The Homemaker

gather mold till they can’t make a good try at anything else. That’s what made it so hard to tell Knapp he was through. Uncle Charley ought to have told him that, after he’d been a month in the store, twelve years ago. It’s a crime to let a man stay on and vegetate and get mildewed like that. It must have been clear for anybody but a blind man to see, after he’d been a month at his desk, that he’d never be anything but a dead loss in the business-world, what with his ill health, and his woolgathering, and his tags of poetry! Uncle Charley ought to have pushed him off to be a dishwasher, or a college professor, or one of those jobs that a man without any jump in him can hold. It’s just a sample of the way poor Uncle Charley let the business run downhill ever since he knew he had that cancer. You can’t blame him, in a manner of speaking. But the fact is that the whole works from the stockroom to the heating plant was just eaten up with dry rot.”

“I’m sorry about that Mr. Knapp though, personally,” said his wife. “He has a wife and three young children, you know.”

“The devil he has!” said Jerome annoyed. “Isn’t that just like him? Well, I’ll try to look him up tomorrow and see if I can’t suggest something else. Or give him a check with the thanks of the firm. That’d be the cheapest way out. I know right now there’s no getting any decent work out of him. Wherever I put him, he’d be like a bit of cotton waste clogging up an oil-pipe.”

“How about the accounting department, anyhow?” asked Nell. “Have you got it straightened out?”

“Yes, now that Knapp has gone I guess it will run all right. Thank heavens, there’s one department in the department-store business that’s pretty well standardized. That young expert accountant McKenzie and Blair sent on has straightened out the awful mess it was in. You can tell where you stand now without closing down and taking a month’s work to unravel the snarls. And I guess Bronson is young enough to keep it running. I’ll give him the chance anyway; he’s the livest wire on that side of the business if he is an awful roughneck! If he’ll come through, it’ll save time having to break somebody else in.”

“I rather think Mr. McCarthy may be good enough, too,” said Mrs. Willing. “Since you spoke about him, I’ve been watching his window displays. Of course they’re crude and he’s a bit old. But he has temperament and if you took him with you a time or two on buying trips to New York to let him look at the real thing and bought him a good modern manual on window-dressing⁠—poor thing! I don’t suppose he dreams there are books on his subject.⁠ ⁠…”

Her husband grunted. “Yes, there’s stuff in him. He’s pretty redheaded and touchy, but there never was a good window-dresser yet that wasn’t as prickly and unreasonable as a teething baby. We’d have to put up with that from anyone who had the temperament to do the work the way it ought to be done. But that’s about all the temperament I can stand. Thank the Lord, I won’t have to put up with a professional buyer. The more I think of it the more I’m sure I want to keep the buying in my own hands, every bit of it⁠—unless you want to come along sometimes, of course. But no highly paid expert buyers in mine! You know them as well as I do. Did you ever see one that wasn’t domineering and stuck on himself and dead sure he never made a mistake in his life?”

“Never!” Nell burned with a resentment of as long a date and as hot as her husband’s. “Never! What always made me the tiredest about them was the way they blamed everything on the selling force or the advertising office. If the goods didn’t move, was it ever their fault? Not once in a million times. It was because the salespeople couldn’t sell or the ad.-writers couldn’t write.”

“And yet look at the times they get suckered into buying a carload of what everybody knew was lemons, only we mustn’t let on, for fear of hurting their sacred temperamental feelings! No, by George, none of that in mine! I feel like sending up a Hallelujah when I think I’ll never have to baby one of them again and smooth him down and calm his nerves. I’ve had the experience and training to handle that whole thing for myself. And I’m going to do it!”

A gong boomed pleasantly behind him. “Dinner,” said Nell, getting up from her desk.

He threw away what was left of his cigar and went into the comfortable dining-room, his appetite whetted by the odor of steak, onions and fried potatoes.

“I bought a case of that near-beer Wertheimer’s has,” said his wife, uncorking and pouring out a foaming brown glassful. “I can’t see that it’s not just as good as it ever was.”

“Yes, tastes pretty good to me tonight, that’s sure,” said Jerome, taking a long drink and smiling as he cut into the thick steak. His wife let him alone while he took the sharpest edge off his appetite. She herself had often come in after working overtime in an office! But as he started in on a second round of everything, she said, “It’ll be a surprise for the old store, won’t it, to have somebody really buying for it after the junk that’s been loaded onto its shelves?”

“Uncle Charley,” pronounced Jerome, “never got beyond the A. T. Stewart 1872 notion of stocking up four times a year with ‘standard goods.’ ” They both laughed at the old phrase.

“Standard goods!” said Nell. “How funny it sounds! When you can’t sell a button the year after it’s made nowadays!”

“I just hope,” said Jerome, “I just hope