It was Fat Ed Meyers, of the Sans-Silk Skirt Company, who first said that Mrs. Emma McChesney was the Maude Adams of the business world. It was on the occasion of his being called to the carpet for his failure to make Sans-silks as popular as Emma McChesney\'s famed Featherlooms. He spoke in self-defense, heatedly.

"It isn\'t Featherlooms. It\'s McChesney. Her line is no better than ours. It\'s her personality, not her petticoats. She\'s got a following that swears by her. If Maude Adams was to open on Broadway in \'East Lynne,\' they\'d flock to see her, wouldn\'t they? Well, Emma McChesney could sell hoop-skirts, I\'m telling you. She could sell bustles. She could sell red-woolen mittens on Fifth Avenue!"

The title stuck.

It was late in September when Mrs. McChesney, sunburned, decidedly under weight, but gloriously triumphant, returned from a four months\' tour of South America. Against the earnest protests of her business partner, T. A. Buck, president of the Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, she had invaded the southern continent and left it abloom with Featherlooms from the Plata to the Canal.

Success was no stranger to Mrs. McChesney. This last business victory had not turned her head. But it had come perilously near to tilting that extraordinarily well-balanced part. A certain light in her eyes, a certain set of her chin, an added briskness of bearing, a cocky slant of the eyebrow revealed the fact that, though Mrs. McChesney\'s feet were still on the ground, she might be said to be standing on tiptoe.

When she had sailed from Brooklyn pier that June afternoon, four months before, she had cast her ordinary load of business responsibilities on the unaccustomed shoulders of T. A. Buck. That elegant person, although president of the company which his father had founded, had never been its real head. When trouble threatened in the workroom, it was to Mrs. McChesney that the forewoman came. When an irascible customer in Green Bay, Wisconsin, waxed impatient over the delayed shipment of a Featherloom order, it was to Emma McChesney that his typewritten protest was addressed. When the office machinery needed mental oiling, when a new hand demanded to be put on silk-work instead of mercerized, when a consignment of skirt-material turned out to be more than usually metallic, it was in Mrs. Emma McChesney\'s little private office that the tangle was unsnarled.

She walked into that little office, now, at nine o\'clock of a brilliant September morning. It was a reassuring room, bright, orderly, workmanlike, reflecting the personality of its owner. She stood in the center of it now and looked about her, eyes glowing, lips parted. She raised her hands high above her head, then brought them down to her sides again with an unconsciously dramatic gesture that expressed triumph, peace, content, relief, accomplishment, and a great and deep satisfaction. T. A. Buck, in the doorway, saw the gesture—and understood.

"Not so bad to get back to it, is it?"

"Bad! It\'s like a drink of cool spring water after too much champagne. In those miserable South American hotels, how I used to long for the orderliness and quiet of this!"

She took off hat and coat. In a vase on the desk, a cluster of yellow chrysanthemums shook their shaggy heads in welcome. Emma McChesney\'s quick eye jumped to them, then to Buck, who had come in and was surveying the scene appreciatively.

"You—of course." She indicated the flowers with a nod and a radiant smile.

"Sorry—no. The office staff did that. There\'s a card of welcome, I believe."

"Oh," said Emma McChesney. The smile was still there, but the radiance was gone.

She seated herself at her desk. Buck took the chair near by. She unlocked a drawer, opened it, rummaged, closed it again, unlocked another. She patted the flat top of her desk with loving fingers.

"I can\'t help it," she said, with a little shamed laugh; "I\'m so glad to be back. I\'ll probably hug the forewoman and bite a piece out of the first Featherloom I lay hands on. I had to use all my self-control to keep from kissing Jake, the elevator-man, coming up."

Out of the corner of her eye, Emma McChesney had been glancing at her handsome business partner. She had found herself doing the same thing from the time he had met her at the dock late in the afternoon of the day before. Those four months had wrought some subtle change. But what? Where? She frowned a moment in thought.

Then:

"Is that a new suit, T. A.?"

"This? Lord, no! Last summer\'s. Put it on because of this July hangover in September. Why?"

"Oh, I don\'t know"—vaguely—"I just—wondered."

There was nothing vague about T. A. Buck, however. His old air of leisureliness was gone. His very attitude as he sat there, erect, brisk, confident, was in direct contrast to his old, graceful indolence.

"I\'d like to go over the home grounds with you this morning," he said. "Of course, in our talk last night, we didn\'t cover the South American situation thoroughly. But your letters and the orders told the story. You carried the thing through to success. It\'s marvelous! But we stay-at-homes haven\'t been marking time during your absence."

The puzzled frown still sat on Emma McChesney\'s brow. As though thinking aloud, she said,

"Have you grown thinner, or fatter or—something?"

"Not an ounce. Weighed at the club yesterday."

He leaned forward a little, his face suddenly very sober.

"Emma, I want to tell you now that—that mother—she—I lost her just a few weeks after you sailed."

Emma McChesney gave a little cry. She came quickly over to him, and one hand went to his shoulder as she stood looking down at him, her face all sympathy and contrition and sorrow.

"And you didn\'t write me! You didn\'t even tell me, last night!"

