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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Emma McChesney & Co., by Edna Ferber
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Emma McChesney & Co.
+
+Author: Edna Ferber
+
+Posting Date: August 30, 2008 [EBook #453]
+Release Date: March, 1996
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EMMA MCCHESNEY & CO. ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Charles Keller.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+EMMA McCHESNEY & CO.
+
+
+by
+
+Edna Ferber
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+   I.  BROADWAY TO BUENOS AIRES
+  II.  THANKS TO MISS MORRISSEY
+ III.  A CLOSER CORPORATION
+  IV.  BLUE SERGE
+   V.  "HOOPS, MY DEAR!"
+  VI.  SISTERS UNDER THEIR SKIN
+ VII.  AN ETUDE FOR EMMA
+
+
+
+
+
+EMMA McCHESNEY & CO.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+BROADWAY TO BUENOS AIRES
+
+The door marked "MRS. MCCHESNEY" was closed.  T. A. Buck, president of
+the Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, coming gaily down the hall,
+stopped before it, dismayed, as one who, with a spicy bit of news at
+his tongue's end, is met with rebuff before the first syllable is
+voiced.  That closed door meant:  "Busy. Keep out."
+
+"She'll be reading a letter," T. A. Buck told himself grimly. Then he
+turned the knob and entered his partner's office.
+
+Mrs. Emma McChesney was reading a letter.  More than that, she was
+poring over it so that, at the interruption, she glanced up in a
+maddeningly half-cocked manner which conveyed the impression that,
+while her physical eye beheld the intruder, her mental eye was still on
+the letter.
+
+"I knew it," said T. A. Buck morosely.
+
+Emma McChesney put down the letter and smiled.
+
+"Sit down--now that you're in.  And if you expect me to say, 'Knew
+what?' you're doomed to disappointment."
+
+T. A. Buck remained standing, both gloved hands clasping his walking
+stick on which he leaned.
+
+"Every time I come into this office, you're reading the latest scrawl
+from your son.  One would think Jock's letters were deathless
+masterpieces.  I believe you read them at half-hour intervals all week,
+and on Sunday get 'em all out and play solitaire with them."
+
+Emma McChesney's smile widened frankly to a grin.
+
+"You make me feel like a cash-girl who's been caught flirting with the
+elevator starter.  Have I been neglecting business?"
+
+"Business?  No; you've been neglecting me!"
+
+"Now, T. A., you've just come from the tailor's, and I suppose it
+didn't fit in the back."
+
+"It isn't that," interrupted Buck, "and you know it. Look here!  That
+day Jock went away and we came back to the office, and you said----"
+
+"I know I said it, T. A., but don't remind me of it.  That wasn't a
+fair test.  I had just seen Jock leave me to take his own place in the
+world.  You know that my day began and ended with him.  He was my
+reason for everything.  When I saw him off for Chicago that day, and
+knew he was going there to stay, it seemed a million miles from New
+York.  I was blue and lonely and heart-sick.  If the office-boy had
+thrown a kind word to me I'd have broken down and wept on his shoulder."
+
+Buck, still standing, looked down between narrowed lids at his business
+partner.
+
+"Emma McChesney," he said steadily, "do you mean that?"
+
+Mrs. McChesney, the straightforward, looked up, looked down, fiddled
+with the letter in her hand.
+
+"Well--practically yes--that is--I thought, now that you're going to
+the mountains for a month, it might give me a chance to think--to----"
+
+"And d'you know what I'll do meanwhile, out of revenge on the sex?
+I've just ordered three suits of white flannel, and I shall break every
+feminine heart in the camp, regardless-- Oh, say, that's what I came in
+to tell you!  Guess whom I saw at the tailor's?"
+
+"Well, Mr. Bones, whom did you, and so forth?"
+
+"Fat Ed Meyers.  I just glimpsed him in one of the fitting-rooms.  And
+they were draping him in white."
+
+Emma McChesney sat up with a jerk.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Sure?  There's only one figure like that.  He had the thing on and was
+surveying himself in the mirror--or as much of himself as could be seen
+in one ordinary mirror.  In that white suit, with his red face above
+it, he looked like those pictures you see labeled, 'Sunrise on
+Snow-covered Mountain.'"
+
+"Did he see----"
+
+"He dodged when he saw me.  Actually!  At least, he seems to have the
+decency to be ashamed of the deal he gave us when he left us flat in
+the thick of his Middle Western trip and went back to the Sans-Silk
+Skirt Company.  I wanted him to know I had seen him.  As  I passed, I
+said, 'You'll mow 'em down in those clothes, Meyers.'"  Buck sat down
+in his leisurely fashion, and laughed his low, pleasant laugh.  "Can't
+you see him, Emma, at the seashore?"
+
+But something in Emma McChesney's eyes, and something in her set,
+unsmiling face, told him that she was not seeing seashores.  She was
+staring straight at him, straight through him, miles beyond him.  There
+was about her that tense, electric, breathless air of complete
+detachment, which always enveloped her when her lightning mind was
+leaping ahead to a goal unguessed by the slower thinking.
+
+"What's your tailor's name?"
+
+"Name?  Trotter.  Why?"
+
+Emma McChesney had the telephone operator before he could finish.
+
+"Get me Trotter, the tailor, T-r-o-double-t-e-r.  Say I want to speak
+to the tailor who fits Mr. Ed Meyers, of the Sans-Silk Skirt Company."
+
+T. A. Buck leaned forward, mouth open, eyes wide.  "Well, what in the
+name of----"
+
+"I'll let you know in a minute.  Maybe I'm wrong.  It's just one of my
+hunches.  But for  ten years I sold Featherlooms through the same
+territory that Ed Meyers was covering for the Sans-Silk Skirt people.
+It didn't take me ten years to learn that Fat Ed hadn't the decency to
+be ashamed of any deal he turned, no matter how raw.  And let me tell
+you, T. A.:  If he dodged when he saw you it wasn't because he was
+ashamed of having played us low-down.  He was contemplating playing
+lower-down.  Of course, I may be----"
+
+She picked up the receiver in answer to the bell.  Then, sweetly, her
+calm eyes smiling into Buck's puzzled ones:
+
+"Hello!  Is this Mr. Meyers' tailor?  I'm to ask if you are sure that
+the grade he selected is the proper weight for the tropics. What?  Oh,
+you say you assured him it was the weight of flannel you always advise
+for South America.  And you said they'd be ready when?  Next week?
+Thank you."
+
+She hung up the receiver.  The pupils of her eyes were dilated. Her
+cheeks were very pink as always under excitement.  She stood up, her
+breath coming rather quickly.
+
+"Hurray for the hunch!  It holds.  Fat Ed Meyers is going down to South
+America for the Sans-Silk Company.  It's what I've been planning to do
+for the last six months.  You remember I spoke of it.  You pooh-poohed
+the idea.  It means hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Sans-Silk
+people if they get it.  But they won't get it."
+
+T. A. Buck stood up suddenly.
+
+"Look here, Emma!  If you're----"
+
+"I certainly am.  Nothing can stop me.  The skirt business has
+been--well, you know what it's been for the last two years.  The South
+American boats sail twice a month.  Fat Ed Meyers' clothes are promised
+for next week.  That means he isn't sailing until week after next.  But
+the next boat sails in three days."  She picked up a piece of paper
+from her desk and tossed it into Buck's hand.  "That's the letter I was
+reading when you came in. No; don't read it.  Let me tell you instead."
+
+Buck threw cane, hat, gloves, and letter on the broad desk, thrust his
+hands into his pockets, and prepared for argument. But he got only as
+far as:  "But I won't allow it!  You couldn't get away in three days,
+at any rate.  And at the end of two weeks you'll have come to your
+senses, and besides----"
+
+"T. A., I don't mean to be rude.  But here are your hat and stick and
+gloves.  It's going to take me just forty-eight hours to mobilize."
+
+"But, Emma, even if you do get in ahead of Meyers, it's an insane idea.
+A woman can't go down there alone.  It isn't safe. It's bad enough for
+a man to tackle it.  Besides, we're holding our own."
+
+"That's just it.  When a doctor issues a bulletin to the effect that
+the patient is holding his own, you may have noticed that the relatives
+always begin to gather."
+
+"It's a bubble, this South American idea.  Oshkosh and Southport and
+Altoona money has always been good enough for us.  If we can keep that
+trade, we ought to be thankful."
+
+Emma McChesney pushed her hair back from her forehead with one gesture
+and patted it into place with another.  Those two gestures, to one who
+knew her, meant loss of composure for one instant, followed by the
+quick regaining of it the next.
+
+"Let's not argue about it now.  Suppose we wait until to-morrow--when
+it's too late.  I am thankful for the trade we've got.  But I don't
+want to be narrow about it.  My thanking capacity is such that I can
+stretch it out to cover some things we haven't got yet.  I've been
+reading up on South America."
+
+"Reading!" put in Buck hotly.  "What actual first-hand information can
+you get about a country from books?"
+
+"Well, then, I haven't only been reading.  I've been talking to
+everyone I could lay my hands on who has been down there and who knows.
+Those South American women love dress--especially the Argentines.  And
+do you know what they've been wearing? Petticoats made in England!  You
+know what that means.  An English woman chooses a petticoat like she
+does a husband--for life.  It isn't only a garment.  It's a shelter.
+It's built like a tent.  If once I can introduce the T. A. Buck
+Featherloom petticoat and knickerbocker into sunny South America,
+they'll use those English and German petticoats for linoleum
+floor-coverings. Heaven knows they'll fit the floor better than the
+human form!"
+
+But Buck was unsmiling.  The muscles of his jaw were tense.
+
+"I won't let you go.  Understand that!  I won't allow it!"
+
+"Tut, tut, T. A.!  What is this?  Cave-man stuff?"
+
+"Emma, I tell you it's dangerous.  It isn't worth the risk, no matter
+what it brings us."
+
+Emma McChesney struck an attitude, hand on heart.  "'Heaven will
+protect the working girrul,'" she sang.
+
+Buck grabbed his hat.
+
+"I'm going to wire Jock."
+
+"All right!  That'll save me fifty cents.  Do you know what he'll wire
+back?  'Go to it.  Get the tango on its native tairn'--or words to that
+effect."
+
+"Emma, use a little logic and common sense!"
+
+There was a note in Buck's voice that brought a quick response from
+Mrs. McChesney.  She dropped her little air of gayety.  The pain in his
+voice, and the hurt in his eyes, and the pleading in his whole attitude
+banished the smile from her face.  It had not been much of a smile,
+anyway.  T. A. knew her genuine smiles well enough to recognize a
+counterfeit at sight.  And Emma McChesney knew that he knew.  She came
+over and laid a hand lightly on his arm.
+
+"T. A., I don't know anything about logic.    It is a hot-house plant.
+But common sense is a field flower, and I've gathered whole bunches of
+it in my years of business experience.  I'm not going down to South
+America for a lark.  I'm going because the time is ripe to go.  I'm
+going because the future of our business needs it.  I'm going because
+it's a job to be handled by the most experienced salesman on our staff.
+And I'm just that.  I say it because it's true.  Your father, T. A.,
+used to see things straighter and farther than any business man I ever
+knew.  Since his death made me a partner in this firm, I find myself,
+when I'm troubled or puzzled, trying to see a situation as he'd see it
+if he were alive.  It's like having an expert stand back of you in a
+game of cards, showing you the next move.  That's the way I'm playing
+this hand.  And I think we're going to take most of the tricks away
+from Fat Ed Meyers."
+
+T. A. Buck's eyes traveled from Emma McChesney's earnest, glowing face
+to the hand that rested on his arm.  He reached over and gently covered
+that hand with his own.
+
+"I suppose you must be right, little woman.  You always are. Dad was
+the founder of this business.  It was the pride of his life.  That
+word 'founder' has two meanings.  I never want to be responsible for
+its second meaning in connection with this concern."
+
+"You never will be, T. A."
+
+"Not with you at the helm." He smiled rather sadly.  "I'm a good,
+ordinary, common seaman.  But you've got imagination, and foresight,
+and nerve, and daring, and that's the stuff that admirals are made of."
+
+"Bless you, T. A.!  I knew you'd see the thing as I do after the first
+shock was over.  It has always been nip and tuck between the Sans-Silk
+Company and us.  You gave me the hint that showed me their plans.  Now
+help me follow it up."
+
+Buck picked up his hat, squared his shoulders and fumbled with his
+gloves like a bashful schoolboy.
+
+"You--you couldn't kill two birds with one stone on this trip, could
+you, Mrs. Mack?"
+
+Mrs. McChesney, back at her desk again, threw him an inquiring glance
+over her shoulder.
+
+"You might make it a combination honeymoon and Featherloom expedition."
+
+"T. A. Buck!" exclaimed Emma McChesney.  Then, as Buck dodged for the
+door:  "Just for that, I'm going to break this to you. You know that I
+intended to handle the Middle Western territory for one trip, or until
+we could get a man to take Fat Ed Meyers' place."
+
+"Well?" said Buck apprehensively.
+
+"I leave in three days.  Goodness knows how long I'll be gone! A
+business deal down there is a ceremony.  And--you won't need any
+white-flannel clothes in Rock Island, Illinois."
+
+Buck, aghast, faced her from the doorway.
+
+"You mean, I----"
+
+"Just that," smiled Emma McChesney pleasantly.  And pressed the button
+that summoned the stenographer.
+
+In the next forty-eight hours, Mrs. McChesney performed a series of
+mental and physical calisthenics that would have landed an ordinary
+woman in a sanatorium.  She cleaned up with the thoroughness and
+dispatch of a housewife who, before going to the seashore, forgets not
+instructions to the iceman, the milkman, the janitor, and the maid.
+She surveyed her territory, behind and before, as a general studies
+troops and countryside before going into battle; she foresaw factory
+emergencies, dictated office  policies, made sure of staff organization
+like the business woman she was.  Out in the stock-room, under her
+supervision, there was scientifically packed into sample-trunks and
+cases a line of Featherloom skirts and knickers calculated to dazzle
+Brazil and entrance Argentina.  And into her own personal trunk there
+went a wardrobe, each article of which was a garment with a purpose.
+Emma McChesney knew the value of a smartly tailored suit in a business
+argument.
+
+T. A. Buck canceled his order at the tailor's, made up his own line for
+the Middle West, and prepared to storm that prosperous and important
+territory for the first time in his business career.
+
+The South American boat sailed Saturday afternoon.  Saturday morning
+found the two partners deep in one of those condensed, last-minute
+discussions.  Mrs. McChesney opened a desk drawer, took out a
+leather-covered pocket notebook, and handed it to Buck.  A tiny smile
+quivered about her lips.  Buck took it, mystified.
+
+"Your last diary?"
+
+"Something much more important.  I call it  'The Salesman's Who's Who.'
+Read it as you ought your Bible."
+
+"But what?"  Buck turned the pages wonderingly.  He glanced at a
+paragraph, frowned, read it aloud, slowly.
+
+
+"Des Moines, Iowa, Klein & Company.  Miss Ella Sweeney, skirt buyer.
+Old girl.  Skittish.  Wants to be entertained.  Take her to dinner and
+the theater."
+
+
+He looked up, dazed.  "Good Lord, what is this?  A joke?"
+
+"Wait until you see Ella; you won't think it's a joke.  She'll buy only
+your smoothest numbers, ask sixty days' dating, and expect you to
+entertain her as you would your rich aunt."
+
+Buck returned to the little book dazedly.  He flipped another
+leaf--another.  Then he read in a stunned sort of voice:
+
+
+"Sam Bloom, Paris Emporium, Duluth.  See Sadie."
+
+
+He closed the book.  "Say, see here, Emma, do you mean to----"
+
+"Sam is the manager," interrupted Mrs. McChesney pleasantly, "and he
+thinks he does the  buying, but the brains of that business is a little
+girl named Sadie Harris.  She's a wonder. Five years from now, if she
+doesn't marry Sam, she'll be one of those ten-thousand-a-year foreign
+buyers.  Play your samples up to Sammy, but quote your prices down to
+Sadie.  Read the next one, T. A."
+
+Buck read on, his tone lifeless:
+
+
+"Miss Sharp.  Berg Brothers, Omaha.  Strictly business.  Known among
+the trade as the human cactus.  Canceled a ten-thousand-dollar order
+once because the grateful salesman called her 'girlie.'  Stick to
+skirts."
+
+
+Buck slapped the book smartly against the palm of his hand.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that you made this book out for me?  Do you
+mean to say that I have to cram on this like a kid studying for exams?
+That I'll have to cater to the personality of the person I'm selling
+to?  Why--it's--it's----"
+
+Emma McChesney nodded calmly.
+
+"I don't know how this trip of yours is going to affect the firm's
+business, T. A.  But it's going to be a liberal education for you.
+You'll  find that you'll need that little book a good many times before
+you're through.  And while you're following its advice, do this: forget
+that your name is Buck, except for business purposes; forget that your
+family has always lived in a brownstone mausoleum in Seventy-second
+street; forget that you like your chops done just so, and your wine at
+such-and-such a temperature; get close to your trade.  They're an
+awfully human lot, those Middle Western buyers.  Don't chuck them under
+the chin, but smile on 'em.  And you've got a lovely smile, T. A."
+
+Buck looked up from the little leather book.  And, as he gazed at Emma
+McChesney, the smile appeared and justified its praise.
+
+"I'll have this to comfort me, anyway, Emma.  I'll know that while I'm
+smirking on the sprightly Miss Sweeney, your face will be undergoing
+various agonizing twists in the effort to make American prices
+understood by an Argentine who can't speak anything but Spanish."
+
+"Maybe I am short on Spanish, but I'm long on Featherlooms.  I may not
+know a senora from a chili con carne, but I know Featherlooms from the
+waistband to the hem."  She leaned forward, dimpling like fourteen
+instead of forty.  "And you've noticed--haven't you, T. A.?--that I've
+got an expressive countenance."
+
+Buck leaned forward, too.  His smile was almost gone.
+
+"I've noticed a lot of things, Emma McChesney.  And if you persist in
+deviling me for one more minute, I'm going to mention a few."
+
+Emma McChesney surveyed her cleared desk, locked the top drawer with a
+snap, and stood up.
+
+"If you do I'll miss my boat.  Just time to make Brooklyn. Suppose you
+write 'em."
+
+That Ed Meyers might know nothing of her sudden plans, she had kept the
+trip secret.  Besides Buck and the office staff, her son Jock was the
+only one who knew.  But she found her cabin stocked like a prima
+donna's on a farewell tour.  There were boxes of flowers, a package of
+books, baskets of fruit, piles of magazines, even a neat little sheaf
+of telegrams, one from the faithful bookkeeper, one from the workroom
+foreman, two from salesmen long in the firm's employ, two from Jock in
+Chicago. She read them, her face glowing.  He and Buck had vied with
+each other in supplying her with luxuries that would make pleasanter
+the twenty-three days of her voyage.
+
+She looked about the snug cabin, her eyes suddenly misty.  Buck poked
+his head in at the door.
+
+"Come on up on deck, Emma; I've only a few minutes left."
+
+She snatched a pink rose from the box, and together they went on deck.
+
+"Just ten minutes," said Buck.  He was looking down at her. "Remember,
+Emma, nothing that concerns the firm's business, however big, is half
+as important as the things that concern you personally, however small.
+I realize what this trip will mean to us, if it pans, and if you can
+beat Meyers to it.  But if anything should happen to you, why----"
+
+"Nothing's going to happen, T. A., except that I'll probably come home
+with my complexion ruined.  I'll feel a great deal more at home talking
+pidgin-English to Senor Alvarez in Buenos Aires than you will talking
+Featherlooms to Miss Skirt-Buyer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  But remember
+this, T. A.:  When you get to know--really to know--the Sadie Harrises
+and the Sammy Blochs and the  Ella Sweeneys of this world, you've
+learned just about all there is to know about human beings.  Quick--the
+gangplank! Goodby, T. A."
+
+The dock reached, he gazed up at her as she leaned far over the
+railing.  He made a megaphone of his hands.
+
+"I feel like an old maid who's staying home with her knitting," he
+called.
+
+The boat began to move.  Emma McChesney passed a quick hand over her
+eyes.
+
+"Don't drop any stitches, T. A."  With unerring aim she flung the big
+pink rose straight at him.
+
+She went about arranging her affairs on the boat like the business
+woman that she was.  First she made her cabin shipshape. She placed
+nearest at hand the books on South America, and the Spanish-American
+pocket interpreter.  She located her deck chair, and her seat in the
+dining-room.  Then, quietly, unobtrusively, and guided by those years
+spent in meeting men and women face to face in business, she took
+thorough, conscientious mental stock of those others who were to be her
+fellow travelers for twenty-three days.
+
+For the most part, the first-class passengers were men.  There were
+American business men--salesmen, some of them, promoters others, or
+representatives of big syndicates shrewd, alert, well dressed, smooth
+shaven.  Emma McChesney knew that she would gain valuable information
+from many of them before the trip was over. She sighed a little
+regretfully as she thought of those smoking-room talks--those intimate,
+tobacco-mellowed business talks from which she would be barred by her
+sex.
+
+There were two engineers, one British, one American, both very
+intelligent-looking, both inclined to taciturnity, as is often the case
+in men of their profession.  They walked a good deal, and smoked
+nut-brown, evil-smelling pipes, and stared unblinkingly across the
+water.
+
+There were Argentines--whole families of them--Brazilians, too. The
+fat, bejeweled Brazilian men eyed Emma McChesney with open approval,
+even talked to her, leering objectionably.  Emma McChesney refused to
+be annoyed.  Her ten years on the road served her in good stead now.
+
+But most absorbing of all to Emma McChesney, watching quietly over her
+book or magazine, was a tall, erect, white-bearded Argentine who, with
+his family, occupied chairs near hers.  His name had struck her with
+the sound of familiarity when she read it on the passenger list.  She
+had asked the deck-steward to point out the name's owner.  "Pages," she
+repeated to herself, worriedly, "Pages?  P----"  Suddenly she knew.
+Pages y Hernandez, the owner of the great Buenos Aires shop--a shop
+finer than those of Paris.  And this was Pages!  All the Featherloom
+instinct in Emma McChesney came to the surface and stayed there,
+seething.
+
+That was the morning of the second day out.  By afternoon, she had
+bribed and maneuvered so that her deck chair was next that of the
+Pages-family flock of chairs.  Senor Pages reminded her of one of those
+dashing, white-haired, distinguished-looking men whose likeness graces
+the cover of a box of your favorite cigars.
+
+General Something-or-other-ending-in-z he should have been, with a
+revolutionary background.  He dressed somberly in black, like most of
+the other Argentine men on board.  There was Senora Pages, very fat,
+very indolent, very blank, much given to pink satin and diamonds at
+dinner.  Senorita Pages, over-powdered, overfrizzed, marvelously
+gowned, with overplumpness just a few years away, sat quietly by Senora
+Pages' side, but her darting, flashing, restless eyes were never still.
+The son (Emma heard them call him Pepe) was barely eighteen, she
+thought, but quite a man of the world, with his cigarettes, his drinks,
+his bold eyes. She looked at his sallow, pimpled skin, his lean, brown
+hands, his lack-luster eyes, and she thought of Jock and was happy.
+
+Mrs. McChesney knew that she might visit the magnificent Buenos Aires
+shop of Pages y Hernandez day after day for months without ever
+obtaining a glimpse of either Pages or Hernandez.  And here was Senor
+Pages, so near that she could reach out and touch him from her deck
+chair.  Here was opportunity!  A caller who had never been obliged to
+knock twice at Emma McChesney's door.
+
+Her methods were so simple that she herself smiled at them.  She donned
+her choicest suit of white serge that she had been saving for shore
+wear.  Its skirt had been cut by the very newest trick. Its coat was
+the kind to make you go home and get out your own white serge and gaze
+at it with loathing.  Senorita Pages' eyes leaped to that suit as iron
+leaps to the magnet.  Emma McChesney, passing her deck chair, detached
+the eyes with a neat smile.  Why hadn't she spent six months neglecting
+Skirts for Spanish? she asked herself, groaning.  As she approached her
+own deck chair again she risked a bright, "Good morning."  Her heart
+bounded, stood still, bounded again, as from the lips of the assembled
+Pages there issued a combined, courteous, perfectly good American,
+"Good morning!"
+
+"You speak English!" Emma McChesney's tone expressed flattery and
+surprise.
+
+Pages pere made answer.
+
+"Ah, yes, it is necessary.  There are many English in Argentina."
+
+A sigh--a fluttering, tremulous sigh of perfect peace and
+happiness--welled up from Emma McChesney's heart and escaped through
+her smiling lips.
+
+By noon, Senorita Pages had tried on the fascinating coat and secured
+the address of its builder.  By afternoon, Emma McChesney was showing
+the newest embroidery stitch to the slow but docile Senora Pages.  Next
+morning she was playing shuffleboard with the elegant, indolent Pepe,
+and talking North American football and baseball to him.  She had not
+been Jock McChesney's mother all those years for nothing.  She could
+discuss sports with the best of them.  Young Pages was avidly
+interested.  Outdoor sports had become the recent fashion among the
+rich young Argentines.
+
+The problem of papa Pages was not so easy.  Emma McChesney approached
+her subject warily, skirting the bypaths of politics, war, climate,
+customs--to business.  Business!
+
+"But a lady as charming as you can understand nothing of business,"
+said Senor Pages.  "Business is for your militant sisters."
+
+"But we American women do understand business.  Many--many charming
+American women are in business."
+
+Senor Pages turned his fine eyes upon her.  She had talked most
+interestingly, this pretty American woman.
+
+"Perhaps--but pardon me if I think not.  A woman cannot be really
+charming and also capable in business."
+
+Emma McChesney dimpled becomingly.
+
+"But I know a woman who is as--well, as charming as you say I am.
+Still, she is known  as a capable, successful business woman.  She'll
+be in Buenos Aires when I am."
+
+Senor Pages shook an unbelieving head.  Emma McChesney leaned forward.
+
+"Will you let me bring her in to meet you, just to prove my point?"
+
+"She must be as charming as you are."  His Argentine betting
+proclivities rose.  "Here; we shall make a wager!"  He took a card from
+his pocket, scribbled on it, handed it to Emma McChesney.  "You will
+please present that to my secretary, who will conduct you immediately
+to my office.  We will pretend it is a friendly call.  Your friend need
+not know.  If I lose----"
+
+"If you lose, you must promise to let her show you her sample line."
+
+"But, dear madam, I do no buying."
+
+"Then you must introduce her favorably to the department buyer of her
+sort of goods."
+
+"But if I win?" persisted Senor Pages.
+
+"If she isn't as charming as--as you say I am, you may make your own
+terms."
+
+Senor Pages' fine eyes opened wide.
+
+It was on the fourteenth day of their trip that they came into quaint
+Bahia.  The stay there was short.  Brazilian business methods  are
+long.  Emma McChesney took no chances with sample-trunks or cases.  She
+packed her three leading samples into her own personal suitcase, eluded
+the other tourists, secured an interpreter, and prepared to brave
+Bahia.  She returned just in time to catch the boat, flushed, tired,
+and orderless.  Bahia would have none of her.
+
+In three days they would reach Rio de Janeiro, the magnificent. They
+would have three days there.  She told herself that Bahia didn't count,
+anyway--sleepy little half-breed town!  But the arrow rankled.  It had
+been the first to penetrate the armor of her business success.  But she
+had learned things from that experience at Bahia.  She had learned that
+the South American dislikes the North American because his Northern
+cousin patronizes him.  She learned that the North American business
+firm is thought by the Southern business man to be tricky and
+dishonest, and that, because the Northerner has not learned how to pack
+a case of goods scientifically, as have the English, Germans, and
+French, the South American rages to pay cubic-feet rates on boxes that
+are three-quarters empty.
+
+So it was with a heavy heart but a knowing head that she faced Rio de
+Janeiro.  They had entered in the evening, the sunset splashing the bay
+and the hills in the foreground and the Sugar-loaf Mountain with an
+unbelievable riot of crimson and gold and orange and blue.  Suddenly
+the sun jerked down, as though pulled by a string, and the magic purple
+night came up as though pulled by another.
+
+"Well, anyway, I've seen that," breathed Emma McChesney thankfully.
+
+Next morning, she packed her three samples, as before, her heart heavy,
+her mind on Fat Ed Meyers coming up two weeks behind her. Three days in
+Rio!  And already she had bumped her impatient, quick-thinking,
+quick-acting North American business head up against the stone wall of
+South American leisureliness and prejudice.  She meant no irreverence,
+no impiety as she prayed, meanwhile packing Nos. 79, 65, and 48 into
+her personal bag:
+
+"O Lord, let Fat Ed Meyers have Bahia; but please, please help me to
+land Rio and Buenos Aires!"
+
+Then, in smart tailored suit and hat, interpreter in tow, a prayer in
+her heart, and excitement blazing in cheeks and eyes, she made her way
+to the dock, through the customs, into a cab that was to take her to
+her arena, the broad Avenida.
+
+Exactly two hours later, there dashed into the customs-house a
+well-dressed woman whose hat was very much over one ear.  She was
+running as only a woman runs when she's made up her mind to get there.
+She came hot-foot, helter-skelter, regardless of modishly crippling
+skirt, past officers, past customs officials, into the section where
+stood the one small sample-trunk that she had ordered down in case of
+emergency.  The trunk had not gone through the customs.  It had not
+even been opened.  But Emma McChesney heeded not trifles like that.
+Rio de Janeiro had fallen for Featherlooms.  Those three samples, Nos.
+79, 65, and 48, that boasted style, cut, and workmanship never before
+seen in Rio, had turned the trick.  They were as a taste of blood to a
+hungry lion.  Rio wanted more!
+
+Emma McChesney was kneeling before her trunk, had whipped out her key,
+unlocked it, and was swiftly selecting the numbers wanted from the
+trays, her breath coming quickly, her deft fingers choosing unerringly,
+when an indignant voice said, in Portuguese, "It is forbidden!"
+
+Emma McChesney did not glance around.  Her head was buried in the
+depths of the trunk.  But her quick ears had caught the word, "PROHIBA!"
+
+"Speak English," she said, and went on unpacking.
+
+"INGLES!" shouted the official.  "No!"  Then, with a superhuman effort,
+as Emma McChesney stood up, her arms laden with Featherloom samples of
+rainbow hues, "PARE!  Ar-r-r-rest!"
+
+Mrs. McChesney slammed down the trunk top, locked it, clutched her
+samples firmly, and faced the enraged official.
+
+"Go 'way!  I haven't time to be arrested this morning.  This is my busy
+day.  Call around this evening."
+
+Whereupon she fled to her waiting cab, leaving behind her a Brazilian
+official stunned and raging by turns.
+
+When she returned, happy, triumphant, order-laden, he was standing
+there, stunned no longer but raging still.  Emma McChesney had
+forgotten all about him.  The gold-braided official advanced,
+mustachios bristling.  A volley of Portuguese burst from his long-pent
+lips.  Emma McChesney glanced behind her.  Her interpreter threw up
+helpless hands, replying with a still more terrifying burst of vowels.
+Bewildered, a little frightened, Mrs. McChesney stood helplessly by.
+The official laid a none too gentle hand on her shoulder.  A little
+group of lesser officials stood, comic-opera fashion, in the
+background. And then Emma McChesney's New York training came to her
+aid.  She ignored the voluble interpreter.  She remained coolly
+unruffled by the fusillade of Portuguese.  Quietly she opened her hand
+bag and plunged her fingers deep, deep therein.  Her blue eyes gazed
+confidingly up into the Brazilian's snapping black ones, and as she
+withdrew her hand from the depths of her purse, there passed from her
+white fingers to his brown ones that which is the Esperanto of the
+nations, the universal language understood from Broadway to Brazil.
+The hand on her shoulder relaxed and fell away.
+
+On deck once more, she encountered the suave Senor Pages.  He stood at
+the rail surveying Rio's shores with that lip-curling contempt of the
+Argentine for everything Brazilian.  He regarded Emma McChesney's
+radiant face.
+
+"You are pleased with this--this Indian Rio?"
+
+Mrs. McChesney paused to gaze with him at the receding shores.
+
+"Like it!  I'm afraid I haven't seen it.  From here it looks like
+Coney.  But it buys like Seattle.  Like it!  Well, I should say I do!"
+
+"Ah, senora," exclaimed Pages, distressed, "wait!  In six days you will
+behold Buenos Aires.  Your New York, Londres, Paris--bah!  You shall
+drive with my wife and daughter through Palermo.  You shall see jewels,
+motors, toilettes as never before.  And you will visit my
+establishment?"  He raised an emphatic forefinger.  "But surely!"
+
+Emma McChesney regarded him solemnly.
+
+"I promise to do that.  You may rely on me."
+
+Six days later they swept up the muddy and majestic Plata, whose color
+should have won it the name of River of Gold instead of River of
+Silver.  From the boat's upper deck, Emma McChesney beheld a sky line
+which was so like the sky line of her own New York that it gave her a
+shock.  She was due for still another shock when, an hour later, she
+found herself in a maelstrom of motors, cabs, street cars, newsboys,
+skyscrapers, pedestrians, policemen, subway stations.  Where was the
+South American languor?  Where the Argentine inertia?  The rush and
+roar of it, the bustle and the bang of it made the twenty-three-day
+voyage seem a myth.
+
+"I'm going to shut my eyes," she told herself, "and then open them
+quickly.  If that little brown traffic-policeman turns out to be a big,
+red-faced traffic-policeman, then I'm right, and this IS Broadway and
+Forty-second."
+
+Shock number three came upon her entrance at the Grande Hotel. It had
+been Emma McChesney's boast that her ten years on the road had
+familiarized her with every type, grade, style, shape, cut, and mold of
+hotel clerk.  She knew him from the Knickerbocker to the Eagle House at
+Waterloo, Iowa.  At the moment she entered the Grande Hotel, she knew
+she had overlooked one.  Accustomed though she was  to the sartorial
+splendors of the man behind the desk, she might easily have mistaken
+this one for the president of the republic.  In his glittering uniform,
+he looked a pass between the supreme chancellor of the K.P.'s in full
+regalia and a prince of India during the Durbar.  He was regal.  He was
+overwhelming. He would have made the most splendid specimen of North
+American hotel clerk look like a scullery boy.  Mrs. McChesney spent
+two whole days in Buenos Aires before she discovered that she could
+paralyze this personage with a peso.  A peso is forty-three cents.
+
+Her experience at Bahia and at Rio de Janeiro had taught her things.
+So for two days, haunted, as she was, by visions of Fat Ed Meyers
+coming up close behind her, she possessed her soul in patience and
+waited.  On the great firm of Pages y Hernandez rested the success of
+this expedition.  When she thought of her little trick on Senor Pages,
+her blithe spirits sank.  Suppose, after all, that this powerful South
+American should resent her little Yankee joke!
+
+Her trunks went through the customs.  She secured an interpreter. She
+arranged her samples with loving care.  Style, cut, workmanship--she
+ran over their strong points in her mind.  She looked at them as a
+mother's eyes rest fondly on the shining faces, the well-brushed hair,
+the clean pinafores of her brood. And her heart swelled with pride.
+They lay on their tables, the artful knickerbockers, the gleaming
+petticoats, the pink and blue pajamas, the bifurcated skirts.  Emma
+McChesney ran one hand lightly over the navy blue satin folds of a
+sample.
+
+"Pages or no Pages, you're a credit to your mother," she said,
+whimsically.
+
+Up in her room once more, she selected her smartest tailor costume, her
+most modish hat, the freshest of gloves and blouses.
+
+She chose the hours between four and six, when wheel traffic was
+suspended in the Calle Florida and throughout the shopping-district,
+the narrow streets of which are congested to the point of suffocation
+at other times.
+
+As she swung down the street they turned to gaze after her--these
+Argentines.  The fat senoras turned, and the smartly costumed, sallow
+senoritas, and the men--all of them.  They spoke to her, these last,
+but she had expected that, and marched on with her free, swinging
+stride, her chin high, her color very bright. Into the great shop of
+Pages y Hernandez at last, up to the private offices, her breath coming
+a little quickly, into the presence of the shiny secretary--shiny
+teeth, shiny hair, shiny skin, shiny nails.  He gazed upon Emma
+McChesney, the shine gleaming brighter.  He took in his slim, brown
+fingers the card on which Senor Pages had scribbled that day on board
+ship.  The shine became dazzling.  He bowed low and backed his way into
+the office of Senor Pages.
+
+A successful man is most impressive when in those surroundings which
+have been built up by his success.  On shipboard, Senor Pages had been
+a genial, charming, distinguished fellow passenger.  In his luxurious
+business office he still was genial, charming, but his environment
+seemed to lend him a certain austerity.
+
+"Senora McChesney!"
+
+("How awful that sounds!" Emma McChesney told herself.)
+
+"We spoke of you but last night.  And now you come to win the wager,
+yes?" He smiled, but shook his head.
+
+"Yes," replied Emma McChesney.  And tried to smile, too.
+
+Senor Pages waved a hand toward the outer office.
+
+"She is with you, this business friend who is also so charming?"
+
+"Oh, yes," said Emma McChesney, "she's--she's with me." Then, as he
+made a motion toward the push-button, which would summon the secretary:
+"No, don't do that!  Wait a minute!" From her bag she drew her business
+card, presented it.  "Read that first."
+
+Senor Pages read it.  He looked up.  Then he read it again.  He gazed
+again at Emma McChesney.  Emma McChesney looked straight at him and
+tried in vain to remember ever having heard of the South American's
+sense of humor.  A moment passed.  Her heart sank. Then Senor Pages
+threw back his fine head and laughed--laughed as the Latin laughs,
+emphasizing his mirth with many ejaculations and gestures.
+
+"Ah, you Northerners!  You are too quick for us.  Come; I myself must
+see this garment which you honor by selling."  His glance rested
+approvingly on Emma McChesney's trim, smart figure. "That which you
+sell, it must be quite right."
+
+"I not only sell it," said Emma McChesney; "I wear it."
+
+"That--how is it you Northerners say?--ah, yes--that settles it!"
+
+Six weeks later, in his hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, T. A. Buck sat
+reading a letter forwarded from New York and postmarked Argentina.  As
+he read he chuckled, grew serious, chuckled again and allowed his cigar
+to grow cold.
+
+For the seventh time:
+
+DEAR T. A.:
+
+They've fallen for Featherlooms the way an Eskimo takes to gum-drops.
+My letter of credit is all shot to pieces, but it was worth it.  They
+make you pay a separate license fee in each province, and South America
+is just one darn province after another.  If they'd lump a peddler's
+license for $5,000 and tell you to go ahead, it would be cheaper.
+
+I landed Pages y Hernandez by a trick.  The best of it is the man I
+played it on saw the point and laughed with me.  We North Americans
+brag too much about our sense of humor.
+
+I thought ten years on the road had hardened me to the most fiendish
+efforts of a hotel chef.  But the food at the Grande here makes a
+quarter-inch round steak with German fried look like Sherry's latest
+triumph.  You know I'm not fussy.  I'm the kind of woman who, given her
+choice of ice cream or cheese for dessert, will take cheese.  Here,
+given my choice, I play safe and take neither.  I've reached the point
+where I make a meal of radishes.  They kill their beef in the morning
+and serve it for lunch.  It looks and tastes like an Ethiop's ear.  But
+I don't care, because I'm getting gorgeously thin.
+
+If the radishes hold out I'll invade Central America and Panama. I've
+one eye on Valparaiso already.  I know it sounds wild, but it means a
+future and a fortune for Featherlooms.  I find I don't even have to
+talk skirts.  They're self-sellers.  But I have to talk honesty and
+packing.
+
+How did you hit it off with Ella Sweeney?  Haven't seen a sign of Fat
+Ed Meyers.  I'm getting nervous.  Do you think he may have exploded at
+the equator?
+
+   EMMA.
+
+
+But kind fortune saw fit to add a last sweet drop to Emma McChesney's
+already brimming cup.  As she reached the docks on the day of her
+departure, clad in cool, crisp white from hat to shoes, her quick eye
+spied a red-faced, rotund, familiar figure disembarking from the New
+York boat, just arrived.  The fates, grinning, had planned this moment
+like a stage-manager.  Fat Ed Meyers came heavily down the gangplank.
+His hat was off.  He was mopping the top of his head with a large, damp
+handkerchief.  His gaze swept over the busy landing-docks, darted
+hither and thither, alighted on Emma McChesney with a shock, and rested
+there.  A distinct little shock went through that lady, too.  But she
+waited at the foot of her boat's gangway until the unbelievably nimble
+Meyers reached her.
+
+He was a fiery spectacle.  His cheeks were distended, his eyes
+protuberant.  He wasted no words.  They understood each other, those
+two.
+
+"Coming or going?"
+
+"Going," replied Emma McChesney.
+
+"Clean up this--this Bonez Areez, too?"
+
+"Absolutely."
+
+"Did, huh?"
+
+Meyers stood a moment panting, his little eyes glaring into her calm
+ones.
+
+"Well, I beat you in Bahia, anyway." he boasted.
+
+Emma McChesney snapped her fingers blithely.
+
+"Bah, for Bahia!"  She took a step or two up the gangplank, and turned.
+"Good-by, Ed.  And good luck.  I can recommend the radishes, but pass
+up the beef.  Dangerous."
+
+Fat Ed Meyers, still staring, began to stutter unintelligibly, his lips
+moving while no words came.  Emma McChesney held up a warning hand.
+
+"Don't do that, Ed!  Not in this climate!  A man of your build, too!
+I'm surprised.  Consider the feelings of your firm!"
+
+Fat Ed Meyers glared up at the white-clad, smiling, gracious figure.
+His hands unclenched.  The words came.
+
+"Oh, if only you were a man for just ten minutes!" he moaned.
+
+
+
+II
+
+THANKS TO MISS MORRISSEY
+
+It was Fat Ed Meyers, of the Sans-Silk Skirt Company, who first said
+that Mrs. Emma McChesney was the Maude Adams of the business world.  It
+was on the occasion of his being called to the carpet for his failure
+to make Sans-silks as popular as Emma McChesney's famed Featherlooms.
+He spoke in self-defense, heatedly.
+
+"It isn't Featherlooms.  It's McChesney.  Her line is no better than
+ours.  It's her personality, not her petticoats.  She's got a following
+that swears by her.  If Maude Adams was to open on Broadway in 'East
+Lynne,' they'd flock to see her, wouldn't they? Well, Emma McChesney
+could sell hoop-skirts, I'm telling you. She could sell bustles.  She
+could sell red-woolen mittens on Fifth Avenue!"
+
+The title stuck.
+
+It was late in September when Mrs. McChesney, sunburned, decidedly
+under weight, but  gloriously triumphant, returned from a four months'
+tour of South America.  Against the earnest protests of her business
+partner, T. A. Buck, president of the Buck Featherloom Petticoat
+Company, she had invaded the southern continent and left it abloom with
+Featherlooms from the Plata to the Canal.
+
+Success was no stranger to Mrs. McChesney.  This last business victory
+had not turned her head.  But it had come perilously near to tilting
+that extraordinarily well-balanced part.  A certain light in her eyes,
+a certain set of her chin, an added briskness of bearing, a cocky slant
+of the eyebrow revealed the fact that, though Mrs. McChesney's feet
+were still on the ground, she might be said to be standing on tiptoe.
+
+When she had sailed from Brooklyn pier that June afternoon, four months
+before, she had cast her ordinary load of business responsibilities on
+the unaccustomed shoulders of T. A. Buck. That elegant person, although
+president of the company which his father had founded, had never been
+its real head.  When trouble threatened in the workroom, it was to Mrs.
+McChesney that the forewoman came.   When an irascible customer in
+Green Bay, Wisconsin, waxed impatient over the delayed shipment of a
+Featherloom order, it was to Emma McChesney that his typewritten
+protest was addressed.  When the office machinery needed mental oiling,
+when a new hand demanded to be put on silk-work instead of mercerized,
+when a consignment of skirt-material turned out to be more than usually
+metallic, it was in Mrs. Emma McChesney's little private office that
+the tangle was unsnarled.
+
+She walked into that little office, now, at nine o'clock of a brilliant
+September morning.  It was a reassuring room, bright, orderly,
+workmanlike, reflecting the personality of its owner. She stood in the
+center of it now and looked about her, eyes glowing, lips parted.  She
+raised her hands high above her head, then brought them down to her
+sides again with an unconsciously dramatic gesture that expressed
+triumph, peace, content, relief, accomplishment, and a great and deep
+satisfaction.  T. A. Buck, in the doorway, saw the gesture--and
+understood.
+
+"Not so bad to get back to it, is it?"
+
+"Bad!  It's like a drink of cool spring water after too much champagne.
+In those miserable South American hotels, how I used to long for the
+orderliness and quiet of this!"
+
+She took off hat and coat.  In a vase on the desk, a cluster of yellow
+chrysanthemums shook their shaggy heads in welcome.  Emma McChesney's
+quick eye jumped to them, then to Buck, who had come in and was
+surveying the scene appreciatively.
+
+"You--of course." She indicated the flowers with a nod and a radiant
+smile.
+
+"Sorry--no.  The office staff did that.  There's a card of welcome, I
+believe."
+
+"Oh," said Emma McChesney.  The smile was still there, but the radiance
+was gone.
+
+She seated herself at her desk.  Buck took the chair near by. She
+unlocked a drawer, opened it, rummaged, closed it again, unlocked
+another.  She patted the flat top of her desk with loving fingers.
+
+"I can't help it," she said, with a little shamed laugh; "I'm so glad
+to be back.  I'll probably hug the forewoman and bite a piece out of
+the first Featherloom I lay hands on.  I had to use all my self-control
+to keep from kissing Jake, the elevator-man, coming up."
+
+Out of the corner of her eye, Emma McChesney had been glancing at her
+handsome business partner.  She had found herself doing the same thing
+from the time he had met her at the dock late in the afternoon of the
+day before.  Those four months had wrought some subtle change.  But
+what?  Where?  She frowned a moment in thought.
+
+Then:
+
+"Is that a new suit, T. A.?"
+
+"This?  Lord, no!  Last summer's.  Put it on because of this July
+hangover in September.  Why?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know"--vaguely--"I just--wondered."
+
+There was nothing vague about T. A. Buck, however.  His old air of
+leisureliness was gone.  His very attitude as he sat there, erect,
+brisk, confident, was in direct contrast to his old, graceful indolence.
+
+"I'd like to go over the home grounds with you this morning," he said.
+"Of course, in our talk last night, we didn't cover the South American
+situation thoroughly.  But your letters and the orders told the story.
+You carried the thing through to success.  It's marvelous!  But we
+stay-at-homes haven't been marking time during your absence."
+
+The puzzled frown still sat on Emma McChesney's brow.  As though
+thinking aloud, she said,
+
+"Have you grown thinner, or fatter or--something?"
+
+"Not an ounce.  Weighed at the club yesterday."
+
+He leaned forward a little, his face suddenly very sober.
+
+"Emma, I want to tell you now that--that mother--she--I lost her just a
+few weeks after you sailed."
+
+Emma McChesney gave a little cry.  She came quickly over to him, and
+one hand went to his shoulder as she stood looking down at him, her
+face all sympathy and contrition and sorrow.
+
+"And you didn't write me!  You didn't even tell me, last night!"
+
+"I didn't want to distress you.  I knew you were having a hard-enough
+pull down there without additional worries.  It happened very suddenly
+while I was out on the road.  I got the wire in Peoria.  She died very
+suddenly  and quite painlessly. Her companion, Miss Tate, was with her.
+She had never been herself since Dad's death."
+
+"And you----"
+
+"I could only do what was to be done.  Then I went back on the road.  I
+closed up the house, and now I've leased it.  Of course it's big enough
+for a regiment.  But we stayed on because mother was used to it.  I
+sold some of the furniture, but stored the things she had loved.  She
+left some to you."
+
+"To me!"
+
+"You know she used to enjoy your visits so much, partly because of the
+way in which you always talked of Dad.  She left you some jewelry that
+she was fond of, and that colossal old mahogany buffet that you used to
+rave over whenever you came up.  Heaven knows what you'll do with it!
+It's a white elephant.  If you add another story to it, you could rent
+it out as an apartment."
+
+"Indeed I shall take it, and cherish it, and polish it up myself every
+week--the beauty!"
+
+She came back to her chair.  They sat a moment in silence.  Then Emma
+McChesney spoke musingly.
+
+"So that was it." Buck looked up.  "I sensed something--different.  I
+didn't know.  I couldn't explain it."
+
+Buck passed a quick hand over his eyes, shook himself, sat up, erect
+and brisk again, and plunged, with a directness that was as startling
+as it was new in him, into the details of Middle Western business.
+
+"Good!" exclaimed Emma McChesney.
+
+"It's all very well to know that Featherlooms are safe in South
+America.  But the important thing is to know how they're going in the
+corn country."
+
+Buck stood up.
+
+"Suppose we transfer this talk to my office.  All the papers are there,
+all the correspondence--all the orders, everything.  You can get the
+whole situation in half an hour.  What's the use of talking when
+figures will tell you."
+
+He walked swiftly over to the door and stood there waiting.  Emma
+McChesney rose.  The puzzled look was there again.
+
+"No, that wasn't it, after all," she said.
+
+"Eh?" said Buck.  "Wasn't what?"
+
+"Nothing," replied Emma McChesney.
+
+"I'm wool-gathering this morning.  I'm afraid  it's going to take me a
+day or two to get back into harness again."
+
+"If you'd rather wait, if you think you'll be more fit to-morrow or the
+day after, we'll wait.  There's no real hurry.  I just thought----"
+
+But Mrs. McChesney led the way across the hall that separated her
+office from her partner's.  Halfway across, she stopped and surveyed
+the big, bright, busy main office, with its clacking typewriters and
+rustle and crackle of papers and its air of concentration.
+
+"Why, you've run up a partition there between Miss Casey's desk and the
+workroom door, haven't you?"
+
+"Yes; it's much better that way."
+
+"Yes, of course.  And--why, where are the boys' desks? Spalding's and
+Hutchinson's, and--they're all gone!"  She turned in amazement.
+
+"Break it to me!  Aren't we using traveling men any more?"
+
+Buck laughed his low, pleasant laugh.
+
+"Oh, yes; but I thought their desks belonged somewhere else than in the
+main office.  They're now installed in the little room between the shop
+and Healy's office.  Close quarters, but better than having them out
+here where they were inclined to neglect their reports in order to
+shine in the eyes of that pretty new stenographer.  There are one or
+two other changes.  I hope you'll approve of them."
+
+"I'm sure I shall," replied Emma McChesney, a little stiffly.
+
+In Buck's office, she settled back in her chair to watch him as he
+arranged neat sheaves of papers for her inspection.  Her eyes traveled
+from his keen, eager face to the piles of paper and back again.
+
+"Tell me, did you hit it off with the Ella Sweeneys and the Sadie
+Harrises of the great Middle West?  Is business as bad as the howlers
+say it is?  You said something last night about a novelty bifurcated
+skirt.  Was that the new designer's idea?  How have the early buyers
+taken to it?"
+
+Buck crooked an elbow over his head in self-defense.
+
+"Stop it!  You make me feel like Rheims cathedral.  Don't bombard until
+negotiations fail."
+
+He handed her the first sheaf of papers.  But, before she began to
+read:  "I'll say this  much.  Miss Sharp, of Berg Brothers, Omaha--the
+one you warned against as the human cactus--had me up for dinner.
+Well, I know you don't, but it's true.  Her father and I hit it off
+just like that.  He's a character, that old boy. Ever meet him?  No?
+And Miss Sharp told me something about herself that explains her
+porcupine pose.  That poor child was engaged to a chap who was killed
+in the Spanish-American war, and she----"
+
+"Kate Sharp!" interrupted Emma McChesney.  "Why, T. A. Buck, in all her
+vinegary, narrow life, that girl has never had a beau, much less----"
+
+Buck's eyebrows came up slightly.
+
+"Emma McChesney, you haven't developed--er--claws, have you?"
+
+With a gasp, Emma McChesney plunged into the papers before her. For ten
+minutes, the silence of the room was unbroken except for the crackling
+of papers.  Then Emma McChesney put down the first sheaf and looked up
+at her business partner.
+
+"Is that a fair sample?" she demanded.
+
+"Very," answered T. A. Buck, and handed her another set.
+
+Another ten minutes of silence.  Emma McChesney reached out a hand for
+still another set of papers.  The pink of repressed excitement was
+tinting her cheeks.
+
+"They're--they're all like this?"
+
+"Practically, yes."
+
+Mrs. McChesney faced him, her eyes wide, her breath coming fast.
+
+"T. A. Buck," she slapped the papers before her smartly with the back
+of her hand, "this means you've broken our record for Middle Western
+sales!"
+
+"Yes," said T. A., quietly.  "Dad would have enjoyed a morning like
+this, wouldn't he?"
+
+Emma McChesney stood up.
+
+"Enjoyed it!  He is enjoying it.  Don't tell me that T. A., Senior,
+just because he is no longer on earth, has failed to get the joy of
+knowing that his son has realized his fondest dreams. Why, I can feel
+him here in this room, I can see those bright brown eyes of his
+twinkling behind his glasses.  Not know it!  Of course he knows it."
+
+Buck looked down at the desk, smiling curiously.
+
+"D'you know, I felt that way, too."
+
+Suddenly Emma McChesney began to laugh.  It was not all mirth--that
+laugh.  Buck waited.
+
+"And to think that I--I kindly and patronizingly handed you a little
+book full of tips on how to handle Western buyers, 'The Salesman's
+Who's Who'--I, who used to think I was the witch of the West when it
+came to selling!  You, on your first selling-trip, have made me look
+like--like a shoe-string peddler."
+
+Buck put out a hand suddenly.
+
+"Don't say that, Emma.  I--somehow it takes away all the pleasure."
+
+"It's true.  And now that I know, it explains a lot of things that I've
+been puzzling about in the last twenty-four hours."
+
+"What kind of things?"
+
+"The way you look and act and think.  The way you carry your head.  The
+way you sit in a chair.  The very words you use, your gestures, your
+intonations.  They're different."
+
+T. A. Buck, busy with his cigar, laughed a little self-consciously.
+
+"Oh, nonsense!" he said.  "You're imagining things."
+
+Which remark, while not a particularly happy one, certainly was not in
+itself so unfortunate as to explain why Mrs. McChesney should have
+turned rather suddenly and bolted into her own office across the hall
+and closed the door behind her.
+
+T. A. Buck, quite cool and unruffled, viewed her sudden departure
+quizzically.  Then he took his cigar from his mouth and stood eying it
+a moment with more attention, perhaps, than it deserved, in spite of
+its fine aroma.  When he put it back between his lips and sat down at
+his desk once more he was smiling ever so slightly.
+
+Then began a new order of things in the offices of the T. A. Buck
+Featherloom Petticoat Company.  Feet that once had turned quite as a
+matter of course toward the door marked "MRS. MCCHESNEY," now took the
+direction of the door opposite--and that door bore the name of Buck.
+Those four months of Mrs. McChesney's absence had put her partner to
+the test.  That acid test had washed away the accumulated dross of
+years and revealed the precious metal beneath.  T. A. Buck had proved
+to be his father's son.
+
+If Mrs. McChesney noticed that the head office had miraculously moved
+across the hall, if her sharp ears marked that the many feet that once
+had paused at her door now stopped at the door opposite, if she
+realized that instead of, "I'd like your opinion on this, Mrs.
+McChesney," she often heard the new, "I'll ask Mr. Buck," she did not
+show it by word or sign.
+
+The first of October found buyers still flocking into New York from
+every State in the country.  Shrewd men and women, these--bargain
+hunters on a grand scale.  Armed with the long spoon of business
+knowledge, they came to skim the cream from factory and workroom
+products set forth for their inspection.
+
+For years, it had been Emma McChesney's quiet boast that of those whose
+business brought them to the offices and showrooms of the T. A. Buck
+Featherloom Petticoat Company, the foremost insisted on dealing only
+with her.  She was proud of her following.  She liked their loyalty.
+Their preference for her was the subtlest compliment that was in their
+power to pay.  Ethel Morrissey, whose friendship dated back to the days
+when Emma McChesney had sold Featherlooms through the Middle West, used
+to say laughingly, her plump, comfortable shoulders shaking, "Emma, if
+you ever give me away by telling how many years I've been buying
+Featherlooms of you, I'll--I'll call down upon you the spinster's
+curse."
+
+Early Monday morning, Mrs. McChesney, coming down the hall from the
+workroom, encountered Miss Ella Sweeney, of Klein & Company, Des
+Moines, Iowa, stepping out of the elevator.  A very skittish Miss
+Sweeney, rustling, preening, conscious of her dangling black earrings
+and her Robespierre collar and her beauty-patch.  Emma McChesney met
+this apparition with outstretched, welcoming hand.
+
+"Ella Sweeney!  Well, I'd almost given you up.  You're late this fall.
+Come into my office."
+
+She led the way, not noticing that Miss Sweeney came reluctantly, her
+eyes on the closed door across the way.
+
+"Sit down," said Emma McChesney, and pulled a chair nearer her desk.
+"No; wait a minute!  Let me look at you.  Now, Ella, don't try to tell
+me that THAT dress came from Des Moines, Iowa! Do I!  Why, child, it's
+distinctive!"
+
+Miss Sweeney, still standing, smiled a  pleased but rather preoccupied
+smile.  Her eyes roved toward the door.
