wore a
nine shoe and a thirteen collar. His first long trousers were let down and
taken in. His second taken up and let out. When shaving promised to become
a manly accomplishment, his complexion suddenly clouded, postponing that
event until long after it had become a hirsute necessity. When he smiled
apoplectically above his first waistcoat and detachable collar, his Adam's
apple and his mother's heart fluttered.

"Blow-cat Dennis is going to City College."

"Who's he?"

"A feller."

"Quit crackin' your knuckles."

"He only got seventy in manual training."

"Tell them things to your father, Edwin; I 'ain't got the say-so."

"His father's only a bookkeeper, too, and they live 'way up on a Hundred
and Forty-fourth near Third."

"I'm willing to scrimp and save for it, Edwin; but in the end I haven't got
the say-so, and you know it."

"The boys that are going to college got to register now for the High School
College Society."

"Your father, Edwin, is the one to tell that to."

"Other fellers' mothers put in a word for 'em."

"I do, Edwin; you know I do! It only aggravates him--There's papa now,
Edwin, coming in. Help mamma dish up. Put this soup at papa's place and
this at yours. There's only two plates left from last night."

In Mrs. Ross's dining-room, a red-glass dome, swung by a chain over the
round table, illuminated its white napery and decently flowered china.
Beside the window looking out upon a gray-brick wall almost within reach,
a canary with a white-fluted curtain about the cage dozed headless. Beside
that window, covered in flowered chintz, a sewing-machine that could
collapse to a table; a golden-oak sideboard laid out in pressed glassware.
A homely simplicity here saved by chance or chintz from the simply homely.

Mr. Harry Ross drew up immediately beside the spread table, jerking
open his newspaper and, head thrown back, read slantingly down at the
head-lines.

"Hello, pop!"

"Hello, son!"

"Watch out!"

"Hah--that's the stuff! Don't spill!"

He jammed the newspaper between his and the chair back, shoving in closer
to the table. He was blond to ashiness, so that the slicked-back hair might
or might not be graying. Pink-shaved, unlined, nose-glasses polished to
sparkle, he was ten years his wife's senior and looked those ten years
younger. Clerks and clergymen somehow maintain that youth of the flesh, as
if life had preserved them in alcohol or shaving-lotion. Mrs. Ross entered
th