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