C4. Blue Serge
For ten years, Mrs. Emma McChesney's home had been a
wardrobe-trunk. She had taken her family life at second hand.
Four nights out of the seven, her bed was "Lower Eight," and
her breakfast, as many mornings, a cinder-strewn, lukewarm
horror, taken tete-a-tete with a sleepy-eyed stranger and
presided over by a white-coated, black-faced bandit, to whom a
coffee-slopped saucer was a matter of course.
It had been her habit during those ten years on the road as
traveling saleswoman for the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat
Company, to avoid the discomfort of the rapidly chilling car by
slipping early into her berth. There, in kimono, if not in
comfort, she would shut down the electric light with a snap,
raise the shade, and, propped up on one elbow, watch the little
towns go by. They had a wonderful fascination for her, those
Middle Western towns, whose very names had a comfortable, home-
like sound--Sandusky, Galesburg, Crawfordsville, Appleton--very
real towns, with very real people in them. Peering wistfully out
through the dusk, she could get little intimate glimpses of the
home life of these people as the night came on. In those modest
frame houses near the station they need not trouble to pull down
the shades as must their cautious city cousins. As the train
slowed down, there could be had a glimpse of a matronly housewife
moving deftly about in the kitchen's warm-yellow glow, a man
reading a paper in slippered, shirt-sleeved comfort, a pig-tailed
girl at the piano, a woman with a baby in her arms, or a family
group, perhaps, seated about the table, deep in an after-supper
conclave. It had made her homeless as she was homesick.
Emma always liked that picture best. Her keen, imaginative mind
could sense the scene, could actually follow the trend of the
talk during this, the most genial, homely, soul-cheering hour of
the day. The trifling events of the last twelve hours in
schoolroom, in store, in office, in street, in kitchen loom up
large as they are rehearsed in that magic, animated, cozy moment
just before ma says, with a sigh:
"Well, folks, go on into the sitting-room. Me and Nellie've got
to clear away."
Just silhouettes as the train flashed by--these small-town
people--but very human, very enviable to Emma McChesney.
"They're real," she would say. "They're regular,
three-meals-a-day people. I've been peeking in at their windows
for ten years, and I've learned that it is in these towns that
folks really live. The difference between life here and life in
New York is the difference between area and depth. D'you see
what I mean? In New York, they live by the mile, and here they
live by the cubic foot. Well, I'd rather have one juicy, thick
club-steak than a whole platterful of quarter-inch. It's the
same idea."
To those of her business colleagues whose habit it was to lounge
in the hotel window with sneering comment upon the small-town
procession as it went by, Emma McChesney had been wont to say:
"Don't sneer at Main Street. When you come to think of it,
isn't it true that Fifth Avenue, any bright winter afternoon
between four and six, is only Main Street on a busy day
multiplied by one thousand?"
Emma McChesney was not the sort of woman to rail at a fate that
had placed her in the harness instead of in the carriage. But
during all the long years of up-hill pull, from the time she
started with a humble salary in the office of the T. A. Buck
Featherloom Petticoat Company, through the years spent on the
road, up to the very time when the crown of success came to her
in the form of the secretaryship of the prosperous firm of T. A.
Buck, there was a minor but fixed ambition in her heart. That
same ambition is to be found deep down in the heart of every
woman whose morning costume is a tailor suit, whose newspaper
must be read in hurried snatches on the way downtown in crowded
train or car, and to whom nine A.M. spells "Business."
"In fifteen years," Emma McChesney used to say, "I've never
known what it is to loll in leisure. I've never had a chance to
luxuriate. Sunday? To a working woman, Sunday is for the
purpose of repairing the ravages of the other six days. By the
time you've washed your brushes, mended your skirt-braid, darned
your stockings and gloves, looked for gray hairs and crows'-feet,
and skimmed the magazine section, it's Monday."
It was small wonder that Emma McChesney's leisure had been
limited. In those busy years she had not only earned the living
for herself and her boy; she had trained that boy into manhood
and placed his foot on the first rung of business success. She
had transformed the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company from
a placidly mediocre concern to a thriving, flourishing,
nationally known institution. All this might have turned another
woman's head. It only served to set Emma McChesney's more
splendidly on her shoulders. Not too splendidly, however; for,
with her marriage to her handsome business partner, T. A. Buck,
that well-set, independent head was found to fit very cozily into
the comfortable hollow formed by T. A. Buck's right arm.
