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When the office machinery needed mental oiling, when a new hand demanded to be put on silk-work instead of mercerized, when a consignment of skirt-material turned out to be more than usually metallic, it was in Mrs. Emma McChesney's little private office that the tangle was unsnarled. She walked into that little office, now, at nine o'clock of a brilliant September morning.
And it was so the evening following, as she came dancing down the kicked-up sand of the beach, in a little bright-blue frock, mercerized silk, if you please, with very brief sleeves that ended right up in the jolliest part of her arm, with a half moon of vaccination winking out roguishly beneath a finish of ribbon bow, and a white-canvas sport hat with a jockey rosette to cap the little climax of her, and by no means least, a metal coin purse, with springy insides designed to hold exactly fifty cents in nickels.
This gives, or should give her, a commanding position in the producing world. If the women of America should definitely decide to-day that they would buy no more corn flakes, or mercerized crochet cotton, or silk elastic, the factories now so busy turning out these products would be shut down to-morrow until they could be converted to other uses.
"At all events" he spoke gravely "you must try to like me a little, because I am not what I was. The person that I am is largely the creature of your own fashioning. Of course, you had very raw material to work with, and you can't make a silk purse of" he broke off and smiled "well, of me, but in time you may at least get me mercerized a little."
She hadn't got enough mercerized thread in the house, she didn't believe, to do it all; and it was such a nuisance to run out of the thread you had to have, and nobody going to the village for goodness knows when, with the farmwork behind the way it was, on account of the rains. She shifted her position and happened to bring one of her feet into view.
Both warp and woof must be finer than in ordinary carpet weaving. Instead of coarse cotton yarn, warp must be fine "mercerized" cotton, or of linen or silk thread, and the warp threads are set much closer in the loom. In place of ten or twelve threads to the inch, there should be from fifteen to twenty.
She undressed in the dark a pale darkness relieved by a lighted window across the areaway. The blue mercerized dress she slid over a hanger, covering it with one of her cotton nightgowns and putting it into careful place behind the cretonne curtain that served her as clothes closet. Her petticoat, white, with a rill of lace, she folded away.
She just loved to sit and sew, in a room all nice and picked up, and know the house-work was done. That would be a real pretty dress, she thought, with the pink sprigs and the pink feather-stitching in mercerized cotton she was going to put on it. Addie would look sweet in it. And if it was washed careful and dried in the shade it wouldn't fade so much. It was a good bright pink to start with.
Each move sees it reproduced in materials a little less elegant and durable, its colors a trifle vulgarized, its ornaments cheapened, its laces poorer. By the time it reaches Grand Street the $400 gown in brocaded velvet from the best looms in Europe has become a cotton velvet from Lawrence or Fall River, decorated with mercerized lace and glass ornaments from Rhode Island!
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