Children of the Ritz

Chapter One

This is about the Penningtons, who lived out on Long Island. They had money to burn, but they didn’t; they put it in stocks and bonds and Coral Gables instead. And when the time came for them to pay the income tax, they began to wish they had burned it after all. But it was too late then; so all they could do with what was left over was to buy more motor cars and more platinum chandeliers and more of Florida.

Mrs. Pennington — Diane — was a stunning woman, with perfectly milk-white hair, black brows, and the complexion of a well-nourished pink cupid. She took Italian lessons that she never quite caught up with, and called her husband by his last name in moments of tenderness and by his given name when she was displeased with him.

Mrs. Pennington — Diane — had a daughter named Angela and Mr. Pennington had a son named Gilbert. I mention this because they always spoke of them as “your daughter Angela” and “your son Gilbert” whenever there was any matter that required a family conference, as, for instance, Gilbert’s frequent expulsions from school.

Angela was eighteen and knew most of the head waiters in New York by their first names. She had an assortment of bracelets that would have made a Hottentot princess sick with envy; they came in three dimensions: the small ones for her arms, the medium ones for her ankles and the large ones for her neck.

At first, Angela had been a tomboy, then she had been a flapper until she realized that flappers were out of style. Just at present, she wasn’t quite decided as to what she wanted to be. She was thinking seriously of being a demi-mondaine; she thought of taking it up the following September; she wasn’t exactly sure how to go about being one, but that could take care of itself.

And then there was Lyle. Lyle was an untroubled twenty-two, had been to college and back, and was above her sister’s week-end flirtations. She came down the stairs in an orange sweater, swinging a tennis racket over her shoulder (Angela, though, would have slid down the banisters with her heels in the air), and crossed the long entrance hall toward a table on which letters were usually to be found at this hour of the morning, to see whether there were any for her. If there were, they were well snowed under. She ran through the assortment hurriedly: Miss Angela Pennington... Miss Angela Pennington... Miss Angela... As usual.

Turning around impatiently, Lyle met the gaze of a tall young man in a dark blue suit who had been sitting there quietly. He rose and bowed, and she saw that what he held in his hand was not a hat, but a cap. She was used to seeing caps, but never with a business suit.

“Excuse me,” he said.

“Yes?” She had taken a slight dislike to him. People ought to know how to dress.

“Are you the lady of the house?” he wanted to know.

This fortified her in her disapproval. She detested middle-class phraseology. “Lady of the house.” It sounded as if she ran a boarding house.

“I don’t understand you,” she said irritably.

“I mean, are you Mrs. Pennington?”

“What is it you want?” she replied, without answering his question.

“I was sent over here by Mrs. Craig. I’ve been her driver for three years. She—”

Lyle arched her brows at this. “About a position — are you inquiring?”

“Why, yes,” he admitted.

“Then I’m surprised Mrs. Craig hasn’t shown you when not to use the main entrance.”

She left him and entered the breakfast room, taking her racket with her as a matter of course.

The sun gleamed through the glass roof on Angela’s blond hair. She had a single earring in the lobe of her left ear.

“Tennis?” she said, looking up from a twelve page letter that had been occupying her.

“You don’t think broad jumping, do you?” replied Lyle, laying the racket over a chair. “You forgot one of your earrings,” she added.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Where’s the other one then?”

“Upstairs in my room.”

“You see, you must’ve forgotten it.”

“You have no sense of humor,” replied Angela. “I’m tired of wearing two earrings at the same time.”

She turned toward the door as their mother came in, in short sleeves and very prettily complexioned under her fluffy white hair. “Hello, Mud,” she said.

“Hello, Angela,” answered Mrs. Pennington whimsically. She turned to Lyle. “I was just talking to Mrs. Craig, and she—”

“What an hour to ring up!” observed Angela, for whom life never began until noon.

“—is sending her driver over for my approval.”

“I bet he’s sixty years old and neuralgic,” said Angela to the ceiling at large.

“He’s waiting outside,” Lyle informed her mother. “He looks terribly young to trust with a car.”

“Does he?” cried Angela immediately. “You don’t say so!” She slipped from her chair and walked deliberately out into the hall, humming, and quite a number of little golden sunbeams followed her as far as the door.

“Angela!” called Lyle, “what’s the matter with you?”

