stopped reporting for duty! Peter was neither an atheist nor a socialist,
yet he was close to cursing his God and his country whenever Helen May
smiled at him around the dozen daffodils.

"Your insurance is due the tenth, dad," she remarked irrelevantly when
they had reached the dessert stage of cream puffs from the delicatessen
nearest Helen May's work. "Why don't you cut it down? It's sinful, the
amount of money we've paid out for insurance. You need a new suit this
spring. And the difference--"

"I don't see what's wrong with this suit," Peter objected, throwing out
his scrawny chest and glancing down his front with a prejudiced eye,
refusing to see any shabbiness. "A little cleaning and pressing, maybe--"

"A little suit of that new gray everybody's wearing these days, you
mean," she amended relentlessly. "Don't argue, dad. You've _got_ to have
a suit. And that old insurance--"

"Jitneys are getting thicker every day," Peter contended in feeble jest.
"A man needs to be well insured in this town. There's Vic--if anything
happened, he's got to be educated just the same. And by the endowment
plan, in twelve years more I'll have a nice little lump. It's--on account
of the endowment, Babe. I don't want to sell drugs all my life."

"Just the same, you're going to have a new suit." Helen May retrenched
herself behind the declaration. "And it's going to be gray. And a gray
hat with a dove-colored band and the bow in the back. And tan shoes," she
added implacably, daintily lifting the roof off her cream puff to see how
generous had been the filling.

"Who? Me?" Vic launched himself in among them and slid spinelessly into
his chair as only a lanky boy can slide. "Happy thought! Only I'll have
bottle green for mine. A fellow stepped on my roof this afternoon, so--"

"You'll wear a cap then--or go bareheaded and claim it's to make your
hair grow." Helen May regarded him coldly. "Lots of fellows do. You don't
get a single new dud before the fourth, Vic Stevenson."

"Oh, don't I?" Vic drawled with much sarcasm, and pulled two dollars from
his trousers pocket, displaying them with lofty triumph. "I get a new hat
to-morrow, Miss Stingy."

"Vic, where did you get that money?" Helen May's eyes flamed to the
battle. "Have you been staying out of school and hanging around those
picture studios?"

"Yup--at two dollars per hang," Vic mouthed, spearing a stuffed green
pepper dexterously. "Fifty rehearsals for two one-minute sce