"But it was she who made you get out of our partnership," I remarked, sympathetically
"Yes, and now she blames it all on me. When she heard you had moved to a larger place she fainted. Couldn't you take me back?"
He finally went to work as a designer for one of the old firms, at a smaller salary than his former employers had paid him
For the present I continued to worry along with my free-lance designer, but as a matter of fact Chaikin's wonderful feeling for line and color was, unbeknown to himself, in my service. The practice of pirating designs was rapidly becoming an open secret, in fact. Styles put out by the big houses were copied by some of their tailors, who would sell the drawing for a few dollars to some of the smaller houses in plenty of time before the new cloak or suit had been placed on the market. In this manner it was that I obtained, almost regularly, copies of Chaikin's latest designs
The period of dire distress that smote the country about this time—the memorable crisis of 1893—dealt me a staggering blow, but I soon recovered from it. The crisis had been preceded by a series of bitter conflicts between the old manufacturers and the Cloak-makers' Union, in the form of lockouts, strikes, and criminal proceedings against the leaders of the union, which had proved fatal to both. The union was still in existence, but it was a mere shadow of the formidable body that it had been three years before. And, as work was scarce, labor could be had for a song, as the phrase goes. This enabled me to make a number of comparatively large sales.
To tell the truth, the decay of the union was a source of regret to me, as the special talents I had developed for dodging it while it was powerful had formerly given me an advantage over a majority of my competitors which I now did not enjoy. Everybody was now practically free from its control.
Everybody could have all the cheap labor he wanted.
Still, I was one of a minority of cloak-manufacturers who contrived to bring down the cost of production to an extraordinarily low level, and so I gradually obtained considerable business, rallying from the shock of the panic before it was well over.
CHAPTER VII
THE panic was followed by a carnival of prosperity of which I received a generous share. My business was progressing with leaps and bounds