“I must see for myself,” answered the irrepressible Angela, not caring who heard her. “Oh, so there you are!” she exclaimed, discovering him in a tall chair against the wall. She looked him over. He stood up a little uncertainly.

“As you were!” said Angela, and went back into the breakfast room.

“Well, does it suit your highness?” asked Lyle mockingly.

Angela refused to commit herself.

“I must go out and speak to the man,” said Mrs. Pennington, being somewhat of a humanitarian.

“Finish your breakfast, my dear,” urged Lyle, being somewhat of an aristocrat.

Angela folded her twelve page letter and stuffed it carelessly into the pocket of her dress.

“Still leading them on, poor dear?” inquired Lyle derisively, her little finger warningly erect over a gold leaf coffee cup.

“Leading them on?” murmured Angela. “They’re ’way ahead of me, most of them. Holding them back would be more like it.”

“I often wonder what you’ll be like at thirty,” Lyle told her.

“Married, divorced, and dead, most likely.” Angela studied herself in a pocket mirror. “One earring is all I can stand,” she said, apropos of nothing. “The new hat comes down on one side of the face and buries my ear. I must go upstairs,” she said more to herself than to any one else, “and telephone half the world. Noon approacheth.”

She met her mother returning with a large sheaf of papers in one hand.

“I’ve engaged him temporarily,” said Mrs. Pennington with a touch of weariness. “I must look these references up the first chance I get.”

“Is that his driver’s license?” said Angela eagerly. “Let me look at it.” She held it in both hands and turned her back on them. “This is to certify that... Dewey Haines... age, twenty-six...”

Angela returned the document, having seen all that really interested her. “Is he a married man?” she wanted to know innocently.

“You would ask that!” observed Lyle cuttingly.

Angela made a face at her which she did not see, and went out of the room and up the stairs three or four at a time, her brief skirt tugging at her knees. At the landing, before turning right or left, she looked back over her shoulder. There wasn’t any one there, alas!

Angela changed the clothes she had put on less than an hour before and which had seemed to suit her well enough then but were much too simple for present purposes. She put on the famous one-sided hat to the very lids of her eyes and came gallantly down the stairs, all legs, in snub-toed French pumps. She met her mother on her way to her room.

“Hello, Mud.”

“Hello, Angela.”

“Listen, Mud,” said Angela, “there are a few things I want to get. Can I have the car to go shopping with?”

“No, you may not,” replied Mrs. Pennington.

Angela ran her fingers nimbly up and down the polished staircase railing. “All right,” she said meekly, “I’ll take it anyway.”

Mrs. Pennington went on up, moving her lips rhythmically. Angela, standing still, imitated her.

“What you can do, though,” her mother called to her from above stairs in a lyrical voice, “if you must go out in the car, is meet your brother at the station. He said he’d be here at two.”

“Is that pest going to be around again?” murmured Angela to herself. “Which station is it?” she called after her, cunningly burying the side of her face against one shoulder.

But her mother had closed the door of her room and was no longer open to argument. Angela went on down and unhooked the telephone receiver. “I want the car,” she said with a pout. This brought her sister out of the breakfast room. Angela always felt that she was surrounded by her family no matter what she wanted to do — her blamed family, as she sometimes put it.

“Going to town?” asked Lyle.

“I thought you wanted to play tennis,” objected Angela without letting her get any further.

“I just counted three clouds while I was at the breakfast table,” said Lyle emphatically. “Most likely there are others I couldn’t see from where I was sitting.”

“Maybe it was just soot you saw on the window panes,” suggested Angela hopefully; “that glass canopy needs washing a lot. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to burn, would you, and get your arms all red?”

“I couldn’t think of playing,” smirked Lyle. “Clouds put me off my game.”

“Oh, say,” objected Angela, who felt that unfair advantage was being taken of her credulity, “that’s laying it on a little too thick.”

The sweet high-sounding growl of a well-bred car greeted them from outside the house.

“Mud says I have to meet Gilbert, darn it,” complained Angela. “You’d think he was an invalid.”

“Wait for me, I’m going with you,” said Lyle, brushing by her and trotting up the stairs. “It won’t take me a second to slip on something.”

“Slip on your elbow for all I care,” thought Angela. “Provoking, disgusting, but why should I?” she reasoned. She gave her hat a conceited pat and went out the front door without waiting for Lyle. There was the machine, knee-high to her where she stood, long as a freight car, finished in a claret-toned enamel and buzzing like a swarm of honey bees. There was His Nibbs, in a smart-looking cap with a visor down to the tip of his nose. “Tricky!” sighed Angela, and her heart melted within her. The door whipped open to her.

