id Emma's
spring hat flaunt flowers, the elevators, at closing time, looked like
gardens abloom. If she appeared on Monday morning in severely tailored
white-linen blouse, the shop on Tuesday was a Boston seminary in its
starched primness.

"It worries me," Emma told her husband-partner. "I can't help thinking
of the story of the girl and the pet chameleon. What would happen if I
were to forget myself some day and come down to work in black velvet
and pearls?"

"They'd manage it somehow," Buck assured her. "I don't know just how;
but I'm sure that twenty-four hours later our shop would look like a
Buckingham drawing-room when the court is in mourning."

Emma never ceased to marvel at their ingenuity, at their almost uncanny
clothes-instinct. Their cheap skirts hung and fitted with an art as
perfect as that of a Fifty-seventh Street modiste; their blouses, in
some miraculous way, were of to-day's style, down to the last detail of
cuff or collar or stitching; their hats were of the shape that the
season demanded, set at the angle that the season approved, and
finished with just that repression of decoration which is known as
"single trimming." They wore their clothes with a chic that would make
the far-famed Parisian outriere look dowdy and down at heel in
comparison. Upper Fifth Avenue, during the shopping or tea-hour, has
been sung, painted, vaunted, boasted. Its furs and millinery, its eyes
and figure, its complexion and ankles have flashed out at us from ten
thousand magazine covers, have been adjectived in reams of
Sunday-supplement stories. Who will picture Lower Fifth Avenue between
five and six, when New York's unsung beauties pour into the streets
from a thousand loft-buildings? Theirs is no mere empty pink-and-white
prettiness. Poverty can make prettiness almost poignantly lovely, for
it works with a scalpel. Your Twenty-sixth Street beauty has a certain
wistful appeal that your Forty-sixth Street beauty lacks; her very
bravado, too, which falls just short of boldness, adds a final piquant
touch. In the face of the girl who works, whether she be a
spindle-legged errand-girl or a ten-thousand-a-year foreign buyer, you
will find both vivacity and depth of expression. What she loses in
softness and bloom she gains in a something that peeps from her eyes,
that lurks in the corners of her mouth. Emma never tired of studying
them--these girls with their firm, slim throats, their lovely faces,
their Orie