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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Roast Beef, Medium, 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: Roast Beef, Medium
+
+Author: Edna Ferber
+
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [EBook #6016]
+This file was first posted on October 17, 2002
+Last Updated: July 2, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Carel Lyn Miske, Charles Franks and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM
+
+THE BUSINESS ADVENTURES OF EMMA McCHESNEY
+
+By Edna Ferber
+
+Author of "Dawn O'Hara," "Buttered Side Down," Etc.
+
+With twenty-seven illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg
+
+
+[Illustration: "'And they call that thing a petticoat!'"]
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy.
+
+Seated at Life's Dining Table, with the Menu of Morals before you, your
+eye wanders a bit over the entrees, the hors d'oeuvres, and the things
+_a la_, though you know that Roast Beef, Medium, is safe, and sane, and
+sure. It agrees with you. As you hesitate there sounds in your ear a
+soft and insinuating Voice.
+
+"You'll find the tongue in aspic very nice today," purrs the Voice.
+"May I recommend the chicken pie, country style? Perhaps you'd relish
+something light and tempting. Eggs Benedictine. Very fine. Or some
+flaked crab meat, perhaps. With a special Russian sauce."
+
+Roast Beef, Medium! How unimaginative it sounds. How prosaic, and dry!
+You cast the thought of it aside with the contempt that it deserves, and
+you assume a fine air of the epicure as you order. There are set before
+you things encased in pastry; things in frilly paper trousers; things
+that prick the tongue; sauces that pique the palate. There are strange
+vegetable garnishings, cunningly cut. This is not only Food. These are
+Viands.
+
+"Everything satisfactory?" inquires the insinuating Voice.
+
+"Yes," you say, and take a hasty sip of water. That paprika has burned
+your tongue. "Yes. Check, please."
+
+You eye the score, appalled. "Look here! Aren't you over-charging!"
+
+"Our regular price," and you catch a sneer beneath the smugness of the
+Voice. "It is what every one pays, sir."
+
+You reach deep, deep into your pocket, and you pay. And you rise and go,
+full but not fed. And later as you take your fifth Moral Pepsin Tablet
+you say Fool! and Fool! and Fool!
+
+When next we dine we are not tempted by the Voice. We are wary of weird
+sauces. We shun the cunning aspics. We look about at our neighbor's
+table. He is eating of things French, and Russian and Hungarian. Of food
+garnished, and garish and greasy. And with a little sigh of Content and
+resignation we settle down to our Roast Beef, Medium.
+
+E. F.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    I. ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM
+   II. REPRESENTING T. A. BUCK
+  III. CHICKENS
+   IV. HIS MOTHER'S SON
+    V. PINK TIGHTS AND GINGHAMS
+   VI. SIMPLY SKIRTS
+  VII. UNDERNEATH THE HIGH-CUT VEST
+ VIII. CATCHING UP WITH CHRISTMAS
+   IX. KNEE-DEEP IN KNICKERS
+    X. IN THE ABSENCE OF THE AGENT
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+"'And they call that thing a petticoat!'"
+
+"'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,' he announced, glibly"
+
+"'That was a married kiss--a two-year-old married kiss at least'"
+
+"'I won't ask you to forgive a hound like me'"
+
+"'You'll never grow up, Emma McChesney'"
+
+"'Well, s'long then, Shrimp. See you at eight'"
+
+"'I'm still in a position to enforce that ordinance against pouting'"
+
+"'Son!' echoed the clerk, staring"
+
+"'Well!' gulped Jock, 'those two double-bedded, bloomin', blasted
+Bisons--'"
+
+"'Come on out of here and I'll lick the shine off your shoes, you
+blue-eyed babe, you!'"
+
+"'You can't treat me with your life's history. I'm going in'"
+
+"'Now, Lillian Russell and cold cream is one; and new potatoes and brown
+crocks is another.'"
+
+"'Why, girls, I couldn't hold down a job in a candy factory'"
+
+"'Honestly, I'd wear it myself!'"
+
+"'I've lived petticoats, I've talked petticoats, I've dreamed
+petticoats--why, I've even worn the darn things!'"
+
+"And found himself addressing the backs of the letters on the door
+marked 'Private'."
+
+"'Shut up, you blamed fool! Can't you see the lady's sick?'"
+
+"At his gaze that lady fled, sample-case banging at her knees"
+
+"In the exuberance of his young strength, he picked her up"
+
+"She read it again, dully, as though every selfish word had not already
+stamped itself on her brain and heart."
+
+"'Not that you look your age--not by ten years!"'
+
+"'Christmas isn't a season ... it's a feeling; and, thank God, I've got
+it!'"
+
+"No man will ever appreciate the fine points of this little garment, but
+the women--"
+
+"Emma McChesney ... I believe in you now! Dad and I both believe in
+you."
+
+"It had been a whirlwind day."
+
+"'Emma,' he said, 'will you marry me?'"
+
+"'Welcome home!' she cried. 'Sketch in the furniture to suit yourself.'"
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM
+
+
+There is a journey compared to which the travels of Bunyan's hero were a
+summer-evening's stroll. The Pilgrims by whom this forced march is
+taken belong to a maligned fraternity, and are known as traveling men.
+Sample-case in hand, trunk key in pocket, cigar in mouth, brown derby
+atilt at an angle of ninety, each young and untried traveler starts on
+his journey down that road which leads through morasses of chicken _a
+la_ Creole, over greasy mountains of queen fritters made doubly perilous
+by slippery glaciers of rum sauce, into formidable jungles of breaded
+veal chops threaded by sanguine and deadly streams of tomato gravy,
+past sluggish mires of dreadful things _en casserole_, over hills of
+corned-beef hash, across shaking quagmires of veal glace, plunging into
+sloughs of slaw, until, haggard, weary, digestion shattered, complexion
+gone, he reaches the safe haven of roast beef, medium. Once there,
+he never again strays, although the pompadoured, white-aproned siren
+sing-songs in his ear the praises of Irish stew, and pork with apple
+sauce.
+
+Emma McChesney was eating her solitary supper at the Berger house at
+Three Rivers, Michigan. She had arrived at the Roast Beef haven many
+years before. She knew the digestive perils of a small town hotel
+dining-room as a guide on the snow-covered mountain knows each
+treacherous pitfall and chasm. Ten years on the road had taught her to
+recognize the deadly snare that lurks in the seemingly calm bosom of
+minced chicken with cream sauce. Not for her the impenetrable mysteries
+of a hamburger and onions. It had been a struggle, brief but terrible,
+from which Emma McChesney had emerged triumphant, her complexion and
+figure saved.
+
+No more metaphor. On with the story, which left Emma at her safe and
+solitary supper.
+
+She had the last number of the _Dry Goods Review_ propped up against
+the vinegar cruet and the Worcestershire, and the salt shaker. Between
+conscientious, but disinterested mouthfuls of medium roast beef, she was
+reading the snappy ad set forth by her firm's bitterest competitors,
+the Strauss Sans-silk Skirt Company. It was a good reading ad. Emma
+McChesney, who had forgotten more about petticoats than the average
+skirt salesman ever knew, presently allowed her luke-warm beef to grow
+cold and flabby as she read. Somewhere in her subconscious mind she
+realized that the lanky head waitress had placed some one opposite her
+at the table. Also, subconsciously, she heard him order liver and bacon,
+with onions. She told herself that as soon as she reached the bottom of
+the column she'd look up to see who the fool was. She never arrived at
+the column's end.
+
+"I just hate to tear you away from that love lyric; but if I might
+trouble you for the vinegar--"
+
+Emma groped for it back of her paper and shoved it across the table
+without looking up, "--and the Worcester--"
+
+One eye on the absorbing column, she passed the tall bottle. But at its
+removal her prop was gone. The _Dry Goods Review_ was too weighty for
+the salt shaker alone.
+
+"--and the salt. Thanks. Warm, isn't it?"
+
+There was a double vertical frown between Emma McChesney's eyes as she
+glanced up over the top of her _Dry Goods Review_. The frown gave way to
+a half smile. The glance settled into a stare.
+
+"But then, anybody would have stared. He expected it," she said,
+afterwards, in telling about it. "I've seen matinee idols, and tailors'
+supplies salesmen, and Julian Eltinge, but this boy had any male
+professional beauty I ever saw, looking as handsome and dashing as a
+bowl of cold oatmeal. And he knew it."
+
+Now, in the ten years that she had been out representing T. A. Buck's
+Featherloom Petticoats Emma McChesney had found it necessary to make a
+rule or two for herself. In the strict observance of one of these she
+had become past mistress in the fine art of congealing the warm advances
+of fresh and friendly salesmen of the opposite sex. But this case was
+different, she told herself. The man across the table was little more
+than a boy--an amazingly handsome, astonishingly impudent, cockily
+confident boy, who was staring with insolent approval at Emma
+McChesney's trim, shirt-waisted figure, and her fresh, attractive
+coloring, and her well-cared-for hair beneath the smart summer hat.
+
+[Illustration: "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers," he
+announced, glibly.]
+
+"It isn't in human nature to be as good-looking as you are," spake Emma
+McChesney, suddenly, being a person who never trifled with half-way
+measures. "I'll bet you have bad teeth, or an impediment in your
+speech."
+
+The gorgeous young man smiled. His teeth were perfect. "Peter Piper
+picked a peck of pickled peppers," he announced, glibly. "Nothing
+missing there, is there?"
+
+"Must be your morals then," retorted Emma McChesney. "My! My! And on the
+road! Why, the trail of bleeding hearts that you must leave all the way
+from Maine to California would probably make the Red Sea turn white with
+envy."
+
+The Fresh Young Kid speared a piece of liver and looked soulfully up
+into the adoring eyes of the waitress who was hovering over him. "Got
+any nice hot biscuits to-night, girlie?" he inquired.
+
+"I'll get you some; sure," wildly promised his handmaiden, and
+disappeared kitchenward.
+
+"Brand new to the road, aren't you?" observed Emma McChesney, cruelly.
+
+"What makes you think--"
+
+"Liver and bacon, hot biscuits, Worcestershire," elucidated she. "No
+old-timer would commit suicide that way. After you've been out for
+two or three years you'll stick to the Rock of Gibraltar--roast beef,
+medium. Oh, I get wild now and then, and order eggs if the girl says she
+knows the hen that layed 'em, but plain roast beef, unchloroformed, is
+the one best bet. You can't go wrong if you stick to it."
+
+The god-like young man leaned forward, forgetting to eat.
+
+"You don't mean to tell me you're on the road!"
+
+"Why not?" demanded Emma McChesney, briskly.
+
+"Oh, fie, fie!" said the handsome youth, throwing her a languishing
+look. "Any woman as pretty as you are, and with those eyes, and that
+hair, and figure--Say, Little One, what are you going to do to-night?"
+
+Emma McChesney sugared her tea, and stirred it, slowly. Then she looked
+up. "To-night, you fresh young kid, you!" she said calmly, "I'm going to
+dictate two letters, explaining why business was rotten last week,
+and why it's going to pick up next week, and then I'm going to keep an
+engagement with a nine-hour beauty sleep."
+
+"Don't get sore at a fellow. You'd take pity on me if you knew how I
+have to work to kill an evening in one of these little townpump burgs.
+Kill 'em! It can't be done. They die harder than the heroine in a
+ten, twenty, thirty. From supper to bedtime is twice as long as from
+breakfast to supper. Honest!"
+
+But Emma McChesney looked inexorable, as women do just before they
+relent. Said she: "Oh, I don't know. By the time I get through trying
+to convince a bunch of customers that T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoat
+has every other skirt in the market looking like a piece of Fourth of
+July bunting that's been left out in the rain, I'm about ready to turn
+down the spread and leave a call for six-thirty."
+
+"Be a good fellow," pleaded the unquenchable one. "Let's take in all the
+nickel shows, and then see if we can't drown our sorrows in--er--"
+
+Emma McChesney slipped a coin under her plate, crumpled her napkin,
+folded her arms on the table, and regarded the boy across the way with
+what our best talent calls a long, level look. It was so long and so
+level that even the airiness of the buoyant youngster at whom it was
+directed began to lessen perceptibly, long before Emma began to talk.
+
+"Tell me, young 'un, did any one ever refuse you anything? I thought
+not. I should think that when you realize what you've got to learn it
+would scare you to look ahead. I don't expect you to believe me when
+I tell you I never talk to fresh guys like you, but it's true. I don't
+know why I'm breaking my rule for you, unless it's because you're so
+unbelievably good-looking that I'm anxious to know where the blemish is.
+The Lord don't make 'em perfect, you know. I'm going to get out those
+letters, and then, if it's just the same to you, we'll take a walk.
+These nickel shows are getting on my nerves. It seems to me that if I
+have to look at one more Western picture about a fool girl with her
+hair in a braid riding a show horse in the wilds of Clapham Junction
+and being rescued from a band of almost-Indians by the handsome, but
+despised Eastern tenderfoot, or if I see one more of those historical
+pictures, with the women wearing costumes that are a pass between early
+Egyptian and late State Street, I know I'll get hysterics and have to be
+carried shrieking, up the aisle. Let's walk down Main Street and look in
+the store windows, and up as far as the park and back."
+
+"Great!" assented he. "Is there a park?
+
+"I don't know," replied Emma McChesney, "but there is. And for your own
+good I'm going to tell you a few things. There's more to this traveling
+game than just knocking down on expenses, talking to every pretty woman
+you meet, and learning to ask for fresh white-bread heels at the Palmer
+House in Chicago. I'll meet you in the lobby at eight."
+
+Emma McChesney talked steadily, and evenly, and generously, from eight
+until eight-thirty. She talked from the great storehouse of practical
+knowledge which she had accumulated in her ten years on the road. She
+told the handsome young cub many things for which he should have been
+undyingly thankful. But when they reached the park--the cool, dim,
+moon-silvered park, its benches dotted with glimpses of white showing
+close beside a blur of black, Emma McChesney stopped talking. Not only
+did she stop talking, but she ceased to think of the boy seated beside
+her on the bench.
+
+In the band-stand, under the arc-light, in the center of the pretty
+little square, some neighborhood children were playing a noisy game,
+with many shrill cries, and much shouting and laughter. Suddenly, from
+one of the houses across the way, a woman's voice was heard, even above
+the clamor of the children.
+
+"Fred-dee!" called the voice. "Maybelle! Come, now."
+
+And a boy's voice answered, as boys' voices have since Cain was a child
+playing in the Garden of Eden, and as boys' voices will as long as boys
+are:
+
+"Aw, ma, I ain't a bit sleepy. We just begun a new game, an' I'm leader.
+Can't we just stay out a couple of minutes more?"
+
+"Well, five minutes," agreed the voice. "But don't let me call you
+again."
+
+Emma McChesney leaned back on the rustic bench and clasped her strong,
+white hands behind her head, and stared straight ahead into the soft
+darkness. And if it had been light you could have seen that the bitter
+lines showing faintly about her mouth were outweighed by the sweet and
+gracious light which was glowing in her eyes.
+
+"Fred-dee!" came the voice of command again. "May-belle! This minute,
+now!"
+
+One by one the flying little figures under the arc-light melted away
+in the direction of the commanding voice and home and bed. And Emma
+McChesney forgot all about fresh young kids and featherloom petticoats
+and discounts and bills of lading and sample-cases and grouchy buyers.
+After all, it had been her protecting maternal instinct which had been
+aroused by the boy at supper, although she had not known it then. She
+did not know it now, for that matter. She was busy remembering just such
+evenings in her own life--summer evenings, filled with the high, shrill
+laughter of children at play. She too, had stood in the doorway, making
+a funnel of her hands, so that her clear call through the twilight might
+be heard above the cries of the boys and girls. She had known how loath
+the little feet had been to leave their play, and how they had lagged up
+the porch stairs, and into the house. Years, whose memory she had tried
+to keep behind her, now suddenly loomed before her in the dim quiet of
+the little flower-scented park.
+
+A voice broke the silence, and sent her dream-thoughts scattering to the
+winds.
+
+"Honestly, kid," said the voice, "I could be crazy about you, if you'd
+let me."
+
+The forgotten figure beside her woke into sudden life. A strong arm
+encircled her shoulders. A strong hand seized her own, which were
+clasped behind her head. Two warm, eager lips were pressed upon her
+lips, checking the little cry of surprise and wrath that rose in her
+throat.
+
+Emma McChesney wrenched herself free with a violent jerk, and pushed
+him from her. She did not storm. She did not even rise. She sat very
+quietly, breathing fast. When she turned at last to look at the boy
+beside her it seemed that her white profile cut the darkness. The man
+shrank a little, and would have stammered something, but Emma McChesney
+checked him.
+
+[Illustration: "'That was a married kiss--a two-year-old married kiss at
+least.'"]
+
+"You nasty, good-for-nothing, handsome young devil, you!" she said. "So
+you're married."
+
+He sat up with a jerk. "How did you--what makes you think so?"
+
+"That was a married kiss--a two-year-old married kiss, at least. No boy
+would get as excited as that about kissing an old stager like me. The
+chances are you're out of practise. I knew that if it wasn't teeth or
+impediment it must be morals. And it is."
+
+She moved over on the bench until she was close beside him. "Now, listen
+to me, boy." She leaned forward, impressively. "Are you listening?"
+
+"Yes," answered the handsome young devil, sullenly.
+
+"What I've got to say to you isn't so much for your sake, as for your
+wife's. I was married when I was eighteen, and stayed married eight
+years. I've had my divorce ten years, and my boy is seventeen years old.
+Figure it out. How old is Ann?"
+
+"I don't believe it," he flashed back. "You're not a day over
+twenty-six--anyway, you don't look it. I--"
+
+"Thanks," drawled Emma. "That's because you've never seen me in
+negligee. A woman's as old as she looks with her hair on the dresser and
+bed only a few minutes away. Do you know why I was decent to you in the
+first place? Because I was foolish enough to think that you reminded me
+of my own kid. Every fond mama is gump enough to think that every Greek
+god she sees looks like her own boy, even if her own happens to squint
+and have two teeth missing--which mine hasn't, thank the Lord! He's the
+greatest young--Well, now, look here, young 'un. I'm going to return
+good for evil. Traveling men and geniuses should never marry. But as
+long as you've done it, you might as well start right. If you move from
+this spot till I get through with you, I'll yell police and murder. Are
+you ready?"
+
+"I'm dead sorry, on the square, I am--"
+
+"Ten minutes late," interrupted Emma McChesney. "I'm dishing up a
+sermon, hot, for one, and you've got to choke it down. Whenever I hear a
+traveling man howling about his lonesome evenings, and what a dog's
+life it is, and no way for a man to live, I always wonder what kind of
+a summer picnic he thinks it is for his wife. She's really a widow seven
+months in the year, without any of a widow's privileges. Did you ever
+stop to think what she's doing evenings? No, you didn't. Well, I'll
+tell you. She's sitting home, night after night, probably embroidering
+monograms on your shirt sleeves by way of diversion. And on Saturday
+night, which is the night when every married woman has the inalienable
+right to be taken out by her husband, she can listen to the woman in the
+flat upstairs getting ready to go to the theater. The fact that there's
+a ceiling between 'em doesn't prevent her from knowing just where
+they're going, and why he has worked himself into a rage over his white
+lawn tie, and whether they're taking a taxi or the car and who they're
+going to meet afterward at supper. Just by listening to them coming
+downstairs she can tell how much Mrs. Third Flat's silk stockings
+cost, and if she's wearing her new La Valliere or not. Women have that
+instinct, you know. Or maybe you don't. There's so much you've missed."
+
+"Say, look here--" broke from the man beside her. But Emma McChesney
+laid her cool fingers on his lips.
+
+"Nothing from the side-lines, please," she said. "After they've gone
+she can go to bed, or she can sit up, pretending to read, but really
+wondering if that squeaky sound coming from the direction of the kitchen
+is a loose screw in the storm door, or if it's some one trying to break
+into the flat. And she'd rather sit there, scared green, than go back
+through that long hall to find out. And when Tillie comes home with her
+young man at eleven o'clock, though she promised not to stay out later
+than ten, she rushes back to the kitchen and falls on her neck, she's so
+happy to see her. Oh, it's a gay life. You talk about the heroism of
+the early Pilgrim mothers! I'd like to know what they had on the average
+traveling man's wife."
+
+"Bess goes to the matinee every Saturday," he began, in feeble defense.
+
+"Matinee!" scoffed Emma McChesney. "Do you think any woman goes to
+matinee by preference? Nobody goes but girls of sixteen, and confirmed
+old maids without brothers, and traveling men's wives. Matinee! Say,
+would you ever hesitate to choose between an all-day train and a
+sleeper? It's the same idea. What a woman calls going to the theater is
+something very different. It means taking a nap in the afternoon, so her
+eyes will be bright at night, and then starting at about five o'clock to
+dress, and lay her husband's clean things out on the bed. She loves it.
+She even enjoys getting his bath towels ready, and putting his shaving
+things where he can lay his hands on 'em, and telling the girl to have
+dinner ready promptly at six-thirty. It means getting out her good dress
+that hangs in the closet with a cretonne bag covering it, and her black
+satin coat, and her hat with the paradise aigrettes that she bought with
+what she saved out of the housekeeping money. It means her best silk
+stockings, and her diamond sunburst that he's going to have made over
+into a La Valliere just as soon as business is better. She loves it all,
+and her cheeks get pinker and pinker, so that she really doesn't need
+the little dash of rouge that she puts on 'because everybody does it,
+don't you know?' She gets ready, all but her dress, and then she puts on
+a kimono and slips out to the kitchen to make the gravy for the chicken
+because the girl never can get it as smooth as he likes it. That's part
+of what she calls going to the theater, and having a husband. And if
+there are children--"
+
+There came a little, inarticulate sound from the boy. But Emma's quick
+ear caught it.
+
+"No? Well, then, we'll call that one black mark less for you. But if
+there are children--and for her sake I hope there will be--she's father
+and mother to them. She brings them up, single-handed, while he's on the
+road. And the worst she can do is to say to them, 'Just wait until your
+father gets home. He'll hear of this.' But shucks! When he comes home
+he can't whip the kids for what they did seven weeks before, and that
+they've forgotten all about, and for what he never saw, and can't
+imagine. Besides, he wants his comfort when he gets home. He says he
+wants a little rest and peace, and he's darned if he's going to run
+around evenings. Not much, he isn't! But he doesn't object to her making
+a special effort to cook all those little things that he's been longing
+for on the road. Oh, there'll be a seat in Heaven for every traveling
+man's wife--though at that, I'll bet most of 'em will find themselves
+stuck behind a post."
+
+"You're all right!" exclaimed Emma McChesney's listener, suddenly. "How
+a woman like you can waste her time on the road is more than I can see.
+And--I want to thank you. I'm not such a fool--"
+
+"I haven't let you finish a sentence so far and I'm not going to yet.
+Wait a minute. There's one more paragraph to this sermon. You remember
+what I told you about old stagers, and the roast beef diet? Well, that
+applies right through life. It's all very well to trifle with the little
+side-dishes at first, but there comes a time when you've got to quit
+fooling with the minced chicken, and the imitation lamb chops of this
+world, and settle down to plain, everyday, roast beef, medium. That
+other stuff may tickle your palate for a while, but sooner or later
+it will turn on you, and ruin your moral digestion. You stick to roast
+beef, medium. It may sound prosaic, and unimaginative and dry, but
+you'll find that it wears in the long run. You can take me over to the
+hotel now. I've lost an hour's sleep, but I don't consider it wasted.
+And you'll oblige me by putting the stopper on any conversation that may
+occur to you between here and the hotel. I've talked until I'm so low
+on words that I'll probably have to sell featherlooms in sign language
+to-morrow."
+
+They walked to the very doors of the Berger House in silence. But at the
+foot of the stairs that led to the parlor floor he stopped, and looked
+into Emma McChesney's face. His own was rather white and tense.
+
+"Look here," he said. "I've got to thank you. That sounds idiotic, but I
+guess you know what I mean. And I won't ask you to forgive a hound like
+me. I haven't been so ashamed of myself since I was a kid. Why, if you
+knew Bess--if you knew--"
+
+"I guess I know Bess, all right. I used to be a Bess, myself. Just
+because I'm a traveling man it doesn't follow that I've forgotten the
+Bess feeling. As far as that goes, I don't mind telling you that I've
+got neuralgia from sitting in that park with my feet in the damp grass.
+I can feel it in my back teeth, and by eleven o'clock it will be camping
+over my left eye, with its little brothers doing a war dance up the side
+of my face. And, boy, I'd give last week's commissions if there was some
+one to whom I had the right to say: 'Henry, will you get up and get me a
+hot-water bag for my neuralgia? It's something awful. And just open the
+left-hand lower drawer of the chiffonier and get out one of those gauze
+vests and then get me a safety pin from the tray on my dresser. I'm
+going to pin it around my head.'"
+
+[Illustration: "'I won't ask you to forgive a hound like me'"]
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+REPRESENTING T. A. BUCK
+
+
+Emma McChesney, Mrs. (I place it in the background because she generally
+did) swung off the 2:15, crossed the depot platform, and dived into the
+hotel 'bus. She had to climb over the feet of a fat man in brown and a
+lean man in black, to do it. Long practise had made her perfect in the
+art. She knew that the fat man and the thin man were hogging the end
+seats so that they could be the first to register and get a choice of
+rooms when the 'bus reached the hotel. The vehicle smelled of straw, and
+mold, and stables, and dampness, and tobacco, as 'buses have from old
+Jonas Chuzzlewit's time to this. Nine years on the road had accustomed
+Emma McChesney's nostrils to 'bus smells. She gazed stolidly out of
+the window, crossed one leg over the other, remembered that her snug
+suit-skirt wasn't built for that attitude, uncrossed them again, and
+caught the delighted and understanding eye of the fat traveling man, who
+was a symphony in brown--brown suit, brown oxfords, brown scarf, brown
+bat, brown-bordered handkerchief just peeping over the edge of his
+pocket. He looked like a colossal chocolate fudge.
+
+"Red-faced, grinning, and a naughty wink--I'll bet he sells coffins and
+undertakers' supplies," mused Emma McChesney. "And the other one--the
+tall, lank, funereal affair in black--I suppose his line would be sheet
+music, or maybe phonographs. Or perhaps he's a lyceum bureau reader,
+scheduled to give an evening of humorous readings for the Young Men's
+Sunday Evening Club course at the First M. E. Church."
+
+During those nine years on the road for the Featherloom Skirt Company
+Emma McChesney had picked up a side line or two on human nature.
+
+She was not surprised to see the fat man in brown and the thin man in
+black leap out of the 'bus and into the hotel before she had had time to
+straighten her hat after the wheels had bumped up against the curbing.
+By the time she reached the desk the two were disappearing in the wake
+of a bell-boy.
+
+The sartorial triumph behind the desk, languidly read her signature
+upside down, took a disinterested look at her, and yelled:
+
+"Front! Show the lady up to nineteen."
+
+Emma McChesney took three steps in the direction of the stairway toward
+which the boy was headed with her bags. Then she stopped.
+
+"Wait a minute, boy," she said, pleasantly enough; and walked back to
+the desk. She eyed the clerk, a half-smile on her lips, one arm, in its
+neat tailored sleeve, resting on the marble, while her right forefinger,
+trimly gloved, tapped an imperative little tattoo. (Perhaps you think
+that last descriptive sentence is as unnecessary as it is garbled.
+But don't you get a little picture of her--trim, taut, tailored,
+mannish-booted, flat-heeled, linen-collared, sailor-hatted?)
+
+"You've made a mistake, haven't you?" she inquired.
+
+"Mistake?" repeated the clerk, removing his eyes from their loving
+contemplation of his right thumb-nail. "Guess not."
+
+"Oh, think it over," drawled Emma McChesney. "I've never seen nineteen,
+but I can describe it with both eyes shut, and one hand tied behind me.
+It's an inside room, isn't it, over the kitchen, and just next to the
+water butt where the maids come to draw water for the scrubbing at 5
+A.M.? And the boiler room gets in its best bumps for nineteen, and the
+patent ventilators work just next door, and there's a pet rat that makes
+his headquarters in the wall between eighteen and nineteen, and the
+housekeeper whose room is across the hail is afflicted with a bronchial
+cough, nights. I'm wise to the brand of welcome that you fellows hand
+out to us women on the road. This is new territory for me--my first
+trip West. Think it over. Don't--er--say, sixty-five strike you as being
+nearer my size?"
+
+The clerk stared at Emma McChesney, and Emma McChesney coolly stared
+back at the clerk.
+
+"Our aim," began he, loftily, "is to make our guests as comfortable as
+possible on all occasions. But the last lady drummer who--"
+
+"That's all right," interrupted Emma McChesney, "but I'm not the kind
+that steals the towels, and I don't carry an electric iron with me,
+either. Also I don't get chummy with the housekeeper and the dining-room
+girls half an hour after I move in. Most women drummers are living up to
+their reputations, but some of us are living 'em down. I'm for revision
+downward. You haven't got my number, that's all."
+
+A slow gleam of unwilling admiration illumined the clerk's chill eye. He
+turned and extracted another key with its jangling metal tag, from one
+of the many pigeonholes behind him.
+
+"You win," he said. He leaned over the desk and lowered his voice
+discreetly. "Say, girlie, go on into the cafe and have a drink on me."
+
+"Wrong again," answered Emma McChesney. "Never use it. Bad for the
+complexion. Thanks just the same. Nice little hotel you've got here."
+
+In the corridor leading to sixty-five there was a great litter of pails,
+and mops, and brooms, and damp rags, and one heard the sigh of a vacuum
+cleaner.
+
+"Spring house-cleaning," explained the bellboy, hurdling a pail.
+
+Emma McChesney picked her way over a little heap of dust-cloths and a
+ladder or so.
+
+"House-cleaning," she repeated dreamily; "spring house-cleaning." And
+there came a troubled, yearning light into her eyes. It lingered there
+after the boy had unlocked and thrown open the door of sixty-five,
+pocketed his dime, and departed.
+
+Sixty-five was--well, you know what sixty-five generally is in a
+small Middle-Western town. Iron bed--tan wall-paper--pine table--pine
+dresser--pine chair--red carpet--stuffy smell--fly buzzing at
+window--sun beating in from the west. Emma McChesney saw it all in one
+accustomed glance.
+
+"Lordy, I hate to think what nineteen must be," she told herself, and
+unclasped her bag. Out came the first aid to the travel-stained--a
+jar of cold cream. It was followed by powder, chamois, brush, comb,
+tooth-brush. Emma McChesney dug four fingers into the cold cream jar,
+slapped the stuff on her face, rubbed it in a bit, wiped it off with
+a dry towel, straightened her hat, dusted the chamois over her face,
+glanced at her watch and hurriedly whisked downstairs.
+
+"After all," she mused, "that thin guy might not be out for a music
+house. Maybe his line is skirts, too. You never can tell. Anyway, I'll
+beat him to it."
+
+Saturday afternoon and spring-time in a small town! Do you know it? Main
+Street--on the right side--all a-bustle; farmers' wagons drawn up at the
+curbing; farmers' wives in the inevitable rusty black with dowdy hats
+furbished up with a red muslin rose in honor of spring; grand opening at
+the new five-and-ten-cent store, with women streaming in and streaming
+out again, each with a souvenir pink carnation pinned to her coat; every
+one carrying bundles and yellow paper bags that might contain bananas or
+hats or grass seed; the thirty-two automobiles that the town boasts
+all dashing up and down the street, driven by hatless youths in
+careful college clothes; a crowd of at least eleven waiting at Jenson's
+drug-store corner for the next interurban car.