“Drive to New York, Oscar,” she said, haughtily, settling herself among the corduroy cushions.

Suddenly she remembered that she hadn’t brought any money with her. But to go back for it now would have meant bringing Lyle with her. She preferred not to, very much so, in fact. “I’ll charge whatever I have to,” she decided.

The gravel began to slip noiselessly away under her. The house retreated into the distance, with Lyle on the front steps in a light green coat, shaking her fist after them. Then they were out on the road, which was straight as an arrow and mottled with gasoline drippings, and trees slipped by on each side of them at regular intervals, stiff as cadets on parade.

Angela determined upon a cigarette. She had brought two with her, wrapped in a handkerchief slightly the worse for rouge and chocolate; they were a little bent but that did not matter. She fastened upon one and leaned forward. “Oscar,” she said confidentially, “can I have a light?”

Most cars had electric cigarette lighters; this one didn’t. How glad she was, she reflected, that her mother refused to allow any such patented appliances in her car, wouldn’t even permit flowers, saying it was meant for an automobile and not a dime museum.

“Oscar” silently passed a folder of matches over his shoulder to her without turning around. “About as much life to him as a stone image,” she said to herself. She tried lighting several of the matches; the wind cut their lives short one after another.

“Oscar,” she said finally, “I can’t get it. You’ll have to stop the car a minute.” They were motionless almost at once. Angela lit her cigarette up one side and down the other, and coughed a little. “I think I’ll sit in front,” she said, and placed her leg across the back of the seat, balancing herself with two finger tips resting on his shoulder. She slid down into the seat next to him, carefully adjusting her skirt a half inch to one side.

“Have one for yourself,” she urged amiably, tendering him the remaining cigarette, which had split and was shedding tobacco grains.

“Not while I’m driving,” he said tonelessly, looking at the far horizon. He was not a little bored by what he termed her antics.

Angela crumpled in her fist the rejected friendly token and threw it out of the car. Her smile was gone in an instant; she gave him a quick, angry glance and then looked stiffly away.

“What are we waiting for, Oscar?” she said.

“Name is Haines, miss,” he told her, sending the beautiful mechanism forward as effortlessly as water receding from a beach.

“I know it’s Haines, Oscar.”

“Dewey Haines.” Something about the way he said it was like the crackle of a spark of electricity.

“I’m not interested, Oscar,” she informed him coldly.

“Fresh kid,” thought Dewey Haines. “I’d like to slap her face for her.”

They crawled into New York over the Queensboro Bridge, in a conglomeration of top-heavy chicken trucks, dainty roadsters, motorcycles, and furniture vans with buffet mirrors showing at one end and bad language coming from the other.

“Oh!” squealed Angela, and clapped her hands to her ears. She recognized several of the expressions, however. She stole a glance sideways at Haines to see how he was taking it. He remained impassive as ever.

“Turn down Fifth,” she commanded, once the congestion had eased its way into the city by a sufficient distance, “and drive until I tell you to stop.” He did as he was told, the green lights being auspicious. “West,” she said sharply at one of the upper Fifties.

Haines swore profoundly within the privacy of his bosom.

Angela got out at a millinery shop which bore the legend “Estelle” in refined gold lettering above the show windows. Haines got out and held the shop door for her to pass through. At the same time, he touched the visor of his cap with two fingers. It was mechanical, simply a reflex action, as far as he was concerned, but it managed to please her excessively. She disappeared into the luxurious interior of the establishment and he returned to the wheel and passed the time wondering what the enigmatic Mme. before Estelle’s name could mean. Finally he decided it was an abbreviation of Mamie.

At the end of an hour Angela reappeared in an enormous broad-brimmed hat that made her look like one of the Gish sisters. It bent backward and forward under its own weight. All she needed was an elastic under her nose. And she was leggier than ever. At her heels came a youth in bottle-green serge staggering under five very large, very ornamental, oval hatboxes. These he deposited next to Haines, who drew in his breath sharply at the ignominy that was being put upon him.

“Do you like it, Oscar?” said Angela, as soon as they were under way again.

“Very becoming,” he said without moving an inch. Not knowing what to say under the circumstances, he made use of an expression that had been on Mrs. Craig’s lips continually.

