C.5 "Hoops, My Dear!"
Emma McChesney Buck always vigorously disclaimed any knowledge of
that dreamy-eyed damsel known as Inspiration. T. A. Buck, her
husband-partner, accused her of being on intimate terms with the
lady. So did the adoring office staff of the T. A. Buck
Featherloom Petticoat Company. Out in the workshop itself, the
designers and cutters, those jealous artists of the pencil,
shears, and yardstick, looked on in awed admiration on those rare
occasions when the feminine member of the business took the
scissors in her firm white hands and slashed boldly into a
shimmering length of petticoat-silk. When she put down the great
shears, there lay on the table the detached parts of that which
the appreciative and experienced eyes of the craftsmen knew to be
a new and original variation of that elastic garment known as the
underskirt.
For weeks preceding one of these cutting- exhibitions, Emma was
likely to be not quite her usual brisk self. A mystic glow
replaced the alert brightness of her eye. Her wide-awake manner
gave way to one of almost sluggish inactivity.
The outer office, noting these things, would lift its eyebrows
significantly.
"Another hunch!" it would whisper. "The last time she beat
the rest of the trade by six weeks with that elastic-top gusset."
"Inspiration working, Emma?" T. A. Buck would ask, noting the
symptoms.
"It isn't inspiration, T. A. Nothing of the kind! It's just an
attack of imagination, complicated by clothes-instinct."
"That's all that ails Poiret," Buck would retort.
Early in the autumn, when women were still walking with an absurd
sidewise gait, like a duck, or a filly that is too tightly
hobbled, the junior partner of the firm began to show
unmistakable signs of business aberration. A blight seemed to
have fallen upon her bright little office, usually humming with
activity. The machinery of her day, ordinarily as noiseless and
well ordered as a thing on ball bearings, now rasped, creaked,
jerked, stood still, jolted on again. A bustling clerk or
stenographer, entering with paper or memorandum, would find her
bent over her desk, pencil in hand, absorbed in a rough drawing
that seemed to bear no relation to the skirt of the day. The
margin of her morning paper was filled with queer little scrawls
by the time she reached the office. She drew weird lines with
her fork on the table-cloth at lunch. These hieroglyphics she
covered with a quick hand, like a bashful schoolgirl, when any
one peeped.
"Tell a fellow what it's going to be, can't you?" pleaded Buck.
"I got one glimpse yesterday, when you didn't know I was looking
over your shoulder. It seemed a pass between an overgrown
Zeppelin and an apple dumpling. So I know it can't be a skirt.
Come on, Emma; tell your old man!"
"Not yet," Emma would reply dreamily.
Buck would strike an attitude intended to intimidate.
"If you have no sense of what is due me as your husband, then I
demand, as senior partner of this firm, to know what it is that
is taking your time, which rightfully belongs to this business."
"Go away, T. A., and stop pestering me! What do you think I'm
designing--a doily?"
Buck, turning to go to his own office, threw a last retort over
his shoulder--a rather sobering one, this time.
"Whatever it is, it had better be good--with business what it is
and skirts what they are."
Emma lifted her head to reply to that.
"It isn't what they are that interests me. It's what they're
going to be."
Buck paused in the doorway.
"Going to be! Anybody can see that. Underneath that full,
fool, flaring over-drape, the real skirt is as tight as ever. I
don't think the spring models will show an inch of real
difference. I tell you, Emma, it's serious."
Emma, apparently absorbed in her work, did not reply to this.
But a vague something about the back of her head told T. A. Buck
that she was laughing at him. The knowledge only gave him new
confidence in this resourceful, many-sided, lovable, level-headed
partner-wife of his.
Two weeks went by--four--six--eight. Emma began to look a little
thin. Her bright color was there only when she was overtired or
excited. The workrooms began to talk of new designs for spring,
though it was scarcely mid-winter. The head designer came
forward timidly with a skirt that measured a yard around the
bottom. Emma looked at it, tried to keep her lower lip prisoner
between her teeth, failed, and began to laugh helplessly, almost
hysterically.
Amazement in the faces of Buck and Koritz, the designer, became
consternation, then, in the designer, resentment.
Koritz, dark, undersized, with the eyes of an Oriental and the
lean, sensitive fingers of one who creates, shivered a little,
like a plant that is swept by an icy blast. Buck came over and
laid one hand on his wife's shaking shoulder.
