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+**The Project Gutenberg Etext of Fanny Herself, by Edna Ferber**
+Author of the movie "Giant"--starring James Dean, Liz Taylor and
+Rock Hudson. . .definitely worth seeing, though we won't bring a
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+Fanny Herself
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+by Edna Ferber**
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+October, 1995  [Etext #350]
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+
+
+FANNY
+HERSELF
+BY
+EDNA FERBER
+
+
+
+TO
+WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+It has become the fashion among novelists to introduce their
+hero in knee pants, their heroine in pinafore and pigtails. 
+Time was when we were rushed up to a stalwart young man of
+twenty-four, who was presented as the pivot about whom the
+plot would revolve.  Now we are led, protesting, up to a
+grubby urchin of five and are invited to watch him through
+twenty years of intimate minutiae.  In extreme cases we have
+been obliged to witness his evolution from swaddling clothes
+to dresses, from dresses to shorts (he is so often English),
+from shorts to Etons.
+
+The thrill we get for our pains is when, at twenty-five, he
+jumps over the traces and marries the young lady we met in
+her cradle on page two.  The process is known as a
+psychological study.  A publisher's note on page five
+hundred and seventy-three assures us that the author is now
+at work on Volume Two, dealing with the hero's adult life. 
+A third volume will present his pleasing senility.  The
+whole is known as a trilogy.  If the chief character is of
+the other sex we are dragged through her dreamy girlhood, or
+hoydenish.  We see her in her graduation white, in her
+bridal finery.  By the time she is twenty we know her better
+than her mother ever will, and are infinitely more bored by
+her.
+
+Yet who would exchange one page in the life of the boy,
+David Copperfield, for whole chapters dealing with Trotwood
+Copperfield, the man?  Who would relinquish the button-
+bursting Peggotty for the saintly Agnes?  And that other
+David--he of the slingshot; one could not love him so well
+in his psalm-singing days had one not known him first as
+the gallant, dauntless vanquisher of giants.  As for Becky
+Sharp, with her treachery, her cruelty, her vindicativeness,
+perhaps we could better have understood and forgiven her had
+we known her lonely and neglected childhood, with the
+drunken artist father and her mother, the French opera girl.
+
+With which modest preamble you are asked to be patient with
+Miss Fanny Brandeis, aged thirteen.  Not only must you
+suffer Fanny, but Fanny's mother as well, without whom there
+could be no understanding Fanny.  For that matter, we
+shouldn't wonder if Mrs. Brandeis were to turn out the
+heroine in the end.  She is that kind of person.
+
+
+
+FANNY HERSELF
+
+CHAPTER ONE
+
+You could not have lived a week in Winnebago without being
+aware of Mrs. Brandeis.  In a town of ten thousand, where
+every one was a personality, from Hen Cody, the drayman, in
+blue overalls (magically transformed on Sunday mornings into
+a suave black-broadcloth usher at the Congregational
+Church), to A. J. Dawes, who owned the waterworks before the
+city bought it.  Mrs. Brandeis was a super-personality. 
+Winnebago did not know it.  Winnebago, buying its dolls, and
+china, and Battenberg braid and tinware and toys of Mrs.
+Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar, realized vaguely that here
+was some one different.
+
+When you entered the long, cool, narrow store on Elm Street,
+Mrs. Brandeis herself came forward to serve you, unless she
+already was busy with two customers.  There were two
+clerks--three, if you count Aloysius, the boy--but to Mrs.
+Brandeis belonged the privilege of docketing you first.  If
+you happened in during a moment of business lull, you were
+likely to find her reading in the left-hand corner at the
+front of the store, near the shelf where were ranged the
+dolls' heads, the pens, the pencils, and school supplies.
+
+You saw a sturdy, well-set-up, alert woman, of the kind that
+looks taller than she really is; a woman with a long,
+straight, clever nose that indexed her character, as did
+everything about her, from her crisp, vigorous, abundant
+hair to the way she came down hard on her heels in
+walking.  She was what might be called a very definite
+person.  But first you remarked her eyes.  Will you concede
+that eyes can be piercing, yet velvety?  Their piercingness
+was a mental quality, I suppose, and the velvety softness a
+physical one.  One could only think, somehow, of wild
+pansies--the brown kind.  If Winnebago had taken the trouble
+to glance at the title of the book she laid face down on the
+pencil boxes as you entered, it would have learned that the
+book was one of Balzac's, or, perhaps, Zangwill's, or
+Zola's.  She never could overcome that habit of snatching a
+chapter here and there during dull moments.  She was too
+tired to read when night came.
+
+There were many times when the little Wisconsin town lay
+broiling in the August sun, or locked in the January drifts,
+and the main business street was as silent as that of a
+deserted village.  But more often she came forward to you
+from the rear of the store, with bits of excelsior clinging
+to her black sateen apron.  You knew that she had been
+helping Aloysius as he unpacked a consignment of chamber
+sets or a hogshead of china or glassware, chalking each
+piece with the price mark as it was dug from its nest of
+straw and paper.
+
+"How do you do!" she would say.  "What can I do for you?" 
+And in that moment she had you listed, indexed, and filed,
+were you a farmer woman in a black shawl and rusty bonnet
+with a faded rose bobbing grotesquely atop it, or one of the
+patronizing East End set who came to Brandeis' Bazaar
+because Mrs. Brandeis' party favors, for one thing, were of
+a variety that could be got nowhere else this side of
+Chicago.  If, after greeting you, Mrs. Brandeis called,
+"Sadie! Stockings!" (supposing stockings were your quest),
+you might know that Mrs. Brandeis had weighed you and found
+you wanting.
+
+There had always been a store--at least, ever since Fanny
+could remember.  She often thought how queer it would seem
+to have to buy pins, or needles, or dishes, or soap, or
+thread.  The store held all these things, and many more. 
+Just to glance at the bewildering display outside gave you
+promise of the variety within.  Winnebago was rather ashamed
+of that display.  It was before the day of repression in
+decoration, and the two benches in front of the windows
+overflowed with lamps, and water sets, and brooms, and
+boilers and tinware and hampers.  Once the Winnebago
+Courier had had a sarcastic editorial about what they
+called the Oriental bazaar (that was after the editor, Lem
+Davis, had bumped his shin against a toy cart that protruded
+unduly), but Mrs. Brandeis changed nothing.  She knew that
+the farmer women who stood outside with their husbands on
+busy Saturdays would not have understood repression in
+display, but they did understand the tickets that marked the
+wares in plain figures--this berry set, $1.59; that lamp,
+$1.23.  They talked it over, outside, and drifted away, and
+came back, and entered, and bought.
+
+She knew when to be old-fashioned, did Mrs. Brandeis, and
+when to be modern.  She had worn the first short walking
+skirt in Winnebago.  It cleared the ground in a day before
+germs were discovered, when women's skirts trailed and
+flounced behind them in a cloud of dust.  One of her
+scandalized neighbors (Mrs. Nathan Pereles, it was) had
+taken her aside to tell her that no decent woman would dress
+that way.
+
+"Next year," said Mrs. Brandeis, "when you are wearing one,
+I'll remind you of that."  And she did, too.  She had worn
+shirtwaists with a broad "Gibson" shoulder tuck, when other
+Winnebago women were still encased in linings and bodices. 
+Do not get the impression that she stood for emancipation,
+or feminism, or any of those advanced things.  They had
+scarcely been touched on in those days.  She was just an
+extraordinarily alert woman, mentally and physically,
+with a shrewd sense of values.  Molly Brandeis never could
+set a table without forgetting the spoons, or the salt, or
+something, but she could add a double column of figures in
+her head as fast as her eye could travel.
+
+There she goes, running off with the story, as we were
+afraid she would.  Not only that, she is using up whole
+pages of description when she should be giving us dialogue. 
+Prospective readers, running their eyes over a printed page,
+object to the solid block formation of the descriptive
+passage.  And yet it is fascinating to weave words about
+her, as it is fascinating to turn a fine diamond this way
+and that in the sunlight, to catch its prismatic hues. 
+Besides, you want to know--do you not?--how this woman who
+reads Balzac should be waiting upon you in a little general
+store in Winnebago, Wisconsin?
+
+In the first place, Ferdinand Brandeis had been a dreamer,
+and a potential poet, which is bad equipment for success in
+the business of general merchandise.  Four times, since her
+marriage, Molly Brandeis had packed her household goods,
+bade her friends good-by, and with her two children, Fanny
+and Theodore, had followed her husband to pastures new.  A
+heart-breaking business, that, but broadening.  She knew
+nothing of the art of buying and selling at the time of her
+marriage, but as the years went by she learned unconsciously
+the things one should not do in business, from watching
+Ferdinand Brandeis do them all.  She even suggested this
+change and that, but to no avail.  Ferdinand Brandeis was a
+gentle and lovable man at home; a testy, quick-tempered one
+in business.
+
+That was because he had been miscast from the first, and yet
+had played one part too long, even though unsuccessfully,
+ever to learn another.  He did not make friends with the
+genial traveling salesmen who breezed in, slapped him on
+the back, offered him a cigar, inquired after his health,
+opened their sample cases and flirted with the girl clerks,
+all in a breath.  He was a man who talked little, listened
+little, learned little.  He had never got the trick of
+turning his money over quickly--that trick so necessary to
+the success of the small-town business.
+
+So it was that, in the year preceding Ferdinand Brandeis'
+death, there came often to the store a certain grim visitor. 
+Herman Walthers, cashier of the First National Bank of
+Winnebago, was a kindly-enough, shrewd, small-town banker,
+but to Ferdinand Brandeis and his wife his visits, growing
+more and more frequent, typified all that was frightful,
+presaged misery and despair.  He would drop in on a bright
+summer morning, perhaps, with a cheerful greeting.  He would
+stand for a moment at the front of the store, balancing
+airily from toe to heel, and glancing about from shelf to
+bin and back again in a large, speculative way.  Then he
+would begin to walk slowly and ruminatively about, his
+shrewd little German eyes appraising the stock.  He would
+hum a little absent-minded tune as he walked, up one aisle
+and down the next (there were only two), picking up a piece
+of china there, turning it over to look at its stamp,
+holding it up to the light, tapping it a bit with his
+knuckles, and putting it down carefully before going
+musically on down the aisle to the water sets, the lamps,
+the stockings, the hardware, the toys.  And so, his hands
+behind his back, still humming, out the swinging screen door
+and into the sunshine of Elm Street, leaving gloom and fear
+behind him.
+
+One year after Molly Brandeis took hold, Herman Walthers'
+visits ceased, and in two years he used to rise to greet her
+from his little cubbyhole when she came into the bank.
+
+Which brings us to the plush photograph album.  The plush
+photograph album is a concrete example of what makes
+business failure and success.  More than that, its brief
+history presents a complete characterization of Ferdinand
+and Molly Brandeis.
+
+Ten years before, Ferdinand Brandeis had bought a large bill
+of Christmas fancy-goods--celluloid toilette sets, leather
+collar boxes, velvet glove cases.  Among the lot was a
+photograph album in the shape of a huge acorn done in
+lightning-struck plush.  It was a hideous thing, and
+expensive.  It stood on a brass stand, and its leaves were
+edged in gilt, and its color was a nauseous green and blue,
+and it was altogether the sort of thing to grace the chill
+and funereal best room in a Wisconsin farmhouse.  Ferdinand
+Brandeis marked it at six dollars and stood it up for the
+Christmas trade.  That had been ten years before.  It was
+too expensive; or too pretentious, or perhaps even too
+horrible for the bucolic purse.  At any rate, it had been
+taken out, brushed, dusted, and placed on its stand every
+holiday season for ten years.  On the day after Christmas it
+was always there, its lightning-struck plush face staring
+wildly out upon the ravaged fancy-goods counter.  It would
+be packed in its box again and consigned to its long
+summer's sleep.  It had seen three towns, and many changes. 
+The four dollars that Ferdinand Brandeis had invested in it
+still remained unturned.
+
+One snowy day in November (Ferdinand Brandeis died a
+fortnight later) Mrs. Brandeis, entering the store, saw two
+women standing at the fancy-goods counter, laughing in a
+stifled sort of way.  One of them was bowing elaborately to
+a person unseen.  Mrs. Brandeis was puzzled.  She watched
+them for a moment, interested.  One of the women was known
+to her.  She came up to them and put her question, bluntly,
+though her quick wits had already given her a suspicion of
+the truth.
+
+"What are you bowing to?"
+
+The one who had done the bowing blushed a little, but
+giggled too, as she said, "I'm greeting my old friend, the
+plush album.  I've seen it here every Christmas for five
+years."
+
+Ferdinand Brandeis died suddenly a little more than a week
+later.  It was a terrible period, and one that might have
+prostrated a less resolute and balanced woman.  There were
+long-standing debts, not to speak of the entire stock of
+holiday goods to be paid for.  The day after the funeral
+Winnebago got a shock.  The Brandeis house was besieged by
+condoling callers.  Every member of the little Jewish
+congregation of Winnebago came, of course, as they had come
+before the funeral.  Those who had not brought cakes, and
+salads, and meats, and pies, brought them now, as was the
+invariable custom in time of mourning.
+
+Others of the townspeople called, too; men and women who had
+known and respected Ferdinand Brandeis.  And the shock they
+got was this:  Mrs. Brandeis was out.  Any one could have
+told you that she should have been sitting at home in a
+darkened room, wearing a black gown, clasping Fanny and
+Theodore to her, and holding a black-bordered handkerchief
+at intervals to her reddened eyes.  And that is what she
+really wanted to do, for she had loved her husband, and she
+respected the conventions.  What she did was to put on a
+white shirtwaist and a black skirt at seven o'clock the
+morning after the funeral.
+
+The store had been closed the day before.  She entered it at
+seven forty-five, as Aloysius was sweeping out with wet
+sawdust and a languid broom.  The extra force of holiday
+clerks straggled in, uncertainly, at eight or after,
+expecting an hour or two of undisciplined gossip.  At eight-
+ten Molly Brandeis walked briskly up to the plush photograph
+album, whisked off its six-dollar price mark, and stuck
+in its place a neatly printed card bearing these figures: 
+"To-day-- 79@!"  The plush album went home in a farmer's
+wagon that afternoon.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWO
+
+Right here there should be something said about Fanny
+Brandeis.  And yet, each time I turn to her I find her
+mother plucking at my sleeve.  There comes to my mind the
+picture of Mrs. Brandeis turning down Norris Street at
+quarter to eight every morning, her walk almost a march, so
+firm and measured it was, her head high, her chin thrust
+forward a little, as a fighter walks, but not pugnaciously;
+her short gray skirt clearing the ground, her shoulders
+almost consciously squared.  Other Winnebago women were just
+tying up their daughters' pigtails for school, or sweeping
+the front porch, or watering the hanging baskets.  Norris
+Street residents got into the habit of timing themselves by
+Mrs. Brandeis.  When she marched by at seven forty-five they
+hurried a little with the tying of the hair bow, as they
+glanced out of the window.  When she came by again, a little
+before twelve, for her hasty dinner, they turned up the fire
+under the potatoes and stirred the flour thickening for the
+gravy.
+
+Mrs. Brandeis had soon learned that Fanny and Theodore could
+manage their own school toilettes, with, perhaps, some
+speeding up on the part of Mattie, the servant girl.  But it
+needed her keen brown eye to detect corners that Aloysius
+had neglected to sweep out with wet sawdust, and her
+presence to make sure that the counter covers were taken off
+and folded, the outside show dusted and arranged, the
+windows washed, the whole store shining and ready for
+business by eight o'clock.  So Fanny had even learned to do
+her own tight, shiny, black, shoulder-length curls, which
+she tied back with a black bow.  They were wet, meek,
+and tractable curls at eight in the morning.  By the time
+school was out at four they were as wildly unruly as if
+charged with electric currents--which they really were, when
+you consider the little dynamo that wore them.
+
+Mrs. Brandeis took a scant half hour to walk the six blocks
+between the store and the house, to snatch a hurried dinner,
+and traverse the distance to the store again.  It was a
+program that would have killed a woman less magnificently
+healthy and determined.  She seemed to thrive on it, and she
+kept her figure and her wit when other women of her age grew
+dull, and heavy, and ineffectual.  On summer days the little
+town often lay shimmering in the heat, the yellow road
+glaring in it, the red bricks of the high school reflecting
+it in waves, the very pine knots in the sidewalks gummy and
+resinous with heat, and sending up a pungent smell that was
+of the woods, and yet stifling.  She must have felt an
+almost irresistible temptation to sit for a moment on the
+cool, shady front porch, with its green-painted flower
+boxes, its hanging fern baskets and the catalpa tree looking
+boskily down upon it.
+
+But she never did.  She had an almost savage energy and
+determination.  The unpaid debts were ever ahead of her;
+there were the children to be dressed and sent to school;
+there was the household to be kept up; there were Theodore's
+violin lessons that must not be neglected--not after what
+Professor Bauer had said about him.
+
+You may think that undue stress is being laid upon this
+driving force in her, upon this business ability.  But
+remember that this was fifteen years or more ago, before
+women had invaded the world of business by the thousands, to
+take their place, side by side, salary for salary, with men. 
+Oh, there were plenty of women wage earners in Winnebago, as
+elsewhere; clerks, stenographers, school teachers,
+bookkeepers.  The paper mills were full of girls, and the
+canning factory too.  But here was a woman gently bred,
+untrained in business, left widowed with two children at
+thirty-eight, and worse than penniless--in debt.
+
+And that was not all.  As Ferdinand Brandeis' wife she had
+occupied a certain social position in the little Jewish
+community of Winnebago.  True, they had never been moneyed,
+while the others of her own faith in the little town were
+wealthy, and somewhat purse-proud.  They had carriages, most
+of them, with two handsome horses, and their houses were
+spacious and veranda-encircled, and set in shady lawns. 
+When the Brandeis family came to Winnebago five years
+before, these people had waited, cautiously, and
+investigated, and then had called.  They were of a type to
+be found in every small town; prosperous, conservative,
+constructive citizens, clannish, but not so much so as their
+city cousins, mingling socially with their Gentile
+neighbors, living well, spending their money freely, taking
+a vast pride in the education of their children.  But here
+was Molly Brandeis, a Jewess, setting out to earn her living
+in business, like a man.  It was a thing to stir
+Congregation Emanu-el to its depths.  Jewish women, they
+would tell you, did not work thus.  Their husbands worked
+for them, or their sons, or their brothers.
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Mrs. Brandeis, when she heard of
+it.  "I seem to remember a Jewess named Ruth who was left
+widowed, and who gleaned in the fields for her living, and
+yet the neighbors didn't talk.  For that matter, she seems
+to be pretty well thought of, to this day."
+
+But there is no denying that she lost caste among her own
+people.  Custom and training are difficult to overcome.  But
+Molly Brandeis was too deep in her own affairs to care. 
+That Christmas season following her husband's death was
+a ghastly time, and yet a grimly wonderful one, for it
+applied the acid test to Molly Brandeis and showed her up
+pure gold.
+
+The first week in January she, with Sadie and Pearl, the two
+clerks, and Aloysius, the boy, took inventory.  It was a
+terrifying thing, that process of casting up accounts.  It
+showed with such starkness how hideously the Brandeis ledger
+sagged on the wrong side.  The three women and the boy
+worked with a sort of dogged cheerfulness at it, counting,
+marking, dusting, washing.  They found shelves full of
+forgotten stock, dust-covered and profitless.  They found
+many articles of what is known as hard stock, akin to the
+plush album; glass and plated condiment casters for the
+dining table, in a day when individual salts and separate
+vinegar cruets were already the thing; lamps with straight
+wicks when round wicks were in demand.
+
+They scoured shelves, removed the grime of years from boxes,
+washed whole battalions of chamber sets, bathed piles of
+plates, and bins of cups and saucers.  It was a dirty, back-
+breaking job, that ruined the finger nails, tried the
+disposition, and caked the throat with dust.  Besides, the
+store was stove-heated and, near the front door,
+uncomfortably cold.  The women wore little shoulder shawls
+pinned over their waists, for warmth, and all four,
+including Aloysius, sniffled for weeks afterward.
+That inventory developed a new, grim line around Mrs.
+Brandeis' mouth, and carved another at the corner of each
+eye.  After it was over she washed her hair, steamed her
+face over a bowl of hot water, packed two valises, left
+minute and masterful instructions with Mattie as to the
+household, and with Sadie and Pearl as to the store, and was
+off to Chicago on her first buying trip.  She took Fanny
+with her, as ballast.  It was a trial at which many men
+would have quailed.  On the shrewdness and judgment of that
+buying trip depended the future of Brandeis' Bazaar, and
+Mrs. Brandeis, and Fanny, and Theodore.
+
+Mrs. Brandeis had accompanied her husband on many of his
+trips to Chicago.  She had even gone with him occasionally
+to the wholesale houses around La Salle Street, and Madison,
+and Fifth Avenue, but she had never bought a dollar's worth
+herself.  She saw that he bought slowly, cautiously, and
+without imagination.  She made up her mind that she would
+buy quickly, intuitively.  She knew slightly some of the
+salesmen in the wholesale houses.  They had often made
+presents to her of a vase, a pocketbook, a handkerchief, or
+some such trifle, which she accepted reluctantly, when at
+all.  She was thankful now for these visits.  She found
+herself remembering many details of them.  She made up her
+mind, with a canny knowingness, that there should be no
+presents this time, no theater invitations, no lunches or
+dinners.  This was business, she told herself; more than
+business--it was grim war.
+
+They still tell of that trip, sometimes, when buyers and
+jobbers and wholesale men get together.  Don't imagine that
+she came to be a woman captain of finance.  Don't think that
+we are to see her at the head of a magnificent business
+establishment, with buyers and department heads below her,
+and a private office done up in mahogany, and stenographers
+and secretaries.  No, she was Mrs. Brandeis, of Brandeis'
+Bazaar, to the end.  The bills she bought were ridiculously
+small, I suppose, and the tricks she turned on that first
+trip were pitiful, perhaps.  But they were magnificent too,
+in their way.  I am even bold enough to think that she might
+have made business history, that plucky woman, if she had
+had an earlier start, and if she had not, to the very end,
+had a pack of unmanageable handicaps yelping at her heels,
+pulling at her skirts.
+
+It was only a six-hour trip to Chicago.  Fanny Brandeis'
+eyes, big enough at any time, were surely twice their size
+during the entire journey of two hundred miles or more. 
+They were to have lunch on the train!  They were to stop at
+an hotel!  They were to go to the theater!  She would have
+lain back against the red plush seat of the car, in a swoon
+of joy, if there had not been so much to see in the car
+itself, and through the car window.
+
+"We'll have something for lunch," said Mrs. Brandeis when
+they were seated in the dining car, "that we never have at
+home, shall we?"
+
+"Oh, yes!" replied Fanny in a whisper of excitement. 
+"Something--something queer, and different, and not so very
+healthy!"
+
+They had oysters (a New Yorker would have sniffed at them),
+and chicken potpie, and asparagus, and ice cream.  If that
+doesn't prove Mrs. Brandeis was game, I should like to know
+what could!  They stopped at the Windsor-Clifton, because it
+was quieter and less expensive than the Palmer House, though
+quite as full of red plush and walnut.  Besides, she had
+stopped at the Palmer House with her husband, and she knew
+how buyers were likely to be besieged by eager salesmen with
+cards, and with tempting lines of goods spread knowingly in
+the various sample-rooms.
+
+Fanny Brandeis was thirteen, and emotional, and incredibly
+receptive and alive.  It is impossible to tell what she
+learned during that Chicago trip, it was so crowded, so
+wonderful.  She went with her mother to the wholesale houses
+and heard and saw and, unconsciously, remembered.  When she
+became fatigued with the close air of the dim showrooms,
+with their endless aisles piled with every sort of ware, she
+would sit on a chair in some obscure corner, watching those
+sleek, over-lunched, genial-looking salesmen who were
+chewing their cigars somewhat wildly when Mrs. Brandeis
+finished with them.  Sometimes she did not accompany her
+mother, but lay in bed, deliciously, until the middle of the
+morning, then dressed, and chatted with the obliging Irish
+chamber maid, and read until her mother came for her at
+noon.