+
+Emma McChesney, radiating good will and energy, went on:
+
+"Wait till you see our new samples!  You'll buy a million dollars'
+worth.  Just let me lead you to our new Walk-Easy bifurcated skirt.  We
+call it the 'one-stepper's delight.'" She put a hand on Ella Sweeney's
+arm, preparatory to guiding her to the showrooms in the rear.  But Miss
+Sweeney's strange reluctance grew into resolve.  A blush, as real as it
+was unaccustomed, arose to her bepowdered cheeks.
+
+"Is--I--that is--Mr. Buck is in, I suppose?"
+
+"Mr. Buck?  Oh, yes, he's in."
+
+Miss Sweeney's eyes sought the closed door across the hall.
+
+"Is that--his office?"
+
+Emma McChesney stiffened a little.  Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully.
+"You have guessed it," she said crisply.  "Mr. Buck's name is on the
+door, and you are looking at it."
+
+Miss Sweeney looked down, looked up, twiddled the chain about her neck.
+
+"You want to see Mr. Buck?" asked Emma McChesney quietly.
+
+Miss Sweeney simpered down at her glove-tips, fluttered her eyelids.
+
+"Well--yes--I--I--you see, I bought of him this year, and when you buy
+of a person, why, naturally, you----"
+
+"Naturally; I understand."
+
+She walked across the hall, threw open the door, and met T. A. Buck's
+glance coolly.
+
+"Mr. Buck, Miss Sweeney, of Des Moines, is here, and I'm sure you want
+to see her.  This way, Miss Sweeney."
+
+Miss Sweeney, sidling, blushing, fluttering, teetered in.  Emma
+McChesney, just before she closed the door, saw a little spasm cross
+Buck's face.  It was gone so quickly, and a radiant smile sat there so
+reassuringly, that she wondered if she had not been mistaken, after
+all.  He had advanced, hand outstretched, with:
+
+"Miss Sweeney!  It--it's wonderful to see you again!  You're
+looking----"
+
+The closed door stifled the rest.  Emma McChesney, in her office across
+the way, stood a moment in the center of the room, her hand covering
+her eyes.  The hardy chrysanthemums still glowed sunnily from their
+vase.  The little room was very quiet except for the ticking  of the
+smart, leather-encased clock on the desk.
+
+The closed door shut out factory and office sounds.  And Emma McChesney
+stood with one hand over her eyes.  So Napoleon might have stood after
+Waterloo.
+
+After this first lesson, Mrs. McChesney did not err again.  When, two
+days later, Miss Sharp, of Berg Brothers, Omaha, breezed in, looking
+strangely juvenile and distinctly anticipatory, Emma greeted her
+smilingly and waved her toward the door opposite. Miss Sharp, the
+erstwhile bristling, was strangely smooth and sleek.  She glanced ever
+so softly, sighed ever so flutteringly.
+
+"Working side by side with him, seeing him day after day, how have you
+been able to resist him?"
+
+Emma McChesney was only human, after all.
+
+"By remembering that this is a business house, not a matrimonial
+parlor."
+
+The dart found no lodging place in Miss Sharp's sleek armor.  She
+seemed scarcely to have heard.
+
+"My dear," she whispered, "his eyes!  And his manner!  You must
+be--whatchamaycallit--adamant.  Is that the way you pronounce it?  You
+know what I mean."
+
+"Oh, yes," replied Emma McChesney evenly, "I--know what you mean."
+
+She told herself that she was justified in the righteous contempt which
+she felt for this sort of thing.  A heart-breaker!  A cheap
+lady-killer!  Whereupon in walked Sam Bloom, of the Paris Emporium,
+Duluth, one of Mrs. McChesney's stanchest admirers and a long-tried
+business friend.
+
+The usual thing:  "Younger than ever, Mrs. McChesney!  You're a
+wonder--yes, you are!  How's business?  Same here.  Going to have lunch
+with me to-day?"  Then:  "I'll just run in and see Buck. Say, where's
+he been keeping himself all these years?  Chip off the old block, that
+boy."
+
+So he had the men, too!
+
+It was in this frame of mind that Miss Ethel Morrissey found her on the
+morning that she came into New York on her semi-annual buying-trip.
+Ethel Morrissey, plump, matronly-looking, quiet, with her hair fast
+graying at the sides, had nothing of the skittish Middle Western buyer
+about her.  She might have passed for the mother of a brood of six if
+it were not for her eyes--the shrewd, twinkling, far-sighted, reckoning
+eyes of the business woman.  She and Emma McChesney had been friends
+from the day that Ethel Morrissey had bought her first cautious bill of
+Featherlooms.  Her love for Emma McChesney had much of the maternal in
+it.  She felt a personal pride in Emma McChesney's work, her success,
+her clean reputation, her life of self-denial for her son Jock.  When
+Ethel Morrissey was planned by her Maker, she had not been meant to be
+wasted on the skirt-and-suit department of a small-town store.  That
+broad, gracious breast had been planned as a resting-place for heads in
+need of comfort. Those plump, firm arms were meant to enfold the weak
+and distressed.  Those capable hands should have smoothed troubled
+heads and patted plump cheeks, instead of wasting their gifts in
+folding piles of petticoats and deftly twitching a plait or a tuck into
+place.  She was playing Rosalind in buskins when she should have been
+cast for the Nurse.
+
+She entered Emma McChesney's office, now, in her quiet blue suit and
+her neat hat, and she  looked very sane and cheerful and rosy-cheeked
+and dependable.  At least, so Emma McChesney thought, as she kissed
+her, while the plump arms held her close.
+
+Ethel Morrissey, the hugging process completed, held her off and eyed
+her.
+
+"Well, Emma McChesney, flourish your Featherlooms for me.  I want to
+buy and get it over, so we can talk."
+
+"Are you sure that you want to buy of me?" asked Emma McChesney, a
+little wearily.
+
+"What's the joke?"
+
+"I'm not joking.  I thought that perhaps you might prefer to see Mr.
+Buck this trip."
+
+Ethel Morrissey placed one forefinger under Emma McChesney's chin and
+turned that lady's face toward her and gazed at her long and
+thoughtfully--the most trying test of courage in the world, that, to
+one whose eyes fear meeting yours.  Emma McChesney, bravest of women,
+tried to withstand it, and failed.  The next instant her head lay on
+Ethel Morrissey's broad breast, her hands were clutching the plump
+shoulders, her cheek was being patted soothingly by the kind hands.
+
+"Now, now--what is it, dear?  Tell Ethel.  Yes; I do know, but tell me,
+anyway.  It'll do you good."
+
+And Emma McChesney told her.  When she had finished:
+
+"You bathe your eyes, Emma, and put on your hat and we'll eat. Oh, yes,
+you will.  A cup of tea, anyway.  Isn't there some little cool fool
+place where I can be comfortable on a hot day like this--where we can
+talk comfortably?  I've got at least an hour's conversation in me."
+
+With the first sip of her first cup of tea, Ethel Morrissey began to
+unload that burden of conversation.
+
+"Emma, this is the best thing that could have happened to you. Oh, yes,
+it is.  The queer thing about it is that it didn't happen sooner.  It
+was bound to come.  You know, Emma, the Lord lets a woman climb just so
+high up the mountain of success.  And then, when she gets too cocky,
+when she begins to measure her wits and brain and strength against that
+of men, and finds herself superior, he just taps her smartly on the
+head and shins, so that she stumbles, falls, and rolls down a few miles
+on the road she has traveled so painfully.  He does it just as a gentle
+reminder to her that she's  only a woman, after all.  Oh, I know all
+about this feminist talk.  But this thing's been proven. Look at what
+happened to--to Joan of Arc, and Becky Sharp, and Mary Queen of Scots,
+and--yes, I have been spending my evenings reading.  Now, stop laughing
+at your old Ethel, Emma McChesney!"
+
+"You meant me to laugh, dear old thing.  I don't feel much like it,
+though.  I don't see why I should be reminded of my lowly state.
+Heaven knows I haven't been so terrifically pleased with myself!  Of
+course, that South American trip was--well, gratifying.  But I earned
+it.  For ten years I lived with head in a sample-trunk, didn't I?  I
+worked hard enough to win the love of all these Westerners.  It wasn't
+all walking dreamily down Main Street, strewing Featherlooms along my
+path."
+
+Ethel Morrissey stirred her second cup of tea, sipped, stirred, smiled,
+then reached over and patted Emma McChesney's hand.
+
+"Emma, I'm a wise old party, and I can see that it isn't all pique with
+you.  It's something else--something deeper.  Oh, yes, it is!  Now let
+me tell you what happened when T. A. Buck invaded your old-time
+territory.  I was busy up in my department the morning he came in.  I
+had my head in a rack of coats, and a henny customer waiting.  But I
+sensed something stirring, and I stuck my head out of the coat-rack in
+which I was fumbling.  The department was aflutter like a poultry-yard.
+Every woman in it, from the little new Swede stock-girl to Gladys
+Hemingway, who is only working to wear out her old clothes, was
+standing with her face toward the elevator, and on her face a look that
+would make the ordinary door-mat marked 'Welcome' seem like an insult.
+I kind of smoothed my back hair, because I knew that only one thing
+could bring that look into a woman's face.  And down the aisle came a
+tall, slim, distinguished-looking, wonderfully tailored,
+chamois-gloved, walking-sticked Fifth Avenue person with EYES! Of
+course, I knew.  But the other girls didn't.  They just sort of fell
+back at his approach, smitten.  He didn't even raise an eyebrow to do
+it.  Now, Emma, I'm not exaggerating.  I know what effect he had on me
+and my girls, and, for that matter, every other man or woman in the
+store.  Why, he was a dream realized to most of 'em.  These shrewd,
+clever buyer-girls know plenty of men--business men of the slap-bang,
+horn-blowing, bluff, good-natured, hello-kid kind--the kind that takes
+you out to dinner and blows cigar smoke in your face.  Along comes this
+chap, elegant, well dressed and not even conscious of it, polished,
+suave, smooth, low-voiced, well bred.  Why, when he spoke to a girl, it
+was the subtlest kind of flattery.  Can you see little Sadie Harris, of
+Duluth, drawing a mental comparison between Sam Bloom, the
+store-manager, and this fascinating devil--Sam, red-faced, loud voiced,
+shirt-sleeving it around the sample room, his hat pushed 'way back on
+his head, chewing his cigar like mad, and wild-eyed for fear he's
+buying wrong?  Why, child, in our town, nobody carries a cane except
+the Elks when they have their annual parade, and old man Schwenkel,
+who's lame. And yet we all accepted that yellow walking-stick of
+Buck's.  It belonged to him.  There isn't a skirt-buyer in the Middle
+West that doesn't dream of him all night and push Featherlooms in the
+store all day.  Emma, I'm old and fat and fifty, but when I had dinner
+with him at the Manitoba House that evening, I caught myself making
+eyes at him, knowing that every woman in the dining-room would have
+given her front teeth to be where I was."
+
+After which extensive period, Ethel Morrissey helped herself to her
+third cup of tea.  Emma McChesney relaxed a little and laughed a
+tremulous little laugh.
+
+"Oh, well, I suppose I must not hope to combat such formidable rivals
+as walking-sticks, chamois gloves, and EYES.  My business arguments are
+futile compared to those."
+
+Ethel Morrissey delivered herself of a last shot.
+
+"You're wrong, Emma.  Those things helped him, but they didn't sell his
+line.  He sold Featherlooms out of salesmanship, and because he sounded
+convincing and sincere and businesslike--and he had the samples.  It
+wasn't all bunk.  It was three-quarters business.  Those two make an
+invincible combination."
+
+An hour later, Ethel Morrissey was shrewdly selecting her winter line
+of Featherlooms from the stock in the showrooms of the T. A. Buck
+Company.  They went about their business transaction, these two, with
+the cool abruptness of men, speaking little, and then only of prices,
+discounts, dating, shipping.   Their luncheon conversation of an hour
+before seemed an impossibility.
+
+"You'll have dinner with me to-night?" Emma asked.  "Up at my
+apartment, all cozy?"
+
+"Not to-night, dearie.  I'll be in bed by eight.  I'm not the girl I
+used to be.  Time was when a New York buying-trip was a vacation.  Now
+it's a chore."
+
+She took Emma McChesney's hand and patted it.
+
+"If you've got something real nice for dinner, though, and feel like
+company, why don't you ask--somebody else that's lonesome."
+
+After which, Ethel Morrissey laughed her wickedest and waved a sudden
+good-by with a last word about seeing her to-morrow.
+
+Emma McChesney, her color high, entered her office.  It was five
+o'clock.  She cleared her desk in half an hour, breathed a sigh of
+weariness, reached for hat and jacket, donned them, and, turning out
+her lights, closed her door behind her for the day. At that same
+instant, T. A. Buck slammed his own door and walked briskly down the
+hall.  They met at the elevator.
+
+They descended in silence.  The street gained, they paused uncertainly.
+
+"Won't you stay down and have dinner with me to-night, Emma?"
+
+"Thanks so much, T. A. Not to-night."
+
+"I'm--sorry."
+
+"Good night."
+
+"Good night."
+
+She turned away.  He stood there, in the busy street, looking
+irresolutely and not at all eagerly in the direction of his club,
+perhaps, or his hotel, or whatever shelter he sought after business
+hours.  Something in his attitude--the loneliness of it, the
+uncertainty, the indecision--smote Emma McChesney with a great pang.
+She came swiftly back.
+
+"I wish you'd come home to dinner with me.  I don't know what Annie'll
+give us.  Probably bread pudding.  She does, when she's left to her own
+devices.  But I--I wish you would."  She looked up at him almost shyly.
+
+T. A. Buck took Emma McChesney's arm in a rather unnecessarily firm
+grip and propelled her, surprised and protesting, in the direction of
+the nearest vacant taxi.
+
+"But, T. A.!  This is idiotic!  Why take a cab to go home from the
+office on a--a week day?"
+
+"In with you!  Besides, I never have a chance to take one from the
+office on Sunday, do I?  Does Annie always cook enough for two?"
+
+Apparently Annie did.  Annie was something of a witch, in her way.  She
+whisked about, wrought certain changes, did things with asparagus and
+mayonnaise, lighted the rose-shaded table-candles. No one noticed that
+dinner was twenty minutes late.
+
+Together they admired the great mahogany buffet that Emma had
+miraculously found space for in the little dining-room.
+
+"It glows like a great, deep ruby, doesn't it?" she said proudly.  "You
+should see Annie circle around it with the carpet-sweeper.  She knows
+one bump would be followed by instant death."
+
+Looking back on it, afterward, they remembered that the dinner was a
+very silent one.  They did not notice their wordlessness at the time.
+Once, when the chops came on, Buck said absently,
+
+"Oh, I had those for l----"  Then he stopped abruptly.
+
+Emma McChesney smiled.
+
+"Your mother trained you well," she said.
+
+The October night had grown cool.  Annie had lighted a wood fire in the
+living-room.
+
+"That was what attracted me to this apartment in the first place," Mrs.
+McChesney said, as they left the dining-room.  "A fireplace--a
+practical, real, wood-burning fireplace in a New York apartment!  I'd
+have signed the lease if the plaster had been falling in chunks and the
+bathtub had been zinc."
+
+"That's because fireplaces mean home--in our minds," said Buck.
+
+He sat looking into the heart of the glow.  There fell another of those
+comfortable silences.
+
+"T. A., I--I want to tell you that I know I've been acting the cat ever
+since I got home from South America and found that you had taken
+charge.  You see, you had spoiled me.  The thing that has happened to
+me is the thing that always happens to those who assume to be
+dictators.  I just want you to know, now, that I'm glad and proud and
+happy because you have come into your own.  It hurt me just at first.
+That was the pride of me.  I'm quite over that now.  You're not only
+president of the T. A. Buck Company in name.  You're its actual head.
+And that's as it should be.  Long live the King!"
+
+Buck sat silent a moment.  Then,
+
+"I had to do it, Emma."  She looked up. "You have a wonderful brain,"
+said Buck then, and the two utterances seemed connected in his mind.
+
+They seemed to bring no great satisfaction to the woman to whom he
+addressed them, however.  She thanked him dryly, as women do when their
+brain is dragged into an intimate conversation.
+
+"But," said Buck, and suddenly stood up, looking at her very intently,
+"it isn't for your mind that I love you this minute. I love you for
+your eyes, Emma, and for your mouth--you have the tenderest, most
+womanly-sweet mouth in the world--and for your hair, and the way your
+chin curves.  I love you for your throat-line, and for the way you walk
+and talk and sit, for the way you look at me, and for the way you don't
+look at me."
+
+He reached down and gathered Emma McChesney, the alert, the aggressive,
+the capable, into his arms, quite as men gather the clingingest kind of
+woman.  "And now suppose you tell me just why and how you love me."
+
+And Emma McChesney told him.
+
+When, at last, he was leaving,
+
+"Don't you think," asked Emma McChesney, her hands on his shoulders,
+"that you overdid the fascination thing just the least leetle bit there
+on the road?"
+
+"Well, but you told me to entertain them, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes," reluctantly; "but I didn't tell you to consecrate your life to
+'em.  The ordinary fat, middle-aged, every-day traveling man will never
+be able to sell Featherlooms in the Middle West again.  They won't have
+'em.  They'll never be satisfied with anything less than John Drew
+after this."
+
+"Emma McChesney, you're not marrying me because a lot of overdressed,
+giggling, skittish old girls have taken a fancy to make eyes at me, are
+you!"
+
+Emma McChesney stood up very straight and tall.
+
+"I'm marrying you, T. A., because you are a great, big, fine,
+upstanding, tender, wonderful----"
+
+"Oh, well, then that's all right," broke in Buck, a little tremulously.
+
+Emma McChesney's face grew serious.
+
+"But promise me one thing, T. A.  Promise me that when you come home
+for dinner at night, you'll never say, 'Good heavens, I had that for
+lunch!'"
+
+
+
+III
+
+A CLOSER CORPORATION
+
+Front offices resemble back kitchens in this: they have always an ear
+at the keyhole, an eye at the crack, a nose in the air.  But
+
+between the ordinary front office and the front office of the T. A.
+Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company there was a difference. The
+employees at Buck's--from Emil, the errand boy, to old Pop Henderson,
+who had started as errand boy himself twenty-five years
+before--possessed the quality of loyalty.  They were loyal to the
+memory of old man Buck, because they had loved and respected him.  They
+were loyal to Mrs. Emma McChesney, because she was Mrs. Emma McChesney
+(which amounts to the same reason). They were loyal to T. A. Buck,
+because he was his father's son.
+
+For three weeks the front office had been bewildered.  From
+bewilderment it passed to worry.  A worried, bewildered front office is
+not an efficient front office.  Ever since Mrs. McChesney had come off
+the road, at the death of old T. A. Buck, to assume the secretaryship
+of the company which she had served faithfully for ten years, she had
+set an example for the entire establishment.  She was the pacemaker.
+Every day of her life she figuratively pressed the electric button that
+set the wheels to whirring.  At nine A.M., sharp, she appeared, erect,
+brisk, alert, vibrating energy.  Usually, the office staff had not yet
+swung into its gait.  In a desultory way, it had been getting into its
+sateen sleevelets, adjusting its eye-shades, uncovering its typewriter,
+opening its ledgers, bringing out its files. Then, down the hall, would
+come the sound of a firm, light, buoyant step.  An electric thrill
+would pass through the front office.  Then the sunny, sincere, "Good
+morning!"
+
+"'Morning, Mrs. McChesney!" the front office would chorus back.
+
+The day had begun for the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company.
+
+Hortense, the blond stenographer (engaged to the shipping-clerk),
+noticed it first.  The psychology of that is interesting. Hortense knew
+that by nine-thirty Mrs. McChesney's desk would be clear and that the
+buzzer would summon her.  Hortense didn't mind taking dictation from T.
+A. Buck, though his method was hesitating and jerky, and he was likely
+to employ quite casually a baffling and unaccustomed word, over which
+Hortense's scampering pencil would pause, struggle desperately, then
+race on.  Hortense often was in for a quick, furtive session with her
+pocket-dictionary after one of T. A.'s periods.  But with Mrs.
+McChesney, dictation was a joy.  She knew what she wanted to say and
+she always said it.  The words she used were short, clean-cut,
+meaningful Anglo-Saxon words.  She never used received when she could
+use got.  Hers was the rapid-fire-gun method, each word sharp, well
+timed, efficient.
+
+Imagine, then, Hortense staring wide-eyed and puzzled at a floundering,
+hesitating, absent-minded Mrs. McChesney--a Mrs. McChesney strangely
+starry as to eyes, strangely dreamy as to mood, decidedly deficient as
+to dictation.  Imagine a Hortense with pencil poised in air a full five
+minutes, waiting until Mrs. McChesney should come to herself with a
+start, frown, smile vaguely, pass a hand over her eyes, and say, "Let
+me see--where was I?"
+
+"'And we find, on referring to your order, that the goods you
+mention----'" Hortense would prompt patiently.
+
+"Oh, yes, of course," with an effort.  Hortense was beginning to grow
+alarmed.
+
+In T. A. Buck's office, just across the hall, the change was quite as
+noticeable, but in another way.  His leisurely drawl was gone.  His
+deliberate manner was replaced by a brisk, quick-thinking,
+quick-speaking one.  His words were brief and to the point.  He seemed
+to be riding on the crest of an excitement-wave.  And, as he dictated,
+he smiled.
+
+Hortense stood it for a week.  Then she unburdened herself to Miss
+Kelly, the assistant bookkeeper.  Miss Kelly evinced no surprise at her
+disclosures.
+
+"I was just talking about it to Pop yesterday.  She acts worried,
+doesn't she?  And yet, not exactly worried, either.  Do you suppose it
+can be that son of hers--what's his name?  Jock."
+
+Hortense shook her head.
+
+"No; he's all right.  She had a letter from him yesterday.  He's got a
+grand position in Chicago, and he's going to marry that girl he was so
+stuck on here.  And it isn't that, either, because Mrs. McChesney likes
+her.  I can tell by the way she talks about her.  I ought to know.
+Look how Henry's ma acted toward me when we were first engaged!"
+
+The front office buzzed with it.  It crept into the workroom--into the
+shipping-room.  It penetrated the frowsy head of Jake, the
+elevator-man.  As the days went on and the tempo of the front office
+slackened with that of the two bright little inner offices, only one
+member of the whole staff remained unmoved, incurious, taciturn.  Pop
+Henderson listened, one scant old eyebrow raised knowingly, a whimsical
+half-smile screwing up his wrinkled face.
+
+At the end of three weeks, Hortense, with that display of temperament
+so often encountered in young ladies of her profession, announced in
+desperation that, if this thing kept on, she was going to forget
+herself and jeopardize her position by demanding to know outright what
+the trouble was.
+
+From the direction of Pop Henderson's inky retreat, there came the
+sound of a dry chuckle.  Pop Henderson had been chuckling in just that
+way for three weeks, now.  It was getting on the nerves of his
+colleagues.
+
+"If you ever spring the joke that's kept you giggling for a month,"
+snapped Hortense, "it'll break up the office."
+
+Pop Henderson removed his eye-shade very deliberately, passed his thin,
+cramped old hand over his scant gray locks to his bald spot, climbed
+down stiffly from his stool, ambled to the center of the room, and,
+head cocked like a knowing old brown sparrow, regarded the pert
+Hortense over his spectacles and under his spectacles and, finally,
+through his spectacles.
+
+"Young folks now 'days," began Pop Henderson dryly, "are so darned cute
+and knowin' that when an old fellow cuts in ahead of 'em for once, he
+likes to hug the joke to himself a while before he springs it."  There
+was no acid in his tone.  He was beaming very benignantly down upon the
+little blond stenographer.  "You say that Mrs. Mack is
+absent-minded-like and dreamy, and that young T. A. acts like he'd
+swallowed an electric battery.  Well, when it comes to that, I've seen
+you many a time, when you didn't know any one was lookin', just sitting
+there at your typewriter, with your hands kind of poised halfway, and
+your lips sort of parted, and your eyes just gazing away somewhere off
+in the distance for fifteen minutes at a stretch.  And out there in the
+shipping-room Henry's singing like a whole minstrel troupe all day
+long, when he isn't whistlin' so loud you can hear him over 's far as
+Eighth Avenue."  Then, as the red surged up through the girl's fair
+skin, "Well?" drawled old Pop Henderson, and the dry chuckle threatened
+again.  "We-e-ell?"
+
+"Why, Pop Henderson!" exploded Miss Kelly from her cage.
+"Why--Pop--Henderson!"
+
+In those six words the brisk and agile-minded Miss Kelly expressed the
+surprise and the awed conviction of the office staff.
+
+Pop Henderson trotted over to the water-cooler, drew a brimming glass,
+drank it off, and gave vent to a great exhaust of breath. He tried not
+to strut as he crossed back to his desk, climbed his stool, adjusted
+his eye-shade, and, with a last throaty chuckle, plunged into his books
+again.
+
+But his words already were working their wonders.  The office, after
+the first shock, was flooded with a new atmosphere--a subtle, pervasive
+air of hushed happiness, of tender solicitude. It went about like a
+mother who has found her child asleep at play, and who steals away
+atiptoe, finger on lip, lips smiling tenderly.
+
+The delicate antennae of Emma McChesney's mind sensed the change.
+
+Perhaps she read something in the glowing eyes of her sister-in-love,
+Hortense.  Perhaps she caught a new tone in Miss Kelly's voice or the
+forewoman's.  Perhaps a whisper from the outer office reached her desk.
+The very afternoon of Pop Henderson's electrifying speech, Mrs.
+McChesney crossed to T. A. Buck's office, shut the door after her,
+lowered her voice discreetly, and said,
+
+"T. A., they're on."
+
+"What makes you think so?"
+
+"Nothing.  That is, nothing definite.  No man-reason.  Just a
+woman-reason."
+
+T. A. Buck strolled over to her, smiling.
+
+"I haven't known you all this time without having learned that that's
+reason enough.  And if they really do know, I'm glad."
+
+"But we didn't want them to know.  Not yet--until--until just before
+the----"
+
+T. A. Buck laid his hands lightly on Emma McChesney's shoulders. Emma
+McChesney promptly reached up and removed them.
+
+"There you are!" exclaimed Buck, and rammed the offending hands into
+his pockets.
+
+"That's why I'm glad they know--if they really do know.  I'm no actor.
+I'm a skirt-and-lingerie manufacturer.  For the last six weeks, instead
+of being allowed to look at you with the expression that a man
+naturally wears when he's looking at the woman he's going to marry,
+what have I had to do?  Glare, that's what!  Scowl!  Act like a captain
+of finance when I've felt like a Romeo!  I've had to be dry, terse,
+businesslike, when I was bursting with adjectives that had nothing to
+do with business. You've avoided my office as you would a small-pox
+camp.  You've greeted me with a what-can-I-do-for-you air when I've
+dared to invade yours.  You couldn't have been less cordial to a book
+agent.  If it weren't for those two hours you grant me in the evening,
+I'd--I'd blow up with a loud report, that's what. I'd----"
+
+"Now, now, T. A.!" interrupted Emma McChesney soothingly, and patted
+one gesticulating arm.  "It has been a bit of a strain--for both of us.
+But, you know, we agreed it would be best this way.  We've ten days
+more to go.  Let's stick it out as we've begun.  It has been best for
+us, for the office, for the business.  The next time you find yourself
+choked up with a stock of fancy adjectives, write a sonnet to me.  Work
+'em off that way."
+
+T. A. Buck stood silent a moment, regarding her with a concentration
+that would have unnerved a woman less poised.
+
+"Emma McChesney, when you talk like that, so coolly, so evenly, so--so
+darned mentally, I sometimes wonder if you really----"
+
+"Don't say it, T. A. Because you don't mean it.  I've had to fight for
+most of my happiness.  I've never before found it ready at hand.  I've
+always had to dig for it with a shovel and a spade and a pickax, and
+then blast.  I had almost twenty years of that--from the time I was
+eighteen until I was thirty-eight. It taught me to take my happiness
+seriously and my troubles lightly."  She shut her eyes for a moment,
+and her voice was very low and very deep and very vibrant.  "So, when
+I'm coolest and evenest and most mental, T. A., you may know that I've
+struck gold."
+
+A great glow illumined Buck's fine eyes.  He took two quick steps in
+her direction.  But Emma McChesney, one hand on the door-knob, warned
+him off with the other.
+
+"Hey--wait a minute!" pleaded Buck.
+
+"Can't.  I've a fitting at the tailor's at three-thirty--my new suit.
+Wait till you see it!"
+
+"The dickens you have!  But so have I"--he jerked out his watch--"at
+three-thirty!  It's the suit I'm going to wear when I travel as a
+blushing bridegroom."
+
+"So's mine.  And look here, T. A.!  We can't both leave this place for
+a fitting.  It's absurd.  If this keeps on, it will break up the
+business.  We'll have to get married one at a time--or, at least, get
+our trousseaux one at a time.  What's your suit?"