"Emma, you're overtired! This--this thing you've been slaving
over has been too much for you."
With one hand, Emma reached up and patted the fingers that rested
protectingly on her shoulder. With the other, she wiped her
eyes, then, all contrition, grasped the slender brown hand of the
offended Koritz.
"Bennie, please forgive me! I--I didn't mean to laugh. I
wasn't laughing at your new skirt."
"You think it's too wide, maybe, huh?" Bennie Koritz said, and
held it up doubtfully.
"Too wide!" For a moment Emma seemed threatened with another
attack of that inexplicable laughter. She choked it back
resolutely.
"No, Bennie; not too wide. I'll tell you to-morrow why I
laughed. Then, perhaps, you'll laugh with me."
Bennie, draping his despised skirt-model over one arm, had the
courage to smile even now, though grimly.
"I laugh--sure," he said, showing his white teeth now. "But
the laugh will be, I bet you, on me--like it was when you
designed that knickerbocker before the trade knew such a thing
could be."
Impulsively Emma grasped his hand and shook it, as though she
found a certain needed encouragement in the loyalty of this
sallow little Russian.
"Bennie, you're a true artist--because you're big enough to
praise the work of a fellow craftsman when you recognize its
value." And Koritz, the dull red showing under the olive of his
cheeks, went back to his cutting-table happy.
Buck bent forward, eagerly.
"You're going to tell me now, Emma? It's finished?"
"To-night--at home. I want to be the first to try it on. I'll
play model. A private exhibition, just for you. It's not only
finished; it is patented."
"Patented! But why? What is it, anyway? A new fastener? I
thought it was a skirt."
"Wait until you see it. You'll think I should have had it
copyrighted as well, not to say passed by the national board of
censors."
"Do you mean to say that I'm to be the entire audience at the
premiere of this new model?"
"You are to be audience, critic, orchestra, box-holder, patron,
and `Diamond Jim' Brady. Now run along into your own
office--won't you, dear? I want to get out these letters." And
she pressed the button that summoned a stenographer.
T. A. Buck, resigned, admiring, and anticipatory, went.
Annie, the cook, was justified that evening in her bitter
complaint. Her excellent dinner received scant enough attention
from these two. They hurried through it like eager, bright-eyed
school-children who have been promised a treat. Two scarlet
spots glowed in Emma's cheeks. Buck's eyes, through the haze of
his after-dinner cigar, were luminous.
"Now?"
"No; not yet. I want you to smoke your cigar and digest your
dinner and read your paper. I want you to twiddle your thumbs a
little and look at your watch. First-night curtains are always
late in rising, aren't they? Well!"
She turned on the full glare of the chandelier, turned it off,
went about flicking on the soft-shaded wall lights and the lamps.
"Turn your chair so that your back will be toward the door."
He turned it obediently.
Emma vanished.
From the direction of her bedroom there presently came the sounds
of dresser drawers hurriedly opened and shut with a bang, of a
slipper dropped on the hard-wood floor, a tune hummed in an
absent-minded absorption under the breath, an excited little
laugh nervously stifled. Buck, in his role of audience, began to
clap impatiently and to stamp with his feet on the floor.
"No gallery!" Emma called in from the hall. "Remember the
temperamental family on the floor below!" A silence--then:
"I'm coming. Shut your eyes and prepare to be jarred by the
Buck balloon-petticoat!"
There was a rustling of silks, a little rush to the center of the
big room, a breathless pause, a sharp snap of finger and thumb.
Buck opened his eyes.
He opened his eyes. Then he closed them and opened them again,
quickly, as we do, sometimes, when we are unwilling to believe
that which we see. What he beheld was this: A very pretty, very
flushed, very bright-eyed woman, her blond hair dressed quaintly
after the fashion of the early 'Sixties, her arms and shoulders
bare, a pink-slip with shoulder-straps in lieu of a bodice,
and--he passed a bewildered hand over his eyes a skirt that
billowed and flared and flounced and spread in a great, graceful
circle--a skirt strangely light for all its fulness--a skirt
like, and yet, somehow, unlike those garments seen in ancient
copies of Godey's Lady Book.