+
+Everything she did was a delightful adventure; everything
+she saw had the tang of novelty.  Fanny Brandeis was to see
+much that was beautiful and rare in her full lifetime, but
+she never again, perhaps, got quite the thrill that those
+ugly, dim, red-carpeted, gas-lighted hotel corridors gave
+her, or the grim bedroom, with its walnut furniture and its
+Nottingham curtains.  As for the Chicago streets themselves,
+with their perilous corners (there were no czars in blue to
+regulate traffic in those days), older and more
+sophisticated pedestrians experienced various emotions while
+negotiating the corner of State and Madison.
+
+That buying trip lasted ten days.  It was a racking
+business, physically and mentally.  There were the hours of
+tramping up one aisle and down the other in the big
+wholesale lofts.  But that brought bodily fatigue only.  It
+was the mental strain that left Mrs. Brandeis spent and limp
+at the end of the day.  Was she buying wisely?  Was she
+over-buying?  What did she know about buying, anyway?  She
+would come back to her hotel at six, sometimes so exhausted
+that the dining-room and dinner were unthinkable.  At such
+times they would have dinner in their room another delicious
+adventure for Fanny.  She would try to tempt the fagged
+woman on the bed with bits of this or that from one of the
+many dishes that dotted the dinner tray.  But Molly
+Brandeis, harrowed in spirit and numbed in body, was too
+spent to eat.
+
+But that was not always the case.  There was that
+unforgettable night when they went to see Bernhardt the
+divine.  Fanny spent the entire morning following standing
+before the bedroom mirror, with her hair pulled out in a
+wild fluff in front, her mother's old marten-fur scarf high
+and choky around her neck, trying to smile that slow, sad,
+poignant, tear-compelling smile; but she had to give it up,
+clever mimic though she was.  She only succeeded in looking
+as though a pin were sticking her somewhere.  Besides,
+Fanny's own smile was a quick, broad, flashing grin, with a
+generous glint of white teeth in it, and she always forgot
+about being exquisitely wistful over it until it was too
+late.
+
+I wonder if the story of the china religious figures will
+give a wrong impression of Mrs. Brandeis.  Perhaps not, if
+you will only remember this woman's white-lipped
+determination to wrest a livelihood from the world, for her
+children and herself.  They had been in Chicago a week, and
+she was buying at Bauder & Peck's.  Now, Bauder & Peck,
+importers, are known the world over.  It is doubtful if
+there is one of you who has not been supplied, indirectly,
+with some imported bit of china or glassware, with French
+opera glasses or cunning toys and dolls, from the great New
+York and Chicago showrooms of that company.
+
+Young Bauder himself was waiting on Mrs. Brandeis, and he
+was frowning because he hated to sell women.  Young Bauder
+was being broken into the Chicago end of the business, and
+he was not taking gracefully to the process.
+
+At the end of a long aisle, on an obscure shelf in a dim
+corner, Molly Brandeis' sharp eyes espied a motley
+collection of dusty, grimy china figures of the kind one
+sees on the mantel in the parlor of the small-town Catholic
+home.  Winnebago's population was two-thirds Catholic,
+German and Irish, and very devout.
+
+Mrs. Brandeis stopped short.  "How much for that lot?"  She
+pointed to the shelf.  Young Bauder's gaze followed hers,
+puzzled.  The figures were from five inches to a foot high,
+in crude, effective blues, and gold, and crimson, and
+white.  All the saints were there in assorted sizes, the
+Pieta, the cradle in the manger.  There were probably two
+hundred or more of the little figures.
+"Oh, those!" said young Bauder vaguely.  "You don't want
+that stuff.  Now, about that Limoges china.  As I said, I
+can make you a special price on it if you carry it as an
+open-stock pattern.  You'll find----"
+
+"How much for that lot?" repeated Mrs. Brandeis.
+
+"Those are left-over samples, Mrs. Brandeis.  Last year's
+stuff.  They're all dirty.  I'd forgotten they were there."
+
+"How much for the lot?" said Mrs. Brandeis, pleasantly, for
+the third time.
+
+"I really don't know.  Three hundred, I should say. 
+But----"
+
+"I'll give you two hundred," ventured Mrs. Brandeis, her
+heart in her mouth and her mouth very firm.
+
+"Oh, come now, Mrs. Brandeis!  Bauder & Peck don't do
+business that way, you know.  We'd really rather not sell
+them at all.  The things aren't worth much to us, or to you,
+for that matter.  But three hundred----"
+
+"Two hundred," repeated Mrs. Brandeis, "or I cancel my
+order, including the Limoges.  I want those figures."
+
+And she got them.  Which isn't the point of the story.  The
+holy figures were fine examples of foreign workmanship,
+their colors, beneath the coating of dust, as brilliant and
+fadeless as those found in the churches of Europe.  They
+reached Winnebago duly, packed in straw and paper, still
+dusty and shelf-worn.  Mrs. Brandeis and Sadie and Pearl sat
+on up-ended boxes at the rear of the store, in the big barn-
+like room in which newly arrived goods were unpacked.  As
+Aloysius dived deep into the crate and brought up figure
+after figure, the three women plunged them into warm and
+soapy water and proceeded to bathe and scour the entire
+school of saints, angels, and cherubim.  They came out
+brilliantly fresh and rosy.
+
+All the Irish ingenuity and artistry in Aloysius came to the
+surface as he dived again and again into the great barrel
+and brought up the glittering pieces.
+
+"It'll make an elegant window," he gasped from the depths of
+the hay, his lean, lengthy frame jack-knifed over the edge. 
+"And cheap."  His shrewd wit had long ago divined the
+store's price mark.  "If Father Fitzpatrick steps by in the
+forenoon I'll bet they'll be gone before nighttime to-
+morrow.  You'll be letting me do the trim, Mrs. Brandeis?"
+
+He came back that evening to do it, and he threw his whole
+soul into it, which, considering his ancestry and
+temperament, was very high voltage for one small-town store
+window.  He covered the floor of the window with black crepe
+paper, and hung it in long folds, like a curtain, against
+the rear wall.  The gilt of the scepters, and halos, and
+capes showed up dazzlingly against this background.  The
+scarlets, and pinks, and blues, and whites of the robes
+appeared doubly bright.  The whole made a picture that
+struck and held you by its vividness and contrast.
+
+Father Fitzpatrick, very tall and straight, and handsome,
+with his iron-gray hair and his cheeks pink as a girl's, did
+step by next morning on his way to the post-office.  It was
+whispered that in his youth Father Fitzpatrick had been an
+actor, and that he had deserted the footlights for the altar
+lights because of a disappointment.  The drama's loss was
+the Church's gain.  You should have heard him on Sunday
+morning, now flaying them, now swaying them!  He still had
+the actor's flexible voice, vibrant, tremulous, or strident,
+at will.  And no amount of fasting or praying had ever
+dimmed that certain something in his eye--the something
+which makes the matinee idol.
+
+Not only did he step by now; he turned, came back; stopped
+before the window.  Then he entered.
+
+"Madam," he said to Mrs. Brandeis, "you'll probably save
+more souls with your window display than I could in a month
+of hell-fire sermons."  He raised his hand.  "You have the
+sanction of the Church."  Which was the beginning of a queer
+friendship between the Roman Catholic priest and the Jewess
+shopkeeper that lasted as long as Molly Brandeis lived.
+
+By noon it seemed that the entire population of Winnebago
+had turned devout.  The figures, a tremendous bargain,
+though sold at a high profit, seemed to melt away from the
+counter that held them.
+
+By three o'clock, "Only one to a customer!" announced Mrs.
+Brandeis.  By the middle of the week the window itself was
+ravished of its show.  By the end of the week there remained
+only a handful of the duller and less desirable pieces--the
+minor saints, so to speak.  Saturday night Mrs. Brandeis did
+a little figuring on paper.  The lot had cost her two
+hundred dollars.  She had sold for six hundred.  Two from
+six leaves four.  Four hundred dollars!  She repeated it to
+herself, quietly.  Her mind leaped back to the plush
+photograph album, then to young Bauder and his cool
+contempt.  And there stole over her that warm, comfortable
+glow born of reassurance and triumph.  Four hundred dollars. 
+Not much in these days of big business.  We said, you will
+remember, that it was a pitiful enough little trick she
+turned to make it, though an honest one.  And--in the face
+of disapproval--a rather magnificent one too.  For it gave
+to Molly Brandeis that precious quality, self-confidence,
+out of which is born success.  
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THREE
+
+By spring Mrs. Brandeis had the farmer women coming to her
+for their threshing dishes and kitchenware, and the West End
+Culture Club for their whist prizes.  She seemed to realize
+that the days of the general store were numbered, and she
+set about making hers a novelty store.  There was something
+terrible about the earnestness with which she stuck to
+business.  She was not more than thirty-eight at this time,
+intelligent, healthy, fun-loving.  But she stayed at it all
+day.  She listened and chatted to every one, and learned
+much.  There was about her that human quality that invites
+confidence.
+
+She made friends by the hundreds, and friends are a business
+asset.  Those blithe, dressy, and smooth-spoken gentlemen
+known as traveling men used to tell her their troubles,
+perched on a stool near the stove, and show her the picture
+of their girl in the back of their watch, and asked her to
+dinner at the Haley House.  She listened to their tale of
+woe, and advised them; she admired the picture of the girl,
+and gave some wholesome counsel on the subject of traveling
+men's lonely wives; but she never went to dinner at the
+Haley House.
+
+It had not taken these debonair young men long to learn that
+there was a woman buyer who bought quickly, decisively, and
+intelligently, and that she always demanded a duplicate
+slip.  Even the most unscrupulous could not stuff an order
+of hers, and when it came to dating she gave no quarter. 
+Though they wore clothes that were two leaps ahead of the
+styles worn by the Winnebago young men--their straw
+sailors were likely to be saw-edged when the local edges
+were smooth, and their coats were more flaring, or their
+trousers wider than the coats and trousers of the Winnebago
+boys--they were not, for the most part, the gay dogs that
+Winnebago's fancy painted them.  Many of them were very
+lonely married men who missed their wives and babies, and
+loathed the cuspidored discomfort of the small-town hotel
+lobby.  They appreciated Mrs. Brandeis' good-natured
+sympathy, and gave her the long end of a deal when they
+could.  It was Sam Kiser who had begged her to listen to his
+advice to put in Battenberg patterns and braid, long before
+the Battenberg epidemic had become widespread and virulent.
+
+"Now listen to me, Mrs. Brandeis," he begged, almost
+tearfully.  "You're a smart woman.  Don't let this get by
+you.  You know that I know that a salesman would have as
+much chance to sell you a gold brick as to sell old John D.
+Rockefeller a gallon of oil."
+Mrs. Brandeis eyed his samples coldly.  "But it looks so
+unattractive.  And the average person has no imagination.  A
+bolt of white braid and a handful of buttons--they wouldn't
+get a mental picture of the completed piece.  Now,
+embroidery silk----"
+
+"Then give 'em a real picture!" interrupted Sam.  "Work up
+one of these water-lily pattern table covers.  Use No. 100
+braid and the smallest buttons.  Stick it in the window and
+they'll tear their hair to get patterns."
+
+She did it, taking turns with Pearl and Sadie at weaving the
+great, lacy square during dull moments.  When it was
+finished they placed it in the window, where it lay like
+frosted lace, exquisitely graceful and delicate, with its
+tracery of curling petals and feathery fern sprays. 
+Winnebago gazed and was bitten by the Battenberg bug.  It
+wound itself up in a network of Battenberg braid, in all
+the numbers.  It bought buttons of every size; it stitched
+away at Battenberg covers, doilies, bedspreads, blouses,
+curtains.  Battenberg tumbled, foamed, cascaded over
+Winnebago's front porches all that summer.  Listening to Sam
+Kiser had done it.
+
+She listened to the farmer women too, and to the mill girls,
+and to the scant and precious pearls that dropped from the
+lips of the East End society section.  There was something
+about her brown eyes and her straight, sensible nose that
+reassured them so that few suspected the mischievous in her. 
+For she was mischievous.  If she had not been I think she
+could not have stood the drudgery, and the heartbreaks, and
+the struggle, and the terrific manual labor.
+
+She used to guy people, gently, and they never guessed it. 
+Mrs. G. Manville Smith, for example, never dreamed of the
+joy that her patronage brought Molly Brandeis, who waited on
+her so demurely.  Mrs. G. Manville Smith (nee Finnegan)
+scorned the Winnebago shops, and was said to send to Chicago
+for her hairpins.  It was known that her household was run
+on the most niggardly basis, however, and she short-rationed
+her two maids outrageously.  It was said that she could
+serve less real food on more real lace doilies than any
+other housekeeper in Winnebago.  Now, Mrs. Brandeis sold
+Scourine two cents cheaper than the grocery stores, using it
+as an advertisement to attract housewives, and making no
+profit on the article itself.  Mrs. G. Manville Smith always
+patronized Brandeis' Bazaar for Scourine alone, and thus
+represented pure loss.  Also she my-good-womaned Mrs.
+Brandeis.  That lady, seeing her enter one day with her
+comic, undulating gait, double-actioned like a giraffe's,
+and her plumes that would have shamed a Knight of Pythias,
+decided to put a stop to these unprofitable visits.
+
+She waited on Mrs. G. Manville Smith, a dangerous gleam in
+her eye.
+
+"Scourine," spake Mrs. G. Manville Smith.
+
+"How many?"
+
+"A dozen."
+
+"Anything else?"
+
+"No.  Send them."
+
+Mrs. Brandeis, scribbling in her sales book, stopped, pencil
+poised.  "We cannot send Scourine unless with a purchase of
+other goods amounting to a dollar or more."
+
+Mrs. G. Manville Smith's plumes tossed and soared
+agitatedly.  "But my good woman, I don't want anything
+else!"
+
+"Then you'll have to carry the Scourine?"
+
+"Certainly not! I'll send for it."
+
+"The sale closes at five."  It was then 4:57.
+
+"I never heard of such a thing!  You can't expect me to
+carry them."
+
+Now, Mrs. G. Manville Smith had been a dining-room girl at
+the old Haley House before she married George Smith, and
+long before he made his money in lumber.
+
+"You won't find them so heavy," Molly Brandeis said
+smoothly.
+
+"I certainly would!  Perhaps you would not.  You're used to
+that sort of thing.  Rough work, and all that."
+
+Aloysius, doubled up behind the lamps, knew what was coming,
+from the gleam in his boss's eye.
+
+"There may be something in that," Molly Brandeis returned
+sweetly.  "That's why I thought you might not mind taking
+them.  They're really not much heavier than a laden tray."
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed the outraged Mrs. G. Manville Smith.  And
+took her plumes and her patronage out of Brandeis' Bazaar
+forever.  
+
+That was as malicious as Molly Brandeis ever could be.  And
+it was forgivable malice.
+
+Most families must be described against the background of
+their homes, but the Brandeis family life was bounded and
+controlled by the store.  Their meals and sleeping hours and
+amusements were regulated by it.  It taught them much, and
+brought them much, and lost them much.  Fanny Brandeis
+always said she hated it, but it made her wise, and
+tolerant, and, in the end, famous.  I don't know what more
+one could ask of any institution.  It brought her in contact
+with men and women, taught her how to deal with them.  After
+school she used often to run down to the store to see her
+mother, while Theodore went home to practice.  Perched on a
+high stool in some corner she heard, and saw, and absorbed. 
+It was a great school for the sensitive, highly-organized,
+dramatic little Jewish girl, for, to paraphrase a well-known
+stage line, there are just as many kinds of people in
+Winnebago as there are in Washington.
+
+It was about this time that Fanny Brandeis began to realize,
+actively, that she was different.  Of course, other little
+Winnebago girls' mothers did not work like a man, in a
+store.  And she and Bella Weinberg were the only two in her
+room at school who stayed out on the Day of Atonement, and
+on New Year, and the lesser Jewish holidays.  Also, she went
+to temple on Friday night and Saturday morning, when the
+other girls she knew went to church on Sunday.  These things
+set her apart in the little Middle Western town; but it was
+not these that constituted the real difference.  She played,
+and slept, and ate, and studied like the other healthy
+little animals of her age.  The real difference was
+temperamental, or emotional, or dramatic, or historic, or
+all four.  They would be playing tag, perhaps, in one of the
+cool, green ravines that were the beauty spots of the little
+Wisconsin town.
+
+They nestled like exquisite emeralds in the embrace of the
+hills, those ravines, and Winnebago's civic surge had not
+yet swept them away in a deluge of old tin cans, ashes, dirt
+and refuse, to be sold later for building lots.  The Indians
+had camped and hunted in them.  The one under the Court
+Street bridge, near the Catholic church and monastery, was
+the favorite for play.  It lay, a lovely, gracious thing,
+below the hot little town, all green, and lush, and cool, a
+tiny stream dimpling through it.  The plump Capuchin
+Fathers, in their coarse brown robes, knotted about the
+waist with a cord, their bare feet thrust into sandals,
+would come out and sun themselves on the stone bench at the
+side of the monastery on the hill, or would potter about the
+garden.  And suddenly Fanny would stop quite still in the
+midst of her tag game, struck with the beauty of the picture
+it called from the past.
+
+Little Oriental that she was, she was able to combine the
+dry text of her history book with the green of the trees,
+the gray of the church, and the brown of the monk's robes,
+and evolve a thrilling mental picture therefrom.  The tag
+game and her noisy little companions vanished.  She was
+peopling the place with stealthy Indians.  Stealthy,
+cunning, yet savagely brave.  They bore no relation to the
+abject, contemptible, and rather smelly Oneidas who came to
+the back door on summer mornings, in calico, and ragged
+overalls, with baskets of huckleberries on their arm, their
+pride gone, a broken and conquered people.  She saw them
+wild, free, sovereign, and there were no greasy, berry-
+peddling Oneidas among them.  They were Sioux, and
+Pottawatomies (that last had the real Indian sound), and
+Winnebagos, and Menomonees, and Outagamis.  She made them
+taciturn, and beady-eyed, and lithe, and fleet, and every
+other adjectival thing her imagination and history book
+could supply.  The fat and placid Capuchin Fathers on the
+hill became Jesuits, sinister, silent, powerful, with
+France and the Church of Rome behind them.  From the shelter
+of that big oak would step Nicolet, the brave, first among
+Wisconsin explorers, and last to receive the credit for his
+hardihood.  Jean Nicolet!  She loved the sound of it.  And
+with him was La Salle, straight, and slim, and elegant, and
+surely wearing ruffles and plumes and sword even in a canoe. 
+And Tonty, his Italian friend and fellow adventurer--Tonty
+of the satins and velvets, graceful, tactful, poised, a
+shadowy figure; his menacing iron hand, so feared by the
+ignorant savages, encased always in a glove.  Surely a
+perfumed g---  Slap!  A rude shove that jerked her head back
+sharply and sent her forward, stumbling, and jarred her like
+a fall.
+
+"Ya-a-a!  Tag!  You're it!  Fanny's it!"
+
+Indians, priests, cavaliers, coureurs de bois, all
+vanished.  Fanny would stand a moment, blinking stupidly. 
+The next moment she was running as fleetly as the best of
+the boys in savage pursuit of one of her companions in the
+tag game.
+
+She was a strange mixture of tomboy and bookworm, which was
+a mercifully kind arrangement for both body and mind.  The
+spiritual side of her was groping and staggering and feeling
+its way about as does that of any little girl whose mind is
+exceptionally active, and whose mother is unusually busy. 
+It was on the Day of Atonement, known in the Hebrew as Yom
+Kippur, in the year following her father's death that that
+side of her performed a rather interesting handspring.
+
+Fanny Brandeis had never been allowed to fast on this, the
+greatest and most solemn of Jewish holy days Molly Brandeis'
+modern side refused to countenance the practice of
+withholding food from any child for twenty-four hours.  So
+it was in the face of disapproval that Fanny, making deep
+inroads into the steak and fried sweet potatoes at
+supper on the eve of the Day of Atonement, announced her
+intention of fasting from that meal to supper on the
+following evening.  She had just passed her plate for a
+third helping of potatoes.  Theodore, one lap behind her in
+the race, had entered his objection.
+
+"Well, for the land's sakes!" he protested.  "I guess you're
+not the only one who likes sweet potatoes."
+
+Fanny applied a generous dab of butter to an already buttery
+morsel, and chewed it with an air of conscious virtue.
+
+"I've got to eat a lot.  This is the last bite I'll have
+until to-morrow night."
+
+"What's that?" exclaimed Mrs. Brandeis, sharply.
+
+"Yes, it is!" hooted Theodore.
+
+Fanny went on conscientiously eating as she explained.
+
+"Bella Weinberg and I are going to fast all day.  We just
+want to see if we can."
+
+"Betcha can't," Theodore said.
+
+Mrs. Brandeis regarded her small daughter with a thoughtful
+gaze.  "But that isn't the object in fasting, Fanny--just to
+see if you can.  If you're going to think of food all
+through the Yom Kippur services----"
+
+"I sha'n't?" protested Fanny passionately.  "Theodore would,
+but I won't."
+
+"Wouldn't any such thing," denied Theodore.  "But if I'm
+going to play a violin solo during the memorial service I
+guess I've got to eat my regular meals."
+
+Theodore sometimes played at temple, on special occasions. 
+The little congregation, listening to the throbbing rise and
+fall of this fifteen-year-old boy's violin playing,
+realized, vaguely, that here was something disturbingly,
+harrowingly beautiful.  They did not know that they were
+listening to genius.
+
+Molly Brandeis, in her second best dress, walked to
+temple Yom Kippur eve, her son at her right side, her
+daughter at her left.  She had made up her mind that she
+would not let this next day, with its poignantly beautiful
+service, move her too deeply.  It was the first since her
+husband's death, and Rabbi Thalmann rather prided himself on
+his rendition of the memorial service that came at three in
+the afternoon.
+
+A man of learning, of sweetness, and of gentle wit was Rabbi
+Thalmann, and unappreciated by his congregation.  He stuck
+to the Scriptures for his texts, finding Moses a greater
+leader than Roosevelt, and the miracle of the Burning Bush
+more wonderful than the marvels of twentieth-century wizardy
+in electricity.  A little man, Rabbi Thalmann, with hands
+and feet as small and delicate as those of a woman.  Fanny
+found him fascinating to look on, in his rabbinical black
+broadcloth and his two pairs of glasses perched, in reading,
+upon his small hooked nose.  He stood very straight in the
+pulpit, but on the street you saw that his back was bent
+just the least bit in the world--or perhaps it was only his
+student stoop, as he walked along with his eyes on the
+ground, smoking those slender, dapper, pale brown cigars
+that looked as if they had been expressly cut and rolled to
+fit him.
+
+The evening service was at seven.  The congregation,
+rustling in silks, was approaching the little temple from
+all directions.  Inside, there was a low-toned buzz of
+conversation.  The Brandeis' seat was well toward the rear,
+as befitted a less prosperous member of the rich little
+congregation.  This enabled them to get a complete picture
+of the room in its holiday splendor.  Fanny drank it in
+eagerly, her dark eyes soft and luminous.  The bare, yellow-
+varnished wooden pews glowed with the reflection from the
+chandeliers.  The seven-branched candlesticks on either side
+of the pulpit were entwined with smilax.  The red plush
+curtain that hung in front of the Ark on ordinary days, and
+the red plush pulpit cover too, were replaced by
+gleaming white satin edged with gold fringe and finished at
+the corners with heavy gold tassels.  How the rich white
+satin glistened in the light of the electric candles!  Fanny
+Brandeis loved the lights, and the gleam, and the music, so
+majestic, and solemn, and the sight of the little rabbi,
+sitting so straight and serious in his high-backed chair, or
+standing to read from the great Bible.  There came to this
+emotional little Jewess a thrill that was not born of
+religious fervor at all, I am afraid.
+
+The sheer drama of the thing got her.  In fact, the thing
+she had set herself to do to-day had in it very little of
+religion.  Mrs. Brandeis had been right about that.  It was
+a test of endurance, as planned.  Fanny had never fasted in
+all her healthy life.  She would come home from school to
+eat formidable stacks of bread and butter, enhanced by brown
+sugar or grape jelly, and topped off with three or four
+apples from the barrel in the cellar.  Two hours later she
+would attack a supper of fried potatoes, and liver, and tea,
+and peach preserve, and more stacks of bread and butter. 
