the smallest possible sum. In that case, one
gets blue serge. I've worn blue serge until it feels like a convict's
uniform. I'm going to blossom out into fawn and green and mauve. I
shall get evening dresses with only bead shoulder-straps. I'm going to
shop. I've never really seen Fifth Avenue between eleven and one, when
the real people come out. My views of it have been at nine A.M. when
the office-workers are going to work, and at five-thirty when they are
going home. I will now cease to observe the proletariat and mingle
with the predatory. I'll probably go in for those tiffin things at the
Plaza. If I do, I'll never be the same woman again."

Whereupon she paused with dramatic effect.

To all of which T. A. Buck had replied:

"Go as far as you like. Take fencing lessons, if you want to, or
Sanskrit. You've been a queen bee for so many years that I think the
role of drone will be a pleasant change. Let me shoulder the business
worries for a while. You've borne them long enough."

"It's a bargain. For three months I shall do nothing more militant
than to pick imaginary threads off your coat lapel and pout when you
mention business. At the end of those three months we'll go into
private session, compare notes, and determine whether the plan shall
cease or become permanent. Shake hands on it."

They shook hands solemnly. As they did so, a faint shadow of doubt
hovered far, far back in the depths of T. A. Buck's fine eyes. And a
faint, inscrutable smile lurked in the corners of Emma's lips.

So it was that Emma McChesney, the alert, the capable, the brisk, the
business-like, assumed the role of Mrs. T. A. Buck, the leisurely, the
languid, the elegant. She, who formerly, at eleven in the morning,
might have been seen bent on selling the best possible bill of spring
Featherlooms to Joe Greenbaum, of Keokuk, Iowa, could now be found in a
modiste's gray-and-raspberry salon, being draped and pinned and fitted.
She, whose dynamic force once charged the entire office and factory
with energy and efficiency, now distributed a tithe of that priceless
vigor here, a tithe there, a tithe everywhere, and thus broke the very
backbone of its power.

She had never been a woman to do things by halves. What she undertook
to do she did thoroughly and whole-heartedly. This principle she
applied to her new mode of life as rigidly as she had to the old.

That first month slipped magically by. Emma was too much a