woman not
to feel a certain exquisite pleasure in the selecting of delicate and
becoming fabrics. There was a thrill of novelty in being able to spend
an hour curled up with a book after lunch, to listen to music one
afternoon a week, to drive through the mistily gray park; to walk up
the thronged, sparkling Avenue, pausing before its Aladdin's Cave
windows. Simple enough pleasures, and taken quite as a matter of
course by thousands of other women who had no work-filled life behind
them to use as contrast.

She plunged into her new life whole-heartedly. The first new gown was
exciting. It was a velvet affair with furs, and gratifyingly becoming.
Her shining blond head rose above the soft background of velvet and fur
with an effect to distract the least observing.

"Like it?" she had asked Buck, turning slowly, frankly sure of herself.

"You're wonderful in it," said T. A. Buck. "Say, Emma, where's that
blue thing you used to wear--the one with the white cuffs and collar,
and the little blue hat with the what-cha-ma-call-ems on it?"

"T. A. Buck, you're--you're--well, you're a man, that's what you are!
That blue thing was worn threadbare in the office, and I gave it to the
laundress's niece weeks ago." Small wonder her cheeks took on a deeper
pink.

"Oh," said Buck, unruffled, "too bad! There was something about that
dress--I don't know----"

At the first sitting of the second gown, Emma revolted openly.

On the floor at Emma's feet there was knotted into a contortionistic
attitude a small, wiry, impolite person named Smalley. Miss Smalley
was an artist in draping and knew it. She was the least fashionable
person in all that smart dressmaking establishment. She refused to
notice the corset-coiffure-and-charmeuse edict that governed all other
employees in the shop. In her shabby little dress, her steel-rimmed
spectacles, her black-sateen apron, Smalley might have passed for a
Bird Center home dressmaker. Yet, given a yard or two or three of
satin and a saucer of pins, Smalley could make the dumpiest of
debutantes look like a fragile flower.

At a critical moment Emma stirred. Handicapped as she was by a
mouthful of nineteen pins and her bow-knot attitude, Smalley still
could voice a protest.

"Don't move!" she commanded, thickly.

"Wait a minute," Emma said, and moved again, more disastrously than
before. "Don't you think it's too--too young?"

She eyed herself in the mirror anxiously, then lo