He never took off his cap, a baggish, greenish plaid number with a big visor sliding down over his nose, and he kept a match behind his ear as a precaution against any delay in getting a smoke the instant the desire struck him. He wore a bow tie and a brick-colored Norfolk suit. He had one silk shirt which Papa said he never took off, but his vanity entitled him to snap his fingers at Papa’s other friend, Ed Hartwell, the finest dresser Papa ever saw.

When Papa first brought Mr. Taylor to the Lesterville rooms the children burst out laughing, for he was small and droll like a monkey. But like many a droll, twinkling-eyed little man with a funny, nasal, cracked voice and clownish ways, he was not funny at all. He had a way of eating the best candies Mr. Hartwell brought to them, of pinching their cheeks, pulling their curls, and ordering them about as if he was a teacher or a relation instead of just a fellow worker at the High Class Novelty Company.

“Mark my words, the novelty business is here to stay,” he said, nodding wisely. “You wouldn’t catch Charlie Taylor traipsing around the country selling tombs like you did, Willard. Stay in an up-and-coming boomtown like Lesterville and get in the novelty business; that’s my advice to anybody.”

Papa agreed heartily, in fact too heartily, that there was a lot in this clever statement. He didn’t intend to stay in Lesterville all his life, but it was a relief not to be kicked around by a cheap outfit like the Mausoleum Company, run by a big crook like Colgate Custer who, it was said, had Negro blood the way all the Southerners did; you could tell by the fingernails. Naturally, a high-spirited fellow who’d been all over, as Papa had, knew what it was all about, missed the cosmopolitan advantages of the road. The latest songs, for instance, oyster cocktails—try and get one in Lesterville!—lobster Newburgh, peach melba. Still, they weren’t everything. At the High Class Novelty Company a man was treated like a gentleman, even though he didn’t get the jack you got on the road. But you got a chance to know everyday folks and there wasn’t a finer man in the business than Troyan, a foreigner, yes, a Bohemian, but the Bohemians were the finest class of people when you got to know them. They didn’t try to catch you up on expense accounts; they knew how to appreciate a first-class salesman. Mr. Taylor silently twigged his nose during Papa’s praise of the boss, venturing no answer but, “A fellow’s got to work for somebody, what the hell? It’s either that or starve, what the hell?”

Marcia and Lena resented Mr. Taylor, for either he interfered with their games by his presence or made their evenings lonely by keeping Papa out, usually, it would appear, at Stein’s Saloon over by the steel mills.

Papa defended his new friend by saying he was a man who had a lot of trouble—wife ran away with another man, leaving him with a little boy, of whom Mr. Taylor didn’t see much. He had efficiently deposited him on his erring wife’s mother who had been made to feel it her duty to do penance for the scandal in the family. Now he sat on the arm of the battered Morris chair, whirling his watch chain around, whistling out of tune, spoiling Papa’s song. Marcia sat on the floor, legs crossed, writing in her composition book, and Lena played solitaire, waiting for their turn to sing with Papa.