Angela disapproved, possibly because he hadn’t turned around to look at her.

“That doesn’t sound like a man at all,” she remarked. “Where’d you get that from? That’s a woman’s expression.”

“That’s a woman’s hat,” he replied.

“That’ll do, Oscar,” said Angela constrainedly. “Stop at Sherry’s.”

To his astonishment, while he was waiting for her there, a page came out to him carrying a glass with a graceful sparkle to it.

“The young lady sent this to you,” he informed him.

Haines looked at it in fascinated horror. It was a vanilla ice cream soda.

She came out herself a little later, munching a powdery red chocolate that came off on her fingernails and streaked her upper lip.

“How’d you like the soda?” she inquired mischievously. “Becoming, what?”

“Can’t say,” he said sullenly. “I wasn’t thirsty.”

“Oh, wasn’t you thoisty?” she flashed back. She bent her wrist and stared at it unbelievingly. “Two-thirty,” she groaned, “and I was supposed to meet him at two! Baby, you’ll have to make a bee line for the station,” she exclaimed excitedly. “What are we stopping here for?”

“There’s a red light up!” Didn’t she have eyes?

“Isn’t that the deuce!” she said, putting the blame on him for it in her own mind, no doubt. She pecked at her youthful chin with a midget powder puff, having attained the primary stage of make-up by now.

Dewey Haines’ private opinion was that she was the most wilful, spoiled little thing he had ever had the misfortune to take orders from.

Eventually (and they were not more than thirty minutes late) they reached the cool blue recesses of the Pennsylvania Station, pungent with gasoline smoke, and Angela said:

“I’ll wait here while you get him. I hate railway stations.”

“How’ll I know him?” objected Haines.

“He came in on the one fifty-seven. He’s a blond. He came down from college. You know how they dress.”

“Right,” said Haines shortly.

Suddenly she called him back. “I forgot to tell you — his name is Gilbert. Make sure that it is Gilbert.”

“Right,” said Haines again.

He disappeared down the long electric lighted chute that led to the trains. Now as little hope as he may have had of finding the right person in there, not even knowing him by sight, there was one individual in the whole of that tremendous place whose equipage and behavior stood out so forcibly from the rest as to make the task much easier.

If Angela’s brother at all resembled her, then this must be he.

He was a youth of twenty or thereabouts, blond, well proportioned, but with very little intelligence showing in his face, or anywhere else for that matter. He was bent forward from the waist, one foot raised horizontally to a shiny patent leather valise with the letters G.D.P. neatly initialed on its side in red. One baggy trouser leg, drawn back by the position of his leg, revealed a garterless sock that had tumbled down over his shoe top. The other trouser leg fell in folds, completely burying everything within a radius of twenty-seven or twenty-eight inches. He wore a necktie of red, blue, black and yellow stripes, and these colors were repeated on the band of his hat. He looked bored. Probably he was bored.

“Excuse me,” said Haines, “you Mr. Gilbert Pennington?”

The youth looked up at him languidly. “You’re damned tootin’ I am,” he answered.

“The car is waiting upstairs,” Haines told him stiffly. He tried to say “Sir” and found it quite impossible.

“It’s about time it was,” was the sulky rejoinder. “I’ve been parked here all morning, almost. You the new shofe?” he wanted to know.

“Yes, I’m the new driver,” said Haines shorter than ever. He wondered how many more adolescents there were going to be in this family.

“Here, carry this,” said Gilbert, motioning toward the patent leather valise. Haines set his mouth in a thin, steely line. He had always worked for women — elderly ladies — until now. One didn’t mind doing things for them. But this galled him somehow. He picked it up grudgingly. It wasn’t heavy, though. Probably full of shirts.

“The rest of my stuff’s coming by express,” proceeded Gilbert, leading the way up an escalator to the street level. “I got fired again.”

“Is that right?” remarked Haines courteously, not understanding and not caring to.

Angela was sitting waiting for them, one nude arm hanging loosely over the side of the car. She was as spineless as a rag doll.

“Oh, my gosh!” was the way she greeted her brother. “Where’d you get that necktie?”

“What do you care?” he said sullenly, getting in beside her.

“Why couldn’t you sit in front?” she complained. “You want to crush my hat, don’t you? You always are so considerate.”

“Hat?” he said. “Call that a hat, do you? It looks more like an awning to me. You could get an army under there.”