"Emma," Buck had said, just before their marriage, "what is
the arrangement to be after--after----"
"Just what it is now, I suppose," Emma had replied, "except
that we'll come down to the office together."
He had regarded her thoughtfully for a long minute. Then,
"Emma, for three months after our marriage will you try being
just Mrs. T. A. Buck?"
"You mean no factory, no Featherlooms, no dictation, no business
bothers!" Her voice was a rising scale of surprise.
"Just try it for three months, with the privilege of a lifetime,
if you like it. But try it. I--I'd like to see you there when I
leave, Emma. I'd like to have you there when I come home. I
suppose I sound like a selfish Turk, but----"
"You sound like a regular husband," Emma McChesney had
interrupted, "and I love you for it. Now listen, T. A. For
three whole months I'm going to be what the yellow novels used to
call a doll-wife. I'm going to meet you at the door every night
with a rose in my hair. I shall wear pink things with lace
ruffles on 'em. Don't you know that I've been longing to do just
those things for years and years? I'm going to blossom out into
a beauty. Watch me! I've never had time to study myself. I'll
hold shades of yellow and green and flesh-color up to my face to
see which brings out the right tints. I'm going to gaze at
myself through half-closed eyes to see which shade produces
tawny lights in my hair. Ever since I can remember, I've been so
busy that it has been a question of getting the best possible
garments in the least possible time for the smallest possible
sum. In that case, one gets blue serge. I've worn blue serge
until it feels like a convict's uniform. I'm going to blossom
out into fawn and green and mauve. I shall get evening dresses
with only bead shoulder-straps. I'm going to shop. I've never
really seen Fifth Avenue between eleven and one, when the real
people come out. My views of it have been at nine A.M. when the
office-workers are going to work, and at five- thirty when they
are going home. I will now cease to observe the proletariat and
mingle with the predatory. I'll probably go in for those tiffin
things at the Plaza. If I do, I'll never be the same woman
again."
Whereupon she paused with dramatic effect.
To all of which T. A. Buck had replied:
"Go as far as you like. Take fencing lessons, if you want to,
or Sanskrit. You've been a queen bee for so many years that I
think the role of drone will be a pleasant change. Let me
shoulder the business worries for a while. You've borne them
long enough."
"It's a bargain. For three months I shall do nothing more
militant than to pick imaginary threads off your coat lapel and
pout when you mention business. At the end of those three months
we'll go into private session, compare notes, and determine
whether the plan shall cease or become permanent. Shake hands on
it."
They shook hands solemnly. As they did so, a faint shadow of
doubt hovered far, far back in the depths of T. A. Buck's fine
eyes. And a faint, inscrutable smile lurked in the corners of
Emma's lips.
So it was that Emma McChesney, the alert, the capable, the brisk,
the business-like, assumed the role of Mrs. T. A. Buck, the
leisurely, the languid, the elegant. She, who formerly, at
eleven in the morning, might have been seen bent on selling the
best possible bill of spring Featherlooms to Joe Greenbaum, of
Keokuk, Iowa, could now be found in a modiste's
gray-and-raspberry salon, being draped and pinned and fitted.
She, whose dynamic force once charged the entire office and
factory with energy and efficiency, now distributed a tithe of
that priceless vigor here, a tithe there, a tithe everywhere, and
thus broke the very backbone of its power.
She had never been a woman to do things by halves. What she
undertook to do she did thoroughly and whole-heartedly. This
principle she applied to her new mode of life as rigidly as she
had to the old.
That first month slipped magically by. Emma was too much a woman
not to feel a certain exquisite pleasure in the selecting of
delicate and becoming fabrics. There was a thrill of novelty in
being able to spend an hour curled up with a book after lunch, to
listen to music one afternoon a week, to drive through the
mistily gray park; to walk up the thronged, sparkling Avenue,
pausing before its Aladdin's Cave windows. Simple enough
pleasures, and taken quite as a matter of course by thousands of
other women who had no work-filled life behind them to use as
contrast.
She plunged into her new life whole-heartedly. The first new
gown was exciting. It was a velvet affair with furs, and
gratifyingly becoming. Her shining blond head rose above the
soft background of velvet and fur with an effect to distract the
least observing.
"Like it?" she had asked Buck, turning slowly, frankly sure of
herself.