+
+Emma McChesney found herself strolling when she should have been
+hustling in the direction of the Novelty Cloak and Suit Store. She
+was aware of a vague, strangely restless feeling in the region of her
+heart--or was it her liver?--or her lungs?
+
+Reluctantly she turned in at the entrance of the Novelty Cloak and Suit
+Store and asked for the buyer. (Here we might introduce one of those
+side-splitting little business deal scenes. But there can be paid no
+finer compliment to Emma McChesney's saleswomanship than to state that
+she landed her man on a busy Saturday afternoon, with a store full of
+customers and the head woman clerk dead against her from the start.)
+
+As she was leaving:
+
+"Generally it's the other way around," smiled the boss, regarding Emma's
+trim comeliness, "but seeing you're a lady, why, it'll be on me." He
+reached for his hat. "Let's go and have--ah--a little something."
+
+"Not any, thanks," Emma McChesney replied, a little wearily.
+
+On her way back to the hotel she frankly loitered. Just to look at her
+made you certain that she was not of our town. Now, that doesn't imply
+that the women of our town do not dress well, because they do. But there
+was something about her--a flirt of chiffon at the throat, or her hat
+quill stuck in a certain way, or the stitching on her gloves, or the
+vamp of her shoe--that was of a style which had not reached us yet.
+
+As Emma McChesney loitered, looking in at the shop windows and watching
+the women hurrying by, intent on the purchase of their Sunday dinners,
+that vaguely restless feeling seized her again. There were rows of plump
+fowls in the butcher-shop windows, and juicy roasts. The cunning hand of
+the butcher had enhanced the redness of the meat by trimmings of curly
+parsley. Salad things and new vegetables glowed behind the grocers'
+plate-glass. There were the tender green of lettuces, the coral of
+tomatoes, the brown-green of stout asparagus stalks, bins of spring peas
+and beans, and carrots, and bunches of greens for soup. There came over
+the businesslike soul of Emma McChesney a wild longing to go in and
+select a ten-pound roast, taking care that there should be just the
+right proportion of creamy fat and red meat. She wanted to go in and
+poke her fingers in the ribs of a broiler. She wanted to order wildly of
+sweet potatoes and vegetables, and soup bones, and apples for pies. She
+ached to turn back her sleeves and don a blue-and-white checked apron
+and roll out noodles.
+
+She still was fighting that wild impulse as she walked back to the
+hotel, went up to her stuffy room, and, without removing hat or coat,
+seated herself on the edge of the bed and stared long and hard at the
+tan wall-paper.
+
+There is this peculiarity about tan wall-paper. If you stare at it
+long enough you begin to see things. Emma McChesney, who pulled down
+something over thirty-two hundred a year selling Featherloom Petticoats,
+saw this:
+
+A kitchen, very bright and clean, with a cluttered kind of cleanliness
+that bespeaks many housewifely tasks under way. There were mixing bowls,
+and saucepans, and a kettle or so, and from the oven there came the
+sounds of sputtering and hissing. About the room there hung the divinely
+delectable scent of freshly baked cookies. Emma McChesney saw herself in
+an all-enveloping checked gingham apron, her sleeves rolled up, her hair
+somewhat wild, and one lock powdered with white where she had pushed it
+back with a floury hand. Her cheeks were surprisingly pink, and her eyes
+were very bright, and she was scraping a baking board and rolling-pin,
+and trimming the edges of pie tins, and turning with a whirl to open the
+oven door, stooping to dip up spoonfuls of gravy only to pour the rich
+brown liquid over the meat again. There were things on top of the stove
+that required sticking into with a fork, and other things that demanded
+tasting and stirring with a spoon. A neighbor came in to borrow a cup of
+molasses, and Emma urged upon her one of her freshly baked cookies. And
+there was a ring at the front-door bell, and she had to rush away to do
+battle with a persistent book agent....
+
+The buzzing fly alighted on Emma McChesney's left eyebrow. She swatted
+it with a hand that was not quite quick enough, spoiled the picture, and
+slowly rose from her perch at the bedside.
+
+"Oh, damn!" she remarked, wearily, and went over to the dresser. Then
+she pulled down her shirtwaist all around and went down to supper.
+
+The dining-room was very warm, and there came a smell of lardy things
+from the kitchen. Those supping were doing so languidly.
+
+"I'm dying for something cool, and green, and fresh," remarked Emma to
+the girl who filled her glass with iced water; "something springish and
+tempting."
+
+"Well," sing-songed she of the ruffled, starched skirt, "we have
+ham'n-aigs, mutton chops, cold veal, cold roast--"
+
+"Two, fried," interrupted Emma hopelessly, "and a pot of tea--black."
+
+Supper over she passed through the lobby on her way upstairs. The place
+was filled with men. They were lolling in the big leather chairs at the
+window, or standing about, smoking and talking. There was a rattle
+of dice from the cigar counter, and a burst of laughter from the men
+gathered about it. It all looked very bright, and cheery, and sociable.
+Emma McChesney, turning to ascend the stairs to her room, felt that she,
+too, would like to sit in one of the big leather chairs in the window
+and talk to some one.
+
+Some one was playing the piano in the parlor. The doors were open. Emma
+McChesney glanced in. Then she stopped. It was not the appearance of
+the room that held her. You may have heard of the wilds of an African
+jungle--the trackless wastes of the desert--the solitude of the
+forest--the limitless stretch of the storm-tossed ocean; they are cozy
+and snug when compared to the utter and soul-searing dreariness of a
+small town hotel parlor. You know what it is--red carpet, red plush and
+brocade furniture, full-length walnut mirror, battered piano on which
+reposes a sheet of music given away with the Sunday supplement of a city
+paper.
+
+A man was seated at the piano, playing. He was not playing the Sunday
+supplement sheet music. His brown hat was pushed back on his head and
+there was a fat cigar in his pursy mouth, and as he played he squinted
+up through the smoke. He was playing Mendelssohn's Spring Song. Not as
+you have heard it played by sweet young things; not as you have heard
+it rendered by the Apollo String Quartette. Under his fingers it was a
+fragrant, trembling, laughing, sobbing, exquisite thing. He was playing
+it in a way to make you stare straight ahead and swallow hard.
+
+Emma McChesney leaned her head against the door. The man at the piano
+did not turn. So she tip-toed in, found a chair in a corner, and
+noiselessly slipped into it. She sat very still, listening, and the
+past-that-might-have-been, and the future-that-was-to-be, stretched
+behind and before her, as is strangely often the case when we are
+listening to music. She stared ahead with eyes that were very wide open
+and bright. Something in the attitude of the man sitting hunched there
+over the piano keys, and something in the beauty and pathos of the music
+brought a hot haze of tears to her eyes. She leaned her head against
+the back of the chair, and shut her eyes and wept quietly and
+heart-brokenly. The tears slid down her cheeks, and dropped on her smart
+tailored waist and her Irish lace jabot, and she didn't care a bit.
+
+The last lovely note died away. The fat man's hands dropped limply to
+his sides. Emma McChesney stared at them, fascinated. They were quite
+marvelous hands; not at all the sort of hands one would expect to see
+attached to the wrists of a fat man. They were slim, nervous, sensitive
+hands, pink-tipped, tapering, blue-veined, delicate. As Emma McChesney
+stared at them the man turned slowly on the revolving stool. His plump,
+pink face was dolorous, sagging, wan-eyed.
+
+He watched Emma McChesney as she sat up and dried her eyes. A satisfied
+light dawned in his face.
+
+"Thanks," he said, and mopped his forehead and chin and neck with the
+brown-edged handkerchief.
+
+"You--you can't be Paderewski. He's thin. But if he plays any better
+than that, then I don't want to hear him. You've upset me for the rest
+of the week. You've started me thinking about things--about things
+that--that-"
+
+The fat man clasped his thin, nervous hands in front of him and leaned
+forward.
+
+"About things that you're trying to forget. It starts me that way, too.
+That's why sometimes I don't touch the keys for weeks. Say, what do you
+think of a man who can play like that, and who is out on the road for a
+living just because he knows it's a sure thing? Music! That's my
+gift. And I've buried it. Why? Because the public won't take a fat man
+seriously. When he sits down at the piano they begin to howl for Italian
+rag. Why, I'd rather play the piano in a five-cent moving picture house
+than do what I'm doing now. But the old man wanted his son to be a
+business man, not a crazy, piano-playing galoot. That's the way he put
+it. And I was darn fool enough to think he was right. Why can't people
+stand up and do the things they're out to do! Not one person in a
+thousand does. Why, take you--I don't know you from Eve, but just from
+the way you shed the briny I know you're busy regretting."
+
+"Regretting?" repeated Emma McChesney, in a wail. "Do you know what I
+am? I'm a lady drummer. And do you know what I want to do this minute?
+I want to clean house. I want to wind a towel around my head, and pin
+up my skirt, and slosh around with a pail of hot, soapy water. I want to
+pound a couple of mattresses in the back yard, and eat a cold dinner off
+the kitchen table. That's what I want to do."
+
+"Well, go on and do it," said the fat man.
+
+"Do it? I haven't any house to clean. I got my divorce ten years ago,
+and I've been on the road ever since. I don't know why I stick. I'm
+pulling down a good, fat salary and commissions, but it's no life for
+a woman, and I know it, but I'm not big enough to quit. It's different
+with a man on the road. He can spend his evenings taking in two or three
+nickel shows, or he can stand on the drug-store corner and watch the
+pretty girls go by, or he can have a game of billiards, or maybe cards.
+Or he can have a nice, quiet time just going up to his room, and smoking
+a cigar and writing to his wife or his girl. D'you know what I do?"
+
+"No," answered the fat man, interestedly. "What?"
+
+"Evenings I go up to my room and sew or read. Sew! Every hook and eye
+and button on my clothes is moored so tight that even the hand laundry
+can't tear 'em off. You couldn't pry those fastenings away with
+dynamite. When I find a hole in my stockings I'm tickled to death,
+because it's something to mend. And read? Everything from the Rules of
+the House tacked up on the door to spelling out the French short story
+in the back of the Swell Set Magazine. It's getting on my nerves. Do
+you know what I do Sunday mornings? No, you don't. Well, I go to church,
+that's what I do. And I get green with envy watching the other women
+there getting nervous about 11:45 or so, when the minister is still in
+knee-deep, and I know they're wondering if Lizzie has basted the chicken
+often enough, and if she has put the celery in cold water, and the
+ice-cream is packed in burlap in the cellar, and if she has forgotten to
+mix in a tablespoon of flour to make it smooth. You can tell by the look
+on their faces that there's company for dinner. And you know that after
+dinner they'll sit around, and the men will smoke, and the women folks
+will go upstairs, and she'll show the other woman her new scalloped,
+monogrammed, hand-embroidered guest towels, and the waist that her
+cousin Ethel brought from Paris. And maybe they'll slip off their skirts
+and lie down on the spare-room bed for a ten minutes' nap. And you can
+hear the hired girl rattling the dishes in the kitchen, and talking to
+her lady friend who is helping her wipe up so they can get out early.
+You can hear the two of them laughing above the clatter of the dishes--"
+
+The fat man banged one fist down on the piano keys with a crash.
+
+"I'm through," he said. "I quit to-night. I've got my own life to
+live. Here, will you shake on it? I'll quit if you will. You're a born
+housekeeper. You don't belong on the road any more than I do. It's now
+or never. And it's going to be now with me. When I strike the pearly
+gates I'm not going to have Saint Peter say to me, 'Ed, old kid, what
+have you done with your talents?'"
+
+"You're right," sobbed Emma McChesney, her face glowing.
+
+"By the way," interrupted the fat man, "what's your line?"
+
+"Petticoats. I'm out for T. A. Buck's Featherloom Skirts. What's yours?"
+
+"Suffering cats!" shouted the fat man. "D' you mean to tell me that
+you're the fellow who sold that bill to Blum, of the Novelty Cloak and
+Suit concern, and spoiled a sale for me?"
+
+"You! Are you--"
+
+"You bet I am. I sell the best little skirt in the world. Strauss's
+Sans-silk Petticoat, warranted not to crack, rip, or fall into holes.
+Greatest little skirt in the country."
+
+Emma McChesney straightened her collar and jabot with a jerk, and sat
+up.
+
+"Oh, now, don't give me that bunk. You've got a good little seller, all
+right, but that guaranty don't hold water any more than the petticoat
+contains silk. I know that stuff. It looms up big in the window
+displays, but it's got a filler of glucose, or starch or mucilage or
+something, and two days after you wear it it's as limp as a cheesecloth
+rag. It's showy, but you take a line like mine, for instance, why--"
+
+"My customers swear by me. I make DeKalb to-morrow, and there's
+Nussbaum, of the Paris Emporium, the biggest store there, who just--"
+
+"I make DeKalb, too," remarked Emma McChesney, the light of battle in
+her eye.
+
+"You mean," gently insinuated the fat man, "that you were going to, but
+that's all over now."
+
+"Huh?" said Emma.
+
+"Our agreement, you know," the fat man reminded her, sweetly. "You
+aren't going back on that. The cottage and the Sunday dinner for you,
+remember."
+
+"Of course," agreed Emma listlessly. "I think I'll go up and get some
+sleep now. Didn't get much last night on the road."
+
+"Won't you--er--come down and have a little something moist? Or we could
+have it sent up here," suggested the fat man.
+
+"You're the third man that's asked me that to-day," snapped Emma
+McChesney, somewhat crossly. "Say, what do I look like, anyway? I guess
+I'll have to pin a white ribbon on my coat lapel."
+
+"No offense," put in the fat man, with haste. "I just thought it would
+bind our bargain. I hope you'll be happy, and contented, and all that,
+you know."
+
+"Let it go double," replied Emma McChesney, and shook his hand.
+
+"Guess I'll run down and get a smoke," remarked he.
+
+He ran down the stairs in a manner wonderfully airy for one so stout.
+Emma watched him until he disappeared around a bend in the stairs. Then
+she walked hastily in the direction of sixty-five.
+
+Down in the lobby the fat man, cigar in mouth, was cautioning the clerk,
+and emphasizing his remarks with one forefinger.
+
+"I want to leave a call for six thirty," he was saying. "Not a minute
+later. I've got to get out of here on that 7:35 for DeKalb. Got a Sunday
+customer there."
+
+As he turned away a telephone bell tinkled at the desk. The clerk bent
+his stately head.
+
+"Clerk. Yes, ma'am. No, ma'am, there's no train out of here to-night
+for DeKalb. To-morrow morning. Seven thirty-five A.M. I sure will. At
+six-thirty? Surest thing you know."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+CHICKENS
+
+
+For the benefit of the bewildered reader it should be said that there
+are two distinct species of chickens. There is the chicken which you
+find in the barnyard, in the incubator, or on a hat. And there is the
+type indigenous to State Street, Chicago. Each is known by its feathers.
+The barnyard variety may puzzle the amateur fancier, but there is no
+mistaking the State Street chicken. It is known by its soiled, high,
+white canvas boots; by its tight, short black skirt; by its slug pearl
+earrings; by its bewildering coiffure. By every line of its slim young
+body, by every curve of its cheek and throat you know it is adorably,
+pitifully young. By its carmined lip, its near-smart hat, its babbling
+of "him," and by the knowledge which looks boldly out of its eyes you
+know it is tragically old.
+
+Seated in the Pullman car, with a friendly newspaper protecting her
+bright hair from the doubtful gray-white of the chair cover, Emma
+McChesney, traveling saleswoman for T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats,
+was watching the telegraph poles chase each other back to Duluth,
+Minnesota, and thinking fondly of Mary Cutting, who is the
+mother-confessor and comforter of the State Street chicken.
+
+Now, Duluth, Minnesota, is trying to be a city. In watching its
+struggles a hunger for a taste of the real city had come upon Emma
+McChesney. She had been out with her late Fall line from May until
+September. Every Middle-Western town of five thousand inhabitants
+or over had received its share of Emma McChesney's attention and
+petticoats. It had been a mystifyingly good season in a bad business
+year. Even old T. A. himself was almost satisfied. Commissions piled up
+with gratifying regularity for Emma McChesney. Then, quite suddenly, the
+lonely evenings, the lack of woman companionship, and the longing for a
+sight of her seventeen-year-old son had got on Emma McChesney's nerves.
+
+She was two days ahead of her schedule, whereupon she wired her son,
+thus:
+
+_"Dear Kid:_
+
+"Meet me Chicago usual place Friday large time my treat. MOTHER."
+
+Then she had packed her bag, wired Mary Cutting that she would see her
+Thursday, and had taken the first train out for Chicago.
+
+You might have found the car close, stuffy, and uninteresting. Ten years
+on the road had taught Emma McChesney to extract a maximum of enjoyment
+out of a minimum of material. Emma McChesney's favorite occupation was
+selling T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats, and her favorite pastime
+was studying men and women. The two things went well together.
+
+When the train stopped for a minute or two you could hear a faint rattle
+and click from the direction of the smoking compartment where three
+jewelry salesmen from Providence, Rhode Island, were indulging in their
+beloved, but dangerous diversion of dice throwing. Just across the aisle
+was a woman, with her daughter, Chicago-bound to buy a trousseau. They
+were typical, wealthy small-town women smartly garbed in a fashion not
+more than twenty minutes late. In the quieter moments of the trip Emma
+McChesney could hear the mother's high-pitched, East End Ladies' Reading
+Club voice saying:
+
+"I'd have the velvet suit made fussy, with a real fancy waist to for
+afternoons. You can go anywhere in a handsome velvet three-piece suit."
+
+The girl had smiled, dreamily, and gazed out of the car window. "I
+wonder," she said, "if there'll be a letter from George. He said he
+would sit right down and write."
+
+In the safe seclusion of her high-backed chair Emma McChesney smiled
+approvingly. Seventeen years ago, when her son had been born, and ten
+years ago, when she had got her divorce, Emma McChesney had thanked her
+God that her boy had not been a girl. Sometimes, now, she was not so
+sure about it. It must be fascinating work--selecting velvet suits, made
+"fussy," for a daughter's trousseau.
+
+Just how fully those five months of small-town existence had got on her
+nerves Emma McChesney did not realize until the train snorted into the
+shed and she sniffed the mingled smell of smoke and stockyards and found
+it sweet in her nostrils. An unholy joy seized her. She entered the
+Biggest Store and made for the millinery department, yielding to an
+uncontrollable desire to buy a hat. It was a pert, trim, smart little
+hat. It made her thirty-six years seem less possible than ever, and her
+seventeen-year-old son an absurdity.
+
+It was four-thirty when she took the elevator up to Mary Cutting's
+office on the tenth floor. She knew she would find Mary Cutting
+there--Mary Cutting, friend, counselor, adviser to every young girl in
+the great store and to all Chicago's silly, helpless "chickens."
+
+A dragon sat before Mary Cutting's door and wrote names on slips. But at
+sight of Emma McChesney she laid down her pencil.
+
+"Well," smiled the dragon, "you're a sight for sore eyes. There's nobody
+in there with her. Just walk in and surprise her."
+
+At a rosewood desk in a tiny cozy office sat a pink-cheeked,
+white-haired woman. You associated her in your mind with black velvet
+and real lace. She did not look up as Emma McChesney entered. Emma
+McChesney waited for one small moment. Then:
+
+"Cut out the bank president stuff, Mary Cutting, and make a fuss over
+me," she commanded.
+
+The pink-cheeked, white-haired woman looked up. You saw that her eyes
+were wonderfully young. She made three marks on a piece of paper, pushed
+a call-button at her desk, rose, and hugged Emma McChesney thoroughly
+and satisfactorily, then held her off a moment and demanded to know
+where she had bought her hat.
+
+"Got it ten minutes ago, in the millinery department downstairs. Had to.
+If I'd have come into New York after five months' exile like this I'd
+probably have bought a brocade and fur-edged evening wrap, to relieve
+this feeling of wild joy. For five months I've spent my evenings in my
+hotel room, or watching the Maude Byrnes Stock Company playing "Lena
+Rivers," with the ingenue coming out between the acts in a calico apron
+and a pink sunbonnet and doing a thing they bill as vaudeville. I'm
+dying to see a real show--a smart one that hasn't run two hundred
+nights on Broadway--one with pretty girls, and pink tights, and a lot
+of moonrises, and sunsets and things, and a prima donna in a dress so
+stunning that all the women in the audience are busy copying it so they
+can describe it to their home-dressmaker next day."
+
+"Poor, poor child," said Mary Cutting, "I don't seem to recall any such
+show."
+
+"Well, it will look that way to me, anyway," said Emma McChesney. "I've
+wired Jock to meet me to-morrow, and I'm going to give the child a
+really sizzling little vacation. But to-night you and I will have an
+old-girl frolic. We'll have dinner together somewhere downtown, and then
+we'll go to the theater, and after that I'm coming out to that blessed
+flat of yours and sleep between real sheets. We'll have some sandwiches
+and beer and other things out of the ice-box, and then we'll have a
+bathroom bee. We'll let down our back hair, and slap cold cream around,
+and tell our hearts' secrets and use up all the hot water. Lordy! It
+will be a luxury to have a bath in a tub that doesn't make you feel as
+though you wanted to scrub it out with lye and carbolic. Come on, Mary
+Cutting."
+
+Mary Cutting's pink cheeks dimpled like a girl's.
+
+[Illustration: "'You'll never grow up, Emma McChesney'"]
+
+"You'll never grow up, Emma McChesney--at least, I hope you never will.
+Sit there in the corner and be a good child, and I'll be ready for you
+in ten minutes."
+
+Peace settled down on the tiny office. Emma McChesney, there in her
+corner, surveyed the little room with entire approval. It breathed of
+things restful, wholesome, comforting. There was a bowl of sweet peas
+on the desk; there was an Indian sweet grass basket filled with autumn
+leaves in the corner; there was an air of orderliness and good taste;
+and there was the pink-cheeked, white-haired woman at the desk.
+
+"There!" said Mary Cutting, at last. She removed her glasses, snapped
+them up on a little spring-chain near her shoulder, sat back, and smiled
+upon Emma McChesney.
+
+Emma McChesney smiled back at her. Theirs was not a talking friendship.
+It was a thing of depth and understanding, like the friendship between
+two men.
+
+They sat looking into each other's eyes, and down beyond, where the soul
+holds forth. And because what each saw there was beautiful and sightly
+they were seized with a shyness such as two men feel when they love each
+other, and so they awkwardly endeavored to cover up their shyness with
+words.
+
+"You could stand a facial and a decent scalp massage, Emma," observed
+Mary Cutting in a tone pregnant with love and devotion. "Your hair looks
+a little dry. Those small-town manicures don't know how to give a real
+treatment."
+
+"I'll have it to-morrow morning, before the Kid gets in at eleven. As
+the Lily Russell of the traveling profession I can't afford to let
+my beauty wane. That complexion of yours makes me mad, Mary. It goes
+through a course of hard water and Chicago dirt and comes up looking
+like a rose leaf with the morning dew on it. Where'll we have supper?"
+
+"I know a new place," replied Mary Cutting. "German, but not greasy."
+
+She was sorting, marking, and pigeonholing various papers and envelopes.
+When her desk was quite tidy she shut and locked it, and came over to
+Emma McChesney.
+
+"Something nice happened to me to-day," she said, softly. "Something
+that made me realize how worth while life is. You know we have five
+thousand women working here--almost double that during the holidays. A
+lot of them are under twenty and, Emma, a working girl, under twenty, in
+a city like this--Well, a brand new girl was looking for me today. She
+didn't know the way to my office, and she didn't know my name. So she
+stopped one of the older clerks, blushed a little, and said, 'Can you
+tell me the way to the office of the Comfort Lady?' That's worth working
+for, isn't it, Emma McChesney?"
+
+"It's worth living for," answered Emma McChesney, gravely. "It--it's
+worth dying for. To think that those girls come to you with their little
+sacred things, their troubles, and misfortunes, and unhappinesses and--"
+
+"And their disgraces--sometimes," Mary Cutting finished for her. "Oh,
+Emma McChesney, sometimes I wonder why there isn't a national school
+for the education of mothers. I marvel at their ignorance more and more
+every day. Remember, Emma, when we were kids our mothers used to send
+us flying to the grocery on baking day? All the way from our house
+to Hine's grocery I'd have to keep on saying, over and over: 'Sugar,
+butter, molasses; sugar, butter, molasses; sugar, butter, molasses.' If
+I stopped for a minute I'd forget the whole thing. It isn't so different
+now. Sometimes at night, going home in the car after a day so bad that
+the whole world seems rotten, I make myself say, over and over, as I
+used to repeat my 'Sugar, butter, and molasses.' 'It's a glorious, good
+old world; it's a glorious, good old world; it's a glorious, good
+old world.' And I daren't stop for a minute for fear of forgetting my
+lesson."
+
+For the third time in that short half-hour a silence fell between the
+two--a silence of perfect sympathy and understanding.
+
+Five little strokes, tripping over each other in their haste, came from
+the tiny clock on Mary Cutting's desk. It roused them both.
+
+"Come on, old girl," said Mary Cutting. "I've a chore or two still to do
+before my day is finished. Come along, if you like. There's a new girl
+at the perfumes who wears too many braids, and puffs, and curls, and in
+the basement misses' ready-to-wear there's another who likes to break
+store rules about short-sleeved, lace-yoked lingerie waists. And one
+of the floor managers tells me that a young chap of that callow,
+semi-objectionable, high-school fraternity, flat-heeled shoe type has
+been persistently hanging around the desk of the pretty little bundle
+inspector at the veilings. We're trying to clear the store of that type.
+They call girls of that description chickens. I wonder why some one
+hasn't found a name for the masculine chicken."
+
+[Illustration: "'Well, s'long, then, Shrimp. See you at eight'"]
+
+"I'll give 'em one," said Emma McChesney as they swung down a broad,
+bright aisle of the store. "Call 'em weasels. That covers their style,
+occupation, and character."
+
+They swung around the corner to the veilings, and there they saw the
+very pretty, very blond, very young "chicken" deep in conversation with
+her weasel. The weasel's trousers were very tight and English, and his
+hat was properly woolly and Alpine and dented very much on one side and
+his heels were fashionably flat, and his hair was slickly pompadour.
+
+Mary Cutting and Emma McChesney approached them very quietly just in
+time to hear the weasel say:
+
+"Well, s' long then, Shrimp. See you at eight."
+
+And he swung around and faced them.
+
+That sick horror of uncertainty which had clutched at Emma McChesney
+when first she saw the weasel's back held her with awful certainty
+now. But ten years on the road had taught her self-control, among other
+things. So she looked steadily and calmly into her son's scarlet face.
+Jock's father had been a liar.
+
+She put her hand on the boy's arm.
+
+"You're a day ahead of schedule, Jock," she said evenly.
+
+"So are you," retorted Jock, sullenly, his hands jammed into his
+pockets.
+
+"All the better for both of us, Kid. I was just going over to the hotel
+to clean up, Jock. Come along, boy."
+
+The boy's jaw set. His eyes sought any haven but that of Emma
+McChesney's eyes. "I can't," he said, his voice very low. "I've an
+engagement to take dinner with a bunch of the fellows. We're going down
+to the Inn. Sorry."
+
+A certain cold rigidity settled over Emma McChesney's face. She eyed her
+son in silence until his miserable eyes, perforce, looked up into hers.
+
+"I'm afraid you'll have to break your engagement," she said.
+
+She turned to face Mary Cutting's regretful, understanding gaze. Her
+eyebrows lifted slightly. Her head inclined ever so little in the
+direction of the half-scared, half-defiant "chicken."
+
+"You attend to your chicken, Mary," she said. "I'll see to my weasel."
+
+So Emma McChesney and her son Jock, looking remarkably like brother
+and sister, walked down the broad store aisles and out into the street.
+There was little conversation between them. When the pillared entrance
+of the hotel came into sight Jock broke the silence, sullenly:
+
+"Why do you stop at that old barracks? It's a rotten place for a woman.
+No one stops there but clothing salesmen and boobs who still think it's
+Chicago's leading hotel. No place for a lady."
+
+"Any place in the world is the place for a lady, Jock," said Emma
+McChesney quietly.
+
+Automatically she started toward the clerk's desk. Then she remembered,
+and stopped. "I'll wait here," she said. "Get the key for five-eighteen,
+will you please? And tell the clerk that I'll want the room adjoining
+beginning to-night, instead of to-morrow, as I first intended. Tell him
+you're Mrs. McChesney's son."
+
+He turned away. Emma McChesney brought her handkerchief up to her mouth
+and held it there a moment, and the skin showed white over the knuckles
+of her hand. In that moment every one of her thirty-six years were on
+the table, face up.
+
+"We'll wash up," said Emma McChesney, when he returned, "and then we'll
+have dinner here."
+
+"I don't want to eat here," objected Jock McChesney. "Besides, there's
+no reason why I can't keep my evening's engagements."
+
+"And after dinner," went on his mother, as though she had not heard,
+"we'll get acquainted, Kid."
+
+It was a cheerless, rather tragic meal, though Emma McChesney saw it
+through from soup to finger-bowls. When it was over she led the way down
+the old-fashioned, red-carpeted corridors to her room. It was the sort
+of room to get on its occupant's nerves at any time, with its red plush
+arm-chairs, its black walnut bed, and its walnut center table inlaid
+with an apoplectic slab of purplish marble.
+
+[Illustration: "'I'm still in position to enforce that ordinance against
+pouting'"]
+
+Emma McChesney took off her hat before the dim old mirror, and stood
+there, fluffing out her hair here, patting it there. Jock had thrown his
+hat and coat on the bed. He stood now, leaning against the footboard,
+his legs crossed, his chin on his breast, his whole attitude breathing
+sullen defiance.
+
+"Jock," said his mother, still patting her hair, "perhaps you don't know
+it, but you're pouting just as you used to when you wore pinafores.
+I always hated pouting children. I'd rather hear them howl. I used to
+spank you for it. I have prided myself on being a modern mother, but
+I want to mention, in passing, that I'm still in a position to enforce
+that ordinance against pouting." She turned around abruptly. "Jock, tell
+me, how did you happen to come here a day ahead of me, and how do you
+happen to be so chummy with that pretty, weak-faced little thing at the
+veiling counter, and how, in the name of all that's unbelievable, have
+you managed to become a grown-up in the last few months?"
+
+Jock regarded the mercifully faded roses in the carpet. His lower lip
+came forward again.
+
+"Oh, a fellow can't always be tied to his mother's apron strings. I like
+to have a little fling myself. I know a lot of fellows here. They are
+frat brothers. And anyway, I needed some new clothes."
+
+For one long moment Emma McChesney stared, in silence. Then: "Of
+course," she began, slowly, "I knew you were seventeen years old. I've
+even bragged about it. I've done more than that--I've gloried in it.
+But somehow, whenever I thought of you in my heart--and that was a
+great deal of the time it was as though you still were a little tyke in
+knee-pants, with your cap on the back of your head, and a chunk of apple
+bulging your cheek. Jock, I've been earning close to six thousand a year
+since I put in that side line of garters. Just how much spending money
+have I been providing you with?"