“We’ll go home now, Oscar,” said Angela fondly, giving her brother a murderous look.

“Not me, I won’t,” Gilbert assured her darkly.

She turned on him sharply. “What do you mean you won’t?”

“I think I better stop over at a hotel,” he explained, “ ’cause I got the gate again.”

“Gil!” wailed Angela in shivery despair. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me that you’ve been expelled from school again? That’s the fifth time in two years!”

“Whataya talkin’ about, that’s the sixth time!” he corrected her fiercely.

“Well, if you aren’t the limit!”

“There aren’t any medals on you either, far as I can see,” he rejoined bitterly.

Angela favored him with another of her peppery looks, which Haines happened to catch in the reflector. Nothing more was said until they arrived home.

“This is a joyous homecoming,” grumbled Gilbert, as he stepped out of the car.

“It’s your own fault,” his sister remarked. Then with a change of voice, “S’long, Oscar,” she called over her shoulder.

At eight o’clock Haines was back on duty again. Mrs. Pennington — Diane — came out of the house in a black lace shawl with emeralds in her white hair. At her heels was Lyle, looking like a Kashmiri beauty, the fringe of her chartreuse-green shawl trailing down the steps after her like the tail feathers of a peacock.

“Isn’t Father coming?” she murmured.

Haines unlatched the door of the car for them.

“I can’t ask him,” her mother said. “He is so upset these days over business affairs.”

“How utterly nonsensical!” remarked Lyle in her well-bred voice, getting into the car and crossing one instep before the other. It was a majestic posture, Haines thought, stealing a look into his mirror. A young empress might have arranged herself that way, disdainfully nonchalant, fringe dripping from her knees.

Gilbert and Angela came out of the house. Gilbert was in a Tuxedo, Angela had chrysanthemums in her hair. Her skirt was the shortest that had ever appeared outside of a ballet.

“Angela!” exclaimed her sister and mother in a breath.

“What is it?” she said composedly.

“Where did you get that?”

“Get what, Mud? This? You mean you don’t like it? Why, I got it right this afternoon at Renée’s.”

“I certainly won’t have you with me,” her mother told her, “looking the way you are. Your father should see you.”

“He did,” admitted Angela cheerfully. “I just sort of — bent my knees forward a little and it made it look longer.”

“Ah, that’s nothing,” interpolated Gilbert vehemently. “Why, you ought to see the way they—”

“Yes, but you’re not Dorothy Knapp, you know,” Lyle reminded Angela.

“Here, get in,” commanded Mrs. Pennington, “and cover yourself with something.”

Angela reached for some of Lyle’s long silky fringe, which the latter hurriedly pulled out of her reach.

“Stingy!” remarked Angela contentedly. She spread a small lace handkerchief over her knees.

“Disgraceful,” sighed her mother patiently.

“Anyhow, it’s darned comfortable,” said Angela.

Lyle and her mother were going to a reception. Angela and brother Gilbert had devices of their own.

“Be back at twelve, Haines,” said Mrs. Pennington, getting out under an orange and white striped canopy.

“Never mind about us,” said Angela quickly. “We’ll get some one to bring us back. We’re going up to the Alabam, later.”

“Not too late,” warned her mother, adjusting the black lace more closely about her powdered throat.

“It’s never too late,” remarked Angela inaudibly.

Haines turned half around in time to see the long fringe on Lyle’s shawl go rippling over the ground like water and vanish across the alabaster door sill.

For a little while Haines was full of dreams. When he had deposited Angela and her brother at their destination, he turned his platinum headlights north and went to visit his old neighborhood, that knew him no more, and give his mother an outing in the car, a thing he did more or less regularly one or two evenings a week.

It wasn’t far from lower Fifth Avenue to upper Amsterdam, but they were worlds apart. He covered the distance in a few minutes, even in spite of the traffic signals, and passed quickly and imperceptibly, one might almost say painlessly, from electricity in amber globes to electricity in uncoated globes, and from that to gaslight in cast-iron jets; from telephones in inlaid cases to telephones upon the wall, and from that to no telephones at all (except at the corner drug store); from fifteen-story apartment houses full of California Japanese domestics to six-story flats full of radios; from head waiters to dumbwaiters; from studiously bad manners and Scheherazade and iced crèmes de menthe with emerald-green cherries to no manners whatever and comic strips and washing machines and Tom Mix. In other words, from lower Fifth to upper Amsterdam.

