At the Twenty-third Street
station Jock left her.
"You'll have dinner to-night with a full-fledged professional
gent," he bragged, in his youth and exuberance and was off down
the aisle and out on the platform. Emma McChesney managed to turn
in her nine-inch space of train seat so that she watched the slim,
buoyant young figure from the window until the train drew away and
he was lost in the stairway jam. Just so Rachel had watched the
boy Joseph go to meet the Persian caravans in the desert.
"Don't let them buffalo you, Jock," Emma had said, just before he
left her. "They'll try it. If they give you a broom and tell you
to sweep down the back stairs, take it, and sweep, and don't
forget the corners. And if, while you're sweeping, you notice that
that kind of broom isn't suited to the stairs go in and suggest a
new kind. They'll like it."
Brooms and back stairways had no place in Jock McChesney's mind as
the mahogany and gold elevator shot him up to the fourteenth floor
of the great office building that housed the Berg, Shriner
Company. Down the marble hallway he went and into the reception
room. A cruel test it was, that reception room, with the cruelty
peculiar to the modern in business.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25