mbed ledger--that
powerful ledger which, at the week's end, decided just how plump or
thin each pay-envelope would be. So the shop and office at T. A.
Buck's were bound together by many ties of affection and sympathy and
loyalty; and these bonds were strongest where, at one end, they touched
Emma McChesney Buck, and, at the other, faithful Sophy Kumpf. Each a
triumphant example of Woman in Business.

It was at this comfortable stage of Featherloom affairs that the
Movement struck the T. A. Buck Company. Emma McChesney Buck had never
mingled much in movements. Not that she lacked sympathy with them; she
often approved of them, heart and soul. But she had been heard to say
that the Movers got on her nerves. Those well-dressed, glib, staccato
ladies who spoke with such ease from platforms and whose pictures
stared out at one from the woman's page failed, somehow, to convince
her. When Emma approved a new movement, it was generally in spite of
them, never because of them. She was brazenly unapologetic when she
said that she would rather listen to ten minutes of Sophy Kumpf's
world-wisdom than to an hour's talk by the most magnetic and
silken-clad spellbinder in any cause. For fifteen business years, in
the office, on the road, and in the thriving workshop, Emma McChesney
had met working women galore. Women in offices, women in stores, women
in hotels--chamber-maids, clerks, buyers, waitresses, actresses in road
companies, women demonstrators, occasional traveling saleswomen, women
in factories, scrubwomen, stenographers, models--every grade, type and
variety of working woman, trained and untrained. She never missed a
chance to talk with them. She never failed to learn from them. She
had been one of them, and still was. She was in the position of one who
is on the inside, looking out. Those other women urging this cause or
that were on the outside, striving to peer in.

The Movement struck T. A. Buck's at eleven o'clock Monday morning.
Eleven o'clock Monday morning in the middle of a busy fall season is
not a propitious moment for idle chit-chat. The three women who
stepped out of the lift at the Buck Company's floor looked very much
out of place in that hummingly busy establishment and appeared, on the
surface, at least, very chit-chatty indeed. So much so, that T. A.
Buck, glancing up from the cards which had preceded them, had
difficulty in repressing a frown of annoyance. T. A. Buck, during his
college