+
+Jock twirled a coat button uncomfortably "Well, quite a lot. But a
+fellow's got to have money to keep up appearances. A lot of the fellows
+in my crowd have more than I. There are clothes, and tobacco, and then
+flowers and cabs for the skirts--girls, I mean, and--"
+
+"Kid," impressively, "I want you to sit down over there in that plush
+chair--the red one, with the lumps in the back. I want you to be
+uncomfortable. From where I am sitting I can see that in you there is
+the making of a first-class cad. That's no pleasant thing for a mother
+to realize. Now don't interrupt me. I'm going to be chairman, speaker,
+program, and ways-and-means committee of this meeting. Jock, I got
+my divorce from your father ten years ago. Now, I'm not going to say
+anything about him. Just this one thing. You're not going to follow in
+his footsteps, Kid. Not if I have to take you to pieces like a nickel
+watch and put you all together again. You're Emma McChesney's son, and
+ten years from now I intend to be able to brag about it, or I'll want to
+know the reason why--and it'll have to be a blamed good reason."
+
+"I'd like to know what I've done!" blurted the boy. "Just because I
+happened to come here a few hours before you expected me, and just
+because you saw me talking to a girl! Why--"
+
+"It isn't what you've done. It's what those things stand for. I've been
+at fault. But I'm willing to admit it. Your mother is a working woman,
+Jock. You don't like that idea, do you? But you don't mind spending the
+money that the working woman provides you with, do you? I'm earning a
+man's salary. But Jock, you oughtn't to be willing to live on it.
+
+"What do you want me to do?" demanded Jock. "I'm not out of high school
+yet. Other fellows whose fathers aren't earning as much--"
+
+"Fathers," interrupted Emma McChesney. "There you are. Jock, I don't
+have to make the distinction for you. You're sufficiently my son to know
+it, in your heart. I had planned to give you a college education, if
+you showed yourself deserving. I don't believe in sending a boy in
+your position to college unless he shows some special leaning toward a
+profession."
+
+"Mother, you know how wild I am about machines, and motors, and
+engineering, and all that goes with it. Why I'd work--"
+
+"You'll have to, Jock. That's the only thing that will make a man of
+you. I've started you wrong, but it isn't too late yet. It's all very
+well for boys with rich fathers to run to clothes, and city jaunts, and
+'chickens,' and cabs and flowers. Your mother is working tooth and nail
+to earn her six thousand, and when you realize just what it means for
+a woman to battle against men in a man's game, you'll stop being a
+spender, and become an earner--because you'll want to. I'll tell you
+what I'm going to do, Kid. I'm going to take you on the road with me for
+two weeks. You'll learn so many things that at the end of that time the
+sides of your head will be bulging."
+
+"I'd like it!" exclaimed the boy, sitting up. "It will be regular fun."
+
+"No, it won't," said Emma McChesney; "not after the first three or four
+days. But it will be worth more to you than a foreign tour and a private
+tutor."
+
+She came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. "Your room's
+just next to mine," she said. "You and I are going to sleep on this.
+To-morrow we'll have a real day of it, as I promised. If you want to
+spend it with the fellows, say so. I'm not going to spoil this little
+lark that I promised you."
+
+"I think," said the boy, looking up into his mother's face, "I think
+that I'll spend it with you."
+
+The door slammed after him.
+
+Emma McChesney remained standing there, in the center of the room. She
+raised her arms and passed a hand over her forehead and across her hair
+until it rested on the glossy knot at the back of her head. It was the
+weary little gesture of a weary, heart-sick woman.
+
+There came a ring at the 'phone.
+
+Emma McChesney crossed the room and picked up the receiver.
+
+"Hello, Mary Cutting," she said, without waiting for the voice at the
+other end. "What? Oh, I just knew. No, it's all right. I've had some
+high-class little theatricals of my own, right here, with me in the
+roles of leading lady, ingenue, villainess, star, and heavy mother. I've
+got Mrs. Fiske looking like a First Reader Room kid that's forgotten her
+Friday piece. What's that?"
+
+There was no sound in the room but the hollow cackle of the voice at the
+other end of the wire, many miles away.
+
+Then: "Oh, that's all right, Mary Cutting. I owe you a great big debt
+of gratitude, bless your pink cheeks and white hair! And, Mary," she
+lowered her voice and glanced in the direction of the room next door, "I
+don't know how a hard, dry sob would go through the 'phone, so I won't
+try to get it over. But, Mary, it's been 'sugar, butter, and molasses'
+for me for the last ten minutes, and I'm dead scared to stop for fear
+I'll forget it. I guess it's 'sugar, butter, and molasses' for me for
+the rest of the night, Mary Cutting; just as hard and fast as I can say
+it, 'sugar, butter, molasses.'"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HIS MOTHER'S SON
+
+
+"Full?" repeated Emma McChesney (and if it weren't for the compositor
+there'd be an exclamation point after that question mark).
+
+"Sorry, Mrs. McChesney," said the clerk, and he actually looked it,
+"but there's absolutely nothing stirring. We're full up. The Benevolent
+Brotherhood of Bisons is holding its regular annual state convention
+here. We're putting up cots in the hall."
+
+Emma McChesney's keen blue eyes glanced up from their inspection of the
+little bunch of mail which had just been handed her. "Well, pick out a
+hall with a southern exposure and set up a cot or so for me," she
+said, agreeably; "because I've come to stay. After selling Featherloom
+Petticoats on the road for ten years I don't see myself trailing up and
+down this town looking for a place to lay my head. I've learned this
+one large, immovable truth, and that is, that a hotel clerk is a hotel
+clerk. It makes no difference whether he is stuck back of a marble
+pillar and hidden by a gold vase full of thirty-six-inch American Beauty
+roses at the Knickerbocker, or setting the late fall fashions for men in
+Galesburg, Illinois."
+
+By one small degree was the perfect poise of the peerless personage
+behind the register jarred. But by only one. He was a hotel night clerk.
+
+"It won't do you any good to get sore, Mrs. McChesney," he began,
+suavely. "Now a man would--"
+
+"But I'm not a man," interrupted Emma McChesney. "I'm only doing a man's
+work and earning a man's salary and demanding to be treated with as much
+consideration as you'd show a man."
+
+The personage busied himself mightily with a pen, and a blotter, and
+sundry papers, as is the manner of personages when annoyed. "I'd like to
+accommodate you; I'd like to do it."
+
+"Cheer up," said Emma McChesney, "you're going to. I don't mind a little
+discomfort. Though I want to mention in passing that if there are any
+lady Bisons present you needn't bank on doubling me up with them. I've
+had one experience of that kind. It was in Albia, Iowa. I'd sleep in the
+kitchen range before I'd go through another."
+
+Up went the erstwhile falling poise. "You're badly mistaken, madam. I'm
+a member of this order myself, and a finer lot of fellows it has never
+been my pleasure to know."
+
+"Yes, I know," drawled Emma McChesney. "Do you know, the thing that gets
+me is the inconsistency of it. Along come a lot of boobs who never use
+a hotel the year around except to loaf in the lobby, and wear out
+the leather chairs, and use up the matches and toothpicks and get the
+baseball returns, and immediately you turn away a traveling man who uses
+a three-dollar-a-day room, with a sample room downstairs for his stuff,
+who tips every porter and bell-boy in the place, asks for no favors, and
+who, if you give him a half-way decent cup of coffee for breakfast, will
+fall in love with the place and boom it all over the country. Half of
+your Benevolent Bisons are here on the European plan, with a view to
+patronizing the free-lunch counters or being asked to take dinner at
+the home of some local Bison whose wife has been cooking up on pies, and
+chicken salad and veal roast for the last week."
+
+[Illustration: "'Son!' echoed the clerk, staring"]
+
+Emma McChesney leaned over the desk a little, and lowered her voice to
+the tone of confidence. "Now, I'm not in the habit of making a nuisance
+of myself like this. I don't get so chatty as a rule, and I know that
+I could jump over to Monmouth and get first-class accommodations there.
+But just this once I've a good reason for wanting to make you and myself
+a little miserable. Y'see, my son is traveling with me this trip."
+
+"Son!" echoed the clerk, staring.
+
+"Thanks. That's what they all do. After a while I'll begin to believe
+that there must be something hauntingly beautiful and girlish about me
+or every one wouldn't petrify when I announce that I've a six-foot son
+attached to my apron-strings. He looks twenty-one, but he's seventeen.
+He thinks the world's rotten because he can't grow one of those fuzzy
+little mustaches that the men are cultivating to match their hats. He's
+down at the depot now, straightening out our baggage. Now I want to say
+this before he gets here. He's been out with me just four days. Those
+four days have been a revelation, an eye-opener, and a series of rude
+jolts. He used to think that his mother's job consisted of traveling
+in Pullmans, eating delicate viands turned out by the hotel chefs, and
+strewing Featherloom Petticoats along the path. I gave him plenty of
+money, and he got into the habit of looking lightly upon anything more
+trifling than a five-dollar bill. He's changing his mind by great leaps.
+I'm prepared to spend the night in the coal cellar if you'll just fix
+him up--not too comfortably. It'll be a great lesson for him. There he
+is now. Just coming in. Fuzzy coat and hat and English stick. Hist! As
+they say on the stage."
+
+The boy crossed the crowded lobby. There was a little worried, annoyed
+frown between his eyes. He laid a protecting hand on his mother's arm.
+Emma McChesney was conscious of a little thrill of pride as she realized
+that he did not have to look up to meet her gaze.
+
+"Look here, Mother, they tell me there's some sort of a convention here,
+and the town's packed. That's what all those banners and things were
+for. I hope they've got something decent for us here. I came up with a
+man who said he didn't think there was a hole left to sleep in."
+
+"You don't say!" exclaimed Emma McChesney, and turned to the clerk.
+"This is my son, Jock McChesney--Mr. Sims. Is this true?"
+
+"Glad to know you, sir," said Mr. Sims. "Why, yes, I'm afraid we are
+pretty well filled up, but seeing it's you maybe we can do something for
+you."
+
+He ruminated, tapping his teeth with a pen-holder, and eying the pair
+before him with a maddening blankness of gaze. Finally:
+
+"I'll do my best, but you can't expect much. I guess I can squeeze
+another cot into eighty-seven for the young man. There's--let's see
+now--who's in eighty-seven? Well, there's two Bisons in the double bed,
+and one in the single, and Fat Ed Meyers in the cot and--"
+
+Emma McChesney stiffened into acute attention. "Meyers?" she
+interrupted. "Do you mean Ed Meyers of the Strauss Sans-silk Skirt
+Company?"
+
+"That's so. You two are in the same line, aren't you? He's a great
+little piano player, Ed is. Ever hear him play?"
+
+"When did he get in?"
+
+"Oh, he just came in fifteen minutes ago on the Ashland division. He's
+in at supper."
+
+"Oh," said Emma McChesney. The two letters breathed relief.
+
+But relief had no place in the voice, or on the countenance of Jock
+McChesney. He bristled with belligerence. "This cattle-car style of
+sleeping don't make a hit. I haven't had a decent night's rest for three
+nights. I never could sleep on a sleeper. Can't you fix us up better
+than that?"
+
+"Best I can do."
+
+"But where's mother going? I see you advertise three 'large and
+commodious steam-heated sample rooms in connection.' I suppose mother's
+due to sleep on one of the tables there."
+
+"Jock," Emma McChesney reproved him, "Mr. Sims is doing us a great
+favor. There isn't another hotel in town that would--"
+
+"You're right, there isn't," agreed Mr. Sims. "I guess the young man
+is new to this traveling game. As I said, I'd like to accommodate you,
+but--Let's see now. Tell you what I'll do. If I can get the housekeeper
+to go over and sleep in the maids' quarters just for to-night, you can
+use her room. There you are! Of course, it's over the kitchen, and there
+may be some little noise early in the morning--"
+
+Emma McChesney raised a protesting hand. "Don't mention it. Just lead
+me thither. I'm so tired I could sleep in an excursion special that was
+switching at Pittsburgh. Jock, me child, we're in luck. That's twice
+in the same place. The first time was when we were inspired to eat our
+supper on the diner instead of waiting until we reached here to take
+the leftovers from the Bisons' grazing. I hope that housekeeper hasn't a
+picture of her departed husband dangling, life-size, on the wall at the
+foot of the bed. But they always have. Good-night, son. Don't let the
+Bisons bite you. I'll be up at seven."
+
+But it was just 6:30 A.M. when Emma McChesney turned the little bend
+in the stairway that led to the office. The scrub-woman was still in
+possession. The cigar-counter girl had not yet made her appearance.
+There was about the place a general air of the night before. All but the
+night clerk. He was as spruce and trim, and alert and smooth-shaven as
+only a night clerk can be after a night's vigil.
+
+"'Morning!" Emma McChesney called to him. She wore blue serge, and a
+smart fall hat. The late autumn morning was not crisper and sunnier than
+she.
+
+"Good-morning, Mrs. McChesney," returned Mr. Sims, sonorously. "Have a
+good night's sleep? I hope the kitchen noises didn't wake you."
+
+Emma McChesney paused with her hand on the door. "Kitchen? Oh, no.
+I could sleep through a vaudeville china-juggling act. But---what an
+extraordinarily unpleasant-looking man that housekeeper's husband must
+have been."
+
+That November morning boasted all those qualities which November-morning
+writers are so prone to bestow upon the month. But the words wine, and
+sparkle, and sting, and glow, and snap do not seem to cover it. Emma
+McChesney stood on the bottom step, looking up and down Main Street and
+breathing in great draughts of that unadjectivable air. Her complexion
+stood the test of the merciless, astringent morning and came up
+triumphantly and healthily firm and pink and smooth. The town was still
+asleep. She started to walk briskly down the bare and ugly Main Street
+of the little town. In her big, generous heart, and her keen, alert
+mind, there were many sensations and myriad thoughts, but varied and
+diverse as they were they all led back to the boy up there in the
+stuffy, over-crowded hotel room--the boy who was learning his lesson.
+
+Half an hour later she reentered the hotel, her cheeks glowing. Jock was
+not yet down. So she ordered and ate her wise and cautious breakfast of
+fruit and cereal and toast and coffee, skimming over her morning paper
+as she ate. At 7:30 she was back in the lobby, newspaper in hand. The
+Bisons were already astir. She seated herself in a deep chair in a
+quiet corner, her eyes glancing up over the top of her paper toward the
+stairway. At eight o'clock Jock McChesney came down.
+
+There was nothing of jauntiness about him. His eyelids were red. His
+face had the doughy look of one whose sleep has been brief and feverish.
+As he came toward his mother you noticed a stain on his coat, and a
+sunburst of wrinkles across one leg of his modish brown trousers.
+
+"Good-morning, son!" said Emma McChesney. "Was it as bad as that?"
+
+Jock McChesney's long fingers curled into a fist.
+
+"Say," he began, his tone venomous, "do you know what
+those--those--those--"
+
+"Say it!" commanded Emma McChesney. "I'm only your mother. If you keep
+that in your system your breakfast will curdle in your stomach."
+
+Jock McChesney said it. I know no phrase better fitted to describe his
+tone than that old favorite of the erotic novelties. It was vibrant
+with passion. It breathed bitterness. It sizzled with savagery. It--Oh,
+alliteration is useless.
+
+"Well," said Emma McChesney, encouragingly, "go on."
+
+[Illustration: "'Well!' gulped Jock, 'those two double-bedded, bloomin'
+blasted Bisons--'"]
+
+"Well!" gulped Jock McChesney, and glared; "those two double-bedded,
+bloomin', blasted Bisons came in at twelve, and the single one about
+fifteen minutes later. They didn't surprise me. There was a herd of
+about ninety-three of 'em in the hall, all saying good-night to each
+other, and planning where they'd meet in the morning, and the time,
+and place and probable weather conditions. For that matter, there were
+droves of 'em pounding up and down the halls all night. I never saw such
+restless cattle. If you'll tell me what makes more noise in the middle
+of the night than the metal disk of a hotel key banging and clanging up
+against a door, I'd like to know what it is. My three Bisons were all
+dolled up with fool ribbons and badges and striped paper canes. When
+they switched on the light I gave a crack imitation of a tired working
+man trying to get a little sleep. I breathed regularly and heavily, with
+an occasional moaning snore. But if those two hippopotamus Bisons had
+been alone on their native plains they couldn't have cared less. They
+bellowed, and pawed the earth, and threw their shoes around, and yawned,
+and stretched and discussed their plans for the next day, and reviewed
+all their doings of that day. Then one of them said something about
+turning in, and I was so happy I forgot to snore. Just then another key
+clanged at the door, in walked a fat man in a brown suit and a brown
+derby, and stuff was off."
+
+"That," said Emma McChesney, "would be Ed Meyers, of the Strauss
+Sans-silk Skirt Company."
+
+"None other than our hero." Jock's tone had an added acidity. "It took
+those four about two minutes to get acquainted. In three minutes they
+had told their real names, and it turned out that Meyers belonged to
+an organization that was a second cousin of the Bisons. In five minutes
+they had got together a deck and a pile of chips and were shirt-sleeving
+it around a game of pinochle. I would doze off to the slap of cards, and
+the click of chips, and wake up when the bell-boy came in with another
+round, which he did every six minutes. When I got up this morning I
+found that Fat Ed Meyers had been sitting on the chair over which I
+trustingly had draped my trousers. This sunburst of wrinkles is where he
+mostly sat. This spot on my coat is where a Bison drank his beer."
+
+Emma McChesney folded her paper and rose, smiling. "It is sort of
+trying, I suppose, if you're not used to it."
+
+"Used to it!" shouted the outraged Jock. "Used to it! Do you mean to
+tell me there's nothing unusual about--"
+
+"Not a thing. Oh, of course you don't strike a bunch of Bisons every
+day. But it happens a good many times. The world is full of Ancient
+Orders and they're everlastingly getting together and drawing up
+resolutions and electing officers. Don't you think you'd better go in to
+breakfast before the Bisons begin to forage? I've had mine."
+
+The gloom which had overspread Jock McChesney's face lifted a little.
+The hungry boy in him was uppermost. "That's so. I'm going to have some
+wheat cakes, and steak, and eggs, and coffee, and fruit, and toast, and
+rolls."
+
+"Why slight the fish?" inquired his mother. Then, as he turned toward
+the dining-room, "I've two letters to get out. Then I'm going down the
+street to see a customer. I'll be up at the Sulzberg-Stein department
+store at nine sharp. There's no use trying to see old Sulzberg before
+ten, but I'll be there, anyway, and so will Ed Meyers, or I'm no skirt
+salesman. I want you to meet me there. It will do you good to watch how
+the overripe orders just drop, ker-plunk, into my lap."
+
+Maybe you know Sulzberg & Stein's big store? No? That's because you've
+always lived in the city. Old Sulzberg sends his buyers to the New York
+market twice a year, and they need two floor managers on the main floor
+now. The money those people spend for red and green decorations at
+Christmas time, and apple-blossoms and pink crepe paper shades in the
+spring, must be something awful. Young Stein goes to Chicago to have his
+clothes made, and old Sulzberg likes to keep the traveling men waiting
+in the little ante-room outside his private office.
+
+Jock McChesney finished his huge breakfast, strolled over to Sulzberg &
+Stein's, and inquired his way to the office only to find that his mother
+was not yet there. There were three men in the little waiting-room. One
+of them was Fat Ed Meyers. His huge bulk overflowed the spindle-legged
+chair on which he sat. His brown derby was in his hands. His eyes were
+on the closed door at the other side of the room. So were the eyes of
+the other two travelers. Jock took a vacant seat next to Fat Ed Meyers
+so that he might, in his mind's eye, pick out a particularly choice spot
+upon which his hard young fist might land--if only he had the chance.
+Breaking up a man's sleep like that, the great big overgrown mutt!
+
+"What's your line?" said Ed Meyers, suddenly turning toward Jock.
+
+Prompted by some imp--"Skirts," answered Jock. "Ladies' petticoats."
+("As if men ever wore 'em!" he giggled inwardly.)
+
+Ed Meyers shifted around in his chair so that he might better stare at
+this new foe in the field. His little red mouth was open ludicrously.
+
+"Who're you out for?" he demanded next.
+
+There was a look of Emma McChesney on Jock's face. "Why--er--the Union
+Underskirt and Hosiery Company of Chicago. New concern."
+
+"Must be," ruminated Ed Meyers. "I never heard of 'em, and I know 'em
+all. You're starting in young, ain't you, kid! Well, it'll never hurt
+you. You'll learn something new every day. Now me, I--"
+
+In breezed Emma McChesney. Her quick glance rested immediately upon
+Meyers and the boy. And in that moment some instinct prompted Jock
+McChesney to shake his head, ever so slightly, and assume a blankness of
+expression. And Emma McChesney, with that shrewdness which had made her
+one of the best salesmen on the road, saw, and miraculously understood.
+
+"How do, Mrs. McChesney," grinned Fat Ed Meyers. "You see I beat you to
+it."
+
+"So I see," smiled Emma, cheerfully. "I was delayed. Just sold a nice
+little bill to Watkins down the Street." She seated herself across the
+way, and kept her eyes on that closed door.
+
+"Say, kid," Meyers began, in the husky whisper of the fat man, "I'm
+going to put you wise to something, seeing you're new to this game.
+See that lady over there?" He nodded discreetly in Emma McChesney's
+direction.
+
+"Pretty, isn't she?" said Jock, appreciatively.
+
+"Know who she is?"
+
+"Well--I--she does look familiar but--"
+
+"Oh, come now, quit your bluffing. If you'd ever met that dame you'd
+remember it. Her name's McChesney--Emma McChesney, and she sells T. A.
+Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. I'll give her her dues; she's the best
+little salesman on the road. I'll bet that girl could sell a ruffled,
+accordion-plaited underskirt to a fat woman who was trying to reduce.
+She's got the darndest way with her. And at that she's straight, too."
+
+If Ed Meyers had not been gazing so intently into his hat, trying at
+the same time to look cherubically benign he might have seen a quick and
+painful scarlet sweep the face of the boy, coupled with a certain tense
+look of the muscles around the jaw.
+
+"Well, now, look here," he went on, still in a whisper. "We're both
+skirt men, you and me. Everything's fair in this game. Maybe you don't
+know it, but when there's a bunch of the boys waiting around to see the
+head of the store like this, and there happens to be a lady traveler in
+the crowd, why, it's considered kind of a professional courtesy to
+let the lady have the first look-in. See? It ain't so often that three
+people in the same line get together like this. She knows it, and she's
+sitting on the edge of her chair, waiting to bolt when that door opens,
+even if she does act like she was hanging on the words of that lady
+clerk there. The minute it does open a crack she'll jump up and give me
+a fleeting, grateful smile, and sail in and cop a fat order away from
+the old man and his skirt buyer. I'm wise. Say, he may be an oyster, but
+he knows a pretty woman when he sees one. By the time she's through
+with him he'll have enough petticoats on hand to last him from now until
+Turkey goes suffrage. Get me?"
+
+"I get you," answered Jock.
+
+"I say, this is business, and good manners be hanged. When a woman
+breaks into a man's game like this, let her take her chances like a man.
+Ain't that straight?"
+
+"You've said something," agreed Jock.
+
+"Now, look here, kid. When that door opens I get up. See? And shoot
+straight for the old man's office. See? Like a duck. See? Say, I may
+be fat, kid, but I'm what they call light on my feet, and when I see an
+order getting away from me I can be so fleet that I have Diana looking
+like old Weston doing a stretch of muddy country road in a coast to
+coast hike. See? Now you help me out on this and I'll see that you don't
+suffer for it. I'll stick in a good word for you, believe me. You take
+the word of an old stager like me and you won't go far--"
+
+The door opened. Simultaneously three figures sprang into action. Jock
+had the seat nearest the door. With marvelous clumsiness he managed
+to place himself in Ed Meyers' path, then reddened, began an apology,
+stepped on both of Ed's feet, jabbed his elbow into his stomach, and
+dropped his hat. A second later the door of old Sulzberg's private
+office closed upon Emma McChesney's smart, erect, confident figure.
+
+Now, Ed Meyers' hands were peculiar hands for a fat man. They were
+tapering, slender, delicate, blue-veined, temperamental hands. At this
+moment, despite his purpling face, and his staring eyes, they were
+the most noticeable thing about him. His fingers clawed the empty air,
+quivering, vibrant, as though poised to clutch at Jock's throat.
+
+Then words came. They spluttered from his lips. They popped like corn
+kernels in the heat of his wrath; they tripped over each other; they
+exploded.
+
+"You darned kid, you!" he began, with fascinating fluency. "You
+thousand-legged, double-jointed, ox-footed truck horse. Come on out of
+here and I'll lick the shine off your shoes, you blue-eyed babe, you!
+What did you get up for, huh? What did you think this was going to be--a
+flag drill?"
+
+With a whoop of pure joy Jock McChesney turned and fled.
+
+They dined together at one o'clock, Emma McChesney and her son Jock.
+Suddenly Jock stopped eating. His eyes were on the door. "There's that
+fathead now," he said, excitedly. "The nerve of him! He's coming over
+here."
+
+Ed Meyers was waddling toward them with the quick light step of the fat
+man. His pink, full-jowled face was glowing. His eyes were bright as a
+boy's. He stopped at their table and paused for one dramatic moment.
+
+"So, me beauty, you two were in cahoots, huh? That's the second low-down
+deal you've handed me. I haven't forgotten that trick you turned with
+Nussbaum at DeKalb. Never mind, little girl. I'll get back at you yet."
+
+He nodded a contemptuous head in Jock's direction. "Carrying a packer?"
+
+[Illustration: "'Come on out of here, and I'll lick the shine off your
+shoes, you blue-eyed babe, you!'"]
+
+Emma McChesney wiped her fingers daintily on her napkin, crushed it
+on the table, and leaned back in her chair. "Men," she observed,
+wonderingly, "are the cussedest creatures. This chap occupied the same
+room with you last night and you don't even know his name. Funny! If two
+strange women had found themselves occupying the same room for a night
+they wouldn't have got to the kimono and back hair stage before they
+would not only have known each other's name, but they'd have tried on
+each other's hats, swapped corset cover patterns, found mutual friends
+living in Dayton, Ohio, taught each other a new Irish crochet stitch,
+showed their family photographs, told how their married sister's little
+girl nearly died with swollen glands, and divided off the mirror into
+two sections to paste their newly washed handkerchiefs on. Don't tell
+_me_ men have a genius for friendship."
+
+"Well, who is he?" insisted Ed Meyers. "He told me everything but his
+name this morning. I wish I had throttled him with a bunch of Bisons'
+badges last night."
+
+"His name," smiled Emma McChesney, "is Jock McChesney. He's my one
+and only son, and he's put through his first little business deal this
+morning just to show his mother that he can be a help to his folks if he
+wants to. Now, Ed Meyers, if you're going to have apoplexy don't you
+go and have it around this table. My boy is only on his second piece of
+pie, and I won't have his appetite spoiled."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+PINK TIGHTS AND GINGHAMS
+
+
+Some one--probably one of those Frenchmen whose life job it was to make
+epigrams---once said that there are but two kinds of women: good women,
+and bad women. Ever since then problem playwrights have been putting
+that fiction into the mouths of wronged husbands and building their "big
+scene" around it. But don't you believe it. There are four kinds: good
+women, bad women, good bad women, and bad good women. And the worst of
+these is the last. This should be a story of all four kinds, and when it
+is finished I defy you to discover which is which.
+
+When the red stuff in the thermometer waxes ambitious, so
+that fat men stand, bulging-eyed, before it and beginning
+with the ninety mark count up with a horrible
+satisfaction--ninety-one--ninety-two--ninety-three--NINETY FOUR! by
+gosh! and the cinders are filtering into your berth, and even the porter
+is wandering restlessly up and down the aisle like a black soul in
+purgatory and a white duck coat, then the thing to do is to don those
+mercifully few garments which the laxity of sleeping-car etiquette
+permits, slip out between the green curtains and fare forth in search of
+draughts, liquid and atmospheric.
+
+At midnight Emma McChesney, inured as she was to sleepers and all
+their horrors, found her lower eight unbearable. With the bravery of
+desperation she groped about for her cinder-strewn belongings, donned
+slippers and kimono, waited until the tortured porter's footsteps had
+squeaked their way to the far end of the car, then sped up the dim aisle
+toward the back platform. She wrenched open the door, felt the rush of
+air, drew in a long, grateful, smoke-steam-dust laden lungful of it,
+felt the breath of it on spine and chest, sneezed, realized that she
+would be the victim of a summer cold next day, and, knowing, cared not.
+
+"Great, ain't it?" said a voice in the darkness. (Nay, reader. A woman's
+voice.)
+
+Emma McChesney was of the non-screaming type. But something inside of
+her suspended action for the fraction of a second. She peered into the
+darkness.
+
+"'J' get scared?" inquired the voice. Its owner lurched forward from the
+corner in which she had been crouching, into the half-light cast by the
+vestibule night-globe.
+
+Even as men judge one another by a Masonic emblem, an Elk pin, or the
+band of a cigar, so do women in sleeping-cars weigh each other according
+to the rules of the Ancient Order of the Kimono. Seven seconds after
+Emma McChesney first beheld the negligee that stood revealed in the dim
+light she had its wearer neatly weighed, marked, listed, docketed and
+placed.
+
+It was the kind of kimono that is associated with straw-colored hair,
+and French-heeled shoes, and over-fed dogs at the end of a leash. The
+Japanese are wrongly accused of having perpetrated it. In pattern
+it showed bright green flowers-that-never-were sprawling on a purple
+background. A diamond bar fastened it not too near the throat.
+
+It was one of Emma McChesney's boasts that she was the only living woman
+who could get off a sleeper at Bay City, Michigan, at 5 A.M., without
+looking like a Swedish immigrant just dumped at Ellis Island. Traveling
+had become a science with her, as witness her serviceable dark-blue silk
+kimono, and her hair in a schoolgirl braid down her back. The blonde
+woman cast upon Emma McChesney an admiring eye.
+
+"Gawd, ain't it hot!" she said, sociably.
+
+"I wonder," mused Emma McChesney, "if that porter could be hypnotized
+into making some lemonade--a pitcherful, with a lot of ice in it, and
+the cold sweat breaking out all over the glass?
+
+"Lemonade!" echoed the other, wonder and amusement in her tone. "Are
+they still usin' it?" She leaned against the door, swaying with the
+motion of the car, and hugging her plump, bare arms. "Travelin' alone?"
+she asked.
+
+"Oh, yes," replied Emma McChesney, and decided it was time to go in.
+
+"Lonesome, ain't it, without company? Goin' far?"
+
+"I'm accustomed to it. I travel on business, not pleasure. I'm on the
+road, representing T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats!"
+
+The once handsome violet eyes of the plump blonde widened with surprise.
+Then they narrowed to critical slits.
+
+"On the road! Sellin' goods! And I thought you was only a kid. It's the
+way your hair's fixed, I suppose. Say, that must be a hard life for a
+woman--buttin' into a man's game like that."
+
+"Oh, I suppose any work that takes a woman out into the world--" began
+Emma McChesney vaguely, her hand on the door-knob.
