er Sunday! Gee, but it's fierce!"

"It's pathetic," March said. "Poor father! I don't suppose there's any
help for it."

What struck him was the pitiful futility of his father's persistence in
trying to impose his ways, his beliefs, his will, upon one so rapidly
growing into full independence. The only sanction he had was a tradition
daily becoming more fragile. He was in for the bitterness of another
disappointment. That was what there was no help for.

Naturally young Ben didn't interpret it this way. "You're a nice one
to talk like that," he said resentfully. "You've always done whatever
you pleased."

"There's nothing to prevent you from doing the same thing if you look at
it that way," Anthony observed. "You've got a job a man could live on,
haven't you?"

"Live on? Fifteen dollars a week?"

And it may be admitted that Ben's sense of outrage had some foundation.
Years ago he had made up his small young mind that he would never work in
the factory and he settled the question by getting himself a job in one
of the piano salesrooms on Wabash Avenue. He wasn't precisely a salesman
yet, he might perhaps have been spoken of by an unkind person as an
office boy. But it was essential that he look like a salesman and act
like a salesman, even in the matter of going to lunch. Some day soon, he
was going to succeed in completing a sale before some one else came
around and took it out of his hands, and he could then strike for a
regular commission.

In the meantime with shoes and socks and shirts and neckties costing what
they did, the suggestion that his salary was adequate to provide a
bachelor's independence was fantastic and infuriating.

"Yes," he grumbled, "if I wanted to live in a rat hole and look
like a tramp."

"My rat hole isn't so bad to live in," Anthony said, "but I'd be sorry to
think I looked like a tramp. Do I, for a fact? I haven't had this suit on
since I went into the army but I thought it looked all right."

"Oh, there's a big rip in the back of the shoulder where the padding is
sticking through and your cuffs are frayed and your necktie's got a hole
worn plumb through it where the wing of your collar rubs. You don't look
like a tramp, of course, because you look clean and decent. It would be
all right if you had to be like that. Only it's all so darned
unnecessary. You could make good money if you'd only live like a regular
person. Every day or two, somebody telephones to know if you aren't ho