“After all, Stan isn’t a boy any more.
Oughtn’t to call him so hard. But rats,
got to haul folks over the coals now and then for their
own good. Unpleasant duty, but—I wonder
if Stan is sore? What’s he saying to McGoun
out there?”
So chill a wind of hatred blew from the outer office
that the normal comfort of his evening home-going
was ruined. He was distressed by losing that
approval of his employees to which an executive is
always slave. Ordinarily he left the office with
a thousand enjoyable fussy directions to the effect
that there would undoubtedly be important tasks to-morrow,
and Miss McGoun and Miss Bannigan would do well to
be there early, and for heaven’s sake remind
him to call up Conrad Lyte soon ’s he came in.
To-night he departed with feigned and apologetic liveliness.
He was as afraid of his still-faced clerks—of
the eyes focused on him, Miss McGoun staring with
head lifted from her typing, Miss Bannigan looking
over her ledger, Mat Penniman craning around at his
desk in the dark alcove, Stanley Graff sullenly expressionless—as
a parvenu before the bleak propriety of his butler.
He hated to expose his back to their laughter, and
in his effort to be casually merry he stammered and
was raucously friendly and oozed wretchedly out of
the door.
But he forgot his misery when he saw from Smith Street
the charms of Floral Heights; the roofs of red tile
and green slate, the shining new sun-parlors, and
the stainless walls.
III
He stopped to inform Howard Littlefield, his scholarly
neighbor, that though the day had been springlike
the evening might be cold. He went in to shout
“Where are you?” at his wife, with no very
definite desire to know where she was. He examined
the lawn to see whether the furnace-man had raked
it properly. With some satisfaction and a good
deal of discussion of the matter with Mrs. Babbitt,
Ted, and Howard Littlefield, he concluded that the
furnace-man had not raked it properly. He cut
two tufts of wild grass with his wife’s largest
dressmaking-scissors; he informed Ted that it was
all nonsense having a furnace-man—“big
husky fellow like you ought to do all the work around
the house;” and privately he meditated that
it was agreeable to have it known throughout the neighborhood
that he was so prosperous that his son never worked
around the house.
He stood on the sleeping-porch and did his day’s
exercises: arms out sidewise for two minutes,
up for two minutes, while he muttered, “Ought
take more exercise; keep in shape;” then went
in to see whether his collar needed changing before
dinner. As usual it apparently did not.
The Lettish-Croat maid, a powerful woman, beat the
dinner-gong.
The roast of beef, roasted potatoes, and string beans
were excellent this evening and, after an adequate
sketch of the day’s progressive weather-states,
his four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee, his lunch with
Paul Riesling, and the proven merits of the new cigar-lighter,
he was moved to a benign, “Sort o’ thinking
about buyin, a new car. Don’t believe we’ll
get one till next year, but still we might.”