"That can't be--you don't mean--what--what IS it?" stammered
Buck, dismayed.
Emma, her arms curved above her head like a ballet-dancer's,
pirouetted, curtsied very low so that the skirt spread all about
her on the floor, like the petals of a flower.
"Hoops, my dear!"
"Hoops!" echoed Buck, in weak protest. "Hoops, my DEAR!"
Emma stroked one silken fold with approving fingers.
"Our new leader for spring."
"But, Emma, you're joking!"
She stared, suddenly serious.
"You mean--you don't like it!"
"Like it! For a fancy-dress costume, yes; but as a petticoat
for every-day wear, to be made up by us for our customers! But
of course you're playing a trick on me." He laughed a little
weakly and came toward her. "You can't catch me that way, old
girl! It's darned becoming, Emma--I'll say that." He bent down,
smiling. "I'll allow you to kiss me. And then try me with the
real surprise, will you?"
Her coquetry vanished. Her smile fled with it. Her pretty pose
was abandoned. Mrs. T. A. Buck, wife, gave way to Emma McChesney
Buck, business woman. She stiffened a little, as though bracing
herself for a verbal encounter.
"You'll get used to it. I expected you to be jolted at the
first shock of it. I was, myself--when the idea came to me."
Buck passed a frenzied forefinger under his collar, as though it
had suddenly grown too tight for him.
"Used to it! I don't want to get used to it! It's
preposterous! You can't be serious! No woman would wear a
garment like that! For five years skirts have been tighter and
tighter----"
"Until this summer they became tightest," interrupted Emma.
"They could go no farther. I knew that meant, `About face!' I
knew it meant not a slightly wider skirt but a wildly wider
skirt. A skirt as bouffant as the other had been scant. I was
sure it wouldn't be a gradual process at all but a mushroom
growth--hobbles to-day, hoops to-morrow. Study the history of
women's clothes, and you'll find that has always been true."
"Look here, Emma," began Buck, desperately; "you're wrong, all
wrong! Here, let me throw this scarf over your shoulders. Now
we'll sit down and talk this thing over sensibly."
"I'll agree to the scarf"--she drew a soft, silken, fringed
shawl about her and immediately one thought of a certain vivid,
brilliant portrait of a hoop-skirted dancer--"but don't ask me
to sit down. I'd rebound like a toy balloon. I've got to
convince you of this thing. I'll have to do it standing."
Buck sank into his chair and dabbed at his forehead with his
handkerchief.
"You'll never convince me, sitting or standing. Emma, I know I
fought the knickerbocker when you originated it, and I know that
it turned out to be a magnificent success. But this is
different. The knicker was practical; this thing's absurd--it's
impossible! This is an age of activity. In Civil War days women
minced daintily along when they walked at all. They stitched on
samplers by way of diversion."
"What has all that to do with it?" inquired Emma sweetly.
"Everything. Use a little logic."
"Logic! In a discussion about women's dress! T. A., I'm
surprised."
"But, Emma, be reasonable. Good Lord! You're usually
clear-sighted enough. Our mode of living has changed in the last
fifty years--our methods of transit, our pastimes, customs,
everything. Imagine a woman trying to climb a Fifth Avenue 'bus
in one of those things. Fancy her in a hot set of tennis. Women
use street-cars, automobiles, airships. Can you see a subway
train full of hoop-skirted clerks, stenographers, and models?
Street-car steps aren't built for it. Office-building elevators
can't stand for it. Six-room apartments won't accommodate 'em.
They're fantastic, wild, improbable. You're wrong, Emma--all
wrong!"
She had listened patiently enough, never once attempting to
interrupt. But on her lips was the maddening half-smile of one
whose rebuttal is ready. Now she perched for a moment at the
extreme edge of the arm of a chair. Her skirt subsided
decorously. Buck noticed that, with surprise, even in the midst
of his heated protest.
"T. A., you've probably forgotten, but those are the very
arguments used when the hobble was introduced. Preposterous,
people said--impossible! Women couldn't walk in 'em. Wouldn't,
couldn't sit down in 'em. Women couldn't run, play tennis, skate
in them. The car steps were too high for them. Well, what
happened? Women had to walk in them, and a new gait became the
fashion. Women took lessons in how to sit down in them. They
slashed them for tennis and skating. And street-car companies
all over the country lowered the car steps to accommodate them.
