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“While I don’t want to seem to hurry you,” drawled Mrs. McChesney, “might I suggest that you shorten the overture and begin on the first act?”

“Well, you know how I feel about your business genius.”

“Yes, I know,” enigmatically.

Ed Meyers grinned. “Can’t forget those two little business misunderstandings we had, can you?”

“Business understandings,” corrected Emma McChesney.

“Call ’em anything your little heart dictates, but listen. Fromkin knows all about you. Knows you’ve got a million friends in the trade, that you know skirts from the belt to the hem. I don’t know just what his proposition is, but I’ll bet he’ll give you half interest in the livest, come-upest little skirt factory in the country, just for a few thousands capital, maybe, and your business head at the executive end. Now just let that sink in before you speak.”

“And why,” inquired Emma McChesney, “don’t you grab this matchless business opportunity yourself?”

“Because, fair lady, Fromkin wouldn’t let me get in with a crowbar. He’ll never be able to pronounce his t’s right, and when he’s dressed up he looks like a ‘bus-boy at Mouquin’s, but he can see a bluff farther than I can throw one–and that’s somewhere beyond the horizon, as you’ll admit. Talk it over with us after dinner then?”

Emma McChesney was regarding the plump, pink, eager face before her with keen, level, searching eyes.

“Yes,” she said slowly, “I will.”

“Cafe? We’ll have a bottle–“

“No.”

“Oh! Er–parlor?”

Mrs. McChesney smiled. “I won’t ask you to make yourself that miserable. You can’t smoke in the parlor. We’ll find a quiet corner in the writing-room, where you men can light up. I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

Down in the writing-room at eight they formed a strange little group. Ed Meyers, flushed and eager, his pink face glowing like a peony, talking, arguing, smoking, reasoning, coaxing, with the spur of a fat commission to urge him on; Abel Fromkin, with his peculiarly pallid skin made paler in contrast to the purplish-black line where the razor had passed, showing no hint of excitement except in the restless little black eyes and in the work-scarred hands that rolled cigarette after cigarette, each glowing for one brief instant, only to die down to a blackened ash the next; Emma McChesney, half fascinated, half distrustful, listening in spite of herself, and trying to still a small inner voice–a voice that had never advised her ill.

“You know the ups and downs to this game,” Ed Meyers was saying. “When I met you there in the elevator you looked like you’d lost your last customer. You get pretty disgusted with it all, at times, like the rest of us.”

“At that minute,” replied Emma McChesney, “I was so disgusted that if some one had called me up on the ‘phone and said, ‘Hullo, Mrs. McChesney! Will you marry me?’ I’d have said: ‘Yes. Who is this?'”

“There! That’s just it. I don’t want to be impolite, or anything like that, Mrs. McChesney, but you’re no kid. Not that you look your age– not by ten years! But I happen to know you’re teetering somewhere between thirty-six and the next top. Ain’t that right?”

“Is that a argument to put to a lady?” remonstrated Abel Fromkin.

Fat Ed Meyers waved the interruption away with a gesture of his strangely slim hands. “This ain’t an argument. It’s facts. Another ten years on the road, and where’ll you be? In the discard. A man of forty-six can keep step with the youngsters, even if it does make him puff a bit. But a woman of forty-six–the road isn’t the place for her. She’s tired. Tired in the morning; tired at night. She wants her kimono and her afternoon snooze. You’ve seen some of those old girls on the road. They’ve come down step by step until you spot ’em, bleached hair, crow’s-feet around the eyes, mussy shirt-waist, yellow and red complexion, demonstrating green and lavender gelatine messes in the grocery of some department store. I don’t say that a brainy corker of a saleswoman like you would come down like that. But you’ve got to consider sickness and a lot of other things. Those six weeks last summer with the fever at Glen Rock put a crimp in you, didn’t it? You’ve never been yourself since then. Haven’t had a decent chance to rest up.”