Emma McCnesney and Co.

“In her ten years on the road, visiting town after town, catching trains, jolting about in rumbling hotel ‘buses or musty-smelling small-town hacks, living in hotels, good, bad and indifferent, Emma McChesney had come upon hundreds of rice-strewn ribbon-bedecked bridal couples…Now, as in a dream, she found herself actually one of these. She stood quietly by while Buck attended to their trunks, just as she had seen it done by hundreds of helpless little cotton-wool women who had never checked a trunk in their lives – she, who had spent ten years of her life wrestling with trunks and baggage-men and porters. Once there was some trifling mistake – Buck’s fault. Emma, with here experience on the road, saw his error. She could have set him right with a word. It was on the tip of her tongue. By sheer force of will she withheld that word, fought back the almost overwhelming inclination to take things in hand, set them right. It was just an incident, almost trifling in itself. But its import was tremendous, for her conduct, that moment, shaped the happiness of their future life together.”