+
+"Sure," agreed the other. "I ought to know. The hotels and time-tables
+alone are enough to kill. Who do you suppose makes up train schedules?
+They don't seem to think no respectable train ought to leave anywhere
+before eleven-fifty A.M., or arrive after six A.M. We played Ottumwa,
+Iowa, last night, and here we are jumpin' to Illinois."
+
+In surprise Emma McChesney turned at the door for another look at the
+hair, figure, complexion and kimono.
+
+"Oh, you're an actress! Well, if you think mine is a hard life for a
+woman, why--"
+
+"Me!" said the green-gold blonde, and laughed not prettily. "I ain't a
+woman. I'm a queen of burlesque.
+
+"Burlesque? You mean one of those--" Emma McChesney stopped, her usually
+deft tongue floundering.
+
+"One of those 'men only' troupes? You guessed it. I'm Blanche LeHaye,
+of the Sam Levin Crackerjack Belles. We get into North Bend at six
+to-morrow morning, and we play there to-morrow night, Sunday." She took
+a step forward so that her haggard face and artificially tinted hair
+were very near Emma McChesney. "Know what I was thinkin' just one second
+before you come out here?"
+
+"No; what?"
+
+"I was thinkin' what a cinch it would be to just push aside that canvas
+thing there by the steps and try what the newspaper accounts call
+'jumping into the night.' Say, if I'd had on my other lawnjerie I'll bet
+I'd have done it."
+
+Into Emma McChesney's understanding heart there swept a wave of pity.
+But she answered lightly: "Is that supposed to be funny?"
+
+The plump blonde yawned. "It depends on your funny bone. Mine's got
+blunted. I'm the lady that the Irish comedy guy slaps in the face with
+a bunch of lettuce. Say, there's something about you that makes a person
+get gabby and tell things. You'd make a swell clairvoyant."
+
+Beneath the comedy of the bleached hair, and the flaccid face, and the
+bizarre wrapper; behind the coarseness and vulgarity and ignorance,
+Emma McChesney's keen mental eye saw something decent and clean and
+beautiful. And something pitiable, and something tragic.
+
+"I guess you'd better come in and get some sleep," said Emma McChesney;
+and somehow found her hand resting on the woman's shoulder. So they
+stood, on the swaying, jolting platform. Blanche LeHaye, of the Sam
+Levin Crackerjack Belles, looked down, askance, at the hand on her
+shoulder, as at some strange and interesting object.
+
+"Ten years ago," she said, "that would have started me telling the story
+of my life, with all the tremolo stops on, and the orchestra in tears.
+Now it only makes me mad."
+
+Emma McChesney's hand seemed to snatch itself away from the woman's
+shoulder.
+
+"You can't treat me with your life's history. I'm going in."
+
+"Wait a minute. Don't go away sore, kid. On the square, I guess I liked
+the feel of your hand on my arm, like that. Say, I've done the same
+thing myself to a strange dog that looked up at me, pitiful. You know,
+the way you reach down, and pat 'm on the head, and say, 'Nice doggie,
+nice doggie, old fellow,' even if it is a street cur, with a chawed
+ear, and no tail. They growl and show their teeth, but they like it.
+A woman--Lordy! there comes the brakeman. Let's beat it. Ain't we the
+nervy old hens!"
+
+The female of the species as she is found in sleeping-car dressing-rooms
+had taught Emma McChesney to rise betimes that she might avoid contact
+with certain frowsy, shapeless beings armed with bottles of milky
+liquids, and boxes of rosy pastes, and pencils that made arched and
+inky lines; beings redolent of bitter almond, and violet toilette water;
+beings in doubtful corsets and green silk petticoats perfect as to
+accordion-plaited flounce, but showing slits and tatters farther
+up; beings jealously guarding their ten inches of mirror space and
+consenting to move for no one; ladies who had come all the way from
+Texas and who insisted on telling about it, despite a mouthful of
+hairpins; doubtful sisters who called one dearie and required to be
+hooked up; distracted mothers with three small children who wiped their
+hands on your shirt-waist.
+
+[Illustration: "'You can't treat me with your life's history. I'm going
+in'"]
+
+So it was that Emma McChesney, hatted and veiled by 5:45, saw the
+curtains of the berth opposite rent asunder to disclose the rumpled,
+shapeless figure of Miss Blanche LeHaye. The queen of burlesque bore
+in her arms a conglomerate mass of shoes, corset, purple skirt, bag and
+green-plumed hat. She paused to stare at Emma McChesney's trim, cool
+preparedness.
+
+"You must have started to dress as soon's you come in last night. I
+never slep' a wink till just about half a hour ago. I bet I ain't got
+more than eleven minutes to dress in. Ain't this a scorcher!"
+
+When the train stopped at North Bend, Emma McChesney, on her way out,
+collided with a vision in a pongee duster, rose-colored chiffon veil,
+chamois gloves, and plumed hat. Miss Blanche LeHaye had made the most of
+her eleven minutes. Her baggage attended to, Emma McChesney climbed
+into a hotel 'bus. It bore no other passengers. From her corner in the
+vehicle she could see the queen of burlesque standing in the center
+of the depot platform, surrounded by her company. It was a tawdry,
+miserable, almost tragic group, the men undersized, be-diamonded, their
+skulls oddly shaped, their clothes a satire on the fashions for
+men, their chins unshaven, their loose lips curved contentedly over
+cigarettes; the women dreadfully unreal with the pitiless light of the
+early morning sun glaring down on their bedizened faces, their spotted,
+garish clothes, their run-down heels, their vivid veils, their matted
+hair. They were quarreling among themselves, and a flame of hate for
+the moment lighted up those dull, stupid, vicious faces. Blanche LeHaye
+appeared to be the center about which the strife waged, for suddenly she
+flung through the shrill group and walked swiftly over to the 'bus and
+climbed into it heavily. One of the women turned, her face lived beneath
+the paint, to scream a great oath after her. The 'bus driver climbed
+into his seat and took up the reins. After a moment's indecision the
+little group on the platform turned and trailed off down the street,
+the women sagging under the weight of their bags, the men, for the most
+part, hurrying on ahead. When the 'bus lurched past them the woman who
+had screamed the oath after Blanche LeHaye laughed shrilly and made a
+face, like a naughty child, whereupon the others laughed in falsetto
+chorus.
+
+A touch of real color showed in Blanche LeHaye's flabby cheek. "I'll
+show'm she snarled. That hussy of a Zella Dacre thinkin' she can get my
+part away from me the last week or so, the lyin' sneak. I'll show'm
+a leadin' lady's a leadin' lady. Let 'em go to their hash hotels. I'm
+goin' to the real inn in this town just to let 'em know that I got my
+dignity to keep up, and that I don't have to mix in with scum like
+that. You see that there? She pointed at something in the street.
+Emma McChesney turned to look. The cheap lithographs of the Sam Levin
+Crackerjack Belles Company glared at one from the bill-boards.
+
+"That's our paper," explained Blanche LeHaye. "That's me, in the center
+of the bunch, with the pink reins in my hands, drivin' that four-in-hand
+of johnnies. Hot stuff! Just let Dacre try to get it away from me,
+that's all. I'll show'm."
+
+She sank back into her corner. Her anger left her with the suddenness
+characteristic of her type.
+
+"Ain't this heat fierce?" she fretted, and closed her eyes.
+
+Now, Emma McChesney was a broad-minded woman. The scars that she had
+received in her ten years' battle with business reminded her to be
+tender at sight of the wounds of others. But now, as she studied the
+woman huddled there in the corner, she was conscious of a shuddering
+disgust of her--of the soiled blouse, of the cheap finery, of the sunken
+places around the jaw-bone, of the swollen places beneath the eyes, of
+the thin, carmined lips, of the--
+
+Blanche LeHaye opened her eyes suddenly and caught the look on Emma
+McChesney's face. Caught it, and comprehended it. Her eyes narrowed, and
+she laughed shortly.
+
+"Oh, I dunno," drawled Blanche LeHaye. "I wouldn't go's far's that, kid.
+Say, when I was your age I didn't plan to be no bum burlesquer neither.
+I was going to be an actress, with a farm on Long Island, like the rest
+of 'em. Every real actress has got a farm on Long Island, if it's only
+there in the mind of the press agent. It's a kind of a religion with
+'em. I was goin' to build a house on mine that was goin' to be a cross
+between a California bungalow and the Horticultural Building at the
+World's Fair. Say, I ain't the worst, kid. There's others outside of my
+smear, understand, that I wouldn't change places with."
+
+A dozen apologies surged to Emma McChesney's lips just as the driver
+drew up at the curbing outside the hotel and jumped down to open the
+door. She found herself hoping that the hotel clerk would not class her
+with her companion.
+
+At eleven o'clock that morning Emma McChesney unlocked her door and
+walked down the red-carpeted hotel corridor. She had had two hours
+of restful sleep. She had bathed, and breakfasted, and donned clean
+clothes. She had brushed the cinders out of her hair, and manicured. She
+felt as alert, and cool and refreshed as she looked, which speaks well
+for her comfort.
+
+Halfway down the hail a bedroom door stood open. Emma McChesney glanced
+in. What she saw made her stop. The next moment she would have hurried
+on, but the figure within called out to her.
+
+Miss Blanche LeHaye had got into her kimono again. She was slumped in
+a dejected heap in a chair before the window. There was a tray, with a
+bottle and some glasses on the table by her side.
+
+"Gawd, ain't it hot!" she whined miserably. "Come on in a minute. I left
+the door open to catch the breeze, but there ain't any. You look like a
+peach just off the ice. Got a gent friend in town?"
+
+"No," answered Emma McChesney hurriedly, and turned to go.
+
+"Wait a minute," said Blanche LeHaye, sharply, and rose. She slouched
+over to where Emma McChesney stood and looked up at her sullenly.
+
+"Why!" gasped Emma McChesney, and involuntarily put out her hand,
+"why--my dear--you've been crying! Is there--"
+
+"No, there ain't. I can bawl, can't I, if I _am_ a bum burlesquer?"
+She put down the squat little glass she had in her hand and stared
+resentfully at Emma McChesney's cool, fragrant freshness.
+
+"Say," she demanded suddenly, "whatja mean by lookin' at me the way you
+did this morning, h'm? Whatja mean? You got a nerve turnin' up your nose
+at me, you have. I'll just bet you ain't no better than you might be,
+neither. What the--"
+
+Swiftly Emma McChesney crossed the room and closed the door. Then she
+came back to where Blanche LeHaye stood.
+
+"Now listen to me," she said. "You shed that purple kimono of yours and
+hustle into some clothes and come along with me. I mean it. Whenever
+I'm anywhere near this town I make a jump and Sunday here. I've a friend
+here named Morrissey--Ethel Morrissey--and she's the biggest-hearted,
+most understanding friend that a woman ever had. She's skirt and suit
+buyer at Barker & Fisk's here. I have a standing invitation to spend
+Sunday at her house. She knows I'm coming. I help get dinner if I feel
+like it, and wash my hair if I want to, and sit out in the back yard,
+and fool with the dog, and act like a human being for one day. After
+you've been on the road for ten years a real Sunday dinner in a real
+home has got Sherry's flossiest efforts looking like a picnic collation
+with ants in the pie. You're coming with me, more for my sake than for
+yours, because the thought of you sitting here, like this, would sour
+the day for me."
+
+Blanche LeHaye's fingers were picking at the pin which fastened her
+gown. She smiled, uncertainly.
+
+"What's your game?" she inquired.
+
+"I'll wait for you downstairs," said Emma McChesney, pleasantly. "Do you
+ever have any luck with caramel icing? Ethel's and mine always curdles."
+
+"Do I?" yelled the queen of burlesque. "I invented it." And she was down
+on her knees, her fingers fumbling with the lock of her suitcase.
+
+Only an Ethel Morrissey, inured to the weird workings of humanity by
+years of shrewd skirt and suit buying, could have stood the test of
+having a Blanche LeHaye thrust upon her, an unexpected guest, and with
+the woman across the street sitting on her front porch taking it all in.
+
+At the door--"This is Miss Blanche LeHaye of the--er--Simon--"
+
+"Sam Levin Crackerjack Belles," put in Miss LeHaye. "Pleased to meet
+you."
+
+"Come in," said Miss Ethel Morrissey without batting an eye. "I just
+'phoned the hotel. Thought you'd gone back on me, Emma. I'm baking a
+caramel cake. Don't slam the door. This your first visit here, Miss
+LeHaye? Excuse me for not shaking hands. I'm all flour. Lay your things
+in there. Ma's spending the day with Aunt Gus at Forest City and I'm
+the whole works around here. It's got skirts and suits beat a mile. Hot,
+ain't it? Say, suppose you girls slip off your waists and I'll give you
+each an all-over apron that's loose and let's the breeze slide around."
+
+Blanche LeHaye, the garrulous, was strangely silent. When she stepped
+about it was in the manner of one who is fearful of wakening a sleeper.
+When she caught the eyes of either of the other women her own glance
+dropped.
+
+When Ethel Morrissey came in with the blue-and-white gingham aprons
+Blanche LeHaye hesitated a long minute before picking hers up. Then she
+held it by both sleeves and looked at it long, and curiously. When
+she looked up again she found the eyes of the other two upon her. She
+slipped the apron over her head with a nervous little laugh.
+
+"I've been a pair of pink tights so long," she said, "that I guess I've
+almost forgotten how to be a woman. But once I get this on I'll bet I
+can come back."
+
+She proved it from the moment that she measured out the first cupful of
+brown sugar for the caramel icing. She shed her rings, and pinned her
+hair back from her forehead, and tucked up her sleeves, and as Emma
+McChesney watched her a resolve grew in her mind.
+
+The cake disposed of--"Give me some potatoes to peel, will you?" said
+Blanche LeHaye, suddenly. "Give 'em to me in a brown crock, with a chip
+out of the side. There's certain things always goes hand-in-hand in your
+mind. You can't think of one without the other. Now, Lillian Russell and
+cold cream is one; and new potatoes and brown crocks is another."
+
+[Illustration: "'Now, Lillian Russell and cold cream is one; and new
+potatoes and brown crocks is another'"]
+
+She peeled potatoes, sitting hunched up on the kitchen chair with her
+high heels caught back of the top rung. She chopped spinach until her
+face was scarlet, and her hair hung in limp strands at the back of her
+neck. She skinned tomatoes. She scoured pans. She wiped up the white
+oilcloth table-top with a capable and soapy hand. The heat and bustle
+of the little kitchen seemed to work some miraculous change in her.
+Her eyes brightened. Her lips smiled. Once, Emma McChesney and Ethel
+Morrissey exchanged covert looks when they heard her crooning one of
+those tuneless chants that women hum when they wring out dishcloths in
+soapy water.
+
+After dinner, in the cool of the sitting-room, with the shades drawn,
+and their skirts tucked halfway to their knees, things looked propitious
+for that first stroke in the plan which had worked itself out in Emma
+McChesney's alert mind. She caught Blanche LeHaye's eye, and smiled.
+
+"This beats burlesquing, doesn't it?" she said. She leaned forward a
+bit in her chair. "Tell me, Miss LeHaye, haven't you ever thought of
+quitting that--the stage--and turning to something--something--"
+
+"Something decent?" Blanche LeHaye finished for her. "I used to.
+I've got over that. Now all I ask is to get a laugh when I kick the
+comedian's hat off with my toe."
+
+"But there must have been a time--" insinuated Emma McChesney, gently.
+
+Blanche LeHaye grinned broadly at the two women who were watching her so
+intently.
+
+"I think I ought to tell you," she began, "that I never was a minister's
+daughter, and I don't remember ever havin' been deserted by my
+sweetheart when I was young and trusting. If I was to draw a picture of
+my life it would look like one of those charts that the weather bureau
+gets out--one of those high and low barometer things, all uphill and
+downhill like a chain of mountains in a kid's geography."
+
+She shut her eyes and lay back in the depths of the leather-cushioned
+chair. The three sat in silence for a moment.
+
+"Look here," said Emma McChesney, suddenly, rising and coming over to
+the woman in the big chair, "that's not the life for a woman like you.
+I can get you a place in our office--not much, perhaps, but something
+decent--something to start with. If you--"
+
+"For that matter," put in Ethel Morrissey, quickly, "I could get you
+something right here in our store. I've been there long enough to have
+some say-so, and if I recommend you they'd start you in the basement at
+first, and then, if you made good, they advance you right along."
+
+Blanche LeHaye stood up and, twisting her arm around at the back, began
+to unbutton her gingham apron.
+
+"I guess you think I'm a bad one, don't you? Well, maybe I am. But I'm
+not the worst. I've got a brother. He lives out West, and he's rich, and
+married, and respectable. You know the way a man can climb out of the
+mud, while a woman just can't wade out of it? Well, that's the way it
+was with us. His wife's a regular society bug. She wouldn't admit that
+there was any such truck as me, unless, maybe, the Municipal Protective
+League, or something, of her town, got to waging a war against burlesque
+shows. I hadn't seen Len--that's my brother---in years and years. Then
+one night in Omaha, I glimmed him sitting down in the B. H. row. His
+face just seemed to rise up at me out of the audience. He recognized
+me, too. Say, men are all alike. What they see in a dingy, half-fed,
+ignorant bunch like us, I don't know. But the minute a man goes to
+Cleveland, or Pittsburgh, or somewhere on business he'll hunt up a
+burlesque show, and what's more, he'll enjoy it. Funny. Well, Len waited
+for me after the show, and we had a talk. He told me his troubles, and
+I told him some of mine, and when we got through I wouldn't have swapped
+with him. His wife's a wonder. She's climbed to the top of the ladder in
+her town. And she's pretty, and young-looking, and a regular swell. Len
+says their home is one of the kind where the rubberneck auto stops while
+the spieler tells the crowd who lives there, and how he made his money.
+But they haven't any kids, Len told me. He's crazy about 'em. But his
+wife don't want any. I wish you could have seen Len's face when he was
+talking about it."
+
+She dropped the gingham apron in a circle at her feet, and stepped out
+of it. She walked over to where her own clothes lay in a gaudy heap.
+
+"Exit the gingham. But it's been great." She paused before slipping her
+skirt over her head. The silence of the other two women seemed to anger
+her a little.
+
+[Illustration: '"Why, girls, I couldn't hold down a job in a candy
+factory'"]
+
+"I guess you think I'm a bad one, clear through, don't you? Well, I
+ain't. I don't hurt anybody but myself. Len's wife--that's what I call
+bad."
+
+"But I _don't_ think you're bad clear through," tried Emma McChesney. "I
+don't. That's why I made that proposition to you. That's why I want you
+to get away from all this, and start over again."
+
+"Me?" laughed Blanche LeHaye. "Me! In a office! With ledgers, and sale
+bills, and accounts, and all that stuff! Why, girls, I couldn't hold
+down a job in a candy factory. I ain't got any intelligence. I never
+had. You don't find women with brains in a burlesque troupe. If they had
+'em they wouldn't be there. Why, we're the dumbest, most ignorant bunch
+there is. Most of us are just hired girls, dressed up. That's why you
+find the Woman's Uplift Union having such a blamed hard time savin'
+souls. The souls they try to save know just enough to be wise to the
+fact that they couldn't hold down a five-per-week job. Don't you feel
+sorry for me. I'm doing the only thing I'm good for."
+
+Emma McChesney put out her hand. "I'm sorry," she said. "I only meant it
+for--"
+
+"Why, of course," agreed Blanche LeHaye, heartily. "And you, too." She
+turned so that her broad, good-natured smile included Ethel Morrissey.
+"I've had a whale of a time. My fingers are all stained up with new
+potatoes, and my nails is full of strawberry juice, and I hope it won't
+come off for a week. And I want to thank you both. I'd like to stay,
+but I'm going to hump over to the theater. That Dacre's got the nerve to
+swipe the star's dressing-room if I don't get my trunks in first."
+
+They walked with her to the front porch, making talk as they went.
+Resentment and discomfiture and a sort of admiration all played across
+the faces of the two women, whose kindness had met with rebuff. At
+the foot of the steps Blanche LeHaye, prima donna of the Sam Levin
+Crackerjack Belles turned.
+
+"Oh, say," she called. "I almost forgot. I want to tell you that if you
+wait until your caramel is off the stove, and then add your butter, when
+the stuff's hot, but not boilin', it won't lump so. H'm? Don't mention
+it."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+SIMPLY SKIRTS
+
+
+They may differ on the subjects of cigars, samples, hotels, ball teams
+and pinochle hands, but two things there are upon which they stand
+united. Every member of that fraternity which is condemned to a hotel
+bedroom, or a sleeper berth by night, and chained to a sample case by
+day agrees in this, first: That it isn't what it used to be. Second:
+If only they could find an opening for a nice, paying gents' furnishing
+business in a live little town that wasn't swamped with that kind of
+thing already they'd buy it and settle down like a white man, by George!
+and quit this peddling. The missus hates it anyhow; and the kids know
+the iceman better than they do their own dad.
+
+On the morning that Mrs. Emma McChesney (representing T. A. Buck,
+Featherloom Petticoats) finished her talk with Miss Hattie Stitch, head
+of Kiser & Bloch's skirt and suit department, she found herself in a
+rare mood. She hated her job; she loathed her yellow sample cases; she
+longed to call Miss Stitch a green-eyed cat; and she wished that she had
+chosen some easy and pleasant way of earning a living, like doing
+plain and fancy washing and ironing. Emma McChesney had been selling
+Featherloom Petticoats on the road for almost ten years, and she was
+famed throughout her territory for her sane sunniness, and her love of
+her work. Which speaks badly for Miss Hattie Stitch.
+
+Miss Hattie Stitch hated Emma McChesney with all the hate that a
+flat-chested, thin-haired woman has for one who can wear a large
+thirty-six without one inch of alteration, and a hat that turns sharply
+away from the face. For forty-six weeks in the year Miss Stitch existed
+in Kiser & Bloch's store at River Falls. For six weeks, two in spring,
+two in fall, and two in mid-winter, Hattie lived in New York, with a
+capital L. She went there to select the season's newest models (slightly
+modified for River Falls), but incidentally she took a regular trousseau
+with her.
+
+All day long Hattie picked skirt and suit models with unerring good
+taste and business judgment. At night she was a creature transformed.
+Every house of which Hattie bought did its duty like a soldier and a
+gentleman. Nightly Hattie powdered her neck and arms, performed sacred
+rites over her hair and nails, donned a gown so complicated that a hotel
+maid had to hook her up the back, and was ready for her evening's escort
+at eight. There wasn't a hat in a grill room from one end of the Crooked
+Cow-path to the other that was more wildly barbaric than Hattie's, even
+in these sane and simple days when the bird of paradise has become the
+national bird. The buyer of suits for a thriving department store in a
+hustling little Middle-Western town isn't to be neglected. Whenever a
+show came to River Falls Hattie would look bored, pass a weary hand over
+her glossy coiffure and say: "Oh, yes. Clever little show. Saw it two
+winters ago in New York. This won't be the original company, of course."
+The year that Hattie came back wearing a set of skunk everyone thought
+it was lynx until Hattie drew attention to what she called the "brown
+tone" in it. After that Old Lady Heinz got her old skunk furs out of the
+moth balls and tobacco and newspapers that had preserved them, and her
+daughter cut them up into bands for the bottom of her skirt, and the
+cuffs of her coat. When Kiser & Bloch had their fall and spring openings
+the town came ostensibly to see the new styles, but really to gaze
+at Hattie in a new confection, undulating up and down the department,
+talking with a heavy Eastern accent about this or that being "smart" or
+"good this year," or having "a world of style," and sort of trailing her
+toes after her to give a clinging, Grecian line, like pictures of Ethel
+Barrymore when she was thin. The year that Hattie confided to some one
+that she was wearing only scant bloomers beneath her slinky silk the
+floor was mobbed, and they had to call in reserves from the basement
+ladies-and-misses-ready-to-wear.
+
+Miss Stitch came to New York in March. On the evening of her arrival
+she dined with Fat Ed Meyers, of the Strauss Sans-silk Skirt Company. He
+informed her that she looked like a kid, and that that was some classy
+little gown, and it wasn't every woman who could wear that kind of thing
+and get away with it. It took a certain style. Hattie smiled, and hummed
+off-key to the tune the orchestra was playing, and Ed told her it was a
+shame she didn't do something with that voice.
+
+"I have something to tell you," said Hattie. "Just before I left I had
+a talk with old Kiser. Or rather, he had a talk with me. You know I have
+pretty much my own way in my department. Pity if I couldn't have. I made
+it. Well, Kiser wanted to know why I didn't buy Featherlooms. I said we
+had no call for 'em, and he came back with figures to prove we're losing
+a good many hundreds a year by not carrying them. He said the Strauss
+Sans-silk skirt isn't what it used to be. And he's right."
+
+"Oh, say--" objected Ed Meyers.
+
+"It's true," insisted Hattie. "But I couldn't tell him that I didn't
+buy Featherlooms because McChesney made me tired. Besides, she never
+entertains me when I'm in New York. Not that I'd go to the theater in
+the evening with a woman, because I wouldn't, but--Say, listen. Why
+don't you make a play for her job? As long as I've got to put in a heavy
+line of Featherlooms you may as well get the benefit of it. You
+could double your commissions. I'll bet that woman makes her I-don't
+know-how-many thousands a year."
+
+Ed Meyers' naturally ruddy complexion took on a richer tone, and he
+dropped his fork hastily. As he gazed at Miss Stitch his glance was not
+more than half flattering. "How you women do love each other, don't
+you! You don't. I don't mind telling you my firm's cutting down its
+road force, and none of us knows who's going to be beheaded
+next. But--well--a guy wouldn't want to take a job away from a
+woman--especially a square little trick like McChesney. Of course she's
+played me a couple of low-down deals and I promised to get back at her,
+but that's business. But--"
+
+"So's this," interrupted Miss Hattie Stitch. "And I don't know that
+she is so square. Let me tell you that I heard she's no better than she
+might be. I have it on good authority that three weeks ago, at the River
+House, in our town--"
+
+Their heads came close together over the little, rose-shaded restaurant
+table.
+
+At eleven o'clock next morning Fat Ed Meyers walked into the office of
+the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company and asked to see old T. A.
+
+"He's in Europe," a stenographer informed him, "spaing, and sprudeling,
+and badening. Want to see T. A. Junior?"
+
+"T. A. Junior!" almost shouted Ed Meyers. "You don't mean to tell me
+_that_ fellow's taken hold--"
+
+"Believe _me_. That's why Featherlooms are soaring and Sans-silks are
+sinking. Nobody would have believed it. T. A. Junior's got a live wire
+looking like a stick of licorice. When they thought old T. A. was going
+to die, young T. A. seemed to straighten out all of a sudden and take
+hold. It's about time. He must be almost forty, but he don't show it. I
+don't know, he ain't so good-looking, but he's got swell eyes."
+
+Ed Meyers turned the knob of the door marked "Private," and entered,
+smiling. Ed Meyers had a smile so cherubic that involuntarily you armed
+yourself against it.
+
+"Hel-lo Buck!" he called jovially. "I hear that at last you're taking an
+interest in skirts--other than on the hoof." And he offered young T.
+A. a large, dark cigar with a fussy-looking band encircling its middle.
+Young T. A. looked at it disinterestedly, and spake, saying:
+
+"What are you after?"
+
+"Why, I just dropped in--" began Ed Meyers lamely.
+
+"The dropping," observed T. A. Junior, "is bad around here this morning.
+I have one little formula for all visitors to-day, regardless of whether
+they're book agents or skirt salesmen. That is, what can I do for you?"
+
+Ed Meyers tucked his cigar neatly into the extreme right corner of his
+mouth, pushed his brown derby far back on his head, rested his strangely
+lean hands on his plump knees, and fixed T. A. Junior with a shrewd blue
+eye. "That suits me fine," he agreed. "I never was one to beat around
+the bush. Look here. I know skirts from the draw-string to the ruffle.
+It's a woman's garment, but a man's line. There's fifty reasons why a
+woman can't handle it like a man. For one thing the packing cases weigh
+twenty-five pounds each, and she's as dependent on a packer and a porter
+as a baby is on its mother. Another is that if a man has to get up to
+make a train at 4 A.M. he don't require twenty-five minutes to fasten
+down three sets of garters, and braid his hair, and hook his waist up
+the back, and miss his train. And he don't have neuralgic headaches.
+Then, the head of a skirt department in a store is a woman, ten times
+out of ten. And lemme tell you," he leaned forward earnestly, "a woman
+don't like to buy of a woman. Don't ask me why. I'm too modest. But it's
+the truth."
+
+"Well?" said young T. A., with the rising inflection.
+
+"Well," finished Ed Meyers, "I like your stuff. I think it's great. It's
+a seller, with the right man to push it. I'd like to handle it. And
+I'll guarantee I could double the returns from your Middle-Western
+territory." T. A. Junior had strangely translucent eyes. Their luminous
+quality had an odd effect upon any one on whom he happened to turn them.
+He had been scrawling meaningless curlycues on a piece of paper as Ed
+Meyers talked. Now he put down the pencil, turned, and looked Ed Meyers
+fairly in the eye.
+
+"You mean you want Mrs. McChesney's territory?" he asked quietly.
+
+"Well, yes, I do," confessed Ed Meyers, without a blush.
+
+Young T. A. swung back to his desk, tore from the pad before him the
+piece of paper on which he had been scrawling, crushed it, and tossed it
+into the wastebasket with an air of finality.
+
+"Take the second elevator down," he said. "The nearest one's out of
+order."
+
+For a moment Ed Meyers stared, his fat face purpling. "Oh, very well,"
+he said, rising. "I just made you a business proposition, that's all. I
+thought I was talking to a business man. Now, old T. A.--"
+
+"That'll be about all," observed T. A. Junior, from his desk.
+
+Ed Meyers started toward the door. Then he paused, turned, and came back
+to his chair. His heavy jaw jutted out threateningly.
+
+"No, it ain't all, either. I didn't want to mention it, and if you'd
+treated me like a gentleman, I wouldn't have. But I want to say to you
+that McChesney's giving this firm a black eye. Morals don't figure with
+a man on the road, but when a woman breaks into this game, she's got to
+be on the level."
+
+T. A. Junior rose. The blonde stenographer who had made the admiring
+remark anent his eyes would have appreciated those features now. They
+glowed luminously into Ed Meyers' pale blue ones until that gentleman
+dropped his eyelids in confusion. He seemed at a disadvantage in every
+way, as T. A. Junior's lean, graceful height towered over the fat man's
+bulk. "I don't know Mrs. McChesney," said T. A. Junior. "I haven't even
+seen her in six years. My interest in the business is very recent. I do
+know that my father swears she's the best salesman he has on the road.
+Before you go any further I want to tell you that you'll have to prove
+what you just implied, so definitely, and conclusively, and convincingly
+that when you finish you'll have an ordinary engineering blue-print
+looking like a Turner landscape. Begin."
+
+Ed Meyers, still standing, clutched his derby tightly and began.
