“Something nice happened to me to-day,” she said, softly. “Something that made me realize how worth while life is. You know we have five thousand women working here—almost double that during the holidays. A lot of them are under twenty and, Emma, a working girl, under twenty, in a city like this—Well, a brand new girl was looking for me today. She didn't know the way to my office, and she didn't know my name. So she stopped one of the older clerks, blushed a little, and said, 'Can you tell me the way to the office of the Comfort Lady?' That's worth working for, isn't it, Emma McChesney?”
“It's worth living for,” answered Emma McChesney, gravely. “It—it's worth dying for. To think that those girls come to you with their little sacred things, their troubles, and misfortunes, and unhappinesses and—”
“And their disgraces—sometimes,” Mary Cutting finished for her. “Oh, Emma McChesney, sometimes I wonder why there isn't a national school for the education of mothers. I marvel at their ignorance more and more every day. Remember, Emma, when we were kids our mothers used to send us flying to the grocery on baking day? All the way from our house to Hine's grocery I'd have to keep on saying, over and over: 'Sugar, butter, molasses; sugar, butter, molasses; sugar, butter, molasses.' If I stopped for a minute I'd forget the whole thing. It isn't so different now. Sometimes at night, going home in the car after a day so bad that the whole world seems rotten, I make myself say, over and over, as I used to repeat my 'Sugar, butter, and molasses.' 'It's a glorious, good old world; it's a glorious, good old world; it's a glorious, good old world.' And I daren't stop for a minute for fear of forgetting my lesson.”
For the third time in that short half-hour a silence fell between the two—a silence of perfect sympathy and understanding.
Five little strokes, tripping over each other in their haste, came from the tiny clock on Mary Cutting's desk. It roused them both.
“Come on, old girl,” said Mary Cutting. “I've a chore or two still to do before my day is finished. Come along, if you like. There's a new girl at the perfumes who wears too many braids, and puffs, and curls, and in the basement misses' ready-to-wear there's another who likes to break store rules about short-sleeved, lace-yoked lingerie waists. And one of the floor managers tells me that a young chap of that callow, semi-objectionable, high-school fraternity, flat-heeled shoe type has been persistently hanging around the desk of the pretty little bundle inspector at the veilings. We're trying to clear the store of that type. They call girls of that description chickens. I wonder why some one hasn't found a name for the masculine chicken.”
{Illustration: “'Well, s'long, then, Shrimp. See you at eight'”}
“I'll give 'em one,” said Emma McChesney as they swung down a broad, bright aisle of the store. “Call 'em weasels. That covers their style, occupation, and character.”
They swung around the corner to the veilings, and there they saw the very pretty, very blond, very young “chicken” deep in conversation with her weasel. The weasel's trousers were very tight and English, and his hat was properly woolly and Alpine and dented very much on one side and his heels were fashionably flat, and his hair was slickly pompadour.
Mary Cutting and Emma McChesney approached them very quietly just in time to hear the weasel say: