in the outer office forever reading last month's magazines. The
badge of fear brands the novice. Standing hat in hand, nervous,
apprehensive, gulpy, with the elevator door clanging behind him,
and the sacred inner door closed before him, he offers up a silent
and paradoxical "Thank heaven!" at the office girl's languid "Not
in," and dives into the friendly shelter of the next elevator
going down. When, at that same message, he can smile, as with a
certain grim agreeableness he says, "I'll wait," then has he
reached the seventh stage, and taken the orders of the regularly
ordained.

Jock McChesney had learned to judge an unknown prospective by
glancing at his hall rug and stenographer, which marks the fifth
stage. He had learned to regard office boys with something less
than white-hot hate. He had learned to let the other fellow do the
talking. He had learned to condense a written report into
twenty-five words. And he had learned that there was as much
difference between the profession of advertising as he had thought
of it and advertising as it really was, as there is between a
steam calliope and a cathedral pipe organ.

In the big office of the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company they
had begun to chuckle a bit over the McChesney solicitor's reports.
Those same reports indicated that young McChesney was beginning to
find the key to that maddening jumble of complexities known as
human nature. Big Sam Hupp, who was the pet caged copy-writing
genius of the place, used even to bring an occasional example of
Jock's business badinage into the Old Man's office, and the two
would grin in secret. As when they ran thus: