CHAPTER VIII
"Hello, Jackie!"
Such familiarity of address on the part of Wright's head draughtsman had long annoyed Hart, but this morning, instead of nodding curtly, he replied briskly,—
"Hello, Cookie!"
The draughtsman winked at his neighbor and thrust out an elbow at a derisive angle, as he bent himself over the linen plan he was carefully inking in. The man next to him snickered, and the stenographer just outside the door smiled. An office joke was in the air.
"Mr. Hart looks as though somethin' good had happened to him," the stenographer remarked in a mincing tone. "Perhaps some more of his folks have died and remembered him in their wills."
But Cook dismissed the subject by calling out to one of the men, "Say, Ed, come over here and tell me what you were trying to do with this old hencoop."
He might take privileges with the august F. Jackson Hart, whose foreign training had rather oppressed the office force at times, but he would not allow Gracie Bellows, the stenographer, to "mix" in his joke.
Cook was a spare, black-haired little man, with beady brown eyes, like a squirrel's. He was a pure product of Wright's Chicago office, having worked his way from a boy's position to the practical headship of the force. Although he permitted himself his little fling at Hart, he was really the young architect's warmest admirer, approving even those magnificent palaces of the French Renaissance type which the Beaux Arts man put forth during the first months of his connection with the firm.
The little draughtsman, who was as sharp as one of his own India ink lines, could see that Hart had something on his mind this morning, and he was curious, in all friendliness, to find out what it was. But Jackson did not emerge from his little box of an office for several hours. Then he sauntered by Cook's table, pausing to look out of the window while he abstractedly lighted a cigarette. Presently the stenographer came up to him and said:—