Automatically she started toward the clerk's desk. Then she remembered, and stopped. "I'll wait here," she said. "Get the key for five-eighteen, will you please? And tell the clerk that I'll want the room adjoining beginning to-night, instead of to-morrow, as I first intended. Tell him you're Mrs. McChesney's son."

He turned away. Emma McChesney brought her handkerchief up to her mouth and held it there a moment, and the skin showed white over the knuckles of her hand. in that moment every one of her thirty-six years were on the table, face up.

"We'll wash up," said Emma McChesney, when he returned, "and then we'll have dinner here."

"I don't want to eat here," objected Jock McChesney. "Besides, there's no reason why I can't keep my evening's engagements."

"And after dinner," went on his mother, as though she had not heard, "we'll get acquainted, Kid."

It was a cheerless, rather tragic meal, though Emma McChesney saw it through from soup to finger-bowls. When it was over she led the way down the old-fashioned, red-carpeted corridors to her room. It was the sort of room to get on its occupant's nerves at any time, with its red plush arm-chairs, its black walnut bed, and its walnut center table inlaid with an apoplectic slab of purplish marble.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'I'm still in position to enforce that ordinance against pouting'"]

Emma McChesney took off her hat before the dim old mirror, and stood there, fluffing out her hair here, patting it there. Jock had thrown his hat and coat on the bed. He stood now, leaning against the footboard, his legs crossed, his chin on his breast, his whole att.i.tude breathing sullen defiance.

"Jock," said his mother, still patting her hair, "perhaps you don't know it, but you're pouting just as you used to when you wore pinafores. I always hated pouting children. I'd rather hear them howl.

I used to spank you for it. I have prided myself on being a modern mother, but I want to mention, in pa.s.sing, that I'm still in a position to enforce that ordinance against pouting." She turned around abruptly. "Jock, tell me, how did you happen to come here a day ahead of me, and how do you happen to be so chummy with that pretty, weak- faced little thing at the veiling counter, and how, in the name of all that's unbelievable, have you managed to become a grown-up in the last few months?"

Jock regarded the mercifully faded roses in the carpet. His lower lip came forward again.

"Oh, a fellow can't always be tied to his mother's ap.r.o.n strings. I like to have a little fling myself. I know a lot of fellows here. They are frat brothers. And anyway, I needed some new clothes."

For one long moment Emma McChesney stared, in silence. Then: "Of course," she began, slowly, "I knew you were seventeen years old. I've even bragged about it. I've done more than that--I've gloried in it.

But somehow, whenever I thought of you in my heart--and that was a great deal of the time it was as though you still were a little tyke in knee-pants, with your cap on the back of your head, and a chunk of apple bulging your cheek. Jock, I've been earning close to six thousand a year since I put in that side line of garters. Just how much spending money have I been providing you with?"

Jock twirled a coat b.u.t.ton uncomfortably "Well, quite a lot. But a fellow's got to have money to keep up appearances. A lot of the fellows in my crowd have more than I. There are clothes, and tobacco, and then flowers and cabs for the skirts--girls, I mean, and--"

"Kid," impressively, "I want you to sit down over there in that plush chair--the red one, with the lumps in the back. I want you to be uncomfortable. From where I am sitting I can see that in you there is the making of a first-cla.s.s cad. That's no pleasant thing for a mother to realize. Now don't interrupt me. I'm going to be chairman, speaker, program, and ways-and-means committee of this meeting. Jock, I got my divorce from your father ten years ago. Now, I'm not going to say anything about him. Just this one thing. You're not going to follow in his footsteps, Kid. Not if I have to take you to pieces like a nickel watch and put you all together again. You're Emma McChesney's son, and ten years from now I intend to be able to brag about it, or I'll want to know the reason why--and it'll have to be a blamed good reason."

"I'd like to know what I've done!" blurted the boy. "Just because I happened to come here a few hours before you expected me, and just because you saw me talking to a girl! Why--"

"It isn't what you've done. It's what those things stand for. I've been at fault. But I'm willing to admit it. Your mother is a working woman, Jock. You don't like that idea, do you? But you don't mind spending the money that the working woman provides you with, do you?

I'm earning a man's salary. But Jock, you oughtn't to be willing to live on it.

"What do you want me to do?" demanded Jock. "I'm not out of high school yet. Other fellows whose fathers aren't earning as much--"

"Fathers," interrupted Emma McChesney. "There you are. Jock, I don't have to make the distinction for you. You're sufficiently my son to know it, in your heart. I had planned to give you a college education, if you showed yourself deserving. I don't believe in sending a boy in your position to college unless he shows some special leaning toward a profession."

"Mother, you know how wild I am about machines, and motors, and engineering, and all that goes with it. Why I'd work--"

"You'll have to, Jock. That's the only thing that will make a man of you. I've started you wrong, but it isn't too late yet. It's all very well for boys with rich fathers to run to clothes, and city jaunts, and 'chickens,' and cabs and flowers. Your mother is working tooth and nail to earn her six thousand, and when you realize just what it means for a woman to battle against men in a man's game, you'll stop being a spender, and become an earner--because you'll want to. I'll tell you what I'm going to do, Kid. I'm going to take you on the road with me for two weeks. You'll learn so many things that at the end of that time the sides of your head will be bulging."