What's true for the hobble holds good for the hoop. Women will
cease to single-foot and learn to undulate when they walk.
They'll widen the car platforms. They'll sit on top the Fifth
Avenue 'buses, and you'll never give them a second thought."
"The things don't stay where they belong. I've seen 'em
misbehave in musical comedies," argued Buck miserably.
"That's where my patent comes in. The old hoop was cumbersome,
unwieldy, clumsy. The new skirt, by my patent featherboning
process, is made light, graceful, easily managed. T. A., I
predict that by midsummer a tight skirt will be as rare a sight
as a full one was a year ago."
"Nonsense!"
"We're not quarreling, are we?"
"Quarreling! I rather think not! A man can have his own
opinion, can't he?"
It appeared, however, that he could not. For when they had
threshed it out, inch by inch, as might two partners whose only
bond was business, it was Emma who won.
"Remember, I'm not convinced," Buck warned her; "I'm only
beaten by superior force. But I do believe in your woman's
intuition--I'll say that. It has never gone wrong. I'm banking
on it.
"It's woman's intuition when we win," Emma observed,
thoughtfully. "When we lose it's a foolish, feminine notion."
There were to be no half-way measures. The skirt was to be the
feature of the spring line. Cutters and designers were one with
Buck in thinking it a freak garment. Emma reminded them that the
same thing had been said of the hobble on its appearance.
In February, Billy Spalding, veteran skirt-salesman, led a
flying wedge of six on a test-trip that included the Middle West
and the Coast. Their sample-trunks had to be rebuilt to
accommodate the new model. Spalding, shirt-sleeved, whistling
dolorously, eyed each garment with a look of bristling
antagonism. Spalding sold skirts on commission.
Emma, surveying his labors, lifted a quizzical eyebrow.
"If you're going to sell that skirt as enthusiastically as you
pack it, you'd better stay here in New York and save the house
traveling expenses."
Spalding ceased to whistle. He held up a billowy sample and
gazed at it.
"Honestly, Mrs. Buck, you know I'd try to sell pretzels in
London if you asked me to. But do you really think any woman
alive would be caught wearing a garment like this in these
days?"
"Not only do I think it, Billy; I'm certain of it. This new
petticoat makes me the Lincoln of the skirt trade. I'm literally
freeing my sisters from the shackles that have bound their ankles
for five years."
Spalding, unimpressed, folded another skirt.
"Um, maybe! But what's that line about slaves hugging their
chains?"
The day following, Spalding and his flying squad scattered to
spread the light among the skirt trade. And things went wrong
from the start.
The first week showed an ominous lack of those cheering epistles
beginning, "Enclosed please find," etc. The second was worse.
The third was equally bad. The fourth was final. The second
week in March, Spalding returned from a territory which had
always been known as firmly wedded to the T. A. Buck Featherloom
petticoat. The Middle West would have none of him.
They held the post-mortem in Emma's bright little office, and
that lady herself seemed to be strangely sunny and undaunted,
considering the completeness of her defeat. She sat at her desk
now, very interested, very bright-eyed, very calm. Buck, in a
chair at the side of her desk, was interested, too, but not so
calm. Spalding, who was accustomed to talk while standing,
leaned against the desk, feet crossed, brows furrowed. As he
talked, he emphasized his remarks by jabbing the air with his
pencil.
"Well," said Emma quietly, "it didn't go."
"It didn't even start," corrected Spalding.
"But why?" demanded Buck. "Why?"
Spalding leaned forward a little, eagerly.
"I'll tell you something: When I started out with that little
garment, I thought it was a joke. Before I'd been out with it a
week, I began to like it. In ten days, I was crazy about it, and
I believed in it from the waistband to the hem. On the level,
Mrs. Buck, I think it's a wonder. Now, can you explain that?"
"Yes," said Emma; "you didn't like it at first because it was
a shock to you. It outraged all your ideas of what a skirt ought
to be. Then you grew accustomed to it. Then you began to see
its good points. Why couldn't you make the trade get your
viewpoint?"
"This is why: Out in Manistee and Oshkosh and Terre Haute, the
girls have just really learned the trick of walking in tight
skirts. It's as impossible to convince a Middle West buyer that
the exaggerated full skirt is going to be worn next summer as it
would be to prove to him that men are going to wear sunbonnets.
