“There’s nothing to prevent you from doing the same thing if you look at it that way,” Anthony observed.  “You’ve got a job a man could live on, haven’t you?”

“Live on?  Fifteen dollars a week?”

And it may be admitted that Ben’s sense of outrage had some foundation.  Years ago he had made up his small young mind that he would never work in the factory and he settled the question by getting himself a job in one of the piano salesrooms on Wabash Avenue.  He wasn’t precisely a salesman yet, he might perhaps have been spoken of by an unkind person as an office boy.  But it was essential that he look like a salesman and act like a salesman, even in the matter of going to lunch.  Some day soon, he was going to succeed in completing a sale before some one else came around and took it out of his hands, and he could then strike for a regular commission.

In the meantime with shoes and socks and shirts and neckties costing what they did, the suggestion that his salary was adequate to provide a bachelor’s independence was fantastic and infuriating.

“Yes,” he grumbled, “if I wanted to live in a rat hole and look like a tramp.”

“My rat hole isn’t so bad to live in,” Anthony said, “but I’d be sorry to think I looked like a tramp.  Do I, for a fact?  I haven’t had this suit on since I went into the army but I thought it looked all right.”

“Oh, there’s a big rip in the back of the shoulder where the padding is sticking through and your cuffs are frayed and your necktie’s got a hole worn plumb through it where the wing of your collar rubs.  You don’t look like a tramp, of course, because you look clean and decent.  It would be all right if you had to be like that.  Only it’s all so darned unnecessary.  You could make good money if you’d only live like a regular person.  Every day or two, somebody telephones to know if you aren’t home and if there isn’t some way we can get word to you, and it’s kind of humiliating to have to say there isn’t;—­that we don’t know where you are, haven’t seen you for a week,—­things like that.  Of course, it’s none of my business, but I’m trying to pull out of this.  I’d like to be somebody someday and it would be a darn sight easier if you were trying to pull the same way instead of queering us all the time.”

“Yes, I know,” Anthony said thoughtfully.  “But then there’s Sarah on the other hand who can’t forgive me for not putting on a red necktie and going Bolshevik.  She’d have me put in my time trying to upset the bourgeois applecart altogether.”

Ben grinned.  “You ought to have heard her go on about the limousine that came and left a note for you the other day.  Lady inside, chauffeur in a big fur coat.  He came up to the door and asked whether you were home and left the note when Sarah said you weren’t.  Last Thursday, I think that was, just before supper.  It’s over there on the mantel, I guess.  Sarah’s afraid you’re going to turn into a little brother of the rich.”