"Well, anyway, you've got the hair and the coloring and the figure for it. Goodness knows you look young enough!"
"That's because I've worked hard all my life," retorted Emma, almost viciously. "Another month of this leisure and I'll be as wrinkled as the rest of them."
Smalley's magic fingers paused in their manipulation of a soft fold of satin.
"Worked? Earned a living? Used your wits and brains every day against the wits and brains of other folks?"
"Every day."
Into the eyes of Miss Smalley, the artist in draping, there crept the shrewd twinkle of Miss Smalley, the successful woman in business. She had been sitting back on her knees, surveying her handiwork through narrowed lids. Now she turned her gaze on Emma, who was smiling down at her.
"Then for goodness' sake don't stop! I've found out that work is a kind of self-oiler. If you're used to it, the minute you stop you begin to get rusty, and your hinges creak and you clog up. And the next thing you know, you break down. Work that you like to do is a blessing. It keeps you young. When my mother was my age, she was crippled with rheumatism, and all gnarled up, and quavery, and all she had to look forward to was death. Now me—every time the styles in skirts change I get a new hold on life. And on a day when I can make a short, fat woman look like a tall, thin woman, just by sitting here on my knees with a handful of pins, and giving her the line she needs, I go home feeling like I'd just been born."
"I know that feeling," said Emma, in her eyes a sparkle that had long been absent. "I've had it when I've landed a thousand-dollar Featherloom order from a man who has assured me that he isn't interested in our line."
At dinner that evening, Emma's gown was so obviously not of the new crop that even her husband's inexpert eye noted it.
"That's not one of the new ones, is it?"