She picked up a piece of flannel and smoothed it on the cutting-table. The head designer had looked on in disapproval while her employer's wife had experimented with scraps of cloth, and pins, and chalk, and scissors. But Emma had gone on serenely cutting and snipping and pinning. They made up samples of service shirts with the new neck-hugging collar and submitted them to Miss Nevins, the head of the woman's uniform department at Fyfe & Gordon's. That astute lady had been obliged to listen to scores of canteeners, nurses, secretaries, and motor leaguers who, standing before a long mirror in one of the many fitting-rooms, had gazed, frowned, fumbled at collar and topmost button, and said, "But it looks so—so lumpy around the neck."
Miss Kate Nevins's reply to this plaint was: "Oh, when you get your tie on—"
"Perhaps they'll let me wear a turn-down collar."
"Absolutely against regulations. The rules strictly forbid anything but the high, close-fitting collar."
The fair war worker would sigh, mutter something about supposing they'd shoot you at sunrise for wearing a becoming shirt, and order six, grumbling.
Kate Nevins had known Mrs. T.A. Buck in that lady's Emma McChesney days. At the end of the first day's trial of the new Featherloom shirt she had telephoned the Featherloom factory and had asked for Emma McChesney. People who had known her by that name never seemed able to get the trick of calling her by any other.
With every fitting-room in the Fyfe & Gordon establishment demanding her attention, Miss Nevins's conversation was necessarily brief. "Emma McChesney?... Kate Nevins.... Who's responsible for the collar on those Featherloom shirts?... I was sure of it.... No regular designer could cut a collar like that. Takes a genius.... H'm?... Well, I mean it. I'm going to write to Washington and have 'em vote you a distinguished service medal. This is the first day since last I-don't-know-when that hasn't found me in the last stages of nervous exhaustion at six o'clock.... All these women warriors are willing to bleed and die for their country, but they want to do it in a collar that fits, and I don't blame 'em. After I saw the pictures of that Russian Battalion of Death, I understood why.... Yes, I know I oughtn't to say that, but...."
By autumn Emma was wearing one of those Featherloom service shirts herself. It was inevitable that a woman of her executive ability, initiative, and detail sense should be pressed into active service. November saw Fifth Avenue a-glitter with uniforms, and one third of them seemed to be petticoated. The Featherloom factory saw little of Emma now. She bore the title of Commandant with feminine captains, lieutenants, and girl workers under her; and her blue uniform, as she herself put it, was so a-jingle with straps, buckles, belts, bars, and bolts that when she first put it on she felt like a jail.
She left the house at eight in the morning now. Dinner time rarely found her back in Sixty-third Street. Buck was devoting four evenings a week to the draft board. At the time of the second Liberty Loan drive in the autumn he had deserted Featherlooms for bonds. His success was due to the commodity he had for sale, the type of person to whom he sold it, and his own selling methods and personality. There was something about this slim, leisurely man, with the handsome eyes and the quiet voice, that convinced and impressed you.
"It's your complete lack of eagerness in the transaction, too," Emma remarked after watching him land a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bond pledge, the buyer a business rival of the Featherloom Petticoat Company. "You make it seem a privilege, not a favour. A man with your method could sell sandbags in the Sahara."