They thought I was trying to sell 'em masquerade costumes. I may
believe in it, and you may believe in it, and T. A.; but the
girls from Joplin--well, they're from Joplin. And they're
waiting to hear from headquarters."
T. A. Buck crossed one leg over the other and sat up with a
little sigh.
"Well, that settles it, doesn't it?" he said.
"It does not," replied Emma McChesney Buck crisply. "If they
want to hear from headquarters, they won't have long to wait."
"Now, Emma, don't try to push this thing if it----"
"T. A., please don't look so forgiving. I'd much rather have
you reproach me."
"It's you I'm thinking of, not the skirt."
"But I want you to think of the skirt, too. We've gone into
this thing, and it has cost us thousands. Don't think I'm going
to sit quietly by and watch those thousands trickle out of our
hands. We've played our first card. It didn't take a trick.
Here's another."
Buck and Spalding were leaning forward, interested, attentive.
There was that in Emma's vivid, glowing face which did not mean
defeat.
"March fifteenth, at Madison Square Garden, there is to be held
the first annual exhibition of the Society for the Promotion of
American Styles for American Women. For one hundred years we've
taken our fashions as Paris dictated, regardless of whether they
outraged our sense of humor or decency or of fitness. This year
the American designer is going to have a chance. Am I an
American designer, T. A., Billy?"
"Yes!" in chorus.
"Then I shall exhibit that skirt on a live model at the First
Annual American Fashion Show next month. Every skirt-buyer in
the country will be there. If it takes hold there, it's
made--and so are we."
March came, and with it an army of men and women buyers,
dependent, for the first time in their business careers, on the
ingenuity of the American brain. The keen-eyed legions that had
advanced on Europe early, armed with letters of credit--the vast
horde that returned each spring and autumn laden with their
spoils--hats, gowns, laces, linens, silks, embroideries--were
obliged to content themselves with what was to be found in their
own camp.
Clever manager that she was, Emma took as much pains with her
model as with the skirt itself. She chose a girl whose demure
prettiness and quiet charm would enhance the possibilities of the
skirt's practicability in the eye of the shrewd buyer. Gertrude,
the model, developed a real interest in the success of the
petticoat. Emma knew enough about the psychology of crowds to
realize how this increased her chances for success.
The much heralded fashion show was to open at one o'clock on the
afternoon of March fifteenth. At ten o'clock that morning, there
breezed in from Chicago a tall, slim, alert young man, who made
straight for the offices of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat
Company, walked into the junior partner's private office, and
took that astonished lady in his two strong arms.
"Jock McChesney!" gasped his rumpled mother, emerging from the
hug. "I've been hungry for a sight of you!" She was submerged
in a second hug. "Come here to the window where I can get a
real look at you! Why didn't you wire me? What are you doing
away from your own job? How's business? And why come to-day, of
all days, when I can't make a fuss over you?"
Jock McChesney, bright-eyed, clear-skinned, steady of hand, stood
up well under the satisfied scrutiny of his adoring mother. He
smiled down at her.
"Wanted to surprise you. Here for three reasons--the Abbott
Grape-juice advertising contract, you, and Grace. And why can't
you make a fuss over me, I'd like to know?"
Emma told him. His keen, quick mind required little in the way
of explanation.
"But why didn't you let me in on it sooner?"
"Because, son, nothing explains harder than embryo success. I
always prefer to wait until it's grown up and let it do its own
explaining."
"But the thing ought to have national advertising," Jock
insisted, with the advertising expert's lightning grasp of its
possibilities. "What that skirt needs is publicity. Why didn't
you let me handle----"
"Yes, I know, dear; but you haven't seen the skirt. It won't do
to ram it down their throats. I want to ease it to them first.
I want them to get used to it. It failed utterly on the road,
because it jarred their notion of what a petticoat ought to be.
That's due to five years of sheath skirts."
"But suppose--just for the sake of argument --that it doesn't
strike them right this afternoon?"
"Then it's gone, that's all. Six months from now, every
skirt-factory in the country will be manufacturing a similar
garment. People will be ready for it then. I've just tried to
cut in ahead of the rest. Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to do
it."