+Then there were the cherry trees in the back yard, and the
+berry bushes, not to speak of sundry bags of small, hard
+candies of the jelly-bean variety, fitted for quick and
+secret munching during school.  She liked good things to
+eat, this sturdy little girl, as did her friend, that blonde
+and creamy person, Bella Weinberg.
+The two girls exchanged meaningful glances during the
+evening service.  The Weinbergs, as befitted their station,
+sat in the third row at the right, and Bella had to turn
+around to convey her silent messages to Fanny.  The evening
+service was brief, even to the sermon.  Rabbi Thalmann and
+his congregation would need their strength for to-morrow's
+trial.
+
+The Brandeises walked home through the soft September
+night, and the children had to use all their Yom Kippur
+dignity to keep from scuffling through the piled-up drifts
+of crackling autumn leaves.  Theodore went to the cellar and
+got an apple, which he ate with what Fanny considered an
+unnecessary amount of scrunching.  It was a firm, juicy
+apple, and it gave forth a cracking sound when his teeth met
+in its white meat.  Fanny, after regarding him with gloomy
+superiority, went to bed.
+
+She had willed to sleep late, for gastronomic reasons, but
+the mental command disobeyed itself, and she woke early,
+with a heavy feeling.  Early as it was, Molly Brandeis had
+tiptoed in still earlier to look at her strange little
+daughter.  She sometimes did that on Saturday mornings when
+she left early for the store and Fanny slept late.  This
+morning Fanny's black hair was spread over the pillow as she
+lay on her back, one arm outflung, the other at her breast. 
+She made a rather startlingly black and white and scarlet
+picture as she lay there asleep.  Fanny did things very much
+in that way, too, with broad, vivid, unmistakable splashes
+of color.  Mrs. Brandeis, looking at the black-haired, red-
+lipped child sleeping there, wondered just how much
+determination lay back of the broad white brow.  She had
+said little to Fanny about this feat of fasting, and she
+told herself that she disapproved of it.  But in her heart
+she wanted the girl to see it through, once attempted.
+
+Fanny awoke at half past seven, and her nostrils dilated to
+that most exquisite, tantalizing and fragrant of smells--the
+aroma of simmering coffee.  It permeated the house.  It
+tickled the senses.  It carried with it visions of hot,
+brown breakfast rolls, and eggs, and butter.  Fanny loved
+her breakfast.  She turned over now, and decided to go to
+sleep again.  But she could not.  She got up and dressed
+slowly and carefully.  There was no one to hurry her this
+morning with the call from the foot of the stairs of,
+"Fanny!  Your egg'll get cold!"
+
+She put on clean, crisp underwear, and did her hair
+expertly.  She slipped an all-enveloping pinafore over her
+head, that the new silk dress might not be crushed before
+church time.  She thought that Theodore would surely have
+finished his breakfast by this time.  But when she came
+down-stairs he was at the table.  Not only that, he had just
+begun his breakfast.  An egg, all golden, and white, and
+crisply brown at the frilly edges, lay on his plate. 
+Theodore always ate his egg in a mathematical sort of way. 
+He swallowed the white hastily first, because he disliked
+it, and Mrs. Brandeis insisted that he eat it.  Then he
+would brood a moment over the yolk that lay, unmarred and
+complete, like an amber jewel in the center of his plate. 
+Then he would suddenly plunge his fork into the very heart
+of the jewel, and it would flow over his plate, mingling
+with the butter, and he would catch it deftly with little
+mops of warm, crisp, buttery roll.
+
+Fanny passed the breakfast table just as Theodore plunged
+his fork into the egg yolk.  She caught her breath sharply,
+and closed her eyes.  Then she turned and fled to the front
+porch and breathed deeply and windily of the heady September
+Wisconsin morning air.  As she stood there, with her stiff,
+short black curls still damp and glistening, in her best
+shoes and stockings, with the all-enveloping apron covering
+her sturdy little figure, the light of struggle and
+renunciation in her face, she typified something at once
+fine and earthy.
+
+But the real struggle was to come later.  They went to
+temple at ten, Theodore with his beloved violin tucked
+carefully under his arm.  Bella Weinberg was waiting at the
+steps.
+
+"Did you?" she asked eagerly.
+
+"Of course not," replied Fanny disdainfully.  "Do you
+think I'd eat old breakfast when I said I was going to fast
+all day?"  Then, with sudden suspicion, "Did you?"
+
+"No!" stoutly.
+
+And they entered, and took their seats.  It was fascinating
+to watch the other members of the congregation come in, the
+women rustling, the men subdued in the unaccustomed dignity
+of black on a week day.  One glance at the yellow pews was
+like reading a complete social and financial register.  The
+seating arrangement of the temple was the Almanach de Gotha
+of Congregation Emanu-el.  Old Ben Reitman, patriarch among
+the Jewish settlers of Winnebago, who had come over an
+immigrant youth, and who now owned hundreds of rich farm
+acres, besides houses, mills and banks, kinged it from the
+front seat of the center section.  He was a magnificent old
+man, with a ruddy face, and a fine head with a shock of
+heavy iron-gray hair, keen eyes, undimmed by years, and a
+startling and unexpected dimple in one cheek that gave him a
+mischievous and boyish look.
+
+Behind this dignitary sat his sons, and their wives, and his
+daughters and their husbands, and their children, and so on,
+back to the Brandeis pew, third from the last, behind which
+sat only a few obscure families branded as Russians, as only
+the German-born Jew can brand those whose misfortune it is
+to be born in that region known as hinter-Berlin.
+
+The morning flew by, with its music, its responses, its
+sermon in German, full of four- and five-syllable German
+words like Barmherzigkeit and Eigentumlichkeit.  All
+during the sermon Fanny sat and dreamed and watched the
+shadow on the window of the pine tree that stood close to
+the temple, and was vastly amused at the jaundiced look that
+the square of yellow window glass cast upon the face of the
+vain and overdressed Mrs. Nathan Pereles.  From time to time
+Bella would turn to bestow upon her a look intended to
+convey intense suffering and a resolute though dying
+condition.  Fanny stonily ignored these mute messages.  They
+offended something in her, though she could not tell what.
+
+At the noon intermission she did not go home to the tempting
+dinner smells, but wandered off through the little city park
+and down to the river, where she sat on the bank and felt
+very virtuous, and spiritual, and hollow.  She was back in
+her seat when the afternoon service was begun.  Some of the
+more devout members had remained to pray all through the
+midday.  The congregation came straggling in by twos and
+threes.  Many of the women had exchanged the severely
+corseted discomfort of the morning's splendor for the
+comparative ease of second-best silks.  Mrs. Brandeis,
+absent from her business throughout this holy day, came
+hurrying in at two, to look with a rather anxious eye upon
+her pale and resolute little daughter.
+
+The memorial service was to begin shortly after three, and
+lasted almost two hours.  At quarter to three Bella slipped
+out through the side aisle, beckoning mysteriously and
+alluringly to Fanny as she went.  Fanny looked at her
+mother.
+
+"Run along," said Mrs. Brandeis.  "The air will be good for
+you.  Come back before the memorial service begins."
+Fanny and Bella met, giggling, in the vestibule.
+
+"Come on over to my house for a minute," Bella suggested. 
+"I want to show you something."  The Weinberg house, a
+great, comfortable, well-built home, with encircling
+veranda, and a well-cared-for lawn, was just a scant block
+away.  They skipped across the street, down the block, and
+in at the back door.  The big sunny kitchen was deserted. 
+The house seemed very quiet and hushed.  Over it hung the
+delicious fragrance of freshly-baked pastry.  Bella, a
+rather baleful look in her eyes, led the way to the
+butler's pantry that was as large as the average kitchen. 
+And there, ranged on platters, and baking boards, and on
+snowy-white napkins, was that which made Tantalus's feast
+seem a dry and barren snack.  The Weinberg's had baked.
+It is the custom in the household of Atonement Day fasters
+of the old school to begin the evening meal, after the
+twenty-four hours of abstainment, with coffee and freshly-
+baked coffee cake of every variety.  It was a lead-pipe blow
+at one's digestion, but delicious beyond imagining.  Bella's
+mother was a famous cook, and her two maids followed in the
+ways of their mistress.  There were to be sisters and
+brothers and out-of-town relations as guests at the evening
+meal, and Mrs. Weinberg had outdone herself.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Fanny in a sort of agony and delight.
+
+"Take some," said Bella, the temptress.
+
+The pantry was fragrant as a garden with spices, and fruit
+scents, and the melting, delectable perfume of brown,
+freshly-baked dough, sugar-coated.  There was one giant
+platter devoted wholly to round, plump cakes, with puffy
+edges, in the center of each a sunken pool that was all
+plum, bearing on its bosom a snowy sifting of powdered
+sugar.  There were others whose centers were apricot, pure
+molten gold in the sunlight.  There were speckled expanses
+of cheese kuchen, the golden-brown surface showing rich
+cracks through which one caught glimpses of the lemon-yellow
+cheese beneath--cottage cheese that had been beaten up with
+eggs, and spices, and sugar, and lemon.  Flaky crust rose,
+jaggedly, above this plateau.  There were cakes with jelly,
+and cinnamon kuchen, and cunning cakes with almond slices
+nestling side by side.  And there was freshly-baked bread--
+twisted loaf, with poppy seed freckling its braid, and its
+sides glistening with the butter that had been liberally
+swabbed on it before it had been thrust into the oven.
+
+Fanny Brandeis gazed, hypnotized.  As she gazed Bella
+selected a plum tart and bit into it--bit generously, so
+that her white little teeth met in the very middle of the
+oozing red-brown juice and one heard a little squirt as they
+closed on the luscious fruit.  At the sound Fanny quivered
+all through her plump and starved little body.
+
+"Have one," said Bella generously.  "Go on.  Nobody'll ever
+know.  Anyway, we've fasted long enough for our age.  I
+could fast till supper time if I wanted to, but I don't want
+to."  She swallowed the last morsel of the plum tart, and
+selected another--apricot, this time, and opened her moist
+red lips.  But just before she bit into it (the Inquisition
+could have used Bella's talents) she selected its
+counterpart and held it out to Fanny.  Fanny shook her head
+slightly.  Her hand came up involuntarily.  Her eyes were
+fastened on Bella's face.
+
+"Go on," urged Bella.  "Take it.  They're grand! M-m-m-m!" 
+The first bite of apricot vanished between her rows of sharp
+white teeth.  Fanny shut her eyes as if in pain.  She was
+fighting the great fight of her life.  She was to meet other
+temptations, and perhaps more glittering ones, in her
+lifetime, but to her dying day she never forgot that first
+battle between the flesh and the spirit, there in the sugar-
+scented pantry--and the spirit won.  As Bella's lips closed
+upon the second bite of apricot tart, the while her eye
+roved over the almond cakes and her hand still held the
+sweet out to Fanny, that young lady turned sharply, like a
+soldier, and marched blindly out of the house, down the back
+steps, across the street, and so into the temple.
+
+The evening lights had just been turned on.  The little
+congregation, relaxed, weary, weak from hunger, many of
+them, sat rapt and still except at those times when the
+prayer book demanded spoken responses.  The voice of the
+little rabbi, rather weak now, had in it a timbre that made
+it startlingly sweet and clear and resonant.  Fanny slid
+very quietly into the seat beside Mrs. Brandeis, and slipped
+her moist and cold little hand into her mother's warm, work-
+roughened palm.  The mother's brown eyes, very bright with
+unshed tears, left their perusal of the prayer book to dwell
+upon the white little face that was smiling rather wanly up
+at her.  The pages of the prayer book lay two-thirds or more
+to the left.  Just as Fanny remarked this, there was a
+little moment of hush in the march of the day's long
+service.  The memorial hour had begun.
+
+Little Doctor Thalmann cleared his throat.  The congregation
+stirred a bit, changed its cramped position.  Bella, the
+guilty, came stealing in, a pink-and-gold picture of angelic
+virtue.  Fanny, looking at her, felt very aloof, and clean,
+and remote.
+
+Molly Brandeis seemed to sense what had happened.
+
+"But you didn't, did you?" she whispered softly.
+
+Fanny shook her head.
+
+Rabbi Thalmann was seated in his great carved chair.  His
+eyes were closed.  The wheezy little organ in the choir loft
+at the rear of the temple began the opening bars of
+Schumann's Traumerei.  And then, above the cracked voice of
+the organ, rose the clear, poignant wail of a violin. 
+Theodore Brandeis had begun to play.  You know the playing
+of the average boy of fifteen--that nerve-destroying,
+uninspired scraping.  There was nothing of this in the
+sounds that this boy called forth from the little wooden box
+and the stick with its taut lines of catgut.  Whatever it
+was--the length of the thin, sensitive fingers, the turn of
+the wrist, the articulation of the forearm, the something in
+the brain, or all these combined--Theodore Brandeis
+possessed that which makes for greatness.  You realized
+that as he crouched over his violin to get his cello tones. 
+As he played to-day the little congregation sat very still,
+and each was thinking of his ambitions and his failures; of
+the lover lost, of the duty left undone, of the hope
+deferred; of the wrong that was never righted; of the lost
+one whose memory spells remorse.  It felt the salt taste on
+its lips.  It put up a furtive, shamed hand to dab at its
+cheeks, and saw that the one who sat in the pew just ahead
+was doing likewise.  This is what happened when this boy of
+fifteen wedded his bow to his violin.  And he who makes us
+feel all this has that indefinable, magic, glorious thing
+known as Genius.
+
+When it was over, there swept through the room that sigh
+following tension relieved.  Rabbi Thalmann passed a hand
+over his tired eyes, like one returning from a far mental
+journey; then rose, and came forward to the pulpit.  He
+began, in Hebrew, the opening words of the memorial service,
+and so on to the prayers in English, with their words of
+infinite humility and wisdom.
+
+"Thou hast implanted in us the capacity for sin, but not sin
+itself!"
+
+Fanny stirred.  She had learned that a brief half hour ago. 
+The service marched on, a moving and harrowing thing.  The
+amens rolled out with a new fervor from the listeners. 
+There seemed nothing comic now in the way old Ben Reitman,
+with his slower eyes, always came out five words behind the
+rest who tumbled upon the responses and scurried briskly
+through them, so that his fine old voice, somewhat hoarse
+and quavering now, rolled out its "Amen!" in solitary
+majesty.  They came to that gem of humility, the mourners'
+prayer; the ancient and ever-solemn Kaddish prayer.  There
+is nothing in the written language that, for sheer drama and
+magnificence, can equal it as it is chanted in the Hebrew. 
+
+As Rabbi Thalmann began to intone it in its monotonous
+repetition of praise, there arose certain black-robed
+figures from their places and stood with heads bowed over
+their prayer books.  These were members of the congregation
+from whom death had taken a toll during the past year. 
+Fanny rose with her mother and Theodore, who had left the
+choir loft to join them.  The little wheezy organ played
+very softly.  The black-robed figures swayed.  Here and
+there a half-stifled sob rose, and was crushed.  Fanny felt
+a hot haze that blurred her vision.  She winked it away, and
+another burned in its place.  Her shoulders shook with a
+sob.  She felt her mother's hand close over her own that
+held one side of the book.  The prayer, that was not of
+mourning but of praise, ended with a final crescendo from
+the organ, The silent black-robed figures were seated.
+
+Over the little, spent congregation hung a glorious
+atmosphere of detachment.  These Jews, listening to the
+words that had come from the lips of the prophets in Israel,
+had been, on this day, thrown back thousands of years, to
+the time when the destruction of the temple was as real as
+the shattered spires and dome of the cathedral at Rheims. 
+Old Ben Reitman, faint with fasting, was far removed from
+his everyday thoughts of his horses, his lumber mills, his
+farms, his mortgages.  Even Mrs. Nathan Pereles, in her
+black satin and bugles and jets, her cold, hard face usually
+unlighted by sympathy or love, seemed to feel something of
+this emotional wave.  Fanny Brandeis was shaken by it.  Her
+head ached (that was hunger) and her hands were icy.  The
+little Russian girl in the seat just behind them had ceased
+to wriggle and squirm, and slept against her mother's side. 
+Rabbi Thalmann, there on the platform, seemed somehow very
+far away and vague.  The scent of clove apples and ammonia
+salts filled the air.  The atmosphere seemed strangely
+wavering and luminous.  The white satin of the Ark
+curtain gleamed and shifted.
+
+The long service swept on to its close.  Suddenly organ and
+choir burst into a paeon.  Little Doctor Thalmann raised his
+arms.  The congregation swept to its feet with a mighty
+surge.  Fanny rose with them, her face very white in its
+frame of black curls, her eyes luminous.  She raised her
+face for the words of the ancient benediction that rolled,
+in its simplicity and grandeur, from the lips of the rabbi:
+
+"May the blessing of the Lord our God rest upon you all. 
+God bless thee and keep thee.  May God cause His countenance
+to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee.  May God lift
+up His countenance unto thee, and grant thee peace."
+
+The Day of Atonement had come to an end.  It was a very
+quiet, subdued and spent little flock that dispersed to
+their homes.  Fanny walked out with scarcely a thought of
+Bella.  She felt, vaguely, that she and this school friend
+were formed of different stuff.  She knew that the bond
+between them had been the grubby, physical one of childhood,
+and that they never would come together in the finer
+relation of the spirit, though she could not have put this
+new knowledge into words.
+
+Molly Brandeis put a hand on her daughter's shoulder.
+
+"Tired, Fanchen?"
+
+"A little."
+
+"Bet you're hungry!" from Theodore.
+
+"I was, but I'm not now."
+
+"M-m-m--wait!  Noodle soup.  And chicken!"
+
+She had intended to tell of the trial in the Weinberg's
+pantry.  But now something within her--something fine, born
+of this day--kept her from it.  But Molly Brandeis, to whom
+two and two often made five, guessed something of what had
+happened.  She had felt a great surge of pride, had Molly
+Brandeis, when her son had swayed the congregation with
+the magic of his music.  She had kissed him good night with
+infinite tenderness and love.  But she came into her
+daughter's tiny room after Fanny had gone to bed, and leaned
+over, and put a cool hand on the hot forehead.
+
+"Do you feel all right, my darling?"
+
+"Umhmph," replied Fanny drowsily.
+
+"Fanchen, doesn't it make you feel happy and clean to know
+that you were able to do the thing you started out to do?"
+
+"Umhmph."
+
+"Only," Molly Brandeis was thinking aloud now, quite
+forgetting that she was talking to a very little girl,
+"only, life seems to take such special delight in offering
+temptation to those who are able to withstand it.  I don't
+know why that's true, but it is.  I hope--oh, my little
+girl, my baby--I hope----"
+
+But Fanny never knew whether her mother finished that
+sentence or not.  She remembered waiting for the end of it,
+to learn what it was her mother hoped.  And she had felt a
+sudden, scalding drop on her hand where her mother bent over
+her.  And the next thing she knew it was morning, with
+mellow September sunshine.
+
+
+CHAPTER FOUR
+
+It was the week following this feat of fasting that two
+things happened to Fanny Brandeis--two seemingly unimportant
+and childish things--that were to affect the whole tenor of
+her life.  It is pleasant to predict thus.  It gives a
+certain weight to a story and a sense of inevitableness.  It
+should insure, too, the readers's support to the point, at
+least, where the prediction is fulfilled.  Sometimes a
+careless author loses sight altogether of his promise, and
+then the tricked reader is likely to go on to the very final
+page, teased by the expectation that that which was hinted
+at will be revealed.
+
+Fanny Brandeis had a way of going to the public library on
+Saturday afternoons (with a bag of very sticky peanut candy
+in her pocket, the little sensualist!) and there, huddled in
+a chair, dreamily and almost automatically munching peanut
+brittle, her cheeks growing redder and redder in the close
+air of the ill-ventilated room, she would read, and read,
+and read.  There was no one to censor her reading, so she
+read promiscuously, wading gloriously through trash and
+classic and historical and hysterical alike, and finding
+something of interest in them all.
+
+She read the sprightly "Duchess" novels, where mad offers of
+marriage were always made in flower-scented conservatories;
+she read Dickens, and Thelma, and old bound Cosmopolitans,
+and Zola, and de Maupassant, and the "Wide, Wide World," and
+"Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates," and "Jane Eyre."  All
+of which are merely mentioned as examples of her
+catholicism in literature.  As she read she was unaware
+of the giggling boys and girls who came in noisily, and made
+dates, and were coldly frowned on by the austere Miss
+Perkins, the librarian.  She would read until the fading
+light would remind her that the short fall or winter day was
+drawing to a close.
+
+She would come, shivering a little after the fetid
+atmosphere of the overheated library, into the crisp, cold
+snap of the astringent Wisconsin air.  Sometimes she would
+stop at the store for her mother.  Sometimes she would run
+home alone through the twilight, her heels scrunching the
+snow, her whole being filled with a vague and unchildish
+sadness and disquiet as she faced the tender rose, and
+orange, and mauve, and pale lemon of the winter sunset. 
+There were times when her very heart ached with the beauty
+of that color-flooded sky; there were times, later, when it
+ached in much the same way at the look in the eyes of a
+pushcart peddler; there were times when it ached, seemingly,
+for no reason at all--as is sometimes the case when one is a
+little Jew girl, with whole centuries of suffering behind
+one.
+
+On this day she had taken a book from the library Miss
+Perkins, at sight of the title, had glared disapprovingly,
+and had hesitated a moment before stamping the card.
+
+"Is this for yourself?" she had asked.
+
+"Yes'm."
+
+"It isn't a book for little girls," snapped Miss Perkins.
+
+"I've read half of it already," Fanny informed her sweetly. 
+And went out with it under her arm.  It was Zola's "The
+Ladies' Paradise" (Au Bonheur des Dames).  The story of
+the shop girl, and the crushing of the little dealer by the
+great and moneyed company had thrilled and fascinated her.
+
+Her mind was full of it as she turned the corner on Norris Street
+and ran full-tilt, into a yowling, taunting, torturing little pack
+of boys.  They were gathered in close formation about some object
+which they were teasing, and knocking about in the mud, and
+otherwise abusing with the savagery of their years.  Fanny, the
+fiery, stopped short.  She pushed into the ring.  The object of
+their efforts was a weak-kneed and hollow-chested little boy
+who could not fight because he was cowardly as well as weak,
+and his name (oh, pity!) was Clarence--Clarence Heyl.  There
+are few things that a mischievous group of small boys cannot
+do with a name like Clarence.  They whined it, they
+catcalled it, they shrieked it in falsetto imitation of
+Clarence's mother.  He was a wide-mouthed, sallow and
+pindling little boy, whose pipe-stemmed legs looked all the
+thinner for being contrasted with his feet, which were long
+and narrow.  At that time he wore spectacles, too, to
+correct a muscular weakness, so that his one good feature--
+great soft, liquid eyes--passed unnoticed.  He was the kind
+of little boy whose mother insists on dressing him in cloth-
+top, buttoned, patent-leather shoes for school.  His blue
+serge suit was never patched or shiny.  His stockings were
+virgin at the knee.  He wore an overcoat on cool autumn
+days.  Fanny despised and pitied him.  We ask you not to,
+because in this puny, shy and ugly little boy of fifteen you
+behold Our Hero.
+
+He staggered to his feet now, as Fanny came up.  His school
+reefer was mud-bespattered.  His stockings were torn.  His
+cap was gone and his hair was wild.  There was a cut or
+scratch on one cheek, from which the blood flowed.
+
+"I'll tell my mother on you!" he screamed impotently, and
+shook with rage and terror.  "You'll see, you will!  You let
+me alone, now!"
+
+Fanny felt a sick sensation at the pit of her stomach and in
+her throat.  Then:
+
+"He'll tell his ma!" sneered the boys in chorus.  "Oh,
+mamma!"  And called him the Name.  And at that a she wildcat
+broke loose among them.  She pounced on them without
+warning, a little fury of blazing eyes and flying hair, and
+white teeth showing in a snarl.  If she had fought fair, or
+if she had not taken them so by surprise, she would have
+been powerless among them.  But she had sprung at them with
+the suddenness of rage.  She kicked, and scratched, and bit,
+and clawed and spat.  She seemed not to feel the defensive
+blows that were showered upon her in turn.  Her own hard
+little fists were now doubled for a thump or opened, like a
+claw, for scratching.
