Personality Plus | Page 4

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.
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?"
Jock was at ease immediately. "Quite a lot; yes. I practically rewrote the Gridiron play that we gave last year, and I was assistant advertising manager of the college publications for two years. That gives a fellow a pretty broad knowledge of advertising."
"Oh, Lord!" groaned Sam Hupp, and covered his eyes with his hand, as if in pain.
Jock stared. The affronted feeling was returning. Sam Hupp recovered himself and smiled a little wistfully.
"McChesney, when