+
+"She's a looker, Emma is. And smooth! As the top of your desk. But she's
+getting careless. Now a decent, hard-working, straight girl like Miss
+Hattie Stitch, of Kiser & Bloch's, River Falls, won't buy of her. You'll
+find you don't sell that firm. And they buy big, too. Why, last summer I
+had it from the clerk of the hotel in that town that she ran around all
+day with a woman named LeHaye--Blanche LeHaye, of an aggregation of
+bum burlesquers called the Sam Levin Crackerjack Belles. And say, for a
+whole month there, she had a tough young kid traveling with her that she
+called her son. Oh, she's queering your line, all right. The days
+are past when it used to be a signal for a loud, merry laugh if you
+mentioned you were selling goods on the road. It's a fine art, and a
+science these days, and the name of T. A. Buck has always stood for--"
+
+Downstairs a trim, well-dressed, attractive woman stepped into the
+elevator and smiled radiantly upon the elevator man, who had smiled
+first.
+
+"Hello, Jake," she said. "What's old in New York? I haven't been here in
+three months. It's good to be back."
+
+"Seems grand t' see you, Mis' McChesney," returned Jake. "Well, nothin'
+much stirrin'. Whatcha think of the Grand Central? I understand
+they're going to have a contrivance so you can stand on a mat in the
+waiting-room and wish yourself down to the track an' train that you're
+leavin' on. The G'ints have picked a bunch of shines this season. T.
+A. Junior's got a new sixty-power auto. Genevieve--that yella-headed
+steno--was married last month to Henry, the shipping clerk. My wife
+presented me with twin girls Monday. Well, thank _you_, Mrs. McChesney.
+I guess that'll help some."
+
+Emma McChesney swung down the hall and into the big, bright office. She
+paused at the head bookkeeper's desk. The head bookkeeper was a woman.
+Old Man Buck had learned something about the faithfulness of women
+employees. The head bookkeeper looked up and said some convincing
+things.
+
+"Thanks," said Emma, in return. "It's mighty good to be here. Is it true
+that skirts are going to be full in the back? How's business? T. A. in?"
+
+"Young T. A. is. But I think he's busy just now. You know T. A. Senior
+isn't back yet. He had a tight squeeze, I guess. Everybody's talking
+about the way young T. A. took hold. You know he spent years running
+around Europe, and he made a specialty of first nights, and first
+editions, and French cars when he did show up here. But now! He's
+changed the advertising, and designing, and cutting departments around
+here until there's as much difference between this place now and the
+place it was three months ago as there is between a hoop-skirt and a
+hobble. He designed one skirt--Here, Miss Kelly! Just go in and get
+one of those embroidery flounce models for Mrs. McChesney. How's that?
+Honestly, I'd wear it myself."
+
+Emma McChesney held the garment in her two hands and looked it over
+critically. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. She looked up to reply when
+the door of T. A. Buck's private office opened, and Ed Meyers walked
+briskly out. Emma McChesney put down the skirt and crossed the office
+so that she and he met just in front of the little gate that formed an
+entrance along the railing.
+
+Ed Meyers' mouth twisted itself into a smile. He put out a welcoming
+hand.
+
+"Why, hello, stranger! When did you drive in? How's every little thing?
+I'm darned if you don't grow prettier and younger every day of your
+sweet life."
+
+"Quit Sans-silks?" inquired Mrs. McChesney briefly.
+
+[Illustration: "'Honestly. I'd wear it myself!'"]
+
+"Why--no. But I was just telling young T. A. in there that if I could
+only find a nice, paying little gents' furnishing business in a live
+little town that wasn't swamped with that kind of thing already I'd buy
+it, by George! I'm tired of this peddling."
+
+"Sing that," said Emma McChesney. "It might sound better," and marched
+into the office marked "Private."
+
+T. A. Junior's good-looking back and semi-bald head were toward her as
+she entered. She noted, approvingly, woman-fashion, that his neck would
+never lap over the edge of his collar in the back. Then Young T.
+A. turned about. He gazed at Emma McChesney, his eyebrows raised
+inquiringly. Emma McChesney's honest blue eyes, with no translucent
+nonsense about them, gazed straight back at T. A. Junior.
+
+"I'm Mrs. McChesney. I got in half an hour ago. It's been a good little
+trip, considering business, and politics, and all that. I'm sorry to
+hear your father's still ill. He and I always talked over things after
+my long trip."
+
+Young T. A.'s expert eye did not miss a single point, from the tip of
+Mrs. McChesney's smart spring hat to the toes of her well-shod feet,
+with full stops for the fit of her tailored suit, the freshness of her
+gloves, the clearness of her healthy pink skin, the wave of her soft,
+bright hair.
+
+"How do you do, Mrs. McChesney," said Young T. A. emphatically. "Please
+sit down. It's a good idea--this talking over your trip. There are
+several little things--now Kiser & Bloch, of River Falls, for instance.
+We ought to be selling them. The head of their skirt and suit department
+is named Stitch, isn't she? Now, what would you say of Miss Stitch?"
+
+"Say?" repeated Emma McChesney quickly. "As a woman, or a buyer?"
+
+T. A. Junior thought a minute. "As a woman."
+
+Mrs. McChesney thoughtfully regarded the tips of her neatly gloved
+hands. Then she looked up. "The kindest and gentlest thing I can say
+about her is that if she'd let her hair grow out gray maybe her face
+wouldn't look so hard."
+
+T. A. Junior flung himself back in his chair and threw back his head and
+laughed at the ceiling.
+
+Then, "How old is your son?" with disconcerting suddenness.
+
+"Jock's scandalously near eighteen." In her quick mind Emma McChesney
+was piecing odds and ends together, and shaping the whole to fit Fat Ed
+Meyers. A little righteous anger was rising within her.
+
+T. A. Junior searched her face with his glowing eyes.
+
+"Does my father know that you have a young man son? Queer you never
+mentioned it.
+
+"Queer? Maybe. Also, I don't remember ever having mentioned what church
+my folks belonged to, or where I was born, or whether I like my steak
+rare or medium, or what my maiden name was, or the size of my shoes, or
+whether I take my coffee with or without. That's because I don't believe
+in dragging private and family affairs into the business relation. I
+think I ought to tell you that on the way in I met Ed Meyers, of the
+Strauss Sans-silk Skirt Company, coming out. So anything you say won't
+surprise me."
+
+"You wouldn't be surprised," asked T. A. Junior smoothly, "if I were to
+say that I'm considering giving a man your territory?" Emma McChesney's
+eyes--those eyes that had seen so much of the world and its ways, and
+that still could return your gaze so clearly and honestly--widened until
+they looked so much like those of a hurt child, or a dumb animal
+that has received a death wound, that young T. A. dropped his gaze in
+confusion.
+
+Emma McChesney stood up. Her breath came a little quickly. But when she
+spoke, her voice was low and almost steady.
+
+"If you expect me to beg you for my job, you're mistaken. T. A. Buck's
+Featherloom Petticoats have been my existence for almost ten years. I've
+sold Featherlooms six days in the week, and seven when I had a Sunday
+customer. They've not only been my business and my means of earning
+a livelihood, they've been my religion, my diversion, my life, my
+pet pastime. I've lived petticoats, I've talked petticoats, I've sold
+petticoats, I've dreamed petticoats--why, I've even worn the darned
+things! And that's more than any man will ever do for you."
+
+[Illustration: "'I've lived petticoats, I've talked petticoats, I've
+dreamed petticoats--why, I've even worn the darn things!'"]
+
+Young T. A. rose. He laughed a little laugh of sheer admiration.
+Admiration shone, too, in those eyes of his which so many women found
+irresistible. He took a step forward and laid one well-shaped hand on
+Emma McChesney's arm. She did not shrink, so he let his hand slip down
+the neat blue serge sleeve until it reached her snugly gloved hand.
+
+"You're all right!" he said. His voice was very low, and there was a new
+note in it. "Listen, girlie. I've just bought a new sixty-power machine.
+Have dinner with me to-night, will you? And we'll take a run out in the
+country somewhere. It's warm, even for March. I'll bring along a fur
+coat for you. H'm?"
+
+Mrs. McChesney stood thoughtfully regarding the hand that covered her
+own. The blue of her eyes and the pink of her cheeks were a marvel to
+behold.
+
+"It's a shame," she began slowly, "that you're not twenty-five years
+younger, so that your father could give you the licking you deserve when
+he comes home. I shouldn't be surprised if he'd do it anyway. The Lord
+preserve me from these quiet, deep devils with temperamental hands and
+luminous eyes. Give me one of the bull-necked, red-faced, hoarse-voiced,
+fresh kind every time. You know what they're going to say, at least,
+and you're prepared for them. If I were to tell you how the hand you're
+holding is tingling to box your ears you'd marvel that any human being
+could have that much repression and live. I've heard of this kind of
+thing, but I didn't know it happened often off the stage and outside of
+novels. Let's get down to cases. If I let you make love to me, I keep my
+job. Is that it?"
+
+"Why--no--I--to tell the truth I was only--"
+
+"Don't embarrass yourself. I just want to tell you that before I'd
+accept your auto ride I'd open a little fancy art goods and needlework
+store in Menominee, Michigan, and get out the newest things in
+Hardanger work and Egyptian embroidery. And that's my notion of zero in
+occupation. Besides, no plain, everyday workingwoman could enjoy herself
+in your car because her conscience wouldn't let her. She'd be thinking
+all the time how she was depriving some poor, hard-working chorus girl
+of her legitimate pastime, and that would spoil everything. The elevator
+man told me that you had a new motor car, but the news didn't interest
+me half as much as that of his having new twin girls. Anything with five
+thousand dollars can have a sixty-power machine, but only an elevator
+man on eight dollars a week can afford the luxury of twins."
+
+"My dear Mrs. McChesney--"
+
+"Don't," said Emma McChesney sharply. "I couldn't stand much more. I
+joke, you know, when other women cry. It isn't so wearing."
+
+She turned abruptly and walked toward the door. T. A. Junior overtook
+her in three long strides, and placed himself directly before her.
+
+"My cue," said Emma McChesney, with a weary brightness, "to say, 'Let me
+pass, sir!'"
+
+"Please don't," pleaded T. A. Junior. "I'll remember this the rest of
+my life. I thought I was a statue of modern business methods, but after
+to-day I'm going to ask the office boy to help me run this thing. If I
+could only think of some special way to apologize to you--"
+
+"Oh, it's all right," said Emma McChesney indifferently.
+
+"But it isn't! It isn't! You don't understand. That human jellyfish of
+a Meyers said some things, and I thought I'd be clever and prove them.
+I can't ask your pardon. There aren't words enough in the language. Why,
+you're the finest little woman--you're--you'd restore the faith of a
+cynic who had chronic indigestion. I wish I--Say, let me relieve you
+of a couple of those small towns that you hate to make, and give you
+Cleveland and Cincinnati. And let me--Why say, Mrs. McChesney! Please!
+Don't! This isn't the time to--"
+
+"I can't help it," sobbed Emma McChesney, her two hands before her face.
+"I'll stop in a minute. There; I'm stopping now. For Heaven's sake, stop
+patting me on the head!"
+
+"Please don't be so decent to me," entreated T. A. Junior, his fine eyes
+more luminous than ever. "If only you'd try to get back at me I wouldn't
+feel so cut up about it." Emma McChesney looked up at him, a smile
+shining radiantly through the tears. "Very well. I'll do it. Just before
+I came in they showed me that new embroidery flounced model you
+just designed. Maybe you don't know it, but women wear only one limp
+petticoat nowadays. And buttoned shoes. The eyelets in that embroidery
+are just big enough to catch on the top button of a woman's shoe, and
+tear, and trip her. I ought to have let you make up a couple of million
+of them, and then watch them come back on your hands. I was going to
+tell you, anyway, for T. A. Senior's sake. Now I'm doing it for your
+own."
+
+[Illustration: "And found himself addressing the backs of the letters on
+the door marked 'Private'"]
+
+"For--" began T. A. Junior excitedly. And found himself addressing the
+backs of the letters on the door marked "Private," as it slammed after
+the trim, erect figure in blue.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+UNDERNEATH THE HIGH-CUT VEST
+
+
+We all carry with us into the one-night-stand country called Sleepland,
+a practical working nightmare that we use again and again, no matter how
+varied the theme or setting of our dream-drama. Your surgeon, tossing
+uneasily on his bed, sees himself cutting to remove an appendix, only
+to discover that that unpopular portion of his patient's anatomy already
+bobs in alcoholic glee in a bottle on the top shelf of the laboratory
+of a more alert professional brother. Your civil engineer constructs
+imaginary bridges which slump and fall as quickly as they are completed.
+Your stage favorite, in the throes of a post-lobster nightmare, has a
+horrid vision of herself "resting" in January. But when he who sells
+goods on the road groans and tosses in the clutches of a dreadful
+dream, it is, strangely enough, never of canceled orders, maniacal
+train schedules, lumpy mattresses, or vilely cooked food. These everyday
+things he accepts with a philosopher's cheerfulness. No--his nightmare
+is always a vision of himself, sick on the road, at a country hotel in
+the middle of a Spring season.
+
+On the third day that she looked with more than ordinary indifference
+upon hotel and dining-car food Mrs. Emma McChesney, representing the T.
+A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, wondered if, perhaps, she did not
+need a bottle of bitter tonic. On the fifth day she noticed that there
+were chills chasing up and down her spine, and back and forth from
+legs to shoulder-blades when other people were wiping their chins and
+foreheads with bedraggled-looking handkerchiefs, and demanding to know
+how long this heat was going to last, anyway. On the sixth day she lost
+all interest in T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. And then she knew
+that something was seriously wrong. On the seventh day, when the blonde
+and nasal waitress approached her in the dining-room of the little hotel
+at Glen Rock, Minnesota, Emma McChesney's mind somehow failed to grasp
+the meaning of the all too obvious string of questions which were put to
+her--questions ending in the inevitable "Tea, coffee 'r milk?" At that
+juncture Emma McChesney had looked up into the girl's face in a puzzled,
+uncomprehending way, had passed one hand dazedly over her hot forehead,
+and replied, with great earnestness:
+
+"Yours of the twelfth at hand and contents noted ... the greatest little
+skirt on the market ... he's going to be a son to be proud of, God bless
+him ... Want to leave a call for seven sharp--"
+
+The lank waitress's face took on an added blankness. One of the two
+traveling men at the same table started to laugh, but the other put out
+his hand quickly, rose, and said, "Shut up, you blamed fool! Can't you
+see the lady's sick?" And started in the direction of her chair.
+
+Even then there came into Emma McChesney's ordinarily well-ordered,
+alert mind the uncomfortable thought that she was talking nonsense. She
+made a last effort to order her brain into its usual sane clearness,
+failed, and saw the coarse white table-cloth rising swiftly and
+slantingly to meet her head.
+
+[Illustration: "'Shut up, you blamed fool! Can't you see the lady's
+sick?'"]
+
+It speaks well for Emma McChesney's balance that when she found herself
+in bed, two strange women, and one strange man, and an all-too-familiar
+bell-boy in the room, she did not say, "Where am I? What happened?"
+Instead she told herself that the amazingly and unbelievably handsome
+young man bending over her with a stethoscope was a doctor; that
+the plump, bleached blonde in the white shirtwaist was the hotel
+housekeeper; that the lank ditto was a waitress; and that the expression
+on the face of each was that of apprehension, tinged with a pleasurable
+excitement. So she sat up, dislodging the stethoscope, and ignoring the
+purpose of the thermometer which had reposed under her tongue.
+
+"Look here!" she said, addressing the doctor in a high, queer voice. "I
+can't be sick, young man. Haven't time. Not just now. Put it off until
+August and I'll be as sick as you like. Why, man, this is the middle of
+June, and I'm due in Minneapolis now."
+
+"Lie down, please," said the handsome young doctor, "and don't dare
+remove this thermometer again until I tell you to. This can't be put off
+until August. You're sick right now."
+
+Mrs. McChesney shut her lips over the little glass tube, and watched
+the young doctor's impassive face (it takes them no time to learn that
+trick) and, woman-wise, jumped to her own conclusion.
+
+"How sick?" she demanded, the thermometer read.
+
+"Oh, it won't be so bad," said the very young doctor, with a
+professionally cheerful smile.
+
+Emma McChesney sat up in bed with a jerk. "You mean--sick! Not ill,
+or grippy, or run down, but sick! Trained-nurse sick! Hospital sick!
+Doctor-twice-a-day sick! Table-by-the-bedside-with-bottles-on-it sick!"
+
+"Well--a--" hesitated the doctor, and then took shelter behind a
+bristling hedge of Latin phrases. Emma McChesney hurdled it at a leap.
+
+"Never mind," she said. "I know." She looked at the faces of those four
+strangers. Sympathy--real, human sympathy--was uppermost in each. She
+smiled a faint and friendly little smile at the group. And at that the
+housekeeper began tucking in the covers at the foot of the bed, and the
+lank waitress walked to the window and pulled down the shade, and the
+bell-boy muttered something about ice-water. The doctor patted her wrist
+lightly and reassuringly.
+
+"You're all awfully good," said Emma McChesney, her eyes glowing with
+something other than fever. "I've something to say. It's just this.
+If I'm going to be sick I'd prefer to be sick right here, unless it's
+something catching. No hospital. Don't ask me why. I don't know. We
+people on the road are all alike. Wire T. A. Buck, Junior, of the
+Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York. You'll find plenty of clean
+nightgowns in the left-hand tray of my trunk, covered with white tissue
+paper. Get a nurse that doesn't sniffle, or talk about the palace she
+nursed in last, where they treated her like a queen and waited on her
+hand and foot. For goodness' sake, put my switch where nothing will
+happen to it, and if I die and they run my picture in the _Dry Goods
+Review_ under the caption, 'Veteran Traveling Saleswoman Succumbs at
+Glen Rock,' I'll haunt the editor." She paused a moment.
+
+"Everything will be all right," said the housekeeper, soothingly.
+"You'll think you're right at home, it'll be so comfortable. Was there
+anything else, now?"
+
+"Yes," said Emma McChesney. "The most important of all. My son, Jock
+McChesney, is fishing up in the Canadian woods. A telegram may not reach
+him for three weeks. They're shifting about from camp to camp. Try to
+get him, but don't scare him too much. You'll find the address under J.
+in my address book in my handbag. Poor kid. Perhaps it's just as well he
+doesn't know."
+
+Perhaps it was. At any rate it was true that had the tribe
+of McChesney been as the leaves of the trees, and had it
+held a family reunion in Emma McChesney's little hotel bedroom,
+it would have mattered not at all to her. For she _was_
+sick--doctor-three-times-a-day-trained-nurse-bottles-by-the-bedside
+sick, her head, with its bright hair rumpled and dry with the fever,
+tossing from side to side on the lumpy hotel pillow, or lying terribly
+silent and inert against the gray-white of the bed linen. She never
+quite knew how narrowly she escaped that picture in the _Dry Goods
+Review_.
+
+Then one day the fever began to recede, slowly, whence fevers come,
+and the indefinable air of suspense and repression that lingers about
+a sick-room at such a crisis began to lift imperceptibly. There came a
+time when Emma McChesney asked in a weak but sane voice:
+
+"Did Jock come? Did they cut off my hair?"
+
+"Not yet, dear," the nurse had answered to the first, "but we'll hear in
+a day or so, I'm sure." And, "Your lovely hair! Well, not if I know it!"
+to the second.
+
+The spirit of small-town kindliness took Emma McChesney in its arms. The
+dingy little hotel room glowed with flowers. The story of the sick woman
+fighting there alone in the terrors of delirium had gone up and down
+about the town. Housewives with a fine contempt for hotel soups sent
+broths of chicken and beef. The local members of the U. C. T. sent roses
+enough to tax every vase and wash-pitcher that the hotel could muster,
+and asked their wives to call at the hotel and see what they could do.
+The wives came, obediently, but with suspicion and distrust in their
+eyes, and remained to pat Emma McChesney's arm, ask to read aloud to
+her, and to indulge generally in that process known as "cheering her
+up." Every traveling man who stopped at the little hotel on his way to
+Minneapolis added to the heaped-up offerings at Emma McChesney's shrine.
+Books and magazines assumed the proportions of a library. One could see
+the hand of T. A. Buck, Junior, in the cases of mineral water, quarts
+of wine, cunning cordials and tiny bottles of liqueur that stood in
+convivial rows on the closet shelf and floor. There came letters, too,
+and telegrams with such phrases as "let nothing be left undone" and
+"spare no expense" under T. A. Buck, Junior's, signature.
+
+So Emma McChesney climbed the long, weary hill of illness and pain,
+reached the top, panting and almost spent, rested there, and began the
+easy descent on the other side that led to recovery and strength.
+But something was lacking. That sunny optimism that had been Emma
+McChesney's most valuable asset was absent. The blue eyes had lost their
+brave laughter. A despondent droop lingered in the corners of the mouth
+that had been such a rare mixture of firmness and tenderness. Even the
+advent of Fat Ed Meyers, her keenest competitor, and representative of
+the Strauss Sans-silk Company, failed to awaken in her the proper spirit
+of antagonism. Fat Ed Meyers sent a bunch of violets that devastated
+the violet beds at the local greenhouse. Emma McChesney regarded them
+listlessly when the nurse lifted them out of their tissue wrappings. But
+the name on the card brought a tiny smile to her lips.
+
+"He says he'd like to see you, if you feel able," said Miss Haney, the
+nurse, when she came up from dinner.
+
+Emma McChesney thought a minute. "Better tell him it's catching," she
+said.
+
+"He knows it isn't," returned Miss Haney. "But if you don't want him,
+why--"
+
+"Tell him to come up," interrupted Emma McChesney, suddenly.
+
+A faint gleam of the old humor lighted up her face when Fat Ed Meyers
+painfully tip-toed in, brown derby in hand, his red face properly
+doleful, brown shoes squeaking. His figure loomed mountainous in a
+light-brown summer suit.
+
+"Ain't you ashamed of yourself?" he began, heavily humorous. "Couldn't
+you find anything better to do in the middle of the season? Say, on the
+square, girlie, I'm dead sorry. Hard luck, by gosh! Young T. A. himself
+went out with a line in your territory, didn't he? I didn't think that
+guy had it in him, darned if I did."
+
+"It was sweet of you to send all those violets, Mr. Meyers. I hope
+you're not disappointed that they couldn't have been worked in the form
+of a pillow, with 'At Rest' done in white curlycues."
+
+"Mrs. McChesney!" Ed Meyers' round face expressed righteous reproof,
+pain, and surprise. "You and I may have had a word, now and then, and I
+will say that you dealt me a couple of low-down tricks on the road, but
+that's all in the game. I never held it up against you. Say, nobody ever
+admired you or appreciated you more than I did--"
+
+"Look out!" said Emma McChesney. "You're speaking in the past tense.
+Please don't. It makes me nervous."
+
+Ed Meyers laughed, uncomfortably, and glanced yearningly toward the
+door. He seemed at a loss to account for something he failed to find in
+the manner and conversation of Mrs. McChesney.
+
+"Son here with you, I suppose," he asked, cheerily, sure that he was on
+safe ground at last.
+
+Emma McChesney closed her eyes. The little room became very still. In a
+panic Ed Meyers looked helplessly from the white face, with its hollow
+cheeks and closed eyelids to the nurse who sat at the window. That
+discreet damsel put her finger swiftly to her lips, and shook her head.
+Ed Meyers rose, hastily, his face a shade redder than usual.
+
+"Well, I guess I gotta be running along. I'm tickled to death to find
+you looking so fat and sassy. I got an idea you were just stalling for
+a rest, that's all. Say, Mrs. McChesney, there's a swell little dame in
+the house named Riordon. She's on the road, too. I don't know what her
+line is, but she's a friendly kid, with a bunch of talk. A woman always
+likes to have another woman fussin' around when she's sick. I told her
+about you, and how I'd bet you'd be crazy to get a chance to talk
+shop and Featherlooms again. I guess you ain't lost your interest in
+Featherlooms, eh, what?"
+
+Emma McChesney's face indicated not the faintest knowledge of
+Featherloom Petticoats. Ed Meyers stared, aghast. And as he stared
+there came a little knock at the door--a series of staccato raps, with
+feminine knuckles back of them. The nurse went to the door, disapproval
+on her face. At the turning of the knob there bounced into the room a
+vision in an Alice-blue suit, plumes to match, pearl earrings, elaborate
+coiffure of reddish-gold and a complexion that showed an unbelievable
+trust in the credulity of mankind.
+
+"How-do, dearie!" exclaimed the vision. "You poor kid, you! I heard you
+was sick, and I says, 'I'm going up to cheer her up if I have to miss
+my train out to do it.' Say, I was laid up two years ago in Idaho Falls,
+Idaho, and believe me, I'll never forget it. I don't know how sick I
+was, but I don't even want to remember how lonesome I was. I just clung
+to the chamber-maid like she was my own sister. If your nurse wants to
+go out for an airing I'll sit with you. Glad to."
+
+"That's a grand little idea," agreed Ed Meyers. "I told 'em you'd
+brighten things up. Well, I'll be going. You'll be as good as new in a
+week, Mrs. McChesney, don't you worry. So long." And he closed the door
+after himself with apparent relief.
+
+Miss Haney, the nurse, was already preparing to go out. It was her
+regular hour for exercise. Mrs. McChesney watched her go with a sinking
+heart.
+
+"Now!" said Miss Riordon, comfortably, "we girls can have a real,
+old-fashioned talk. A nurse isn't human. The one I had in Idaho Falls
+was strictly prophylactic, and antiseptic, and she certainly could
+give the swell alcohol rubs, but you can't get chummy with a human
+disinfectant. Your line's skirts, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Land, I've heard an awful lot about you. The boys on the road certainly
+speak something grand of you. I'm really jealous. Say, I'd love to show
+you some of my samples for this season. They're just great. I'll just
+run down the hall to my room--"
+
+She was gone. Emma McChesney shut her eyes, wearily. Her nerves were
+twitching. Her thoughts were far, far away from samples and sample
+cases. So he had turned out to be his worthless father's son after all!
+He must have got some news of her by now. And he ignored it. He was
+content to amuse himself up there in the Canadian woods, while his
+mother--
+
+Miss Riordon, flushed, and panting a little, burst into the room again,
+sample-case in hand.
+
+"Lordy, that's heavy! It's a wonder I haven't killed myself before now,
+wrestling with those blamed things."
+
+Mrs. McChesney sat up on one elbow as Miss Riordon tugged at the
+sample-case cover. Then she leaned forward, interested in spite of
+herself at sight of the pile of sheer, white, exquisitely embroidered
+and lacy garments that lay disclosed as the cover fell back.
+
+"Oh, lingerie! That's an ideal line for a woman. Let's see the yoke in
+that first nightgown. It's a really wonderful design."
+
+Miss Riordon laughed and shook out the folds of the topmost garment.
+"Nightgown!" she said, and laughed again. "Take another look."
+
+"Why, what--" began Emma McChesney.
+
+"Shrouds!" announced Miss Riordon complacently.
+
+"Shrouds!" shrieked Mrs. McChesney, and her elbow gave way. She fell
+back on the pillow.
+
+"Beautiful, ain't they?" Miss Riordon twirled the white garment in her
+hand. "They're the very newest thing. You'll notice they're made up
+slightly hobble, with a French back, and high waist-line in the front.
+Last season kimono sleeves was all the go, but they're not used this
+season. This one--"
+
+"Take them away!" screamed Emma McChesney hysterically. "Take them away!
+Take them away!" And buried her face in her trembling white hands.
+
+Miss Riordon stared. Then she slammed the cover of the case, rose, and
+started toward the door. But before she reached it, and while the sick
+woman's sobs were still sounding hysterically the door flew open to
+admit a tall, slim, miraculously well-dressed young man. The next
+instant Emma McChesney's lace nightgown was crushed against the top of
+a correctly high-cut vest, and her tears coursed, unmolested, down the
+folds of an exquisitely shaded lavender silk necktie.
+
+"Jock!" cried Emma McChesney; and then, "Oh, my son, my son, my
+beautiful boy!" like a woman in a play.
+
+Jock was holding her tight, and patting her shoulder, and pressing his
+healthy, glowing cheek close to hers that was so gaunt and pale.
+
+"I got seven wires, all at the same time. They'd been chasing me for
+days, up there in the woods. I thought I'd never get here."
+
+And at that a wonderful thing happened to Emma McChesney. She lifted her
+face, and showed dimples where lines had been, smiles where tears had
+coursed, a glow where there had been a grayish pallor. She leaned back a
+bit to survey this son of hers.
+
+"Ugh! how black you are!" It was the old Emma McChesney that spoke. "You
+young devil, you're actually growing a mustache! There's something hard
+in your left-hand vest pocket. If it's your fountain pen you'd better
+rescue it, because I'm going to hug you again."
+
+But Jock McChesney was not smiling. He glanced around the stuffy little
+hotel room. It looked stuffier and drearier than ever in contrast
+with his radiant youth, his glowing freshness, his outdoor tan, his
+immaculate attire. He looked at the astonished Miss Riordon. At his
+gaze that lady muttered something, and fled, sample-case banging at
+her knees. At the look in his eyes his mother hastened, woman-wise, to
+reassure him.
+
+[Illustration: "At his gaze that lady fled, sample-case banging at her
+knees"]
+
+"It wasn't so bad, Jock. Now that you're here, it's all right. Jock, I
+didn't realize just what you meant to me until you didn't come. I didn't
+realize--"
+
+Jock sat down at the edge of the bed, and slid one arm under his
+mother's head. There was a grim line about his mouth.
+
+"And I've been fishing," he said. "I've been sprawling under a tree in
+front of a darned fool stream and wondering whether to fry 'em for lunch
+now, or to put my hat over my eyes and fall asleep."
+
+His mother reached up and patted his shoulder. But the line around
+Jock's jaw did not soften. He turned his head to gaze down at his
+mother.
+
+"Two of those telegrams, and one letter, were from T. A. Buck, Junior,"
+he said. "He met me at Detroit. I never thought I'd stand from a total
+stranger what I stood from that man."
+
+"Why, what do you mean?" Alarm, dismay, astonishment were in her eyes.
+
+"He said things. And he meant 'em. He showed me, in a perfectly
+well-bred, cleancut, and most convincing way just what a miserable,
+selfish, low-down, worthless young hound I am."
+
+"He--dared!--"
+
+"You bet he dared. And then some. And I hadn't an argument to come back
+with. I don't know just where he got all his information from, but it
+was straight."
+
+He got up, strode to the window, and came back to the bed. Both hands
+thrust deep in his pockets, he announced his life plans, thus:
+
+"I'm eighteen years old. And I look twenty-three, and act
+twenty-five--when I'm with twenty-five-year-olds. I've been as much help
+and comfort to you as a pet alligator. You've always said that I was to
+go to college, and I've sort of trained myself to believe I was. Well,
+I'm not. I want to get into business, with a capital B. And I want to
+jump in now. This minute. I've started out to be a first-class slob,
+with you keeping me in pocket money, and clothes, and the Lord knows
+what all. Why, I--"
+
+"Jock McChesney," said that young man's bewildered mother, "just what
+did T. A. Buck, Junior, say to you anyway?"
+
+"Plenty. Enough to make me see things. I used to think that I wanted to
+get into one of the professions. Professions! You talk about the romance
+of a civil engineer's life! Why, to be a successful business man these
+days you've got to be a buccaneer, and a diplomat, and a detective, and
+a clairvoyant, and an expert mathematician, and a wizard. Business--just
+plain everyday business--is the gamiest, chanciest, most thrilling line
+there is to-day, and I'm for it. Let the other guy hang out his shingle
+and wait for 'em. I'm going out and get mine."