+
+"Go on home!" she yelled to Clarence, even while she fought. 
+And Clarence, gathering up his tattered school books, went,
+and stood not on the order of his going.  Whereupon Fanny
+darted nimbly to one side, out of the way of boyish brown
+fists.  In that moment she was transformed from a raging
+fury into a very meek and trembling little girl, who looked
+shyly and pleadingly out from a tangle of curls.  The boys
+were for rushing at her again.
+
+"Cowardy-cats!  Five of you fighting one girl," cried Fanny,
+her lower lip trembling ever so little.  "Come on!  Hit me! 
+Afraid to fight anything but girls!  Cowardy-cats!"  A tear,
+pearly, pathetic, coursed down her cheek.
+
+The drive was broken.  Five sullen little boys stood and
+glared at her, impotently.
+
+"You hit us first," declared one boy.  "What business d' you
+have scratching around like that, I'd like to know!  You old
+scratch cat!"
+
+"He's sickly," said Fanny.  "He can't fight.  There's
+something the matter with his lungs, or something, and
+they're going to make him quit school.  Besides, he's a
+billion times better than any of you, anyway."
+
+At once, "Fanny's stuck on Clar-ence!  Fanny's stuck on
+Clar-ence!"
+
+Fanny picked up her somewhat battered Zola from where it had
+flown at her first onslaught.  "It's a lie!" she shouted. 
+And fled, followed by the hateful chant.
+
+She came in at the back door, trying to look casual.  But
+Mattie's keen eye detected the marks of battle, even while
+her knife turned the frying potatoes.
+
+"Fanny Brandeis!  Look at your sweater!  And your hair!"
+
+Fanny glanced down at the torn pocket dangling untidily. 
+"Oh, that!" she said airily.  And, passing the kitchen
+table, deftly filched a slice of cold veal from the platter,
+and mounted the back stairs to her room.  It was a hungry
+business, this fighting.  When Mrs. Brandeis came in at six
+her small daughter was demurely reading.  At supper time
+Mrs. Brandeis looked up at her daughter with a sharp
+exclamation.
+
+"Fanny!  There's a scratch on your cheek from your eye to
+your chin."
+
+Fanny put up her hand.  "Is there?"
+
+"Why, you must have felt it.  How did you get it?"
+
+Fanny said nothing.  "I'll bet she was fighting," said
+Theodore with the intuitive knowledge that one child has of
+another's ways.
+
+"Fanny!"  The keen brown eyes were upon her.
+"Some boys were picking on Clarence Heyl, and it made me
+mad.  They called him names."
+
+"What names?"
+
+"Oh, names."
+
+"Fanny dear, if you're going to fight every time you hear
+that name----"
+
+Fanny thought of the torn sweater, the battered Zola, the
+scratched cheek.  "It is pretty expensive," she said
+reflectively.
+
+After supper she settled down at once to her book.  Theodore
+would labor over his algebra after the dining-room table
+was cleared.  He stuck his cap on his head now, and slammed
+out of the door for a half-hour's play under the corner arc-
+light.  Fanny rarely brought books from school, and yet she
+seemed to get on rather brilliantly, especially in the
+studies she liked.  During that winter following her
+husband's death Mrs. Brandeis had a way of playing solitaire
+after supper; one of the simpler forms of the game.  It
+seemed to help her to think out the day's problems, and to
+soothe her at the same time.  She would turn down the front
+of the writing desk, and draw up the piano stool.
+
+All through that winter Fanny seemed to remember reading to
+the slap-slap of cards, and the whir of their shuffling.  In
+after years she was never able to pick up a volume of
+Dickens without having her mind hark back to those long,
+quiet evenings.  She read a great deal of Dickens at that
+time.  She had a fine contempt for his sentiment, and his
+great ladies bored her.  She did not know that this was
+because they were badly drawn.  The humor she loved, and she
+read and reread the passages dealing with Samuel Weller, and
+Mr. Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, and Fanny Squeers.  It was
+rather trying to read Dickens before supper, she had
+discovered.  Pickwick Papers was fatal, she had found.  It
+sent one to the pantry in a sort of trance, to ransack for
+food--cookies, apples, cold meat, anything.  But whatever
+one found, it always fell short of the succulent sounding
+beefsteak pies, and saddles of mutton, and hot pineapple
+toddy of the printed page.
+
+To-night Mrs. Brandeis, coming in from the kitchen after a
+conference with Mattie, found her daughter in conversational
+mood, though book in hand.
+
+"Mother, did you ever read this?"  She held up "The Ladies'
+Paradise."
+
+"Yes; but child alive, what ever made you get it?  That
+isn't the kind of thing for you to read.  Oh, I wish I had
+more time to give----"
+
+Fanny leaned forward eagerly.  "It made me think a lot of
+you.  You know--the way the big store was crushing the
+little one, and everything.  Like the thing you were talking
+to that man about the other day.  You said it was killing
+the small-town dealer, and he said some day it would be
+illegal, and you said you'd never live to see it."
+
+"Oh, that!  We were talking about the mail-order business,
+and how hard it was to compete with it, when the farmers
+bought everything from a catalogue, and had whole boxes of
+household goods expressed to them.  I didn't know you were
+listening, Fanchen."
+
+"I was.  I almost always do when you and some traveling man
+or somebody like that are talking.  It--it's interesting."
+
+Fanny went back to her book then.  But Molly Brandeis sat a
+moment, eyeing her queer little daughter thoughtfully.  Then
+she sighed, and laid out her cards for solitaire.  By eight
+o'clock she was usually so sleepy that she would fall, dead-
+tired, asleep on the worn leather couch in the sitting-room. 
+She must have been fearfully exhausted, mind and body.  The
+house would be very quiet, except for Mattie, perhaps,
+moving about in the kitchen or in her corner room upstairs. 
+Sometimes the weary woman on the couch would start suddenly
+from her sleep and cry out, choked and gasping, "No!  No! 
+No!"  The children would jump, terrified, and come running
+to her at first, but later they got used to it, and only
+looked up to say, when she asked them, bewildered, what it
+was that wakened her, "You had the no-no-nos."
+
+She had never told of the thing that made her start out of
+her sleep and cry out like that.  Perhaps it was just the
+protest of the exhausted body and the overwrought nerves. 
+Usually, after that, she would sit up, haggardly, and take
+the hairpins out of her short thick hair, and announce her
+intention of going to bed.  She always insisted that the
+children go too, though they often won an extra half hour by
+protesting and teasing.  It was a good thing for them, these
+nine o'clock bed hours, for it gave them the tonic sleep
+that their young, high-strung natures demanded.
+
+"Come, children," she would say, yawning.
+
+"Oh, mother, please just let me finish this chapter!"
+
+"How much?"
+
+"Just this little bit.  See?  Just this."
+
+"Well, just that, then," for Mrs. Brandeis was a reasonable
+woman, and she had the book-lover's knowledge of the
+fascination of the unfinished chapter.
+
+Fanny and Theodore were not always honest about the bargain. 
+They would gallop, hot-cheeked, through the allotted
+chapter.  Mrs. Brandeis would have fallen into a doze,
+perhaps.  And the two conspirators would read on, turning
+the leaves softly and swiftly, gulping the pages, cramming
+them down in an orgy of mental bolting, like naughty
+children stuffing cake when their mother's back is turned. 
+But the very concentration of their dread of waking her
+often brought about the feared result.  Mrs. Brandeis would
+start up rather wildly, look about her, and see the two
+buried, red-cheeked and eager, in their books.
+
+"Fanny!  Theodore!  Come now!  Not another minute!"
+
+Fanny, shameless little glutton, would try it again.  "Just
+to the end of this chapter!  Just this weenty bit!"
+
+"Fiddlesticks!  You've read four chapters since I spoke to
+you the last time.  Come now!"
+
+Molly Brandeis would see to the doors, and the windows, and
+the clock, and then, waiting for the weary little figures to
+climb the stairs, would turn out the light, and, hairpins in
+one hand, corset in the other, perhaps, mount to bed.
+
+By nine o'clock the little household would be sleeping, the
+children sweetly and dreamlessly, the tired woman
+restlessly and fitfully, her overwrought brain still surging
+with the day's problems.  It was not like a household at
+rest, somehow.  It was like a spirited thing standing,
+quivering for a moment, its nerves tense, its muscles
+twitching.
+
+Perhaps you have quite forgotten that here were to be
+retailed two epochal events in Fanny Brandeis's life.  If
+you have remembered, you will have guessed that the one was
+the reading of that book of social protest, though its
+writer has fallen into disfavor in these fickle days.  The
+other was the wild and unladylike street brawl in which she
+took part so that a terrified and tortured little boy might
+escape his tormentors.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIVE
+
+There was no hard stock in Brandeis' Bazaar now.  The
+packing-room was always littered with straw and excelsior
+dug from hogsheads and great crates.  Aloysius lorded it
+over a small red-headed satellite who disappeared inside
+barrels and dived head first into huge boxes, coming up
+again with a lamp, or a doll, or a piece of glassware, like
+a magician.  Fanny, perched on an overturned box, used to
+watch him, fascinated, while he laboriously completed a
+water set, or a tea set.  A preliminary dive would bring up
+the first of a half dozen related pieces, each swathed in
+tissue paper.  A deft twist on the part of the attendant
+Aloysius would strip the paper wrappings and disclose a
+ruby-tinted tumbler, perhaps.  Another dive, and another,
+until six gleaming glasses stood revealed, like chicks
+without a hen mother.  A final dip, much scratching and
+burrowing, during which armfuls of hay and excelsior were
+thrown out, and then the red-headed genie of the barrel
+would emerge, flushed and triumphant, with the water pitcher
+itself, thus completing the happy family.
+
+Aloysius, meanwhile, would regale her with one of those
+choice bits of gossip he had always about him, like a jewel
+concealed, and only to be brought out for the appreciative. 
+Mrs. Brandeis disapproved of store gossip, and frowned on
+Sadie and Pearl whenever she found them, their heads close
+together, their stifled shrieks testifying to his wit. 
+There were times when Molly Brandeis herself could not
+resist the spell of his tongue.  No one knew where Aloysius
+got his information.  He had news that Winnebago's
+two daily papers never could get, and wouldn't have dared to
+print if they had.
+
+"Did you hear about Myrtle Krieger," he would begin, "that's
+marryin' the Hempel boy next month?  The one in the bank. 
+She's exhibiting her trewsow at the Outagamie County Fair
+this week, for the handwork and embroid'ry prize.  Ain't it
+brazen?  They say the crowd's so thick around the table that
+they had to take down the more pers'nal pieces.  The first
+day of the fair the grand-stand was, you might say, empty,
+even when they was pullin' off the trottin' races and the
+balloon ascension.  It's funny--ain't it?--how them garmints
+that you wouldn't turn for a second look at on the
+clothesline or in a store winda' becomes kind of wicked and
+interestin' the minute they get what they call the human
+note.  There it lays, that virgin lawnjerie, for all the
+county to look at, with pink ribbons run through everything,
+and the poor Krieger girl never dreamin' she's doin'
+somethin' indelicate.  She says yesterday if she wins the
+prize she's going to put it toward one of these kitchen
+cabinets."
+
+I wish we could stop a while with Aloysius.  He is well
+worth it.  Aloysius, who looked a pass between Ichabod Crane
+and Smike; Aloysius, with his bit of scandal burnished with
+wit; who, after a long, hard Saturday, would go home to
+scrub the floor of the dingy lodgings where he lived with
+his invalid mother, and who rose in the cold dawn of Sunday
+morning to go to early mass, so that he might return to cook
+the dinner and wait upon the sick woman.  Aloysius, whose
+trousers flapped grotesquely about his bony legs, and whose
+thin red wrists hung awkwardly from his too-short sleeves,
+had in him that tender, faithful and courageous stuff of
+which unsung heroes are made.  And he adored his clever,
+resourceful boss to the point of imitation.  You should have
+seen him trying to sell a sled or a doll's go-cart in
+her best style.  But we cannot stop for Aloysius.  He is
+irrelevant, and irrelevant matter halts the progress of a
+story.  Any one, from Barrie to Harold Bell Wright, will
+tell you that a story, to be successful, must march.
+
+We'll keep step, then, with Molly Brandeis until she drops
+out of the ranks.  There is no detouring with Mrs. Brandeis
+for a leader.  She is the sort that, once her face is set
+toward her goal, looks neither to right nor left until she
+has reached it.
+
+When Fanny Brandeis was fourteen, and Theodore was not quite
+sixteen, a tremendous thing happened.  Schabelitz, the
+famous violinist, came to Winnebago to give a concert under
+the auspices of the Young Men's Sunday Evening Club.
+
+The Young Men's Sunday Evening Club of the Congregational
+Church prided itself (and justifiably) on what the papers
+called its "auspices."  It scorned to present to Winnebago
+the usual lyceum attractions--Swiss bell ringers, negro glee
+clubs, and Family Fours.  Instead, Schumann-Heink sang her
+lieder for them; McCutcheon talked and cartooned for them;
+Madame Bloomfield-Zeisler played.  Winnebago was one of
+those wealthy little Mid-Western towns whose people
+appreciate the best and set out to acquire it for
+themselves.
+
+To the Easterner, Winnebago, and Oshkosh, and Kalamazoo, and
+Emporia are names invented to get a laugh from a vaudeville
+audience.  Yet it is the people from Winnebago and Emporia
+and the like whom you meet in Egypt, and the Catalina
+Islands, and at Honolulu, and St. Moritz.  It is in the
+Winnebago living-room that you are likely to find a prayer
+rug got in Persia, a bit of gorgeous glaze from China, a
+scarf from some temple in India, and on it a book, hand-
+tooled and rare.  The Winnebagoans seem to know what is
+being served and worn, from salad to veilings,
+surprisingly soon after New York has informed itself on
+those subjects.  The 7:52 Northwestern morning train out of
+Winnebago was always pretty comfortably crowded with
+shoppers who were taking a five-hour run down to Chicago to
+get a hat and see the new musical show at the Illinois.
+
+So Schabelitz's coming was an event, but not an
+unprecedented one.  Except to Theodore.  Theodore had a
+ticket for the concert (his mother had seen to that), and he
+talked of nothing else.  He was going with his violin
+teacher, Emil Bauer.  There were strange stories as to why
+Emil Bauer, with his gift of teaching, should choose to bury
+himself in this obscure little Wisconsin town.  It was known
+that he had acquaintance with the great and famous of the
+musical world.  The East End set fawned upon him, and his
+studio suppers were the exclusive social events in
+Winnebago.
+
+Schabelitz was to play in the evening.  At half past three
+that afternoon there entered Brandeis' Bazaar a white-faced,
+wide-eyed boy who was Theodore Brandeis; a plump, voluble,
+and excited person who was Emil Bauer; and a short, stocky
+man who looked rather like a foreign-born artisan--plumber
+or steam-fitter--in his Sunday clothes.  This was Levine
+Schabelitz.
+
+Molly Brandeis was selling a wash boiler to a fussy
+housewife who, in her anxiety to assure herself of the
+flawlessness of her purchase, had done everything but climb
+inside it.  It had early been instilled in the minds of Mrs.
+Brandeis's children that she was never to be approached when
+busy with a customer.  There were times when they rushed
+into the store bursting with news or plans, but they had
+learned to control their eagerness.  This, though, was no
+ordinary news that had blanched Theodore's face.  At sight
+of the three, Mrs. Brandeis quietly turned her boiler
+purchaser over to Pearl and came forward from the rear of
+the store.
+
+"Oh, Mother!" cried Theodore, an hysterical note in his
+voice.  "Oh, Mother!"
+
+And in that moment Molly Brandeis knew.  Emil Bauer
+introduced them, floridly.  Molly Brandeis held out her
+hand, and her keen brown eyes looked straight and long into
+the gifted Russian's pale blue ones.  According to all rules
+he should have started a dramatic speech, beginning with
+"Madame!" hand on heart.  But Schabelitz the great had
+sprung from Schabelitz the peasant boy, and in the process
+he had managed, somehow, to retain the simplicity which was
+his charm.  Still, there was something queer and foreign in
+the way he bent over Mrs. Brandeis's hand.  We do not bow
+like that in Winnebago.
+
+"Mrs. Brandeis, I am honored to meet you."
+
+"And I to meet you," replied the shopkeeper in the black
+sateen apron.
+
+"I have just had the pleasure of hearing your son play,"
+began Schabelitz.
+
+"Mr. Bauer called me out of my economics class at school,
+Mother, and said that----"
+
+"Theodore!" Theodore subsided.
+"He is only a boy," went on Schabelitz, and put one hand on
+Theodore's shoulder.  "A very gifted boy.  I hear hundreds. 
+Oh, how I suffer, sometimes, to listen to their devilish
+scraping!  To-day, my friend Bauer met me with that old
+plea, `You must hear this pupil play.  He has genius.' 
+`Bah! Genius!'  I said, and I swore at him a little, for he
+is my friend, Bauer.  But I went with him to his studio--
+Bauer, that is a remarkably fine place you have there, above
+that drug store; a room of exceptional proportions.  And
+those rugs, let me tell you----"
+
+"Never mind the rugs, Schabelitz.  Mrs. Brandeis here----"
+
+"Oh, yes, yes!  Well, dear lady, this boy of yours will be a
+great violinist if he is willing to work, and work, and
+work.  He has what you in America call the spark.  To make
+it a flame he must work, always work.  You must send him to
+Dresden, under Auer."
+
+"Dresden!" echoed Molly Brandeis faintly, and put one hand
+on the table that held the fancy cups and saucers, and they
+jingled a little.
+
+"A year, perhaps, first, in New York with Wolfsohn."
+
+Wolfsohn!  New York!  Dresden!  It was too much even for
+Molly Brandeis' well-balanced brain.  She was conscious of
+feeling a little dizzy.  At that moment Pearl approached
+apologetically.  "Pardon me, Mis' Brandeis, but Mrs. Trost
+wants to know if you'll send the boiler special this
+afternoon.  She wants it for the washing early to-morrow
+morning."
+
+That served to steady her.
+
+"Tell Mrs. Trost I'll send it before six to-night."  Her
+eyes rested on Theodore's face, flushed now, and glowing. 
+Then she turned and faced Schabelitz squarely.  "Perhaps you
+do not know that this store is our support.  I earn a living
+here for myself and my two children.  You see what it is--
+just a novelty and notion store in a country town.  I speak
+of this because it is the important thing.  I have known for
+a long time that Theodore's playing was not the playing of
+the average boy, musically gifted.  So what you tell me does
+not altogether surprise me.  But when you say Dresden--well,
+from Brandeis' Bazaar in Winnebago, Wisconsin, to Auer, in
+Dresden, Germany, is a long journey for one afternoon."
+
+"But of course you must have time to think it over.  It must
+be brought about, somehow."
+
+"Somehow----"  Mrs. Brandeis stared straight ahead, and you
+could almost hear that indomitable will of hers working,
+crashing over obstacles, plowing through difficulties. 
+Theodore watched her, breathless, as though expecting an
+immediate solution.  His mother's eyes met his own
+intent ones, and at that her mobile mouth quirked in a
+sudden smile.  "You look as if you expected pearls to pop
+out of my mouth, son.  And, by the way, if you're going to a
+concert this evening don't you think it would be a good idea
+to squander an hour on study this afternoon?  You may be a
+musical prodigy, but geometry's geometry."
+
+"Oh, Mother!  Please!"
+
+"I want to talk to Mr. Schabelitz and Mr. Bauer, alone." 
+She patted his shoulder, and the last pat ended in a gentle
+push.  "Run along."
+
+"I'll work, Mother.  You know perfectly well I'll work." 
+But he looked so startlingly like his father as he said it
+that Mrs. Brandeis felt a clutching at her heart.
+
+Theodore out of the way, they seemed to find very little to
+discuss, after all.  Schabelitz was so quietly certain,
+Bauer so triumphantly proud.
+
+Said Schabelitz, "Wolfsohn, of course, receives ten dollars
+a lesson ordinarily."
+
+"Ten dollars!"
+
+"But a pupil like Theodore is in the nature of an
+investment," Bauer hastened to explain.  "An advertisement. 
+After hearing him play, and after what Schabelitz here will
+have to say for him, Wolfsohn will certainly give Theodore
+lessons for nothing, or next to nothing.  You remember" --
+proudly-- "I offered to teach him without charge, but you
+would not have it."
+
+Schabelitz smote his friend sharply on the shoulder "The
+true musician!  Oh, Bauer, Bauer!  That you should bury
+yourself in this----"
+
+But Bauer stopped him with a gesture.  "Mrs. Brandeis is a
+busy woman.  And as she says, this thing needs thinking
+over."
+
+"After all," said Mrs. Brandeis, "there isn't much to think
+about.  I know just where I stand.  It's a case of
+mathematics, that's all.  This business of mine is just
+beginning to pay.  From now on I shall be able to save
+something every year.  It might be enough to cover his
+musical education.  It would mean that Fanny--my daughter--
+and I would have to give up everything.  For myself, I
+should be only too happy, too proud.  But it doesn't seem
+fair to her.  After all, a girl----"
+
+"It isn't fair," broke in Schabelitz.  "It isn't fair.  But
+that is the way of genius.  It never is fair.  It takes, and
+takes, and takes.  I know.  My mother could tell you, if she
+were alive.  She sold the little farm, and my sisters gave
+up their dowries, and with them their hopes of marriage, and
+they lived on bread and cabbage.  That was not to pay for my
+lessons.  They never could have done that.  It was only to
+send me to Moscow.  We were very poor.  They must have
+starved.  I have come to know, since, that it was not worth
+it.  That nothing could be worth it."
+
+"But it was worth it.  Your mother would do it all over
+again, if she had the chance.  That's what we're for."
+
+Bauer pulled out his watch and uttered a horrified
+exclamation.  "Himmel!  Four o'clock!  And I have a pupil at
+four."  He turned hastily to Mrs. Brandeis.  "I am giving a
+little supper in my studio after the concert to-night."
+
+"Oh, Gott!" groaned Schabelitz.
+
+"It is in honor of Schabelitz here.  You see how overcome he
+is.  Will you let me bring Theodore back with me after the
+concert?  There will be some music, and perhaps he will play
+for us."
+
+Schabelitz bent again in his queer little foreign bow.  "And
+you, of course, will honor us, Mrs. Brandeis."  He had never
+lived in Winnebago.
+
+"Oh, certainly," Bauer hastened to say.  He had.
+
+"I!"  Molly Brandeis looked down at her apron, and
+stroked it with her fingers.  Then she looked up with a
+little smile that was not so pleasant as her smile usually
+was.  There had flashed across her quick mind a picture of
+Mrs. G. Manville Smith.  Mrs. G. Manville Smith, in an
+evening gown whose decolletage was discussed from the Haley
+House to Gerretson's department store next morning, was
+always a guest at Bauer's studio affairs.  "Thank you, but
+it is impossible.  And Theodore is only a schoolboy.  Just
+now he needs, more than anything else in the world, nine
+hours of sleep every night.  There will be plenty of time
+for studio suppers later.  When a boy's voice is changing,
+and he doesn't know what to do with his hands and feet, he
+is better off at home."
+
+"God!  These mothers!" exclaimed Schabelitz.  "What do they
+not know!"
+
+"I suppose you are right."  Bauer was both rueful and
+relieved.  It would have been fine to show off Theodore as
+his pupil and Schabelitz's protege.  But Mrs. Brandeis?  No,
+that would never do.  "Well, I must go.  We will talk about
+this again, Mrs. Brandeis.  In two weeks Schabelitz will
+pass through Winnebago again on his way back to Chicago. 
+Meanwhile he will write Wolfsohn.  I also.  So!  Come,
+Schabelitz!"
