p with a sigh of relief. Chairs
were pushed back, aprons unbuttoned.

Emma McChesney Buck stepped forward and raised a hand for attention.
The noise of a hundred tongues was stilled.

"Girls, Miss Gladys Orton-Wells is going to speak to you for five
minutes on the subject of dress. Will you give her your attention,
please. The five minutes will be added to your noon hour."

Gladys Orton-Wells looked down at her hands for one terrified moment,
then she threw her head up bravely. There was no lack of color in her
cheeks now. She stepped to the middle of the room.

"What I have to say won't take five minutes," she said, in her clear,
well-bred tones.

"You all dress so smartly, and I'm such a dowd, I just want to ask you
whether you think I ought to get blue, or that new shade of gray for a
traveling-suit."

And the shop, hardened to the eccentricities of noonday speakers, made
composed and ready answer:

"Oh, get blue; it's always good."

"Thank you," laughed Gladys Orton-Wells, and was off down the hall and
away, with never a backward glance at her gasping and outraged mother.

Emma McChesney Buck took Lily Bernstein's soft cheek between thumb and
forefinger and pinched it ever so fondly.

"I knew you'd do it, Judy O'Grady," she said.

"Judy O'Who?"

"O'Grady--a lady famous in history."

"Oh, now, quit your kiddin', Mrs. Buck!" said Lily Bernstein.

VII

AN ETUDE FOR EMMA

If you listen long enough, and earnestly enough, and with ear
sufficiently attuned to the music of this sphere there will come to you
this reward: The violins and oboes and 'cellos and brasses of humanity
which seemed all at variance with each other will unite as one
instrument; seeming discords and dissonances will blend into harmony,
and the wail and blare and thrum of humanity's orchestra will sound in
your ear the sublime melody of that great symphony called Life.

In her sunny little private office on the twelfth floor of the great
loft-building that housed the T. A. Buck Company, Emma McChesney Buck
sat listening to the street-sounds that were wafted to her, mellowed by
height and distance. The noises, taken separately, were the
nerve-racking sounds common to a busy down-town New York cross-street.
By the time they reached the little office on the twelfth floor, they
were softened, mellowed, debrutalized, welded into a weird choirlike
chant first high, then low, rising, swelling, dying away, rising again
to a dul