Tom Carlin’s foot did not touch the button. Horns honked and cars backed out of symmetrical lines as an attendant directed parking-lot traffic. Silence, brittle and strange, lingered in the Carlin sedan. “I—I thought you’d be glad,” Joe said uncertainly. “Is that your reason for telling me?” The boy was startled. “Don’t you want me?” Tom Carlin stepped on the button. The attendant waved an arm and he shook his head. The motor idled, warming. “When you told me you wanted to be an actor,” the man said as though he debated each word, “I let you have your fling. Was there anything else for me to do? I was afraid of making you a round peg in a square hole. You failed as an actor. But you still stayed in show business and turned to production. That’s the rub, Joe.” “What?” Joe demanded. “Let me put it this way: After you’d failed—don’t get the idea I’m rubbing that in; as I told you, I made a miserable failure of my first job—had you come to me after that first failure, I’d have welcomed you instantly. A lot of persons change their first desires. I couldn’t ask for a better man than Fairchild; he started out to be a mechanical engineer. But you made show business both your first and second choices. You’ve made the store a very bad third choice. You leave the impression that you’re coming to me now because there’s no place else to go. That doesn’t set so well, Joe.” Joe’s nerves were raw from a day of chafing, and this disappointment was crushing. “You mean I needn’t come around?” “I didn’t say that. I’ll have to think this over. I’m trying to see the situation from your angle as well as from my own. What will it benefit you in the long run to use the business as a door of escape? If you come to the store as a place of last resort, you’re still a round peg in a square hole. It might be better for you to get a job on your own and try yourself out in somebody else’s business. For a while, anyway.” Disappointment and raw nerves united to make the boy stiff with anger. “All right, Dad, if that’s how you want it.” “That isn’t how I want it,” Tom Carlin said. “That’s how it seems to be.” They said little more to each other on the ride out to the Northend. But they were talking as they entered the house, and talk was a lively stream around the dinner table. Front, Joe thought, wasn’t confined to show business; you could wear a front at home. The meal over, he found that morning’s _Journal_ and went to his room.