+
+"Any particular line, or just planning to corner the business market
+generally?" came a cool, not too amused voice from the bed.
+
+"Advertising," replied Jock crisply. "Magazine advertising, to start
+with. I met a fellow up in the woods--named O'Rourke. He was a star
+football man at Yale. He's bucking the advertising line now for the
+_Mastodon Magazine_. He's crazy about it, and says it's the greatest
+game ever. I want to get into it now--not four years from now."
+
+He stopped abruptly. Emma McChesney regarded him, eyes glowing. Then
+she gave a happy little laugh, reached for her kimono at the foot of the
+bed, and prepared to kick off the bedclothes.
+
+"Just run into the hall a second, son," she announced. "I'm going to get
+up."
+
+"Up! No, you're not!" shouted Jock, making a rush at her. Then, in the
+exuberance of his splendid young strength, he picked her up, swathed
+snugly in a roll of sheeting and light blanket, carried her to the big
+chair by the window, and seated himself, with his surprised and laughing
+mother in his arms.
+
+But Mrs. McChesney was serious again in a moment. She lay with her head
+against her boy's breast for a while. Then she spoke what was in her
+sane, far-seeing mind.
+
+[Illustration: "In the exuberance of his young strength, he picked her
+up"]
+
+"Jock, if I've ever wished you were a girl, I take it all back now. I'd
+rather have heard what you just said than any piece of unbelievable
+good fortune in the world. God bless you for it, dear. But, Jock, you're
+going to college. No--wait a minute. You'll have a chance to prove the
+things you just said by getting through in three years instead of the
+usual four. If you're in earnest you can do it. I want my boy to start
+into this business war equipped with every means of defense. You
+called it a game. It's more than that--it's a battle. Compared to the
+successful business man of to-day the Revolutionary Minute Men were
+as keen and alert as the Seven Sleepers. I know that there are more
+non-college men driving street-cars than there are college men. But that
+doesn't influence me. You could get a job now. Not much of a position,
+perhaps, but something self-respecting and fairly well-paying.
+It would teach you many things. You might get a knowledge
+of human nature that no college could give you. But there's
+something--poise--self-confidence--assurance--that nothing but college
+can give you. You will find yourself in those three years. After you
+finish college you'll have difficulty in fitting into your proper niche,
+perhaps, and you'll want to curse the day on which you heeded my advice.
+It'll look as though you had simply wasted those three precious years.
+But in five or six years after, when your character has jelled, and
+you've hit your pace, you'll bless me for it. As for a knowledge of
+humanity, and of business tricks--well, your mother is fairly familiar
+with the busy marts of trade. If you want to learn folks you can spend
+your summers selling Featherlooms with me."
+
+"But, mother, you don't understand just why--"
+
+"Yes, dear 'un, I do. After all, remember you're only eighteen. You'll
+probably spend part of your time rushing around at class proms with a
+red ribbon in your coat lapel to show you're on the floor committee. And
+you'll be girl-fussing, too. But you'd be attracted to girls, in or
+out of college, and I'd rather, just now, that it would be some pretty,
+nice-thinking college girl in a white sweater and a blue serge skirt,
+whose worst thought was wondering if you could be cajoled into taking
+her to the Freshman-Sophomore basketball game, than some red-lipped,
+black-jet-earringed siren gazing at you across the table in some
+basement cafe. And, goodness knows, Jock, you wear your clothes so
+beautifully that even the haberdashers' salesmen eye you with respect.
+I've seen 'em. That's one course you needn't take at college."
+
+Jock sat silent, his face grave with thought. "But when I'm earning
+money--real money--it's off the road for you," he said, at last. "I
+don't want this to sound like a scene from East Lynne, but, mother--"
+
+"Um-m-m-m--ye-ee-es," assented Emma McChesney, with no alarming
+enthusiasm. "Jock dear, carry me back to bed again, will you? And then
+open the closet door and pull out that big sample-case to the side of
+my bed. The newest Fall Featherlooms are in it, and somehow, I've just a
+whimsy notion that I'd like to look 'em over."
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+CATCHING UP WITH CHRISTMAS
+
+
+Temptation himself is not much of a spieler. Raucous-voiced, red-faced,
+greasy, he stands outside his gaudy tent, dilating on the wonders
+within. One or two, perhaps, straggle in. But the crowd, made wary by
+bitter experience of the sham and cheap fraud behind the tawdry canvas
+flap, stops a moment, laughs, and passes on. Then Temptation, in a
+panic, seeing his audience drifting away, summons from inside the tent
+his bespangled and bewitching partner, Mlle. Psychological Moment, the
+Hypnotic Charmer. She leaps to the platform, bows, pirouettes. The crowd
+surges toward the ticket-window, nickel in hand.
+
+Six months of bad luck had dogged the footsteps of Mrs. Emma McChesney,
+traveling saleswoman for the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company,
+New York. It had started with a six-weeks' illness endured in the
+discomfort of a stuffy little hotel bedroom at Glen Rock, Minnesota. By
+August she was back in New York, attending to out-of-town buyers.
+
+Those friendly Middle-Western persona showed dismay at her pale,
+hollow-eyed appearance. They spoke to her of teaspoonfuls of olive-oil
+taken thrice a day, of mountain air, of cold baths, and, above all, of
+the advisability of leaving the road and taking an inside position. At
+that Emma McChesney always showed signs of unmistakable irritation.
+
+In September her son, Jock McChesney, just turned eighteen, went
+blithely off to college, disguised as a millionaire's son in a blue
+Norfolk, silk hose, flat-heeled shoes, correctly mounted walrus bag,
+and next-week's style in fall hats. As the train glided out of the great
+shed Emma McChesney had waved her handkerchief, smiling like fury
+and seeing nothing but an indistinct blur as the observation platform
+slipped around the curve. She had not felt that same clutching, desolate
+sense of loss since the time, thirteen years before, when she had cut
+off his curls and watched him march sturdily off to kindergarten.
+
+In October it was plain that spring skirts, instead of being full as
+predicted, were as scant and plaitless as ever. That spelled gloom for
+the petticoat business. It was necessary to sell three of the present
+absurd style to make the profit that had come from the sale of one skirt
+five years before.
+
+The last week in November, tragedy stalked upon the scene in the death
+at Marienbad of old T. A. Buck, Mrs. McChesney's stanch friend and
+beloved employer. Emma McChesney had wept for him as one weeps at the
+loss of a father.
+
+They had understood each other, those two, from the time that Emma
+McChesney, divorced, penniless, refusing support from the man she had
+married eight years before, had found work in the office of the T. A.
+Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company.
+
+Old Buck had watched her rise from stenographer to head stenographer,
+from head stenographer to inside saleswoman, from that to a minor road
+territory, and finally to the position of traveling representative
+through the coveted Middle-Western territory.
+
+Old T. A. Buck, gruff, grim, direct, far-seeing, kindly, shrewd--he had
+known Emma McChesney for what she was worth. Once, when she had been
+disclosing to him a clever business scheme which might be turned into
+good advertising material, old Buck had slapped his knee with one broad,
+thick palm and had said:
+
+"Emma McChesney, you ought to have been a man. With that head on a man's
+shoulders, you could put us out of business."
+
+"I could do it anyway," Mrs. McChesney had retorted.
+
+Old Buck had regarded her a moment over his tortoise-shell rimmed
+glasses. Then, "I believe you could," he had said, quietly and
+thoughtfully.
+
+That brings her up to December. To some few millions of people
+D-e-c-e-m-b-e-r spells Christmas. But to Emma McChesney it spelled the
+dreaded spring trip. It spelled trains stalled in snowdrifts, baggage
+delayed, cold hotel bedrooms, harassed, irritable buyers.
+
+It was just six o'clock on the evening of December ninth when Mrs. Emma
+McChesney swung off the train at Columbus, Ohio, five hours late. As
+she walked down the broad platform her eyes unconsciously searched the
+loaded trucks for her own trunks. She'd have recognized them in the hold
+of a Nile steamer--those grim, travel-scarred sample-trunks. They had a
+human look to her. She had a way of examining them after each trip, as a
+fond mother examines her child for stray scratches and bruises when she
+puts it to bed for the night. She knew each nook and corner of the great
+trunks as another woman knows her linen-closet or her preserve-shelves.
+
+Columbus, Ohio, was a Featherloom town. Emma McChesney had a fondness
+for it, with its half rustic, half metropolitan air. Sometimes she
+likened it to a country girl in a velvet gown, and sometimes to a
+city girl in white muslin and blue sash. Singer & French always had a
+Featherloom window twice a year.
+
+The hotel lobby wore a strangely deserted look. December is a
+slack month for actors and traveling men. Mrs. McChesney registered
+automatically, received her mail, exchanged greetings with the affable
+clerk.
+
+"Send my trunks up to my sample-room as soon as they get in. Three of
+'em--two sample-trunks and my personal trunk. And I want to see a porter
+about putting up some extra tables. You see, I'm two days late now. I
+expect two buyers to-morrow morning.
+
+"Send 'em right up, Mrs. McChesney," the clerk assured her. "Jo'll
+attend to those tables. Too bad about old Buck. How's the skirt
+business?"
+
+"Skirts? There is no such thing," corrected Emma McChesney gently.
+
+"Sausage-casing business, you mean."
+
+"Guess you're right, at that. By the way, how's that handsome youngster
+of yours? He's not traveling with you this trip?"
+
+There came a wonderful glow into Emma McChesney's tired face.
+
+"Jock's at college. Coming home for the holidays. We're going to have a
+dizzy week in New York. I'm wild to see if those three months of college
+have done anything to him, bless his heart! Oh, kind sir, forgive a
+mother's fond ravings! Where'd that youngster go with my bag?"
+
+Up at last in the stuffy, unfriendly, steam-smelling hotel bedroom
+Emma McChesney prepared to make herself comfortable. A cocky bell-boy
+switched on the lights, adjusted a shade, straightened a curtain. Mrs.
+McChesney reached for her pocket-book.
+
+"Just open that window, will you?"
+
+"Pretty cold," remonstrated the bell-boy. "Beginning to snow, too."
+
+"Can't help it. I'll shut it in a minute. The last man that had this
+room left a dead cigar around somewhere. Send up a waiter, please. I'm
+going to treat myself to dinner in my room."
+
+The boy gone, she unfastened her collar, loosened a shoe that had
+pressed a bit too tightly over the instep, took a kimono and toilette
+articles out of her bag.
+
+"I'll run through my mail," she told herself. "Then I'll get into
+something loose, see to my trunks, have dinner, and turn in early. Wish
+Jock were here. We'd have a steak, and some French fried, and a salad,
+and I'd let the kid make the dressing, even if he does always get in too
+much vinegar--"
+
+She was glancing through her mail. Two from the firm--one from Mary
+Cutting--one from the Sure-White Laundry at Dayton (hope they found that
+corset-cover)--one from--why, from Jock! From Jock! And he'd written
+only two days before. Well!
+
+Sitting there on the edge of the bed she regarded the dear scrawl
+lovingly, savoring it, as is the way of a woman. Then she took a hairpin
+from the knot of bright hair (also as is the way of woman) and slit the
+envelope with a quick, sure rip. M-m-m--it wasn't much as to length.
+Just a scrawled page. Emma McChesney's eye plunged into it hungrily, a
+smile of anticipation dimpling her lips, lighting up her face.
+
+"_Dearest Blonde_," it began.
+
+("The nerve of the young imp!")
+
+He hoped the letter would reach her in time. Knew how this
+weather mussed up her schedule. He wanted her honest opinion about
+something--straight, now! One of the frat fellows was giving a Christmas
+house-party. Awful swells, by the way. He was lucky even to be asked.
+He'd never remembered a real Christmas--in a home, you know, with a
+tree, and skating, and regular high jinks, and a dinner that left you
+feeling like a stuffed gooseberry. Old Wells says his grandmother wears
+lace caps with lavender ribbons. Can you beat it! Of course he felt
+like a hog, even thinking of wanting to stay away from her at Christmas.
+Still, Christmas in a New York hotel--! But the fellows had nagged him
+to write. Said they'd do it if he didn't. Of course he hated to think of
+her spending Christmas alone--felt like a bloody villain--
+
+Little by little the smile that had wreathed her lips faded and was
+gone. The lips still were parted, but by one of those miracles with
+which the face expresses what is within the heart their expression had
+changed from pleasure to bitter pain.
+
+She sat there, at the edge of the bed, staring dully until the black
+scrawls danced on the white page. With the letter before her she raised
+her hand slowly and wiped away a hot, blinding mist of tears with her
+open palm. Then she read it again, dully, as though every selfish word
+of it had not already stamped itself on her brain and heart.
+
+[Illustration: "She read it again, dully, as though every selfish word
+had not already stamped itself on her brain and heart"]
+
+After the second reading she still sat there, her eyes staring down at
+her lap. Once she brushed an imaginary fleck of lint from the lap of her
+blue serge skirt--brushed, and brushed and brushed, with a mechanical,
+pathetic little gesture that showed how completely absent her mind was
+from the room in which she sat. Then her hand fell idle, and she became
+very still, a crumpled, tragic, hopeless look rounding the shoulders
+that were wont to hold themselves so erect and confident.
+
+A tentative knock at the door. The figure on the bed did not stir.
+Another knock, louder this time. Emma McChesney sat up with a start. She
+shivered as she became conscious of the icy December air pouring into
+the little room. She rose, walked to the window, closed it with a bang,
+and opened the door in time to intercept the third knock.
+
+A waiter proffered her a long card. "Dinner, Madame?"
+
+"Oh!" She shook her head. "Sorry I've changed my mind. I--I shan't want
+any dinner."
+
+She shut the door again and stood with her back against it, eying the
+bed. In her mind's eye she had already thrown herself upon it, buried
+her face in the nest of pillows, and given vent to the flood of tears
+that was beating at her throat. She took a quick step toward the bed,
+stopped, turned abruptly, and walked toward the mirror.
+
+"Emma McChesney," she said aloud to the woman in the glass, "buck up,
+old girl! Bad luck comes in bunches of threes. It's like breaking the
+first cup in a new Haviland set. You can always count on smashing two
+more. This is your third. So pick up the pieces and throw 'em in the
+ash-can."
+
+Then she fastened her collar, buttoned her shoe, pulled down her
+shirtwaist all around, smeared her face with cold cream, wiped it with
+a towel, smoothed her hair, donned her hat. The next instant the
+little room was dark, and Emma McChesney was marching down the long,
+red-carpeted hallway to the elevator, her head high, her face set.
+
+Down-stairs in the lobby--"How about my trunks?" she inquired of a
+porter.
+
+That blue-shirted individual rubbed a hard brown hand over his cheek
+worriedly.
+
+"They ain't come."
+
+"Ain't come!"--surprise disregarded grammar.
+
+"Nope. No signs of 'em. I'll tell you what: I think prob'ly they was
+overlooked in the rush, the train being late from Dayton when you
+started. Likely they'll be in on the ten-thirteen. I'll send 'em up the
+minute they get in."
+
+"I wish you would. I've got to get my stuff out early. I can't keep
+customers waiting for me. Late, as it is."
+
+She approached the clerk once more. "Anything at the theaters?"
+
+"Well, nothing much, Mrs. McChesney. Christmas coming on kind of puts a
+crimp in the show business. Nice little bill on at the Majestic, if you
+like vaudeville."
+
+"Crazy about it. Always get so excited watching to see if the next act
+is going to be as rotten as the last one. It always is."
+
+From eight-fifteen until ten-thirty Mrs. McChesney sat absolutely
+expressionless while a shrill blonde lady and a nasal dark gentleman
+went through what the program ironically called a "comedy sketch,"
+followed by a chummy person who came out in evening dress to sing a
+sentimental ditty, shed the evening dress to reappear in an ankle-length
+fluffy pink affair; shucked the fluffy pink affair for a child's
+pinafore, sash, and bare knees; discarded the kiddie frock, disclosing
+a bathing-suit; left the bathing-suit behind the wings in favor of
+satin knee-breeches and tight jacket--and very discreetly stopped there,
+probably for no reason except to give way to the next act, consisting of
+two miraculously thin young men in lavender dress suits and white silk
+hats, who sang and clogged in unison, like two things hung on a single
+wire.
+
+The night air was grateful to her hot forehead as she walked from the
+theater to the hotel.
+
+"Trunks in?" to the porter.
+
+"No sign of 'em, lady. They didn't come in on the ten. Think they'd
+better wire back to Dayton."
+
+But the next morning Mrs. McChesney was in the depot baggage-room when
+Dayton wired back:
+
+_"Trunks not here. Try Columbus, Nebraska."_
+
+"Crash!" said Emma McChesney to the surprised baggage-master. "There
+goes my Haviland vegetable-dish."
+
+"Were you selling china?" he inquired.
+
+"No, I wasn't," replied Emma McChesney viciously. "And if you don't
+let me stand here and give my frank, unbiased opinion of this road,
+its president, board of directors, stockholders, baggage-men, Pullman
+porters, and other things thereto appertaining, I'll probably have
+hysterics."
+
+"Give it," said the baggage-master. "You'll feel better. And we're used
+to it."
+
+She gave it. When she had finished:
+
+"Did you say you was selling goods on the road? Say, that's a hell of a
+job for a woman! Excuse me, lady. I didn't mean--"
+
+"I think perhaps you're right," said Emma McChesney slowly. "It is just
+that."
+
+"Well, anyway, we'll do our best to trace it. Guess you're in for a
+wait."
+
+Emma McChesney waited. She made the rounds of her customers, and waited.
+She wired her firm, and waited. She wrote Jock to run along and enjoy
+himself, and waited. She cut and fitted a shirt-waist, took her hat
+apart and retrimmed it, made the rounds of her impatient customers
+again, threatened to sue the road, visited the baggage-room daily--and
+waited.
+
+Four weary, nerve-racking days passed. It was late afternoon of the
+fourth day when Mrs. McChesney entered the elevator to go to her room.
+She had come from another fruitless visit to the baggage-room. She sank
+into a leather-cushioned seat in a corner of the lift. Two men entered
+briskly, followed by a bellboy. Mrs. McChesney did not look up.
+
+"Well, I'll be dinged!" boomed a throaty voice. "Mrs. McChesney, by the
+Great Horn Spoon! H'are you? Talking about you this minute to my friend
+here."
+
+Emma McChesney, with the knowledge of her lost sample-trunks striking
+her afresh, looked up and smiled bravely into the plump pink face of Fat
+Ed Meyers, traveling representative for her firm's bitterest rival, the
+Strauss Sans-silk Skirt Company.
+
+"Talking about me, Mr. Meyers? Sufficient grounds for libel, right
+there."
+
+The little sallow, dark man just at Meyers' elbow was gazing at her
+unguardedly. She felt that he had appraised her from hat to heels. Ed
+Meyers placed a plump hand on the little man's shoulder.
+
+"Abe, you tell the lady what I was saying. This is Mr. Abel Fromkin,
+maker of the Fromkin Form-Fit Skirt. Abe, this is the wonderful Mrs.
+McChesney."
+
+"Sorry I can't wait to hear what you've said of me. This is my floor."
+Mrs. McChesney was already leaving the elevator.
+
+"Here! Wait a minute!" Fat Ed Meyers was out and standing beside her,
+his movements unbelievably nimble. "Will you have dinner with us, Mrs.
+McChesney?"
+
+"Thanks. Not to-night."
+
+Meyers turned to the waiting elevator. "Fromkin, you go on up with the
+boy; I'll talk to the lady a minute."
+
+A little displeased frown appeared on Emma McChesney's face.
+
+"You'll have to excuse me, Mr. Meyers, I--"
+
+"Heigh-ho for that haughty stuff, Mrs. McChesney," grinned Ed Meyers.
+"Don't turn up your nose at that little Kike friend of mine till you've
+heard what I have to say. Now just let me talk a minute. Fromkin's heard
+all about you. He's got a proposition to make. And it isn't one to sniff
+at."
+
+He lowered his voice mysteriously in the silence of the dim hotel
+corridor.
+
+"Fromkin started in a little one-room hole-in-the-wall over on the East
+Side. Lived on a herring and a hunk of rye bread. Wife used to help him
+sew. That was seven years ago. In three years, or less, she'll have the
+regulation uniform--full length seal coat, bunch of paradise, five-drop
+diamond La Valliere set in platinum, electric brougham. Abe has got
+a business head, take it from me. But he's wise enough to know that
+business isn't the rough-and-tumble game it used to be. He realizes that
+he'll do for the workrooms, but not for the front shop. He knows that if
+he wants to keep on growing he's got to have what they call a steerer.
+Somebody smooth, and polished, and politic, and what the highbrows call
+suave. Do you pronounce that with a long _a_, or two dots over? Anyway,
+you get me. You're all those things and considerable few besides. He's
+wise to the fact that a business man's got to have poise these days,
+and balance. And when it comes to poise and balance, Mrs. McChesney, you
+make a Fairbanks scale look like a raft at sea."
+
+"While I don't want to seem to hurry you," drawled Mrs. McChesney,
+"might I suggest that you shorten the overture and begin on the first
+act?"
+
+"Well, you know how I feel about your business genius."
+
+"Yes, I know," enigmatically.
+
+Ed Meyers grinned. "Can't forget those two little business
+misunderstandings we had, can you?"
+
+"Business understandings," corrected Emma McChesney.
+
+"Call 'em anything your little heart dictates, but listen. Fromkin knows
+all about you. Knows you've got a million friends in the trade, that
+you know skirts from the belt to the hem. I don't know just what his
+proposition is, but I'll bet he'll give you half interest in the livest,
+come-upest little skirt factory in the country, just for a few thousands
+capital, maybe, and your business head at the executive end. Now just
+let that sink in before you speak."
+
+"And why," inquired Emma McChesney, "don't you grab this matchless
+business opportunity yourself?"
+
+"Because, fair lady, Fromkin wouldn't let me get in with a crowbar.
+He'll never be able to pronounce his t's right, and when he's dressed
+up he looks like a 'bus-boy at Mouquin's, but he can see a bluff farther
+than I can throw one--and that's somewhere beyond the horizon, as you'll
+admit. Talk it over with us after dinner then?"
+
+Emma McChesney was regarding the plump, pink, eager face before her with
+keen, level, searching eyes.
+
+"Yes," she said slowly, "I will."
+
+"Cafe? We'll have a bottle--"
+
+"No."
+
+"Oh! Er--parlor?"
+
+Mrs. McChesney smiled. "I won't ask you to make yourself that miserable.
+You can't smoke in the parlor. We'll find a quiet corner in the
+writing-room, where you men can light up. I don't want to take advantage
+of you."
+
+[Illustration: "'Not that you look your age--not by ten years!'"]
+
+Down in the writing-room at eight they formed a strange little group. Ed
+Meyers, flushed and eager, his pink face glowing like a peony, talking,
+arguing, smoking, reasoning, coaxing, with the spur of a fat commission
+to urge him on; Abel Fromkin, with his peculiarly pallid skin made
+paler in contrast to the purplish-black line where the razor had passed,
+showing no hint of excitement except in the restless little black eyes
+and in the work-scarred hands that rolled cigarette after cigarette,
+each glowing for one brief instant, only to die down to a blackened ash
+the next; Emma McChesney, half fascinated, half distrustful, listening
+in spite of herself, and trying to still a small inner voice--a voice
+that had never advised her ill.
+
+"You know the ups and downs to this game," Ed Meyers was saying. "When
+I met you there in the elevator you looked like you'd lost your last
+customer. You get pretty disgusted with it all, at times, like the rest
+of us."
+
+"At that minute," replied Emma McChesney, "I was so disgusted that
+if some one had called me up on the 'phone and said, 'Hullo, Mrs.
+McChesney! Will you marry me?' I'd have said: 'Yes. Who is this?'"
+
+"There! That's just it. I don't want to be impolite, or anything like
+that, Mrs. McChesney, but you're no kid. Not that you look your age--not
+by ten years! But I happen to know you're teetering somewhere between
+thirty-six and the next top. Ain't that right?"
+
+"Is that a argument to put to a lady?" remonstrated Abel Fromkin.
+
+Fat Ed Meyers waved the interruption away with a gesture of his
+strangely slim hands. "This ain't an argument. It's facts. Another
+ten years on the road, and where'll you be? In the discard. A man of
+forty-six can keep step with the youngsters, even if it does make him
+puff a bit. But a woman of forty-six--the road isn't the place for her.
+She's tired. Tired in the morning; tired at night. She wants her kimono
+and her afternoon snooze. You've seen some of those old girls on the
+road. They've come down step by step until you spot 'em, bleached
+hair, crow's-feet around the eyes, mussy shirt-waist, yellow and red
+complexion, demonstrating green and lavender gelatine messes in the
+grocery of some department store. I don't say that a brainy corker of
+a saleswoman like you would come down like that. But you've got to
+consider sickness and a lot of other things. Those six weeks last summer
+with the fever at Glen Rock put a crimp in you, didn't it? You've never
+been yourself since then. Haven't had a decent chance to rest up."
+
+"No," said Emma McChesney wearily.
+
+"Furthermore, now that old T. A.'s cashed in, how do you know what
+young Buck's going to do? He don't know shucks about the skirt business.
+They've got to take in a third party to keep it a close corporation. It
+was all between old Buck, Buck junior, and old lady Buck. How can you
+tell whether the new member will want a woman on the road, or not?"
+
+A little steely light hardened the blue of Mrs. McChesney's eyes.
+
+"We'll leave the firm of T. A. Buck out of this discussion, please."
+
+"Oh, very well!" Ed Meyers was unabashed. "Let's talk about Fromkin.
+He don't object, do you, Abe? It's just like this. He needs your smart
+head. You need his money. It'll mean a sure thing for you--a share in
+a growing and substantial business. When you get your road men trained
+it'll mean that you won't need to go out on the road yourself, except
+for a little missionary trip now and then, maybe. No more infernal early
+trains, no more bum hotel grub, no more stuffy, hot hotel rooms, no more
+haughty lady buyers--gosh, I wish I had the chance!"
+
+Emma McChesney sat very still. Two scarlet spots glowed in her cheeks.
+"No one appreciates your gift of oratory more than I do, Mr. Meyers.
+Your flow of language, coupled with your peculiar persuasive powers,
+make a combination a statue couldn't resist. But I think it would sort
+of rest me if Mr. Fromkin were to say a word, seeing that it's really
+his funeral."
+
+Abel Fromkin started nervously, and put his dead cigarette to his lips.
+"I ain't much of a talker," he said, almost sheepishly. "Meyers, he's
+got it down fine. I tell you what. I'll be in New York the twenty-first.
+We can go over the books and papers and the whole business. And I like
+you should know my wife. And I got a little girl--Would you believe
+it, that child ain't more as a year old, and says Papa and Mama like a
+actress!"
+
+"Sure," put in Ed Meyers, disregarding the more intimate family details.
+"You two get together and fix things up in shape; then you can sign
+up and have it off your mind so you can enjoy the festive Christmas
+season."
+
+Emma McChesney had been gazing out of the window to where the
+street-lamps were reflected in the ice-covered pavements. Now she spoke,
+still staring out upon the wintry street.
+
+"Christmas isn't a season. It's a feeling. And I haven't got it."
+
+"Oh, come now, Mrs. McChesney!" objected Ed Meyers.
+
+With a sudden, quick movement Emma McChesney turned from the window
+to the little dark man who was watching her so intently. She faced him
+squarely, as though utterly disregarding Ed Meyers' flattery and
+banter and cajolery. The little man before her seemed to recognize the
+earnestness of the moment. He leaned forward a bit attentively.
+
+"If what has been said is true," she began, "this ought to be a good
+thing for me. If I go into it, I'll go in heart, soul, brain, and
+pocket-book. I do know the skirt business from thread to tape and back
+again. I've managed to save a few thousand dollars. Only a woman could
+understand how I've done it. I've scrimped on little things. I've denied
+myself necessities. I've worn silk blouses instead of linen ones to save
+laundry-bills and taken a street-car or 'bus to save a quarter or fifty
+cents. I've always tried to look well dressed and immaculate--"
+
+"You!" exclaimed Ed Meyers. "Why, say, you're what I call a swell
+dresser. Nothing flashy, understand, or loud, but the quiet, good stuff
+that spells ready money."
+
+"M-m-m--yes. But it wasn't always so ready. Anyway, I always managed
+somehow. The boy's at college. Sometimes I wonder--well, that's another
+story. I've saved, and contrived, and planned ahead for a rainy day.
+There have been two or three times when I thought it had come. Sprinkled
+pretty heavily, once or twice. But I've just turned up my coat-collar,
+tucked my hat under my skirt, and scooted for a tree. And each time
+it has turned out to be just a summer shower, with the sun coming out
+bright and warm."
+
+Her frank, clear, honest, blue eyes were plumbing the depths of the
+black ones. "Those few thousand dollars that you hold so lightly will
+mean everything to me. They've been my cyclone-cellar. If--"
+
+Through the writing-room sounded a high-pitched, monotonous voice with a
+note of inquiry in it.
+
+"Mrs. McChesney! Mr. Fraser! Mr. Ludwig! Please! Mrs. McChesney! Mr.
+Fraser! Mr. Lud--"
+
+"Here, boy!" Mrs. McChesney took the little yellow envelope from the
+salver that the boy held out to her. Her quick glance rested on the
+written words. She rose, her face colorless.
+
+"Not bad news?" The two men spoke simultaneously.
+
+"I don't know," said Emma McChesney. "What would you say?"
+
+She handed the slip of paper to Fat Ed Meyers. He read it in silence.
+Then once more, aloud:
+
+"'Take first train back to New York. Spalding will finish your trip.'"
+
+"Why--say--" began Meyers.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Why--say--this--this looks as if you were fired!"
+
+"Does, doesn't it?" She smiled.
+
+"Then our little agreement goes?" The two men were on their feet, eager,
+alert. "That means you'll take Fromkin's offer?"
+
+"It means that our little agreement is off. I'm sorry to disappoint you.
+I want to thank you both for your trouble. I must have been crazy to
+listen to you for a minute. I wouldn't have if I'd been myself."
+
+"But that telegram--"
+
+"It's signed, 'T. A. Buck.' I'll take a chance."
+
+The two men stared after her, disappointment and bewilderment chasing
+across each face.
+
+"Well, I thought I knew women, but--" began Ed Meyers fluently.
+
+Passing the desk, Mrs. McChesney heard her name. She glanced toward the
+clerk. He was just hanging up the telephone-receiver.
+
+"Baggage-room says the depot just notified 'em your trunks were traced
+to Columbia City. They're on their way here now."
+
+"Columbia City!" repeated Emma McChesney. "Do you know, I believe I've
+learned to hate the name of the discoverer of this fair land."
+
+Up in her room she opened the crumpled telegram again, and regarded it
+thoughtfully before she began to pack her bag.
+
+The thoughtful look was still there when she entered the big bright
+office of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. And with it was
+another expression that resembled contrition.
+
+"Mr. Buck's waiting for you," a stenographer told her.
+
+Mrs. McChesney opened the door of the office marked "Private."