"You're wonderful in it," said T. A. Buck. "Say, Emma, where's
that blue thing you used to wear--the one with
the white cuffs and collar, and the little blue hat with the
what-cha-ma-call-ems on it?"
"T. A. Buck, you're--you're--well, you're a man, that's what you
are! That blue thing was worn threadbare in the office, and I
gave it to the laundress's niece weeks ago." Small wonder her
cheeks took on a deeper pink.
"Oh," said Buck, unruffled, "too bad! There was something
about that dress--I don't know----"
At the first sitting of the second gown, Emma revolted openly.
On the floor at Emma's feet there was knotted into a
contortionistic attitude a small, wiry, impolite person named
Smalley. Miss Smalley was an artist in draping and knew it. She
was the least fashionable person in all that smart dressmaking
establishment. She refused to notice the
corset-coiffure-and-charmeuse edict that governed all other
employees in the shop. In her shabby little dress, her
steel-rimmed spectacles, her black-sateen apron, Smalley might
have passed for a Bird Center home dressmaker. Yet, given a yard
or two or three of satin and a saucer of pins, Smalley could make
the dumpiest of debutantes look like a fragile flower.
At a critical moment Emma stirred. Handicapped as she was by a
mouthful of nineteen pins and her bow-knot attitude, Smalley
still could voice a protest.
"Don't move!" she commanded, thickly.
"Wait a minute," Emma said, and moved again, more disastrously
than before. "Don't you think it's too--too young?"
She eyed herself in the mirror anxiously, then looked down at
Miss Smalley's nut-cracker face that was peering up at her, its
lips pursed grotesquely over the pins.
"Of course it is," mumbled Miss Smalley. "Everybody's clothes
are too young for 'em nowadays. The only difference between the
dresses we make for girls of sixteen and the dresses we make for
their grandmothers of sixty is that the sixty-year-old ones want
'em shorter and lower, and they run more to rose-bud trimming."
Emma surveyed the acid Miss Smalley with a look that was half
amused, half vexed, wholly determined.
"I shan't wear it. Heaven knows I'm not sixty, but I'm not
sixteen either! I don't want to be."
Miss Smalley, doubling again to her task, flung upward a grudging
compliment.
"Well, anyway, you've got the hair and the coloring and the
figure for it. Goodness knows you look young enough!"
"That's because I've worked hard all my life," retorted Emma,
almost viciously. "Another month of this leisure and I'll be as
wrinkled as the rest of them."
Smalley's magic fingers paused in their manipulation of a soft
fold of satin.
"Worked? Earned a living? Used your wits and brains every day
against the wits and brains of other folks?"
"Every day."
Into the eyes of Miss Smalley, the artist in draping, there crept
the shrewd twinkle of Miss Smalley, the successful woman in
business. She had been sitting back on her knees, surveying her
handiwork through narrowed lids. Now she turned her gaze on
Emma, who was smiling down at her.
"Then for goodness' sake don't stop! I've found out that work
is a kind of self-oiler. If you're used to it, the minute you
stop you begin to get rusty, and your hinges creak and you clog
up. And the next thing you know, you break down. Work that you
like to do is a blessing. It keeps you young. When my mother
was my age, she was crippled with rheumatism, and all gnarled up,
and quavery, and all she had to look forward to was death. Now
me--every time the styles in skirts change I get a new hold on
life. And on a day when I can make a short, fat woman look like
a tall, thin woman, just by sitting here on my knees with a
handful of pins, and giving her the line she needs, I go home
feeling like I'd just been born."
"I know that feeling," said Emma, in her eyes a sparkle that
had long been absent. "I've had it when I've landed a
thousand-dollar Featherloom order from a man who has assured me
that he isn't interested in our line."
At dinner that evening, Emma's gown was so obviously not of the
new crop that even her husband's inexpert eye noted it.
"That's not one of the new ones, is it?"
"This! And you a manufacturer of skirts!"
"What's the matter with the supply of new dresses? Isn't there
enough to go round?"
"Enough! I've never had so many new gowns in my life. The
trouble is that I shan't feel at home in them until I've had 'em
all dry-cleaned at least once."
During the second month, there came a sudden, sharp change in
skirt modes. For four years women had been mincing along in
garments so absurdly narrow that each step was a thing to be
considered, each curbing or car-step demanding careful
negotiation. Now, Fashion, in her freakiest mood, commanded a
bewildering width of skirt that was just one remove from the
flaring hoops of Civil War days. Emma knew what that meant for
the Featherloom workrooms and selling staff. New designs, new
models, a shift in prices, a boom for petticoats, for four years
a garment despised.
