“You see how quick you can wash Junior and put him into his other suit,” he said. “I will take him back to school in the carriage. I intend to have it understood by the Superintendent and the teachers that the son of the heaviest tax payer and the president of the School Board has some rights!” An hour later the door of Room Five was suddenly flung wide and on the threshold stood the imposing figure of the banker, beside him his son, clothed in his second best suit, his composure quite recovered. The boy marched in and found a vacant seat among his classmates. Miss Mehitable Ashcroft dropped the book she was holding and stared at the banker. A whiteness slowly overspread her face. She had been teaching school so many years that she should have been fortified for anything; but she was not. As she grew older the nerve strain of each day of noise and confusion bit deeper into her physical strength. She lifted a bewildered hand to smooth down the graying hair that dipped over her ears and lifted to a meagre coil at the back, and then her hands fell and began fingering the folds of a black calico skirt liberally sprinkled with white huckleberries. Suddenly she found her voice and quaveringly she said: “Good morning, Mr. Moreland. We are so glad to see you. Won’t you have a chair?” Mr. Moreland was a tall man with a heavy frame. The lines in his face at that minute were not pleasant. He had eyes of intense vision; in anger they were ugly eyes. They went flashing over the room from pupil to pupil until they found and settled on the white face of Jason Peters. There was something of the look on Jason’s face that was on the face of the banker as their eyes met and clashed; a hate of arrogant fearlessness. Martin Moreland lifted a shaking finger. “I have come,” he said, “to accompany Jason Peters to the office of the Superintendent. I will have it understood that while I am the president of the School Board and while I am the heaviest tax payer in this town, the sons of washerwomen, or the sons of any one else, will not undertake, in a cowardly and underhand manner, to abuse my son.” Martin Moreland was an imposing figure; he knew better than any one else exactly how imposing. He never saw himself in a mirror or reflected on a plate-glass window he was passing, without making sure that the imposing part of him was well in evidence. He was at his tallest, his coldest, his most arresting moment as he rolled out “my son” at the awed children, pausing to allow his words to sink deeply, and well gratified to note that they did.