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 glowi