oked down at Miss
Smalley's nut-cracker face that was peering up at her, its lips pursed
grotesquely over the pins.

"Of course it is," mumbled Miss Smalley. "Everybody's clothes are too
young for 'em nowadays. The only difference between the dresses we
make for girls of sixteen and the dresses we make for their
grandmothers of sixty is that the sixty-year-old ones want 'em shorter
and lower, and they run more to rose-bud trimming."

Emma surveyed the acid Miss Smalley with a look that was half amused,
half vexed, wholly determined.

"I shan't wear it. Heaven knows I'm not sixty, but I'm not sixteen
either! I don't want to be."

Miss Smalley, doubling again to her task, flung upward a grudging
compliment.

"Well, anyway, you've got the hair and the coloring and the figure for
it. Goodness knows you look young enough!"

"That's because I've worked hard all my life," retorted Emma, almost
viciously. "Another month of this leisure and I'll be as wrinkled as
the rest of them."

Smalley's magic fingers paused in their manipulation of a soft fold of
satin.

"Worked? Earned a living? Used your wits and brains every day against
the wits and brains of other folks?"

"Every day."

Into the eyes of Miss Smalley, the artist in draping, there crept the
shrewd twinkle of Miss Smalley, the successful woman in business. She
had been sitting back on her knees, surveying her handiwork through
narrowed lids. Now she turned her gaze on Emma, who was smiling down
at her.

"Then for goodness' sake don't stop! I've found out that work is a
kind of self-oiler. If you're used to it, the minute you stop you
begin to get rusty, and your hinges creak and you clog up. And the
next thing you know, you break down. Work that you like to do is a
blessing. It keeps you young. When my mother was my age, she was
crippled with rheumatism, and all gnarled up, and quavery, and all she
had to look forward to was death. Now me--every time the styles in
skirts change I get a new hold on life. And on a day when I can make a
short, fat woman look like a tall, thin woman, just by sitting here on
my knees with a handful of pins, and giving her the line she needs, I
go home feeling like I'd just been born."

"I know that feeling," said Emma, in her eyes a sparkle that had long
been absent. "I've had it when I've landed a thousand-dollar
Featherloom order from a man who has assured me that he isn't
interested in our line."

At d