A hundred questions were on the tip of Emma's tongue; a hundred
suggestions flashed into her keen mind; there occurred to her a
wonderful design for a new model which should be full and flaring
without being bulky and uncomfortable as were the wide petticoats
of the old days.
But a bargain was a bargain. Still, Emma Buck was as human as
Emma McChesney had been. She could not resist a timid,
"T. A., are you--that is--I was just wondering--you're making
'em wide, I suppose, for the spring trade."
A queer look flashed into T. A. Buck's eyes --a relieved look
that was as quickly replaced by an expression both baffled and
anxious.
"Why--a--mmmm--yes--oh, yes, we're making 'em up wide, but----"
"But what?" Emma leaned forward, tense.
"Oh, nothing--nothing."
During the second month there came calling on Emma, those solid
and heavy New Yorkers, with whom the Buck family had been on
friendly terms for many years. They came at the correct hour, in
their correct motor or conservative broughams, wearing their
quietly correct clothes, and Emma gave them tea, and they talked
on every subject from suffrage to salad dressings, and from war
to weather, but never once was mention made of business. And
Emma McChesney's life had been interwoven with business for more
than fifteen years.
There were dinners--long, heavy, correct dinners. Emma, very
well dressed, bright-eyed, alert, intelligent, vital, became very
popular at these affairs, and her husband very proud of her
popularity. And if any one as thoroughly alive as Mrs. T. A.
Buck could have been bored to extinction by anything, then those
dinners would have accomplished the deadly work.
"T. A.," she said one evening, after a particularly large
affair of this sort, "T. A., have you ever noticed anything
about me that is different from other women?"
"Have I? Well, I should say I----"
"Oh, I don't mean what you mean, dear-- thanks just the same. I
mean those women tonight. They all seem to `go in' for something
--votes or charity or dancing or social service, or
something--even the girls. And they all sounded so amateurish,
so untrained, so unprepared, yet they seemed to be dreadfully in
earnest."
"This is the difference," said T. A. Buck. "You've rubbed up
against life, and you know. They've always been sheltered, but now
they want to know. Well, naturally they're going to bungle and
bump their heads a good many times before they really find out."
"Anyway," retorted Emma, "they want to know. That's
something. It's better to have bumped your head, even though you
never see what's on the other side of the wall, than never to
have tried to climb it."
It was in the third week of the third month that Emma encountered
Hortense. Hortense, before her marriage to Henry, the shipping-
clerk, had been a very pretty, very pert, very devoted little
stenographer in the office of the T. A. Buck Featherloom
Petticoat Company. She had married just a month after her
employers, and Emma, from the fulness of her own brimming cup of
happiness, had made Hortense happy with a gift of linens and
lingerie and lace of a fineness that Hortense's beauty-loving,
feminine heart could never have hoped for.
They met in the busy aisle of a downtown department store and
shook hands as do those who have a common bond.
Hortense, as pretty as ever and as pert, spoke first.
"I wouldn't have known you, Mrs. Mc-- Buck!"
"No? Why not?"
"You look--no one would think you'd ever worked in your life. I
was down at the office the other day for a minute--the first time
since I was married. They told me you weren't there any more."
"No; I haven't been down since my marriage either. I'm like
you--an elegant lady of leisure."
Hortense's bright-blue eyes dwelt searchingly on the face of her
former employer.
"The bunch in the office said they missed you something awful."
Then, in haste: "Oh, I don't mean that Mr. Buck don't make
things go all right. They're awful fond of him. But--I don't
know--Miss Kelly said she never has got over waiting for the
sound of your step down the hall at nine--sort of light and quick
and sharp and busy, as if you couldn't wait till you waded into
the day's work. Do you know what I mean?"
"I know what you mean," said Emma.
There was a little pause. The two women so far apart, yet so
near; so different, yet so like, gazed far down into each other's
soul.
"Miss it, don't you?" said Hortense.
"Yes; don't you?"
"Do I! Say----" She turned and indicated the women surging up
and down the store aisles, and her glance and gesture were
replete with contempt. "Say; look at 'em! Wandering around
here, aimless as a lot of chickens in a barnyard. Half of 'em
are here because they haven't got anything else to do. Think of
it! I've watched 'em lots of times. They go pawing over silks
and laces and trimmings just for the pleasure of feeling 'em.