+
+"Sort of brown."
+
+"Brown?  So's mine!  Good heavens, T. A., we'll look like a minstrel
+troupe!"
+
+
+Buck sighed resignedly.
+
+"If I telephone my tailor that I can't make it until four-thirty, will
+you promise to be back by that time?"
+
+"Yes; but remember, if your bride appears in a skirt that sags in the
+back or a coat that bunches across the shoulders, the crime will lie at
+your door."
+
+So it was that the lynx-eyed office staff began to wonder if, after
+all, Pop Henderson was the wizard that he had claimed to be.
+
+During working hours, Mrs. McChesney held rigidly to business. Her
+handsome partner tried bravely to follow her example.  If he failed
+occasionally, perhaps Emma McChesney was not so displeased as she
+pretended to be.  A business discussion, deeply interesting to both,
+was likely to run thus:
+
+Buck, entering her office briskly, papers in hand:  "Mrs.
+McChesney--ahem!--I have here a letter from Singer & French, Columbus,
+Ohio.  They ask for an extension.  They've had ninety days."
+
+"That's enough.  That firm's slow pay, and always will be until old
+Singer has the good taste and common sense to retire.  It isn't because
+the stock doesn't move.  Singer simply believes in not paying for
+anything until he has to.  If I were you, I'd write him that this is a
+business house, not a charitable institution---- No, don't do that.  It
+isn't politic.  But you know what I mean."
+
+"H'm; yes."  A silence.  "Emma, that's a fiendishly becoming gown."
+
+"Now, T. A.!"
+
+"But it is!  It--it's so kind of loose, and yet clinging, and those
+white collar-and-cuff things----"
+
+"T. A. Buck, I've worn this thing down to the office every day for a
+month.  It shines in the back.  Besides, you promised not to----"
+
+"Oh, darn it all, Emma, I'm human, you know!  How do you suppose I can
+stand here and look at you and not----"
+
+Emma McChesney (pressing the buzzer that summons Hortense): "You know,
+Tim, I don't exactly hate you this morning, either. But business is
+business.  Stop looking at me like that!"  Then, to Hortense, in the
+doorway:  "Just take this letter, Miss Stotz-Singer & French, Columbus,
+Ohio.  Dear Sirs:  Yours of the tenth at hand.  Period.  Regarding your
+request for further extension we wish to say that, in view of the
+fact----"
+
+T. A. Buck, half resentful, half amused, wholly admiring, would
+disappear.  But Hortense, eyes demurely cast down at her notebook, was
+not deceived.
+
+"Say," she confided to Miss Kelly, "they think they've got me fooled.
+But I'm wise.  Don't I know?  When Henry passes through the office
+here, from the shipping-room, he looks at me just as cool and
+indifferent.  Before we announced it, we had you all guessing, didn't
+we?  But I can see something back of that look that the rest of you
+can't get.  Well, when Mr. Buck looks at her, I can see the same thing
+in his eyes.  Say, when it comes to seeing the love-light through the
+fog, I'm there with the spy-glass."
+
+If Emma McChesney held herself well in leash during the busy day, she
+relished her happiness none the less when she could allow herself the
+full savor of it.  When a girl of eighteen she had married a man of the
+sort that must put whisky into his stomach before the machinery of his
+day would take up its creaking round.
+
+Out of the degradation of that marriage she had emerged triumphantly,
+sweet and unsullied, and she had succeeded in bringing her son, Jock
+McChesney, out into the clear sunlight with her.
+
+The evenings spent with T. A. Buck, the man of fine instincts, of
+breeding, of proven worth, of rare tenderness, filled her with a great
+peace and happiness.  When doubts assailed her, it was not for herself
+but for him.  Sometimes the fear would clutch her as they sat before
+the fire in the sitting-room of her comfortable little apartment.  She
+would voice those fears for the very joy of having them stilled.
+
+"T. A., this is too much happiness.  I'm--I'm afraid.  After all,
+you're a young man, though you are a bit older than I in actual years.
+But men of your age marry girls of eighteen. You're handsome.  And
+you've brains, family, breeding, money. Any girl in New York would be
+glad to marry you--those tall, slim, exquisite young girls.  Young!
+And well bred, and poised and fresh and sweet and lovable.  You see
+them every day on Fifth Avenue, exquisitely dressed, entirely
+desirable.  They make me feel--old--old and battered.  I've sold goods
+on the road.  I've fought and worked and struggled.  And it has left
+its mark.  I did it for the boy, God bless him!  And I'm glad I did it.
+But it put me out of the class of that girl you see on----"
+
+"Yes, Emma; you're not at all in the class with that girl you see every
+day on Fifth Avenue.  Fifth Avenue's full of her--hundreds of her,
+thousands of her.  Perhaps, five years ago, before I had worked side by
+side with you, I might have been attracted by that girl you see every
+day on Fifth Avenue.  You don't see a procession of Emma McChesneys
+every day on Fifth Avenue--not by a long shot!  Why?  Because there's
+only one of her.  She doesn't come in dozen lots.  I know that that
+girl you see every day on Fifth Avenue is all that I deserve.  But, by
+some heaven-sent miracle, I'm to have this Emma McChesney woman! I
+don't know how it came to be true.  I don't deserve it.  But it is
+true, and that's enough for me."
+
+Emma McChesney would look up at him, eyes wet, mouth smiling.
+
+"T. A., you're balm and myrrh and incense and meat and drink to me.  I
+wish I had words to tell you what I'm thinking now.  But I haven't.  So
+I'll just cover it up.  We both know it's there. And I'll tell you that
+you make love like a 'movie' hero.  Yes, you do!  Better than a 'movie'
+hero, because, in the films, the heroine always has to turn to face the
+camera, which makes it necessary for him to make love down the back of
+her neck."
+
+But T. A. Buck was unsmiling.
+
+"Don't trifle, Emma.  And don't think you can fool me that way. I
+haven't finished.  I want to settle this Fifth Avenue creature for all
+time.  What I have to say is this:  I think you are more
+attractive--finer, bigger, more rounded in character and manner,
+mellower, sweeter, sounder, with all your angles and corners rubbed
+smooth, saner, better poised than any woman I have ever known.  And
+what I am to-day you have made me, directly and indirectly, by
+association and by actual orders, by suggestion, and by direct contact.
+What you did for Jock, purposefully and by force, you did for me, too.
+Not so directly, perhaps, but with the same result.  Emma McChesney,
+you've made--actually made, molded, shaped, and turned out two men.
+You're the greatest sculptor that ever lived.  You could make a
+scarecrow in a field get up and achieve.  Everywhere one sees women
+over-wrought, over-stimulated, eager, tense.  When there appears one
+who has herself in leash, balanced, tolerant, poised, sane, composed,
+she restores your faith in things.  You lean on her, spiritually.  I
+know I need you more than you need me, Emma.  And I know you won't love
+me the less for that.  There--that's about all for this evening."
+
+"I think," breathed Emma McChesney in a choked little voice, "that
+that's about--enough."
+
+Two days before the date set for their very quiet wedding, they told
+the heads of office and workroom.  Office and workroom, somewhat moist
+as to eye and flushed as to cheek and highly congratulatory, proved
+their knowingness by promptly presenting to their employers a very
+costly and unbelievably hideous set of mantel ornaments and clock,
+calculated to strike horror to the heart of any woman who has lovingly
+planned the furnishing of her drawing-room.  Pop Henderson, after some
+preliminary wrestling with collar, necktie, spectacles, and voice,
+launched forth on a presentation speech that threatened to close down
+the works for the day.  Emma McChesney heard it, tears in her eyes.  T.
+A. Buck gnawed his mustache.  And when Pop Henderson's cracked old
+voice broke altogether in the passage that touched on his departed
+employer, old T. A. Buck, and the great happiness that this occasion
+would have brought him, Emma's hand met young T. A.'s and rested there.
+Hortense and Henry, standing very close together all through the
+speech, had, in this respect, anticipated their employers by several
+minutes.
+
+They were to be away two weeks only.  No one knew just where, except
+that some small part of the trip was to be spent on a flying visit to
+young Jock McChesney out in Chicago.  He himself was to be married very
+soon.  Emma McChesney had rather startled her very good-looking
+husband-to-be by whirling about at him with,
+
+"T. A., do you realize that you're very likely to be a step-grandfather
+some fine day not so far away!"
+
+T. A. had gazed at her for a rather shocked moment, swallowed hard,
+smiled, and said,
+
+"Even that doesn't scare me, Emma."
+
+Everything had been planned down to the last detail.  Mrs. McChesney's
+little apartment had been subleased, and a very smart one taken and
+furnished almost complete, with Annie installed in the kitchen and a
+demure parlor-maid engaged.
+
+"When we come back, we'll come home," T. A. Buck had said. "Home!"
+
+There had been much to do, but it had all been done smoothly and
+expertly, under the direction of these two who had learned how to plan,
+direct, and carry out.
+
+Then, on the last day, Emma McChesney, visibly perturbed, entered her
+partner's office, a letter in her hand.
+
+"This is ghastly!" she exclaimed.
+
+Buck pulled out a chair for her.
+
+"Klein cancel his order again?"
+
+"No.  And don't ask me to sit down.  Be thankful that I don't blow up."
+
+"Is it as bad as that?"
+
+"Bad!  Here--read that!  No, don't read it; I'll tell you. It'll
+relieve my feelings.  You know how I've been angling and scheming and
+contriving and plotting for years to get an exclusive order from Gage &
+Fosdick.  Of course we've had a nice little order every few months, but
+what's that from the biggest mail-order house in the world?  And now,
+out of a blue sky, comes this bolt from O'Malley, who buys our stuff,
+saying that he's coming on the tenth--that's next week--that he's
+planned to establish our line with their trade, and that he wants us to
+be prepared for a record-breaking order.  I've fairly prayed for this.
+And now--what shall we do?"
+
+"Do?"--smoothly--"just write the gentleman and tell him you're busy
+getting married this week and next, and that, by a singular
+coincidence, your partner is similarly engaged; that our manager will
+attend to him with all care and courtesy, unless he can postpone his
+trip until our return.  Suggest that he call around a week or two
+later."
+
+"T. A. Buck, I know it isn't considered good form to rage and glare at
+one's fiance on the eve of one's wedding-day.  If this were a week
+earlier or a week later, I'd be tempted to--shake you!"
+
+Buck stood up, came over to her, and laid a hand very gently on her
+arm.  With the other hand he took the letter from her fingers.
+
+"Emma, you're tired, and a little excited.  You've been under an
+unusual physical and mental strain for the last few weeks.  Give me
+that letter.  I'll answer it.  This kind of thing"--he held up the
+letter--"has meant everything to you.  If it had not, where would I be
+to-day?  But to-night, Emma, it doesn't mean a thing.  Not--one thing."
+
+Slowly Emma McChesney's tense body relaxed.  A great sigh that had in
+it weariness and relief and acquiescence came from her. She smiled ever
+so faintly.
+
+"I've been a ramrod so long it's going to be hard to learn to be a
+clinging vine.  I've been my own support for so many years, I don't use
+a trellis very gracefully--yet.  But I think I'll get the hang of it
+very soon."
+
+She turned toward the door, crossed to her own office, looked all about
+at the orderly, ship-shape room that reflected her personality--as did
+any room she occupied.
+
+"Just the same," she called out, over her shoulder, to Buck in the
+doorway, "I hate like fury to see that order slide."
+
+In hat and coat and furs she stood a moment, her fingers on the
+electric switch, her eyes very bright and wide.  The memories of ten
+years, fifteen years, twenty years crowded up around her and filled the
+little room.  Some of them were golden and some of them were black; a
+few had power to frighten her, even now.  So she turned out the light,
+stood for just another moment there in the darkness, then stepped out
+into the hall, closed the door softly behind her, and stood face to
+face with the lettering on the glass panel of the door--the lettering
+that spelled the name, "MRS. MCCHESNEY."
+
+T. A. Buck watched her in silence.  She reached up with one wavering
+forefinger and touched each of the twelve letters, one after the other.
+Then she spread her hand wide, blotting out the second word.  And when
+she turned away, one saw--she being Emma McChesney, and a woman, and
+very tired and rather sentimental, and a bit hysterical and altogether
+happy--that, though she was smiling, her eyes were wet.
+
+
+In her ten years on the road, visiting town after town, catching
+trains, jolting about in rumbling hotel 'buses or musty-smelling
+small-town hacks, living in hotels, good, bad, and indifferent, Emma
+McChesney had come upon hundreds of rice-strewn, ribbon-bedecked bridal
+couples.  She had leaned from her window at many a railway station to
+see the barbaric and cruel old custom of bride-and-bridegroom baiting.
+She had smiled very tenderly--and rather sadly, and hopefully,
+too--upon the boy and girl who rushed breathless into the car in a
+flurry of white streamers, flowers, old shoes, laughter, cheers, last
+messages. Now, as in a dream, she found herself actually of these.  Of
+rice, old shoes, and badinage there had been none, it is true. She
+stood quietly by while Buck attended to their trunks, just as she had
+seen it done by hundreds of helpless little cotton-wool women who had
+never checked a trunk in their lives--she, who had spent ten years of
+her life wrestling with trunks and baggagemen and porters.  Once there
+was some trifling mistake--Buck's fault. Emma, with her experience of
+the road, saw his error.  She could have set him right with a word.  It
+was on the tip of her tongue. By sheer force of will she withheld that
+word, fought back the almost overwhelming inclination to take things in
+hand, set them right.  It was just an incident, almost trifling in
+itself.  But its import was tremendous, for her conduct, that moment,
+shaped the happiness of their future life together.
+
+Emma had said that there would be no rude awakenings for them, no
+startling shocks.
+
+"There isn't a thing we don't know about each other," she had said.
+"We each know the other's weaknesses and strength.  I hate the way you
+gnaw your mustache when you're troubled, and I think the fuss you make
+when the waiter pours your coffee without first having given you sugar
+and cream is the most absurd thing I've ever seen.  But, then, I know
+how it annoys you to see me sitting with one slipper dangling from my
+toe, when I'm particularly comfortable and snug.  You know how I like
+my eggs, and you think it's immoral.  I suppose we're really set in our
+ways.  It's going to be interesting to watch each other shift."
+
+"Just the same," Buck said, "I didn't dream there was any woman living
+who could actually make a Pullman drawing-room look homelike."
+
+"Any woman who has spent a fourth of her life in hotels and trains
+learns that trick.  She has to.  If she happens to be the sort that
+likes books and flowers and sewing, she carries some of each with her.
+And one book, one rose, and one piece of unfinished embroidery would
+make an oasis in the Sahara Desert look homelike."
+
+It was on the westbound train that they encountered Sam--Sam of the
+rolling eye, the genial grin, the deft hand.  Sam was known to every
+hardened traveler as the porter de luxe of the road. Sam was a
+diplomat, a financier, and a rascal.  He never forgot a face.  He never
+forgave a meager tip.  The passengers who traveled with him were at
+once his guests and his victims.
+
+Therefore his, "Good evenin', Mis' McChesney, ma'am.  Good even'!
+Well, it suh't'nly has been a long time sense Ah had the pleasuh of yoh
+presence as passengah, ma'am.  Ah sure am----"
+
+The slim, elegant figure of T. A. Buck appeared in the doorway. Sam's
+rolling eye became a thing on ball bearings.  His teeth flashed
+startlingly white in the broadest of grins.  He took Buck's hat, ran a
+finger under its inner band, and shook it very gently.
+
+"What's the idea?" inquired Buck genially.  "Are you a combination
+porter and prestidigitator?"
+
+Sam chuckled his infectious negro chuckle.
+
+"Well, no, sah!  Ah wouldn' go's fah as t' say that, sah.  But Ah hab
+been known to shake rice out of a gen'lman's ordinary, ever'-day, black
+derby hat."
+
+"Get out!" laughed T. A. Buck, as Sam ducked.
+
+"You may as well get used to it," smiled Emma, "because I'm known to
+every train-conductor, porter, hotel-clerk, chamber-maid, and bell-boy
+between here and the Great Lakes."
+
+It was Sam who proved himself hero of the honeymoon, for he saved T. A.
+Buck from continuing his journey to Chicago brideless. Fifteen minutes
+earlier, Buck had gone to the buffet-car for a smoke.  At Cleveland,
+Emma, looking out of the car window, saw a familiar figure pacing up
+and down the station platform.  It was that dapper and important little
+Irishman, O'Malley, buyer for Gage & Fosdick, the greatest mail-order
+house in the world--O'Malley, whose letter T. A. Buck had answered;
+O'Malley, whose order meant thousands.  He was on his way to New York,
+of course.
+
+In that moment Mrs. T. A. Buck faded into the background and Emma
+McChesney rose up in her place.  She snatched hat and coat and furs,
+put them on as she went down the long aisle, swung down the car steps,
+and flew down the platform to the unconscious O'Malley.  He was
+smoking, all unconscious.  The Fates had delivered him into her expert
+hands.  She knew those kindly sisters of old, and she was the last to
+refuse their largesse.
+
+"Mr. O'Malley!"
+
+He wheeled.
+
+"Mrs. McChesney!"  He had just a charming trace of a brogue. His
+enemies said he assumed it.  "Well, who was I thinkin' of but you a
+minute ago.  What----"
+
+"I'm on my way to Chicago.  Saw you from the car window.  You're on the
+New York train?  I thought so.  Tell me, you're surely seeing our man,
+aren't you?"
+
+O'Malley's smiling face clouded.  He was a temperamental Irishman--Ted
+O'Malley--with ideas on the deference due him and his great house.
+
+"I'll tell you the truth, Mrs. McChesney.  I had a letter from your Mr.
+Buck.  It wasn't much of a letter to a man like me, representing a
+house like Gage & Fosdick.  It said both heads of the firm would be out
+of town, and would I see the manager. Me--see the manager!  Well,
+thinks I, if that's how important they think my order, then they'll not
+get it--that's all.  I've never yet----"
+
+"Dear Mr. O'Malley, please don't be offended.  As a McChesney to an
+O'Malley, I want to tell you that I've just been married."
+
+"Married!  God bless me--to----"
+
+"To T. A. Buck, of course.  He's on that train.  He----"
+
+She turned toward the train.  And as she turned it began to move, ever
+so gently.  At the same moment there sped toward her, with unbelievable
+swiftness, the figure of Sam the porter, his eyes all whites.  By one
+arm he grasped her, and half carried, half jerked her to the steps of
+the moving train, swung her up to the steps like a bundle of rags,
+caught the rail by a miracle, and stood, grinning and triumphant,
+gazing down at the panting O'Malley, who was running alongside the
+train.
+
+"Back in a week.  Will you wait for us in New York?" called Emma, her
+breath coming fast.  She was trembling, too, and laughing.
+
+"Will I wait!" called back the puffing O'Malley, every bit of the Irish
+in him beaming from his eyes.  "I'll be there when you get back as sure
+as your name's McBuck."
+
+From his pocket he took a round, silver Western dollar and, still
+running, tossed it to the toothy Sam.  That peerless porter caught it,
+twirled it, kissed it, bowed, and grinned afresh as the train glided
+out of the shed.
+
+Emma, flushed, smiling, flew up the aisle.
+
+Buck, listening to her laughing, triumphant account of her hairbreadth,
+harum-scarum adventure, frowned before he smiled.
+
+"Emma, how could you do it!  At least, why didn't you send back for me
+first?"
+
+Emma smiled a little tremulously.
+
+"Don't be angry.  You see, dear boy, I've only been your wife for a
+week.  But I've been Featherloom petticoats for over fifteen years.
+It's a habit."
+
+Just how strong and fixed a habit, she proved to herself a little more
+than a week later.  It was the morning of their first breakfast in the
+new apartment.  You would have thought, to see them over their coffee
+and eggs and rolls, that they had been breakfasting together thus for
+years--Annie was so at home in her new kitchen; the deft little maid,
+in her crisp white, fitted so perfectly into the picture.  Perhaps the
+thing that T. A. Buck said, once the maid left them alone, might have
+given an outsider the cue.
+
+"You remind me of a sweetpea, Emma.  One of those crisp, erect,
+golden-white, fresh, fragrant sweetpeas.  I think it is the slenderest,
+sweetest, neatest, trimmest flower in the world, so delicately set on
+its stem, and yet so straight, so independent."
+
+"T. A., you say such dear things to me!"
+
+No; they had not been breakfasting together for years.
+
+"I'm glad you're not one of those women that wears a frowsy, lacy,
+ribbony, what-do-you-call-'em-boudoir-cap--down to breakfast.  They
+always make me think of uncombed hair.  That's just one reason why I'm
+glad."
+
+"And I'm glad," said Emma, looking at his clear eyes and steady hand
+and firm skin, "for a number of reasons.  One of them is that you're
+not the sort of man who's a grouch at breakfast."
+
+When he had hat and coat and stick in hand, and had kissed her good-by
+and reached the door and opened it, he came back again, as is the way
+of bridegrooms.  But at last the door closed behind him.
+
+Emma sat there a moment, listening to his quick, light step down the
+corridor, to the opening of the lift door, to its metallic closing.
+She sat there, in the sunshiny dining-room, in her fresh, white morning
+gown.  She picked up her newspaper, opened it; scanned it, put it down.
+For years, now, she had read her newspaper in little gulps on the way
+downtown in crowded subway or street-car.  She could not accustom
+herself to this leisurely scanning of the pages.  She rose, went to the
+window, came back to the table, stood there a moment, her eyes fixed on
+something far away.
+
+The swinging door between dining-room and butler's pantry opened.
+Annie, in her neat blue-and-white stripes, stood before her.
+
+"Shall it be steak or chops to-night, Mrs. Mc--Buck?"
+
+Emma turned her head in Annie's direction--then her eyes.  The two
+actions were distinct and separate.
+
+"Steak or----"  There was a little bewildered look in her eyes.
+
+Her mind had not yet focused on the question.  "Steak--oh!  Oh, yes, of
+course!  Why--why, Annie"--and the splendid thousand-h.-p. mind brought
+itself down to the settling of this butter-churning, two-h.-p.
+question--"why, Annie, considering all things, I think we'll make it
+filet with mushrooms."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+BLUE SERGE
+
+For ten years, Mrs. Emma McChesney's home had been a wardrobe-trunk.
+She had taken her family life at second hand. Four nights out of the
+seven, her bed was "Lower Eight," and her breakfast, as many mornings,
+a cinder-strewn, lukewarm horror, taken tete-a-tete with a sleepy-eyed
+stranger and presided over by a white-coated, black-faced bandit, to
+whom a coffee-slopped saucer was a matter of course.
+
+It had been her habit during those ten years on the road as traveling
+saleswoman for the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, to avoid
+the discomfort of the rapidly chilling car by slipping early into her
+berth.  There, in kimono, if not in comfort, she would shut down the
+electric light with a snap, raise the shade, and, propped up on one
+elbow, watch the little towns go by.  They had a wonderful fascination
+for her, those Middle Western towns, whose very names had a
+comfortable, home-like sound--Sandusky, Galesburg, Crawfordsville,
+Appleton--very real towns, with very real people in them.  Peering
+wistfully out through the dusk, she could get little intimate glimpses
+of the home life of these people as the night came on.  In those modest
+frame houses near the station they need not trouble to pull down the
+shades as must their cautious city cousins.  As the train slowed down,
+there could be had a glimpse of a matronly housewife moving deftly
+about in the kitchen's warm-yellow glow, a man reading a paper in
+slippered, shirt-sleeved comfort, a pig-tailed girl at the piano, a
+woman with a baby in her arms, or a family group, perhaps, seated about
+the table, deep in an after-supper conclave.  It had made her homeless
+as she was homesick.
+
+Emma always liked that picture best.  Her keen, imaginative mind could
+sense the scene, could actually follow the trend of the talk during
+this, the most genial, homely, soul-cheering hour of the day.  The
+trifling events of the last twelve hours in schoolroom, in store, in
+office, in street, in kitchen loom up large as they are rehearsed in
+that magic, animated, cozy moment just before ma says, with a sigh:
+
+"Well, folks, go on into the sitting-room.  Me and Nellie've got to
+clear away."
+
+Just silhouettes as the train flashed by--these small-town people--but
+very human, very enviable to Emma McChesney.
+
+"They're real," she would say.  "They're regular, three-meals-a-day
+people.  I've been peeking in at their windows for ten years, and I've
+learned that it is in these towns that folks really live.  The
+difference between life here and life in New York is the difference
+between area and depth.  D'you see what I mean?  In New York, they live
+by the mile, and here they live by the cubic foot.  Well, I'd rather
+have one juicy, thick club-steak than a whole platterful of
+quarter-inch.  It's the same idea."
+
+To those of her business colleagues whose habit it was to lounge in the
+hotel window with sneering comment upon the small-town procession as it
+went by, Emma McChesney had been wont to say:
+
+"Don't sneer at Main Street.  When you come to think of it, isn't it
+true that Fifth Avenue, any bright winter afternoon between four and
+six, is only Main Street on a busy day multiplied by one thousand?"
+
+Emma McChesney was not the sort of woman to rail at a fate that had
+placed her in the harness instead of in the carriage.  But during all
+the long years of up-hill pull, from the time she started with a humble
+salary in the office of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company,
+through the years spent on the road, up to the very time when the crown
+of success came to her in the form of the secretaryship of the
+prosperous firm of T. A. Buck, there was a minor but fixed ambition in
+her heart.  That same ambition is to be found deep down in the heart of
+every woman whose morning costume is a tailor suit, whose newspaper
+must be read in hurried snatches on the way downtown in crowded train
+or car, and to whom nine A.M. spells "Business."
+
+"In fifteen years," Emma McChesney used to say, "I've never known what
+it is to loll in leisure.  I've never had a chance to luxuriate.
+Sunday?  To a working woman, Sunday is for the purpose of repairing the
+ravages of the other six days.  By the time you've washed your brushes,
+mended your skirt-braid, darned your stockings and gloves, looked for
+gray hairs and crows'-feet, and skimmed the magazine section, it's
+Monday."
+
+It was small wonder that Emma McChesney's leisure had been limited.  In
+those busy years she had not only earned the living for herself and her
+boy; she had trained that boy into manhood and placed his foot on the
+first rung of business success.  She had transformed the T. A. Buck
+Featherloom Petticoat Company from a placidly mediocre concern to a
+thriving, flourishing, nationally known institution.  All this might
+have turned another woman's head.  It only served to set Emma
+McChesney's more splendidly on her shoulders.  Not too splendidly,
+however; for, with her marriage to her handsome business partner, T. A.
+Buck, that well-set, independent head was found to fit very cozily into
+the comfortable hollow formed by T. A. Buck's right arm.
+
+"Emma," Buck had said, just before their marriage, "what is the
+arrangement to be after--after----"
+
+"Just what it is now, I suppose," Emma had replied, "except that we'll
+come down to the office together."
+
+He had regarded her thoughtfully for a long minute.  Then, "Emma, for
+three months after our marriage will you try being just Mrs. T. A.
+Buck?"
+
+"You mean no factory, no Featherlooms, no dictation, no business
+bothers!"  Her voice was a rising scale of surprise.
+
+"Just try it for three months, with the privilege of a lifetime, if you
+like it.  But try it.  I--I'd like to see you there when I leave, Emma.
+I'd like to have you there when I come home.  I suppose I sound like a
+selfish Turk, but----"
+
+"You sound like a regular husband," Emma McChesney had interrupted,
+"and I love you for it.  Now listen, T. A.  For three whole months I'm
+going to be what the yellow novels used to call a doll-wife.  I'm going
+to meet you at the door every night with a rose in my hair.  I shall
+wear pink things with lace ruffles on 'em.  Don't you know that I've
+been longing to do just those things for years and years?  I'm going to
+blossom out into a beauty.  Watch me!  I've never had time to study
+myself.  I'll hold shades of yellow and green and flesh-color up to my
+face to see which brings out the right tints.  I'm going to gaze at
+myself through half-closed eyes to see which shade produces tawny
+lights in my hair.  Ever since I can remember, I've been so busy that
+it has been a question of getting the best possible garments in the
+least possible time for the smallest possible sum.  In that case, one
+gets blue serge.  I've worn blue serge until it feels like a convict's
+uniform.  I'm going to blossom out into fawn and green and mauve.  I
+shall get evening dresses with only bead shoulder-straps.  I'm going to
+shop.  I've never really seen Fifth Avenue between eleven and one, when
+the real people come out.  My views of it have been at nine A.M. when
+the office-workers are going to work, and at five-thirty when they are
+going home.  I will now cease to observe the proletariat and mingle
+with the predatory.  I'll probably go in for those tiffin things at the
+Plaza.  If I do, I'll never be the same woman again."
+
+Whereupon she paused with dramatic effect.
+
+To all of which T. A. Buck had replied:
+
+"Go as far as you like.  Take fencing lessons, if you want to, or
+Sanskrit.  You've been a queen bee for so many years that I think the
+role of drone will be a pleasant change.  Let me shoulder the business
+worries for a while.  You've borne them long enough."
