Emma McChesney and Co Part 15

"No."

"You knew plenty of home-women that you could have married, didn't you?"

"I didn't ask them, Emma, but----"

"You know what I mean. Now listen, T. A.: I've loafed for three months. I've lolled and lazied and languished. And I've never been so tired in my life--not even when we were taking January inventory.

Another month of this, and I'd be an old, old woman. I understand, now, what it is that brings that hard, tired, stony look into the faces of the idle women. They have to work so hard to try to keep happy. I suppose if I had been a homebody all my life, I might be hardened to this kind of thing. But it's too late now. And I'm thankful for it.

Those women who want to shop and dress and drive and play are welcome to my share of it. If I am to be punished in the next world for my wickedness in this, I know what form my torture will take. I shall have to go from shop to shop with a piece of lace in my hand, matching a sample of insertion. Fifteen years of being in the thick of it spoil one for tatting and tea. The world is full of homebodies, I suppose.

And they're happy. I suppose I might have been one, too, if I hadn't been obliged to get out and hustle. But it's too late to learn now.

Besides, I don't want to. If I do try, I'll be destroying the very thing that attracted you to me in the first place. Remember what you said about the Fifth Avenue girl?"

"But, Emma," interrupted Buck very quietly, "I don't want you to try."

Emma, with a rush of words at her very lips, paused, eyed him for a doubtful moment, asked a faltering question.

"But it was your plan--you said you wanted me to be here when you came home and when you left, didn't you? Do you mean you----"

"I mean that I've missed my business partner every minute for three months. All the time we've been going to those fool dinners and all that kind of thing, I've been bursting to talk skirts to you. I--say, Emma, Adler's designed a new model--a full one, of course, but there's something wrong with it. I can't put my finger on the flaw, but----"

Emma came swiftly over to his chair.

"Make a sketch of it, can't you?" she said. From his pocket Buck drew a pencil, an envelope, and fell to sketching rapidly, squinting down through his cigar smoke as he worked.

"It's like this," he began, absorbed and happy; "you see, where the fulness begins at the knee----"

"Yes!" prompted Emma, breathlessly.

Two hours later they were still bent over the much marked bit of paper.

But their interest in it was not that of those who would solve a perplexing problem. It was the lingering, satisfied contemplation of a task accomplished.

Emma straightened, leaned back, sighed--a victorious, happy sigh.

"And to think," she said, marveling, "to think that I once envied the women who had nothing to do but the things I've done in the last three months!"

Buck had risen, stretched luxuriously, yawned. Now he came over to his wife and took her head in his two hands, cozily, and stood a moment looking into her shining eyes.

"Emma, I may have mentioned this once or twice before, but perhaps you'll still be interested to know that I think you're a wonder. A wonder! You're the----"

"Oh, well, we won't quarrel about that," smiled Emma brazenly. "But I wonder if Adler will agree with us when he sees what we've done to his newest skirt design."

Suddenly a new thought seemed to strike her. She was off down the hall. Buck, following in a leisurely manner, hands in pockets, stood in the bedroom door and watched her plunge into the innermost depths of the clothes-closet.

"What's the idea, Emma?"

"Looking for something," came back his wife's m.u.f.fled tones.

A long wait.

"Can I help?"

"I've got it!" cried Emma, and emerged triumphant, flushed, smiling, holding a garment at arm's length, aloft.

"What----"

Emma shook it smartly, turned it this way and that, held it up under her chin by the sleeves.

"Why, girl!" exclaimed Buck, all a-grin, "it's the----"

"The blue serge," Emma finished for him, "with the white collars and cuffs. And what's more, young man, it's the little blue hat with the what-cha-ma-call-ems on it. And praise be! I'm wearing 'em both down-town to-morrow morning."

V

"HOOPS, MY DEAR!"

Emma McChesney Buck always vigorously disclaimed any knowledge of that dreamy-eyed damsel known as Inspiration. T. A. Buck, her husband-partner, accused her of being on intimate terms with the lady.

So did the adoring office staff of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. Out in the workshop itself, the designers and cutters, those jealous artists of the pencil, shears, and yardstick, looked on in awed admiration on those rare occasions when the feminine member of the business took the scissors in her firm white hands and slashed boldly into a shimmering length of petticoat-silk. When she put down the great shears, there lay on the table the detached parts of that which the appreciative and experienced eyes of the craftsmen knew to be a new and original variation of that elastic garment known as the underskirt.

For weeks preceding one of these cutting-exhibitions, Emma was likely to be not quite her usual brisk self. A mystic glow replaced the alert brightness of her eye. Her wide-awake manner gave way to one of almost sluggish inactivity.

The outer office, noting these things, would lift its eyebrows significantly.

"Another hunch!" it would whisper. "The last time she beat the rest of the trade by six weeks with that elastic-top gusset."

"Inspiration working, Emma?" T. A. Buck would ask, noting the symptoms.

"It isn't inspiration, T. A. Nothing of the kind! It's just an attack of imagination, complicated by clothes-instinct."

"That's all that ails Poiret," Buck would retort.

Early in the autumn, when women were still walking with an absurd sidewise gait, like a duck, or a filly that is too tightly hobbled, the junior partner of the firm began to show unmistakable signs of business aberration. A blight seemed to have fallen upon her bright little office, usually humming with activity. The machinery of her day, ordinarily as noiseless and well ordered as a thing on ball bearings, now rasped, creaked, jerked, stood still, jolted on again. A bustling clerk or stenographer, entering with paper or memorandum, would find her bent over her desk, pencil in hand, absorbed in a rough drawing that seemed to bear no relation to the skirt of the day. The margin of her morning paper was filled with queer little scrawls by the time she reached the office. She drew weird lines with her fork on the table-cloth at lunch. These hieroglyphics she covered with a quick hand, like a bashful schoolgirl, when any one peeped.

"Tell a fellow what it's going to be, can't you?" pleaded Buck.

"I got one glimpse yesterday, when you didn't know I was looking over your shoulder. It seemed a pa.s.s between an overgrown Zeppelin and an apple dumpling. So I know it can't be a skirt. Come on, Emma; tell your old man!"

"Not yet," Emma would reply dreamily.

Buck would strike an att.i.tude intended to intimidate.

"If you have no sense of what is due me as your husband, then I demand, as senior partner of this firm, to know what it is that is taking your time, which rightfully belongs to this business."

"Go away, T. A., and stop pestering me! What do you think I'm designing--a doily?"

Buck, turning to go to his own office, threw a last retort over his shoulder--a rather sobering one, this time.

"Whatever it is, it had better be good--with business what it is and skirts what they are."