Yet intuition is one thing and proof quite another. For a fortnight the store manager worked upon her surpassing problem. She induced Macy to suspend for a time his order of discharge and she kept putting the women cashiers in relays in the cage, to suit her own fancy and her own plans. The petty thefts continued. But not for long. The plans worked. The altered checks were found to be all in the time of one of the cashiers--and that was not the one who had been discharged. Miss Getchell drove to the home of Miss Upper New York and there, in the presence of her family, got both confession and reparation. [Illustration: THE BEGINNINGS OF MACY'S The original small store in Sixth Avenue just south of 14th Street. Here the business starts in 1858] She was forever seeking new lines of activities for the store--branching out here, branching out there, and turning most of these new ventures into lines of resounding profits. "If necessary, we shall handle everything except one," she is reputed to have said. And upon being asked what that one was, she replied brusquely, "Coffins." Once she embarked Macy upon the grocery business--whole decades before the establishment of the present huge grocery department--and while eventually the store was forced to drop for a time this line of merchandise, she succeeded in taking so much business from New York's then leading firm of grocers that they came to Macy, himself, and begged him to drop the competition. In the retailing world of that day, tradition and habit still governed and with an iron hand. Stores opened early in the morning and kept open until late in the evening, and did this six days of the week. Their workers rose and left their homes--before dawn in many months of the year--and did not return to them until well after dark. Yet they did not complain, for that was the fashion of the times and was recognized as such. Wages were as low as the hours were long. But food-costs also were low, and rentals but a tiny fraction of their present figure. The apartment house had not yet come to New York. It was a development set for a full two decades later. The store-workers lived in boarding-houses, in small furnished rooms or with their families. The greater part of them resided within walking distance of their employment.