+
+"It's a bargain.  For three months I shall do nothing more militant
+than to pick imaginary threads off your coat lapel and pout when you
+mention business.  At the end of those three months we'll go into
+private session, compare notes, and determine whether the plan shall
+cease or become permanent.  Shake hands on it."
+
+They shook hands solemnly.  As they did so, a faint shadow of doubt
+hovered far, far back in the depths of T. A. Buck's fine eyes.  And a
+faint, inscrutable smile lurked in the corners of Emma's lips.
+
+So it was that Emma McChesney, the alert, the capable, the brisk, the
+business-like, assumed the role of Mrs. T. A. Buck, the leisurely, the
+languid, the elegant.  She, who formerly, at eleven in the morning,
+might have been seen bent on selling the best possible bill of spring
+Featherlooms to Joe Greenbaum, of Keokuk, Iowa, could now be found in a
+modiste's gray-and-raspberry salon, being draped and pinned and fitted.
+She, whose dynamic force once charged the entire office and factory
+with energy and efficiency, now distributed a tithe of that priceless
+vigor here, a tithe there, a tithe everywhere, and thus broke the very
+backbone of its power.
+
+She had never been a woman to do things by halves.  What she undertook
+to do she did thoroughly and whole-heartedly.  This principle she
+applied to her new mode of life as rigidly as she had to the old.
+
+That first month slipped magically by.  Emma was too much a woman not
+to feel a certain exquisite pleasure in the selecting of delicate and
+becoming fabrics.  There was a thrill of novelty in being able to spend
+an hour curled up with a book after lunch, to listen to music one
+afternoon a week, to drive through the mistily gray park; to walk up
+the thronged, sparkling Avenue, pausing before its Aladdin's Cave
+windows.  Simple enough pleasures, and taken quite as a matter of
+course by thousands of other women who had no work-filled life behind
+them to use as contrast.
+
+She plunged into her new life whole-heartedly.  The first new gown was
+exciting.  It was a velvet affair with furs, and gratifyingly becoming.
+Her shining blond head rose above the soft background of velvet and fur
+with an effect to distract the least observing.
+
+"Like it?" she had asked Buck, turning slowly, frankly sure of herself.
+
+"You're wonderful in it," said T. A. Buck.  "Say, Emma, where's that
+blue thing you used to wear--the one with the white cuffs and collar,
+and the little blue hat with the what-cha-ma-call-ems on it?"
+
+"T. A. Buck, you're--you're--well, you're a man, that's what you are!
+That blue thing was worn threadbare in the office, and I gave it to the
+laundress's niece weeks ago."  Small wonder her cheeks took on a deeper
+pink.
+
+"Oh," said Buck, unruffled, "too bad!  There was something about that
+dress--I don't know----"
+
+At the first sitting of the second gown, Emma revolted openly.
+
+On the floor at Emma's feet there was knotted into a contortionistic
+attitude a small, wiry, impolite person named Smalley.  Miss Smalley
+was an artist in draping and knew it.  She was the least fashionable
+person in all that smart dressmaking establishment.  She refused to
+notice the corset-coiffure-and-charmeuse edict that governed all other
+employees in the shop.  In her shabby little dress, her steel-rimmed
+spectacles, her black-sateen apron, Smalley might have passed for a
+Bird Center home dressmaker.  Yet, given a yard or two or three of
+satin and a saucer of pins, Smalley could make the dumpiest of
+debutantes look like a fragile flower.
+
+At a critical moment Emma stirred.  Handicapped as she was by a
+mouthful of nineteen pins and her bow-knot attitude, Smalley still
+could voice a protest.
+
+"Don't move!" she commanded, thickly.
+
+"Wait a minute," Emma said, and moved again, more disastrously than
+before.  "Don't you think it's too--too young?"
+
+She eyed herself in the mirror anxiously, then looked down at Miss
+Smalley's nut-cracker face that was peering up at her, its lips pursed
+grotesquely over the pins.
+
+"Of course it is," mumbled Miss Smalley.  "Everybody's clothes are too
+young for 'em nowadays.  The only difference between the dresses we
+make for girls of sixteen and the dresses we make for their
+grandmothers of sixty is that the sixty-year-old ones want 'em shorter
+and lower, and they run more to rose-bud trimming."
+
+Emma surveyed the acid Miss Smalley with a look that was half amused,
+half vexed, wholly determined.
+
+"I shan't wear it.  Heaven knows I'm not sixty, but I'm not sixteen
+either!  I don't want to be."
+
+Miss Smalley, doubling again to her task, flung upward a grudging
+compliment.
+
+"Well, anyway, you've got the hair and the coloring and the figure for
+it.  Goodness knows you look young enough!"
+
+"That's because I've worked hard all my life," retorted Emma, almost
+viciously.  "Another month of this leisure and I'll be as wrinkled as
+the rest of them."
+
+Smalley's magic fingers paused in their manipulation of a soft fold of
+satin.
+
+"Worked?  Earned a living?  Used your wits and brains every day against
+the wits and brains of other folks?"
+
+"Every day."
+
+Into the eyes of Miss Smalley, the artist in draping, there crept the
+shrewd twinkle of Miss Smalley, the successful woman in business.  She
+had been sitting back on her knees, surveying her handiwork through
+narrowed lids.  Now she turned her gaze on Emma, who was smiling down
+at her.
+
+"Then for goodness' sake don't stop!  I've found out that work is a
+kind of self-oiler.  If you're used to it, the minute you stop you
+begin to get rusty, and your hinges creak and you clog up.  And the
+next thing you know, you break down.  Work that you like to do is a
+blessing.  It keeps you young.  When my mother was my age, she was
+crippled with rheumatism, and all gnarled up, and quavery, and all she
+had to look forward to was death.  Now me--every time the styles in
+skirts change I get a new hold on life.  And on a day when I can make a
+short, fat woman look like a tall, thin woman, just by sitting here on
+my knees with a handful of pins, and giving her the line she needs, I
+go home feeling like I'd just been born."
+
+"I know that feeling," said Emma, in her eyes a sparkle that had long
+been absent.  "I've had it when I've landed a thousand-dollar
+Featherloom order from a man who has assured me that he isn't
+interested in our line."
+
+At dinner that evening, Emma's gown was so obviously not of the new
+crop that even her husband's inexpert eye noted it.
+
+"That's not one of the new ones, is it?"
+
+"This!  And you a manufacturer of skirts!"
+
+"What's the matter with the supply of new dresses?  Isn't there enough
+to go round?"
+
+"Enough!  I've never had so many new gowns in my life.  The trouble is
+that I shan't feel at home in them until I've had 'em all dry-cleaned
+at least once."
+
+During the second month, there came a sudden, sharp change in skirt
+modes.  For four years women had been mincing along in garments so
+absurdly narrow that each step was a thing to be considered, each
+curbing or car-step demanding careful negotiation.  Now, Fashion, in
+her freakiest mood, commanded a bewildering width of skirt that was
+just one remove from the flaring hoops of Civil War days.  Emma knew
+what that meant for the Featherloom workrooms and selling staff.  New
+designs, new models, a shift in prices, a boom for petticoats, for four
+years a garment despised.
+
+A hundred questions were on the tip of Emma's tongue; a hundred
+suggestions flashed into her keen mind; there occurred to her a
+wonderful design for a new model which should be full and flaring
+without being bulky and uncomfortable as were the wide petticoats of
+the old days.
+
+But a bargain was a bargain.  Still, Emma Buck was as human as Emma
+McChesney had been.  She could not resist a timid,
+
+"T. A., are you--that is--I was just wondering--you're making 'em wide,
+I suppose, for the spring trade."
+
+A queer look flashed into T. A. Buck's eyes--a relieved look that was
+as quickly replaced by an expression both baffled and anxious.
+
+"Why--a--mmmm--yes--oh, yes, we're making 'em up wide, but----"
+
+"But what?" Emma leaned forward, tense.
+
+"Oh, nothing--nothing."
+
+During the second month there came calling on Emma, those solid and
+heavy New Yorkers, with whom the Buck family had been on friendly terms
+for many years.  They came at the correct hour, in their correct motor
+or conservative broughams, wearing their quietly correct clothes, and
+Emma gave them tea, and they talked on every subject from suffrage to
+salad dressings, and from war to weather, but never once was mention
+made of business.  And Emma McChesney's life had been interwoven with
+business for more than fifteen years.
+
+There were dinners--long, heavy, correct dinners.  Emma, very well
+dressed, bright-eyed, alert, intelligent, vital, became very popular at
+these affairs, and her husband very proud of her popularity.  And if
+any one as thoroughly alive as Mrs. T. A. Buck could have been bored to
+extinction by anything, then those dinners would have accomplished the
+deadly work.
+
+"T. A.," she said one evening, after a particularly large affair of
+this sort, "T. A., have you ever noticed anything about me that is
+different from other women?"
+
+"Have I?  Well, I should say I----"
+
+"Oh, I don't mean what you mean, dear--thanks just the same.  I mean
+those women tonight.  They all seem to 'go in' for something--votes or
+charity or dancing or social service, or something--even the girls.
+And they all sounded so amateurish, so untrained, so unprepared, yet
+they seemed to be dreadfully in earnest."
+
+"This is the difference," said T. A. Buck.  "You've rubbed up against
+life, and you know.  They've always been sheltered, but now they want
+to know.  Well, naturally they're going to bungle and bump their heads
+a good many times before they really find out."
+
+"Anyway," retorted Emma, "they want to know.  That's something.  It's
+better to have bumped your head, even though you never see what's on
+the other side of the wall, than never to have tried to climb it."
+
+It was in the third week of the third month that Emma encountered
+Hortense.  Hortense, before her marriage to Henry, the shipping-clerk,
+had been a very pretty, very pert, very devoted little stenographer in
+the office of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company.  She had
+married just a month after her employers, and Emma, from the fulness of
+her own brimming cup of happiness, had made Hortense happy with a gift
+of linens and lingerie and lace of a fineness that Hortense's
+beauty-loving, feminine heart could never have hoped for.
+
+They met in the busy aisle of a downtown department store and shook
+hands as do those who have a common bond.
+
+Hortense, as pretty as ever and as pert, spoke first.
+
+"I wouldn't have known you, Mrs. Mc-- Buck!"
+
+"No?  Why not?"
+
+"You look--no one would think you'd ever worked in your life.  I was
+down at the office the other day for a minute--the first time since I
+was married.  They told me you weren't there any more."
+
+"No; I haven't been down since my marriage either.  I'm like you--an
+elegant lady of leisure."
+
+Hortense's bright-blue eyes dwelt searchingly on the face of her former
+employer.
+
+"The bunch in the office said they missed you something awful." Then,
+in haste:  "Oh, I don't mean that Mr. Buck don't make things go all
+right.  They're awful fond of him.  But--I don't know--Miss Kelly said
+she never has got over waiting for the sound of your step down the hall
+at nine--sort of light and quick and sharp and busy, as if you couldn't
+wait till you waded into the day's work.  Do you know what I mean?"
+
+"I know what you mean," said Emma.
+
+There was a little pause.  The two women so far apart, yet so near; so
+different, yet so like, gazed far down into each other's soul.
+
+"Miss it, don't you?" said Hortense.
+
+"Yes; don't you?"
+
+"Do I!  Say----"  She turned and indicated the women surging up and
+down the store aisles, and her glance and gesture were replete with
+contempt.  "Say; look at 'em!  Wandering around here, aimless as a lot
+of chickens in a barnyard.  Half of 'em are here because they haven't
+got anything else to do.  Think of it!  I've watched 'em lots of times.
+They go pawing over silks and laces and trimmings just for the pleasure
+of feeling 'em. They stand in front of a glass case with a figure in it
+all dressed up in satin and furs and jewels, and you'd think they were
+worshiping an idol like they used to in the olden days. They don't seem
+to have anything to do.  Nothing to occupy their--their heads.  Say, if
+I thought I was going to be like them in time, I----"
+
+"Hortense, my dear child, you're--you're happy, aren't you? Henry----"
+
+"Well, I should say we are!  I'm crazy about Henry, and he thinks I'm
+perfect.  Honestly, ain't they a scream!  They think they're so big and
+manly and all, and they're just like kids; ain't it so?  We're living
+in a four-room apartment in Harlem. We've got it fixed up too cozy for
+anything."
+
+"I'd like to come and see you," said Emma.  Hortense opened her eyes
+wide.
+
+"Honestly; if you would----"
+
+"Let's go up now.  I've the car outside."
+
+"Now!  Why I--I'd love it!"
+
+They chattered like schoolgirls on the way uptown--these two who had
+found so much in common.  The little apartment reached, Hortense threw
+open the door with the confident gesture of the housekeeper who is not
+afraid to have her household taken by surprise--whose housekeeping is
+an index of character.
+
+Hortense had been a clean-cut little stenographer.  Her correspondence
+had always been free from erasures, thumb-marks, errors.  Her four-room
+flat was as spotless as her typewritten letters had been.  The kitchen
+shone in its blue and white and nickel.  A canary chirped in the tiny
+dining-room.  There were books and magazines on the sitting-room table.
+The bedroom was brave in its snowy spread and the toilet silver that
+had been Henry's gift to her the Christmas they became engaged.
+
+Emma examined everything, exclaimed over everything, admired
+everything.  Hortense glowed like a rose.
+
+"Do you really like it?  I like the green velours in the sitting-room,
+don't you?  It's always so kind and cheerful. We're not all settled
+yet.  I don't suppose we ever will be. Sundays, Henry putters around,
+putting up shelves, and fooling around with a can of paint.  I always
+tell him he ought to have lived on a farm, where he'd have elbow-room."
+
+"No wonder you're so happy and busy," Emma exclaimed, and patted the
+girl's fresh, young cheek.
+
+Hortense was silent a moment.
+
+"I'm happy," she said, at last, "but I ain't busy.  And--well, if
+you're not busy, you can't be happy very long, can you?"
+
+"No," said Emma, "idleness, when you're not used to it, is misery."
+
+"There!  You've said it!  It's like running on half-time when you're
+used to a day-and-night shift.  Something's lacking.  It isn't that
+Henry isn't grand to me, because he is.  Evenings, we're so happy that
+we just sit and grin at each other and half the time we forget to go to
+a 'movie.' After Henry leaves in the morning, I get to work.  I
+suppose, in the old days, when women used to have to chop the kindling,
+and catch the water for washing in a rain-barrel, and keep up a fire in
+the kitchen stove and do their own bread baking and all, it used to
+keep 'em hustling.  But, my goodness!  A four-room flat for two isn't
+any work.  By eleven, I'm through.  I've straightened everything, from
+the bed to the refrigerator; the marketing's done, and the dinner
+vegetables are sitting around in cold water.  The mending for two is a
+joke.  Henry says it's a wonder I don't sew double-breasted buttons on
+his undershirts."
+
+Emma was not smiling.  But, then, neither was Hortense.  She was
+talking lightly, seemingly, but her pretty face was quite serious.
+
+"The big noise in my day is when Henry comes home at six.  That was all
+right and natural, I suppose, in those times when a quilting-bee was a
+wild afternoon's work, and teaching school was the most advanced job a
+woman could hold down."
+
+Emma was gazing fascinated at the girl's sparkling face.  Her own eyes
+were very bright, and her lips were parted.
+
+"Tell me, Hortense," she said now; "what does Henry say to all this?
+Have you told him how you feel?"
+
+"Well, I--I talked to him about it once or twice.  I told him that I've
+got about twenty-four solid hours a week that I might be getting fifty
+cents an hour for.  You know, I worked for a manuscript-typewriting
+concern before I came over to Buck's--plays and stories and that kind
+of thing.  They used to like my work because I never queered their
+speeches by leaving out punctuation or mixing up the characters.  The
+manager there said I could have work any time I wanted it.  I've got my
+own typewriter.  I got it second hand when I first started in.  Henry
+picks around on it sometimes, evenings.  I hardly ever touch it. It's
+getting rusty--and so am I."
+
+"It isn't just the money you want, Hortense?  Are you sure?"
+
+"Of course I'd like the money.  That extra coming in would mean
+books--I'm crazy about reading, and so is Henry--and theaters and lots
+of things we can't afford now.  But that isn't all.  Henry don't want
+to be a shipping-clerk all his life.  He's crazy about mechanics and
+that kind of stuff.  But the books that he needs cost a lot.  Don't you
+suppose I'd be proud to feel that the extra money I'd earned would lift
+him up where he could have a chance to be something!  But Henry is dead
+set against it.  He says he is the one that's going to earn the money
+around here.  I try to tell him that I'm used to using my mind.  He
+laughs and pinches my cheek and tells me to use it thinking about him."
+She stopped suddenly and regarded Emma with conscience-stricken eyes.
+"You don't think I'm running down Henry, do you?  My goodness, I don't
+want you to think that I'd change back again for a million dollars,
+because I wouldn't."  She looked up at Emma, conscience-stricken.
+
+Emma came swiftly over and put one hand on the girl's shoulder.
+
+"I don't think it.  Not for a minute.  I know that the world is full of
+Henrys, and that the number of Hortenses is growing larger and larger.
+I don't know if the four-room flats are to blame, or whether it's just
+a natural development.  But the Henry-Hortense situation seems to be
+spreading to the nine-room-and-three-baths apartments, too."
+
+Hortense nodded a knowing head.
+
+"I kind of thought so, from the way you were listening."
+
+The two, standing there gazing at each other almost shyly, suddenly
+began to laugh.  The laugh was a safety-valve.  Then, quite as
+suddenly, both became serious.  That seriousness had been the
+under-current throughout.
+
+"I wonder," said Emma very gently, "if a small Henry, some day, won't
+provide you with an outlet for all that stored-up energy."
+
+Hortense looked up very bravely.
+
+"Maybe.  You--you must have been about my age when your boy was born.
+Did he make you feel--different?"
+
+The shade of sadness that always came at the mention of those unhappy
+years of her early marriage crept into Emma's face now.
+
+"That was not the same, dear," she explained.  "I hadn't your sort of
+Henry.  You see, my boy was my only excuse for living. You'll never
+know what that means.  And when things grew altogether impossible, and
+I knew that I must earn a living for Jock and myself, I just did
+it--that's all.  I had to."
+
+Hortense thought that over for one deliberate moment.  Her brows were
+drawn in a frown.
+
+"I'll tell you what I think," she announced, at last, "though I don't
+know that I can just exactly put it into words.  I mean this:  Some
+people are just bound to--to give, to build up things, to--well, to
+manufacture, because they just can't help it.  It's in 'em, and it's
+got to come out.  Dynamos--that's what Henry's technical books would
+call them.  You're one--a great big one.  I'm one.  Just a little tiny
+one.  But it's sparking away there all the time, and it might as well
+be put to some use, mightn't it?"
+
+Emma bent down and kissed the troubled forehead, and then, very
+tenderly, the pretty, puckered lips.
+
+"Little Hortense," she said, "you're asking a great big question.  I
+can answer it for myself, but I can't answer it for you.  It's too
+dangerous.  I wouldn't if I could."
+
+Emma, waiting in the hall for the lift, looked back at the slim little
+figure in the doorway.  There was a droop to the shoulders.  Emma's
+heart smote her.
+
+"Don't bother your head about all this, little girl," she called back
+to her.  "Just forget to be ambitious and remember to be happy.  That's
+much the better way."
+
+Hortense, from the doorway, grinned a rather wicked little grin.
+
+"When are you going back to the office, Mrs. Buck?" she asked, quietly
+enough.
+
+"What makes you think I'm going back at all?" demanded Emma, stepping
+into the shaky little elevator.
+
+"I don't think it," retorted Hortense, once more the pert.  "I know it."
+
+Emma knew it, too.  She had known it from the moment that she shook
+hands in her compact.  There was still one week remaining of the
+stipulated three months.  It seemed to Emma that that one week was
+longer than the combined eleven.  But she went through with colors
+flying.  Whatever Emma McChesney Buck did, she did well.  But, then, T.
+A. Buck had done his part well, too--so well that, on the final day,
+Emma felt a sinking at her heart.  He seemed so satisfied with affairs
+as they were.  He was, apparently, so content to drop all thought of
+business when he left the office for his home.
+
+
+Emma had planned a very special little dinner that evening.  She wore a
+very special gown, too--one of the new ones.  T. A. noticed it at once,
+and the dinner as well, being that kind of husband.  Still, Annie, the
+cook, complained later, to the parlor-maid, about the thanklessness of
+cooking dinners for folks who didn't eat more'n a mouthful, anyway.
+
+Dinner over,
+
+"Well, Emma?" said T. A. Buck.
+
+"Light your cigar, T. A.," said Emma.  "You'll need it."
+
+T. A. lighted it with admirable leisureliness, sent out a great puff of
+fragrant smoke, and surveyed his wife through half-closed lids.
+Beneath his air of ease there was a tension.
+
+"Well, Emma?" he said again, gently.
+
+Emma looked at him a moment appreciatively.  She had too much poise and
+balance and control herself not to recognize and admire those qualities
+in others.
+
+"T. A., if I had been what they call a homebody, we wouldn't be married
+to-day, would we?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You knew plenty of home-women that you could have married, didn't you?"
+
+"I didn't ask them, Emma, but----"
+
+"You know what I mean.  Now listen, T. A.:  I've loafed for three
+months.  I've lolled and lazied and languished.  And I've never been so
+tired in my life--not even when we were taking January inventory.
+Another month of this, and I'd be an old, old woman.  I understand,
+now, what it is that brings that hard, tired, stony look into the faces
+of the idle women.  They have to work so hard to try to keep happy.  I
+suppose if I had been a homebody all my life, I might be hardened to
+this kind of thing.  But it's too late now.  And I'm thankful for it.
+Those women who want to shop and dress and drive and play are welcome
+to my share of it.  If I am to be punished in the next world for my
+wickedness in this, I know what form my torture will take.  I shall
+have to go from shop to shop with a piece of lace in my hand, matching
+a sample of insertion.  Fifteen years of being in the thick of it spoil
+one for tatting and tea.  The world is full of homebodies, I suppose.
+And they're happy. I suppose I might have been one, too, if I hadn't
+been obliged to get out and hustle.  But it's too late to learn now.
+Besides, I don't want to.  If I do try, I'll be destroying the very
+thing that attracted you to me in the first place.  Remember what you
+said about the Fifth Avenue girl?"
+
+"But, Emma," interrupted Buck very quietly, "I don't want you to try."
+
+Emma, with a rush of words at her very lips, paused, eyed him for a
+doubtful moment, asked a faltering question.
+
+"But it was your plan--you said you wanted me to be here when you came
+home and when you left, didn't you?  Do you mean you----"
+
+"I mean that I've missed my business partner every minute for three
+months.  All the time we've been going to those fool dinners and all
+that kind of thing, I've been bursting to talk skirts to you.  I--say,
+Emma, Adler's designed a new model--a full one, of course, but there's
+something wrong with it.  I can't put my finger on the flaw, but----"
+
+Emma came swiftly over to his chair.
+
+"Make a sketch of it, can't you?" she said.  From his pocket Buck drew
+a pencil, an envelope, and fell to sketching rapidly, squinting down
+through his cigar smoke as he worked.
+
+"It's like this," he began, absorbed and happy; "you see, where the
+fulness begins at the knee----"
+
+"Yes!" prompted Emma, breathlessly.
+
+Two hours later they were still bent over the much marked bit of paper.
+But their interest in it was not that of those who would solve a
+perplexing problem.  It was the lingering, satisfied contemplation of a
+task accomplished.
+
+Emma straightened, leaned back, sighed--a victorious, happy sigh.
+
+"And to think," she said, marveling, "to think that I once envied the
+women who had nothing to do but the things I've done in the last three
+months!"
+
+Buck had risen, stretched luxuriously, yawned.  Now he came over to his
+wife and took her head in his two hands, cozily, and stood a moment
+looking into her shining eyes.
+
+"Emma, I may have mentioned this once or twice before, but perhaps
+you'll still be interested to know that I think you're a wonder.  A
+wonder!  You're the----"
+
+"Oh, well, we won't quarrel about that," smiled Emma brazenly. "But I
+wonder if Adler will agree with us when he sees what we've done to his
+newest skirt design."
+
+Suddenly a new thought seemed to strike her.  She was off down the
+hall.  Buck, following in a leisurely manner, hands in pockets, stood
+in the bedroom door and watched her plunge into the innermost depths of
+the clothes-closet.
+
+"What's the idea, Emma?"
+
+"Looking for something," came back his wife's muffled tones.
+
+A long wait.
+
+"Can I help?"
+
+"I've got it!" cried Emma, and emerged triumphant, flushed, smiling,
+holding a garment at arm's length, aloft.
+
+"What----"
+
+Emma shook it smartly, turned it this way and that, held it up under
+her chin by the sleeves.
+
+"Why, girl!" exclaimed Buck, all a-grin, "it's the----"
+
+"The blue serge," Emma finished for him, "with the white collars and
+cuffs.  And what's more, young man, it's the little blue hat with the
+what-cha-ma-call-ems on it.  And praise be! I'm wearing 'em both
+down-town to-morrow morning."
+
+
+
+V
+
+"HOOPS, MY DEAR!"
+
+Emma McChesney Buck always vigorously disclaimed any knowledge of that
+dreamy-eyed damsel known as Inspiration.  T. A. Buck, her
+husband-partner, accused her of being on intimate terms with the lady.
+So did the adoring office staff of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat
+Company.  Out in the workshop itself, the designers and cutters, those
+jealous artists of the pencil, shears, and yardstick, looked on in awed
+admiration on those rare occasions when the feminine member of the
+business took the scissors in her firm white hands and slashed boldly
+into a shimmering length of petticoat-silk.  When she put down the
+great shears, there lay on the table the detached parts of that which
+the appreciative and experienced eyes of the craftsmen knew to be a new
+and original variation of that elastic garment known as the underskirt.
+
+For weeks preceding one of these cutting-exhibitions, Emma was likely
+to be not quite her usual brisk self.  A mystic glow replaced the alert
+brightness of her eye.  Her wide-awake manner gave way to one of almost
+sluggish inactivity.
+
+The outer office, noting these things, would lift its eyebrows
+significantly.
+
+"Another hunch!" it would whisper.  "The last time she beat the rest of
+the trade by six weeks with that elastic-top gusset."
+
+"Inspiration working, Emma?" T. A. Buck would ask, noting the symptoms.
+
+"It isn't inspiration, T. A. Nothing of the kind!  It's just an attack
+of imagination, complicated by clothes-instinct."
+
+"That's all that ails Poiret," Buck would retort.
+
+Early in the autumn, when women were still walking with an absurd
+sidewise gait, like a duck, or a filly that is too tightly hobbled, the
+junior partner of the firm began to show unmistakable signs of business
+aberration.  A blight seemed to have fallen upon her bright little
+office, usually humming with activity.  The machinery of her day,
+ordinarily as noiseless and well ordered as a thing on ball bearings,
+now rasped, creaked, jerked, stood still, jolted on again.  A bustling
+clerk or stenographer, entering with paper or memorandum, would find
+her bent over her desk, pencil in hand, absorbed in a rough drawing
+that seemed to bear no relation to the skirt of the day.  The margin of
+her morning paper was filled with queer little scrawls by the time she
+reached the office.  She drew weird lines with her fork on the
+table-cloth at lunch.  These hieroglyphics she covered with a quick
+hand, like a bashful schoolgirl, when any one peeped.
+
+"Tell a fellow what it's going to be, can't you?" pleaded Buck.
+
+"I got one glimpse yesterday, when you didn't know I was looking over
+your shoulder.  It seemed a pass between an overgrown Zeppelin and an
+apple dumpling.  So I know it can't be a skirt. Come on, Emma; tell
+your old man!"
+
+"Not yet," Emma would reply dreamily.
+
+Buck would strike an attitude intended to intimidate.
+
+"If you have no sense of what is due me as your husband, then I demand,
+as senior partner of this firm, to know what it is that is taking your
+time, which rightfully belongs to this business."
+
+"Go away, T. A., and stop pestering me!  What do you think I'm
+designing--a doily?"
+
+Buck, turning to go to his own office, threw a last retort over his
+shoulder--a rather sobering one, this time.
+
+"Whatever it is, it had better be good--with business what it is and
+skirts what they are."
+
+Emma lifted her head to reply to that.
+
+"It isn't what they are that interests me.  It's what they're going to
+be."
+
+Buck paused in the doorway.
+
+"Going to be!  Anybody can see that.  Underneath that full, fool,
+flaring over-drape, the real skirt is as tight as ever.  I don't think
+the spring models will show an inch of real difference.  I tell you,
+Emma, it's serious."
+
+Emma, apparently absorbed in her work, did not reply to this. But a
+vague something about the back of her head told T. A. Buck that she was
+laughing at him.  The knowledge only gave him new confidence in this
+resourceful, many-sided, lovable, level-headed partner-wife of his.
