"We’ll meet it, Jo," she said, quietly. "We’ve been through other things. I’ve saved a little money ahead—nearly a hundred dollars. Don’t feel badly. I’m glad you’re out of Collingham & Law’s, where you’ve said yourself that your desk was in a draught. You’ll get another job, with bigger pay, and perhaps"—she sprang to the great glorious hope she was always cherishing—"and perhaps Teddy will earn more money and be a great success." "_Hel_-lo, ma!" Teddy himself was swinging down the room, Pansy capering round him with her silvery bark. Having tossed his cap on the sofa, he caught his mother in a bearish hug. Fresh from his bath, gleaming, ruddy, clear-eyed, stocky rather than short, he was a Herculean cub, the makings of a man, but as yet with no soul beyond play. No one had ever seen him serious. It was a drawback to him at Collingham & Law’s, where he skylarked his way through everything. "You must knock the song-and-dance out of that young blood," was Mr. Bickley’s report on him, "or he’ll never earn his pay." Before his mother could say anything he was tickling her under the chin with little "clks!" of the tongue, Pansy assisting by springing halfway to his shoulder. The sport ended, he held her out at his strong arm’s length, laughing down into her eyes. "Good old ma!—the best ever! What have you got for supper?" She told him, as nearly as possible as if nothing else was on her mind. Then she added: "You’ve got to know, Teddy darling. They’ve discharged your father from Collingham & Law’s." Confusedly, Teddy Follett knew he had received a summons, the call to be a man. Hitherto he had been a boy; he had thought himself a boy; he had called himself a boy. Even in the navy he had been with boys who were treated as boys. The pang of agony he felt now was that he was a boy still—with a man’s part to play. He did his best to play it on the instant. "Oh, is he? Then that’s all right. I’ll be making more money soon and be able to swing the whole thing." Gussie was here the discordant element. "You’ve got to make it pretty quick, then, and be smarter than you’ve ever been before." He turned away from the group in which his mother watched him with adoring eyes while his father stood with gaze cast down like a criminal. "I’m sorry to put the burden on you at your age, my boy," he said, brokenly, "but perhaps I may get another job, after all, and one that’ll pay better." Teddy didn’t hear this, not that he was so far away, but because he was listening to that call which seemed so impossible to respond to. He would _have_ to be a man; he would _have_ to earn big money, and at present he didn’t see how. Fifty bucks a week, he was saying to himself, was hardly enough to run the family, and he had only eighteen! He was standing with his back to them all, his hands in his pockets, when the front door opened again. Jennie came in all aglow and abloom after her walk from the street cars.