“Mamma’s boy!  I made you three pen-wipers to-day out of the old red table-cover.”

“Aw, fellers don’t use pen-wipers!”

He set up a jiggling, his great feet coming down with a clatter.

“Stop!”

“Can’t I jig?”

“No; not with neighbors underneath.”

He flopped down, hooking his heels in the chair-rung.

At sixteen’s stage of cruel hazing into man’s estate Edwin Ross, whose voice, all in a breath, could slip up from the quality of rock in the drilling to the more brittle octave of early-morning milk-bottles, wore a nine shoe and a thirteen collar.  His first long trousers were let down and taken in.  His second taken up and let out.  When shaving promised to become a manly accomplishment, his complexion suddenly clouded, postponing that event until long after it had become a hirsute necessity.  When he smiled apoplectically above his first waistcoat and detachable collar, his Adam’s apple and his mother’s heart fluttered.

“Blow-cat Dennis is going to City College.”

“Who’s he?”

“A feller.”

“Quit crackin’ your knuckles.”

“He only got seventy in manual training.”

“Tell them things to your father, Edwin; I ’ain’t got the say-so.”

“His father’s only a bookkeeper, too, and they live ’way up on a Hundred and Forty-fourth near Third.”

“I’m willing to scrimp and save for it, Edwin; but in the end I haven’t got the say-so, and you know it.”

“The boys that are going to college got to register now for the High School College Society.”

“Your father, Edwin, is the one to tell that to.”

“Other fellers’ mothers put in a word for ’em.”

“I do, Edwin; you know I do!  It only aggravates him—­There’s papa now, Edwin, coming in.  Help mamma dish up.  Put this soup at papa’s place and this at yours.  There’s only two plates left from last night.”

In Mrs. Ross’s dining-room, a red-glass dome, swung by a chain over the round table, illuminated its white napery and decently flowered china.  Beside the window looking out upon a gray-brick wall almost within reach, a canary with a white-fluted curtain about the cage dozed headless.  Beside that window, covered in flowered chintz, a sewing-machine that could collapse to a table; a golden-oak sideboard laid out in pressed glassware.  A homely simplicity here saved by chance or chintz from the simply homely.

Mr. Harry Ross drew up immediately beside the spread table, jerking open his newspaper and, head thrown back, read slantingly down at the head-lines.

“Hello, pop!”

“Hello, son!”

“Watch out!”

“Hah—­that’s the stuff!  Don’t spill!”

He jammed the newspaper between his and the chair back, shoving in closer to the table.  He was blond to ashiness, so that the slicked-back hair might or might not be graying.  Pink-shaved, unlined, nose-glasses polished to sparkle, he was ten years his wife’s senior and looked those ten years younger.  Clerks and clergymen somehow maintain that youth of the flesh, as if life had preserved them in alcohol or shaving-lotion.  Mrs. Ross entered then in her crisp but faded house dress, her round, intent face still moistly pink, two steaming dishes held out.