+
+He turned to see that gentleman strolling off in the
+direction of the notion counter behind which his expert eye
+had caught a glimpse of Sadie in her white shirtwaist and
+her trim skirt.  Sadie always knew what they were wearing on
+State Street, Chicago, half an hour after Mrs. Brandeis
+returned from one of her buying trips.  Shirtwaists had just
+come in, and with them those neat leather belts with a
+buckle, and about the throat they were wearing folds of
+white satin ribbon, smooth and high and tight, the two ends
+tied pertly at the back.  Sadie would never be the
+saleswoman that Pearl was, but her unfailing good nature and
+her cheery self-confidence made her an asset in the store. 
+Besides, she was pretty.  Mrs. Brandeis knew the value
+of a pretty clerk.
+
+At the approach of this stranger Sadie leaned coyly against
+the stocking rack and patted her paper sleevelets that were
+secured at wrist and elbow with elastic bands.  Her method
+was sure death to traveling men.  She prepared now to try it
+on the world-famous virtuoso.  The ease with which she
+succeeded surprised even Sadie, accustomed though she was to
+conquest.
+
+"Come, come, Schabelitz!" said Bauer again.  "I must get
+along."
+
+"Then go, my friend.  Go along and make your preparations
+for that studio supper.  The only interesting woman in
+Winnebago--" he bowed to Mrs. Brandeis-- "will not be there. 
+I know them, these small-town society women, with their
+imitation city ways.  And bony!  Always!  I am enjoying
+myself.  I shall stay here."
+
+And he did stay.  Sadie, talking it over afterward with
+Pearl and Aloysius, put it thus:
+
+"They say he's the grandest violin player in the world.  Not
+that I care much for the violin, myself.  Kind of squeaky, I
+always think.  But it just goes to show they're all alike. 
+Ain't it the truth?  I jollied him just like I did Sam
+Bloom, of Ganz & Pick, Novelties, an hour before.  He
+laughed just where Sam did.  And they both handed me a line
+of talk about my hair and eyes, only Sam said I was a doll,
+and this Schabelitz, or whatever his name is, said I was as
+alluring as a Lorelei.  I guess he thought he had me there,
+but I didn't go through the seventh reader for nothing.  `If
+you think I'm flattered,' I said to him, `you're mistaken. 
+She was the mess who used to sit out on a rock with her back
+hair down, combing away and singing like mad, and keeping an
+eye out for sailors up and down the river.  If I had to work
+that hard to get some attention,' I said, `I'd give up the
+struggle, and settle down with a cat and a teakettle.' 
+At that he just threw back his head and roared.  And when
+Mrs. Brandeis came up he said something about the wit of
+these American women.  `Work is a great sharpener of wit--
+and wits,' Mrs. Brandeis said to him.  `Pearl, did Aloysius
+send Eddie out with that boiler, special?'  And she didn't
+pay any more attention to him, or make any more fuss over
+him, than she would to a traveler with a line of samples she
+wasn't interested in.  I guess that's why he had such a good
+time."
+
+Sadie was right.  That was the reason.  Fanny, coming into
+the store half an hour later, saw this man who had swayed
+thousands with his music, down on his hands and knees in the
+toy section at the rear of Brandeis' Bazaar.  He and Sadie
+and Aloysius were winding up toy bears, and clowns, and
+engines, and carriages, and sending them madly racing across
+the floor.  Sometimes their careening career was threatened
+with disaster in the form of a clump of brooms or a stack of
+galvanized pails.  But Schabelitz would scramble forward
+with a shout and rescue them just before the crash came, and
+set them deftly off again in the opposite direction.
+
+"This I must have for my boy in New York."  He held up a
+miniature hook and ladder.  "And this windmill that whirls
+so busily.  My Leo is seven, and his head is full of
+engines, and motors, and things that run on wheels.  He
+cares no more for music, the little savage, than the son of
+a bricklayer."
+
+"Who is that man?" Fanny whispered, staring at him.
+
+"Levine Schabelitz."
+
+"Schabelitz!  Not the--"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"But he's playing on the floor like--like a little boy!  And
+laughing!  Why, Mother, he's just like anybody else, only
+nicer."
+
+If Fanny had been more than fourteen her mother might have
+told her that all really great people are like that, finding
+joy in simple things.  I think that is the secret of their
+genius--the child in them that keeps their viewpoint fresh,
+and that makes us children again when we listen to them.  It
+is the Schabelitzes of this world who can shout over a toy
+engine that would bore a Bauer to death.
+
+Fanny stood looking at him thoughtfully.  She knew all about
+him.  Theodore's talk of the past week had accomplished
+that.  Fanny knew that here was a man who did one thing
+better than any one else in the world.  She thrilled to that
+thought.  She adored the quality in people that caused them
+to excel.  Schabelitz had got hold of a jack-in-the-box, and
+each time the absurd head popped out, with its grin and its
+squawk, he laughed like a boy.  Fanny, standing behind the
+wrapping counter, and leaning on it with her elbows the
+better to see this great man, smiled too, as her flexible
+spirit and her mobile mind caught his mood.  She did not
+know she was smiling.  Neither did she know why she suddenly
+frowned in the intensity of her concentration, reached up
+for one of the pencils on the desk next the wrapping
+counter, and bent over the topmost sheet of yellow wrapping
+paper that lay spread out before her.  Her tongue-tip curled
+excitedly at one corner of her mouth.  Her head was cocked
+to one side.
+
+She was rapidly sketching a crude and startling likeness of
+Levine Schabelitz as he stood there with the ridiculous toy
+in his hand.  It was a trick she often amused herself with
+at school.  She had drawn her school-teacher one day as she
+had looked when gazing up into the eyes of the visiting
+superintendent, who was a married man.  Quite innocently and
+unconsciously she had caught the adoring look in the eyes of
+Miss McCook, the teacher, and that lady, happening upon the
+sketch later, had dealt with Fanny in a manner seemingly
+unwarranted.  In the same way it was not only the exterior
+likeness of the man which she was catching now--the
+pompadour that stood stiffly perpendicular like a brush; the
+square, yellow peasant teeth; the strong, slender hands and
+wrists; the stocky figure; the high cheek bones; the square-
+toed, foreign-looking shoes and the trousers too wide at the
+instep to have been cut by an American tailor.  She caught
+and transmitted to paper, in some uncanny way, the
+simplicity of the man who was grinning at the jack-in-the-
+box that smirked back at him.  Behind the veneer of poise
+and polish born of success and adulation she had caught a
+glimpse of the Russian peasant boy delighted with the crude
+toy in his hand.  And she put it down eagerly, wetting her
+pencil between her lips, shading here, erasing there.
+
+Mrs. Brandeis, bustling up to the desk for a customer's
+change, and with a fancy dish to be wrapped, in her hand,
+glanced over Fanny's shoulder.  She leaned closer.  "Why,
+Fanny, you witch!"
+
+Fanny gave a little crow of delight and tossed her head in a
+way that switched her short curls back from where they had
+fallen over her shoulders.  "It's like him, isn't it?"
+
+"It looks more like him than he does himself."  With which
+Molly Brandeis unconsciously defined the art of cartooning.
+
+Fanny looked down at it, a smile curving her lips.  Mrs.
+Brandeis, dish in hand, counted her change expertly from the
+till below the desk, and reached for the sheet of wrapping
+paper just beneath that on which Fanny had made her drawing. 
+At that moment Schabelitz, glancing up, saw her, and came
+forward, smiling, the jack-in-the-box still in his hand.
+
+"Dear lady, I hope I have not entirely disorganized your
+shop.  I have had a most glorious time.  Would you believe
+it, this jack-in-the-box looks exactly--but exactly--
+like my manager, Weber, when the box-office receipts are
+good.  He grins just--"
+
+And then his eye fell on the drawing that Fanny was trying
+to cover with one brown paw.  "Hello!  What's this?"  Then
+he looked at Fanny.  Then he grasped her wrist in his
+fingers of steel and looked at the sketch that grinned back
+at him impishly.  "Well, I'm damned!" exploded Schabelitz in
+amusement, and surprise, and appreciation.  And did not
+apologize.  "And who is this young lady with the sense of
+humor?"
+
+"This is my little girl, Fanny."
+
+He looked down at the rough sketch again, with its clean-cut
+satire, and up again at the little girl in the school coat
+and the faded red tam o' shanter, who was looking at him
+shyly, and defiantly, and provokingly, all at once.
+
+"Your little girl Fanny, h'm?  The one who is to give up
+everything that the boy Theodore may become a great
+violinist."  He bent again over the crude, effective
+cartoon, then put a forefinger gently under the child's chin
+and tipped her glowing face up to the light.  "I am not so
+sure now that it will work.  As for its being fair!  Why,
+no!  No!"
+
+Fanny waited for her mother that evening, and they walked
+home together.  Their step and swing were very much alike,
+now that Fanny's legs were growing longer.  She was at the
+backfisch age.
+
+"What did he mean, Mother, when he said that about Theodore
+being a great violinist, and its not being fair?  What isn't
+fair?  And how did he happen to be in the store, anyway?  He
+bought a heap of toys, didn't he?  I suppose he's awfully
+rich."
+
+"To-night, when Theodore's at the concert, I'll tell you
+what he meant, and all about it."
+
+"I'd love to hear him play, wouldn't you?  I'd just love
+to."
+
+Over Molly Brandeis's face there came a curious look. 
+"You could hear him, Fanny, in Theodore's place.  Theodore
+would have to stay home if I told him to."
+
+Fanny's eyes and mouth grew round with horror.  "Theodore
+stay home!  Why Mrs.--Molly--Brandeis!"  Then she broke into
+a little relieved laugh.  "But you're just fooling, of
+course."
+
+"No, I'm not.  If you really want to go I'll tell Theodore
+to give up his ticket to his sister."
+
+"Well, my goodness!  I guess I'm not a pig.  I wouldn't have
+Theodore stay home, not for a million dollars."
+
+"I knew you wouldn't," said Molly Brandeis as they swung
+down Norris Street.  And she told Fanny briefly of what
+Schabelitz had said about Theodore.
+
+It was typical of Theodore that he ate his usual supper that
+night.  He may have got his excitement vicariously from
+Fanny.  She was thrilled enough for two.  Her food lay
+almost untouched on her plate.  She chattered incessantly. 
+When Theodore began to eat his second baked apple with
+cream, her outraged feelings voiced their protest.
+
+"But, Theodore, I don't see how you can!"
+
+"Can what?"
+
+"Eat like that.  When you're going to hear him play.  And
+after what he said, and everything."
+
+"Well, is that any reason why I should starve to death?"
+
+"But I don't see how you can," repeated Fanny helplessly,
+and looked at her mother.  Mrs. Brandeis reached for the
+cream pitcher and poured a little more cream over Theodore's
+baked apple.  Even as she did it her eyes met Fanny's, and
+in them was a certain sly amusement, a little gleam of fun,
+a look that said, "Neither do I."  Fanny sat back,
+satisfied.  Here, at least, was some one who understood.
+
+At half past seven Theodore, looking very brushed and
+sleek, went off to meet Emil Bauer.  Mrs. Brandeis had
+looked him over, and had said, "Your nails!" and sent him
+back to the bathroom, and she had resisted the desire to
+kiss him because Theodore disliked demonstration.  "He hated
+to be pawed over," was the way he put it.  After he had
+gone, Mrs. Brandeis went into the dining-room where Fanny
+was sitting.  Mattie had cleared the table, and Fanny was
+busy over a book and a tablet, by the light of the lamp that
+they always used for studying.  It was one of the rare
+occasions when she had brought home a school lesson.  It was
+arithmetic, and Fanny loathed arithmetic.  She had no head
+for mathematics.  The set of problems were eighth-grade
+horrors, in which A is digging a well 20 feet deep and 9
+feet wide; or in which A and B are papering two rooms, or
+building two fences, or plastering a wall.  If A does his
+room in 9 1/2 days, the room being 12 feet high, 20 feet
+long, and 15 1/2 feet wide, how long will it take B to do a
+room 14 feet high, 11 3/4 feet, etc.
+
+Fanny hated the indefatigable A and B with a bitter personal
+hatred.  And as for that occasional person named C, who
+complicated matters still more--!
+
+Sometimes Mrs. Brandeis helped to disentangle Fanny from the
+mazes of her wall paper problems, or dragged her up from the
+bottom of the well when it seemed that she was down there
+for eternity unless a friendly hand rescued her.  As a rule
+she insisted that Fanny crack her own mathematical nuts. 
+She said it was good mental training, not to speak of the
+moral side of it.  But to-night she bent her quick mind upon
+the problems that were puzzling her little daughter, and
+cleared them up in no time.
+
+When Fanny had folded her arithmetic papers neatly inside
+her book and leaned back with a relieved sigh Molly Brandeis
+bent forward in the lamplight and began to talk very
+soberly.  Fanny, red-cheeked and bright-eyed from her
+recent mental struggles, listened interestedly, then
+intently, then absorbedly.  She attempted to interrupt,
+sometimes, with an occasional, "But, Mother, how--" but Mrs.
+Brandeis shook her head and went on.  She told Fanny a few
+things about her early married life--things that made Fanny
+look at her with new eyes.  She had always thought of her
+mother as her mother, in the way a fourteen-year-old girl
+does.  It never occurred to her that this mother person, who
+was so capable, so confident, so worldly-wise, had once been
+a very young bride, with her life before her, and her hopes
+stepping high, and her love keeping time with her hopes. 
+Fanny heard, fascinated, the story of this girl who had
+married against the advice of her family and her friends.
+
+Molly Brandeis talked curtly and briefly, and her very
+brevity and lack of embroidering details made the story
+stand out with stark realism.  It was such a story of
+courage, and pride, and indomitable will, and sheer pluck as
+can only be found among the seemingly commonplace.
+
+"And so," she finished, "I used to wonder, sometimes,
+whether it was worth while to keep on, and what it was all
+for.  And now I know.  Theodore is going to make up for
+everything.  Only we'll have to help him, first.  It's going
+to be hard on you, Fanchen.  I'm talking to you as if you
+were eighteen, instead of fourteen.  But I want you to
+understand.  That isn't fair to you either--my expecting you
+to understand.  Only I don't want you to hate me too much
+when you're a woman, and I'm gone, and you'll remember--"
+
+"Why, Mother, what in the world are you talking about?  Hate
+you!"
+
+"For what I took from you to give to him, Fanny.  You don't
+understand now.  Things must be made easy for Theodore.  It
+will mean that you and I will have to scrimp and save.  Not
+now and then, but all the time.  It will mean that we
+can't go to the theater, even occasionally, or to lectures,
+or concerts.  It will mean that your clothes won't be as
+pretty or as new as the other girls' clothes.  You'll sit on
+the front porch evenings, and watch them go by, and you'll
+want to go too."
+
+"As if I cared."
+
+"But you will care.  I know.  I know.  It's easy enough to
+talk about sacrifice in a burst of feeling; but it's the
+everyday, shriveling grind that's hard.  You'll want
+clothes, and books, and beaux, and education, and you ought
+to have them.  They're your right.  You ought to have them!" 
+Suddenly Molly Brandeis' arms were folded on the table, and
+her head came down on her arms and she was crying, quietly,
+horribly, as a man cries.  Fanny stared at her a moment in
+unbelief.  She had not seen her mother cry since the day of
+Ferdinand Brandeis' death.  She scrambled out of her chair
+and thrust her head down next her mother's, so that her hot,
+smooth cheek touched the wet, cold one.  "Mother, don't! 
+Don't Molly dearie.  I can't bear it.  I'm going to cry too. 
+Do you think I care for old dresses and things?  I should
+say not.  It's going to be fun going without things.  It'll
+be like having a secret or something.  Now stop, and let's
+talk about it."
+
+Molly Brandeis wiped her eyes, and sat up, and smiled.  It
+was a watery and wavering smile, but it showed that she was
+mistress of herself again.
+
+"No," she said, "we just won't talk about it any more.  I'm
+tired, that's what's the matter with me, and I haven't sense
+enough to know it.  I'll tell you what.  I'm going to put on
+my kimono, and you'll make some fudge.  Will you?  We'll
+have a party, all by ourselves, and if Mattie scolds about
+the milk to-morrow you just tell her I said you could.  And
+I think there are some walnut meats in the third cocoa can
+on the shelf in the pantry.  Use 'em all."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SIX
+
+Theodore came home at twelve o'clock that night.  He had
+gone to Bauer's studio party after all.  It was the first
+time he had deliberately disobeyed his mother in a really
+big thing.  Mrs. Brandeis and Fanny had nibbled fudge all
+evening (it had turned out deliciously velvety) and had gone
+to bed at their usual time.  At half past ten Mrs. Brandeis
+had wakened with the instinctive feeling that Theodore was
+not in the house.  She lay there, wide awake, staring into
+the darkness until eleven.  Then she got up and went into
+his room, though she knew he was not there.  She was not
+worried as to his whereabouts or his well-being.  That same
+instinctive feeling told her where he was.  She was very
+angry, and a little terrified at the significance of his
+act.  She went back to bed again, and she felt the blood
+pounding in her head.  Molly Brandeis had a temper, and it
+was surging now, and beating against the barriers of her
+self-control.
+
+She told herself, as she lay there, that she must deal with
+him coolly and firmly, though she wanted to spank him.  The
+time for spankings was past.  Some one was coming down the
+street with a quick, light step.  She sat up in bed,
+listening.  The steps passed the house, went on.  A half
+hour passed.  Some one turned the corner, whistling
+blithely.  But, no, he would not be whistling, she told
+herself.  He would sneak in, quietly.  It was a little after
+twelve when she heard the front door open (Winnebago rarely
+locked its doors).  She was surprised to feel her heart
+beating rapidly.  He was trying to be quiet, and was making
+a great deal of noise about it.  His shoes and the squeaky
+fifth stair alone would have convicted him.  The imp
+of perversity in Molly Brandeis made her smile, angry as she
+was, at the thought of how furious he must be at that stair.
+
+"Theodore!" she called quietly, just as he was tip-toeing
+past her room.
+
+"Yeh."
+
+"Come in here.  And turn on the light."
+
+He switched on the light and stood there in the doorway. 
+Molly Brandeis, sitting up in bed in the chilly room, with
+her covers about her, was conscious of a little sick
+feeling, not at what he had done, but that a son of hers
+should ever wear the sullen, defiant, hang-dog look that
+disfigured Theodore's face now.
+
+"Bauer's?"
+
+A pause.  "Yes."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I just stopped in there for a minute after the concert.  I
+didn't mean to stay.  And then Bauer introduced me around to
+everybody.  And then they asked me to play, and--"
+
+"And you played badly."
+
+"Well, I didn't have my own violin."
+
+"No football game Saturday.  And no pocket money this week. 
+Go to bed."
+
+He went, breathing hard, and muttering a little under his
+breath.  At breakfast next morning Fanny plied him with
+questions and was furious at his cool uncommunicativeness.
+
+"Was it wonderful, Theodore?  Did he play--oh--like an
+angel?"
+
+"Played all right.  Except the `Swan' thing.  Maybe he
+thought it was too easy, or something, but I thought he
+murdered it.  Pass the toast, unless you want it all."
+
+
+It was not until the following autumn that Theodore went
+to New York.  The thing that had seemed so impossible was
+arranged.  He was to live in Brooklyn with a distant cousin
+of Ferdinand Brandeis, on a business basis, and he was to
+come into New York three times a week for his lessons.  Mrs.
+Brandeis took him as far as Chicago, treated him to an
+extravagant dinner, put him on the train and with difficulty
+stifled the impulse to tell all the other passengers in the
+car to look after her Theodore.  He looked incredibly grown
+up and at ease in his new suit and the hat that they had
+wisely bought in Chicago.  She did not cry at all (in the
+train), and she kissed him only twice, and no man can ask
+more than that of any mother.
+
+Molly Brandeis went back to Winnebago and the store with her
+shoulders a little more consciously squared, her jaw a
+little more firmly set.  There was something almost terrible
+about her concentrativeness.  Together she and Fanny began a
+life of self-denial of which only a woman could be capable. 
+They saved in ways that only a woman's mind could devise;
+petty ways, that included cream and ice, and clothes, and
+candy.  It was rather fun at first.  When that wore off it
+had become a habit.  Mrs. Brandeis made two resolutions
+regarding Fanny.  One was that she should have at least a
+high school education, and graduate.  The other that she
+should help in the business of the store as little as
+possible.  To the first Fanny acceded gladly.  To the second
+she objected.
+
+"But why?  If you can work, why can't I?  I could help you a
+lot on Saturdays and at Christmas time, and after school."
+
+"I don't want you to," Mrs. Brandeis had replied, almost
+fiercely.  "I'm giving my life to it.  That's enough.  I
+don't want you to know about buying and selling.  I don't
+want you to know a bill of lading from a sales slip when you
+see it.  I don't want you to know whether f. o. b. is a
+wireless signal or a branch of the Masons."  At which
+Fanny grinned.  No one appreciated her mother's humor more
+than she.
+
+"But I do know already.  The other day when that fat man was
+selling you those go-carts I heard him say.  `F. o. b.
+Buffalo,' and I asked Aloysius what it meant and he told
+me."
+
+It was inevitable that Fanny Brandeis should come to know
+these things, for the little household revolved about the
+store on Elm Street.  By the time she was eighteen and had
+graduated from the Winnebago high school, she knew so many
+things that the average girl of eighteen did not know, and
+was ignorant of so many things that the average girl of
+eighteen did know, that Winnebago was almost justified in
+thinking her queer.  She had had a joyous time at school, in
+spite of algebra and geometry and physics.  She took the
+part of the heroine in the senior class play given at the
+Winnebago opera house, and at the last rehearsal electrified
+those present by announcing that if Albert Finkbein (who
+played the dashing Southern hero) didn't kiss her properly
+when the curtain went down on the first act, just as he was
+going into battle, she'd rather he didn't kiss her at all.
+
+"He just makes it ridiculous," she protested.  "He sort of
+gives a peck two inches from my nose, and then giggles. 
+Everybody will laugh, and it'll spoil everything."
+
+With the rather startled elocution teacher backing her she
+rehearsed the bashful Albert in that kiss until she had
+achieved the effect of realism that she thought the scene
+demanded.  But when, on the school sleighing parties and hay
+rides the boy next her slipped a wooden and uncertain arm
+about her waist while they all were singing "Jingle Bells,
+Jingle Bells," and "Good Night Ladies," and "Merrily We Roll
+Along," she sat up stiffly and unyieldingly until the arm,
+discouraged, withdrew to its normal position.  Which two
+instances are quoted as being of a piece with what
+Winnebago termed her queerness.
+
+Not that Fanny Brandeis went beauless through school.  On
+the contrary, she always had some one to carry her books,
+and to take her to the school parties and home from the
+Friday night debating society meetings.  Her first love
+affair turned out disastrously.  She was twelve, and she
+chose as the object of her affections a bullet-headed boy
+named Simpson.  One morning, as the last bell rang and they
+were taking their seats, Fanny passed his desk and gave his
+coarse and stubbly hair a tweak.  It was really a love
+tweak, and intended to be playful, but she probably put more
+fervor into it than she knew.  It brought the tears of pain
+to his eyes, and he turned and called her the name at which
+she shrank back, horrified.  Her shock and unbelief must
+have been stamped on her face, for the boy, still smarting,
+had snarled, "Ya-as, I mean it,
+
+It was strange how she remembered that incident years after
+she had forgotten important happenings in her life. 
+Clarence Heyl, whose very existence you will have failed to
+remember, used to hover about her uncertainly, always
+looking as if he would like to walk home with her, but never
+summoning the courage to do it.  They were graduated from
+the grammar school together, and Clarence solemnly read a
+graduation essay entitled "Where is the Horse?"  Automobiles
+were just beginning to flash plentifully up and down Elm
+Street.  Clarence had always been what Winnebago termed
+sickly, in spite of his mother's noodle soup, and coddling. 
+He was sent West, to Colorado, or to a ranch in Wyoming,
+Fanny was not quite sure which, perhaps because she was not
+interested.  He had come over one afternoon to bid her good-
+by, and had dangled about the front porch until she went
+into the house and shut the door.
