“You mean that you admitted who you were?”

“Oh, no!  The red-haired woman laughed and took the package in at the front door,” Jack responded.  Anybody in Little Rivers would have understood just how he looked and smiled and why it was that the red-haired woman laughed.

“Jack—­now, really, Jack, this is not quite dignified!” expostulated the father.  “What do you think your ancestor would say to it?”

“I suspect that he would have made an even more ingratiating bow to the lady than I could,” said Jack, thoughtfully.  “They had the grand manner better developed in his day than in ours.”

In the ensuing weeks John Wingfield, Sr. dwelt in a kind of infernal wonder about his son.  He was cheered when some friend of his world who had met Jack in the garb of his caste, as fitted by Burleigh, would say:  “Fine, strapping son you have there, Wingfield!” He was abashed and dumfounded when Jack announced that he had taken Mamie Devore, who sold culinary utensils in the basement, out to luncheon with her “steady company,” Joe Mathewson, driver of one of the warehouse trucks.

“They were a little awed at first,” Jack explained, “but they soon became natural.  I don’t know anything pleasanter than making people feel perfectly natural, do you?  You see, Joe and Mamie are very real, father, and most businesslike; an ambitious, upstanding pair.  They’re going to have two thousand dollars saved before they marry.

“‘I don’t believe that a woman ought to work out after she’s married,’ was the way Joe put it.  And Mamie, with her eyes fairly devouring him, snapped back:  ’No, she’d have enough to do looking after you, you big old bluff!’

“Mamie is a wiry little thing and Joe is a heavyweight, with a hand almost as big as a baseball mit.  That’s partly why their practical romance is so fascinating.  Why, it’s wonderful the stories that are playing themselves out in that big store, father!  Well, you see Joe is on a stint—­two thousand before he gets Mamie.  He had been making money on the side nights in boxing bouts.  But Mamie stopped the fighting.  She said she was not going to have a husband with the tip of his nose driven up between his eyes like a bull-dog’s.  And what do you imagine they are going to do with the two thousand?  Buy a farm!  Isn’t that corking!”

John Wingfield, Sr. shrugged his shoulders, but did not express his feelings with any remark.  It seemed to him that Jack must have been born without a sense of proportion.

With the breaking of spring, when gardens were beginning to sprout, Jack broadened his study to the trails of Westchester, Long Island, and New Jersey, coursed by the big automobile vans of the suburban delivery.  To the people of the store, whose streets he traversed at will in unremitting wonder over its varied activities, he had brought something of the same sensation that he had to an Arizona town.  He came to know the employees by name, even as he had his neighbors in Little Rivers.  He nodded to the clerks as he passed down an aisle.  They watched for his coming and brightened with his approach and met his smile with their smiles.  In their idle moments he would stop and talk of the desert.