"I didn\'t want to distress you. I knew you were having a hard-enough pull down there without additional worries. It happened very suddenly while I was out on the road. I got the wire in Peoria. She died very suddenly and quite painlessly. Her companion, Miss Tate, was with her. She had never been herself since Dad\'s death."

"And you——"

"I could only do what was to be done. Then I went back on the road. I closed up the house, and now I\'ve leased it. Of course it\'s big enough for a regiment. But we stayed on because mother was used to it. I sold some of the furniture, but stored the things she had loved. She left some to you."

"To me!"

"You know she used to enjoy your visits so much, partly because of the way in which you always talked of Dad. She left you some jewelry that she was fond of, and that colossal old mahogany buffet that you used to rave over whenever you came up. Heaven knows what you\'ll do with it! It\'s a white elephant. If you add another story to it, you could rent it out as an apartment."

"Indeed I shall take it, and cherish it, and polish it up myself every week—the beauty!"

She came back to her chair. They sat a moment in silence. Then Emma McChesney spoke musingly.

"So that was it." Buck looked up. "I sensed something—different. I didn\'t know. I couldn\'t explain it."

Buck passed a quick hand over his eyes, shook himself, sat up, erect and brisk again, and plunged, with a directness that was as startling as it was new in him, into the details of Middle Western business.

"Good!" exclaimed Emma McChesney.

"It\'s all very well to know that Featherlooms are safe in South America. But the important thing is to know how they\'re going in the corn country."

Buck stood up.

"Suppose we transfer this talk to my office. All the papers are there, all the correspondence—all the orders, everything. You can get the whole situation in half an hour. What\'s the use of talking when figures will tell you."

He walked swiftly over to the door and stood there waiting. Emma McChesney rose. The puzzled look was there again.

"No, that wasn\'t it, after all," she said.

"Eh?" said Buck. "Wasn\'t what?"

"Nothing," replied Emma McChesney.

"I\'m wool-gathering this morning. I\'m afraid it\'s going to take me a day or two to get back into harness again."

"If you\'d rather wait, if you think you\'ll be more fit to-morrow or the day after, we\'ll wait. There\'s no real hurry. I just thought——"

But Mrs. McChesney led the way across the hall that separated her office from her partner\'s. Halfway across, she stopped and surveyed the big, bright, busy main office, with its clacking typewriters and rustle and crackle of papers and its air of concentration.

"Why, you\'ve run up a partition there between Miss Casey\'s desk and the workroom door, haven\'t you?"

"Yes; it\'s much better that way."

"Yes, of course. And—why, where are the boys\' desks? Spalding\'s and Hutchinson\'s, and—they\'re all gone!" She turned in amazement.

"Break it to me! Aren\'t we using traveling men any more?"

Buck laughed his low, pleasant laugh.

"Oh, yes; but I thought their desks belonged somewhere else than in the main office. They\'re now installed in the little room between the shop and Healy\'s office. Close quarters, but better than having them out here where they were inclined to neglect their reports in order to shine in the eyes of that pretty new stenographer. There are one or two other changes. I hope you\'ll approve of them."

"I\'m sure I shall," replied Emma McChesney, a little stiffly.

In Buck\'s office, she settled back in her chair to watch him as he arranged neat sheaves of papers for her inspection. Her eyes traveled from his keen, eager face to the piles of paper and back again.

"Tell me, did you hit it off with the Ella Sweeneys and the Sadie Harrises of the great Middle West? Is business as bad as the howlers say it is? You said something last night about a novelty bifurcated skirt. Was that the new designer\'s idea? How have the early buyers taken to it?"

Buck crooked an elbow over his head in self-defense.

"Stop it! You make me feel like Rheims cathedral. Don\'t bombard until negotiations fail."

He handed her the first sheaf of papers. But, before she began to read: "I\'ll say this much. Miss Sharp, of Berg Brothers, Omaha—the one you warned against as the human cactus—had me up for dinner. Well, I know you don\'t, but it\'s true. Her father and I hit it off just like that. He\'s a character, that old boy. Ever meet him? No? And Miss Sharp told me something about herself that explains her porcupine pose. That poor child was engaged to a chap who was killed in the Spanish-American war, and she——"

"Kate Sharp!" interrupted Emma McChesney. "Why, T. A. Buck, in all her vinegary, narrow life, that girl has never had a beau, much less——"

Buck\'s eyebrows came up slightly.

"Emma McChesney, you haven\'t developed—er—claws, have you?"

With a gasp, Emma McChesney plunged into the papers before her. For ten minutes, the silence of the room was unbroken except for the crackling of papers. Then Emma McChesney put down the first sheaf and looked up at her business partner.

"Is that a fair sample?" she demanded.

"Very," answered T. A. Buck, and handed her another set.

Another ten minutes of silence. Emma McChesney reached out a hand for still another set of papers. The pink of repressed excitement was tinting her cheeks.

"They\'re—they\'re all like this?"

"Practically, yes."

Mrs. McChesney faced him, her eyes wide, her breath coming fast.

"T. A. Buck," she slapped the papers before her smartly with the back of her hand, "this means you\'ve broken our record for Middle Western sales!"