+
+When she was sixteen there was a blond German boy whose
+taciturnity attracted her volubility and vivacity.  She
+mistook his stolidness for depth, and it was a long time
+before she realized that his silence was not due to the
+weight of his thoughts but to the fact that he had nothing
+to say.  In her last year at high school she found herself
+singled out for the attentions of Harmon Kent, who was the
+Beau Nash of the Winnebago high school.  His clothes were
+made by Schwartze, the tailor, when all the other boys of
+his age got theirs at the spring and fall sales of the
+Golden Eagle Clothing Store.  It was always nip and tuck
+between his semester standings and his track team and
+football possibilities.  The faculty refused to allow
+flunkers to take part in athletics.
+
+He was one of those boys who have definite charm, and
+manner, and poise at seventeen, and who crib their exams off
+their cuffs.  He was always at the head of any social plans
+in the school, and at the dances he rushed about wearing in
+his coat lapel a ribbon marked Floor Committee.  The
+teachers all knew he was a bluff, but his engaging manner
+carried him through.  When he went away to the state
+university he made Fanny solemnly promise to write; to come
+down to Madison for the football games; to be sure to
+remember about the Junior prom.  He wrote once--a badly
+spelled scrawl--and she answered.  But he was the sort of
+person who must be present to be felt.  He could not project
+his personality.  When he came home for the Christmas
+holidays Fanny was helping in the store.  He dropped in one
+afternoon when she was selling whisky glasses to Mike Hearn
+of the Farmers' Rest Hotel.
+
+They did not write at all during the following semester, and
+when he came back for the long summer vacation they met on
+the street one day and exchanged a few rather forced
+pleasantries.  It suddenly dawned on Fanny that he was
+patronizing her much as the scion of an aristocratic line
+banters the housemaid whom he meets on the stairs.  She bit
+an imaginary apron corner, and bobbed a curtsy right there
+on Elm Street, in front of the Courier office and walked
+off, leaving him staring.  It was shortly after this that
+she began a queer line of reading for a girl--lives of
+Disraeli, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Mozart--distinguished Jews
+who had found their religion a handicap.
+
+The year of her graduation she did a thing for which
+Winnebago felt itself justified in calling her different. 
+Each member of the graduating class was allowed to choose a
+theme for a thesis.  Fanny Brandeis called hers "A Piece of
+Paper."  On Winnebago's Fox River were located a number of
+the largest and most important paper mills in the country. 
+There were mills in which paper was made of wood fiber, and
+others in which paper was made of rags.  You could smell the
+sulphur as soon as you crossed the bridge that led to the
+Flats.  Sometimes, when the wind was right, the pungent odor
+of it spread all over the town.  Strangers sniffed it and
+made a wry face, but the natives liked it.
+
+The mills themselves were great ugly brick buildings, their
+windows festooned with dust webs.  Some of them boasted high
+detached tower-like structures where a secret acid process
+went on.  In the early days the mills had employed many
+workers, but newly invented machinery had come to take the
+place of hand labor.  The rag-rooms alone still employed
+hundreds of girls who picked, sorted, dusted over the great
+suction bins.  The rooms in which they worked were gray with
+dust.  They wore caps over their hair to protect it from the
+motes that you could see spinning and swirling in the watery
+sunlight that occasionally found its way through the gray-
+filmed window panes.  It never seemed to occur to them that
+the dust cap so carefully pulled down about their heads
+did not afford protection for their lungs.  They were pale
+girls, the rag-room girls, with a peculiarly gray-white
+pallor.
+
+Fanny Brandeis had once been through the Winnebago Paper
+Company's mill and she had watched, fascinated, while a pair
+of soiled and greasy old blue overalls were dusted and
+cleaned, and put through this acid vat, and that acid tub,
+growing whiter and more pulpy with each process until it was
+fed into a great crushing roller that pressed the moisture
+out of it, flattened it to the proper thinness and spewed it
+out at last, miraculously, in the form of rolls of crisp,
+white paper.
+On the first day of the Easter vacation Fanny Brandeis
+walked down to the office of the Winnebago Paper Company's
+mill and applied at the superintendent's office for a job. 
+She got it.  They were generally shorthanded in the rag-
+room.  When Mrs. Brandeis heard of it there followed one of
+the few stormy scenes between mother and daughter.
+
+"Why did you do it?" demanded Mrs. Brandeis.
+
+"I had to, to get it right."
+
+"Oh, don't be silly.  You could have visited the mill a
+dozen times."
+
+Fanny twisted the fingers of her left hand in the fingers of
+her right as was her way when she was terribly in earnest,
+and rather excited.  
+
+"But I don't want to write about the paper business as a
+process."
+
+"Well, then, what do you want?"
+
+"I want to write about the overalls on some railroad
+engineer, perhaps; or the blue calico wrapper that belonged,
+maybe, to a scrub woman.  And how they came to be spotted,
+or faded, or torn, and finally all worn out.  And how the
+rag man got them, and the mill, and how the girls sorted
+them.  And the room in which they do it.  And the bins.  And
+the machinery.  Oh, it's the most fascinating, and--and sort
+of relentless machinery.  And the acid burns on the
+hands of the men at the vats.  And their shoes.  And then
+the paper, so white.  And the way we tear it up, or crumple
+it, and throw it in the waste basket.  Just a piece of
+paper, don't you see what I mean?  Just a piece of paper,
+and yet all that--" she stopped and frowned a little, and
+grew inarticulate, and gave it up with a final, "Don't you
+see what I mean, Mother?  Don't you see what I mean?"
+
+Molly Brandeis looked at her daughter in a startled way,
+like one who, walking tranquilly along an accustomed path,
+finds himself confronting a new and hitherto unsuspected
+vista, formed by a peculiar arrangement of clouds, perhaps,
+or light, or foliage, or all three blended.  "I see what you
+mean," she said.  "But I wish you wouldn't do it.  I--I wish
+you didn't feel that you wanted to do it."
+
+"But how can I make it real if I don't?"
+
+"You can't," said Molly Brandeis.  "That's just it.  You
+can't, ever."
+
+Fanny got up before six every morning of that Easter
+vacation, and went to the mill, lunch box in hand.  She came
+home at night dead-tired.  She did not take the street car
+to and from the mill, as she might have, because she said
+the other girls in the rag-room walked, some of them from
+the very edge of town.  Mrs. Brandeis said that she was
+carrying things too far, but Fanny stuck it out for the two
+weeks, at the end of which period she spent an entire Sunday
+in a hair-washing, face-steaming, and manicuring bee.  She
+wrote her paper from notes she had taken, and turned it in
+at the office of the high school principal with the feeling
+that it was not at all what she had meant it to be.  A week
+later Professor Henning called her into his office.  The
+essay lay on his desk.
+
+"I've read your thesis," he began, and stopped, and cleared
+his throat.  He was not an eloquent man.  "Where did you
+get your information, Miss Brandeis?"
+
+"I got it at the mill."
+
+"From one of the employees?"
+
+"Oh, no.  I worked there, in the rag-room."
+
+Professor Henning gave a little startled exclamation that he
+turned hastily into a cough.  "I thought that perhaps the
+editor of the Courier might like to see it--it being
+local.  And interesting."
+
+He brought it down to the office of the little paper
+himself, and promised to call for it again in an hour or
+two, when Lem Davis should have read it.  Lem Davis did read
+it, and snorted, and scuffled with his feet in the drift of
+papers under his desk, which was a way he had when enraged.
+
+"Read it!" he echoed, at Professor Henning's question. 
+"Read it!  Yes, I read it.  And let me tell you it's
+socialism of the rankest kind, that's what!  It's anarchism,
+that's what!  Who's this girl?  Mrs. Brandeis's daughter--of
+the Bazaar?  Let me tell you I'd go over there and tell her
+what I think of the way she's bringing up that girl--if she
+wasn't an advertiser.  `A Piece of Paper'!  Hell!"  And to
+show his contempt for what he had read he wadded together a
+great mass of exchanges that littered his desk and hurled
+them, a crumpled heap, to the floor, and then spat tobacco
+juice upon them.
+
+"I'm sorry," said Professor Henning, and rose; but at the
+door he turned and said something highly unprofessorial. 
+"It's a darn fine piece of writing."  And slammed the door. 
+At supper that night he told Mrs. Henning about it.  Mrs.
+Henning was a practical woman, as the wife of a small-town
+high school principal must needs be.  "But don't you know,"
+she said, "that Roscoe Moore, who is president of the
+Outagamie Pulp Mill and the Winnebago Paper Company,
+practically owns the Courier?"
+
+Professor Henning passed a hand over his hair, ruefully,
+like a school boy.  "No, Martha, I didn't know.  If I knew
+those things, dear, I suppose we wouldn't be eating sausage
+for supper to-night."  There was a little silence between
+them.  Then he looked up.  "Some day I'm going to brag about
+having been that Brandeis girl's teacher."
+
+Fanny was in the store a great deal now.  After she finished
+high school they sent Mattie away and Fanny took over the
+housekeeping duties, but it was not her milieu.  Not that
+she didn't do it well.  She put a perfect fury of energy and
+care into the preparation of a pot roast.  After she had
+iced a cake she enhanced it with cunning arabesques of
+jelly.  The house shone as it never had, even under Mattie's
+honest regime.  But it was like hitching a high-power engine
+to a butter churn.  There were periods of maddening
+restlessness.  At such times she would set about cleaning
+the cellar, perhaps.  It was a three-roomed cellar, brick-
+floored, cool, and having about it that indefinable cellar
+smell which is of mold, and coal, and potatoes, and onions,
+and kindling wood, and dill pickles and ashes.
+
+Other girls of Fanny's age, at such times, cleaned out their
+bureau drawers and read forbidden novels.  Fanny armed
+herself with the third best broom, the dust-pan, and an old
+bushel basket.  She swept up chips, scraped up ashes,
+scoured the preserve shelves, washed the windows, cleaned
+the vegetable bins, and got gritty, and scarlet-cheeked and
+streaked with soot.  It was a wonderful safety valve, that
+cellar.  A pity it was that the house had no attic.
+
+Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was
+nothing to do but read.  And dream.  And watch the town go
+by to supper.  I think that is why our great men and women
+so often have sprung from small towns, or villages.  They
+have had time to dream in their adolescence.  No cars to
+catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming,
+empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city child. 
+Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously
+absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings
+for reading, long afternoons in the fields or woods.  With
+the cloth laid, and the bread cut and covered with a napkin,
+and the sauce in the glass bowl, and the cookies on a blue
+plate, and the potatoes doing very, very slowly, and the
+kettle steaming with a Peerybingle cheerfulness, Fanny would
+stroll out to the front porch again to watch for the
+familiar figure to appear around the corner of Norris
+Street.  She would wear her blue-and-white checked gingham
+apron deftly twisted over one hip, and tucked in, in
+deference to the passers-by.  And the town would go by--Hen
+Cody's drays, rattling and thundering; the high school boys
+thudding down the road, dog-tired and sweaty in their
+football suits, or their track pants and jersies, on their
+way from the athletic field to the school shower baths; Mrs.
+Mosher flying home, her skirts billowing behind her, after a
+protracted afternoon at whist; little Ernie Trost with a
+napkin-covered peach basket carefully balanced in his hand,
+waiting for the six-fifteen interurban to round the corner
+near the switch, so that he could hand up his father's
+supper; Rudie Mass, the butcher, with a moist little packet
+of meat in his hand, and lurching ever so slightly, and
+looking about defiantly.  Oh, Fanny probably never realized
+how much she saw and absorbed, sitting there on Brandeis'
+front porch, watching Winnebago go by to supper.
+
+At Christmas time she helped in the store, afternoons and
+evenings.  Then, one Christmas, Mrs. Brandeis was ill for
+three weeks with grippe.  They had to have a helper in the
+house.  When Mrs. Brandeis was able to come back to the
+store Sadie left to marry, not one of her traveling-men
+victims, but a steady person, in the paper-hanging way,
+whose suit had long been considered hopeless.  After that
+Fanny took her place.  She developed a surprising knack
+at selling.  Yet it was not so surprising, perhaps, when one
+considered her teacher.  She learned as only a woman can
+learn who is brought into daily contact with the outside
+world.  It was not only contact: it was the relation of
+buyer and seller.  She learned to judge people because she
+had to.  How else could one gauge their tastes,
+temperaments, and pocketbooks?  They passed in and out of
+Brandeis' Bazaar, day after day, in an endless and varied
+procession--traveling men, school children, housewives,
+farmers, worried hostesses, newly married couples bent on
+house furnishing, business men.
+
+She learned that it was the girls from the paper mills who
+bought the expensive plates--the ones with the red roses and
+green leaves hand-painted in great smears and costing two
+dollars and a half, while the golf club crowd selected for a
+gift or prize one of the little white plates with the faded-
+looking blue sprig pattern, costing thirty-nine cents.  One
+day, after she had spent endless time and patience over the
+sale of a nondescript little plate to one of Winnebago's
+socially elect, she stared wrathfully after the retreating
+back of the trying customer.
+
+"Did you see that?  I spent an hour with her.  One hour!  I
+showed her everything from the imported Limoges bowls to the
+Sevres cups and saucers, and all she bought was that
+miserable little bonbon dish with the cornflower pattern. 
+Cat!"
+
+Mrs. Brandeis spoke from the depths of her wisdom.
+
+"Fanny, I didn't miss much that went on during that hour,
+and I was dying to come over and take her away from you, 
+but I didn't because I knew you needed the lesson, and I 
+knew that that McNulty woman never spends more than 
+twenty-five cents, anyway.  But I want to tell you now 
+that it isn't only a matter of plates.  It's a matter of 
+understanding  folks.  When you've learned whom to show 
+the expensive  hand-painted things to, and when to 
+suggest quietly the little, vague things, with what you 
+call the faded  look, why, you've learned just about all 
+there is to know of human nature.  Don't expect it, at 
+your age."
+
+Molly Brandeis had never lost her trick of chatting with
+customers, or listening to them, whenever she had a moment's
+time.  People used to drop in, and perch themselves on one
+of the stools near the big glowing base burner and talk to
+Mrs. Brandeis.  It was incredible, the secrets they revealed
+of business, and love and disgrace; of hopes and
+aspirations, and troubles, and happiness.  The farmer women
+used to fascinate Fanny by their very drabness.  Mrs.
+Brandeis had a long and loyal following of these women.  It
+was before the day when every farmhouse boasted an
+automobile, a telephone, and a phonograph.
+
+A worn and dreary lot, these farmer women, living a skimmed
+milk existence, putting their youth, and health, and looks
+into the soil.  They used often to sit back near the stove
+in winter, or in a cool corner near the front of the store
+in summer, and reveal, bit by bit, the sordid, tragic
+details of their starved existence.  Fanny was often shocked
+when they told their age--twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty,
+but old and withered from drudgery, and child-bearing, and
+coarse, unwholesome food.  Ignorant women, and terribly
+lonely, with the dumb, lack-luster eyes that bespeak
+monotony.  When they smiled they showed blue-white, glassily
+perfect false teeth that flashed incongruously in the ruin
+of their wrinkled, sallow, weather-beaten faces.  Mrs.
+Brandeis would question them gently.
+
+Children?  Ten.  Living?  Four.  Doctor?  Never had one in
+the house.  Why?  He didn't believe in them.  No proper
+kitchen utensils, none of the devices that lighten the
+deadeningly monotonous drudgery of housework.  Everything
+went to make his work easier--new harrows, plows, tractors,
+wind mills, reapers, barns, silos.  The story would come
+out, bit by bit, as the woman sat there, a worn, unlovely
+figure, her hands--toil-blackened, seamed, calloused,
+unlovelier than any woman's hands were ever meant to be--
+lying in unaccustomed idleness in her lap.
+
+Fanny learned, too, that the woman with the shawl, and with
+her money tied in a corner of her handkerchief, was more
+likely to buy the six-dollar doll, with the blue satin
+dress, and the real hair and eye-lashes, while the Winnebago
+East End society woman haggled over the forty-nine cent
+kind, which she dressed herself.
+
+I think their loyalty to Mrs. Brandeis might be explained by
+her honesty and her sympathy.  She was so square with them. 
+When Minnie Mahler, out Centerville way, got married, she
+knew there would be no redundancy of water sets, hanging
+lamps, or pickle dishes.
+
+"I thought like I'd get her a chamber set," Minnie's aunt
+would confide to Mrs. Brandeis.
+
+"Is this for Minnie Mahler, of Centerville?"
+
+"Yes; she gets married Sunday."
+
+"I sold a chamber set for that wedding yesterday.  And a set
+of dishes.  But I don't think she's got a parlor lamp.  At
+least I haven't sold one.  Why don't you get her that?  If
+she doesn't like it she can change it.  Now there's that
+blue one with the pink roses."
+
+And Minnie's aunt would end by buying the lamp.
+
+Fanny learned that the mill girls liked the bright-colored
+and expensive wares, and why; she learned that the woman
+with the "fascinator" (tragic misnomer!) over her head
+wanted the finest sled for her boy.  She learned to keep her
+temper.  She learned to suggest without seeming to suggest. 
+She learned to do surprisingly well all those things that
+her mother did so surprisingly well--surprisingly because
+both the women secretly hated the business of buying and
+selling.  Once, on the Fourth of July, when there was a
+stand outside the store laden with all sorts of fireworks,
+Fanny came down to find Aloysius and the boy Eddie absent on
+other work, and Mrs. Brandeis momentarily in charge.  The
+sight sickened her, then infuriated her.
+
+"Come in," she said, between her teeth.  "That isn't your
+work."
+
+"Somebody had to be there.  Pearl's at dinner.  And Aloysius
+and Eddie were--"
+
+"Then leave it alone.  We're not starving--yet.  I won't
+have you selling fireworks like that--on the street.  I
+won't have it!  I won't have it!"
+
+The store was paying, now.  Not magnificently, but well
+enough.  Most of the money went to Theodore, in Dresden.  He
+was progressing, though not so meteorically as Bauer and
+Schabelitz had predicted.  But that sort of thing took time,
+Mrs. Brandeis argued.  Fanny often found her mother looking
+at her these days with a questioning sadness in her eyes. 
+Once she suggested that Fanny join the class in drawing at
+the Winnebago university--a small fresh-water college. 
+Fanny did try it for a few months, but the work was not what
+she wanted; they did fruit pictures and vases, with a book,
+on a table; or a clump of very pink and very white flowers. 
+Fanny quit in disgust and boredom.  Besides, they were busy
+at the store, and needed her.
+
+There came often to Winnebago a woman whom Fanny Brandeis
+admired intensely.  She was a traveling saleswoman,
+successful, magnetic, and very much alive.  Her name was
+Mrs. Emma McChesney, and between her and Mrs. Brandeis there
+existed a warm friendship.  She always took dinner with Mrs.
+Brandeis and Fanny, and they made a special effort to give
+her all those delectable home-cooked dishes denied her in
+her endless round of hotels.
+
+"Noodle soup!" she used to say, almost lyrically.  
+
+"With real hand-made, egg noodles!  You don't know what it
+means.  You haven't been eating vermicelli soup all through
+Illinois and Wisconsin."
+
+"We've made a dessert, though, that--"
+
+"Molly Brandeis, don't you dare to tell me what you've got
+for dessert.  I couldn't stand it.  But, oh, suppose,
+SUPPOSE it's homemade strawberry shortcake!"
+
+Which it more than likely was.
+
+Fanny Brandeis used to think that she would dress exactly as
+Mrs. McChesney dressed, if she too were a successful
+business woman earning a man-size salary.  Mrs. McChesney
+was a blue serge sort of woman--and her blue serge never was
+shiny in the back.  Her collar, or jabot, or tie, or cuffs,
+or whatever relieving bit of white she wore, was always of
+the freshest and crispest.  Her hats were apt to be small
+and full of what is known as "line."  She usually would try
+to arrange her schedule so as to spend a Sunday in
+Winnebago, and the three alert, humor-loving women, grown
+wise and tolerant from much contact with human beings, would
+have a delightful day together.
+
+"Molly," Mrs. McChesney would say, when they were
+comfortably settled in the living-room, or on the front
+porch, "with your shrewdness, and experience, and brains,
+you ought to be one of those five or ten thousand a year
+buyers.  You know how to sell goods and handle people.  And
+you know values.  That's all there is to the whole game of
+business.  I don't advise you to go on the road.  Heaven
+knows I wouldn't advise my dearest enemy to do that, much
+less a friend.  But you could do bigger things, and get
+bigger results.  You know most of the big wholesalers, and
+retailers too.  Why don't you speak to them about a
+department position?  Or let me nose around a bit for you."
+
+Molly Brandeis shook her head, though her expressive eyes
+were eager and interested.  "Don't you think I've thought of
+that, Emma?  A thousand times?  But I'm--I'm afraid. 
+There's too much at stake.  Suppose I couldn't succeed? 
+There's Theodore.  His whole future is dependent on me for
+the next few years.  And there's Fanny here.  No, I guess
+I'm too old.  And I'm sure of the business here, small as it
+is."
+
+Emma McChesney glanced at the girl.  "I'm thinking that
+Fanny has the making of a pretty capable business woman
+herself."
+
+Fanny drew in her breath sharply, and her face sparkled into
+sudden life, as always when she was tremendously interested.
+
+"Do you know what I'd do if I were in Mother's place?  I'd
+take a great, big running jump for it and land!  I'd take a
+chance.  What is there for her in this town?  Nothing! 
+She's been giving things up all her life, and what has it
+brought her?"
+
+"It has brought me a comfortable living, and the love of my
+two children, and the respect of my townspeople."
+
+"Respect?  Why shouldn't they respect you?  You're the
+smartest woman in Winnebago, and the hardest working."
+
+Emma McChesney frowned a little, in thought.  "What do you
+two girls do for recreation?"
+
+"I'm afraid we have too little of that, Emma.  I know Fanny
+has.  I'm so dog-tired at the end of the day.  All I want is
+to take my hairpins out and go to bed."
+
+"And Fanny?"
+
+"Oh, I read.  I'm free to pick my book friends, at least."
+
+"Now, just what do you mean by that, child?  It sounds a
+little bitter."
+
+"I was thinking of what Chesterfield said in one of his
+Letters to His Son.  `Choose always to be in the society of
+those above you,' he wrote.  I guess he lived in Winnebago,
+Wisconsin.  I'm a working woman, and a Jew, and we
+haven't any money or social position.  And unless she's a
+Becky Sharp any small town girl with all those handicaps
+might as well choose a certain constellation of stars in the
+sky to wear as a breastpin, as try to choose the friends she
+really wants."
+
+From Molly Brandeis to Emma McChesney there flashed a look
+that said, "You see?"  And from Emma McChesney to Molly
+Brandeis another that said, "Yes; and it's your fault."
+
+"Look here, Fanny, don't you see any boys--men?"
+
+"No.  There aren't any.  Those who have any sense and
+initiative leave to go to Milwaukee, or Chicago, or New
+York.  Those that stay marry the banker's lovely daughter."
+
+Emma McChesney laughed at that, and Molly Brandeis too, and
+Fanny joined them a bit ruefully.  Then quite suddenly,
+there came into her face a melting, softening look that made
+it almost lovely.  She crossed swiftly over to where her
+mother sat, and put a hand on either cheek (grown thinner of
+late) and kissed the tip of her nose.  "We don't care--
+really.  Do we Mother?  We're poor wurkin' girruls.  But
+gosh!  Ain't we proud?  Mother, your mistake was in not
+doing as Ruth did."
+
+"Ruth?"
+
+"In the Bible.  Remember when What's-his-name, her husband,
+died?  Did she go back to her home town?  No, she didn't. 
+She'd lived there all her life, and she knew better.  She
+said to Naomi, her mother-in-law, `Whither thou goest I will
+go.'  And she went.  And when they got to Bethlehem, Ruth
+looked around, knowingly, until she saw Boaz, the catch of
+the town.  So she went to work in his fields, gleaning, and
+she gleaned away, trying to look just as girlish, and
+dreamy, and unconscious, but watching him out of the corner
+of her eye all the time.  Presently Boaz came along, looking
+over the crops, and he saw her.  `Who's the new damsel?'
+he asked.  `The peach?'"
+
+"Fanny Brandeis, aren't you ashamed?"
+
+"But, Mother, that's what it says in the Bible, actually. 
