st 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 mana