MOTHER'S SON

BY

EDNA FERBER

"Full?" repeated Emma McChesney (and if it weren't for the compositor
there'd be an exclamation point after that question mark).

"Sorry, Mrs. McChesney," said the clerk, and he actually looked it, "but
there's absolutely nothing stirring. We're full up. The Benevolent
Brotherhood of Bisons is holding its regular annual state convention
here. We're putting up cots in the hall."

Emma McChesney's keen blue eyes glanced up from their inspection of the
little bunch of mail which had just been handed her. "Well, pick out a
hall with a southern exposure and set up a cot or so for me," she said,
agreeably, "because I've come to stay. After selling Featherloom
Petticoats on the road for ten years I don't see myself trailing up and
down this town looking for a place to lay my head. I've learned this one
large, immovable truth, and that is, that a hotel clerk is a hotel
clerk. It makes no difference whether he is stuck back of a marble
pillar and hidden by a gold vase full of thirty-six-inch American Beauty
roses at the Knickerbocker, or setting the late fall fashions for men in
Galesburg, Illinois."

By one small degree was the perfect poise of the peerless personage
behind the register jarred. But by only one. He was a hotel night clerk.

"It won't do you any good to get sore, Mrs. McChesney," he began,
suavely. "Now a man would----"

"But I'm not a man," interrupted Emma McChesney. "I'm only doing a
man's work and earning a man's salary and demanding to be treated with
as much consideration as you'd show a man."

The personage busied himself mightily with a pen, and a blotter, and
sundry papers, as is the manner of personages when annoyed. "I'd like to
accommodate you; I'd like to do it."

"Cheer up," said Emma McChesney, "you're going to. I don't mind a little
discomfort. Though I want to mention in passing that if there are any
lady Bisons present you needn't bank on doubling me up with them. I've
had one experience of that kind. It was in Albia, Iowa. I'd sleep in the
kitchen range before I'd go through another."

Up went the erstwhile falling poise. "You're badly mistaken, madam. I'm
a member of this order myself, and a finer lot of fellows it has never
been my pleasure to know."

"Yes, I know," drawled Emma McChesney. "Do you know, the thing that gets
me is the inconsistency of it. Along come a lot of boobs who never use a
hotel the year around except to loaf in the lobby,