Emma in these days found relief in a vast activity. The restaurant business kept growing and growing until at last she secured a long lease on the shoe store next door and undertook the necessary alterations. She was in and out of the place a score of times a day, watching the carpenters, the plumbers and the painters, quarreling with the contractor and insisting that pipes should be placed where it was impossible to place them and pillars spaced so that there would be a permanent danger of the roof falling in upon her customers.
She was active, too, in her church work and contributed half a wagon load of cakes and pies to the annual June church fair. The Minerva Circle met at her house and Naomi was introduced to those members whom she did not know already, and so launched in a series of sewing parties which she attended in a kind of misery because on account of Philip she could not answer honestly the persistent questions of her new women “friends.” And Emma kept up as well her fervent activities as President of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, carrying war into the enemy’s country, trying to drive whisky from a country of mills and furnaces where every other corner was occupied by a saloon. She even called upon Moses Slade, Congressman of the district, and lately become a widower, in his great boxlike house set back among the trees on Park Avenue. It was an odd call which began with open hostility when she urged him to wear a white ribbon and declare himself at once on the side of God and Purity.
But Slade, being a politician, felt that Fortune had not yet sided with God and Purity, and declined the honor with a great flow of eloquence for which he was famed. There was much talk of his being chosen to represent the majority of the people, and as yet the majority seemed unfortunately (“the human race is naturally wicked and must be educated to goodness—we must not forget that, Mrs. Downes”) still on the side of gin.
He was a man of fifty, with a great stomach and massive feet and hands, who had a round, flat face and a broad, flat nose, with odd little shifty eyes. He was bald in front, but what remained of the once luxuriant black locks was now worn, loose and free, bobbed in a style which women came, shockingly, to adopt years afterward.
He received Emma in his study, a room with red walls, set round with mastodon furniture in mahogany and red leather. In the beginning he was taken aback by the vigor and power of Emma’s handsome figure.
She said to him, “The day will come, Mr. Slade, when you will have to vote on the side of purity if you wish to survive—you and all your fellow-members.”
And he replied, “That, Mrs. Downes, is what I am waiting for—a sign from the people. You may tell your members that my heart is with them but that I must not lose my head. A sign is all I’m waiting for, Mrs. Downes—only a sign.”
Emma, feeling that she had gained at least half a victory, turned the conversation to other things. They discussed the Republican chances at the coming election, and the lateness of the summer, the question, as it was called, of “smoke abatement” and, of course, the amazing growth and prosperity of the Town. They found presently that they saw eye to eye on every subject, for Emma was in her own way a born politician. Congressman Slade observed that since the death of his wife (here a deep sigh interrupted his observation) life had not been the same. To lose a woman after thirty years! Well, it made a gap that could never be filled, or at least, it was extremely unlikely that it would be filled. And now his housekeeper had left, leaving him helpless.
Emma, in her turn, sighed and murmured a few words of condolence. She knew what it was to be alone in the world. Hadn’t she been alone for more than twenty years? Ever since Mr. Downes, going to China to make a fortune for himself and his son, had been killed there. They hadn’t even found his body, so that she hadn’t even the consolation of visiting his grave. That, of course, was a great deal. Congressman Slade ought to be thankful that he had his wife’s grave. It helped. In a way, it made the thing definite. It was not like the torturing hope in which she had lived for twenty years.... Yes, more than twenty years, hoping all the while that he might not be really dead. Oh, she understood. She sympathized.
“But as to the housekeeper, Mr. Slade, don’t let that trouble you. Come and take your meals at the restaurant. I’d be delighted to have you. It would be an honor to have you eat there.”