Jock hugged her again at that, to the edification of the office
windows across the way.
"Gad, you're a wiz, mother! Now listen: I 'phoned Grace when I
got in. She's going to meet me here at one. I'll chase over to
the office now on this grape-juice thing and come back here in
time for lunch. Is T. A. in? I'll look in on him a minute.
We'll all lunch together, and then----"
"Can't do it, son. The show opens at one. Gertrude, my model,
comes on at three. She's going to have the stage to herself for
ten minutes, during which she'll make four changes of costume to
demonstrate the usefulness of the skirt for every sort of gown
from chiffon to velvet. Come back here at one, if you like. If
I'm not here, come over to the show. But--lunch! I'd choke."
At twelve-thirty, there scampered into Emma's office a very
white-faced, round-eyed little stock-girl. Emma, deep in a
last-minute discussion with Buck, had a premonition of trouble
before the girl gasped out her message.
"Oh, Mrs. Buck, Gertie's awful sick!"
"Sick!" echoed Emma and Buck, in duet. Then Emma:
"But she can't be! It's impossible! She was all right a half
hour ago." She was hurrying down the hall as she spoke.
"Where is she?"
"They've got her on one of the tables in the workroom. She's
moaning awful."
Gertie's appendix, with that innate sense of the dramatic so
often found in temperamental appendices, had indeed chosen this
moment to call attention to itself. Gertie, the demurely pretty
and quietly charming, was rolled in a very tight ball on the
workroom cutting-table. At one o'clock, she was on her way home
in a cab, under the care of a doctor, Miss Kelly, the bookkeeper,
and Jock, who, coming in gaily at one, had been pressed into
service, bewildered but willing.
Three rather tragic figures stared at one another in the junior
partner's office. They were Emma, Buck, and Grace Galt, Jock's
wife-to-be. Grace Galt, slim, lovely, girlish, was known, at
twenty-four, as one of the most expert copy writers in the
advertising world. In her clear-headed, capable manner, she
tried to suggest a way out of the difficulty now.
"But surely the world's full of girls," she said. "It's late,
I know; but any theatrical agency will send a girl over."
"That's just what I tried to avoid," Emma replied. "I wanted
to show this skirt on a sweet, pretty, refined sort of girl who
looks and acts like a lady. One of those blond show girls would
kill it."
Gloom settled down again over the three. Emma broke the silence
with a rueful little laugh.
"I think," she said, "that perhaps you're right, T. A., and
this is the Lord's way of showing me that the world is not quite
ready for this skirt."
"You're not beaten yet, Emma," Buck assured her vigorously.
"How about this new girl--what's her name?--Myrtle. She's one
of those thin, limp ones, isn't she? Try her."
"I will," said Emma. "You're right. I'm not beaten yet.
I've had to fight for everything worth while in my life. I'm
superstitious about it now. When things come easy I'm afraid of
them." Then, to the stock-girl, "Annie, tell Myrtle I want to
see her."
Silence fell again upon the three. Myrtle, very limp, very thin,
very languid indeed, roused them at her entrance. The hopeful
look in Emma's eyes faded as she beheld her. Myrtle was so
obviously limp, so hopelessly new.
"Annie says you want me to take Gertie's place," drawled
Myrtle, striking a magazine-cover attitude.
"I don't know that you are just the--er--type; but perhaps, if
you're willing----"
"Of course I didn't come here as a model," said Myrtle, and
sagged on the other hip. "But, as a special favor to you I'm
willing to try it--at special model's rates."
Emma ran a somewhat frenzied hand through her hair.
"Then, as a special favor to me, will you begin by trying to
stand up straight, please? That debutante slouch would kill a
queen's coronation costume."
Myrtle straightened, slumped again.
"I can't help it if I am willowy"--listlessly.
"Your hair!" Myrtle's hand went vaguely to her head. "I can't
have you wear it that way."
"Why, this is the French roll!" protested Myrtle, offended.
"Then do it in a German bun!" snapped Emma. "Any way but
that. Will you walk, please?"
"Walk?"--dully.
"Yes, walk; I want to see how you----"
Myrtle walked across the room. A groan came from Emma.
"I thought so." She took a long breath.
