while you played low-down whenever you had a chance."

"Now, my dear Mrs. McChesney—"

"That\'ll be all," said Emma McChesney, as one whose patience is fast slipping away. "Mr. Buck will see you next week." Then, turning to her son as the door closed on the drooping figure of the erstwhile buoyant Meyers, "Where\'ll we lunch, Jock?"

"Mother," Jock broke out hotly, "why in the name of all that\'s foolish do you persist in using the methods of Methuselah! People don\'t sell goods any more by sending out fat old ex-traveling men to jolly up the trade."

"Jock," repeated Emma McChesney slowly, "where—shall—we—lunch?"

It was a grim little meal, eaten almost in silence. Emma McChesney had made it a rule to use luncheon time as a recess. She played mental tag and hop-scotch, so that, returning to her office refreshed in mind and body, she could attack the afternoon\'s work with new vigor. And never did she talk or think business.

To-day she ate her luncheon with a forced appetite, glanced about with a listlessness far removed from her usual alert interest, and followed Jock\'s attempts at conversation with a polite effort that was more insulting than downright inattention.

"Dessert, Mother?" Jock had to say it twice before she heard.

"What? Oh, no—I think not."

The waiter hesitated, coughed discreetly, lifted his eyebrows insinuatingly. "The French pastry\'s particularly nice to-day, madam. If you\'d care to try something? Eclair, madam—peach tart—mocha tart—caramel—"

Emma McChesney smiled. "It does sound tempting." She glanced at Jock. "And we\'re wearing our gowns so floppy this year that it makes no difference whether one\'s fat or not." She turned to the waiter. "I never can tell till I see them. Bring your pastry tray, will you?"

Jock McChesney\'s finger and thumb came together with a snap. He leaned across the table toward his mother, eyes glowing, lips parted and eager. "There! you\'ve proved my point."

"Point?"

"About advertising. No, don\'t stop me. Don\'t you see that what applies to pastry applies to petticoats? You didn\'t think of French pastry until he suggested it to you—advertised it, really. And then you wanted a picture of them. You wanted to know what they looked like before buying. That\'s all there is to advertising. Telling people about a thing, making \'em want it, and showing \'em how it will look when they have it. Get me?"

Emma McChesney was gazing at Jock with a curious, fascinated stare. It was a blank little look, such as we sometimes wear when the mind is working furiously. If the insinuating waiter, presenting the laden tray for her inspection, was startled by the rapt expression which she turned upon the cunningly wrought wares, he was too much a waiter to show it.

A pause. "That one," said Mrs. McChesney, pointing to the least ornate. She ate it, down to the last crumb, in a silence that was pregnant with portent. She put down her fork and sat back.

"Jock, you win. I—I suppose I have fallen out of step. Perhaps I\'ve been too busy watching my own feet. T.A. will be back next week. Could your office ha............