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A slow gleam of unwilling admiration illumined the clerk’s chill eye. He turned and extracted another key with its jangling metal tag, from one of the many pigeonholes behind him.

“You win,” he said. He leaned over the desk and lowered his voice discreetly. “Say, girlie, go on into the cafe and have a drink on me.”

“Wrong again,” answered Emma McChesney. “Never use it. Bad for the complexion. Thanks just the same. Nice little hotel you’ve got here.”

In the corridor leading to sixty-five there was a great litter of pails, and mops, and brooms, and damp rags, and one heard the sigh of a vacuum cleaner.

“Spring house-cleaning,” explained the bellboy, hurdling a pail.

Emma McChesney picked her way over a little heap of dust-cloths and a ladder or so.

“House-cleaning,” she repeated dreamily; “spring house-cleaning.” And there came a troubled, yearning light into her eyes. It lingered there after the boy had unlocked and thrown open the door of sixty-five, pocketed his dime, and departed.

Sixty-five was–well, you know what sixty-five generally is in a small Middle-Western town. Iron bed–tan wall-paper–pine table–pine dresser–pine chair–red carpet–stuffy smell–fly buzzing at window– sun beating in from the west. Emma McChesney saw it all in one accustomed glance.

“Lordy, I hate to think what nineteen must be,” she told herself, and unclasped her bag. Out came the first aid to the travel-stained–a jar of cold cream. It was followed by powder, chamois, brush, comb, tooth- brush. Emma McChesney dug four fingers into the cold cream jar, slapped the stuff on her face, rubbed it in a bit, wiped it off with a dry towel, straightened her hat, dusted the chamois over her face, glanced at her watch and hurriedly whisked downstairs.

“After all,” she mused, “that thin guy might not be out for a music house. Maybe his line is skirts, too. You never can tell. Anyway, I’ll beat him to it.”

Saturday afternoon and spring-time in a small town! Do you know it? Main Street–on the right side–all a-bustle; farmers’ wagons drawn up at the curbing; farmers’ wives in the inevitable rusty black with dowdy hats furbished up with a red muslin rose in honor of spring; grand opening at the new five-and-ten-cent store, with women streaming in and streaming out again, each with a souvenir pink carnation pinned to her coat; every one carrying bundles and yellow paper bags that might contain bananas or hats or grass seed; the thirty-two automobiles that the town boasts all dashing up and down the street, driven by hatless youths in careful college clothes; a crowd of at least eleven waiting at Jenson’s drug-store corner for the next interurban car.

Emma McChesney found herself strolling when she should have been hustling in the direction of the Novelty Cloak and Suit Store. She was aware of a vague, strangely restless feeling in the region of her heart–or was it her liver?–or her lungs?

Reluctantly she turned in at the entrance of the Novelty Cloak and Suit Store and asked for the buyer. (Here we might introduce one of those side-splitting little business deal scenes. But there can be paid no finer compliment to Emma McChesney’s saleswomanship than to state that she landed her man on a busy Saturday afternoon, with a store full of customers and the head woman clerk dead against her from the start.)

As she was leaving:

“Generally it’s the other way around,” smiled the boss, regarding Emma’s trim comeliness, “but seeing you’re a lady, why, it’ll be on me.” He reached for his hat. “Let’s go and have–ah–a little something.”

“Not any, thanks,” Emma McChesney replied, a little wearily.

On her way back to the hotel she fra
nkly loitered. Just to look at her made you certain that she was not of our town. Now, that doesn’t imply that the women of our town do not dress well, because they do. But there was something about her–a flirt of chiffon at the throat, or her hat quill stuck in a certain way, or the stitching on her gloves, or the vamp of her shoe–that was of a style which had not reached us yet.

As Emma McChesney loitered, looking in at the shop windows and watching the women hurrying by, intent on the purchase of their Sunday dinners, that vaguely restless feeling seized her again. There were rows of plump fowls in the butcher-shop windows, and juicy roasts. The cunning hand of the butcher had enhanced the redness of the meat by trimmings of curly parsley. Salad things and new vegetables glowed behind the grocers’ plate-glass. There were the tender green of lettuces, the coral of tomatoes, the brown-green of stout asparagus stalks, bins of spring peas and beans, and carrots, and bunches of greens for soup. There came over the businesslike soul of Emma McChesney a wild longing to go in and select a ten-pound roast, taking care that there should be just the right proportion of creamy fat and red meat. She wanted to go in and poke her fingers in the ribs of a broiler. She wanted to order wildly of sweet potatoes and vegetables, and soup bones, and apples for pies. She ached to turn back her sleeves and don a blue-and-white checked apron and roll out noodles.