Haines’ mother and his sister Margie lived there, in a four-room flat on the third floor, with windows to the street. Broadway was a block to the west, but not the Broadway of the bright lights; up around this locality it consisted mainly of dressmaking establishments and insolent negro elevator operators.

Haines stopped in front of the house and gave the siren a long mournful blast. He sat looking up at the windows of his home. It was May and they were open as far as the sashes could be made to go, with a glimpse of the buff-colored ceiling through the neat curtains.

His mother came to the window and leaned her head out, and he waved to her and she waved back and called out: “I’ll be ready this minute.” Then she withdrew, and after a little while, he saw the lights go out, first in one room and then in the other. She was eagerly putting on her hat as she came out of the house and crossed the pavement to him. They kissed soundly. It may have been that they had no manners, but—

Haines looked at his mother, thinking of Diane Pennington with her emeralds and black lace scarf. Bessie Haines was plump, and she had a sweet face and her hair was still quite dark. She had buttoned shoes that came up over her insteps like gaiters, and she wore a black suit with a white pencil stripe running through it. He wanted her to have emeralds, to have riches, to have eternal youth. She was his mother. She moved in next to him and settled herself with a little sigh of physical content.

“Where’s Margie?” he asked. “No Margie? S’matter no Margie?” he asked.

“Not to-night,” she told him. “She went to the movies with that feller of hers.”

“Gaffney?”

“Him,” she assured him with a ponderous nod of her head.

“Why couldn’t they come with us?” he proceeded, slapping the door to. “Wass matter, car ain’t good enough for ’em?”

“Ah, you know them,” his mother reproved with a wave of her hand. “Don’t you think they’d rather be by themselves? Wait’ll the day you’re in love and then see.”

“Me?” he said dryly. “I am, I’m in love already.” Chartreuse-green fringe rippling over the ground like water...

“Go ’way,” remarked Bessie Haines skeptically. “What’re you handing me?”

“I’m handing you the truth,” he assured her with a whimsical curl of the lip.

“The truth isn’t in you,” she told him cozily.

“Where to?” he wanted to know. “I’m due back at twelve.”

Bessie Haines folded her hands regally across her lap. “Take me up by the Concourse,” she sighed blissfully. It was the quintessence of comfort, it was luxury, it was — it was ideal. He was the best chauffeur in the world, he was the handsomest chauffeur in the world. No one else could drive like he could drive. He was her son.

They followed the shore of the Hudson, slightly incurving at this point, dark with trees and gleaming with pearls. The water of the Hudson was smooth as lacquer, black as licorice.

“Need any money?” asked Haines suddenly.

“Not a blessed cent,” she said, patting his sleeve reassuringly. “I made out lovely this week.”

“It’s here if you want it,” he said, almost a little hurt. He thought of Mrs. Pennington’s puffy insteps crammed into gold brocade slippers with heels of sparkling jet. He slipped his wallet out of his pocket with one hand. It came up against the unyielding flat of her hand. “Now put it away, that’s a good boy.”

“Tell you what you do,” he offered. “Find out if Gaffney has any good tips this week.”

“Hosses?” said his mother hoarsely.

“That’s what they’re known as,” he assured her.

Gaffney, in other words, was a bookie who accepted sums on the races, frequently at unheard of odds. But, in addition, Gaffney was Margie Haines’ “company”; she lovingly referred to him as her “boy friend” and “Old Reliable.” So that poor Haines, being in the family, had more than once lost money on Gaffney’s hunches. And still he went ahead, incurably fascinated.

“You promised me,” said his mother, “to let those hosses alone.”

“Ah, now,” he said easily, “what else is there to do with it?”

“It’d be a whole lot better for you if you put it in a bank,” she replied.

“A bank, says you?” he echoed. “I’d just as soon bury it in the ground.” He stuffed a wad of crisp crinkly paper down the neck of her shirtwaist. “You tell Margie to give that to Gaffney next time she sees him,” he went on, “and tell him to put it where it’ll do the most good, hear? And don’t try to fool me, either of you.”

“Where did you get it?” his mother wanted to know.

“It’s the bonus I told you about. Mrs. Craig’s going to Europe and all her people get one.”

Bessie Haines inhaled dolorously. “It must be heaven to go to Yirrop,” she said.

“Never mind,” said the handsomest, the very best chauffeur in the world. “There’ll be emeralds and black lace and heels of shining jet...”