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Updated: June 14, 2025
She felt a personal pride in Emma McChesney's work, her success, her clean reputation, her life of self-denial for her son Jock. When Ethel Morrissey was planned by her Maker, she had not been meant to be wasted on the skirt-and-suit department of a small-town store. That broad, gracious breast had been planned as a resting-place for heads in need of comfort.
The last week in November, tragedy stalked upon the scene in the death at Marienbad of old T. A. Buck, Mrs. McChesney's stanch friend and beloved employer. Emma McChesney had wept for him as one weeps at the loss of a father.
McChesney's little apartment had been subleased, and a very smart one taken and furnished almost complete, with Annie installed in the kitchen and a demure parlor-maid engaged. "When we come back, we'll come home," T. A. Buck had said. "Home!"
It had been Emma McChesney's boast that her ten years on the road had familiarized her with every type, grade, style, shape, cut, and mold of hotel clerk. She knew him from the Knickerbocker to the Eagle House at Waterloo, Iowa. At the moment she entered the Grande Hotel, she knew she had overlooked one.
McChesney's feet were still on the ground, she might be said to be standing on tiptoe. When she had sailed from Brooklyn pier that June afternoon, four months before, she had cast her ordinary load of business responsibilities on the unaccustomed shoulders of T. A. Buck. That elegant person, although president of the company which his father had founded, had never been its real head.
Warm, isn't it?" There was a double vertical frown between Emma McChesney's eyes as she glanced up over the top of her Dry Goods Review. The frown gave way to a half smile. The glance settled into a stare. "But then, anybody would have stared. He expected it," she said, afterwards, in telling about it.
Emma McChesney's home had been a wardrobe-trunk. She had taken her family life at second hand. Four nights out of the seven, her bed was "Lower Eight," and her breakfast, as many mornings, a cinder-strewn, lukewarm horror, taken tete-a-tete with a sleepy-eyed stranger and presided over by a white-coated, black-faced bandit, to whom a coffee-slopped saucer was a matter of course.
A faint line about the mouth, a fairy tracing at the corners of the eyes, a mere vague touch just at the nostrils and the thing is done. Even Emma McChesney's eyes those mother-eyes which make the lynx seem a mole had failed to note the subtle change. Then, suddenly, one night, the lines leaped out at her.
Jock McChesney's side of the big table was completely covered with the mass of copy-paper, rough sketches, photographs and drawings which make up an advertising lay-out. He was bent over the work, absorbed, intent, his forearms resting on the table. Emma McChesney glanced up from her magazine just as Jock bent forward to reach a scrap of paper that had fluttered away.
She had seen his struggles, his prosperity; she had grieved at his death; she had watched young T. A. take the reins in his unaccustomed hands, and she had gloried in Emma McChesney's rise from office to salesroom, from salesroom to road, from road to private office and recognized authority. Sophy had left her early work far behind.
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