At the first sitting of the second gown, Emma revolted openly.
On the floor at Emma's feet there was knotted into a contortionistic attitude a small, wiry, impolite person named Smalley. Miss Smalley was an artist in draping and knew it. She was the least fashionable person in all that smart dressmaking establishment. She refused to notice the corset-coiffure-and-charmeuse edict that governed all other employees in the shop. In her shabby little dress, her steel-rimmed spectacles, her black-sateen apron, Smalley might have passed for a Bird Center home dressmaker. Yet, given a yard or two or three of satin and a saucer of pins, Smalley could make the dumpiest of debutantes look like a fragile flower.
At a critical moment Emma stirred. Handicapped as she was by a mouthful of nineteen pins and her bow-knot attitude, Smalley still could voice a protest.
"Don't move!" she commanded, thickly.
"Wait a minute," Emma said, and moved again, more disastrously than before. "Don't you think it's too—too young?"
She eyed herself in the mirror anxiously, then looked down at Miss Smalley's nut-cracker face that was peering up at her, its lips pursed grotesquely over the pins.
"Of course it is," mumbled Miss Smalley. "Everybody's clothes are too young for 'em nowadays. The only difference between the dresses we make for girls of sixteen and the dresses we make for their grandmothers of sixty is that the sixty-year-old ones want 'em shorter and lower, and they run more to rose-bud trimming."
Emma surveyed the acid Miss Smalley with a look that was half amused, half vexed, wholly determined.
"I shan't wear it. Heaven knows I'm not sixty, but I'm not sixteen either! I don't want to be."
Miss Smalley, doubling again to her task, flung upward a grudging compliment.