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.
"Well, what's the pose?" she asked, briskly, of Teddy, beginning to take off her jacket. "You ought to be model to a sculptor."
"Jen," he whispered, hoarsely, before she could join the others, "pa's fired."
To take this information in, Jennie paused with her arms still outstretched in the act of taking off her jacket.
"Do you mean they don't want him any more at Collingham & Law's?"
"That's the right number."
"But—but what are we going to do?"