med to be.

During working hours, Mrs. McChesney held rigidly to business. Her
handsome partner tried bravely to follow her example. If he failed
occasionally, perhaps Emma McChesney was not so displeased as she
pretended to be. A business discussion, deeply interesting to both,
was likely to run thus:

Buck, entering her office briskly, papers in hand: "Mrs.
McChesney--ahem!--I have here a letter from Singer & French, Columbus,
Ohio. They ask for an extension. They've had ninety days."

"That's enough. That firm's slow pay, and always will be until old
Singer has the good taste and common sense to retire. It isn't because
the stock doesn't move. Singer simply believes in not paying for
anything until he has to. If I were you, I'd write him that this is a
business house, not a charitable institution---- No, don't do that. It
isn't politic. But you know what I mean."

"H'm; yes." A silence. "Emma, that's a fiendishly becoming gown."

"Now, T. A.!"

"But it is! It--it's so kind of loose, and yet clinging, and those
white collar-and-cuff things----"

"T. A. Buck, I've worn this thing down to the office every day for a
month. It shines in the back. Besides, you promised not to----"

"Oh, darn it all, Emma, I'm human, you know! How do you suppose I can
stand here and look at you and not----"

Emma McChesney (pressing the buzzer that summons Hortense): "You know,
Tim, I don't exactly hate you this morning, either. But business is
business. Stop looking at me like that!" Then, to Hortense, in the
doorway: "Just take this letter, Miss Stotz-Singer & French, Columbus,
Ohio. Dear Sirs: Yours of the tenth at hand. Period. Regarding your
request for further extension we wish to say that, in view of the
fact----"

T. A. Buck, half resentful, half amused, wholly admiring, would
disappear. But Hortense, eyes demurely cast down at her notebook, was
not deceived.

"Say," she confided to Miss Kelly, "they think they've got me fooled.
But I'm wise. Don't I know? When Henry passes through the office
here, from the shipping-room, he looks at me just as cool and
indifferent. Before we announced it, we had you all guessing, didn't
we? But I can see something back of that look that the rest of you
can't get. Well, when Mr. Buck looks at her, I can see the same thing
in his eyes. Say, when it comes to seeing the love-light through the
fog, I'm there with the spy-glass."

If Emma McChesney held hers