In the busy year that followed, anyone watching Emma McChesney Buck as she worked and played and constructed, and helped others to work and play and construct, would have agreed with T. A. Buck. She did not seem a woman who was looking at life objectively. As she went about her home in the evening, or the office, the workroom, or the showrooms during the day, adjusting this, arranging that, smoothing out snarls, solving problems of business or household, she was very much alive, very vital, very personal, very electric. In that year there came to her many letters from Jock and Grace—happy letters, all of them, some with an undertone of great seriousness, as is fitting when two people are readjusting their lives. Then, in spring, came the news of the baby. The telegram came to Emma as she sat in her office near the close of a busy day. As she read it and reread it, the slip of paper became a misty yellow with vague lines of blue dancing about on it; then it became a blur of nothing in particular, as Emma's tears fell on it in a little shower of joy and pride and wonder at the eternal miracle.
Then she dried her eyes, mopped the telegram and her lace jabot impartially, went across the hall and opened the door marked "T. A. BUCK."
T. A. looked up from his desk, smiled, held out a hand.
"Girl or boy?"
"Girl, of course," said Emma tremulously, "and her name is Emma McChesney."
T. A. stood up and put an arm about his wife's shoulders.
"Lean on me, grandma," he said.
"Fiend!" retorted Emma, and reread the telegram happily. She folded it then, with a pensive sigh, "I hope she'll look like Grace. But with Jock's eyes. They were wasted in a man. At any rate, she ought to be a raving, tearing beauty with that father and mother."
"What about her grandmother, when it comes to looks! Yes, and think of the brain she'll have," Buck reminded her excitedly. "Great Scott! With a grandmother who has made the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat a household word, and a mother who was the cleverest woman advertising copy-writer in New York, this young lady ought to be a composite Hetty Green, Madame de Stael, Hypatia, and Emma McChesney Buck. She'll be a lady wizard of finance or a——"
"She'll be nothing of the kind," Emma disputed calmly. "That child will be a throwback. The third generation generally is. With a militant mother and a grandmother such as that child has, she'll just naturally be a clinging vine. She'll be a reversion to type. She'll be the kind who'll make eyes and wear pale blue and be crazy about new embroidery-stitches. Just mark my words, T. A."