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-sh.e.l.l-rimmed gla.s.ses, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "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, rea.s.suring 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 pa.s.sages 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 b.u.mp 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, pa.s.sed 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 sc.r.a.p of paper into the br.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 antic.i.p.atory child when she had got her wraps from the tiny closet, and was standing before the mirror, adjusting her hat.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "It had been a whirlwind day"]