+
+Two weeks went by--four--six--eight.  Emma began to look a little thin.
+Her bright color was there only when she was overtired or excited.  The
+workrooms began to talk of new designs for spring, though it was
+scarcely mid-winter.  The head designer came forward timidly with a
+skirt that measured a yard around the bottom.  Emma looked at it, tried
+to keep her lower lip prisoner between her teeth, failed, and began to
+laugh helplessly, almost hysterically.
+
+Amazement in the faces of Buck and Koritz, the designer, became
+consternation, then, in the designer, resentment.
+
+Koritz, dark, undersized, with the eyes of an Oriental and the lean,
+sensitive fingers of one who creates, shivered a little, like a plant
+that is swept by an icy blast.  Buck came over and laid one hand on his
+wife's shaking shoulder.
+
+"Emma, you're overtired!  This--this thing you've been slaving over has
+been too much for you."
+
+With one hand, Emma reached up and patted the fingers that rested
+protectingly on her shoulder.  With the other, she wiped her eyes,
+then, all contrition, grasped the slender brown hand of the offended
+Koritz.
+
+"Bennie, please forgive me!  I--I didn't mean to laugh.  I wasn't
+laughing at your new skirt."
+
+"You think it's too wide, maybe, huh?" Bennie Koritz said, and held it
+up doubtfully.
+
+"Too wide!"  For a moment Emma seemed threatened with another attack of
+that inexplicable laughter.  She choked it back resolutely.
+
+"No, Bennie; not too wide.  I'll tell you to-morrow why I laughed.
+Then, perhaps, you'll laugh with me."
+
+Bennie, draping his despised skirt-model over one arm, had the courage
+to smile even now, though grimly.
+
+"I laugh--sure," he said, showing his white teeth now.  "But the laugh
+will be, I bet you, on me--like it was when you designed that
+knickerbocker before the trade knew such a thing could be."
+
+Impulsively Emma grasped his hand and shook it, as though she found a
+certain needed encouragement in the loyalty of this sallow little
+Russian.
+
+"Bennie, you're a true artist--because you're big enough to praise the
+work of a fellow craftsman when you recognize its value."  And Koritz,
+the dull red showing under the olive of his cheeks, went back to his
+cutting-table happy.
+
+Buck bent forward, eagerly.
+
+"You're going to tell me now, Emma?  It's finished?"
+
+"To-night--at home.  I want to be the first to try it on.  I'll play
+model.  A private exhibition, just for you.  It's not only finished; it
+is patented."
+
+"Patented!  But why?  What is it, anyway?  A new fastener?  I thought
+it was a skirt."
+
+"Wait until you see it.  You'll think I should have had it copyrighted
+as well, not to say passed by the national board of censors."
+
+"Do you mean to say that I'm to be the entire audience at the premiere
+of this new model?"
+
+"You are to be audience, critic, orchestra, box-holder, patron, and
+'Diamond Jim' Brady.  Now run along into your own office--won't you,
+dear?  I want to get out these letters."  And she pressed the button
+that summoned a stenographer.
+
+T. A. Buck, resigned, admiring, and anticipatory, went.
+
+Annie, the cook, was justified that evening in her bitter complaint.
+Her excellent dinner received scant enough attention from these two.
+They hurried through it like eager, bright-eyed school-children who
+have been promised a treat.  Two scarlet spots glowed in Emma's cheeks.
+Buck's eyes, through the haze of his after-dinner cigar, were luminous.
+
+"Now?"
+
+"No; not yet.  I want you to smoke your cigar and digest your dinner
+and read your paper.  I want you to twiddle your thumbs a little and
+look at your watch.  First-night curtains are always late in rising,
+aren't they?  Well!"
+
+She turned on the full glare of the chandelier, turned it off, went
+about flicking on the soft-shaded wall lights and the lamps.
+
+"Turn your chair so that your back will be toward the door."
+
+He turned it obediently.
+
+Emma vanished.
+
+From the direction of her bedroom there presently came the sounds of
+dresser drawers hurriedly opened and shut with a bang, of a slipper
+dropped on the hard-wood floor, a tune hummed in an absent-minded
+absorption under the breath, an excited little laugh nervously stifled.
+Buck, in his role of audience, began to clap impatiently and to stamp
+with his feet on the floor.
+
+"No gallery!" Emma called in from the hall.  "Remember the
+temperamental family on the floor below!"  A silence--then: "I'm
+coming.  Shut your eyes and prepare to be jarred by the Buck
+balloon-petticoat!"
+
+There was a rustling of silks, a little rush to the center of the big
+room, a breathless pause, a sharp snap of finger and thumb. Buck opened
+his eyes.
+
+He opened his eyes.  Then he closed them and opened them again,
+quickly, as we do, sometimes, when we are unwilling to believe that
+which we see.  What he beheld was this:  A very pretty, very flushed,
+very bright-eyed woman, her blond hair dressed quaintly after the
+fashion of the early 'Sixties, her arms and shoulders bare, a pink-slip
+with shoulder-straps in lieu of a bodice, and--he passed a bewildered
+hand over his eyes a skirt that billowed and flared and flounced and
+spread in a great, graceful circle--a skirt strangely light for all its
+fulness--a skirt like, and yet, somehow, unlike those garments seen in
+ancient copies of Godey's Lady Book.
+
+"That can't be--you don't mean--what--what IS it?" stammered Buck,
+dismayed.
+
+Emma, her arms curved above her head like a ballet-dancer's,
+pirouetted, curtsied very low so that the skirt spread all about her on
+the floor, like the petals of a flower.
+
+"Hoops, my dear!"
+
+"Hoops!" echoed Buck, in weak protest.  "Hoops, my DEAR!"
+
+Emma stroked one silken fold with approving fingers.
+
+"Our new leader for spring."
+
+"But, Emma, you're joking!"
+
+She stared, suddenly serious.
+
+"You mean--you don't like it!"
+
+"Like it!  For a fancy-dress costume, yes; but as a petticoat for
+every-day wear, to be made up by us for our customers!  But of course
+you're playing a trick on me."  He laughed a little weakly and came
+toward her.  "You can't catch me that way, old girl!  It's darned
+becoming, Emma--I'll say that."  He bent down, smiling.  "I'll allow
+you to kiss me.  And then try me with the real surprise, will you?"
+
+Her coquetry vanished.  Her smile fled with it.  Her pretty pose was
+abandoned.  Mrs. T. A. Buck, wife, gave way to Emma McChesney Buck,
+business woman.  She stiffened a little, as though bracing herself for
+a verbal encounter.
+
+"You'll get used to it.  I expected you to be jolted at the first shock
+of it.  I was, myself--when the idea came to me."
+
+Buck passed a frenzied forefinger under his collar, as though it had
+suddenly grown too tight for him.
+
+"Used to it!  I don't want to get used to it!  It's preposterous!  You
+can't be serious!  No woman would wear a garment like that!  For five
+years skirts have been tighter and tighter----"
+
+"Until this summer they became tightest," interrupted Emma. "They could
+go no farther.  I knew that meant, 'About face!'  I knew it meant not a
+slightly wider skirt but a wildly wider skirt.  A skirt as bouffant as
+the other had been scant.  I was sure it wouldn't be a gradual process
+at all but a mushroom growth--hobbles to-day, hoops to-morrow.  Study
+the history of women's clothes, and you'll find that has always been
+true."
+
+"Look here, Emma," began Buck, desperately; "you're wrong, all wrong!
+Here, let me throw this scarf over your shoulders.  Now we'll sit down
+and talk this thing over sensibly."
+
+"I'll agree to the scarf"--she drew a soft, silken, fringed shawl about
+her and immediately one thought of a certain vivid, brilliant portrait
+of a hoop-skirted dancer--"but don't ask me to sit down.  I'd rebound
+like a toy balloon.  I've got to convince you of this thing.  I'll have
+to do it standing."
+
+Buck sank into his chair and dabbed at his forehead with his
+handkerchief.
+
+"You'll never convince me, sitting or standing.  Emma, I know I fought
+the knickerbocker when you originated it, and I know that it turned out
+to be a magnificent success.  But this is different.  The knicker was
+practical; this thing's absurd--it's impossible!  This is an age of
+activity.  In Civil War days women minced daintily along when they
+walked at all.  They stitched on samplers by way of diversion."
+
+"What has all that to do with it?" inquired Emma sweetly.
+
+"Everything.  Use a little logic."
+
+"Logic!  In a discussion about women's dress!  T. A., I'm surprised."
+
+"But, Emma, be reasonable.  Good Lord!  You're usually clear-sighted
+enough.  Our mode of living has changed in the last fifty years--our
+methods of transit, our pastimes, customs, everything.  Imagine a woman
+trying to climb a Fifth Avenue 'bus in one of those things.  Fancy her
+in a hot set of tennis.  Women use street-cars, automobiles, airships.
+Can you see a subway train full of hoop-skirted clerks, stenographers,
+and models? Street-car steps aren't built for it.  Office-building
+elevators can't stand for it.  Six-room apartments won't accommodate
+'em. They're fantastic, wild, improbable.  You're wrong, Emma--all
+wrong!"
+
+She had listened patiently enough, never once attempting to interrupt.
+But on her lips was the maddening half-smile of one whose rebuttal is
+ready.  Now she perched for a moment at the extreme edge of the arm of
+a chair.  Her skirt subsided decorously.  Buck noticed that, with
+surprise, even in the midst of his heated protest.
+
+"T. A., you've probably forgotten, but those are the very arguments
+used when the hobble was introduced.  Preposterous, people
+said--impossible!  Women couldn't walk in 'em.  Wouldn't, couldn't sit
+down in 'em.  Women couldn't run, play tennis, skate in them.  The car
+steps were too high for them.  Well, what happened?  Women had to walk
+in them, and a new gait became the fashion.  Women took lessons in how
+to sit down in them.  They slashed them for tennis and skating.  And
+street-car companies all over the country lowered the car steps to
+accommodate them. What's true for the hobble holds good for the hoop.
+Women will cease to single-foot and learn to undulate when they walk.
+They'll widen the car platforms.  They'll sit on top the Fifth Avenue
+'buses, and you'll never give them a second thought."
+
+"The things don't stay where they belong.  I've seen 'em misbehave in
+musical comedies," argued Buck miserably.
+
+"That's where my patent comes in.  The old hoop was cumbersome,
+unwieldy, clumsy.  The new skirt, by my patent featherboning process,
+is made light, graceful, easily managed.  T. A., I predict that by
+midsummer a tight skirt will be as rare a sight as a full one was a
+year ago."
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+"We're not quarreling, are we?"
+
+"Quarreling!  I rather think not!  A man can have his own opinion,
+can't he?"
+
+It appeared, however, that he could not.  For when they had threshed it
+out, inch by inch, as might two partners whose only bond was business,
+it was Emma who won.
+
+"Remember, I'm not convinced," Buck warned her; "I'm only beaten by
+superior force.  But I do believe in your woman's intuition--I'll say
+that.  It has never gone wrong.  I'm banking on it.
+
+"It's woman's intuition when we win," Emma observed, thoughtfully.
+"When we lose it's a foolish, feminine notion."
+
+There were to be no half-way measures.  The skirt was to be the feature
+of the spring line.  Cutters and designers were one with Buck in
+thinking it a freak garment.  Emma reminded them that the same thing
+had been said of the hobble on its appearance.
+
+In February, Billy Spalding, veteran skirt-salesman, led a flying wedge
+of six on a test-trip that included the Middle West and the Coast.
+Their sample-trunks had to be rebuilt to accommodate the new model.
+Spalding, shirt-sleeved, whistling dolorously, eyed each garment with a
+look of bristling antagonism.  Spalding sold skirts on commission.
+
+Emma, surveying his labors, lifted a quizzical eyebrow.
+
+"If you're going to sell that skirt as enthusiastically as you pack it,
+you'd better stay here in New York and save the house traveling
+expenses."
+
+Spalding ceased to whistle.  He held up a billowy sample and gazed at
+it.
+
+"Honestly, Mrs. Buck, you know I'd try to sell pretzels in London if
+you asked me to.  But do you really think any woman alive would be
+caught wearing a garment like this in these days?"
+
+"Not only do I think it, Billy; I'm certain of it.  This new petticoat
+makes me the Lincoln of the skirt trade.  I'm literally freeing my
+sisters from the shackles that have bound their ankles for five years."
+
+Spalding, unimpressed, folded another skirt.
+
+"Um, maybe!  But what's that line about slaves hugging their chains?"
+
+The day following, Spalding and his flying squad scattered to spread
+the light among the skirt trade.  And things went wrong from the start.
+
+The first week showed an ominous lack of those cheering epistles
+beginning, "Enclosed please find," etc.  The second was worse. The
+third was equally bad.  The fourth was final.  The second week in
+March, Spalding returned from a territory which had always been known
+as firmly wedded to the T. A. Buck Featherloom petticoat.  The Middle
+West would have none of him.
+
+They held the post-mortem in Emma's bright little office, and that lady
+herself seemed to be strangely sunny and undaunted, considering the
+completeness of her defeat.  She sat at her desk now, very interested,
+very bright-eyed, very calm.  Buck, in a chair at the side of her desk,
+was interested, too, but not so calm.  Spalding, who was accustomed to
+talk while standing, leaned against the desk, feet crossed, brows
+furrowed.  As he talked, he emphasized his remarks by jabbing the air
+with his pencil.
+
+"Well," said Emma quietly, "it didn't go."
+
+"It didn't even start," corrected Spalding.
+
+"But why?" demanded Buck.  "Why?"
+
+Spalding leaned forward a little, eagerly.
+
+"I'll tell you something:  When I started out with that little garment,
+I thought it was a joke.  Before I'd been out with it a week, I began
+to like it.  In ten days, I was crazy about it, and I believed in it
+from the waistband to the hem.  On the level, Mrs. Buck, I think it's a
+wonder.  Now, can you explain that?"
+
+"Yes," said Emma; "you didn't like it at first because it was a shock
+to you.  It outraged all your ideas of what a skirt ought to be.  Then
+you grew accustomed to it.  Then you began to see its good points.  Why
+couldn't you make the trade get your viewpoint?"
+
+"This is why:  Out in Manistee and Oshkosh and Terre Haute, the girls
+have just really learned the trick of walking in tight skirts.  It's as
+impossible to convince a Middle West buyer that the exaggerated full
+skirt is going to be worn next summer as it would be to prove to him
+that men are going to wear sunbonnets. They thought I was trying to
+sell 'em masquerade costumes.  I may believe in it, and you may believe
+in it, and T. A.; but the girls from Joplin--well, they're from Joplin.
+And they're waiting to hear from headquarters."
+
+T. A. Buck crossed one leg over the other and sat up with a little sigh.
+
+"Well, that settles it, doesn't it?" he said.
+
+"It does not," replied Emma McChesney Buck crisply.  "If they want to
+hear from headquarters, they won't have long to wait."
+
+"Now, Emma, don't try to push this thing if it----"
+
+"T. A., please don't look so forgiving.  I'd much rather have you
+reproach me."
+
+"It's you I'm thinking of, not the skirt."
+
+"But I want you to think of the skirt, too.  We've gone into this
+thing, and it has cost us thousands.  Don't think I'm going to sit
+quietly by and watch those thousands trickle out of our hands.  We've
+played our first card.  It didn't take a trick. Here's another."
+
+Buck and Spalding were leaning forward, interested, attentive. There
+was that in Emma's vivid, glowing face which did not mean defeat.
+
+"March fifteenth, at Madison Square Garden, there is to be held the
+first annual exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of American
+Styles for American Women.  For one hundred years we've taken our
+fashions as Paris dictated, regardless of whether they outraged our
+sense of humor or decency or of fitness.  This year the American
+designer is going to have a chance.  Am I an American designer, T. A.,
+Billy?"
+
+"Yes!" in chorus.
+
+"Then I shall exhibit that skirt on a live model at the First Annual
+American Fashion Show next month.  Every skirt-buyer in the country
+will be there.  If it takes hold there, it's made--and so are we."
+
+March came, and with it an army of men and women buyers, dependent, for
+the first time in their business careers, on the ingenuity of the
+American brain.  The keen-eyed legions that had advanced on Europe
+early, armed with letters of credit--the vast horde that returned each
+spring and autumn laden with their spoils--hats, gowns, laces, linens,
+silks, embroideries--were obliged to content themselves with what was
+to be found in their own camp.
+
+Clever manager that she was, Emma took as much pains with her model as
+with the skirt itself.  She chose a girl whose demure prettiness and
+quiet charm would enhance the possibilities of the skirt's
+practicability in the eye of the shrewd buyer.  Gertrude, the model,
+developed a real interest in the success of the petticoat.  Emma knew
+enough about the psychology of crowds to realize how this increased her
+chances for success.
+
+The much heralded fashion show was to open at one o'clock on the
+afternoon of March fifteenth.  At ten o'clock that morning, there
+breezed in from Chicago a tall, slim, alert young man, who made
+straight for the offices of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat
+Company, walked into the junior partner's private office, and took that
+astonished lady in his two strong arms.
+
+"Jock McChesney!" gasped his rumpled mother, emerging from the hug.
+"I've been hungry for a sight of you!"  She was submerged in a second
+hug.  "Come here to the window where I can get a real look at you!  Why
+didn't you wire me?  What are you doing away from your own job?  How's
+business?  And why come to-day, of all days, when I can't make a fuss
+over you?"
+
+Jock McChesney, bright-eyed, clear-skinned, steady of hand, stood up
+well under the satisfied scrutiny of his adoring mother.  He smiled
+down at her.
+
+"Wanted to surprise you.  Here for three reasons--the Abbott
+Grape-juice advertising contract, you, and Grace.  And why can't you
+make a fuss over me, I'd like to know?"
+
+Emma told him.  His keen, quick mind required little in the way of
+explanation.
+
+"But why didn't you let me in on it sooner?"
+
+"Because, son, nothing explains harder than embryo success.  I always
+prefer to wait until it's grown up and let it do its own explaining."
+
+"But the thing ought to have national advertising," Jock insisted, with
+the advertising expert's lightning grasp of its possibilities.  "What
+that skirt needs is publicity.  Why didn't you let me handle----"
+
+"Yes, I know, dear; but you haven't seen the skirt.  It won't do to ram
+it down their throats.  I want to ease it to them first. I want them to
+get used to it.  It failed utterly on the road, because it jarred their
+notion of what a petticoat ought to be. That's due to five years of
+sheath skirts."
+
+"But suppose--just for the sake of argument--that it doesn't strike
+them right this afternoon?"
+
+"Then it's gone, that's all.  Six months from now, every skirt-factory
+in the country will be manufacturing a similar garment.  People will be
+ready for it then.  I've just tried to cut in ahead of the rest.
+Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to do it."
+
+Jock hugged her again at that, to the edification of the office windows
+across the way.
+
+"Gad, you're a wiz, mother!  Now listen:  I 'phoned Grace when I got
+in.  She's going to meet me here at one.  I'll chase over to the office
+now on this grape-juice thing and come back here in time for lunch.  Is
+T. A. in?  I'll look in on him a minute. We'll all lunch together, and
+then----"
+
+"Can't do it, son.  The show opens at one.  Gertrude, my model, comes
+on at three.  She's going to have the stage to herself for ten minutes,
+during which she'll make four changes of costume to demonstrate the
+usefulness of the skirt for every sort of gown from chiffon to velvet.
+Come back here at one, if you like.  If I'm not here, come over to the
+show.  But--lunch!  I'd choke."
+
+At twelve-thirty, there scampered into Emma's office a very
+white-faced, round-eyed little stock-girl.  Emma, deep in a last-minute
+discussion with Buck, had a premonition of trouble before the girl
+gasped out her message.
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Buck, Gertie's awful sick!"
+
+"Sick!" echoed Emma and Buck, in duet.  Then Emma:
+
+"But she can't be!  It's impossible!  She was all right a half hour
+ago."  She was hurrying down the hall as she spoke. "Where is she?"
+
+"They've got her on one of the tables in the workroom.  She's moaning
+awful."
+
+Gertie's appendix, with that innate sense of the dramatic so often
+found in temperamental appendices, had indeed chosen this moment to
+call attention to itself.  Gertie, the demurely pretty and quietly
+charming, was rolled in a very tight ball on the workroom
+cutting-table.  At one o'clock, she was on her way home in a cab, under
+the care of a doctor, Miss Kelly, the bookkeeper, and Jock, who, coming
+in gaily at one, had been pressed into service, bewildered but willing.
+
+Three rather tragic figures stared at one another in the junior
+partner's office.  They were Emma, Buck, and Grace Galt, Jock's
+wife-to-be.  Grace Galt, slim, lovely, girlish, was known, at
+twenty-four, as one of the most expert copy writers in the advertising
+world.  In her clear-headed, capable manner, she tried to suggest a way
+out of the difficulty now.
+
+"But surely the world's full of girls," she said.  "It's late, I know;
+but any theatrical agency will send a girl over."
+
+"That's just what I tried to avoid," Emma replied.  "I wanted to show
+this skirt on a sweet, pretty, refined sort of girl who looks and acts
+like a lady.  One of those blond show girls would kill it."
+
+Gloom settled down again over the three.  Emma broke the silence with a
+rueful little laugh.
+
+"I think," she said, "that perhaps you're right, T. A., and this is the
+Lord's way of showing me that the world is not quite ready for this
+skirt."
+
+"You're not beaten yet, Emma," Buck assured her vigorously. "How about
+this new girl--what's her name?--Myrtle.  She's one of those thin, limp
+ones, isn't she?  Try her."
+
+"I will," said Emma.  "You're right.  I'm not beaten yet. I've had to
+fight for everything worth while in my life.  I'm superstitious about
+it now.  When things come easy I'm afraid of them."  Then, to the
+stock-girl, "Annie, tell Myrtle I want to see her."
+
+Silence fell again upon the three.  Myrtle, very limp, very thin, very
+languid indeed, roused them at her entrance.  The hopeful look in
+Emma's eyes faded as she beheld her.  Myrtle was so obviously limp, so
+hopelessly new.
+
+"Annie says you want me to take Gertie's place," drawled Myrtle,
+striking a magazine-cover attitude.
+
+"I don't know that you are just the--er--type; but perhaps, if you're
+willing----"
+
+"Of course I didn't come here as a model," said Myrtle, and sagged on
+the other hip. "But, as a special favor to you I'm willing to try
+it--at special model's rates."
+
+Emma ran a somewhat frenzied hand through her hair.
+
+"Then, as a special favor to me, will you begin by trying to stand up
+straight, please?  That debutante slouch would kill a queen's
+coronation costume."
+
+Myrtle straightened, slumped again.
+
+"I can't help it if I am willowy"--listlessly.
+
+"Your hair!" Myrtle's hand went vaguely to her head.  "I can't have you
+wear it that way."
+
+"Why, this is the French roll!" protested Myrtle, offended.
+
+"Then do it in a German bun!" snapped Emma.  "Any way but that.  Will
+you walk, please?"
+
+"Walk?"--dully.
+
+"Yes, walk; I want to see how you----"
+
+Myrtle walked across the room.  A groan came from Emma.
+
+"I thought so."  She took a long breath.
+
+"Myrtle, listen:  That Australian crawl was necessary when our skirts
+were so narrow we had to negotiate a curbing before we could take it.
+But the skirt you're going to demonstrate is wide.  Like that!  You're
+practically a free woman in it.  Step out!  Stride!  Swing!  Walk!"
+
+Myrtle tried it, stumbled, sulked.
+
+Emma, half smiling, half woeful, patted the girl's shoulder.
+
+"Oh, I see; you're wearing a tight one.  Well, run in and get into the
+skirt.  Miss Loeb will help you.  Then come back here--and quickly,
+please."
+
+The three looked at each other in silence.  It was a silence brimming
+with eloquent meaning.  Each sought encouragement in the eyes of the
+other--and failed to find it.  Failing, they broke into helpless
+laughter.  It proved a safety-valve.
+
+"She may do, Emma--when she has her hair done differently, and if
+she'll only stand up."
+
+But Emma shook her head.
+
+"T. A., something tells me you're going to have a wonderful chance to
+say, 'I told you so!' at three o'clock this afternoon."
+
+"You know I wouldn't say it, Emma."
+
+"Yes; I do know it, dear.  But what's the difference, if the chance is
+there?"
+
+Suspense settled down on the little office.  Billy Spalding entered,
+smiling.  After five minutes of waiting, even his buoyant spirits sank.
+
+"Don't you think--if you were to go in and--and sort of help adjust
+things----" suggested Buck vaguely.
+
+"No; I don't want to prop her up.  She'll have to stand alone when she
+gets there.  She'll either do, or not.  When she enters that door, I'll
+know."
+
+When Myrtle entered, wearing the fascinatingly fashioned new model,
+they all knew.
+
+Emma spoke decisively.
+
+"That settles it."
+
+"What's the matter?  Don't it look all right?" demanded Myrtle.
+
+"Take it off, Myrtle."
+
+Then, to the others, as Myrtle, sulking, left the room:
+
+"I can stand to see that skirt die if necessary.  But I won't help
+murder it."
+
+"But, Mrs. Buck," protested Spalding, almost tearfully, "you've got to
+exhibit that skirt.  You've got to!"
+
+Emma shook a sorrowing head.
+
+"That wouldn't be an exhibition, Billy.  It would be an expose."
+
+Spalding clapped a desperate hand to his bald head.
+
+"If only I had Julian Eltinge's shape, I'd wear it to the show for you
+myself."
+
+"That's all it needs now," retorted Emma grimly.
+
+Whereupon, Grace Galt spoke up in her clear, decisive voice.
+
+"Wait a minute," she said quietly.  "I'm going to wear that skirt at
+the fashion show."
+
+"You!" cried the three, like a trained trio.
+
+"Why not?" demanded Grace Galt, coolly.  Then:  "No; don't tell me why
+not.  I won't listen."
+
+But Emma, equally cool, would have none of it.
+
+"It's impossible, dear.  You're an angel to want to help me. But you
+must know it's quite out of the question."
+
+"It's nothing of the kind.  This skirt isn't merely a fad.  It has a
+fortune in it.  I'm business woman enough to know that. You've got to
+let me do it.  It isn't only for yourself.  It's for T. A. and for the
+future of the firm."
+
+"Do you suppose I'd allow you to stand up before all those people?"
+
+"Why not?  I don't know them.  They don't know me.  I can make them get
+the idea in that skirt.  And I'm going to do it.  You don't object to
+me on the same grounds that you did to Myrtle, do you?"
+
+"You!" burst from the admiring Spalding.  "Say, you'd make a
+red-flannel petticoat look like crepe de Chine and lace."
+
+"There!" said Grace, triumphant.  "That settles it!"  And she was off
+down the hall.  They stood a moment in stunned silence. Then:
+
+"But Jock!" protested Emma, following her.  "What will Jock say? Grace!
+Grace dear!  I can't let you do it!  I can't!"
+
+"Just unhook this for me, will you?" replied Grace Galt sweetly.
+
+At two o'clock, Jock McChesney, returned from his errand of mercy,
+burst into the office to find mother, step-father, and fiancee all
+flown.
+
+"Where?  What?" he demanded of the outer office.
+
+"Fashion show!" chorused the office staff
+
+"Might have waited for me," Jock said to himself, much injured. And
+hurled himself into a taxi.
+
+There was a crush of motors and carriages for a block on all sides of
+Madison Square Garden.  He had to wait for what seemed an interminable
+time at the box-office.  Then he began the task of worming his way
+through the close-packed throng in the great auditorium.  It was a
+crowd such as the great place had not seen since the palmy days of the
+horse show.  It was a crowd that sparkled and shone in silks and
+feathers and furs and jewels.
+
+"Jove, if mother has half a chance at this gang!" Jock told himself.
+"If only she has grabbed some one who can really show that skirt!"
+
+He was swept with the crowd toward a high platform at the extreme end
+of the auditorium.  All about that platform stood hundreds, close
+packed, faces raised eagerly, the better to see the slight, graceful,
+girlish figure occupying the center of the stage--a figure strangely
+familiar to Jock's eyes in spite of its quaintly billowing, ante-bellum
+garb.  She was speaking.  Jock, mouth agape, eyes protruding, ears
+straining, heard, as in a daze, the sweet, clear, charmingly modulated
+voice:
+
+"The feature of the skirt, ladies and gentlemen, is that it gives a
+fulness without weight, something which the skirt-maker has never
+before been able to achieve.  This is due to the patent featherboning
+process invented by Mrs. T. A. Buck, of the T. A. Buck Featherloom
+Petticoat Company, New York.  Note, please, that it has all the
+advantages of our grandmother's hoop-skirt, but none of its awkward
+features.  It is graceful"--she turned slowly, lightly--"it is
+bouffant" she twirled on her toes--"it is practical, serviceable,
+elegant.  It can be made up in any shade, in any material--silk, lace,
+crepe de Chine, charmeuse, taffeta.  The T. A. Buck Featherloom
+Petticoat Company is prepared to fill orders for immediate----"
+
+"Well, I'll be darned!" said Jock McChesney aloud.  And, again,
+heedless of the protesting "Sh-sh-sh-sh!" that his neighbors turned
+upon him, "Well, I'll--be--darned!"