+
+Two men rose. One she recognized as the firm's lawyer. The other, who
+came swiftly toward her, was T. A. Buck--no longer junior. There was
+a new look about him--a look of responsibility, of efficiency, of
+clear-headed knowledge.
+
+The two clasped hands--a firm, sincere, understanding grip.
+
+Buck spoke first. "It's good to see you. We were talking of you as
+you came in. You know Mr. Beggs, of course. He has some things to tell
+you--and so have I. His will be business things, mine will be personal.
+I got there before father passed away--thank God! But he couldn't speak.
+He'd anticipated that with his clear-headedness, and he'd written what
+he wanted to say. A great deal of it was about you. I want you to read
+that letter later."
+
+"I shall consider it a privilege," said Emma McChesney.
+
+Mr. Beggs waved her toward a chair. She took it in silence. She heard
+him in silence, his sonorous voice beating upon her brain.
+
+"There are a great many papers and much business detail, but that
+will be attended to later," began Beggs ponderously. "You are to be
+congratulated on the position of esteem and trust which you held in
+the mind of your late employer. By the terms of his will--I'll put it
+briefly, for the moment--you are offered the secretaryship of the firm
+of T. A. Buck, Incorporated. Also you are bequeathed thirty shares in
+the firm. Of course, the company will have to be reorganized. The late
+Mr. Buck had great trust in your capabilities."
+
+Emma McChesney rose to her feet, her breath coming quickly. She turned
+to T. A. Buck. "I want you to know--I want you to know--that just before
+your telegram came I was half tempted to leave the firm. To--"
+
+"Can't blame you," smiled T. A. Buck. "You've had a rotten six months of
+it, beginning with that illness and ending with those infernal trunks.
+The road's no place for a woman."
+
+[Illustration: "'Christmas isn't a season...it's a feeling, and, thank
+God, I've got it!'"]
+
+"Nonsense!" flashed Emma McChesney. "I've loved it. I've gloried in
+it. And I've earned my living by it. Giving it up--don't now think me
+ungrateful--won't be so easy, I can tell you."
+
+T. A. Buck nodded understandingly. "I know. Father knew too. And I don't
+want you to let his going from us make any difference in this holiday
+season. I want you to enjoy it and be happy."
+
+A shade crossed Emma McChesney's face. It was there when the door opened
+and a boy entered with a telegram. He handed it to Mrs. McChesney. It
+held ten crisp words:
+
+_Changed my darn fool mind. Me for home and mother._
+
+Emma McChesney looked up, her face radiant.
+
+"Christmas isn't a season, Mr. Buck. It's a feeling; and, thank God,
+I've got it!"
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+KNEE-DEEP IN KNICKERS
+
+
+When the column of figures under the heading known as "Profits," and
+the column of figures under the heading known as "Loss" are so unevenly
+balanced that the wrong side of the ledger sags, then to the listening
+stockholders there comes the painful thought that at the next regular
+meeting it is perilously possible that the reading may come under the
+heads of Assets and Liabilities.
+
+There had been a meeting in the offices of the T. A. Buck Featherloom
+Petticoat Company, New York. The quarterly report had had a startlingly
+lop-sided sound. After it was over Mrs. Emma McChesney, secretary of
+the company, followed T. A. Buck, its president, into the big, bright
+show-room. T. A. Buck's hands were thrust deep into his pockets. His
+teeth worried a cigar, savagely. Care, that clawing, mouthing hag,
+perched on his brow, tore at his heart.
+
+He turned to face Emma McChesney.
+
+"Well," he said, bitterly, "it hasn't taken us long, has it? Father's
+been dead a little over a year. In that time we've just about run this
+great concern, the pride of his life, into the ground."
+
+Mrs. Emma McChesney, calm, cool, unruffled, scrutinized the harassed man
+before her for a long minute.
+
+"What rotten football material you would have made, wouldn't you?" she
+observed.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," answered T. A. Buck, through his teeth. "I can stand
+as stiff a scrimmage as the next one. But this isn't a game. You take
+things too lightly. You're a woman. I don't think you know what this
+means."
+
+Emma McChesney's lips opened as do those of one whose tongue's end holds
+a quick and stinging retort. Then they closed again. She walked over to
+the big window that faced the street. When she had stood there a moment,
+silent, she swung around and came back to where T. A. Buck stood, still
+wrapped in gloom.
+
+"Maybe I don't take myself seriously. I'd have been dead ten years
+ago if I had. But I do take my job seriously. Don't forget that for a
+minute. You talk the way a man always talks when his pride is hurt."
+
+"Pride! It isn't that."
+
+"Oh, yes, it is. I didn't sell T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats on
+the road for almost ten years without learning a little something about
+men and business. When your father died, and I learned that he had shown
+his appreciation of my work and loyalty by making me secretary of
+this great company, I didn't think of it as a legacy--a stroke of good
+fortune."
+
+"No?"
+
+"No. To me it was a sacred trust--something to be guarded, nursed,
+cherished. And now you say we've run this concern into the ground. Do
+you honestly think that?"
+
+T. A. shrugged impotent shoulders. "Figures don't lie." He plunged into
+another fathom of gloom. "Another year like this and we're done for."
+
+Emma McChesney came over and put one firm hand on T. A. Buck's drooping
+shoulder. It was a strange little act for a woman--the sort of thing a
+man does when he would hearten another man.
+
+"Wake up!" she said, lightly. "Wake up, and listen to the birdies sing.
+There isn't going to be another year like this. Not if the planning,
+and scheming, and brain-racking that I've been doing for the last two or
+three months mean anything."
+
+T. A. Buck seated himself as one who is weary, body and mind.
+
+"Got another new one?"
+
+Emma McChesney regarded him a moment thoughtfully. Then she stepped to
+the tall show-case, pushed back the sliding glass door, and pointed to
+the rows of brilliant-hued petticoats that hung close-packed within.
+
+"Look at 'em!" she commanded, disgust in her voice. "Look at 'em!"
+
+T. A. Buck raised heavy, lack-luster eyes and looked. What he saw did
+not seem to interest him. Emma McChesney drew from the rack a skirt of
+king's blue satin messaline and held it at arm's length.
+
+"And they call that thing a petticoat! Why, fifteen years ago the
+material in this skirt wouldn't have made even a fair-sized sleeve."
+
+T. A. Buck regarded the petticoat moodily. "I don't see how they get
+around in the darned things. I honestly don't see how they wear 'em."
+
+"That's just it. They don't wear 'em. There you have the root of the
+whole trouble."
+
+"Oh, nonsense!" disputed T. A. "They certainly wear something--some sort
+of an--"
+
+"I tell you they don't. Here. Listen. Three years ago our taffeta skirts
+ran from thirty-six to thirty-eight yards to the dozen. We paid
+from ninety cents to one dollar five a yard. Now our skirts run from
+twenty-five to twenty-eight yards to the dozen. The silk costs us
+from fifty to sixty cents a yard. Silk skirts used to be a luxury. Now
+they're not even a necessity."
+
+"Well, what's the answer? I've been pondering some petticoat problems
+myself. I know we've got to sell three skirts to-day to make the profit
+that we used to make on one three years ago."
+
+Emma McChesney had the brave-heartedness to laugh. "This skirt business
+reminds me of a game we used to play when I was a kid. We called it
+Going to Jerusalem, I think. Anyway, I know each child sat in a chair
+except the one who was It. At a signal everybody had to get up and
+change chairs. There was a wild scramble, in which the one who was
+It took part. When the burly-burly was over some child was always
+chairless, of course. He had to be It. That's the skirt business to-day.
+There aren't enough chairs to go round, and in the scramble somebody's
+got to be left out. And let me tell you, here and now, that the firm of
+T. A. Buck, Featherloom Petticoats, is not going to be It."
+
+T. A. rose as wearily as he had sat down. Even the most optimistic of
+watchers could have discerned no gleam of enthusiasm on his face.
+
+"I thought," he said listlessly, "that you and I had tried every
+possible scheme to stimulate the skirt trade."
+
+"Every possible one, yes," agreed Mrs. McChesney, sweetly. "And now it's
+time to try the impossible. The possibilities haven't worked. My land!
+I could write a book on the Decline and Fall of the Petticoat, beginning
+with the billowy white muslin variety, and working up to the present
+slinky messaline affair. When I think of those dear dead days of the
+glorious--er--past, when the hired girl used to complain and threaten
+to leave because every woman in the family had at least three ruffled,
+embroidery-flounced white muslin petticoats on the line on Mondays--"
+
+The lines about T. A. Buck's mouth relaxed into a grim smile.
+
+"Remember that feature you got them to run in the _Sunday Sphere?_ The
+one headed 'Are Skirts Growing Fuller, and Where?'"
+
+"Do I remember it!" wailed Emma McChesney. "And can I ever forget the
+money we put into that fringed model we called the Carmencita! We made
+it up so it could retail for a dollar ninety-five, and I could have
+sworn that the women would maim each other to get to it. But it didn't
+go. They won't even wear fringe around their ankles."
+
+T. A.'s grim smile stretched into a reminiscent grin. "But nothing in
+our whole hopeless campaign could touch your Municipal Purity League
+agitation for the abolition of the form-hugging skirt. You talked public
+morals until you had A. Comstock and Lucy Page Gaston looking like
+Parisian Apaches."
+
+A little laugh rippled up to Emma McChesney's lips, only to die away to
+a sigh. She shook her head in sorrowful remembrance.
+
+"Yes. But what good did it do? The newspapers and magazines did take
+it up, but what happened? The dressmakers and tailors, who are charging
+more than ever for their work, and putting in half as much material,
+got together and knocked my plans into a cocked hat. In answer to those
+snap-shots showing what took place every time a woman climbed a car
+step, they came back with pictures of the styles of '61, proving that
+the street-car effect is nothing to what happened to a belle of '61 if
+she chanced to sit down or get up too suddenly in the hoop-skirt days."
+
+They were both laughing now, like a couple of children. "And, oh, say!"
+gasped Emma, "remember Moe Selig, of the Fine-Form Skirt Company,
+trying to get the doctors to state that hobble skirts were making women
+knock-kneed! Oh, mercy!"
+
+But their laugh ended in a little rueful silence. It was no laughing
+matter, this situation. T. A. Buck shrugged his shoulders, and began a
+restless pacing up and down. "Yep. There you are. Meanwhile--"
+
+"Meanwhile, women are still wearing 'em tight, and going petticoatless."
+
+Suddenly T. A. stopped short in his pacing and fastened his surprised
+and interested gaze on the skirt of the trim and correct little business
+frock that sat so well upon Emma McChesney's pretty figure.
+
+"Why, look at that!" he exclaimed, and pointed with one eager finger.
+
+"Mercy!" screamed Emma McChesney. "What is it? Quick! A mouse?"
+
+T. A. Buck shook his head, impatiently. "Mouse! Lord, no! Plaits!"
+
+"Plaits!"
+
+She looked down, bewildered.
+
+"Yes. In your skirt. Three plaits at the front-left, and three in the
+back. That's new, isn't it? If outer skirts are being made fuller, then
+it follows--"
+
+"It ought to follow," interrupted Emma McChesney, "but it doesn't.
+It lags way behind. These plaits are stitched down. See? That's the
+fiendishness of it. And the petticoat underneath--if there is one--must
+be just as smooth, and unwrinkled, and scant as ever. Don't let 'em fool
+you."
+
+Buck spread his palms with a little gesture of utter futility.
+
+"I'm through. Out with your scheme. We're ready for it. It's our last
+card, whatever it is."
+
+There was visible on Emma McChesney's face that little tightening of
+the muscles, that narrowing of the eyelids which betokens intense
+earnestness; the gathering of all the forces before taking a momentous
+step. Then, as quickly, her face cleared. She shook her head with a
+little air of sudden decision.
+
+"Not now. Just because it's our last card I want to be sure that I'm
+playing it well. I'll be ready for you to-morrow morning in my office.
+Come prepared for the jolt of your young life."
+
+For the first time since the beginning of the conversation a glow of new
+courage and hope lighted up T. A. Buck's good-looking features. His fine
+eyes rested admiringly upon Emma McChesney standing there by the great
+show-case. She seemed to radiate energy, alertness, confidence.
+
+"When you begin to talk like that," he said, "I always feel as though I
+could take hold in a way to make those famous jobs that Hercules tackled
+look like little Willie's chores after school."
+
+"Fine!" beamed Emma McChesney. "Just store that up, will you? And don't
+let it filter out at your finger-tips when I begin to talk to-morrow."
+
+"We'll have lunch together, eh? And talk it over then sociably."
+
+Mrs. McChesney closed the glass door of the case with a bang.
+
+"No, thanks. My office at 9:30."
+
+T. A. Buck followed her to the door. "But why not lunch? You never will
+take lunch with me. Ever so much more comfortable to talk things over
+that way--"
+
+"When I talk business," said Emma McChesney, pausing at the threshold,
+"I want to be surrounded by a business atmosphere. I want the scene
+all set--one practical desk, two practical chairs, one telephone, one
+letter-basket, one self-filling fountain-pen, et cetera. And when
+I lunch I want to lunch, with nothing weightier on my mind than the
+question as to whether I'll have chicken livers saute or creamed
+sweetbreads with mushrooms."
+
+"That's no reason," grumbled T. A. "That's an excuse."
+
+"It will have to do, though," replied Mrs. McChesney abruptly, and
+passed out as he held the door open for her. He was still standing in
+the doorway after her trim, erect figure had disappeared into the little
+office across the hail.
+
+The little scarlet leather clock on Emma McChesney's desk pointed
+to 9:29 A.M. when there entered her office an immaculately garbed,
+miraculously shaven, healthily rosy youngish-middle-aged man who looked
+ten years younger than the harassed, frowning T. A. Buck with whom
+she had almost quarreled the evening before. Mrs. McChesney was busily
+dictating to a sleek little stenographer. The sleek little stenographer
+glanced up at T. A. Buck's entrance. The glance, being a feminine one,
+embraced all of T. A.'s good points and approved them from the tips of
+his modish boots to the crown of his slightly bald head, and including
+the creamy-white flower that reposed in his buttonhole.
+
+"'Morning!" said Emma McChesney, looking up briefly. "Be with you in a
+minute.... and in reply would say we regret that you have had trouble
+with No. 339. It is impossible to avoid pulling at the seams in the
+lower-grade silk skirts when they are made up in the present scant
+style. Our Mr. Spalding warned you of this at the time of your purchase.
+We will not under any circumstances consent to receive the goods if
+they are sent back on our hands. Yours sincerely. That'll be all, Miss
+Casey."
+
+She swung around to face her visitor as the door closed. If T. A.
+Buck looked ten years younger than he had the afternoon before, Emma
+McChesney undoubtedly looked five years older. There were little,
+worried, sagging lines about her eyes and mouth.
+
+T. A. Buck's eyes had followed the sheaf of signed correspondence, and
+the well-filled pad of more recent dictation which the sleek little
+stenographer had carried away with her.
+
+"Good Lord! It looks as though you had stayed down here all night."
+
+Emma McChesney smiled a little wearily. "Not quite that. But I was here
+this morning in time to greet the night watchman. Wanted to get my mail
+out of the way." Her eyes searched T. A. Buck's serene face. Then she
+leaned forward, earnestly.
+
+"Haven't you seen the morning paper?"
+
+"Just a mere glance at 'em. Picked up Burrows on the way down, and we
+got to talking. Why?"
+
+"The Rasmussen-Welsh Skirt Company has failed. Liabilities three hundred
+thousand. Assets one hundred thousand."
+
+"Failed! Good God!" All the rosy color, all the brisk morning freshness
+had vanished from his face. "Failed! Why, girl, I thought that concern
+was as solid as Gibraltar." He passed a worried hand over his head.
+"That knocks the wind out of my sails."
+
+"Don't let it. Just say that it fills them with a new breeze. I'm all
+the more sure that the time is ripe for my plan."
+
+T. A. Buck took from a vest pocket a scrap of paper and a fountain
+pen, slid down in his chair, crossed his legs, and began to scrawl
+meaningless twists and curlycues, as was his wont when worried or deeply
+interested.
+
+"Are you as sure of this scheme of yours as you were yesterday?"
+
+"Sure," replied Emma McChesney, briskly. "Sartin-sure."
+
+"Then fire away."
+
+Mrs. McChesney leaned forward, breathing a trifle fast. Her eyes were
+fastened on her listener.
+
+"Here's the plan. We'll make Featherloom Petticoats because there still
+are some women who have kept their senses. But we'll make them as a side
+line. The thing that has got to keep us afloat until full skirts come
+in again will be a full and complete line of women's satin messaline
+knickerbockers made up to match any suit or gown, and a full line of
+pajamas for women and girls. Get the idea? Scant, smart, trim little
+taupe-gray messaline knickers for a taupe gray suit, blue messaline for
+blue suits, brown messaline for brown--"
+
+T. A. Buck stared, open-mouthed, the paper on which he had been
+scrawling fluttering unnoticed to the floor.
+
+"Look here!" he interrupted. "Is this supposed to be humorous?"
+
+"And," went on Emma McChesney, calmly, "in our full and complete, not
+to say nifty line of women's pajamas--pink pajamas, blue pajamas, violet
+pajamas, yellow pajamas, white silk--"
+
+T. A. Buck stood up. "I want to say," he began, "that if you are
+jesting, I think this is a mighty poor time to joke. And if you are
+serious I can only deduce from it that this year of business worry and
+responsibility has been too much for you. I'm sure that if you were--"
+
+"That's all right," interrupted Emma McChesney. "Don't apologize. I
+purposely broke it to you this way, when I might have approached it
+gently. You've done just what I knew you'd do, so it's all right. After
+you've thought it over, and sort of got chummy with the idea, you'll be
+just as keen on it as I am."
+
+"Never!"
+
+"Oh, yes, you will. It's the knickerbocker end of it that scares you.
+Nothing new or startling about pajamas, except that more and more women
+are wearing 'em, and that no girl would dream of going away to school
+without her six sets of pajamas. Why, a girl in a regulation nightie
+at one of their midnight spreads would be ostracized. Of course I've
+thought up a couple of new kinks in 'em--new ways of cutting and all
+that, and there's one model--a washable crepe, for traveling, that
+doesn't need to be pressed--but I'll talk about that later."
+
+T. A. Buck was trying to put in a word of objection, but she would have
+none of it. But at Emma McChesney's next words his indignation would
+brook no barriers.
+
+"Now," she went on, "the feature of the knickerbockers will be this:
+They've got to be ready for the boys' spring trip, and in all the larger
+cities, especially in the hustling Middle-Western towns, and along
+the coast, too, I'm planning to have the knickerbockers introduced at
+private and exclusive exhibitions, and worn by--get this, please--worn
+by living models. One big store in each town, see? Half a dozen
+good-looking girls--"
+
+"Never!" shouted T. A. Buck, white and shaking. "Never! This firm has
+always had a name for dignity, solidness, conservatism--"
+
+"Then it's just about time it lost that reputation. It's all very well
+to hang on to your dignity when you're on solid ground, but when you
+feel things slipping from under you the thing to do is to grab on to
+anything that'll keep you on your feet for a while at least. I tell
+you the women will go wild over this knickerbocker idea. They've been
+waiting for it."
+
+"It's a wild-cat scheme," disputed Buck hotly. "It's a drowning man's
+straw, and just about as helpful. I'm a reasonable man--"
+
+"All unreasonable men say that," smiled Emma McChesney.
+
+"--I'm a reasonable man, I say. And heaven knows I have the interest of
+this firm at heart. But this is going too far. If we're going to smash
+we'll go decently, and with our name untarnished. Pajamas are bad
+enough. But when it comes to the firm of T. A. Buck being represented
+by--by--living model hussies stalking about in satin tights like chorus
+girls, why--"
+
+In Emma McChesney's alert, electric mind there leapt about a dozen plans
+for winning this man over. For win him she would, in the end. It was
+merely a question of method. She chose the simplest. There was a set
+look about her jaw. Her eyes flashed. Two spots of carmine glowed in her
+cheeks.
+
+"I expected just this," she said. "And I prepared for it." She crossed
+swiftly to her desk, opened a drawer, and took out a flat package. "I
+expected opposition. That's why I had these samples made up to show you.
+I designed them myself, and tore up fifty patterns before I struck one
+that suited me. Here are the pajamas."
+
+She lifted out a dainty, shell-pink garment, and shook it out before the
+half-interested, half-unwilling eyes of T. A. Buck.
+
+"This is the jacket. Buttons on the left; see? Instead of the right, as
+it would in a man's garment. Semi-sailor collar, with knotted soft
+silk scarf. Oh, it's just a little kink, but they'll love it. They're
+actually becoming. I've tried 'em. Notice the frogs and cord. Pretty
+neat, yes? Slight flare at the hips. Makes 'em set and hang right.
+Perfectly straight, like a man's coat."
+
+T. A. Buck eyed the garments with a grudging admiration.
+
+"Oh, that part of it don't sound so unreasonable, although I don't
+believe there is much of a demand for that kind of thing. But the
+other---the--the knickerbocker things--that's not even practical. It
+will make an ugly garment, and the women who would fall for a fad like
+that wouldn't be of the sort to wear an ugly piece of lingerie. It isn't
+to be thought of seriously--"
+
+Emma McChesney stepped to the door of the tiny wash-room off her office
+and threw it open.
+
+"Miss La Noyes! We're ready for you."
+
+And there emerged from the inner room a trim, lithe, almost boyishly
+slim figure attired in a bewitchingly skittish-looking garment
+consisting of knickerbockers and snug brassiere of king's blue satin
+messaline. Dainty black silk stockings and tiny buckled slippers set off
+the whole effect.
+
+"Miss La Noyes," said Emma McChesney, almost solemnly, "this is Mr. T.
+A. Buck, president of the firm. Miss La Noyes, of the 'Gay Social Whirl'
+company."
+
+Miss La Noyes bowed slightly and rested one white hand at her side in an
+attitude of nonchalant ease.
+
+"Pleased, I'm shaw!" she said, in a clear, high voice.
+
+And, "Charmed," replied T. A. Buck, his years and breeding standing him
+in good stead now.
+
+Emma McChesney laid a kindly hand on the girl's shoulder. "Turn slowly,
+please. Observe the absence of unnecessary fulness about the hips, or
+at the knees. No wrinkles to show there. No man will ever appreciate the
+fine points of this little garment, but the women!--To the left, Miss La
+Noyes. You'll see it fastens snug and trim with a tiny clasp just below
+the knees. This garment has the added attraction of being fastened
+to the upper garment, a tight satin brassiere. The single, unattached
+garment is just as satisfactory, however. Women are wearing plush this
+year. Not only for the street, but for evening dresses. I rather think
+they'll fancy a snappy little pair of yellow satin knickers under a gown
+of the new orange plush. Or a taupe pair, under a gray street suit. Or a
+natty little pair of black satin, finished and piped in white satin, to
+be worn with a black and white shopping costume. Why, I haven't worn a
+petticoat since I--"
+
+"Do you mean to tell me," burst from the long-pent T. A. Buck, "that you
+wear 'em too?"
+
+"Crazy about 'em. Miss La Noyes, will you just slip on your street
+skirt, please?"
+
+She waited in silence until the demure Miss La Noyes reappeared. A
+narrow, straight-hanging, wrinkleless cloth skirt covered the much
+discussed under-garment. "Turn slowly, please. Thanks. You see, Mr.
+Buck? Not a wrinkle. No bunchiness. No lumps. No crawling up about the
+knees. Nothing but ease, and comfort, and trim good looks."
+
+T. A. Buck passed his hand over his head in a dazed, helpless gesture.
+There was something pathetic in his utter bewilderment and helplessness
+in contrast with Emma McChesney's breezy self-confidence, and the
+show-girl's cool poise and unconcern.
+
+"Wait a minute," he murmured, almost pleadingly. "Let me ask a couple of
+questions, will you?"
+
+"Questions? A hundred. That proves you're interested."
+
+"Well, then, let me ask this young lady the first one. Miss--er--La
+Noyes, do you honestly and truly like this garment? Would you buy one if
+you saw it in a shop window?"
+
+Miss La Noyes' answer came trippingly and without hesitation. She did
+not even have to feel of her back hair first.
+
+"Say, I'd go without my lunch for a week to get it. Mrs. McChesney says
+I can have this pair. I can't wait till our prima donna sees 'em. She'll
+hate me till she's got a dozen like 'em."
+
+"Next!" urged Mrs. McChesney, pleasantly.
+
+But T. A. Buck shook his head. "That's all. Only--"
+
+Emma McChesney patted Miss La Noyes lightly on the shoulder, and smiled
+dazzlingly upon her. "Run along, little girl. You've done beautifully.
+And many thanks."
+
+Miss La Noyes, appearing in another moment dressed for the street,
+stopped at the door to bestow a frankly admiring smile upon the
+abstracted president of the company, and a grateful one upon its
+pink-cheeked secretary.
+
+"Hope you'll come and see our show some evening. You won't know me at
+first, because I wear a blond wig in the first scene. Third from the
+left, front row." And to Mrs. McChesney: "I cer'nly did hate to get up
+so early this morning, but after you're up it ain't so fierce. And it
+cer'nly was easy money. Thanks."
+
+[Illustration: "'No man will ever appreciate the fine points of this
+little garment, but the women--!'"]
+
+Emma McChesney glanced quickly at T. A., saw that he was pliant enough
+for the molding process, and deftly began to shape, and bend, and smooth
+and pat.
+
+"Let's sit down, and unravel the kinks in our nerves. Now, if you do
+favor this new plan--oh, I mean after you've given it consideration, and
+all that! Yes, indeed. But if you do, I think it would be good policy
+to start the game in--say--Cleveland. The Kaufman-Oster Company of
+Cleveland have a big, snappy, up-to-the-minute store. We'll get them to
+send out announcement cards. Something neat and flattering-looking.
+See? Little stage all framed up. Scene set to show a bedroom or boudoir.
+Then, thin girls, plump girls, short girls, high girls. They'll go
+through all the paces. We won't only show the knickerbockers: we
+demonstrate how the ordinary petticoat bunches and crawls up under the
+heavy plush and velvet top skirt. We'll show 'em in street clothes,
+evening clothes, afternoon frocks. Each one in a different shade of
+satin knicker. And silk stockings and cunning little slippers to match.
+The store will stand for that. It's a big ad for them, too."
+
+Emma McChesney's hair was slightly tousled. Her cheeks were carmine. Her
+eyes glowed.
+
+"Don't you see! Don't you get it! Can't you feel how the thing's going
+to take hold?"
+
+"By Gad!" burst from T. A. Buck, "I'm darned if I don't believe you're
+right--almost--But are you sure that you believe--"
+
+Emma McChesney brought one little white fist down into the palm of the
+other hand. "Sure? Why, I'm so sure that when I shut my eyes I can see
+T. A. Senior sitting over there in that chair, tapping the side of his
+nose with the edge of his tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses, and nodding his
+head, with his features all screwed up like a blessed old gargoyle, the
+way he always did when something tickled him. That's how sure I am."
+
+T. A. Buck stood up abruptly. He shrugged his shoulders. His face looked
+strangely white and drawn. "I'll leave it to you. I'll do my share of
+the work. But I'm not more than half convinced, remember."
+
+"That's enough for the present," answered Emma McChesney, briskly.
+"Well, now, suppose we talk machinery and girls, and cutters for a
+while."
+
+Two months later found T. A. Buck and his sales-manager, both
+shirt-sleeved, both smoking nervously, as they marked, ticketed, folded,
+arranged. They were getting out the travelers' spring lines. Entered
+Mrs. McChesney, and stood eying them, worriedly. It was her dozenth
+visit to the stock-room that morning. A strange restlessness seemed to
+trouble her. She wandered from office to show-room, from show-room to
+factory.
+
+"What's the trouble?" inquired T. A. Buck, squinting up at her through a
+cloud of cigar smoke.
+
+"Oh, nothing," answered Mrs. McChesney, and stood fingering the piles of
+glistening satin garments, a queer, faraway look in her eyes. Then she
+turned and walked listlessly toward the door. There she encountered
+Spalding--Billy Spalding, of the coveted Middle-Western territory, Billy
+Spalding, the long-headed, quick-thinking; Spalding, the persuasive,
+Spalding the mixer, Spalding on whom depended the fate of the T. A. Buck
+Featherloom Knickerbocker and Pajama.
+
+"'Morning! When do you start out?" she asked him.
+
+"In the morning. Gad, that's some line, what? I'm itching to spread it.
+You're certainly a wonder-child, Mrs. McChesney. Why, the boys--"
+
+Emma McChesney sighed, somberly. "That line does sort of--well, tug at
+your heart-strings, doesn't it?" She smiled, almost wistfully. "Say,
+Billy, when you reach the Eagle House at Waterloo, tell Annie, the
+head-waitress to rustle you a couple of Mrs. Traudt's dill pickles. Tell
+her Mrs. McChesney asked you to. Mrs. Traudt, the proprietor's wife,
+doles 'em out to her favorites. They're crisp, you know, and firm, and
+juicy, and cold, and briny."
+
+Spalding drew a sibilant breath. "I'll be there!" he grinned. "I'll be
+there!"
+
+But he wasn't. At eight the next morning there burst upon Mrs. McChesney
+a distraught T. A. Buck.
+
+"Hear about Spalding?" he demanded.
+
+"Spalding? No."
+
+"His wife 'phoned from St. Luke's. Taken with an appendicitis attack
+at midnight. They operated at five this morning. One of those
+had-it-been-twenty-four-hours-later-etc. operations. That settles us."
+
+"Poor kid," replied Emma McChesney. "Rough on him and his brand-new
+wife."
+
+"Poor kid! Yes. But how about his territory? How about our new line? How
+about--"
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Emma McChesney, cheerfully.
+
+"I'd like to know how! We haven't a man equal to the territory. He's our
+one best bet."
+
+"Oh, that's all right," said Mrs. McChesney again, smoothly.
+
+A little impatient exclamation broke from T. A. Buck. At that Emma
+McChesney smiled. Her new listlessness and abstraction seemed to drop
+from her. She braced her shoulders, and smiled her old sunny, heartening
+smile.
+
+"I'm going out with that line. I'm going to leave a trail of pajamas and
+knickerbockers from Duluth to Canton."
+
+"You! No, you won't!" A dull, painful red had swept into T. A. Buck's
+face. It was answered by a flood of scarlet in Mrs. McChesney's
+countenance.
+
+"I don't get you," she said. "I'm afraid you don't realize what this
+trip means. It's going to be a fight. They'll have to be coaxed and
+bullied and cajoled, and reasoned with. It's going to be a 'show-me'
+trip."
+
+T. A. Buck took a quick step forward. "That's just why. I won't have you
+fighting with buyers, taking their insults, kowtowing to them, salving
+them. It--it isn't woman's work."
+
+Emma McChesney was sorting the contents of her desk with quick, nervous
+fingers. "I'll get the Twentieth Century," she said, over her shoulder.
