“About ten million other boys have.”

“How do you know they have? You’re not their father. Bay’s more sensitive than most. He’ll take hold in time.”

Louise Husack loved her son blindly, and believed this. Dave Husack loved his son, with reservations, and rejected this.

“Time! He’s been playing around for six years now.”

“He’s at the office every day.”

“Two hours for lunch. When I say I want him to go to Alaska for a few weeks, learn something about where all that dough comes from he spends on cars and boats and stuff, he says, No, thank you very much, as if I’d made a joke.”

“It’s so wild and uncomfortable.”

“I said how about running for Congress right here in this state, he could swing a lot of stuff for us down in Washington, Sid Kleet could set it all up for us, all the young fellas seem to be going in for politics lately. It used to be you had to be old, but look at Nixon, sharp as a gimlet, and that Neuberger, and kid governors all over the country like Michigan and New Jersey, and Dewey ran for President. President! Damn near made it, too, if it hadn’t been for that damned cockalorum. But no, none of that for our Bay, he’s more sensitive than most. Who’s going to take over when I’m gone!”

“Gone! Why, Dave Husack, you’re only fifty-eight.”

“Never mind about that. I was twenty-five when Bay was born. And that ended it.” Grimly.

Louise Husack’s eyes misted. “You know I wanted another child, Dave. I’d have given anything for a daughter. That’s why I was so happy to have Dina here, almost like a daughter to us. I’ve hoped and hoped that Bay would fall in love with her. I know she likes him.”

“She say so?”

“She said she thought he was a dear boy.”

“Uh-huh.”

Whenever Dave took these matters up with his son, Bay listened in a polite but detached way which infuriated the older man, whose boiling point was, at best, low. Dave, seated at his office desk at the end of the day, glared at his son standing there at the window staring out at a city that lay, a pink opal, encircled by the sparkle of water and mountains. Dave’s desk was the uncluttered and imposing barricade behind which the middle-aged successful American businessman defends himself. No papers, no pads, no baskets marked In and Out, not even the ugly base of a telephone. This hung suspended and out of sight below the desk’s surface. Here was the battlefield of a man who carried his schemes in his head, and his accomplished plans neatly filed elsewhere behind steel. Like Mort Caswell’s desk in the office building next door, like a hundred thousand desks presided over by the successful, this polished expanse bore a photograph in a foot-square handsome standing silver frame. And like the thousands of others, it pictured a black-velvet-and-pearls wife against whose knee a child leaned. Louise Husack with Bay at the age of six. When angry—as he now was—Dave had the habit of picking up this heavy frame in one great fist and slamming it down on the desk. This he now did. Dave would have been shocked if some one had told him why he did this. Again, as in the Mort Caswell office, the photograph was an office fixture like the glowing colors of the oriental rugs, the pictures of ships, the ship models on the carved oak mantel. A handsome old-fashioned room that resounded now to the boom of Dave’s voice.