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“Oh, nonsense!” disputed T. A. “They certainly wear something–some sort of an–“

“I tell you they don’t. Here. Listen. Three years ago our taffeta skirts ran from thirty-six to thirty-eight yards to the dozen. We paid from ninety cents to one dollar five a yard. Now our skirts run from twenty-five to twenty-eight yards to the dozen. The silk costs us from fifty to sixty cents a yard. Silk skirts used to be a luxury. Now they’re not even a necessity.”

“Well, what’s the answer? I’ve been pondering some petticoat problems myself. I know we’ve got to sell three skirts to-day to make the profit that we used to make on one three years ago.”

Emma McChesney had the brave-heartedness to laugh. “This skirt business reminds me of a game we used to play when I was a kid. We called it Going to Jerusalem, I think. Anyway, I know each child sat in a chair except the one who was It. At a signal everybody had to get up and change chairs. There was a wild scramble, in which the one who was It took part. When the burly-burly was over some child was always chairless, of course. He had to be It. That’s the skirt business to- day. There aren’t enough chairs to go round, and in the scramble somebody’s got to be left out. And let me tell you, here and now, that the firm of T. A. Buck, Featherloom Petticoats, is not going to be It.”

T. A. rose as wearily as he had sat down. Even the most optimistic of watchers could have discerned no gleam of enthusiasm on his face.

“I thought,” he said listlessly, “that you and I had tried every possible scheme to stimulate the skirt trade.”

“Every possible one, yes,” agreed Mrs. McChesney, sweetly. “And now it’s time to try the impossible. The possibilities haven’t worked. My land! I could write a book on the Decline and Fall of the Petticoat, beginning with the billowy white muslin variety, and working up to the present slinky messaline affair. When I think of those dear dead days of the glorious–er–past, when the hired girl used to complain and threaten to leave because every woman in the family had at least three ruffled, embroidery-flounced white muslin petticoats on the line on Mondays–“

The lines about T. A. Buck’s mouth relaxed into a grim smile.

“Remember that feature you got them to run in the Sunday Sphere? The one headed ‘Are Skirts Growing Fuller, and Where?'”

“Do I remember it!” wailed Emma McChesney. “And can I ever forget the money we put into that fringed model we called the Carmencita! We made it up so it could retail for a dollar ninety-five, and I could have sworn that the women would maim each other to get to it. But it didn’t go. They won’t even wear fringe around their ankles.”

T. A.’s grim smile stretched into a reminiscent grin. “But nothing in our whole hopeless campaign could touch your Municipal Purity League agitation for the abolition of the form-hugging skirt. You talked public morals until you had A. Comstock and Lucy Page Gaston looking like Parisian Apaches.”

A little laugh rippled up to Emma McChesney’s lips, only to die away to a sigh. She shook her head in sorrowful remembrance.

“Yes. But what good did it do? The newspapers and magazines did take it up, but what happened? The dressmakers and tailors, who are charging more than ever for their work, and putting in half as much material, got together and knocked my plans into a cocked hat. In answer to those snap-shots showing what took place every time a woman climbed a car step, they came back with pictures of the styles of ’61, proving that the street-car effect is nothing to what happened to a belle of ’61 if she chanced to sit down or get up too suddenly in the hoop-skirt days.”

They were both laughing now, like a couple of children. “And, oh, say!” gasped Emma, “remember Moe Selig, of the Fine-Form Skirt Company, trying to get the doctors to state that hobble skirts were making women knock-kneed! Oh, mercy!”

But
their laugh ended in a little rueful silence. It was no laughing matter, this situation. T. A. Buck shrugged his shoulders, and began a restless pacing up and down. “Yep. There you are. Meanwhile–“