They stand in front of a glass case with a figure in it all
dressed up in satin and furs and jewels, and you'd think they
were worshiping an idol like they used to in the olden days.
They don't seem to have anything to do. Nothing to occupy
their--their heads. Say, if I thought I was going to be like
them in time, I----"
"Hortense, my dear child, you're--you're happy, aren't you?
Henry----"
"Well, I should say we are! I'm crazy about Henry, and he
thinks I'm perfect. Honestly, ain't they a scream! They think
they're so big and manly and all, and they're just like kids;
ain't it so? We're living in a four-room apartment in Harlem.
We've got it fixed up too cozy for anything."
"I'd like to come and see you," said Emma. Hortense opened her
eyes wide.
"Honestly; if you would----"
"Let's go up now. I've the car outside."
"Now! Why I--I'd love it!"
They chattered like schoolgirls on the way uptown--these two who
had found so much in common. The little apartment reached,
Hortense threw open the door with the confident gesture of the
housekeeper who is not afraid to have her household taken by
surprise --whose housekeeping is an index of character.
Hortense had been a clean-cut little stenographer. Her
correspondence had always been free from erasures, thumb-marks,
errors. Her four-room flat was as spotless as her typewritten
letters had been. The kitchen shone in its blue and white and
nickel. A canary chirped in the tiny dining-room. There were
books and magazines on the sitting-room table. The bedroom was
brave in its snowy spread and the toilet silver that had been
Henry's gift to her the Christmas they became engaged.
Emma examined everything, exclaimed over everything, admired
everything. Hortense glowed like a rose.
"Do you really like it? I like the green velours in the
sitting-room, don't you? It's always so kind and cheerful.
We're not all settled yet. I don't suppose we ever will be.
Sundays, Henry putters around, putting up shelves, and fooling
around with a can of paint. I always tell him he ought to have
lived on a farm, where he'd have elbow-room."
"No wonder you're so happy and busy," Emma exclaimed, and
patted the girl's fresh, young cheek.
Hortense was silent a moment.
"I'm happy," she said, at last, "but I ain't busy. And--well,
if you're not busy, you can't be happy very long, can you?"
"No," said Emma, "idleness, when you're not used to it, is
misery."
"There! You've said it! It's like running on half-time when
you're used to a day-and-night shift. Something's lacking. It
isn't that Henry isn't grand to me, because he is. Evenings,
we're so happy that we just sit and grin at each other and half
the time we forget to go to a `movie.' After Henry leaves in the
morning, I get to work. I suppose, in the old days, when women
used to have to chop the kindling, and catch the water for
washing in a rain-barrel, and keep up a fire in the kitchen stove
and do their own bread baking and all, it used to keep 'em
hustling. But, my goodness! A four-room flat for two isn't any
work. By eleven, I'm through. I've straightened everything,
from the bed to the refrigerator; the marketing's done, and the
dinner vegetables are sitting around in cold water. The mending
for two is a joke. Henry says it's a wonder I don't sew
double-breasted buttons on his undershirts."
Emma was not smiling. But, then, neither was Hortense. She was
talking lightly, seemingly, but her pretty face was quite
serious.
"The big noise in my day is when Henry comes home at six. That
was all right and natural, I suppose, in those times when a
quilting-bee was a wild afternoon's work, and teaching school
was the most advanced job a woman could hold down."
Emma was gazing fascinated at the girl's sparkling face. Her own
eyes were very bright, and her lips were parted.
"Tell me, Hortense," she said now; "what does Henry say to all
this? Have you told him how you feel?"
"Well, I--I talked to him about it once or twice. I told him
that I've got about twenty-four solid hours a week that I might
be getting fifty cents an hour for. You know, I worked for a
manuscript-typewriting concern before I came over to
Buck's--plays and stories and that kind of thing. They used to
like my work because I never queered their speeches by leaving
out punctuation or mixing up the characters. The manager there
said I could have work any time I wanted it. I've got my own
typewriter. I got it second hand when I first started in. Henry
picks around on it sometimes, evenings. I hardly ever touch it.
It's getting rusty--and so am I."
"It isn't just the money you want, Hortense? Are you sure?"