"Myrtle, listen: That Australian crawl was necessary when our
skirts were so narrow we had to negotiate a curbing before we
could take it. But the skirt you're going to demonstrate is
wide. Like that! You're practically a free woman in it. Step
out! Stride! Swing! Walk!"
Myrtle tried it, stumbled, sulked.
Emma, half smiling, half woeful, patted the girl's shoulder.
"Oh, I see; you're wearing a tight one. Well, run in and get
into the skirt. Miss Loeb will help you. Then come back
here--and quickly, please."
The three looked at each other in silence. It was a silence
brimming with eloquent meaning. Each sought encouragement in the
eyes of the other--and failed to find it. Failing, they broke
into helpless laughter. It proved a safety-valve.
"She may do, Emma--when she has her hair done differently, and
if she'll only stand up."
But Emma shook her head.
"T. A., something tells me you're going to have a wonderful
chance to say, `I told you so!' at three o'clock this
afternoon."
"You know I wouldn't say it, Emma."
"Yes; I do know it, dear. But what's the difference, if the
chance is there?"
Suspense settled down on the little office. Billy Spalding
entered, smiling. After five minutes of waiting, even his
buoyant spirits sank.
"Don't you think--if you were to go in and--and sort of help
adjust things----" suggested Buck vaguely.
"No; I don't want to prop her up. She'll have to stand alone
when she gets there. She'll either do, or not. When she enters
that door, I'll know."
When Myrtle entered, wearing the fascinatingly fashioned new
model, they all knew.
Emma spoke decisively.
"That settles it."
"What's the matter? Don't it look all right?" demanded Myrtle.
"Take it off, Myrtle."
Then, to the others, as Myrtle, sulking, left the room:
"I can stand to see that skirt die if necessary. But I won't
help murder it."
"But, Mrs. Buck," protested Spalding, almost tearfully,
"you've got to exhibit that skirt. You've got to!"
Emma shook a sorrowing head.
"That wouldn't be an exhibition, Billy. It would be an
expose."
Spalding clapped a desperate hand to his bald head.
"If only I had Julian Eltinge's shape, I'd wear it to the show
for you myself."
"That's all it needs now," retorted Emma grimly.
Whereupon, Grace Galt spoke up in her clear, decisive voice.
"Wait a minute," she said quietly. "I'm going to wear that
skirt at the fashion show."
"You!" cried the three, like a trained trio.
"Why not?" demanded Grace Galt, coolly. Then: "No; don't
tell me why not. I won't listen."
But Emma, equally cool, would have none of it.
"It's impossible, dear. You're an angel to want to help me.
But you must know it's quite out of the question."
"It's nothing of the kind. This skirt isn't merely a fad. It
has a fortune in it. I'm business woman enough to know that.
You've got to let me do it. It isn't only for yourself. It's
for T. A. and for the future of the firm."
"Do you suppose I'd allow you to stand up before all those
people?"
"Why not? I don't know them. They don't know me. I can make
them get the idea in that skirt. And I'm going to do it. You
don't object to me on the same grounds that you did to Myrtle, do
you?"
"You!" burst from the admiring Spalding. "Say, you'd make a
red-flannel petticoat look like crepe de Chine and lace."
"There!" said Grace, triumphant. "That settles it!" And she
was off down the hall. They stood a moment in stunned silence.
Then:
"But Jock!" protested Emma, following her "What will Jock say?
Grace! Grace dear! I can't let you do it! I can't!"
"Just unhook this for me, will you?" replied Grace Galt
sweetly.
At two o'clock, Jock McChesney, returned from his errand of
mercy, burst into the office to find mother, step-father, and
fiancee all flown.
"Where? What?" he demanded of the outer office.
"Fashion show!" chorused the office staff
"Might have waited for me," Jock said to himself, much injured.
And hurled himself into a taxi.
There was a crush of motors and carriages for a block on all
sides of Madison Square Garden. He had to wait for what seemed
an interminable time at the box-office. Then he began the task
of worming his way through the close-packed throng in the great
auditorium. It was a crowd such as the great place had not seen
since the palmy days of the horse show. It was a crowd that
sparkled and shone in silks and feathers and furs and jewels.
"Jove, if mother has half a chance at this gang!" Jock told
himself. "If only she has grabbed some one who can really show
that skirt!"
