“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 red-headed 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 any one 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 to-night, 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?”