reful there! You'll trip. Never you mind what I mean I think it
is when I say. Count ten, and then just tell me what you think you
mean."

Jock passed his hand over his head again with that nervous little
gesture. Then he sat down, a little wearily. He stared moodily
down at the pile of papers before him: His mother faced him
quietly across the table.

"Grace Galt's getting twice as much as I am," Jock broke out, with
savage suddenness. "The first year I didn't mind. A fellow gets
accustomed, these days, to see women breaking into all the
professions and getting away with men-size salaries. But her pay
check doubles mine--more than doubles it."

"It's been my experience," observed Emma McChesney, "that when a
firm condescends to pay a woman twice as much as a man, that means
she's worth six times as much."

A painful red crept into Jock's face. "Maybe. Two years ago that
would have sounded reasonable to me. Two years ago, when I walked
down Broadway at night, a fifty-foot electric sign at Forty-second
was just an electric sign to me. Just part of the town's
decoration like the chorus girls, and the midnight theater crowds.
Now--well, now every blink of every red and yellow globe is
crammed full of meaning. I know the power that advertising has;
how it influences our manners, and our morals, and our minds, and
our health. It regulates the food we eat, and the clothes we wear,
and the books we read, and the entertainment we seek. It's
colossal, that's what it is! It's--"

"Keep on like that for another two years, sonny, and no business
banquet will be complete without you. The next thing you know
you'll be addressing the Y.M.C.A. advertising classes on The Young
Man in Business."

Jock laughed a rueful little laugh. "I didn't mean to make
a speech. I was just trying to say that I've served my
apprenticeship. It hurts a fellow's pride. You can't hold your
head up before a girl when you know her salary's twice yours, and
you know that she knows it. Why look at Mrs. Hoffman, who's with
the Dowd Agency. Of course she's a wonder, even if her face does
look like the fifty-eighth variety. She can write copy that lifts
a campaign right out of the humdrum class, and makes it luminous.
Her husband works in a bank somewhere. He earns about as much as
Mrs. Hoffman pays the least of her department subordinates. And
he's so subdued that he side-steps when he walks, and they call
him the human jelly-fish."

Emma McChesney wa