He was swept with the crowd toward a high platform at the extreme
end of the auditorium. All about that platform stood hundreds,
close packed, faces raised eagerly, the better to see the slight,
graceful, girlish figure occupying the center of the stage--a
figure strangely familiar to Jock's eyes in spite of its quaintly
billowing, ante-bellum garb. She was speaking. Jock, mouth
agape, eyes protruding, ears straining, heard, as in a daze, the
sweet, clear, charmingly modulated voice:
"The feature of the skirt, ladies and gentlemen, is that it
gives a fulness without weight, something which the skirt-maker
has never before been able to achieve. This is due to the patent
featherboning process invented by Mrs. T. A. Buck, of the T. A.
Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, New York. Note, please, that
it has all the advantages of our grandmother's hoop-skirt, but
none of its awkward features. It is graceful"--she turned
slowly, lightly--"it is bouffant" she twirled on her toes--"it
is practical, serviceable, elegant. It can be made up in any
shade, in any material-- silk, lace, crepe de Chine, charmeuse,
taffeta. The T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company is
prepared to fill orders for immediate----"
"Well, I'll be darned!" said Jock McChesney aloud. And, again,
heedless of the protesting "Sh-sh-sh-sh!" that his neighbors
turned upon him, "Well, I'll--be--darned!"
A hand twitched his coat sleeve. He turned, still dazed. His
mother, very pink-cheeked, very bright-eyed, pulled him through
the throng. As they reached the edge of the crowd, there came a
great burst of applause, a buzz of conversation, the turning,
shifting, nodding, staccato movements which mean approval in a
mass of people.
"What the dickens! How!" stammered Jock. "When--did she--did
she----"
Emma, half smiling, half tearful, raised a protesting hand.
"I don't know. Don't ask me, dear. And don't hate me for it.
I tried to tell her not to, but she insisted. And, Jock, she's
done it, I tell you! She's done it! They love the skirt!
Listen to 'em!"
"Don't want to," said Jock. "Lead me to her."
"Angry, dear!"
"Me? No! I'm--I'm proud of her! She hasn't only brains and
looks, that little girl; she's got nerve--the real kind! Gee,
how did I ever have the gall to ask her to marry me!"
Together they sped toward the door that led to the
dressing-rooms. Buck, his fine eyes more luminous than ever as
he looked at this wonder-wife of his, met them at the entrance.
"She's waiting for you, Jock," he said, smiling. Jock took the
steps in one leap.
"Well, T. A. ?" said Emma.
"Well, Emma?" said T. A.
Which burst of eloquence was interrupted abruptly by a short,
squat, dark man, who seized Emma's hand in his left and Buck's in
his right, and pumped them up and down vigorously. It was that
volatile, voluble person known to the skirt trade as Abel I.
Fromkin, of the "Fromkin Form-fit Skirt. It Clings!"
"I'm looking everywhere for you!" he panted. Then, his shrewd
little eyes narrowing, "You want to talk business?"
"Not here," said Buck abruptly.
"Sure--here," insisted Fromkin. "Say, that's me. When I got
a thing on my mind, I like to settle it. How much you take for
the rights to that skirt?"
"Take for it!" exclaimed Emma, in the tone a mother would use
to one who has suggested taking a beloved child from her.
"Now wait a minute. Don't get mad. You ain't started that
skirt right. It should have been advertised. It's too much of a
shock. You'll see. They won't buy. They're afraid of it. I'll
take it off your hands and push it right, see? I offer you forty
thousand for the rights to make that skirt and advertise it as
the `Fromkin Full-flounce Skirt. It Flares!' "
Emma smiled.
"How much?" she asked quizzically.
Abel I. Fromkin gulped.
"Fifty thousand," he said.
"Fifty thousand," repeated Emma quietly, and looked at Buck.
"Thanks, Mr. Fromkin! I know, now, that if it's worth fifty
thousand to you to-day as the `Fromkin Full-flounce Skirt. It
Flares!' then it's worth one hundred and fifty thousand to us as
the `T. A. Buck Balloon-Petticoat. It Billows!' "
And it was.
Edna Ferber's short story: "Hoops, My Dear!"
Read next: CHAPTER VI - SISTERS UNDER THEIR SKIN
Read previous: CHAPTER IV - BLUE SERGE
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