+
+A hand twitched his coat sleeve.  He turned, still dazed.  His mother,
+very pink-cheeked, very bright-eyed, pulled him through the throng.  As
+they reached the edge of the crowd, there came a great burst of
+applause, a buzz of conversation, the turning, shifting, nodding,
+staccato movements which mean approval in a mass of people.
+
+"What the dickens!  How!" stammered Jock.  "When--did she--did she----"
+
+Emma, half smiling, half tearful, raised a protesting hand.
+
+"I don't know.  Don't ask me, dear.  And don't hate me for it. I tried
+to tell her not to, but she insisted.  And, Jock, she's done it, I tell
+you!  She's done it!  They love the skirt! Listen to 'em!"
+
+"Don't want to," said Jock.  "Lead me to her."
+
+"Angry, dear!"
+
+"Me?  No!  I'm--I'm proud of her!  She hasn't only brains and looks,
+that little girl; she's got nerve--the real kind!  Gee, how did I ever
+have the gall to ask her to marry me!"
+
+Together they sped toward the door that led to the dressing-rooms.
+Buck, his fine eyes more luminous than ever as he looked at this
+wonder-wife of his, met them at the entrance.
+
+"She's waiting for you, Jock," he said, smiling.  Jock took the steps
+in one leap.
+
+"Well, T. A.?" said Emma.
+
+"Well, Emma?" said T. A.
+
+Which burst of eloquence was interrupted abruptly by a short, squat,
+dark man, who seized Emma's hand in his left and Buck's in his right,
+and pumped them up and down vigorously.  It was that volatile, voluble
+person known to the skirt trade as Abel I. Fromkin, of the "Fromkin
+Form-fit Skirt.  It Clings!"
+
+"I'm looking everywhere for you!" he panted.  Then, his shrewd little
+eyes narrowing, "You want to talk business?"
+
+"Not here," said Buck abruptly.
+
+"Sure--here," insisted Fromkin.  "Say, that's me.  When I got a thing
+on my mind, I like to settle it.  How much you take for the rights to
+that skirt?"
+
+"Take for it!" exclaimed Emma, in the tone a mother would use to one
+who has suggested taking a beloved child from her.
+
+"Now wait a minute.  Don't get mad.  You ain't started that skirt
+right.  It should have been advertised.  It's too much of a shock.
+You'll see.  They won't buy.  They're afraid of it.  I'll take it off
+your hands and push it right, see?  I offer you forty thousand for the
+rights to make that skirt and advertise it as the 'Fromkin Full-flounce
+Skirt.  It Flares!'"
+
+Emma smiled.
+
+"How much?" she asked quizzically.
+
+Abel I. Fromkin gulped.
+
+"Fifty thousand," he said.
+
+"Fifty thousand," repeated Emma quietly, and looked at Buck. "Thanks,
+Mr. Fromkin!  I know, now, that if it's worth fifty thousand to you
+to-day as the 'Fromkin Full-flounce Skirt.  It Flares!' then it's worth
+one hundred and fifty thousand to us as the 'T. A. Buck
+Balloon-Petticoat.  It Billows!'"
+
+And it was.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SISTERS UNDER THEIR SKIN
+
+Women who know the joys and sorrows of a pay envelope do not speak of
+girls who work as Working Girls.  Neither do they use the term Laboring
+Class, as one would speak of a distinct and separate race, like the
+Ethiopian.
+
+Emma McChesney Buck was no exception to this rule.  Her fifteen years
+of man-size work for a man-size salary in the employ of the T. A. Buck
+Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York, precluded that.  In those
+days, she had been Mrs. Emma McChesney, known from coast to coast as
+the most successful traveling saleswoman in the business.  It was due
+to her that no feminine clothes-closet was complete without a
+Featherloom dangling from one hook.  During those fifteen years she had
+educated her son, Jock McChesney, and made a man of him; she had
+worked, fought, saved, triumphed, smiled under hardship; and she had
+acquired a broad and deep knowledge of those fascinating and
+diversified subjects which we lump carelessly under the heading of
+Human Nature.  She was Mrs. T. A. Buck now, wife of the head of the
+firm, and partner in the most successful skirt manufactory in the
+country.  But the hard-working, clear-thinking, sane-acting habits of
+those fifteen years still clung.
+
+Perhaps this explained why every machine-girl in the big, bright shop
+back of the offices raised adoring eyes when Emma entered the workroom.
+Italian, German, Hungarian, Russian--they lifted their faces toward
+this source of love and sympathetic understanding as naturally as a
+plant turns its leaves toward the sun.  They glowed under her praise;
+they confided to her their troubles; they came to her with their
+joys--and they copied her clothes.
+
+This last caused her some uneasiness.  When Mrs. T. A. Buck wore blue
+serge, an epidemic of blue serge broke out in the workroom. Did Emma's
+spring hat flaunt flowers, the elevators, at closing time, looked like
+gardens abloom.  If she appeared on Monday morning in severely tailored
+white-linen blouse, the shop on Tuesday was a Boston seminary in its
+starched primness.
+
+"It worries me," Emma told her husband-partner.  "I can't help thinking
+of the story of the girl and the pet chameleon. What would happen if I
+were to forget myself some day and come down to work in black velvet
+and pearls?"
+
+"They'd manage it somehow," Buck assured her.  "I don't know just how;
+but I'm sure that twenty-four hours later our shop would look like a
+Buckingham drawing-room when the court is in mourning."
+
+Emma never ceased to marvel at their ingenuity, at their almost uncanny
+clothes-instinct.  Their cheap skirts hung and fitted with an art as
+perfect as that of a Fifty-seventh Street modiste; their blouses, in
+some miraculous way, were of to-day's style, down to the last detail of
+cuff or collar or stitching; their hats were of the shape that the
+season demanded, set at the angle that the season approved, and
+finished with just that repression of decoration which is known as
+"single trimming." They wore their clothes with a chic that would make
+the far-famed Parisian outriere look dowdy and down at heel in
+comparison.  Upper Fifth Avenue, during the shopping or tea-hour, has
+been sung, painted, vaunted, boasted.  Its furs and millinery, its eyes
+and figure, its complexion and ankles have flashed out at us from ten
+thousand magazine covers, have been adjectived in reams of
+Sunday-supplement stories.  Who will picture Lower Fifth Avenue between
+five and six, when New York's unsung beauties pour into the streets
+from a thousand loft-buildings?  Theirs is no mere empty pink-and-white
+prettiness.  Poverty can make prettiness almost poignantly lovely, for
+it works with a scalpel.  Your Twenty-sixth Street beauty has a certain
+wistful appeal that your Forty-sixth Street beauty lacks; her very
+bravado, too, which falls just short of boldness, adds a final piquant
+touch. In the face of the girl who works, whether she be a
+spindle-legged errand-girl or a ten-thousand-a-year foreign buyer, you
+will find both vivacity and depth of expression.  What she loses in
+softness and bloom she gains in a something that peeps from her eyes,
+that lurks in the corners of her mouth. Emma never tired of studying
+them--these girls with their firm, slim throats, their lovely faces,
+their Oriental eyes, and their conscious grace.  Often, as she looked,
+an unaccountable mist of tears would blur her vision.
+
+So that sunny little room whose door was marked "MRS. BUCK" had come to
+be more than a mere private office for the transaction of business.  It
+was a clearing-house for trouble; it was a shrine, a confessional, and
+a court of justice.  When Carmela Colarossi, her face swollen with
+weeping, told a story of parental harshness grown unbearable, Emma
+would put aside business to listen, and six o'clock would find her
+seated in the dark and smelly Colarossi kitchen, trying, with all her
+tact and patience and sympathy, to make home life possible again for
+the flashing-eyed Carmela.  When the deft, brown fingers of Otti Markis
+became clumsy at her machine, and her wage slumped unaccountably from
+sixteen to six dollars a week, it was in Emma's quiet little office
+that it became clear why Otti's eyes were shadowed and why Otti's mouth
+drooped so pathetically.  Emma prescribed a love philter made up of
+common sense, understanding, and world-wisdom. Otti took it, only half
+comprehending, but sure of its power.  In a week, Otti's eyes were
+shadowless, her lips smiling, her pay-envelope bulging.  But it was in
+Sophy Kumpf that the T. A. Buck Company best exemplified its policy.
+Sophy Kumpf had come to Buck's thirty years before, slim, pink-cheeked,
+brown-haired. She was a grandmother now, at forty-six, broad-bosomed,
+broad-hipped, but still pink of cheek and brown of hair.  In those
+thirty years she had spent just three away from Buck's. She had brought
+her children into the world; she had fed them and clothed them and sent
+them to school, had Sophy, and seen them married, and helped them to
+bring their children into the world in turn.  In her round, red,
+wholesome face shone a great wisdom, much love, and that infinite
+understanding which is born only of bitter experience.  She had come to
+Buck's when old T. A. was just beginning to make Featherlooms a
+national institution.  She had seen his struggles, his prosperity; she
+had grieved at his death; she had watched young T. A. take the reins in
+his unaccustomed hands, and she had gloried in Emma McChesney's rise
+from office to salesroom, from salesroom to road, from road to private
+office and recognized authority.  Sophy had left her early work far
+behind.  She had her own desk now in the busy workshop, and it was she
+who allotted the piece-work, marked it in her much-thumbed ledger--that
+powerful ledger which, at the week's end, decided just how plump or
+thin each pay-envelope would be.  So the shop and office at T. A.
+Buck's were bound together by many ties of affection and sympathy and
+loyalty; and these bonds were strongest where, at one end, they touched
+Emma McChesney Buck, and, at the other, faithful Sophy Kumpf.  Each a
+triumphant example of Woman in Business.
+
+It was at this comfortable stage of Featherloom affairs that the
+Movement struck the T. A. Buck Company.  Emma McChesney Buck had never
+mingled much in movements.  Not that she lacked sympathy with them; she
+often approved of them, heart and soul.  But she had been heard to say
+that the Movers got on her nerves.  Those well-dressed, glib, staccato
+ladies who spoke with such ease from platforms and whose pictures
+stared out at one from the woman's page failed, somehow, to convince
+her.  When Emma approved a new movement, it was generally in spite of
+them, never because of them.  She was brazenly unapologetic when she
+said that she would rather listen to ten minutes of Sophy Kumpf's
+world-wisdom than to an hour's talk by the most magnetic and
+silken-clad spellbinder in any cause.  For fifteen business years, in
+the office, on the road, and in the thriving workshop, Emma McChesney
+had met working women galore.  Women in offices, women in stores, women
+in hotels--chamber-maids, clerks, buyers, waitresses, actresses in road
+companies, women demonstrators, occasional traveling saleswomen, women
+in factories, scrubwomen, stenographers, models--every grade, type and
+variety of working woman, trained and untrained.  She never missed a
+chance to talk with them.  She never failed to learn from them.  She
+had been one of them, and still was. She was in the position of one who
+is on the inside, looking out.  Those other women urging this cause or
+that were on the outside, striving to peer in.
+
+The Movement struck T. A. Buck's at eleven o'clock Monday morning.
+Eleven o'clock Monday morning in the middle of a busy fall season is
+not a propitious moment for idle chit-chat.  The three women who
+stepped out of the lift at the Buck Company's floor looked very much
+out of place in that hummingly busy establishment and appeared, on the
+surface, at least, very chit-chatty indeed.  So much so, that T. A.
+Buck, glancing up from the cards which had preceded them, had
+difficulty in repressing a frown of annoyance.  T. A. Buck, during his
+college-days, and for a lamentably long time after, had been known as
+"Beau" Buck, because of his faultless clothes and his charming manner.
+His eyes had something to do with it, too, no doubt.  He had lived down
+the title by sheer force of business ability.  No one thought of using
+the nickname now, though the clothes, the manner, and the eyes were the
+same.  At the entrance of the three women, he had been engrossed in the
+difficult task of selling a fall line to Mannie Nussbaum, of Portland,
+Oregon. Mannie was what is known as a temperamental buyer.  He couldn't
+be forced; he couldn't be coaxed; he couldn't be led.  But when he
+liked a line he bought like mad, never cancelled, and T. A. Buck had
+just got him going.  It spoke volumes for his self-control that he
+could advance toward the waiting three, his manner correct, his
+expression bland.
+
+"I am Mr. Buck," he said.  "Mrs. Buck is very much engaged.  I
+understand your visit has something to do with the girls in the shop.
+I'm sure our manager will be able to answer any questions----"
+
+The eldest women raised a protesting, white-gloved hand.
+
+"Oh, no--no, indeed!  We must see Mrs. Buck."  She spoke in the crisp,
+decisive platform-tones of one who is often addressed as "Madam
+Chairman."
+
+Buck took a firmer grip on his self-control.
+
+"I'm sorry; Mrs. Buck is in the cutting-room."
+
+"We'll wait," said the lady, brightly.  She stepped back a pace.  "This
+is Miss Susan H. Croft"--indicating a rather sparse person of very
+certain years--"But I need scarcely introduce her."
+
+"Scarcely," murmured Buck, and wondered why.
+
+"This is my daughter, Miss Gladys Orton-Wells."
+
+Buck found himself wondering why this slim, negative creature should
+have such sad eyes.  There came an impatient snort from Mannie
+Nussbaum.  Buck waved a hasty hand in the direction of Emma's office.
+
+"If you'll wait there, I'll send in to Mrs. Buck."
+
+The three turned toward Emma's bright little office.  Buck scribbled a
+hasty word on one of the cards.
+
+Emma McChesney Buck was leaning over the great cutting-table, shears in
+hand.  It might almost be said that she sprawled.  Her eyes were very
+bright, and her cheeks were very pink.  Across the table stood a
+designer and two cutters, and they were watching Emma with an
+intentness as flattering as it was sincere.  They were looking not only
+at cloth but at an idea.
+
+"Get that?" asked Emma crisply, and tapped the pattern spread before
+her with the point of her shears.  "That gives you the fulness without
+bunching, d'you see?"
+
+"Sure," assented Koritz, head designer; "but when you get it cut you'll
+find this piece is wasted, ain't it?"  He marked out a triangular
+section of cloth with one expert forefinger.
+
+"No; that works into the ruffle," explained Emma.  "Here, I'll cut it.
+Then you'll see."
+
+She grasped the shears firmly in her right hand, smoothed the cloth
+spread before her with a nervous little pat of her left, pushed her
+bright hair back from her forehead, and prepared to cut.  At which
+critical moment there entered Annie, the errand-girl, with the three
+bits of white pasteboard.
+
+Emma glanced down at them and waved Annie away.
+
+"Can't see them.  Busy."
+
+Annie stood her ground.
+
+"Mr. Buck said you'd see 'em.  They're waiting."
+
+Emma picked up one of the cards.  On it Buck had scribbled a single
+word:  "Movers."  Mrs. T. A. Buck smiled.  A little malicious gleam
+came into her eyes.
+
+"Show 'em in here, Annie," she commanded, with a wave of the huge
+shears.  "I'll teach 'em to interrupt me when I've got my hands in the
+bluing-water."
+
+She bent over the table again, measuring with her keen eye.  When the
+three were ushered in a moment later, she looked up briefly and nodded,
+then bent over the table again.  But in that brief moment she had the
+three marked, indexed and pigeonholed.  If one could have looked into
+that lightning mind of hers, one would have found something like this:
+
+"Hmm!  What Ida Tarbell calls 'Restless women.'  Money, and always have
+had it.  Those hats were born in one of those exclusive little shops
+off the Avenue.  Rich but somber.  They think they're advanced, but
+they still resent the triumph of the motor-car over the horse.  That
+girl can't call her soul her own. Good eyes, but too sad.  He probably
+didn't suit mother."
+
+What she said was:
+
+"Howdy-do.  We're just bringing a new skirt into the world.  I thought
+you might like to be in at the birth."
+
+"How very interesting!" chirped the two older women.  The girl said
+nothing, but a look of anticipation brightened her eyes.  It deepened
+and glowed as Emma McChesney Buck bent to her task and the great jaws
+of the shears opened and shut on the virgin cloth. Six pairs of eyes
+followed the fascinating steel before which the cloth rippled and fell
+away, as water is cleft by the prow of a stanch little boat.  Around
+the curves went the shears, guided by Emma's firm white hands,
+snipping, slashing, doubling on itself, a very swashbuckler of a shears.
+
+"There!" exclaimed Emma at last, and dropped the shears on the table
+with a clatter.  "Put that together and see whether it makes a skirt or
+not.   Now, ladies!"
+
+The three drew a long breath.  It was the sort of sound that comes up
+from the crowd when a sky-rocket has gone off successfully, with a
+final shower of stars.
+
+"Do you do that often?" ventured Mrs. Orton-Wells.
+
+"Often enough to keep my hand in," replied Emma, and led the way to her
+office.
+
+The three followed in silence.  They were strangely silent, too, as
+they seated themselves around Emma Buck's desk.  Curiously enough, it
+was the subdued Miss Orton-Wells who was the first to speak.
+
+"I'll never rest," she said, "until I see that skirt finished and
+actually ready to wear."
+
+She smiled at Emma.  When she did that, you saw that Miss Orton-Wells
+had her charm.  Emma smiled back, and patted the girl's hand just once.
+At that there came a look into Miss Orton-Wells' eyes, and you saw that
+most decidedly she had her charm.
+
+Up spoke Mrs. Orton-Wells.
+
+"Gladys is such an enthusiast!  That's really her reason for being
+here.  Gladys is very much interested in working girls.  In fact, we
+are all, as you probably know, intensely interested in the working
+woman."
+
+"Thank you!" said Emma McChesney Buck.
+
+"That's very kind.  We working women are very grateful to you."
+
+"We!" exclaimed Mrs. Orton-Wells and Miss Susan Croft blankly, and in
+perfect time.
+
+Emma smiled sweetly.
+
+"Surely you'll admit that I'm a working woman."
+
+Miss Susan H. Croft was not a person to be trifled with.  She
+elucidated acidly.
+
+"We mean women who work with their hands."
+
+"By what power do you think those shears were moved across the
+cutting-table?  We don't cut our patterns with an ouija-board."
+
+Mrs. Orton-Wells rustled protestingly.
+
+"But, my dear Mrs. Buck, you know, we mean women of the Laboring Class."
+
+"I'm in this place of business from nine to five, Monday to Saturday,
+inclusive.  If that doesn't make me a member of the laboring class I
+don't want to belong."
+
+It was here that Mrs. Orton-Wells showed herself a woman not to be
+trifled with.  She moved forward to the edge of her chair, fixed Emma
+Buck with determined eyes, and swept into midstream, sails spread.
+
+"Don't be frivolous, Mrs. Buck.  We are here on a serious errand.  It
+ought to interest you vitally because of the position you occupy in the
+world of business.  We are launching a campaign against the
+extravagant, ridiculous, and oftentimes indecent dress of the working
+girl, with especial reference to the girl who works in garment
+factories.  They squander their earnings in costumes absurdly unfitted
+to their station in life.  Our plan is to influence them in the
+direction of neatness, modesty, and economy in dress.  At present each
+tries to outdo the other in style and variety of costume.  Their shoes
+are high-heeled, cloth-topped, their blouses lacy and collarless, their
+hats absurd.  We propose a costume which shall be neat, becoming, and
+appropriate.  Not exactly a uniform, perhaps, but something with a
+fixed idea in cut, color, and style.  A corps of twelve young ladies
+belonging to our best families has been chosen to speak to the shop
+girls at noon meetings on the subject of good taste, health, and
+morality in women's dress.  My daughter Gladys is one of them.  In this
+way, we hope to convince them that simplicity, and practicality, and
+neatness are the only proper notes in the costume of the working girl.
+Occupying as you do a position unique in the business world, Mrs. Buck,
+we expect much from your cooperation with us in this cause."
+
+Emma McChesney Buck had been gazing at Mrs. Orton-Wells with an
+intentness as flattering as it was unfeigned.  But at the close of Mrs.
+Orton-Wells' speech she was strangely silent.  She glanced down at her
+shoes.  Now, Emma McChesney Buck had a weakness for smart shoes which
+her slim, well-arched foot excused.  Hers were what might be called
+intelligent-looking feet.  There was nothing thick, nothing clumsy,
+nothing awkward about them.  And Emma treated them with the
+consideration they deserved.  They were shod now, in a pair of slim,
+aristocratic, and modish ties above which the grateful eye caught a
+flashing glimpse of black-silk stocking.  Then her eye traveled up her
+smartly tailored skirt, up the bodice of that well-made and becoming
+costume until her glance rested on her own shoulder and paused.  Then
+she looked up at Mrs. Orton-Wells.  The eyes of Mrs. Orton-Wells, Miss
+Susan H. Croft, and Miss Gladys Orton-Wells had, by some strange power
+of magnetism, followed the path of Emma's eyes.  They finished just one
+second behind her, so that when she raised her eyes it was to encounter
+theirs.
+
+"I have explained," retorted Mrs. Orton-Wells, tartly, in reply to
+nothing, seemingly, "that our problem is with the factory girl.  She
+represents a distinct and separate class."
+
+Emma McChesney Buck nodded:
+
+"I understand.  Our girls are very young--eighteen, twenty, twenty-two.
+At eighteen, or thereabouts, practical garments haven't the strong
+appeal that you might think they have."
+
+"They should have," insisted Mrs. Orton-Wells.
+
+"Maybe," said Emma Buck gently.  "But to me it seems just as reasonable
+to argue that an apple tree has no right to wear pink-and-white
+blossoms in the spring, so long as it is going to bear sober russets in
+the autumn."
+
+Miss Susan H. Croft rustled indignantly.
+
+"Then you refuse to work with us?  You will not consent to Miss
+Orton-Wells' speaking to the girls in your shop this noon?"
+
+Emma looked at Gladys Orton-Wells.  Gladys was wearing black, and black
+did not become her.  It made her creamy skin sallow.  Her suit was
+severely tailored, and her hat was small and harshly outlined, and her
+hair was drawn back from her face.  All this, in spite of the fact that
+Miss Orton-Wells was of the limp and fragile type, which demands
+ruffles, fluffiness, flowing lines and frou-frou.  Emma's glance at the
+suppressed Gladys was as fleeting as it was keen, but it sufficed to
+bring her to a decision.  She pressed a buzzer at her desk.
+
+"I shall be happy to have Miss Orton-Wells speak to the girls in our
+shop this noon, and as often as she cares to speak.  If she can
+convince the girls that a--er--fixed idea in cut, color, and style is
+the thing to be adopted by shop-workers I am perfectly willing that
+they be convinced."
+
+Then to Annie, who appeared in answer to the buzzer,
+
+"Will you tell Sophy Kumpf to come here, please?"
+
+Mrs. Orton-Wells beamed.  The somber plumes in her correct hat bobbed
+and dipped to Emma.  The austere Miss Susan H. Croft unbent in a
+nutcracker smile.  Only Miss Gladys Orton-Wells remained silent,
+thoughtful, unenthusiastic.  Her eyes were on Emma's face.
+
+A heavy, comfortable step sounded in the hall outside the office door.
+Emma turned with a smile to the stout, motherly, red-cheeked woman who
+entered, smoothing her coarse brown hair with work-roughened fingers.
+
+Emma took one of those calloused hands in hers.
+
+"Sophy, we need your advice.  This is Mrs. Sophy Kumpf--Mrs.
+Orton-Wells, Miss Susan H. Croft"--Sophy threw her a keen glance; she
+knew that name--"and Miss Orton-Wells."  Of the four, Sophy was the
+most at ease.
+
+"Pleased to meet you," said Sophy Kumpf.
+
+The three bowed, but did not commit themselves.  Emma, her hand still
+on Sophy's, elaborated:
+
+"Sophy Kumpf has been with the T. A. Buck Company for thirty years.
+She could run this business single-handed, if she had to. She knows any
+machine in the shop, can cut a pattern, keep books, run the entire
+plant if necessary.  If there's anything about petticoats that Sophy
+doesn't know, it's because it hasn't been invented yet.  Sophy was
+sixteen when she came to Buck's.  I've heard she was the prettiest and
+best dressed girl in the shop."
+
+"Oh, now, Mrs. Buck!" remonstrated Sophy.
+
+Emma tried to frown as she surveyed Sophy's bright eyes, her rosy
+cheeks, her broad bosom, her ample hips--all that made Sophy an object
+to comfort and rest the eye.
+
+"Don't dispute, Sophy.  Sophy has educated her children, married them
+off, and welcomed their children.  She thinks that excuses her for
+having been frivolous and extravagant at sixteen.  But we know better,
+don't we?  I'm using you as a horrible example, Sophy."
+
+Sophy turned affably to the listening three.
+
+"Don't let her string you," she said, and winked one knowing eye.
+
+Mrs. Orton-Wells stiffened.  Miss Susan H. Croft congealed.  But Miss
+Gladys Orton-Wells smiled.  And then Emma knew she was right.
+
+"Sophy, who's the prettiest girl in our shop?  And the best dressed?"
+
+"Lily Bernstein," Sophy made prompt answer.
+
+"Send her in to us, will you?  And give her credit for lost time when
+she comes back to the shop."
+
+Sophy, with a last beamingly good-natured smile, withdrew.  Five
+minutes later, when Lily Bernstein entered the office, Sophy qualified
+as a judge of beauty.  Lily Bernstein was a tiger-lily--all browns and
+golds and creams, all graciousness and warmth and lovely curves.  As
+she came into the room, Gladys Orton-Wells seemed as bloodless and pale
+and ineffectual as a white moth beside a gorgeous tawny butterfly.
+
+Emma presented the girl as formally as she had Sophy Kumpf.  And Lily
+Bernstein smiled upon them, and her teeth were as white and even as one
+knew they would be before she smiled.  Lily had taken off her
+shop-apron.  Her gown was blue serge, cheap in quality, flawless as to
+cut and fit, and incredibly becoming.  Above it, her vivid face glowed
+like a golden rose.
+
+"Lily," said Emma, "Miss Orton-Wells is going to speak to the girls
+this noon.  I thought you might help by telling her whatever she wants
+to know about the girls' work and all that, and by making her feel at
+home."
+
+"Well, sure," said Lily, and smiled again her heart-warming smile.
+"I'd love to."
+
+"Miss Orton-Wells," went on Emma smoothly, "wants to speak to the girls
+about clothes."
+
+Lily looked again at Miss Orton-Wells, and she did not mean to be
+cruel.  Then she looked quickly at Emma, to detect a possible joke.
+But Mrs. Buck's face bore no trace of a smile.
+
+"Clothes!" repeated Lily.  And a slow red mounted to Gladys
+Orton-Wells' pale face. When Lily went out Sunday afternoons, she might
+have passed for a millionaire's daughter if she hadn't been so well
+dressed.
+
+"Suppose you take Miss Orton-Wells into the shop," suggested Emma, "so
+that she may have some idea of the size and character of our family
+before she speaks to it.  How long shall you want to speak?"
+
+Miss Orton-Wells started nervously, stammered a little, stopped.
+
+"Oh, ten minutes," said Mrs. Orton-Wells graciously.
+
+"Five," said Gladys, quickly, and followed Lily Bernstein into the
+workroom.
+
+Mrs. Orton-Wells and Miss Susan H. Croft gazed after them.
+
+"Rather attractive, that girl, in a coarse way," mused Mrs.
+Orton-Wells.  "If only we can teach them to avoid the cheap and tawdry.
+If only we can train them to appreciate the finer things in life.  Of
+course, their life is peculiar.  Their problems are not our problems;
+their----"
+
+"Their problems are just exactly our problems," interrupted Emma
+crisply.  "They use garlic instead of onion, and they don't bathe as
+often as we do; but, then, perhaps we wouldn't either, if we hadn't
+tubs and showers so handy."
+
+In the shop, queer things were happening to Gladys Orton-Wells. At her
+entrance into the big workroom, one hundred pairs of eyes had lifted,
+dropped, and, in that one look, condemned her hat, suit, blouse, veil
+and tout ensemble.  When you are on piece-work you squander very little
+time gazing at uplift visitors in the wrong kind of clothes.
+
+Gladys Orton-Wells looked about the big, bright workroom.  The noonday
+sun streamed in from a dozen great windows.  There seemed, somehow, to
+be a look of content and capableness about those heads bent so busily
+over the stitching.
+
+"It looks--pleasant," said Gladys Orton-Wells.
+
+"It ain't bad.  Of course it's hard sitting all day.  But I'd rather do
+that than stand from eight to six behind a counter. And there's good
+money in it."
+
+Gladys Orton-Wells turned wistful eyes on friendly little Lily
+Bernstein.