"I'd like it!" exclaimed the boy, sitting up. "It will be regular fun."

"No, it won't," said Emma McChesney; "not after the first three or four days. But it will be worth more to you than a foreign tour and a private tutor."

She came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. "Your room's just next to mine," she said. "You and I are going to sleep on this.

To-morrow we'll have a real day of it, as I promised. If you want to spend it with the fellows, say so. I'm not going to spoil this little lark that I promised you."

"I think," said the boy, looking up into his mother's face, "I think that I'll spend it with you."

The door slammed after him.

Emma McChesney remained standing there, in the center of the room. She raised her arms and pa.s.sed a hand over her forehead and across her hair until it rested on the glossy knot at the back of her head. It was the weary little gesture of a weary, heart-sick woman.

There came a ring at the 'phone.

Emma McChesney crossed the room and picked up the receiver.

"h.e.l.lo, Mary Cutting," she said, without waiting for the voice at the other end. "What? Oh, I just knew. No, it's all right. I've had some high-cla.s.s little theatricals of my own, right here, with me in the roles of leading lady, ingenue, villainess, star, and heavy mother.

I've got Mrs. Fiske looking like a First Reader Room kid that's forgotten her Friday piece. What's that?"

There was no sound in the room but the hollow cackle of the voice at the other end of the wire, many miles away.

Then: "Oh, that's all right, Mary Cutting. I owe you a great big debt of grat.i.tude, bless your pink cheeks and white hair! And, Mary," she lowered her voice and glanced in the direction of the room next door, "I don't know how a hard, dry sob would go through the 'phone, so I won't try to get it over. But, Mary, it's been 'sugar, b.u.t.ter, and mola.s.ses' for me for the last ten minutes, and I'm dead scared to stop for fear I'll forget it. I guess it's 'sugar, b.u.t.ter, and mola.s.ses'

for me for the rest of the night, Mary Cutting; just as hard and fast as I can say it, 'sugar, b.u.t.ter, mola.s.ses.'"

IV

HIS MOTHER'S SON

"Full?" repeated Emma McChesney (and if it weren't for the compositor there'd be an exclamation point after that question mark).

"Sorry, Mrs. McChesney," said the clerk, and he actually looked it, "but there's absolutely nothing stirring. We're full up. The Benevolent Brotherhood of Bisons is holding its regular annual state convention here. We're putting up cots in the hall."

Emma McChesney's keen blue eyes glanced up from their inspection of the little bunch of mail which had just been handed her. "Well, pick out a hall with a southern exposure and set up a cot or so for me,"

she said, agreeably; "because I've come to stay. After selling Featherloom Petticoats on the road for ten years I don't see myself trailing up and down this town looking for a place to lay my head.

I've learned this one large, immovable truth, and that is, that a hotel clerk is a hotel clerk. It makes no difference whether he is stuck back of a marble pillar and hidden by a gold vase full of thirty-six-inch American Beauty roses at the Knickerbocker, or setting the late fall fashions for men in Galesburg, Illinois."

By one small degree was the perfect poise of the peerless personage behind the register jarred. But by only one. He was a hotel night clerk.

"It won't do you any good to get sore, Mrs. McChesney," he began, suavely. "Now a man would--"

"But I'm not a man," interrupted Emma McChesney. "I'm only doing a man's work and earning a man's salary and demanding to be treated with as much consideration as you'd show a man."

The personage busied himself mightily with a pen, and a blotter, and sundry papers, as is the manner of personages when annoyed. "I'd like to accommodate you; I'd like to do it."

"Cheer up," said Emma McChesney, "you're going to. I don't mind a little discomfort. Though I want to mention in pa.s.sing that if there are any lady Bisons present you needn't bank on doubling me up with them. I've had one experience of that kind. It was in Albia, Iowa. I'd sleep in the kitchen range before I'd go through another."

Up went the erstwhile falling poise. "You're badly mistaken, madam.

I'm a member of this order myself, and a finer lot of fellows it has never been my pleasure to know."

"Yes, I know," drawled Emma McChesney. "Do you know, the thing that gets me is the inconsistency of it. Along come a lot of b.o.o.bs who never use a hotel the year around except to loaf in the lobby, and wear out the leather chairs, and use up the matches and toothpicks and get the baseball returns, and immediately you turn away a traveling man who uses a three-dollar-a-day room, with a sample room downstairs for his stuff, who tips every porter and bell-boy in the place, asks for no favors, and who, if you give him a half-way decent cup of coffee for breakfast, will fall in love with the place and boom it all over the country. Half of your Benevolent Bisons are here on the European plan, with a view to patronizing the free-lunch counters or being asked to take dinner at the home of some local Bison whose wife has been cooking up on pies, and chicken salad and veal roast for the last week."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Son!' echoed the clerk, staring"]