In ‘A Woman of Substance’s Penultimate Episode, It’s War
Emma presents her case to the panel of military officers who will assign the bid for uniform manufacture.
Welcome to the penultimate episode of Season 1 of the over-the-top drama A Woman of Substance. Our older Emma Harte has returned to the New York City headquarters of Harte Enterprises following a heart attack and hospital stay, successfully covered up as a business trip. Now she’s catching up, finding that her granddaughter Paula took over a major presentation, and is now working on a new line of leisure/athletic wear – dabbling in lycra, as Emma puts it.
Expecting her disappearance to continue, her children are holding a board meeting in England the following Monday. More concerningly, the chief conspirators – her daughter Edwina and sons Kit and Robin – have enough votes to do anything they want. But naturally, Emma has a plan.
Mentioning her son Kit, who we last saw at a long-ago Christmas as a baby, reminds Emma of his first birthday party, a picnic by the river in the summer of 1914. Her friends are all together, with Mac and Laura now married, but the celebration is shadowed by anticipation of war with Germany. Joe doesn’t believe it until he reads a newspaper headline, and Emma is among a crowd of people at the newspaper office where a special notice is posted.