+"Don't argue, please. If it's no work for a woman then I suppose it
+follows that I'm unwomanly. For ten years I traveled this country
+selling T. A. Buck's Featherloom Petticoats. My first trip on the road
+I was in the twenties--and pretty, too. I'm a woman of thirty-seven
+now. I'll never forget that first trip--the heartbreaks, the insults
+I endured, the disappointments, the humiliation, until they understood
+that I meant business--strictly business. I'm tired of hearing you men
+say that this and that and the other isn't woman's work. Any work is
+woman's work that a woman can do well. I've given the ten best years of
+my life to this firm. Next to my boy at school it's the biggest thing in
+my life. Sometimes it swamps even him. Don't come to me with that sort
+of talk." She was locking drawers, searching pigeon-holes, skimming
+files. "This is my busy day." She arose, and shut her desk with a bang,
+locked it, and turned a flushed and beaming face toward T. A. Buck, as
+he stood frowning before her.
+
+[Illustration: "Emma McChesney... I believe in you now! Dad and I both
+believe in you'"]
+
+"Your father believed in me--from the ground up. We understood each
+other, he and I. You've learned a lot in the last year and a half, T. A.
+Junior-that-was, but there's one thing you haven't mastered. When will
+you learn to believe in Emma McChesney?"
+
+She was out of the office before he had time to answer, leaving him
+standing there.
+
+In the dusk of a late winter evening just three weeks later, a man
+paused at the door of the unlighted office marked "Mrs. McChesney." He
+looked about a moment, as though dreading detection. Then he opened the
+door, stepped into the dim quiet of the little room, and closed the door
+gently after him. Everything in the tiny room was quiet, neat, orderly.
+It seemed to possess something of the character of its absent owner. The
+intruder stood there a moment, uncertainly, looking about him.
+
+Then he took a step forward and laid one hand on the back of the empty
+chair before the closed desk. He shut his eyes and it seemed that he
+felt her firm, cool, reassuring grip on his fingers as they clutched the
+wooden chair. The impression was so strong that he kept his eyes shut,
+and they were still closed when his voice broke the silence of the dim,
+quiet little room.
+
+"Emma McChesney," he was saying aloud, "Emma McChesney, you great big,
+fine, brave, wonderful woman, you! I believe in you now! Dad and I both
+believe in you."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+IN THE ABSENCE OF THE AGENT
+
+
+This is a love-story. But it is a love-story with a logical ending.
+Which means that in the last paragraph no one has any one else in his
+arms. Since logic and love have long been at loggerheads, the story may
+end badly. Still, what love passages there are shall be left intact.
+There shall be no trickery. There shall be no running breathless,
+flushed, eager-eyed, to the very gateway of Love's garden, only to bump
+one's nose against that baffling, impregnable, stone-wall phrase of "let
+us draw a veil, dear reader." This is the story of the love of a man for
+a woman, a mother for her son, and a boy for a girl. And there shall be
+no veil.
+
+Since 8 A.M., when she had unlocked her office door, Mrs. Emma McChesney
+had been working in bunches of six. Thus, from twelve to one she
+had dictated six letters, looked up memoranda, passed on samples of
+petticoat silk, fired the office-boy, wired Spalding out in Nebraska,
+and eaten her lunch. Emma McChesney was engaged in that nerve-racking
+process known as getting things out of the way. When Emma McChesney
+aimed to get things out of the way she did not use a shovel; she used a
+road-drag.
+
+Now, at three-thirty, she shut the last desk-drawer with a bang, locked
+it, pushed back the desk-phone, discovered under it the inevitable
+mislaid memorandum, scanned it hastily, tossed the scrap of paper into
+the brimming waste-basket, and, yawning, raised her arms high above her
+head. The yawn ended, her arms relaxed, came down heavily, and landed
+her hands in her lap with a thud. It had been a whirlwind day. At that
+moment most of the lines in Emma McChesney's face slanted downward.
+
+But only for that moment. The next found her smiling. Up went the
+corners of her mouth! Out popped her dimples! The laugh-lines appeared
+at the corners of her eyes. She was still dimpling like an anticipatory
+child when she had got her wraps from the tiny closet, and was standing
+before the mirror, adjusting her hat.
+
+[Illustration: "It had been a whirlwind day"]
+
+The hat was one of those tiny, pert, head-hugging trifles that only
+a very pretty woman can wear. A merciless little hat, that gives no
+quarter to a blotched skin, a too large nose, colorless eyes. Emma
+McChesney stood before the mirror, the cruel little hat perched atop her
+hair, ready to give it the final and critical bash which should bring it
+down about her ears where it belonged. But even now, perched grotesquely
+atop her head as it was, you could see that she was going to get away
+with it.
+
+It was at this critical moment that the office door opened, and there
+entered T. A. Buck, president of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat
+and Lingerie Company. He entered smiling, leisurely, serene-eyed, as
+one who anticipates something pleasurable. At sight of Emma McChesney
+standing, hatted before the mirror, the pleasurable look became less
+confident.
+
+"Hello!" said T. A. Buck. "Whither?" and laid a sheaf of
+businesslike-looking papers on the top of Mrs. McChesney's well cleared
+desk.
+
+Mrs. McChesney, without turning, performed the cramming process
+successfully, so that her hat left only a sub-halo of fluffy bright hair
+peeping out from the brim.
+
+Then, "Playing hooky," she said. "Go 'way."
+
+T. A. Buck picked up the sheaf of papers and stowed them into an inside
+coat-pocket. "As president of this large and growing concern," he said,
+"I want to announce that I'm going along."
+
+Emma McChesney adjusted her furs. "As secretary of said firm I rise to
+state that you're not invited."
+
+T. A. Buck, hands in pockets, stood surveying the bright-eyed woman
+before him. The pleasurable expression had returned to his face.
+
+"If the secretary of the above-mentioned company has the cheek to play
+hooky at 3:30 P.M. in the middle of November, I fancy the president can
+demand to know where she's going, and then go too."
+
+Mrs. McChesney unconcernedly fastened the clasp of her smart English
+glove.
+
+"Didn't you take two hours for lunch? Had mine off the top of my desk.
+Ham sandwich and a glass of milk. Dictated six letters between bites and
+swallows."
+
+A frown of annoyance appeared between T. A. Buck's remarkably fine eyes.
+He came over to Mrs. McChesney and looked down at her.
+
+"Look here, you'll kill yourself. It's all very well to be interested in
+one's business, but I draw the line at ruining my digestion for it. Why
+in Sam Hill don't you take a decent hour at least?"
+
+"Only bricklayers can take an hour for lunch," retorted Emma McChesney.
+"When you get to be a lady captain of finance you can't afford it."
+
+She crossed to her desk and placed her fingers on the electric switch.
+The desk-light cast a warm golden glow on the smart little figure in the
+trim tailored suit, the pert hat, the shining furs. She was rosy-cheeked
+and bright-eyed as a schoolgirl. There was about her that vigor, and
+glow, and alert assurance which bespeaks congenial work, sound sleep,
+healthy digestion, and a sane mind. She was as tingling, and bracing,
+and alive, and antiseptic as the crisp, snappy November air outdoors.
+
+T. A. Buck drew a long breath as he looked at her.
+
+"Those are devastating clothes," he remarked. "D'you know, until now I
+always had an idea that furs weren't becoming to women. Make most of 'em
+look stuffy. But you--"
+
+Emma McChesney glanced down at the shining skins of muff and scarf. She
+stroked them gently and lovingly with her gloved hand.
+
+"M-m-m-m! These semi-precious furs _are_ rather satisfactory--until you
+see a woman in sealskin and sables. Then you want to use 'em for a hall
+rug."
+
+T. A. Buck stepped within the radius of the yellow light, so that its
+glow lighted up his already luminous eyes--eyes that had a trick of
+translucence under excitement.
+
+"Sables and sealskin," repeated T. A. Buck, his voice vibrant. "If it's
+those you want, you can--"
+
+Snap! went the electric switch under Emma McChesney's fingers. It was as
+decisive as a blow in the face. She walked to the door. The little room
+was dim.
+
+"I'm sending my boy through college with my sealskin-and-sable fund,"
+she said crisply; "and I'm to meet him at 4:30."
+
+"Oh, that's your appointment!" Relief was evident in T. A. Buck's tone.
+
+Emma McChesney shook a despairing head. "For impudent and unquenchable
+inquisitiveness commend me to a man! Here! If you must know, though I
+intended it as a surprise when it was finished and furnished--I'm going
+to rent a flat, a regular six-room, plenty-of-closets flat, after ten
+years of miserable hotel existence. Jock's running over for two days to
+approve it. I ought to have waited until the holidays, so he wouldn't
+miss classes; but I couldn't bear to. I've spent ten Thanksgivings, and
+ten Christmases, and ten New Years in hotels. Hell has no terrors for
+me."
+
+They were walking down the corridor together.
+
+"Take me along--please!" pleaded T. A. Buck, like a boy. "I know all
+about flats, and gas-stoves, and meters, and plumbing, and everything!"
+
+"You!" scoffed Emma McChesney, "with your five-story house and your
+summer home in the mountains!"
+
+"Mother won't hear of giving up the house. I hate it myself. Bathrooms
+in those darned old barracks are so cold that a hot tub is an icy plunge
+before you get to it." They had reached the elevator. A stubborn look
+appeared about T. A. Buck's jaw. "I'm going!" he announced, and
+scudded down the hail to his office door. Emma McChesney pressed the
+elevator-button. Before the ascending car showed a glow of light in the
+shaft T. A. Buck appeared with hat, gloves, stick.
+
+"I think the car's downstairs. We'll run up in it. What's the address?
+Seventies, I suppose?"
+
+Emma McChesney stepped out of the elevator and turned. "Car! Not I!
+If you're bound to come with me you'll take the subway. They're asking
+enough for that apartment as it is. I don't intend to drive up in a
+five-thousand-dollar motor and have the agent tack on an extra twenty
+dollars a month."
+
+T. . Buck smiled with engaging agreeableness. "Subway it is," he said.
+"Your presence would turn even a Bronx train into a rose-garden."
+
+Twelve minutes later the new apartment building, with its cream-tile
+and red-brick Louis Somethingth facade, and its tan brick and plaster
+Michael-Dougherty-contractor back, loomed before them, soaring even
+above its lofty neighbors. On the door-step stood a maple-colored giant
+in a splendor of scarlet, and gold braid, and glittering buttons. The
+great entrance door was opened for them by a half-portion duplicate of
+the giant outside. In the foyer was splendor to grace a palace hall.
+There were great carved chairs. There was a massive oaken table. There
+were rugs, there were hangings, there were dim-shaded lamps casting a
+soft glow upon tapestry and velours.
+
+Awaiting the pleasure of the agent, T. A. Buck, leaning upon his stick,
+looked about him appreciatively. "Makes the Knickerbocker lobby look
+like the waiting-room in an orphan asylum."
+
+"Don't let 'em fool you," answered Emma McChesney, _sotto voce,_ just
+before the agent popped out of his office. "It's all included in the
+rent. Dinky enough up-stairs. If ever I have guests that I want to
+impress I'll entertain 'em in the hall."
+
+There approached them the agent, smiling, urbane, pleasing as to
+manner--but not too pleasing; urbanity mixed, so to speak, with the
+leaven of caution.
+
+"Ah, yes! Mrs.--er--McChesney, wasn't it? I can't tell you how many
+parties have been teasing me for that apartment since you looked at it.
+I've had to--well--make myself positively unpleasant in order to hold it
+for you. You said you wished your son to--"
+
+The glittering little jewel-box of an elevator was taking them higher
+and higher. The agent stared hard at T. A. Buck.
+
+Mrs. McChesney followed his gaze. "My business associate, Mr. T. A.
+Buck," she said grimly.
+
+The agent discarded caution; he was all urbanity. Their floor attained,
+he unlocked the apartment door and threw it open with a gesture which
+was a miraculous mixture of royalty and generosity.
+
+"He knows you!" hissed Emma McChesney, entering with T. A. "Another
+ten on the rent." The agent pulled up a shade, switched on a light,
+straightened an electric globe. T. A. Buck looked about at the bare
+white walls, at the bare polished floor, at the severe fireplace.
+
+"I knew it couldn't last," he said.
+
+"If it did," replied Emma McChesney good-naturedly, "I couldn't afford
+to live here," and disappeared into the kitchen followed by the agent,
+who babbled ever and anon of views, of Hudsons, of express-trains, of
+parks, as is the way of agents from Fiftieth Street to One Hundred and
+'Umpty-ninth.
+
+T. A. Buck, feet spread wide, hands behind him, was left standing in the
+center of the empty living-room. He was leaning on his stick and gazing
+fixedly upward at the ornate chandelier. It was a handsome fixture, and
+boasted some of the most advanced ideas in modern lighting equipment.
+Yet it scarcely seemed to warrant the passionate scrutiny which T.
+A. Buck was bestowing upon it. So rapt was his gaze that when the
+telephone-bell shrilled unexpectedly in the hallway he started so that
+his stick slipped on the polished floor, and as Emma McChesney and the
+still voluble agent emerged from the kitchen the dignified head of the
+firm of T. A. Buck and Company presented an animated picture, one leg in
+the air, arms waving wildly, expression at once amazed and hurt.
+
+Emma McChesney surveyed him wide-eyed. The agent, unruffled, continued
+to talk on his way to the telephone.
+
+"It only looks small to you," he was saying. "Fact is, most people think
+it's too large. They object to a big kitchen. Too much work." He gave
+his attention to the telephone.
+
+Emma McChesney looked troubled. She stood in the doorway, head on one
+side, as one who conjures up a mental picture.
+
+"Come here," she commanded suddenly, addressing the startled T. A. "You
+nagged until I had to take you along. Here's a chance to justify your
+coming. I want your opinion on the kitchen."
+
+"Kitchens," announced T. A. Buck of the English clothes and the
+gardenia, "are my specialty," and entered the domain of the gas-range
+and the sink.
+
+Emma McChesney swept the infinitesimal room with a large gesture.
+
+"Considering it as a kitchen, not as a locker, does it strike you as
+being adequate?"
+
+T. A. Buck, standing in the center of the room, touched all four walls
+with his stick.
+
+"I've heard," he ventured, "that they're--ah--using 'em small this
+year."
+
+Emma McChesney's eyes took on a certain wistful expression. "Maybe. But
+whenever I've dreamed of a home, which was whenever I got lonesome on
+the road, which was every evening for ten years, I'd start to plan a
+kitchen. A kitchen where you could put up preserves, and a keg of dill
+pickles, and get a full-sized dinner without getting things more than
+just comfortably cluttered."
+
+T. A. Buck reflected. He flapped his arms as one who feels pressed for
+room. "With two people occupying the room, as at present, the presence
+of one dill pickle would sort of crowd things, not to speak of a keg of
+'em, and the full-sized dinner, and the--er--preserves. Still--"
+
+"As for a turkey," wailed Emma McChesney, "one would have to go out on
+the fire-escape to baste it."
+
+The swinging door opened to admit the agent. "Would you excuse me?
+A party down-stairs--lease--be back in no time. Just look about--any
+questions--glad to answer later--"
+
+"Quite all right," Mrs. McChesney assured him. Her expression was one of
+relief as the hall door closed behind him. "Good! There's a spot in the
+mirror over the mantel. I've been dying to find out if it was a flaw in
+the glass or only a smudge."
+
+She made for the living-room. T. A. Buck followed thoughtfully.
+Thoughtfully and interestedly he watched her as she stood on tiptoe,
+breathed stormily upon the mirror's surface, and rubbed the moist place
+with her handkerchief. She stood back a pace, eyes narrowed critically.
+
+"It's gone, isn't it?" she asked.
+
+T. A. Buck advanced to where she stood and cocked his head too,
+judicially, and in the opposite direction to which Emma McChesney's head
+was cocked. So that the two heads were very close together.
+
+"It's a poor piece of glass," he announced at last.
+
+A simple enough remark. Perhaps it was made with an object in view, but
+certainly it was not meant to bring forth the storm of protest that
+came from Emma McChesney's lips. She turned on him, lips quivering, eyes
+wrathful.
+
+"You shouldn't have come!" she cried. "You're as much out of place in a
+six-room flat as a truffle would be in a boiled New England dinner. Do
+you think I don't see its shortcomings? Every normal woman, no matter
+what sort of bungalow, palace, ranch-house, cave, cottage, or tenement
+she may be living in, has in her mind's eye a picture of the sort of
+apartment she'd live in if she could afford it. I've had mine mapped
+out from the wall-paper in the front hall to the laundry-tubs in the
+basement, and it doesn't even bear a family resemblance to this."
+
+"I'm sorry," stammered T. A. Buck. "You asked my opinion and I--"
+
+"Opinion! If every one had so little tact as to give their true opinion
+when it was asked this would be a miserable world. I asked you because
+I wanted you to lie. I expected it of you. I needed bolstering up.
+I realize that the rent I'm paying and the flat I'm getting form a
+geometrical problem where X equals the unknown quantity and only the
+agent knows the answer. But it's going to be a home for Jock and me.
+It's going to be a place where he can bring his friends; where he can
+have his books, and his 'baccy, and his college junk. It will be
+the first real home that youngster has known in all his miserable
+boarding-house, hotel, boys' school, and college existence. Sometimes
+when I think of what he's missed, of the loneliness and the neglect when
+I was on the road, of the barrenness of his boyhood, I--"
+
+T. A. Buck started forward as one who had made up his mind about
+something long considered. Then he gulped, retreated, paced excitedly
+to the door and back again. On the return trip he found smiling and
+repentant Emma McChesney regarding him.
+
+"Now aren't you sorry you insisted on coming along? Letting yourself in
+for a ragging like that? I think I'm a wee bit taut in the nerves at the
+prospect of seeing Jock--and planning things with him--I--"
+
+T. A. Buck paused in his pacing. "Don't!" he said. "I had it coming to
+me. I did it deliberately. I wanted to know how you really felt about
+it."
+
+Emma McChesney stared at him curiously. "Well, now you know. But I
+haven't told you half. In all those years while I was selling T. A.
+Buck's Featherloom Petticoats on the road, and eating hotel food that
+tasted the same, whether it was roast beef or ice-cream, I was planning
+this little place. I've even made up my mind to the scandalous price I'm
+willing to pay a maid who'll cook real dinners for us and serve them as
+I've always vowed Jock's dinners should be served when I could afford
+something more than a shifting hotel home."
+
+T. A. Buck was regarding the head of his if walking-stick with a gaze as
+intent as that which he previously had bestowed upon the chandelier. For
+that matter it was a handsome enough stick--a choice thing in malacca.
+But it was scarcely more deserving than the chandelier had been.
+
+Mrs. McChesney had wandered into the dining-room. She peered out of
+windows. She poked into butler's pantry. She inspected wall-lights. And
+still T. A. Buck stared at his stick.
+
+"It's really robbery," came Emma McChesney's voice from the next room.
+"Only a New York agent could have the nerve to do it. I've a friend who
+lives in Chicago--Mary Cutting. You've heard me speak of her. Has a
+flat on the north side there, just next door to the lake. The rent
+is ridiculous; and--would you believe it?--the flat is equipped with
+bookcases, and gorgeous mantel shelves, and buffet, and bathroom
+fixtures, and china-closets, and hall-tree--"
+
+Her voice trailed into nothingness as she disappeared into the kitchen.
+When she emerged again she was still enumerating the charms of the
+absurdly low-priced Chicago flat, thus:
+
+"--and full-length mirrors, and wonderful folding table-shelf gimcracks
+in the kitchen, and--"
+
+T. A. Buck did not look up. But, "Oh, Chicago!" he might have been heard
+to murmur, as only a New-Yorker can breathe those two words.
+
+"Don't 'Oh, Chicago!' like that," mimicked Emma McChesney. "I've lain
+awake nights dreaming of a home I once saw there, with the lake in
+the back yard, and a couple of miles of veranda, and a darling
+vegetable-garden, and the whole place simply honeycombed with bathrooms,
+and sleeping-porches, and sun-parlors, and linen-closets, and--gracious,
+I wonder what's keeping Jock!"
+
+T. A. Buck wrenched his eyes from his stick. All previous remarks
+descriptive of his eyes under excitement paled at the glow which lighted
+them now. They glowed straight into Emma McChesney's eyes and held them,
+startled.
+
+"Emma," said T. A. Buck quite calmly, "will you marry me? I want to
+give you all those things, beginning with the lake in the back yard and
+ending with the linen-closets and the sun-parlor."
+
+And Emma McChesney, standing there in the middle of the dining-room
+floor, stared long at T. A. Buck, standing there in the center of the
+living-room floor. And if any human face, in the space of seventeen
+seconds, could be capable of expressing relief, and regret, and alarm,
+and dismay, and tenderness, and wonder, and a great womanly sympathy,
+Emma McChesney's countenance might be said to have expressed all those
+emotions--and more. The last two were uppermost as she slowly came
+toward him.
+
+"T. A.," she said, and her voice had in it a marvelous quality, "I'm
+thirty-nine years old. You know I was married when I was eighteen and
+got my divorce after eight years. Those eight years would have left any
+woman who had endured them with one of two determinations: to take up
+life again and bring it out into the sunshine until it was sound, and
+sweet, and clean, and whole once more, or to hide the hurt and brood
+over it, and cover it with bitterness, and hate until it destroyed by
+its very foulness. I had Jock, and I chose the sun, thank God! I said
+then that marriage was a thing tried and abandoned forever, for me. And
+now--"
+
+There was something almost fine in the lines of T. A. Buck's too
+feminine mouth and chin; but not fine enough.
+
+"Now, Emma," he repeated, "will you marry me?"
+
+Emma McChesney's eyes were a wonderful thing to see, so full of pain
+were they, so wide with unshed tears.
+
+"As long as--he--lived," she went on, "the thought of marriage was
+repulsive to me. Then, that day seven months ago out in Iowa, when I
+picked up that paper and saw it staring out at me in print that
+seemed to waver and dance"--she covered her eyes with her hand for a
+moment--"'McChesney--Stuart McChesney, March 7, aged forty-seven years.
+Funeral to-day from Howland Brothers' chapel. Aberdeen and Edinburgh
+papers please copy!'"
+
+[Illustration: "'Emma.' he said, 'will you marry me?'"]
+
+T. A. Buck took the hand that covered her eyes and brought it gently
+down.
+
+"Emma," he said, "will you marry me?"
+
+"T. A., I don't love you. Wait! Don't say it! I'm thirty-nine, but
+I'm brave and foolish enough to say that all these years of work, and
+disappointment, and struggle, and bitter experience haven't convinced
+me that love does not exist. People have said about me, seeing me in
+business, that I'm not a marrying woman. There is no such thing as that.
+Every woman is a marrying woman, and sometimes the light-heartedest, and
+the scoffingest, and the most self-sufficient of us are, beneath it all,
+the marryingest. Perhaps I'm making a mistake. Perhaps ten years from
+now I'll be ready to call myself a fool for having let slip what the
+wise ones would call a 'chance.' But I don't think so, T. A."
+
+"You know me too well," argued T. A. Buck rather miserably. "But at
+least you know the worst of me as well as the best. You'd be taking no
+risks."
+
+Emma McChesney walked to the window. There was a little silence. Then
+she finished it with one clean stroke. "We've been good business
+chums, you and I. I hope we always shall be. I can imagine nothing more
+beautiful on this earth for a woman than being married to a man she
+cares for and who cares for her. But, T. A., you're not the man."
+
+And then there were quick steps in the corridor, a hand at the
+door-knob, a slim, tall figure in the doorway. Emma McChesney seemed to
+waft across the rooms and into the embrace of the slim, tall figure.
+
+"Welcome--home!" she cried. "Sketch in the furniture to suit yourself."
+
+"This is going to be great--great!" announced Jock. "What do you know
+about the Oriental potentate down-stairs! I guess Otis Skinner has
+nothing on him when it comes--Why, hello, Mr. Buck!" He was peering into
+the next room. "Why don't you folks light up? I thought you were another
+agent person. Met that one down in the hail. Said he'd be right up.
+What's the matter with him anyway? He smiles like a waxworks. When the
+elevator took me up he was still smiling from the foyer, and I could
+see his grin after the rest of him was lost to sight. Regular Cheshire.
+What's this? Droring-room?"
+
+[Illustration: "'Welcome home!' she cried. 'Sketch in the furniture to
+suit yourself'"]
+
+He rattled on like a pleased boy. He strode over to shake hands with
+Buck. Emma McChesney, cheeks glowing, eyed him adoringly. Then she gave
+a little suppressed cry.
+
+"Jock, what's happened?"
+
+Jock whirled around like a cat. "Where? When? What?"
+
+Emma McChesney pointed at him with one shaking finger. "You! You're
+thin! You're--you're emaciated. Your shoulders, where are they?
+Your--your legs--"
+
+Jock looked down at himself. His glance was pride. "Clothes," he said.
+
+"Clothes?" faltered his mother.
+
+"You're losing your punch, Mother? You used to be up on men's rigging.
+All the boys look like their own shadows these days. English cut. No
+padding. No heels. Incurve at the waist. Watch me walk." He flapped
+across the room, chest concave, shoulders rounded, arms hanging limp,
+feet wide apart, chin thrust forward.
+
+"Do you mean to tell me that's your present form of locomotion?"
+demanded his mother.
+
+"I hope so. Been practising it for weeks. They call it the juvenile
+jump, and all our best leading men have it. I trailed Douglas Fairbanks
+for days before I really got it."
+
+And the tension between T. A. Buck and Emma McChesney snapped with
+a jerk, and they both laughed, and laughed again, at Jock's air of
+offended dignity. They laughed until the rancor in the heart of the man
+and the hurt and pity in the heart of the woman melted into a bond of
+lasting understanding.
+
+"Go on--laugh!" said Jock. "Say, Mother, is there a shower in the
+bathroom, h'm?" And was off to investigate.
+
+The laughter trailed away into nothingness. "Jock," called his mother,
+"do you want your bedroom done in plain or stripes?"
+
+"Plain," came from the regions beyond. "Got a lot of pennants and
+everything."
+
+T. A. Buck picked up his stick from the corner in which it stood.
+
+"I'll run along," he said. "You two will want to talk things over
+together." He raised his voice to reach the boy in the other room. "I'm
+off, Jock."
+
+Jock's protest sounded down the hall. "Don't leave me alone with her.
+She'll blarney me into consenting to blue-and-pink rosebud paper in my
+bedroom."
+
+T. A. Buck had the courage to smile even at that. Emma McChesney was
+watching him, her clear eyes troubled, anxious.
+
+At the door Buck turned, came back a step or two. "I--I think, if you
+don't mind, I'll play hooky this time and run over to Atlantic City for
+a couple of days. You'll find things slowing up, now that the holidays
+are so near."
+
+"Fine idea--fine!" agreed Emma McChesney; but her eyes still wore the
+troubled look.
+
+"Good-by," said T. A. Buck abruptly.
+
+"Good--" and then she stopped. "I've a brand-new idea. Give you
+something to worry about on your vacation."
+
+"I'm supplied," answered T. A. Buck grimly.
+
+"Nonsense! A real worry. A business worry. A surprise."
+
+Jock had joined them, and was towering over his mother, her hand in his.
+
+T. A. Buck regarded them moodily. "After your pajama and knickerbocker
+stunt I'm braced for anything."
+
+"Nothing theatrical this time," she assured him. "Don't expect a show
+such as you got when I touched off the last fuse."
+
+An eager, expectant look was replacing the gloom that bad clouded his
+face. "Spring it."
+
+Emma McChesney waited a moment; then, "I think the time has come to put
+in another line--a staple. It's--flannel nightgowns."
+
+"Flannel nightgowns!" Disgust shivered through Buck's voice. "_Flannel
+nightgowns!_ They quit wearing those when Broadway was a cow-path."
+
+"Did, eh?" retorted Emma McChesney. "That's the New-Yorker speaking.
+Just because the French near-actresses at the Winter Garden wear silk
+lace and sea-foam nighties in their imported boudoir skits, and just
+because they display only those frilly, beribboned handmade affairs
+in the Fifth Avenue shop-windows, don't you ever think that they're a
+national vice. Let me tell you," she went on as T. A. Buck's demeanor
+grew more bristlingly antagonistic, "there are thousands and thousands
+of women up in Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and Michigan, and Oregon, and
+Alaska, and Nebraska, and Dakota who are thankful to retire every night
+protected by one long, thick, serviceable flannel nightie, and one
+practical hot-water bag. Up in those countries retiring isn't a social
+rite: it's a feat of hardihood. I'm keen for a line of plain, full,
+roomy old-fashioned flannel nightgowns of the improved T. A. Buck
+Featherloom products variety. They'll be wearing 'em long after
+knickerbockers have been cut up for patchwork."
+
+The moody look was quite absent from T. A. Buck's face now, and the
+troubled look from Emma McChesney's eyes.
+
+"Well," Buck said grudgingly, "if you were to advise making up a line of
+the latest models in deep-sea divers' uniforms, I suppose I'd give in.
+But flannel nightgowns! In the twentieth century--flannel night--"
+
+"Think it over," laughed Emma McChesney as he opened the door. "We'll
+have it out, tooth and nail, when you get back."
+
+The door closed upon him. Emma McChesney and her son were left alone in
+their new home to be.
+
+"Turn out the light, son," said Emma McChesney, "and come to the window.
+There's a view! Worth the money, alone."
+
+Jock switched off the light. "D' you know, Blonde, I shouldn't wonder if
+old T. A.'s sweetish on you," he said as he came over to the window.
+
+"Old!"
+
+"He's forty or over, isn't he?"
+
+"Son, do you realize your charming mother's thirty-nine?"
+
+"Oh, you! That's different. You look a kid. You're young in all the
+spots where other women of thirty-nine look old. Around the eyes, and
+under the chin, and your hands, and the corners of your mouth."
+
+In the twilight Emma McChesney turned to stare at her son. "Just where
+did you learn all that, young 'un? At college?"
+
+And, "Some view, isn't it, Mother?" parried Jock. The two stood there,
+side by side, looking out across the great city that glittered and swam
+in the soft haze of the late November afternoon. There are lovelier
+sights than New York seen at night, from a window eyrie with a mauve
+haze softening all, as a beautiful but experienced woman is softened by
+an artfully draped scarf of chiffon. There are cities of roses, cities
+of mountains, cities of palm-trees and sparkling lakes; but no sight,
+be it of mountains, or roses, or lakes, or waving palm-trees, is more
+likely to cause that vague something which catches you in the throat.
+
+It caught those two home-hungry people. And it opened the lips of one of
+them almost against his will.
+
+"Mother," said Jock haltingly, painfully, "I came mighty near coming
+home--for good--this time."
+
+His mother turned and searched his face in the dim light.
+
+"What was it, Jock?" she asked, quite without fuss.
+
+The slim young figure in the jumping juvenile clothes stirred and tried
+to speak, tried again, formed the two words: "A--girl."
+
+Emma McChesney waited a second, until the icy, cruel, relentless hand
+that clutched her very heart should have relaxed ever so little. Then,
+"Tell me, sonny boy," she said.
+
+"Why, Mother--that girl--" There was an agony of bitterness and of
+disillusioned youth in his voice.
+
+Emma McChesney came very close, so that her head, in the pert little
+close-fitting hat, rested on the boy's shoulder. She linked her arm
+through his, snug and warm.
+
+"That girl--" she echoed encouragingly.
+
+And, "That girl," went on Jock, taking up the thread of his grief, "why,
+Mother, that--girl--"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Roast Beef, Medium, by Edna Ferber
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