trouble you for the vinegar--"

Emma groped for it back of her paper and shoved it across the table
without looking up. "--and the Worcester--"

One eye on the absorbing column, she passed the tall bottle. But at
its removal her prop was gone. The _Dry Goods Review_ was too weighty
for the salt shaker alone.

"--and the salt. Thanks. Warm, isn't it?"

There was a double vertical frown between Emma McChesney's eyes as she
glanced up over the top of her _Dry Goods Review_. The frown gave way
to a half smile. The glance settled into a stare.

"But then, anybody would have stared. He expected it," she said,
afterwards, in telling about it. "I've seen matinee idols, and
tailors' supplies salesmen, and Julian Eltinge, but this boy had any
male professional beauty I ever saw, looking as handsome and dashing
as a bowl of cold oatmeal. And he knew it."

Now, in the ten years that she had been out representing T. A. Buck's
Featherloom Petticoats Emma McChesney had found it necessary to make a
rule or two for herself. In the strict observance of one of these she
had become past mistress in the fine art of congealing the warm
advances of fresh and friendly salesmen of the opposite sex. But this
case was different, she told herself. The man across the table was
little more than a boy--an amazingly handsome, astonishingly impudent,
cockily confident boy, who was staring with insolent approval at Emma
McChesney's trim, shirt-waisted figure, and her fresh, attractive