"Of course I'd like the money. That extra coming in would mean
books--I'm crazy about reading, and so is Henry--and theaters and
lots of things we can't afford now. But that isn't all. Henry
don't want to be a shipping-clerk all his life. He's crazy
about mechanics and that kind of stuff. But the books that he
needs cost a lot. Don't you suppose I'd be proud to feel that
the extra money I'd earned would lift him up where he could have
a chance to be something! But Henry is dead set against it. He
says he is the one that's going to earn the money around here. I
try to tell him that I'm used to using my mind. He laughs and
pinches my cheek and tells me to use it thinking about him." She
stopped suddenly and regarded Emma with conscience-stricken
eyes. "You don't think I'm running down Henry, do you? My
goodness, I don't want you to think that I'd change back again
for a million dollars, because I wouldn't." She looked up at
Emma, conscience-stricken.
Emma came swiftly over and put one hand on the girl's shoulder.
"I don't think it. Not for a minute. I know that the world is
full of Henrys, and that the number of Hortenses is growing
larger and larger. I don't know if the four-room flats are to
blame, or whether it's just a natural development. But the
Henry-Hortense situation seems to be spreading to the
nine-room-and-three-baths apartments, too."
Hortense nodded a knowing head.
"I kind of thought so, from the way you were listening."
The two, standing there gazing at each other almost shyly,
suddenly began to laugh. The laugh was a safety-valve. Then,
quite as suddenly, both became serious. That seriousness had
been the under-current throughout.
"I wonder," said Emma very gently, "if a small Henry, some
day, won't provide you with an outlet for all that stored-up
energy."
Hortense looked up very bravely.
"Maybe. You--you must have been about my age when your boy was
born. Did he make you feel--different?"
The shade of sadness that always came at the mention of those
unhappy years of her early marriage crept into Emma's face now.
"That was not the same, dear," she explained. "I hadn't your
sort of Henry. You see, my boy was my only excuse for living.
You'll never know what that means. And when things grew
altogether impossible, and I knew that I must earn a living for
Jock and myself, I just did it--that's all. I had to."
Hortense thought that over for one deliberate moment. Her brows
were drawn in a frown.
"I'll tell you what I think," she announced, at last, "though
I don't know that I can just exactly put it into words. I mean
this: Some people are just bound to--to give, to build up
things, to--well, to manufacture, because they just can't help
it. It's in 'em, and it's got to come out. Dynamos--that's what
Henry's technical books would call them. You're one--a great
big one. I'm one. Just a little tiny one. But it's sparking
away there all the time, and it might as well be put to some use,
mightn't it?"
Emma bent down and kissed the troubled forehead, and then, very
tenderly, the pretty, puckered lips.
"Little Hortense," she said, "you're asking a great big
question. I can answer it for myself, but I can't answer it for
you. It's too dangerous. I wouldn't if I could."
Emma, waiting in the hall for the lift, looked back at the slim
little figure in the doorway. There was a droop to the
shoulders. Emma's heart smote her.
"Don't bother your head about all this, little girl," she
called back to her. "Just forget to be ambitious and remember
to be happy. That's much the better way."
Hortense, from the doorway, grinned a rather wicked little grin.
"When are you going back to the office, Mrs. Buck?" she asked,
quietly enough.
"What makes you think I'm going back at all?" demanded Emma,
stepping into the shaky little elevator.
"I don't think it," retorted Hortense, once more the pert. "I
know it."
Emma knew it, too. She had known it from the moment that she
shook hands in her compact. There was still one week remaining
of the stipulated three months. It seemed to Emma that that one
week was longer than the combined eleven. But she went through
with colors flying. Whatever Emma McChesney Buck did, she did
well. But, then, T. A. Buck had done his part well, too--so well
that, on the final day, Emma felt a sinking at her heart. He
seemed so satisfied with affairs as they were. He was,
apparently, so content to drop all thought of business when he
left the office for his home.
Emma had planned a very special little dinner that evening. She
wore a very special gown, too--one of the new ones. T. A.
noticed it at once, and the dinner as well, being that kind of
husband. Still, Annie, the cook, complained later, to the
parlor-maid, about the thanklessness of cooking dinners for folks
who didn't eat more'n a mouthful, anyway.
Dinner over,
"Well, Emma?" said T. A. Buck.
"Light your cigar, T. A.," said Emma. "You'll need it."
