"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 ap.r.o.n 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 ap.r.o.ns 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 ap.r.o.n 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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 unb.u.t.ton her gingham ap.r.o.n.

"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 Munic.i.p.al 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 ap.r.o.n 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: '"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 b.u.t.ter, 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 St.i.tch, 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 St.i.tch 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 St.i.tch.

Miss Hattie St.i.tch 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 St.i.tch 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.