ing far away.

The swinging door between dining-room and butler's pantry opened.
Annie, in her neat blue-and-white stripes, stood before her.

"Shall it be steak or chops to-night, Mrs. Mc--Buck?"

Emma turned her head in Annie's direction--then her eyes. The two
actions were distinct and separate.

"Steak or----" There was a little bewildered look in her eyes.

Her mind had not yet focused on the question. "Steak--oh! Oh, yes, of
course! Why--why, Annie"--and the splendid thousand-h.-p. mind brought
itself down to the settling of this butter-churning, two-h.-p.
question--"why, Annie, considering all things, I think we'll make it
filet with mushrooms."

IV

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 actua