+
+"I'd like to earn money," she said.  "I'd like to work."
+
+"Well, why don't you?" demanded Lily.
+
+"Work's all the style this year.  They're all doing it.  Look at the
+Vanderbilts and that Morgan girl, and the whole crowd.  These days you
+can't tell whether the girl at the machine next to you lives in the
+Bronx or on Fifth Avenue."
+
+"It must be wonderful to earn your own clothes."
+
+"Believe me," laughed Lily Bernstein, "it ain't so wonderful when
+you've had to do it all your life."
+
+She studied the pale girl before her with brows thoughtfully knit.
+Lily had met too many uplifters to be in awe of them. Besides, a
+certain warm-hearted friendliness was hers for every one she met.  So,
+like the child she was, she spoke what was in her mind:
+
+"Say, listen, dearie.  I wouldn't wear black if I was you.  And that
+plain stuff--it don't suit you.  I'm like that, too. There's some
+things I can wear and others I look fierce in.  I'd like you in one of
+them big flat hats and a full skirt like you see in the ads, with lots
+of ribbons and tag ends and bows on it. D'you know what I mean?"
+
+"My mother was a Van Cleve," said Gladys drearily, as though that
+explained everything.  So it might have, to any but a Lily Bernstein.
+
+Lily didn't know what a Van Cleve was, but she sensed it as a drawback.
+
+"Don't you care.  Everybody's folks have got something the matter with
+'em.  Especially  when you're a girl.  But if I was you, I'd go right
+ahead and do what I wanted to."
+
+In the doorway at the far end of the shop appeared Emma with her two
+visitors.  Mrs. Orton-Wells stopped and said something to a girl at a
+machine, and her very posture and smile reeked of an offensive
+kindliness, a condescending patronage.
+
+Gladys Orton-Wells did a strange thing.  She saw her mother coming
+toward her.  She put one hand on Lily Bernstein's arm and she spoke
+hurriedly and in a little gasping voice.
+
+"Listen!  Would you--would you marry a man who hadn't any money to
+speak of, and no sort of family, if you loved him, even if your mother
+wouldn't--wouldn't----"
+
+"Would I!  Say, you go out to-morrow morning and buy yourself one of
+them floppy hats and a lace waist over flesh-colored chiffon and get
+married in it.  Don't get it white, with your coloring.  Get it kind of
+cream.  You're so grand and thin, this year's things will look lovely
+on you."
+
+A bell shrilled somewhere in the shop.  A hundred machines stopped
+their whirring.  A hundred heads came up with a sigh of relief.  Chairs
+were pushed back, aprons unbuttoned.
+
+Emma McChesney Buck stepped forward and raised a hand for attention.
+The noise of a hundred tongues was stilled.
+
+"Girls, Miss Gladys Orton-Wells is going to speak to you for five
+minutes on the subject of dress.  Will you give her your attention,
+please.  The five minutes will be added to your noon hour."
+
+Gladys Orton-Wells looked down at her hands for one terrified moment,
+then she threw her head up bravely.  There was no lack of color in her
+cheeks now.  She stepped to the middle of the room.
+
+"What I have to say won't take five minutes," she said, in her clear,
+well-bred tones.
+
+"You all dress so smartly, and I'm such a dowd, I just want to ask you
+whether you think I ought to get blue, or that new shade of gray for a
+traveling-suit."
+
+And the shop, hardened to the eccentricities of noonday speakers, made
+composed and ready answer:
+
+"Oh, get blue; it's always good."
+
+"Thank you," laughed Gladys Orton-Wells, and was off down the hall and
+away, with never a backward glance at her gasping and outraged mother.
+
+Emma McChesney Buck took Lily Bernstein's soft cheek between thumb and
+forefinger and pinched it ever so fondly.
+
+"I knew you'd do it, Judy O'Grady," she said.
+
+"Judy O'Who?"
+
+"O'Grady--a lady famous in history."
+
+"Oh, now, quit your kiddin', Mrs. Buck!" said Lily Bernstein.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+AN ETUDE FOR EMMA
+
+If you listen long enough, and earnestly enough, and with ear
+sufficiently attuned to the music of this sphere there will come to you
+this reward:  The violins and oboes and 'cellos and brasses of humanity
+which seemed all at variance with each other will unite as one
+instrument; seeming discords and dissonances will blend into harmony,
+and the wail and blare and thrum of humanity's orchestra will sound in
+your ear the sublime melody of that great symphony called Life.
+
+In her sunny little private office on the twelfth floor of the great
+loft-building that housed the T. A. Buck Company, Emma McChesney Buck
+sat listening to the street-sounds that were wafted to her, mellowed by
+height and distance.  The noises, taken separately, were the
+nerve-racking sounds common to a busy down-town New York cross-street.
+By the time they reached the little office on the twelfth floor, they
+were softened, mellowed, debrutalized, welded into a weird choirlike
+chant first high, then low, rising, swelling, dying away, rising again
+to a dull roar, with now and then vast undertones like the rumbling of
+a cathedral pipe-organ.  Emma knew that the high, clear tenor note was
+the shrill cry of the lame "newsie" at the corner of Sixth Avenue and
+Twenty-sixth Street.  Those deep, thunderous bass notes were the
+combined reverberation of nearby "L" trains, distant subway and
+clanging surface cars.  That sharp staccato was a motorman clanging his
+bell of warning.  These things she knew.  But she liked, nevertheless,
+to shut her eyes for a moment in the midst of her busy day and listen
+to the chant of the city as it came up to her, subdued, softened,
+strangely beautified. The sound saddened even while it filled her with
+a certain exaltation.  We have no one word for that sensation.  The
+German (there's a language!) has it--Weltschmerz.
+
+As distance softened the harsh sounds to her ears, so time and
+experience had given her a perspective on life itself.  She saw it, not
+as a series of incidents, pleasant and unpleasant, but as a great
+universal scheme too mighty to comprehend--a scheme that always worked
+itself out in some miraculous way.
+
+She had had a singularly full life, had Emma McChesney Buck.  A life
+replete with work, leavened by sorrows, sweetened with happiness.
+These ingredients make for tolerance.  She saw, for example, how the
+capable, modern staff in the main business office had forged ahead of
+old Pop Henderson.  Pop Henderson had been head bookkeeper for years.
+But the pen in his trembling hand made queer spidery marks in the
+ledgers now, and his figure seven was very likely to look like a
+drunken letter "z."  The great bulk of his work was done by the
+capable, comely Miss Kelly who could juggle figures like a Cinquevalli.
+His shaking, blue-veined yellow hand was no match for Miss Kelly's
+cool, firm fingers.  But he stayed on at Buck's, and no one dreamed of
+insulting him with talk of a pension, least of all Emma.  She saw the
+work-worn pathetic old man not only as a figure but as a symbol.
+
+Jock McChesney, very young, very handsome, very successful, coming on
+to New York from Chicago to be married in June, found his mother
+wrapped in this contemplative calm.  Now, Emma McChesney Buck, mother
+of an about-to-be-married son, was also surprisingly young and
+astonishingly handsome and highly successful.  Jock, in a lucid moment
+the day before his wedding, took occasion to comment rather resentfully
+on his mother's attitude.
+
+"It seems to me," he said gloomily, "that for a mother whose only son
+is about to be handed over to what the writers call the other woman,
+you're pretty resigned, not to say cheerful."
+
+Emma glanced up at him as he stood there, so tall and straight and
+altogether good to look at, and the glow of love and pride in her eyes
+belied the lightness of her words.
+
+"I know it," she said, with mock seriousness, "and it worries me.  I
+can't imagine why I fail to feel those pangs that mothers are supposed
+to suffer at this time.  I ought to rend my garments and beat my
+breast, but I can't help thinking of what a stunning girl Grace Galt
+is, and what a brain she has, and how lucky you are to get her.  Any
+girl--with the future that girl had in the advertising field--who'll
+give up four thousand a year and her independence to marry a man does
+it for love, let me tell you. If anybody knows you better than your
+mother, son, I'd hate to know who it is.  And if anybody loves you more
+than your mother--well, we needn't go into that, because it would have
+to be hypothetical, anyway.  You see, Jock, I've loved you so long and
+so well that I know your faults as well as your virtues; and I love
+you, not in spite of them but because of them.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," interrupted Jock, with some warmth, "I'm not
+perfect, but a fellow----"
+
+"Perfect!  Jock McChesney, when I think of Grace's feelings when she
+discovers that you never close a closet door!  When I contemplate her
+emotions on hearing your howl at finding one seed in your orange juice
+at breakfast!  When she learns of your secret and unholy passion for
+neckties that have a dash of red in 'em, and how you have to be
+restrained by force from----"
+
+With a simulated roar of rage, Jock McChesney fell upon his mother with
+a series of bear-hugs that left her flushed, panting, limp, but
+bright-eyed.
+
+It was to her husband that Emma revealed the real source of her Spartan
+calm.  The wedding was over.  There had been a quiet little
+celebration, after which Jock McChesney had gone West with his very
+lovely young wife. Emma had kissed her very tenderly, very soberly
+after the brief ceremony.  "Mrs. McChesney," she had said, and her
+voice shook ever so little; "Mrs. Jock McChesney!"  And the new Mrs.
+McChesney, a most astonishingly intuitive young woman indeed, had
+understood.
+
+T. A. Buck, being a man, puzzled over it a little.  That night, when
+Emma had reached the kimono and hair-brushing stage, he ventured to
+speak his wonderment.
+
+"D'you know, Emma, you were about the calmest and most serene mother
+that I ever did see at a son's wedding.  Of course I didn't expect you
+to have hysterics, or anything like that.  I've always said that, when
+it came to repose and self-control, you could make the German Empress
+look like a hoyden.  But I always thought that, at such times, a mother
+viewed her new daughter-in-law as a rival, that the very sight of her
+filled her with a jealous rage like that of a tigress whose cub is
+taken from her.  I must say you were so smiling and urbane that I
+thought it was almost uncomplimentary to the young couple.  You didn't
+even weep, you unnatural woman!"
+
+Emma, seated before her dressing-table, stopped brushing her hair and
+sat silent a moment, looking down with unseeing eyes at the brush in
+her hand.
+
+"I know it, T. A.  Would you like to have me tell you why?"
+
+He came over to her then and ran a tender hand down the length of her
+bright hair.  Then he kissed the top of her head.  This satisfactory
+performance he capped by saying:
+
+"I think I know why.  It's because the minister hesitated a minute and
+looked from you to Grace and back again, not knowing which was the
+bride.  The way you looked in that dress, Emma, was enough to reconcile
+any woman to losing her entire family."
+
+"T. A., you do say the nicest things to me."
+
+"Like 'em, Emma?"
+
+"Like 'em?  You know perfectly well that you never can offend me by
+making me compliments like that.  I not only like them; I actually
+believe them!"
+
+"That's because I mean them, Emma.  Now, out with that reason!"
+
+Emma stood up then and put her hands on his shoulders.  But she was not
+looking at him.  She was gazing past him, her eyes dreamy,
+contemplative.
+
+"I don't know whether I'll be able to explain to you just how I feel
+about it.  I'll probably make a mess of it.  But I'll try. You see,
+dear, it's just this way:  Two years ago--a year ago, even--I might
+have felt just that sensation of personal resentment and loss.  But
+somehow, lately, I've been looking at life through--how shall I put
+it?--through seven-league glasses. I used to see life in its relation
+to me and mine.  Now I see it in terms of my relation to it.  Do you
+get me?  I was the soloist, and the world my orchestral accompaniment.
+Lately, I've been content just to step back with the other instruments
+and let my little share go to make up a more perfect whole.  In those
+years, long before I met you, when Jock was all I had in the world, I
+worked and fought and saved that he might have the proper start, the
+proper training, and environment.  And I did succeed in giving him
+those things.  Well, as I looked at him there to-day I saw him, not as
+my son, my property that was going out of my control into the hands of
+another woman, but as a link in the great chain that I had helped to
+forge--a link as strong and sound and perfect as I could make it.  I
+saw him, not as my boy, Jock McChesney, but as a unit.  When I am gone
+I shall still live in him, and he in turn will live in his children.
+There! I've muddled it--haven't I?--as I said I would.  But I think"--
+And she looked into her husband's glowing eyes.--"No; I'm sure you
+understand.  And when I die, T. A.----"
+
+"You, Emma!"  And he held her close, and then held her off to look at
+her through quizzical, appreciative eyes.  "Why, girl, I can't imagine
+you doing anything so passive."
+
+
+In the busy year that followed, anyone watching Emma McChesney Buck as
+she worked and played and constructed, and helped others to work and
+play and construct, would have agreed with T. A. Buck.  She did not
+seem a woman who was looking at life objectively.  As she went about
+her home in the evening, or the office, the workroom, or the showrooms
+during the day, adjusting this, arranging that, smoothing out snarls,
+solving problems of business or household, she was very much alive,
+very vital, very personal, very electric.  In that year there came to
+her many letters from Jock and Grace--happy letters, all of them, some
+with an undertone of great seriousness, as is fitting when two people
+are readjusting their lives.  Then, in spring, came the news of the
+baby.  The telegram came to Emma as she sat in her office near the
+close of a busy day.  As she read it and reread it, the slip of paper
+became a misty yellow with vague lines of blue dancing about on it;
+then it became a blur of nothing in particular, as Emma's tears fell on
+it in a little shower of joy and pride and wonder at the eternal
+miracle.
+
+Then she dried her eyes, mopped the telegram and her lace jabot
+impartially, went across the hall and opened the door marked  "T. A.
+BUCK."
+
+T. A. looked up from his desk, smiled, held out a hand.
+
+"Girl or boy?"
+
+"Girl, of course," said Emma tremulously, "and her name is Emma
+McChesney."
+
+T. A. stood up and put an arm about his wife's shoulders.
+
+"Lean on me, grandma," he said.
+
+"Fiend!" retorted Emma, and reread the telegram happily.  She folded it
+then, with a pensive sigh, "I hope she'll look like Grace.  But with
+Jock's eyes.  They were wasted in a man.  At any rate, she ought to be
+a raving, tearing beauty with that father and mother."
+
+"What about her grandmother, when it comes to looks!  Yes, and think of
+the brain she'll have," Buck reminded her excitedly. "Great Scott!
+With a grandmother who has made the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat a
+household word, and a mother who was the cleverest woman advertising
+copy-writer in New York, this young lady ought to be a composite Hetty
+Green, Madame de Stael, Hypatia, and Emma McChesney Buck.  She'll be a
+lady wizard of finance or a----"
+
+"She'll be nothing of the kind," Emma disputed calmly.  "That child
+will be a throwback.  The third generation generally is. With a
+militant mother and a grandmother such as that child has, she'll just
+naturally be a clinging vine.  She'll be a reversion to type.  She'll
+be the kind who'll make eyes and wear pale blue and be crazy about new
+embroidery-stitches.  Just mark my words, T. A."
+
+Buck had a brilliant idea.
+
+"Why don't you pack a bag and run over to Chicago for a few days and
+see this marvel of the age?"
+
+But Emma shook her head.
+
+"Not now, T. A.  Later.  Let the delicate machinery of that new
+household adjust itself and begin to run smoothly and sweetly again.
+Anyone who might come in now--even Jock's mother--would be only an
+outsider."
+
+So she waited very patiently and considerately.  There was much to
+occupy her mind that spring.  Business was unexpectedly and
+gratifyingly good.  Then, too, one of their pet dreams was being
+realized; they were to have their own house in the country, at
+Westchester.  Together they had pored over the plans.  It was to be a
+house of wide, spacious verandas, of fireplaces, of bookshelves, of
+great, bright windows, and white enamel and cheerful chintz.  By the
+end of May it was finished, furnished, and complete.  At which a
+surprising thing happened; and yet, not so surprising.  A demon of
+restlessness seized Emma McChesney Buck.  It had been a busy, happy
+winter, filled with work.  Now that it was finished, there came upon
+Emma and Buck that unconscious and quite natural irritation which
+follows a long winter spent together by two people, no matter how much
+in harmony.  Emma pulled herself up now and then, horrified to find a
+rasping note of impatience in her voice.  Buck found himself, once or
+twice, fairly caught in a little whirlpool of ill temper of his own
+making.  These conditions they discovered almost simultaneously.  And
+like the comrades they were, they talked it over and came to a sensible
+understanding.
+
+"We're a bit ragged and saw-edged," said Emma.  "We're getting on each
+other's nerves.  What we need is a vacation from each other.  This
+morning I found myself on the verge of snapping at you.  At you!
+Imagine, T. A.!"
+
+Whereupon Buck came forward with his confession.
+
+"It's a couple of late cases of spring fever.  You've been tied to this
+office all winter.  So've I.  We need a change.  You've had too much
+petticoats, too much husband, too much cutting room and sales-room and
+rush orders and business generally.  Too much Featherloom and not
+enough foolishness."  He came over and put a gentle hand on his wife's
+shoulder, a thing strictly against the rules during business hours.
+And Emma not only permitted it but reached over and covered his hand
+with her own.  "You're tired, and you're a wee bit nervous; so g'wan,"
+said T. A., ever so gently, and kissed his wife, "g'wan; get out of
+here!"
+
+And Emma got.
+
+She went, not to the mountains or the seashore but with her face to the
+west.  In her trunks were tiny garments--garments pink-ribboned,
+blue-ribboned, things embroidered and scalloped and hemstitched and
+hand-made and lacy.  She went looking less grandmotherly than ever in
+her smart, blue tailor suit, her rakish hat, her quietly correct
+gloves, and slim shoes and softly becoming jabot.  Her husband had got
+her a compartment, had laden her down with books, magazines, fruit,
+flowers, candy.  Five minutes before the train pulled out, Emma looked
+about the little room and sighed, even while she smiled.
+
+"You're an extravagant boy, T. A. I look as if I were equipped for a
+dash to the pole instead of an eighteen-hour run to Chicago.  But I
+love you for it.  I suppose I ought to be ashamed to confess how I like
+having a whole compartment just for myself. You see, a compartment
+always will spell luxury to me.  There were all those years on the
+road, you know, when I often considered myself in luck to get an upper
+on a local of a branch line that threw you around in your berth like a
+bean in a tin can every time the engineer stopped or started."
+
+Buck looked at his watch, then stooped in farewell.  Quite suddenly
+they did not want to part.  They had grown curiously used to each
+other, these two.  Emma found herself clinging to this man with the
+tender eyes, and Buck held her close, regardless of train-schedules.
+Emma rushed him to the platform and watched him, wide-eyed, as he swung
+off the slowly moving train.
+
+"Come on along!" she called, almost tearfully.
+
+Buck looked up at her.  At her trim, erect figure, at her clear
+youthful coloring, at the brightness of her eye.
+
+"If you want to get a reputation for comedy," he laughed, "tell
+somebody on that train that you're going to visit your granddaughter."
+
+Jock met her at the station in Chicago and drove her home in a very
+dapper and glittering black runabout.
+
+"Grace wanted to come down," he explained, as they sped along, "but
+they're changing the baby's food or something, and she didn't want to
+leave.  You know those nurses."  Emma felt a curious little pang.  This
+was her boy, her baby, talking about his baby and nurses.  She had a
+sense of unreality.  He turned to her with shining eyes.  "That's a
+stunning get-up, Blonde. Honestly, you're a wiz, mother. Grace has told
+all her friends that you're coming, and their mothers are going to
+call.  But, good Lord, you look like my younger sister, on the square
+you do!"
+
+The apartment reached, it seemed to Emma that she floated across the
+walk and up the stairs, so eagerly did her heart cry out for a glimpse
+of this little being who was flesh of her flesh. Grace, a little pale
+but more beautiful than ever, met them at the door.  Her arms went
+about Emma's neck.  Then she stood her handsome mother-in-law off and
+gazed at her.
+
+"You wonder!  How lovely you look!  Good heavens, are they wearing that
+kind of hat in New York!  And those collars!  I haven't seen a thing
+like 'em here.  'East is east and West is west and----'"
+
+"Where's that child?" demanded Emma McChesney Buck.  "Where's my baby?"
+
+"Sh-sh-sh-sh!" came in a sibilant duet from Grace and Jock. "Not now.
+She's sleeping.  We were up with her for three hours last night.  It
+was the new food.  She's not used to it yet."
+
+"But, you foolish children, can't I peek at her?"
+
+"Oh, dear, no!" said Grace hastily.  "We never go into her room when
+she's asleep.  This is your room, mother dear.  And just as soon as she
+wakes up--this is your bath--you'll want to freshen up.  Dear me; who
+could have hung the baby's little shirt here?  The nurse, I suppose.
+If I don't attend to every little thing----"
+
+Emma took off her hat and smoothed her hair with light, deft fingers.
+She turned a smiling face toward Jock and Grace standing there in the
+doorway.
+
+"Now don't bother, dear.  If you knew how I love having that little
+shirt to look at!  And I've such things in my trunk!  Wait till you see
+them."
+
+So she possessed her soul in patience for one hour, two hours. At the
+end of the second hour, a little wail went up.  Grace vanished down the
+hall.  Emma, her heart beating very fast, followed her.  A moment later
+she was bending over a very pink morsel with very blue eyes and she was
+saying, over and over in a rapture of delightful idiocy:
+
+"Say hello to your gran-muzzer, yes her is!  Say, hello, granny!"  And
+her longing arms reached down to take up her namesake.
+
+"Not now!" Grace said hastily.  "We never play with her just before
+feeding-time.  We find that it excites her, and that's bad for her
+digestion."
+
+"Dear me!" marveled Emma.  "I don't remember worrying about Jock's
+digestion when he was two and a half months old!"
+
+It was thus that Emma McChesney Buck, for many years accustomed to
+leadership, learned to follow humbly and in silence.  She had always
+been the orbit about which her world revolved.  Years of brilliant
+success, of triumphant execution, had not spoiled her, or made her
+offensively dictatorial.  But they had taught her a certain
+self-confidence; had accustomed her to a degree of deference from
+others.  Now she was the humblest of the satellites revolving about
+this sun of the household.  She learned to tiptoe when small Emma
+McChesney was sleeping.  She learned that the modern mother does not
+approve of the holding of a child in one's arms, no matter how those
+arms might be aching to feel the frail weight of the soft, sweet body.
+She who had brought a child into the world, who had had to train that
+child alone, had raised him single-handed, had educated him, denied
+herself for him, made a man of him, now found herself all ignorant of
+twentieth century child-raising methods.  She learned strange things
+about barley-water and formulae and units and olive oil, and orange
+juice and ounces and farina, and bath-thermometers and blue-and-white
+striped nurses who view grandmothers with a coldly disapproving and
+pitying eye.
+
+She watched the bathing-process for the first time with wonder as frank
+as it was unfeigned.
+
+"And I thought I was a modern woman!" she marveled.  "When I used to
+bathe Jock I tested the temperature of the water with my elbow; and I
+know my mother used to test my bath-water when I was a baby by putting
+me into it.  She used to say that if I turned blue she knew the water
+was too cold, and if I turned red she knew it was too hot."
+
+"Humph!" snorted the blue-and-white striped nurse, and rightly.
+
+"Oh, I don't say that your method isn't the proper one," Emma hastened
+to say humbly, and watched Grace scrutinize the bath-thermometer with
+critical eye.
+
+In the days that followed, there came calling the mothers of Grace's
+young-women friends, as Jock had predicted.  Charming elderly women,
+most of them, all of them gracious and friendly with that generous
+friendliness which is of the West.  But each fell into one of two
+classes--the placid, black-silk, rather vague woman of middle age,
+whose face has the blank look of the sheltered woman and who wrinkles
+early from sheer lack of sufficient activity or vital interest in life;
+and the wiry, well-dressed, assertive type who talked about her club
+work and her charities, her voice always taking the rising inflection
+at the end of a sentence, as though addressing a meeting.  When they
+met Emma, it was always with a little startled look of surprise,
+followed by something that bordered on disapproval.  Emma, the keenly
+observant, watching them, felt vaguely uncomfortable.  She tried to be
+politely interested in what they had to say, but she found her thoughts
+straying a thousand miles away to the man whom she loved and who loved
+her, to the big, busy factory with its humming machinery and its
+capable office staff, to the tasteful, comfortable, spacious house that
+she had helped to plan; to all the vital absorbing, fascinating and
+constructive interests with which her busy New York life was filled to
+overflowing.
+
+So she looked smilingly at the plump, gray-haired ladies who came
+a-calling in their smart black with the softening lace-effect at the
+throat, and they looked, smiling politely, too, at this slim, erect,
+pink-cheeked, bright-eyed woman with the shining golden hair and the
+firm, smooth skin, and the alert manner; and in their eyes was that
+distrust which lurks in the eyes of a woman as she looks at another
+woman of her own age who doesn't show it.
+
+In the weeks of her stay, Emma managed, little by little, to take the
+place of second mother in the household.  She had tact and finesse and
+cleverness enough even for that herculean feat. Grace's pale cheeks and
+last year's wardrobe made her firm in her stand.
+
+"Grace," she said, one day, "listen to me:  I want you to get some
+clothes--a lot of them, and foolish ones, all of them. Babies are all
+very well, but husbands have some slight right to consideration.  The
+clock, for you, is an instrument devised to cut up the day and night
+into your baby's eating- and sleeping-periods.  I want you to get some
+floppy hats with roses on 'em, and dresses with ruffles and sashes.
+I'll stay home and guard your child from vandals and ogres.  Scat!"
+
+Her stay lengthened to four weeks, five weeks, six.  She had the
+satisfaction of seeing the roses blooming in Grace's cheeks as well as
+in her hats.  She learned to efface her own personality that others
+might shine who had a better right.  And she lost some of her own
+bright color, a measure of her own buoyancy.  In the sixth week she
+saw, in her mirror, something that caused her to lean forward, to stare
+for one intent moment, then to shrink back, wide-eyed.  A little
+sunburst, hair-fine but undeniable, was etched delicately about the
+corners of her eyes.  Fifteen minutes later, she had wired New York
+thus:
+
+     Home Friday.  Do you still love me?  EMMA.
+
+
+When she left, little Emma McChesney was sleeping, by a curious
+coincidence, as she had been when Emma arrived, so that she could not
+have the satisfaction of a last pressure of the lips against the
+rose-petal cheek.  She had to content herself with listening close to
+the door in the vain hope of catching a last sound of the child's
+breathing.
+
+She was laden with fruits and flowers and magazines on her departure,
+as she had been when she left New York.  But, somehow, these things did
+not seem to interest her.  After the train had left Chicago's smoky
+buildings far behind, she sat very still for a long time, her eyes
+shut.  She told herself that she felt and looked very old, very tired,
+very unlike the Emma McChesney Buck who had left New York a few weeks
+before.  Then she thought of T. A., and her eyes unclosed and she
+smiled.  By the time the train had reached Cleveland the little lines
+seemed miraculously to have disappeared, somehow, from about her eyes.
+When they left the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street station she was
+a creature transformed.  And when the train rolled into the great
+down-town shed, Emma was herself again, bright-eyed, alert, vibrating
+energy.
+
+There was no searching, no hesitation.  Her eyes met his, and his eyes
+found hers with a quite natural magnetism.
+
+"Oh, T. A., my dear, my dear!  I didn't know you were so handsome!  And
+how beautiful New York is!  Tell me:  Have I grown old?  Have I?"
+
+T. A. bundled her into a taxi and gazed at her in some alarm.
+
+"You!  Old!  What put that nonsense into your head?  You're tired,
+dear.  We'll go home, and you'll have a good rest, and a quiet
+evening----"
+
+"Rest!" echoed Emma, and sat up very straight, her cheeks pink. "Quiet
+evening!  T. A. Buck, listen to me.  I've had nothing but rest and
+quiet evenings for six weeks.  I feel a million years old.  One more
+day of being a grandmother and I should have died! Do you know what I'm
+going to do?  I'm going to stop at Fifth Avenue this minute and buy a
+hat that's a thousand times too young for me, and you're going with me
+to tell me that it isn't. And then you'll take me somewhere to
+dinner--a place with music and pink shades.  And then I want to see a
+wicked play, preferably with a runway through the center aisle for the
+chorus.
+
+And then I want to go somewhere and dance!  Get that, dear? Dance!
+Tell me, T. A.--tell me the truth:  Do you think I'm old, and faded,
+and wistful and grandmotherly?"
+
+"I think," said T. A. Buck, "that you're the most beautiful, the most
+wonderful, the most adorable woman in the world, and the more foolish
+your new hat is and the later we dance the better I'll like it.  It has
+been awful without you, Emma."
+
+Emma closed her eyes and there came from the depths of her heart a
+great sigh of relief, and comfort and gratification.
+
+"Oh, T. A., my dear, it's all very well to drown your identity in the
+music of the orchestra, but there's nothing equal to the soul-filling
+satisfaction that you get in solo work."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Emma McChesney & Co., by Edna Ferber
+
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