ey're going to
have two thousand dollars saved before they marry.

"'I don't believe that a woman ought to work out after she's married,'
was the way Joe put it. And Mamie, with her eyes fairly devouring him,
snapped back: 'No, she'd have enough to do looking after you, you big
old bluff!'

"Mamie is a wiry little thing and Joe is a heavyweight, with a hand
almost as big as a baseball mit. That's partly why their practical
romance is so fascinating. Why, it's wonderful the stories that are
playing themselves out in that big store, father! Well, you see Joe is on
a stint--two thousand before he gets Mamie. He had been making money on
the side nights in boxing bouts. But Mamie stopped the fighting. She said
she was not going to have a husband with the tip of his nose driven up
between his eyes like a bull-dog's. And what do you imagine they are
going to do with the two thousand? Buy a farm! Isn't that corking!"

John Wingfield, Sr. shrugged his shoulders, but did not express his
feelings with any remark. It seemed to him that Jack must have been born
without a sense of proportion.

With the breaking of spring, when gardens were beginning to sprout, Jack
broadened his study to the trails of Westchester, Long Island, and New
Jersey, coursed by the big automobile vans of the suburban delivery. To
the people of the store, whose streets he traversed at will in
unremitting wonder over its varied activities, he had brought something
of the same sensation that he had to an Arizona town. He came to know the
employees by name, even as he had his neighbors in Little Rivers. He
nodded to the clerks as he passed down an aisle. They watched for his
coming and brightened with his approach and met his smile with their
smiles. In their idle moments he would stop and talk of the desert.

Although he was learning to like the store as a community of human beings
its business was as the works of a watch, when all he knew was how to
tell the time by the face. But he tried hard to learn; tried until his
head was dizzy with a whirl of dissociated facts, which he knew ought to
be associated, and under the call of his utter restlessness would
disappear altogether for two or three days.

"Relieving the pressure! It's a safety-valve so I shan't blow up," he
explained to his father, sadly.

"Take your time," said John Wingfield, Sr., having in mind a recent talk
with Dr. Bennington.

Jack listened faithfully to his father's clear-cut lessons