Part 20

"Back in a week. Will you wait for us in New York?" called Emma, her breath coming fast. She was trembling, too, and laughing.

"Will I wait!" called back the puffing O'Malley, every bit of the Irish in him beaming from his eyes. "I'll be there when you get back as sure as your name's McBuck."

From his pocket he took a round, silver Western dollar and, still running, tossed it to the toothy Sam. That peerless porter caught it, twirled it, kissed it, bowed, and grinned afresh as the train glided out of the shed.

Emma, flushed, smiling, flew up the aisle.

Buck, listening to her laughing, triumphant account of her hairbreadth, harum-scarum adventure, frowned before he smiled.

"Emma, how could you do it! At least, why didn't you send back for me first?"

Emma smiled a little tremulously.

"Don't be angry. You see, dear boy, I've only been your wife for a week. But I've been Featherloom petticoats for over fifteen years. It's a habit."

Just how strong and fixed a habit, she proved to herself a little more than a week later. It was the morning of their first breakfast in the new apartment. You would have thought, to see them over their coffee and eggs and rolls, that they had been breakfasting together thus for years--Annie was so at home in her new kitchen; the deft little maid, in her crisp white, fitted so perfectly into the picture. Perhaps the thing that T. A. Buck said, once the maid left them alone, might have given an outsider the cue.

"You remind me of a sweetpea, Emma. One of those crisp, erect, golden-white, fresh, fragrant sweetpeas. I think it is the slenderest, sweetest, neatest, trimmest flower in the world, so delicately set on its stem, and yet so straight, so independent."

"T. A., you say such dear things to me!"

No; they had not been breakfasting together for years.

"I'm glad you're not one of those women that wears a frowsy, lacy, ribbony, what-do-you-call-'em-boudoir-cap--down to breakfast. They always make me think of uncombed hair. That's just one reason why I'm glad."

"And I'm glad," said Emma, looking at his clear eyes and steady hand and firm skin, "for a number of reasons. One of them is that you're not the sort of man who's a grouch at breakfast."

When he had hat and coat and stick in hand, and had kissed her good-by and reached the door and opened it, he came back again, as is the way of bridegrooms. But at last the door closed behind him.

Emma sat there a moment, listening to his quick, light step down the corridor, to the opening of the lift door, to its metallic closing. She sat there, in the sunshiny dining-room, in her fresh, white morning gown. She picked up her newspaper, opened it; scanned it, put it down. For years, now, she had read her newspaper in little gulps on the way downtown in crowded subway or street-car. She could not accustom herself to this leisurely scanning of the pages. She rose, went to the window, came back to the table, stood there a moment, her eyes fixed on something far away.

The swinging door between dining-room and butler's pantry opened. Annie, in her neat blue-and-white stripes, stood before her.

"Shall it be steak or chops to-night, Mrs. Mc--Buck?"

Emma turned her head in Annie's direction--then her eyes. The two actions were distinct and separate.

"Steak or----" There was a little bewildered look in her eyes.

Her mind had not yet focused on the question. "Steak--oh! Oh, yes, of course! Why--why, Annie"--and the splendid thousand-h.-p. mind brought itself down to the settling of this butter-churning, two-h.-p. question--"why, Annie, considering all things, I think we'll make it filet with mushrooms."

BLUE SERGE

For ten years, Mrs. Emma McChesney's home had been a wardrobe-trunk. She had taken her family life at second hand. Four nights out of the seven, her bed was "Lower Eight," and her breakfast, as many mornings, a cinder-strewn, lukewarm horror, taken tete-a-tete with a sleepy-eyed stranger and presided over by a white-coated, black-faced bandit, to whom a coffee-slopped saucer was a matter of course.

It had been her habit during those ten years on the road as traveling saleswoman for the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company, to avoid the discomfort of the rapidly chilling car by slipping early into her berth. There, in kimono, if not in comfort, she would shut down the electric light with a snap, raise the shade, and, propped up on one elbow, watch the little towns go by. They had a wonderful fascination for her, those Middle Western towns, whose very names had a comfortable, home-like sound--Sandusky, Galesburg, Crawfordsville, Appleton--very real towns, with very real people in them. Peering wistfully out through the dusk, she could get little intimate glimpses of the home life of these people as the night came on. In those modest frame houses near the station they need not trouble to pull down the shades as must their cautious city cousins. As the train slowed down, there could be had a glimpse of a matronly housewife moving deftly about in the kitchen's warm-yellow glow, a man reading a paper in slippered, shirt-sleeved comfort, a pig-tailed girl at the piano, a woman with a baby in her arms, or a family group, perhaps, seated about the table, deep in an after-supper conclave. It had made her homeless as she was homesick.

Emma always liked that picture best. Her keen, imaginative mind could sense the scene, could actually follow the trend of the talk during this, the most genial, homely, soul-cheering hour of the day. The trifling events of the last twelve hours in schoolroom, in store, in office, in street, in kitchen loom up large as they are rehearsed in that magic, animated, cozy moment just before ma says, with a sigh:

"Well, folks, go on into the sitting-room. Me and Nellie've got to clear away."

Just silhouettes as the train flashed by--these small-town people--but very human, very enviable to Emma McChesney.

"They're real," she would say. "They're regular, three-meals-a-day people. I've been peeking in at their windows for ten years, and I've learned that it is in these towns that folks really live. The difference between life here and life in New York is the difference between area and depth. D'you see what I mean? In New York, they live by the mile, and here they live by the cubic foot. Well, I'd rather have one juicy, thick club-steak than a whole platterful of quarter-inch. It's the same idea."