+`Whose damsel is this?'  They told him it was Ruth, the
+dashing widow.  After that it was all off with the Bethlehem
+girls.  Boaz paid no more attention to them than if they had
+never existed.  He married Ruth, and she led society.  Just
+a little careful scheming, that's all."
+
+"I should say you have been reading, Fanny Brandeis," said
+Emma McChesney.  She was smiling, but her eyes were serious. 
+"Now listen to me, child.  The very next time a traveling
+man in a brown suit and a red necktie asks you to take
+dinner with him at the Haley House--even one of those roast
+pork, queen-fritter-with-rum-sauce, Roman punch Sunday
+dinners--I want you to accept."
+
+"Even if he wears an Elks' pin, and a Masonic charm, and a
+diamond ring and a brown derby?"
+"Even if he shows you the letters from his girl in
+Manistee," said Mrs. McChesney solemnly.  "You've been
+seeing too much of Fanny Brandeis."
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVEN
+
+Theodore had been gone six years.  His letters, all too
+brief, were events in the lives of the two women.  They read
+and reread them.  Fanny unconsciously embellished them with
+fascinating details made up out of her own imagination.
+
+"They're really triumphs of stupidity and dullness," she
+said one day in disgust, after one of Theodore's long-
+awaited letters had proved particularly dry and sparse. 
+"Just think of it!  Dresden, Munich, Leipsic, Vienna,
+Berlin, Frankfurt!  And from his letters you would never
+know he had left Winnebago.  I don't believe he actually
+sees anything of these cities--their people, and the queer
+houses, and the streets.  I suppose a new city means nothing
+to him but another platform, another audience, another
+piano, all intended as a background for his violin.  He
+could travel all over the world and it wouldn't touch him
+once.  He's got his mental fingers crossed all the time."
+
+Theodore had begun to play in concert with some success, but
+he wrote that there was no real money in it yet.  He was not
+well enough known.  It took time.  He would have to get a
+name in Europe before he could attempt an American tour. 
+Just now every one was mad over Greinert.  He was drawing
+immense audiences.  He sent them a photograph at which they
+gasped, and then laughed, surprisedly.  He looked so awfully
+German, so different, somehow.
+
+"It's the way his hair is clipped, I suppose," said Fanny. 
+"High, like that, on the temples.  And look at his clothes! 
+That tie!  And his pants!  And that awful collar! 
+Why, his very features look German, don't they?  I suppose
+it's the effect of that haberdashery."
+
+A month after the photograph, came a letter announcing his
+marriage.  Fanny's quick eye, leaping ahead from line to
+line, took in the facts that her mind seemed unable to
+grasp.  Her name was Olga Stumpf.  (In the midst of her
+horror some imp in Fanny's brain said that her hands would
+be red, and thick, with a name like that.)  An orphan.  She
+sang.  One of the Vienna concert halls, but so different
+from the other girls.  And he was so happy.  And he hated to
+ask them for it, but if they could cable a hundred or so. 
+That would help.  And here was her picture.
+
+And there was her picture.  One of the so-called vivacious
+type of Viennese of the lower class, smiling a conscious
+smile, her hair elaborately waved and dressed, her figure
+high-busted, narrow-waisted; earrings, chains, bracelets. 
+You knew that she used a heavy scent.  She was older than
+Theodore.  Or perhaps it was the earrings.
+
+They cabled the hundred.
+
+After the first shock of it Molly Brandeis found excuses for
+him.  "He must have been awfully lonely, Fanny.  Often.  And
+perhaps it will steady him, and make him more ambitious. 
+He'll probably work all the harder now."
+
+"No, he won't.  But you will.  And I will.  I didn't mind
+working for Theodore, and scrimping, and never having any of
+the things I wanted, from blouses to music.  But I won't
+work and deny myself to keep a great, thick, cheap, German
+barmaid, or whatever she is in comfort.  I won't!"
+
+But she did.  And quite suddenly Molly Brandeis, of the
+straight, firm figure and the bright, alert eye, and the
+buoyant humor, seemed to lose some of those electric
+qualities.  It was an almost imperceptible letting down. 
+You have seen a fine race horse suddenly break and lose his
+stride in the midst of the field, and pull up and try to
+gain it again, and go bravely on, his stride and form still
+there, but his spirit broken?  That was Molly Brandeis.
+
+Fanny did much of the buying now.  She bought quickly and
+shrewdly, like her mother.  She even went to the Haley House
+to buy, when necessary, and Winnebagoans, passing the hotel,
+would see her slim, erect figure in one of the sample-rooms
+with its white-covered tables laden with china, or
+glassware, or Christmas goods, or whatever that particular
+salesman happened to carry.  They lifted their eye-brows at
+first, but, somehow, it was impossible to associate this
+girl with the blithe, shirt-sleeved, cigar-smoking traveling
+men who followed her about the sample-room, order book in
+hand.
+
+As time went on she introduced some new features into the
+business, and did away with various old ones.  The
+overflowing benches outside the store were curbed, and
+finally disappeared altogether.  Fanny took charge of the
+window displays, and often came back to the store at night
+to spend the evening at work with Aloysius.  They would tack
+a piece of muslin around the window to keep off the gaze of
+passers-by, and together evolve a window that more than made
+up for the absent show benches.
+
+This, I suppose, is no time to stop for a description of
+Fanny Brandeis.  And yet the impulse to do so is
+irresistible.  Personally, I like to know about the hair,
+and eyes, and mouth of the person whose life I am following. 
+How did she look when she said that?  What sort of
+expression did she wear when this happened?  Perhaps the
+thing that Fanny Brandeis said about herself one day, when
+she was having one of her talks with Emma McChesney, who was
+on her fall trip for the Featherbloom Petticoat Company,
+might help.
+
+"No ballroom would ever be hushed into admiring awe when I
+entered," she said.  "No waiter would ever drop his tray,
+dazzled, and no diners in a restaurant would stop to gaze at
+me, their forks poised halfway, their eyes blinded by my
+beauty.  I could tramp up and down between the tables for
+hours, and no one would know I was there.  I'm one of a
+million women who look their best in a tailor suit and a hat
+with a line.  Not that I ever had either.  But I have my
+points, only they're blunted just now."
+
+Still, that bit of description doesn't do, after all. 
+Because she had distinct charm, and some beauty.  She was
+not what is known as the Jewish type, in spite of her
+coloring.  The hair that used to curl, waved now.  In a day
+when coiffures were a bird's-nest of puffs and curls and
+pompadour, she wore her hair straight back from her forehead
+and wound in a coil at the neck.  Her face in repose was apt
+to be rather lifeless, and almost heavy.  But when she
+talked, it flashed into sudden life, and you found yourself
+watching her mouth, fascinated.  It was the key to her whole
+character, that mouth.  Mobile, humorous, sensitive, the
+sensuousness of the lower lip corrected by the firmness of
+the upper.  She had large, square teeth, very regular, and
+of the yellow-white tone that bespeaks health.  She used to
+make many of her own clothes, and she always trimmed her
+hats.  Mrs. Brandeis used to bring home material and styles
+from her Chicago buying trips, and Fanny's quick mind
+adapted them.  She managed, somehow, to look miraculously
+well dressed.
+
+The Christmas following Theodore's marriage was the most
+successful one in the history of Brandeis' Bazaar.  And it
+bred in Fanny Brandeis a lifelong hatred of the holiday
+season.  In years after she always tried to get away from
+the city at Christmas time.  The two women did the work of
+four men.  They had a big stock on hand.  Mrs. Brandeis was
+everywhere at once.  She got an enormous amount of work
+out of her clerks, and they did not resent it.  It is a gift
+that all born leaders have.  She herself never sat down, and
+the clerks unconsciously followed her example.  She never
+complained of weariness, she never lost her temper, she
+never lost patience with a customer, even the tight-fisted
+farmer type who doled their money out with that reluctance
+found only in those who have wrung it from the soil.
+
+In the midst of the rush she managed, somehow, never to fail
+to grasp the humor of a situation.  A farmer woman came in
+for a doll's head, which she chose with incredible
+deliberation and pains.  As it was being wrapped she
+explained that it was for her little girl, Minnie.  She had
+promised the head this year.  Next Christmas they would buy
+a body for it.  Molly Brandeis's quick sympathy went out to
+the little girl who was to lavish her mother-love on a
+doll's head for a whole year.  She saw the head, in ghastly
+decapitation, staring stiffly out from the cushions of the
+chill and funereal parlor sofa, and the small Minnie peering
+in to feast her eyes upon its blond and waxen beauty.
+
+"Here," she had said, "take this, and sew it on the head, so
+Minnie'll have something she can hold, at least."  And she
+had wrapped a pink cambric, sawdust-stuffed body in with the
+head.
+
+It was a snowy and picturesque Christmas, and intensely
+cold, with the hard, dry, cutting cold of Wisconsin.  Near
+the door the little store was freezing.  Every time the door
+opened it let in a blast.  Near the big glowing stove it was
+very hot.
+
+The aisles were packed so that sometimes it was almost
+impossible to wedge one's way through.  The china plates,
+stacked high, fairly melted away, as did the dolls piled on
+the counters.  Mrs. Brandeis imported her china and dolls,
+and no store in Winnebago, not even Gerretson's big
+department store, could touch them for value.
+
+The two women scarcely stopped to eat in the last ten days
+of the holiday rush.  Often Annie, the girl who had taken
+Mattie's place in the household, would bring down their
+supper, hot and hot, and they would eat it quickly up in the
+little gallery where they kept the sleds, and doll buggies,
+and drums.  At night (the store was open until ten or eleven
+at Christmas time) they would trudge home through the snow,
+so numb with weariness that they hardly minded the cold. 
+The icy wind cut their foreheads like a knife, and made the
+temples ache.  The snow, hard and resilient, squeaked
+beneath their heels.  They would open the front door and
+stagger in, blinking.  The house seemed so weirdly quiet and
+peaceful after the rush and clamor of the store.
+
+"Don't you want a sandwich, Mother, with a glass of beer?"
+
+"I'm too tired to eat it, Fanny.  I just want to get to
+bed."
+
+Fanny grew to hate the stock phrases that met her with each
+customer.  "I want something for a little boy about ten. 
+He's really got everything."  Or, "I'm looking for a present
+for a lady friend.  Do you think a plate would be nice?" 
+She began to loathe them--these satiated little boys, these
+unknown friends, for whom she must rack her brains.
+
+They cleared a snug little fortune that Christmas.  On
+Christmas Eve they smiled wanly at each other, like two
+comrades who have fought and bled together, and won.  When
+they left the store it was nearly midnight.  Belated
+shoppers, bundle-laden, carrying holly wreaths, with strange
+handles, and painted heads, and sticks protruding from lumpy
+brown paper burdens, were hurrying home.
+
+They stumbled home, too spent to talk.  Fanny, groping
+for the keyhole, stubbed her toe against a wooden box
+between the storm door and the inner door.  It had evidently
+been left there by the expressman or a delivery boy.  It was
+a very heavy box.
+
+"A Christmas present!" Fanny exclaimed.  "Do you think it
+is?  But it must be."  She looked at the address, "Miss
+Fanny Brandeis."  She went to the kitchen for a crowbar, and
+came back, still in her hat and coat.  She pried open the
+box expertly, tore away the wrappings, and disclosed a
+gleaming leather-bound set of Balzac, and beneath that,
+incongruously enough, Mark Twain.
+
+"Why!" exclaimed Fanny, sitting down on the floor rather
+heavily.  Then her eye fell upon a card tossed aside in the
+hurry of unpacking.  She picked it up, read it hastily. 
+"Merry Christmas to the best daughter in the world.  From
+her Mother."
+
+Mrs. Brandeis had taken off her wraps and was standing over
+the sitting-room register, rubbing her numbed hands and
+smiling a little.
+
+"Why, Mother!" Fanny scrambled to her feet.  "You darling! 
+In all that rush and work, to take time to think of me! 
+Why--" Her arms were around her mother's shoulders.  She was
+pressing her glowing cheek against the pale, cold one.  And
+they both wept a little, from emotion, and weariness, and
+relief, and enjoyed it, as women sometimes do.
+
+Fanny made her mother stay in bed next morning, a thing that
+Mrs. Brandeis took to most ungracefully.  After the holiday
+rush and strain she invariably had a severe cold, the
+protest of the body she had over-driven and under-nourished
+for two or three weeks.  As a patient she was as trying and
+fractious as a man, tossing about, threatening to get up,
+demanding hot-water bags, cold compresses, alcohol rubs. 
+She fretted about the business, and imagined that things
+were at a stand-still during her absence.
+
+Fanny herself rose early.  Her healthy young body, after a
+night's sleep, was already recuperating from the month's
+strain.  She had planned a real Christmas dinner, to banish
+the memory of the hasty and unpalatable lunches they had had
+to gulp during the rush.  There was to be a turkey, and
+Fanny had warned Annie not to touch it.  She wanted to stuff
+it and roast it herself.  She spent the morning in the
+kitchen, aside from an occasional tip-toeing visit to her
+mother's room.  At eleven she found her mother up, and no
+amount of coaxing would induce her to go back to bed.  She
+had read the papers and she said she felt rested already.
+
+The turkey came out a delicate golden-brown, and deliciously
+crackly.  Fanny, looking up over a drumstick, noticed, with
+a shock, that her mother's eyes looked strangely sunken, and
+her skin, around the jaws and just under the chin, where her
+loose wrapper revealed her throat, was queerly yellow and
+shriveled.  She had eaten almost nothing.
+
+"Mother, you're not eating a thing!  You really must eat a
+little."
+
+Mrs. Brandeis began a pretense of using knife and fork, but
+gave it up finally and sat back, smiling rather wanly.  "I
+guess I'm tireder than I thought I was, dear.  I think I've
+got a cold coming on, too.  I'll lie down again after
+dinner, and by to-morrow I'll be as chipper as a sparrow. 
+The turkey's wonderful, isn't it?  I'll have some, cold, for
+supper."
+
+After dinner the house felt very warm and stuffy.  It was
+crisply cold and sunny outdoors.  The snow was piled high
+except on the sidewalks, where it had been neatly shoveled
+away by the mufflered Winnebago sons and fathers.  There was
+no man in the Brandeis household, and Aloysius had been too
+busy to perform the chores usually considered his work about
+the house.  The snow lay in drifts upon the sidewalk in
+front of the Brandeis house, except where passing feet
+had trampled it a bit.
+
+"I'm going to shovel the walk," Fanny announced suddenly. 
+"Way around to the woodshed.  Where are those old mittens of
+mine?  Annie, where's the snow shovel?  Sure I am.  Why
+not?"
+
+She shoveled and scraped and pounded, bending rhythmically
+to the work, lifting each heaping shovelful with her strong
+young arms, tossing it to the side, digging in again, and
+under.  An occasional neighbor passed by, or a friend, and
+she waved at them, gayly, and tossed back their badinage. 
+"Merry Christmas!" she called, again and again, in reply to
+a passing acquaintance.  "Same to you!"
+
+At two o'clock Bella Weinberg telephoned to say that a
+little party of them were going to the river to skate.  The
+ice was wonderful.  Oh, come on!  Fanny skated very well. 
+But she hesitated.  Mrs. Brandeis, dozing on the couch,
+sensed what was going on in her daughter's mind, and roused
+herself with something of her old asperity.
+
+"Don't be foolish, child.  Run along!  You don't intend to
+sit here and gaze upon your sleeping beauty of a mother all
+afternoon, do you?  Well, then!"
+
+So Fanny changed her clothes, got her skates, and ran out
+into the snap and sparkle of the day.  The winter darkness
+had settled down before she returned, all glowing and rosy,
+and bright-eyed.  Her blood was racing through her body. 
+Her lips were parted.  The drudgery of the past three weeks
+seemed to have been blotted out by this one radiant
+afternoon.
+
+The house was dark when she entered.  It seemed very quiet,
+and close, and depressing after the sparkle and rush of the
+afternoon on the river.  "Mother!  Mother dear!  Still
+sleeping?"
+
+Mrs. Brandeis stirred, sighed, awoke.  Fanny flicked on the
+light.  Her mother was huddled in a kimono on the sofa. 
+She sat up rather dazedly now, and stared at Fanny.
+
+"Why--what time is it?  What?  Have I been sleeping all
+afternoon?  Your mother's getting old."
+
+She yawned, and in the midst of it caught her breath with a
+little cry of pain.
+
+"What is it?  What's the matter?"
+
+Molly Brandeis pressed a hand to her breast.  "A stitch, I
+guess.  It's this miserable cold coming on.  Is there any
+asperin in the house?  I'll dose myself after supper, and
+take a hot foot bath and go to bed.  I'm dead."
+
+She ate less for supper than she had for dinner.  She hardly
+tasted the cup of tea that Fanny insisted on making for her. 
+She swayed a little as she sat, and her lids came down over
+her eyes, flutteringly, as if the weight of them was too
+great to keep up.  At seven she was up-stairs, in bed,
+sleeping, and breathing heavily.
+
+At eleven, or thereabouts, Fanny woke up with a
+start.  She sat up in bed, wide-eyed, peering into the
+darkness and listening.  Some one was talking in a high,
+queer voice, a voice like her mother's, and yet unlike.  She
+ran, shivering with the cold, into her mother's bedroom. 
+She switched on the light.  Mrs. Brandeis was lying on the
+pillow, her eyes almost closed, except for a terrifying slit
+of white that showed between the lids.  Her head was tossing
+to and fro on the pillow.  She was talking, sometimes
+clearly, and sometimes mumblingly.
+
+"One gross cups and saucers . . . and now what do you think
+you'd like for a second prize . . . in the basement,
+Aloysius . . . the trains . . . I'll see that they get there
+to-day . . . yours of the tenth at hand . . ."
+
+"Mother!  Mother!  Molly dear!"  She shook her gently, then
+almost roughly.  The voice ceased.  The eyes remained the
+same.  "Oh, God!" She ran to the back of the house. 
+"Annie! Annie, get up!  Mother's sick.  She's out of her
+head.  I'm going to 'phone for the doctor.  Go in with her."
+
+She got the doctor at last.  She tried to keep her voice
+under control, and thought, with a certain pride, that she
+was succeeding.  She ran up-stairs again.  The voice had
+begun again, but it seemed thicker now.  She got into her
+clothes, shaking with cold and terror, and yet thinking very
+clearly, as she always did in a crisis.  She put clean
+towels in the bathroom, pushed the table up to the bed, got
+a glass of water, straightened the covers, put away the
+clothes that the tired woman had left about the room. 
+Doctor Hertz came.  He went through the usual preliminaries,
+listened, tapped, counted, straightened up at last.
+
+"Fresh air," he said.  "Cold air.  All the windows open." 
+They rigged up a device of screens and sheets to protect the
+bed from the drafts.  Fanny obeyed orders silently, like a
+soldier.  But her eyes went from the face on the pillow to
+that of the man bent over the bed.  Something vague, cold,
+clammy, seemed to be closing itself around her heart.  It
+was like an icy hand, squeezing there.  There had suddenly
+sprung up that indefinable atmosphere of the sick-room--a
+sick-room in which a fight is being waged.  Bottles on the
+table, glasses, a spoon, a paper shade over the electric
+light globe.
+
+"What is it?" said Fanny, at last.  "Grip?--grip?"
+
+Doctor Hertz hesitated a moment.  "Pneumonia."
+
+Fanny's hands grasped the footboard tightly.  "Do you think
+we'd better have a nurse?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+The nurse seemed to be there, somehow, miraculously.  And
+the morning came.  And in the kitchen Annie went about her
+work, a little more quietly than usual.  And yesterday
+seemed far away.  It was afternoon; it was twilight.  Doctor
+Hertz had been there for hours.  The last time he
+brought another doctor with him--Thorn.  Mrs. Brandeis was
+not talking now.  But she was breathing.  It filled the
+room, that breathing; it filled the house.  Fanny took her
+mother's hand, that hand with the work-hardened palm and the
+broken nails.  It was very cold.  She looked down at it. 
+The nails were blue.  She began to rub it.  She looked up
+into the faces of the two men.  She picked up the other
+hand--snatched at it.  "Look here!" she said.  "Look here!" 
+And then she stood up.  The vague, clammy thing that had
+been wound about her heart suddenly relaxed.  And at that
+something icy hot rushed all over her body and shook her. 
+She came around to the foot of the bed, and gripped it with
+her two hands.  Her chin was thrust forward, and her eyes
+were bright and staring.  She looked very much like her
+mother, just then.  It was a fighting face.  A desperate
+face.
+
+"Look here," she began, and was surprised to find that she
+was only whispering.  She wet her lips and smiled, and tried
+again, forming the words carefully with her lips.  "Look
+here.  She's dying--isn't she?  Isn't she!  She's dying,
+isn't she?"
+
+Doctor Hertz pursed his lips.  The nurse came over to her,
+and put a hand on her shoulder.  Fanny shook her off.
+
+"Answer me.  I've got a right to know.  Look at this!"  She
+reached forward and picked up that inert, cold, strangely
+shriveled blue hand again.
+
+"My dear child--I'm afraid so."
+
+There came from Fanny's throat a moan that began high, and
+poignant, and quavering, and ended in a shiver that seemed
+to die in her heart.  The room was still again, except for
+the breathing, and even that was less raucous.
+
+Fanny stared at the woman on the bed--at the long, finely-
+shaped head, with the black hair wadded up so carelessly
+now; at the long, straight, clever nose; the full,
+generous mouth.  There flooded her whole being a great,
+blinding rage.  What had she had of life? she demanded
+fiercely.  What?  What?  Her teeth came together grindingly. 
+She breathed heavily through her nostrils, as if she had
+been running.  And suddenly she began to pray, not with the
+sounding, unctions thees and thous of the Church and Bible;
+not elegantly or eloquently, with well-rounded phrases, as
+the righteous pray, but threateningly, hoarsely, as a
+desperate woman prays.  It was not a prayer so much as a cry
+of defiance---a challenge.
+
+"Look here, God!" and there was nothing profane as she said
+it.  "Look here, God!  She's done her part.  It's up to You
+now.  Don't You let her die!  Look at her.  Look at her!" 
+She choked and shook herself angrily, and went on.  "Is that
+fair?  That's a rotten trick to play on a woman that gave
+what she gave!  What did she ever have of life?  Nothing! 
+That little miserable, dirty store, and those little
+miserable, dirty people.  You give her a chance, d'You hear? 
+You give her a chance, God, or I'll----"
+
+Her voice broke in a thin, cracked quaver.  The nurse turned
+her around, suddenly and sharply, and led her from the room.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHT
+
+"You can come down now.  They're all here, I guess.  Doctor
+Thalmann's going to begin."  Fanny, huddled in a chair in
+her bedroom, looked up into the plump, kindly face of the
+woman who was bending over her.  Then she stood up,
+docilely, and walked toward the stairs with a heavy,
+stumbling step.
+
+"I'd put down my veil if I were you," said the neighbor
+woman.  And reached up for the black folds that draped
+Fanny's hat.  Fanny's fingers reached for them too,
+fumblingly.  "I'd forgotten about it," she said.  The heavy
+crape fell about her shoulders, mercifully hiding the
+swollen, discolored face.  She went down the stairs.  There
+was a little stir, a swaying toward her, a sibilant murmur
+of sympathy from the crowded sitting-room as she passed
+through to the parlor where Rabbi Thalmann stood waiting,
+prayer book in hand, in front of that which was covered with
+flowers.  Fanny sat down.  A feeling of unreality was strong
+upon her.  Doctor Thalmann cleared his throat and opened the
+book.
+
+After all, it was not Rabbi Thalmann's funeral sermon that
+testified to Mrs. Brandeis's standing in the community.  It
+was the character of the gathering that listened to what he
+had to say.  Each had his own opinion of Molly Brandeis, and
+needed no final eulogy to confirm it.  Father Fitzpatrick
+was there, tall, handsome, ruddy, the two wings of white
+showing at the temples making him look more than ever like a
+leading man.  He had been of those who had sat in what he
+called Mrs. Brandeis's confessional, there in the quiet
+little store.  The two had talked of things
+theological and things earthy.  His wit, quick though it
+was, was no match for hers, but they both had a humor sense
+and a drama sense, and one day they discovered, queerly
+enough, that they worshiped the same God.  Any one of these
+things is basis enough for a friendship.  Besides, Molly
+Brandeis could tell an Irish story inimitably.  And you
+should have heard Father Fitzpatrick do the one about Ikey
+and the nickel.  No, I think the Catholic priest, seeming to
+listen with such respectful attention, really heard very
+little of what Rabbi Thalmann had to say.
