attle in club committee, business conclave, or
family council, she lay on her back in a darkened room, a prisoner to
pain. The only vent she had for her pent-up energy was in hourly tirades
against her daughters for their inefficiency, the nurses for their
incompetency, the doctors for their lack of skill, and the servants for
their disobedience.

The one person who, in any particular, found favor with her these days
was her son's new secretary. Every Saturday, when Quinby Graham stopped
on his way to the bank with various papers for her to sign, he was plied
with questions and intrusted with various commissions. A top sergeant was
evidently just what Madam had been looking for all her life--one trained
to receive orders and execute them. All went well until one day when Quin
refused to smuggle in some forbidden article of diet; then the
steam-roller of her wrath promptly passed over him also.

He waited respectfully until her breath and vocabulary were alike
exhausted, then said good-humoredly:

"I used to board with a woman up in Maine that had hysterics like that.
They always made her feel a lot better. Don't you want me to shift that
pulley a bit? You don't look comfortable."

Madam promptly ordered him out of the room. But next day she made an
excuse to send for him, and actually laughed when he stepped briskly up
to the bed, saluted smartly, and impudently asked her how her grouch was.

There was something in his very lack of reverence, in his impertinent
assumption of equality, in his refusal to pay her the condescending
homage due feebleness and old age, that seemed to flatter her.

"He's a mule," she told Randolph--"a mule with horse sense."

Quin's change from khaki to civilian clothes affected him in more ways
than one. Constitutionally he was opposed to saying "sir" to his fellow
men; to standing at attention until he was recognized; to acknowledging,
by word or gesture, that he was any one's inferior on this wide and
democratic planet. He much preferred organizing to being organized,
leading to being led. Early in his military training he had evinced an
inclination to take things into his own hands and act without authority.
It was somewhat ironic that the very trait that had deprived him of a
couple of bars on his shoulder should have put the medal on his breast.

But freedom from the restrictions of army life brought its penalties. He
found that blunders condoned in a soldier were seriously critici