It required a good deal of logic, or long-distance reasoning, to figure out such a possibility and an almost certain safeguard against it. But that was Macy. His was not the day of cash-registers or other checking devices. The salesman and the saleswoman in a store was still apt to find himself or herself an object of suspicion on the part of his or her employer. Business ethics were still in the making. A long road in them was still to be traversed. Mr. Macy's brother-in-law, Mr. Houghton, did not long remain in partnership with him, but retired to Boston, where he became senior partner of the house of Houghton & Dutton, which is still in existence. For a long number of years thereafter Macy conducted his business alone. Its steadily increasing growth, however, the multiplication of its responsibilities and problems, and his own oncoming years finally caused him to admit to partnership on the first day of January, 1877, two of his oldest and most valued employees, Abiel T. LaForge and Robert M. Valentine. It had long been rumored in the store that Miss Getchell's years of faithful service were finally to be rewarded by a real partnership in it. But even in 1876, woman's place in modern business had not been firmly enough established to permit so radical a step by a business house of as large ramifications and responsibilities as Macy's had come to be. Yet the point was quickly overcome--and in a most unexpected way. Early in 1876 Miss Getchell became Mr. LaForge's wife. And so, in a most active and interested way, she gained at the end a real financial interest in the profitable business, in the upbuilding of which she had been so large a factor. Mr. LaForge had been a major in the Northern Army during the Civil War; in fact it was there that he had contracted the tuberculosis which was to cause his early demise. He had come into the store in the middle of the 'seventies as one of its first professional buyers--being a specialist in laces--and had developed real executive ability. He had great affection for things military. And when Mr. Macy told him of the uniformed attendants of his beloved Bon Marché, LaForge promptly proceeded to place the entire salesforce of Macy's in uniform. Neat uniforms they were, too: of a bluish-grey cadet cloth, and with stiff upstanding collars of a much darker blue upon the points of which were interwoven the familiar device of the bright red star. The Macy uniforms did not long remain, however. New York is not Paris. And in that day, when uniforms in general were looked upon as something quite foreign to the idea of the republic, American labor was particularly averse to them.