"Yes," said T. A., quietly. "Dad would have enjoyed a morning like this, wouldn\'t he?"

Emma McChesney stood up.

"Enjoyed it! He is enjoying it. Don\'t tell me that T. A., Senior, just because he is no longer on earth, has failed to get the joy of knowing that his son has realized his fondest dreams. Why, I can feel him here in this room, I can see those bright brown eyes of his twinkling behind his glasses. Not know it! Of course he knows it."

Buck looked down at the desk, smiling curiously.

"D\'you know, I felt that way, too."

Suddenly Emma McChesney began to laugh. It was not all mirth—that laugh. Buck waited.

"And to think that I—I kindly and patronizingly handed you a little book full of tips on how to handle Western buyers, \'The Salesman\'s Who\'s Who\'—I, who used to think I was the witch of the West when it came to selling! You, on your first selling-trip, have made me look like—like a shoe-string peddler."

Buck put out a hand suddenly.

"Don\'t say that, Emma. I—somehow it takes away all the pleasure."

"It\'s true. And now that I know, it explains a lot of things that I\'ve been puzzling about in the last twenty-four hours."

"What kind of things?"

"The way you look and act and think. The way you carry your head. The way you sit in a chair. The very words you use, your gestures, your intonations. They\'re different."

T. A. Buck, busy with his cigar, laughed a little self-consciously.

"Oh, nonsense!" he said. "You\'re imagining things."

Which remark, while not a particularly happy one, certainly was not in itself so unfortunate as to explain why Mrs. McChesney should have turned rather suddenly and bolted into her own office across the hall and closed the door behind her.

T. A. Buck, quite cool and unruffled, viewed her sudden departure quizzically. Then he took his cigar from his mouth and stood eying it a moment with more attention, perhaps, than it deserved, in spite of its fine aroma. When he put it back between his lips and sat down at his desk once more he was smiling ever so slightly.

Then began a new order of things in the offices of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. Feet that once had turned quite as a matter of course toward the door marked "MRS. MCCHESNEY," now took the direction of the door opposite—and that door bore the name of Buck. Those four months of Mrs. McChesney\'s absence had put her partner to the test. That acid test had washed away the accumulated dross of years and revealed the precious metal beneath. T. A. Buck had proved to be his father\'s son.

If Mrs. McChesney noticed that the head office had miraculously moved across the hall, if her sharp ears marked that the many feet that once had paused at her door now stopped at the door opposite, if she realized that instead of, "I\'d like your opinion on this, Mrs. McChesney," she often heard the new, "I\'ll ask Mr. Buck," she did not show it by word or sign.

The first of October found buyers still flocking into New York from every State in the country. Shrewd men and women, these—bargain hunters on a grand scale. Armed with the long spoon of business knowledge, they came to skim the cream from factory and workroom products set forth for their inspection.

For years, it had been Emma McChesney\'s quiet boast that of those whose business brought them to the offices and showrooms of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, the foremost insisted on dealing only with her. She was proud of her following. She liked their loyalty. Their preference for her was the subtlest compliment that was in their power to pay. Ethel Morrissey, whose friendship dated back to the days when Emma McChesney had sold Featherlooms through the Middle West, used to say laughingly, her plump, comfortable shoulders shaking, "Emma, if you ever give me away by telling how many years I\'ve been buying Featherlooms of you, I\'ll—I\'ll call down upon you the spinster\'s curse."

Early Monday morning, Mrs. McChesney, coming down the hall from the workroom, encountered Miss Ella Sweeney, of Klein & Company, Des Moines, Iowa, stepping out of the elevator. A very skittish Miss Sweeney, rustling, preening, conscious of her dangling black earrings and her Robespierre collar and her beauty-patch. Emma McChesney met this apparition with outstretched, welcoming hand.

"Ella Sweeney! Well, I\'d almost given you up. You\'re late this fall. Come into my office."

She led the way, not noticing that Miss Sweeney came reluctantly, her eyes on the closed door across the way.

"Sit down," said Emma McChesney, and pulled a chair nearer her desk. "No; wait a minute! Let me look at you. Now, Ella, don\'t try to tell me that THAT dress came from Des Moines, Iowa! Do I! Why, child, it\'s distinctive!"

Miss Sweeney, still standing, smiled a pleased but rather preoccupied smile. Her eyes roved toward the door.

Emma McChesney, radiating good will and energy, went on:

"Wait till you see our new samples! You\'ll buy a million dollars\' worth. Just let me lead you to our new Walk-Easy bifurcated skirt. We call it the \'one-stepper\'s delight.\'" She put a hand on Ella Sweeney\'s arm, preparatory to guiding her to the showrooms in the rear. But Miss Sweeney\'s strange reluctance grew into resolve. A blush, as real as it was unaccustomed, arose to her bepowdered cheeks.

"Is—I—that is—Mr. Buck is in, I suppose?"

"Mr. Buck? Oh, yes, he\'s in."

Miss Sweeney\'s eyes sought the closed door across the hall.

"Is that—his office?"

Emma McChesney stiffened a little. Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. ............