Personality Plus | Page 4

inquiring, yet not offensively
curious--a very Machiavelli of reception-room ushers. Even while his
lips questioned, his eyes appraised clothes, character, conduct.
"Mr. Hupp, please," said Jock, serene in the perfection of his shirt, tie,
collar and scarf pin, upon which the appraising eye now rested. "Mr.
McChesney." He produced a card.
"Appointment?"
"No--but he'll see me."
But Machiavelli had seen too many overconfident callers. Their very
confidence had taught him caution.

"If you will please state your--ah--business--"
Jock smiled a little patient 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--"