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“As for a turkey,” wailed Emma McChesney, “one would have to go out on the fire-escape to baste it.”

The swinging door opened to admit the agent. “Would you excuse me? A party down-stairs–lease–be back in no time. Just look about–any questions–glad to answer later–“

“Quite all right,” Mrs. McChesney assured him. Her expression was one of relief as the hall door closed behind him. “Good! There’s a spot in the mirror over the mantel. I’ve been dying to find out if it was a flaw in the glass or only a smudge.”

She made for the living-room. T. A. Buck followed thoughtfully. Thoughtfully and interestedly he watched her as she stood on tiptoe, breathed stormily upon the mirror’s surface, and rubbed the moist place with her handkerchief. She stood back a pace, eyes narrowed critically.

“It’s gone, isn’t it?” she asked.

T. A. Buck advanced to where she stood and cocked his head too, judicially, and in the opposite direction to which Emma McChesney’s head was cocked. So that the two heads were very close together.

“It’s a poor piece of glass,” he announced at last.

A simple enough remark. Perhaps it was made with an object in view, but certainly it was not meant to bring forth the storm of protest that came from Emma McChesney’s lips. She turned on him, lips quivering, eyes wrathful.

“You shouldn’t have come!” she cried. “You’re as much out of place in a six-room flat as a truffle would be in a boiled New England dinner. Do you think I don’t see its shortcomings? Every normal woman, no matter what sort of bungalow, palace, ranch-house, cave, cottage, or tenement she may be living in, has in her mind’s eye a picture of the sort of apartment she’d live in if she could afford it. I’ve had mine mapped out from the wall-paper in the front hall to the laundry-tubs in the basement, and it doesn’t even bear a family resemblance to this.”

“I’m sorry,” stammered T. A. Buck. “You asked my opinion and I–“

“Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion when it was asked this would be a miserable world. I asked you because I wanted you to lie. I expected it of you. I needed bolstering up. I realize that the rent I’m paying and the flat I’m getting form a geometrical problem where X equals the unknown quantity and only the agent knows the answer. But it’s going to be a home for Jock and me. It’s going to be a place where he can bring his friends; where he can have his books, and his ‘baccy, and his college junk. It will be the first real home that youngster has known in all his miserable boarding-house, hotel, boys’ school, and college existence. Sometimes when I think of what he’s missed, of the loneliness and the neglect when I was on the road, of the barrenness of his boyhood, I–“

T. A. Buck started forward as one who had made up his mind about something long considered. Then he gulped, retreated, paced excitedly to the door and back again. On the return trip he found smiling and repentant Emma McChesney r
egarding him.

“Now aren’t you sorry you insisted on coming along? Letting yourself in for a ragging like that? I think I’m a wee bit taut in the nerves at the prospect of seeing Jock–and planning things with him–I–“

T. A. Buck paused in his pacing. “Don’t!” he said. “I had it coming to me. I did it deliberately. I wanted to know how you really felt about it.”

Emma McChesney stared at him curiously. “Well, now you know. But I haven’t told you half. In all those years while I was selling T. A. Buck’s Featherloom Petticoats on the road, and eating hotel food that tasted the same, whether it was roast beef or ice-cream, I was planning this little place. I’ve even made up my mind to the scandalous price I’m willing to pay a maid who’ll cook real dinners for us and serve them as I’ve always vowed Jock’s dinners should be served when I could afford something more than a shifting hotel home.”

T. A. Buck was regarding the head of his if walking-stick with a gaze as intent as that which he previously had bestowed upon the chandelier. For that matter it was a handsome enough stick–a choice thing in malacca. But it was scarcely more deserving than the chandelier had been.