T. A. lighted it with admirable leisureliness, sent out a great
puff of fragrant smoke, and surveyed his wife through half-closed
lids. Beneath his air of ease there was a tension.
"Well, Emma?" he said again, gently.
Emma looked at him a moment appreciatively. She had too much
poise and balance and control herself not to recognize and admire
those qualities in others.
"T. A., if I had been what they call a homebody, we wouldn't be
married to-day, would we?"
"No."
"You knew plenty of home-women that you could have married,
didn't you?"
"I didn't ask them, Emma, but----"
"You know what I mean. Now listen, T. A.: I've loafed for
three months. I've lolled and lazied and languished. And I've
never been so tired in my life--not even when we were taking
January inventory. Another month of this, and I'd be an old, old
woman. I understand, now, what it is that brings that hard,
tired, stony look into the faces of the idle women. They have to
work so hard to try to keep happy. I suppose if I had been a
homebody all my life, I might be hardened to this kind of
thing. But it's too late now. And I'm thankful for it. Those
women who want to shop and dress and drive and play are welcome
to my share of it. If I am to be punished in the next world for
my wickedness in this, I know what form my torture will take. I
shall have to go from shop to shop with a piece of lace in my
hand, matching a sample of insertion. Fifteen years of being in
the thick of it spoil one for tatting and tea. The world is full
of homebodies, I suppose. And they're happy. I suppose I might
have been one, too, if I hadn't been obliged to get out and
hustle. But it's too late to learn now. Besides, I don't want
to. If I do try, I'll be destroying the very thing that
attracted you to me in the first place. Remember what you said
about the Fifth Avenue girl?"
"But, Emma," interrupted Buck very quietly, "I don't want you
to try."
Emma, with a rush of words at her very lips, paused, eyed him for
a doubtful moment, asked a faltering question.
"But it was your plan--you said you wanted me to be here when
you came home and when you left, didn't you? Do you mean
you----"
"I mean that I've missed my business partner every minute for
three months. All the time we've been going to those fool
dinners and all that kind of thing, I've been bursting to talk
skirts to you. I--say, Emma, Adler's designed a new model--a
full one, of course, but there's something wrong with it. I
can't put my finger on the flaw, but----"
Emma came swiftly over to his chair.
"Make a sketch of it, can't you?" she said. From his pocket
Buck drew a pencil, an envelope, and fell to sketching rapidly,
squinting down through his cigar smoke as he worked.
"It's like this," he began, absorbed and happy; "you see,
where the fulness begins at the knee----"
"Yes!" prompted Emma, breathlessly.
Two hours later they were still bent over the much marked bit of
paper. But their interest in it was not that of those who would
solve a perplexing problem. It was the lingering, satisfied
contemplation of a task accomplished.
Emma straightened, leaned back, sighed--a victorious, happy sigh.
"And to think," she said, marveling, "to think that I once
envied the women who had nothing to do but the things I've done
in the last three months!"
Buck had risen, stretched luxuriously, yawned. Now he came over
to his wife and took her head in his two hands, cozily, and stood
a moment looking into her shining eyes.
"Emma, I may have mentioned this once or twice before, but
perhaps you'll still be interested to know that I think you're a
wonder. A wonder! You're the----"
"Oh, well, we won't quarrel about that," smiled Emma brazenly.
"But I wonder if Adler will agree with us when he sees what
we've done to his newest skirt design."
Suddenly a new thought seemed to strike her. She was off down
the hall. Buck, following in a leisurely manner, hands in
pockets, stood in the bedroom door and watched her plunge into
the innermost depths of the clothes-closet.
"What's the idea, Emma?"
"Looking for something," came back his wife's muffled tones.
A long wait.
"Can I help?"
"I've got it!" cried Emma, and emerged triumphant, flushed,
smiling, holding a garment at arm's length, aloft.
"What----"
Emma shook it smartly, turned it this way and that, held it up
under her chin by the sleeves.
"Why, girl!" exclaimed Buck, all a-grin, "it's the----"
"The blue serge," Emma finished for him, "with the white
collars and cuffs. And what's more, young man, it's the little
blue hat with the what-cha-ma-call-ems on it. And praise be!
I'm wearing 'em both down-town to-morrow morning."
Edna Ferber's short story: Blue Serge
Read next: CHAPTER V - "HOOPS, MY DEAR!"
Read previous: CHAPTER III - A CLOSER CORPORATION
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