now, I've been with Maw on her birthday ever since she was born! That
is--I mean ever since I was born. No sir-e-ee! Never missed once. We
always looked forward to it, Maw and I do. Seems as if it was just our
day, and nobody else's at all! Maybe it's more important to her because
it happens to be my birthday too. I go home because I want to be with
her on her birthday, I reckon, and she likes to have me come home
because it's mine. So, come rain or shine, loss of business or train
wrecks, I'm home on that day, and--and the minute I step inside the
front door, I'm--I'm just a kid again."

Two days later there leapt up the cement steps of a neat old-fashioned
house in the suburbs of Baltimore a man who had come home to "feel like
a kid again," and with a shout bolted inside to be received by a gentle
gray-haired woman whom he picked up in his arms and kissed with boyish
demonstrativeness.

"By Gosh, Maw! You're looking younger and prettier, every time I see
you!" he exclaimed, holding her off at arm's length and studying her
solicitously. "I never see you without wishing I could stay here all the
time--just you and me. All alone! Just we two."

"Jims," she said, using an old pet name, "you'll get over that sometime.
And--it's about time, too, isn't it, that you stopped courting your own
mother, and began to remember that you're grown up. You will be
thirty-four years old to-morrow and I shall be----"

"Twenty-four! Always twenty-four."

"Sixty-four!"

"Twenty-four! Don't I know? Haven't I kept count?"

"I can keep my own count. Sixty-four. I hope you didn't bring me
another foolish thing for a birthday present. I always think of that
hat!" And she lifted her fine chin and laughed amusedly.

"That hat," Jimmy expostulated, "was bought in the best shop on Fifth
avenue and the girl that sold it to me put it on to show me how well it
looked."

"It must have been the girl rather than the hat that hypnotized you into
paying fifty dollars for something that would look better on someone of
about sixteen rather than sixty."

Jimmy did not appear to take the joke in his usual good tolerance but
soberly insisted that the hat was "A peach."

"No, the trouble with you is, Maw, that you don't realize how young you
look, and how handsome you are. It's not my fault you look like twenty,
is it? I told that lady hat drummer that I was going to give the hat to
somebody that was a darned sight better looking than she was, and s