On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.




OATS FOR THE WOMAN

That women who toil not neither do they spin might know the feel of
fabrics so cunningly devised that they lay to the flesh like the inner
petals of buds, three hundred and fifty men, women, and children
contrived, between strikes, to make the show-rooms of the Kessler
Costume Company, Incorporated, a sort of mauve and mirrored Delphi where
buyers from twenty states came to invoke forecast of the mood of skirts,
the caprice of sleeves, and the rumored flip to the train. Before these
flips and moods, a gigantic industry held semi-annual pause, destinies
of lace-factories trembling before a threatened season of strictly
tailor-mades, velvet-looms slowing at the shush of taffeta. When woman
would be sleazy, petticoat manufacturers went overnight into an oblivion
from which there might or might not be returning. The willow plume waved
its day, making and unmaking merchants.

Destiny loves thus to spring from acorn beginnings. Helen smiled, and
Troy fell. Roast pork, and I doubt not then and there the apple sauce,
became a national institution because a small boy burnt his fingers.

That is why, out from the frail love of women for the flesh and its
humors, and because for the webby cling of chiffon too often no price is
too high, the Kessler Costume Company employed, on the factory side of