very popular at
these affairs, and her husband very proud of her popularity. And if
any one as thoroughly alive as Mrs. T. A. Buck could have been bored to
extinction by anything, then those dinners would have accomplished the
deadly work.

"T. A.," she said one evening, after a particularly large affair of
this sort, "T. A., have you ever noticed anything about me that is
different from other women?"

"Have I? Well, I should say I----"

"Oh, I don't mean what you mean, dear--thanks just the same. I mean
those women tonight. They all seem to 'go in' for something--votes or
charity or dancing or social service, or something--even the girls.
And they all sounded so amateurish, so untrained, so unprepared, yet
they seemed to be dreadfully in earnest."

"This is the difference," said T. A. Buck. "You've rubbed up against
life, and you know. They've always been sheltered, but now they want
to know. Well, naturally they're going to bungle and bump their heads
a good many times before they really find out."

"Anyway," retorted Emma, "they want to know. That's something. It's
better to have bumped your head, even though you never see what's on
the other side of the wall, than never to have tried to climb it."

It was in the third week of the third month that Emma encountered
Hortense. Hortense, before her marriage to Henry, the shipping-clerk,
had been a very pretty, very pert, very devoted little stenographer in
the office of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company. She had
married just a month after her employers, and Emma, from the fulness of
her own brimming cup of happiness, had made Hortense happy with a gift
of linens and lingerie and lace of a fineness that Hortense's
beauty-loving, feminine heart could never have hoped for.

They met in the busy aisle of a downtown department store and shook
hands as do those who have a common bond.

Hortense, as pretty as ever and as pert, spoke first.

"I wouldn't have known you, Mrs. Mc-- Buck!"

"No? Why not?"

"You look--no one would think you'd ever worked in your life. I was
down at the office the other day for a minute--the first time since I
was married. They told me you weren't there any more."

"No; I haven't been down since my marriage either. I'm like you--an
elegant lady of leisure."

Hortense's bright-blue eyes dwelt searchingly on the face of her former
employer.

"The bunch in the office said they missed you something awful." Then,