Personality Plus | Page 3

thing you know, Mrs. McChesney, ma'am, we'll have a
motor truck backing up at the door once a month and six strong men
carrying my salary to the freight elevator in sacks."
Emma McChesney buttered her bit of toast, then looked up to remark
quietly:
"Hadn't you better qualify for the trial heats, Jock, before you jump into
the finals?"
"Trial heats!" sneered Jock. "They're poky. I want real money. Now! It
isn't enough to be just well-to-do in these days. It needs money. I want
to be rich! Not just prosperous, but rich! So rich that I can let the bath
soap float around in the water without any pricks of conscience. So
successful that they'll say, 'And he's a mere boy, too. Imagine!'"
And, "Jock dear," Emma McChesney said, "you've still to learn that
plans and ambitions are like soap bubbles. The harder you blow and the
more you inflate them, the quicker they burst. Plans and ambitions are
things to be kept locked away in your heart, Son, with no one but
yourself to take an occasional peep at them."
Jock leaned over the table, with his charming smile. "You're a jealous
blonde," he laughed. "Because I'm going to be a captain of finance--an

advertising wizard; you're afraid I'll grab the glory all away from you."
[Illustration: "'You're a jealous blond,' he said"]
Mrs. McChesney folded her napkin and rose. She looked unbelievably
young, and trim, and radiant, to be the mother of this boasting boy.
"I'm not afraid," she drawled, a wicked little glint in her blue eyes.
"You see, they'll only regard your feats and say, 'H'm, no wonder. He
ought to be able to sell ice to an Eskimo. His mother was Emma
McChesney.'"
And then, being a modern mother, she donned smart autumn hat and
tailored suit coat and stood ready to reach her office by nine-thirty. But
because she was as motherly as she was modern she swung open the
door between kitchen and dining-room to advise with Annie, the adept.
"Lamb chops to-night, eh, Annie? And sweet potatoes. Jock loves 'em.
And corn au gratin and some head lettuce." She glanced toward Jock in
the hallway, then lowered her voice. "Annie," she teased, "just give us
one of your peach cobblers, will you? You see he--he's going to be
awfully--tired when he gets home."
So they went stepping off to work together, mother and son. A mother
of twenty-five years before would have watched her son with
tear-dimmed eyes from the vine-wreathed porch of a cottage. There
was no watching a son from the tenth floor of an up-town apartment
house. Besides, she had her work to do. The subway swallowed both of
them. Together they jostled and swung their way down-town in the
close packed train. At the Twenty-third Street station Jock left her.
"You'll have dinner to-night with a full-fledged professional gent," he
bragged, in his youth and exuberance and was off down the aisle and
out on the platform. Emma McChesney managed to turn in her
nine-inch space of train seat so that she watched the slim, buoyant
young figure from the window until the train drew away and he was
lost in the stairway jam. Just so Rachel had watched the boy Joseph go
to meet the Persian caravans in the desert.

"Don't let them buffalo you, Jock," Emma had said, just before he left
her. "They'll try it. If they give you a broom and tell you to sweep down
the back stairs, take it, and sweep, and don't forget the corners. And if,
while you're sweeping, you notice that that kind of broom isn't suited to
the stairs go in and suggest a new kind. They'll like it."
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,