+
+Herman Walthers was there, he of the First National Bank of
+Winnebago, whose visits had once brought such terror to
+Molly Brandeis.  Augustus G. Gerretson was there, and three
+of his department heads.  Emil Bauer sat just behind him. 
+In a corner was Sadie, the erstwhile coquette, very subdued
+now, and months behind the fashions in everything but baby
+clothes.  Hen Cody, who had done all of Molly Brandeis's
+draying, sat, in unaccustomed black, next to Mayor A. J.
+Dawes.  Temple Emmanu-el was there, almost a unit.  The
+officers of Temple Emanu-el Ladies' Aid Society sat in a
+row.  They had never honored Molly Brandeis with office in
+the society--she who could have managed its business,
+politics and social activities with one hand tied behind
+her, and both her bright eyes shut.  In the kitchen and on
+the porch and in the hallway stood certain obscure people--
+women whose finger tips stuck out of their cotton gloves,
+and whose skirts dipped ludicrously in the back.  Only Molly
+Brandeis could have identified them for you.  Mrs. Brosch,
+the butter and egg woman, hovered in the dining-room
+doorway.  She had brought a pound of butter.  It was her
+contribution to the funeral baked meats.  She had deposited
+it furtively on the kitchen table.  Birdie Callahan, head
+waitress at the Haley House, found a seat just next to
+the elegant Mrs. Morehouse, who led the Golf Club crowd.  A
+haughty young lady in the dining-room, Birdie Callahan, in
+her stiffly starched white, but beneath the icy crust of her
+hauteur was a molten mass of good humor and friendliness. 
+She and Molly Brandeis had had much in common.
+
+But no one--not even Fanny Brandeis--ever knew who sent the
+great cluster of American Beauty roses that had come all the
+way from Milwaukee.  There had been no card, so who could
+have guessed that they came from Blanche Devine.  Blanche
+Devine, of the white powder, and the minks, and the
+diamonds, and the high-heeled shoes, and the plumes, lived
+in the house with the closed shutters, near the freight
+depot.  She often came into Brandeis' Bazaar.  Molly
+Brandeis had never allowed Sadie, or Pearl, or Fanny or
+Aloysius to wait on her.  She had attended to her herself. 
+And one day, for some reason, Blanche Devine found herself
+telling Molly Brandeis how she had come to be Blanche
+Devine, and it was a moving and terrible story.  And now her
+cardless flowers, a great, scarlet sheaf of them, lay next
+the chaste white roses that had been sent by the Temple
+Emanu-el Ladies' Aid.  Truly, death is a great leveler.
+
+In a vague way Fanny seemed to realize that all these people
+were there.  I think she must even have found a certain grim
+comfort in their presence.  Hers had not been the dry-eyed
+grief of the strong, such as you read about.  She had wept,
+night and day, hopelessly, inconsolably, torturing herself
+with remorseful questions.  If she had not gone skating,
+might she not have seen how ill her mother was?  Why hadn't
+she insisted on the doctor when her mother refused to eat
+the Christmas dinner?  Blind and selfish, she told herself;
+blind and selfish.  Her face was swollen and distorted now,
+and she was thankful for the black veil that shielded
+her.  Winnebago was scandalized to see that she wore no
+other black.  Mrs. Brandeis had never wanted Fanny to wear
+it; she hadn't enough color, she said.  So now she was
+dressed in her winter suit of blue, and her hat with the
+pert blue quill.  And the little rabbi's voice went on and
+on, and Fanny knew that it could not be true.  What had all
+this dust-to-dust talk to do with any one as vital, and
+electric, and constructive as Molly Brandeis.  In the midst
+of the service there was a sharp cry, and a little stir, and
+the sound of stifled sobbing.  It was Aloysius the merry,
+Aloysius the faithful, whose Irish heart was quite broken. 
+Fanny ground her teeth together in an effort at self-
+control.
+
+And so to the end, and out past the little hushed,
+respectful group on the porch, to the Jewish cemetery on the
+state road.  The snow of Christmas week was quite virgin
+there, except for that one spot where the sexton and his men
+had been at work.  Then back at a smart jog trot through the
+early dusk of the winter afternoon, the carriage wheels
+creaking upon the hard, dry snow.  And Fanny Brandeis said
+to herself (she must have been a little light-headed from
+hunger and weeping):
+
+"Now I'll know whether it's true or not.  When I go into the
+house.  If she's there she'll say, `Well Fanchen!  Hungry? 
+Oh, but my little girl's hands are cold!  Come here to the
+register and warm them.'  O God, let her be there!  Let her
+be there!"
+
+But she wasn't.  The house had been set to rights by brisk
+and unaccustomed hands.  There was a bustle and stir in the
+dining-room, and from the kitchen came the appetizing odors
+of cooking food.  Fanny went up to a chair that was out of
+its place, and shoved it back against the wall where it
+belonged.  She straightened a rug, carried the waste basket
+from the desk to the spot near the living-room table where
+it had always served to hide the shabby, worn place in
+the rug.  Fanny went up-stairs, past The Room that was once
+more just a comfortable, old fashioned bedroom, instead of a
+mysterious and awful chamber; bathed her face, tidied her
+hair, came down-stairs again, ate and drank things hot and
+revivifying.  The house was full of kindly women.
+
+Fanny found herself clinging to them--clinging desperately
+to these ample, broad-bosomed, soothing women whom she had
+scarcely known before.  They were always there, those women,
+and their husbands too; kindly, awkward men, who patted her
+shoulder, and who spoke of Molly Brandeis with that
+sincerity of admiration such as men usually give only to
+men.  People were constantly popping in at the back door
+with napkin-covered trays, and dishes and baskets.  A
+wonderful and beautiful thing, that homely small-town
+sympathy that knows the value of physical comfort in time of
+spiritual anguish.
+
+Two days after the funeral Fanny Brandeis went back to the
+store, much as her mother had done many years before, after
+her husband's death.  She looked about at the bright, well-
+stocked shelves and tables with a new eye--a speculative
+eye.  The Christmas season was over.  January was the time
+for inventory and for replenishment.  Mrs. Brandeis had
+always gone to Chicago the second week in January for the
+spring stock.  But something was forming in Fanny Brandeis's
+mind--a resolve that grew so rapidly as to take her breath
+away.  Her brain felt strangely clear and keen after the
+crashing storm of grief that had shaken her during the past
+week.
+
+"What are you going to do now?" people had asked her,
+curious and interested.  "Is Theodore coming back?"
+
+"I don't know--yet."  In answer to the first.  And, "No. 
+Why should he?  He has his work."  
+
+"But he could be of such help to you."
+
+"I'll help myself," said Fanny Brandeis, and smiled a
+curious smile that had in it more of bitterness and less of
+mirth than any smile has a right to have.
+
+Mrs. Brandeis had left a will, far-sighted business woman
+that she was.  It was a terse, clear-headed document, that
+gave "to Fanny Brandeis, my daughter," the six-thousand-
+dollar insurance, the stock, good-will and fixtures of
+Brandeis' Bazaar, the house furnishings, the few pieces of
+jewelry in their old-fashioned setting.  To Theodore was
+left the sum of fifteen hundred dollars.  He had received
+his share in the years of his musical education.
+
+Fanny Brandeis did not go to Chicago that January.  She took
+inventory of Brandeis' Bazaar, carefully and minutely.  And
+then, just as carefully and minutely she took stock of Fanny
+Brandeis.  There was something relentless and terrible in
+the way she went about this self-analysis.  She walked a
+great deal that winter, often out through the drifts to the
+little cemetery.  As she walked her mind was working,
+working.  She held long mental conversations with herself
+during these walks, and once she was rather frightened to
+find herself talking aloud.  She wondered if she had done
+that before.  And a plan was maturing in her brain, while
+the fight went on within herself, thus:
+
+"You'll never do it, Fanny.  You're not built that way."
+
+"Oh, won't I!  Watch me!  Give me time."
+
+"You'll think of what your mother would have done under the
+same conditions, and you'll do that thing."
+
+"I won't.  Not unless it's the long-headed thing to do.  I'm
+through being sentimental and unselfish.  What did it bring
+her?  Nothing!"
+
+The weeks went by.  Fanny worked hard in the store, and
+bought little.  February came, and with the spring her
+months of private thinking bore fruit.  There came to Fanny
+Brandeis a great resolve.  She would put herself in a high
+place.  Every talent she possessed, every advantage, every
+scrap of knowledge, every bit of experience, would be used
+toward that end.  She would make something of herself.  It
+was a worldly, selfish resolve, born of a bitter sorrow, and
+ambition, and resentment.  She made up her mind that she
+would admit no handicaps.  Race, religion, training, natural
+impulses--she would discard them all if they stood in her
+way.  She would leave Winnebago behind.  At best, if she
+stayed there, she could never accomplish more than to make
+her business a more than ordinarily successful small-town
+store.  And she would be--nobody.  No, she had had enough of
+that.  She would crush and destroy the little girl who had
+fasted on that Day of Atonement; the more mature girl who
+had written the thesis about the paper mill rag-room; the
+young woman who had drudged in the store on Elm Street.  In
+her place she would mold a hard, keen-eyed, resolute woman,
+whose godhead was to be success, and to whom success would
+mean money and position.  She had not a head for
+mathematics, but out of the puzzling problems and syllogisms
+in geometry she had retained in her memory this one
+immovable truth:
+
+A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
+
+With her mental eye she marked her two points, and then,
+starting from the first, made directly for the second.  But
+she forgot to reckon with the law of tangents.  She forgot,
+too, how paradoxical a creature was this Fanny Brandeis
+whose eyes filled with tears at sight of a parade--just the
+sheer drama of it--were the marchers G. A. R. veterans,
+school children in white, soldiers, Foresters, political
+marching clubs; and whose eyes burned dry and bright as she
+stood over the white mound in the cemetery on the state
+road.  Generous, spontaneous, impulsive, warm-hearted,
+she would be cold, calculating, deliberate, she told
+herself.
+
+Thousands of years of persecution behind her made her quick
+to appreciate suffering in others, and gave her an innate
+sense of fellowship with the downtrodden.  She resolved to
+use that sense as a searchlight aiding her to see and
+overcome obstacles.  She told herself that she was done with
+maudlin sentimentality.  On the rare occasions when she had
+accompanied her mother to Chicago, the two women had found
+delight in wandering about the city's foreign quarters. 
+When other small-town women buyers snatched occasional
+moments of leisure for the theater or personal shopping,
+these two had spent hours in the ghetto around Jefferson and
+Taylor, and Fourteenth Streets.  Something in the sight of
+these people--alien, hopeful, emotional, often grotesque--
+thrilled and interested both the women.  And at sight of an
+ill-clad Italian, with his slovenly, wrinkled old-young
+wife, turning the handle of his grind organ whilst both
+pairs of eyes searched windows and porches and doorsteps
+with a hopeless sort of hopefulness, she lost her head
+entirely and emptied her limp pocketbook of dimes, and
+nickels, and pennies.  Incidentally it might be stated that
+she loved the cheap and florid music of the hand organ
+itself.
+
+It was rumored that Brandeis' Bazaar was for sale.  In the
+spring Gerretson's offered Fanny the position of buyer and
+head of the china, glassware, and kitchenware sections. 
+Gerretson's showed an imposing block of gleaming plate-glass
+front now, and drew custom from a dozen thrifty little towns
+throughout the Fox River Valley.  Fanny refused the offer. 
+In March she sold outright the stock, good-will, and
+fixtures of Brandeis' Bazaar.  The purchaser was a thrifty,
+farsighted traveling man who had wearied of the road
+and wanted to settle down.  She sold the household
+goods too--those intimate, personal pieces of wood and cloth
+that had become, somehow, part of her life.  She had grown
+up with them.  She knew the history of every nick, every
+scratch and worn spot.  Her mother lived again in every
+piece.  The old couch went off in a farmer's wagon.  Fanny
+turned away when they joggled it down the front steps and
+into the rude vehicle.  It was like another funeral.  She
+was furious to find herself weeping again.  She promised
+herself punishment for that.
+
+Up in her bedroom she opened the bottom drawer of her
+bureau.  That bureau and its history and the history of
+every piece of furniture in the room bore mute testimony to
+the character of its occupant; to her protest against things
+as she found them, and her determination to make them over
+to suit her.  She had spent innumerable Sunday mornings
+wielding the magic paint brush that had transformed the
+bedroom from dingy oak to gleaming cream enamel.  She sat
+down on the floor now, before the bureau, and opened the
+bottom drawer.
+
+In a corner at the back, under the neat pile of garments,
+was a tightly-rolled bundle of cloth.  Fanny reached for it,
+took it out, and held it in her hands a moment.  Then she
+unrolled it slowly, and the bundle revealed itself to be a
+faded, stained, voluminous gingham apron, blue and white. 
+It was the kind of apron women don when they perform some
+very special household ritual--baking, preserving, house
+cleaning.  It crossed over the shoulders with straps, and
+its generous fullness ran all the way around the waist.  It
+was discolored in many places with the brown and reddish
+stains of fruit juices.  It had been Molly Brandeis' canning
+apron.  Fanny had come upon it hanging on a hook behind the
+kitchen door, after that week in December.  And at sight of
+it all her fortitude and forced calm had fled.  She had
+spread her arms over the limp, mute, yet speaking thing
+dangling there, and had wept so wildly and uncontrollably as
+to alarm even herself.
+
+Nothing in connection with her mother's death had power to
+call up such poignant memories as did this homely, intimate
+garment.  She saw again the steamy kitchen, deliciously
+scented with the perfume of cooking fruit, or the
+tantalizing, mouth-watering spiciness of vinegar and
+pickles.  On the stove the big dishpan, in which the jelly
+glasses and fruit jars, with their tops and rubbers, bobbed
+about in hot water.  In the great granite kettle simmered
+the cooking fruit Molly Brandeis, enveloped in the familiar
+blue-and-white apron, stood over it, like a priestess,
+stirring, stirring, slowly, rhythmically.  Her face would be
+hot and moist with the steam, and very tired too, for she
+often came home from the store utterly weary, to stand over
+the kettle until ten or eleven o'clock.  But the pride in it
+as she counted the golden or ruby tinted tumblers gleaming
+in orderly rows as they cooled on the kitchen table!
+
+"Fifteen glasses of grape jell, Fan!  And I didn't mix a bit
+of apple with it.  I didn't think I'd get more than ten. 
+And nine of the quince preserve.  That makes--let me see--
+eighty-three, ninety-eight--one hundred and seven
+altogether."
+
+"We'll never eat it, Mother."
+
+"You said that last year, and by April my preserve cupboard
+looked like Old Mother Hubbard's."
+
+But then, Mrs. Brandeis was famous for her preserves, as
+Father Fitzpatrick, and Aloysius, and Doctor Thalmann, and a
+dozen others could testify.  After the strain and flurry of
+a busy day at the store there was something about this
+homely household rite that brought a certain sense of rest
+and peace to Molly Brandeis.
+
+All this moved through Fanny Brandeis's mind as she sat with
+the crumpled apron in her lap, her eyes swimming with hot
+tears.  The very stains that discolored it, the faded blue
+of the front breadth, the frayed buttonhole, the little
+scorched place where she had burned a hole when trying
+unwisely to lift a steaming kettle from the stove with the
+apron's corner, spoke to her with eloquent lips.  That apron
+had become a vice with Fanny.  She brooded over it as a
+mother broods over the shapeless, scuffled bit of leather
+that was a baby's shoe; as a woman, widowed, clings to a
+shabby, frayed old smoking jacket.  More than once she had
+cried herself to sleep with the apron clasped tightly in her
+arms.
+
+She got up from the floor now, with the apron in her hands,
+and went down the stairs, opened the door that led to the
+cellar, walked heavily down those steps and over to the
+furnace.  She flung open the furnace door.  Red and purple
+the coal bed gleamed, with little white flame sprites
+dancing over it.  Fanny stared at it a moment, fascinated. 
+Her face was set, her eyes brilliant.  Suddenly she flung
+the tightly-rolled apron into the heart of the gleaming
+mass.  She shut her eyes then.  The fire seemed to hold its
+breath for a moment.  Then, with a gasp, it sprang upon its
+food.  The bundle stiffened, writhed, crumpled, sank, lay a
+blackened heap, was dissolved.  The fire bed glowed red and
+purple as before, except for a dark spot in its heart. 
+Fanny shivered a little.  She shut the furnace door and went
+up-stairs again.
+
+"Smells like something burning--cloth, or something," called
+Annie, from the kitchen.
+
+"It's only an old apron that was cluttering up my--my bureau
+drawer."
+
+Thus she successfully demonstrated the first lesson in the
+cruel and rigid course of mental training she had mapped out
+for herself.
+
+Leaving Winnebago was not easy.  There is something about a
+small town that holds you.  Your life is so intimately
+interwoven with that of your neighbor.  Existence is so
+safe, so sane, so sure.  Fanny knew that when she turned the
+corner of Elm Street every third person she met would speak
+to her.  Life was made up of minute details, too trivial for
+the notice of the hurrying city crowds.  You knew when Milly
+Glaenzer changed the baby buggy for a go-cart.  The youngest
+Hupp boy--Sammy--who was graduated from High School in June,
+is driving A. J. Dawes's automobile now.  My goodness, how
+time flies!  Doeppler's grocery has put in plate-glass
+windows, and they're getting out-of-season vegetables every
+day now from Milwaukee.  As you pass you get the coral glow
+of tomatoes, and the tender green of lettuces.  And that
+vivid green?  Fresh young peas!  And in February.  Well! 
+They've torn down the old yellow brick National Bank, and in
+its place a chaste Greek Temple of a building looks rather
+contemptuously down its classic columns upon the farmer's
+wagons drawn up along the curb.  If Fanny Brandeis' sense of
+proportion had not been out of plumb she might have realized
+that, to Winnebago, the new First National Bank building was
+as significant and epochal as had been the Woolworth
+Building to New York.
+
+The very intimacy of these details, Fanny argued, was
+another reason for leaving Winnebago.  They were like
+detaining fingers that grasped at your skirts, impeding your
+progress.
+
+She had early set about pulling every wire within her reach
+that might lead, directly or indirectly, to the furtherance
+of her ambition.  She got two offers from Milwaukee retail
+stores.  She did not consider them for a moment.  Even a
+Chicago department store of the second grade (one of those
+on the wrong side of State Street) did not tempt her.  She
+knew her value.  She could afford to wait.  There was
+money enough on which to live comfortably until the right
+chance presented itself.  She knew every item of her
+equipment, and she conned them to herself greedily: 
+Definite charm of manner; the thing that is called
+magnetism; brains; imagination; driving force; health;
+youth; and, most precious of all, that which money could not
+buy, nor education provide--experience.  Experience, a
+priceless weapon, that is beaten into shape only by much
+contact with men and women, and that is sharpened by much
+rubbing against the rough edges of this world.
+
+In April her chance came to her; came in that accidental,
+haphazard way that momentous happenings have.  She met on
+Elm Street a traveling man from whom Molly Brandeis had
+bought for years.  He dropped both sample cases and shook
+hands with Fanny, eying her expertly and approvingly, and
+yet without insolence.  He was a wise, road-weary, skillful
+member of his fraternity, grown gray in years of service,
+and a little bitter.  Though perhaps that was due partly to
+traveling man's dyspepsia, brought on by years of small-town
+hotel food.
+
+"So you've sold out."
+
+"Yes.  Over a month ago."
+
+"H'm.  That was a nice little business you had there.  Your
+ma built it up herself.  There was a woman!  Gosh! 
+Discounted her bills, even during the panic."
+
+Fanny smiled a reflective little smile.  "That line is a
+complete characterization of my mother.  Her life was a
+series of panics.  But she never lost her head.  And she
+always discounted."
+
+He held out his hand.  "Well, glad I met you."  He picked up
+his sample cases.  "You leaving Winnebago?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Going to the city, I suppose.  Well you're a smart girl. 
+And your mother's daughter.  I guess you'll get along all
+right.  What house are you going with?"
+
+"I don't know.  I'm waiting for the right chance.  It's all
+in starting right.  I'm not going to hurry."
+
+He put down his cases again, and his eyes grew keen and
+kindly.  He gesticulated with one broad forefinger. 
+"Listen, m' girl.  I'm what they call an old-timer.  They
+want these high-power, eight-cylinder kids on the road these
+days, and it's all we can do to keep up.  But I've got
+something they haven't got--yet.  I never read anybody on
+the Psychology of Business, but I know human nature all the
+way from Elm Street, Winnebago, to Fifth Avenue, New York."
+
+"I'm sure you do," said Fanny politely, and took a little
+step forward, as though to end the conversation.
+
+"Now wait a minute.  They say the way to learn is to make
+mistakes.  If that's true, I'm at the head of the class. 
+I've made 'em all.  Now get this.  You start out and
+specialize.  Specialize!  Tie to one thing, and make
+yourself an expert in it.  But first be sure it's the right
+thing."
+
+"But how is one to be sure?"
+
+"By squinting up your eyes so you can see ten years ahead. 
+If it looks good to you at that distance--better, in fact,
+than it does close by--then it's right.  I suppose that's
+what they call having imagination.  I never had any.  That's
+why I'm still selling goods on the road.  To look at you I'd
+say you had too much.  Maybe I'm wrong.  But I never yet saw
+a woman with a mouth like yours who was cut out for
+business--unless it was your mother--And her eyes were
+different.  Let's see, what was I saying?"
+
+"Specialize."
+
+"Oh, yes.  And that reminds me.  Bunch of fellows in the
+smoker last night talking about Haynes-Cooper.  Your mother
+hated 'em like poison, the way every small-town
+merchant hates the mail-order houses.  But I hear they've
+got an infants' wear department that's just going to grass
+for lack of a proper head.  You're only a kid.  And they
+have done you dirt all these years, of course.  But if you
+could sort of horn in there--why, say, there's no limit to
+the distance you could go.  No limit!  With your brains and
+experience."
+
+That had been the beginning.  From then on the thing had
+moved forward with a certain inevitableness.  There was
+something about the vastness of the thing that appealed to
+Fanny.  Here was an organization whose great arms embraced
+the world.  Haynes-Cooper, giant among mail-order houses,
+was said to eat a small-town merchant every morning for
+breakfast.
+
+"There's a Haynes-Cooper catalogue in every farmer's
+kitchen," Molly Brandeis used to say.  "The Bible's in the
+parlor, but they keep the H. C. book in the room where they
+live."
+
+That she was about to affiliate herself with this house
+appealed to Fanny Brandeis's sense of comedy.  She had heard
+her mother presenting her arguments to the stubborn farmer
+folk who insisted on ordering their stove, or dinner set, or
+plow, or kitchen goods from the fascinating catalogue.  "I
+honestly think it's just the craving for excitement that
+makes them do it," she often said.  "They want the thrill
+they get when they receive a box from Chicago, and open it,
+and take off the wrappings, and dig out the thing they
+ordered from a picture, not knowing whether it will be right
+or wrong."
+
+Her arguments usually left the farmer unmoved.  He would
+drive into town, mail his painfully written letter and order
+at the post-office, dispose of his load of apples, or
+butter, or cheese, or vegetables, and drive cheerfully back
+again, his empty wagon bumping and rattling down the
+old corduroy road.  Express, breakage, risk, loyalty to his
+own region--an these arguments left him cold.
+
+In May, after much manipulation, correspondence, two
+interviews, came a definite offer from the Haynes-Cooper
+Company.  It was much less than the State Street store had
+offered, and there was something tentative about the whole
+agreement.  Haynes-Cooper proffered little and demanded
+much, as is the way of the rich and mighty.  But Fanny
+remembered the ten-year viewpoint that the weary-wise old
+traveling man had spoken about.  She took their offer.  She
+was to go to Chicago almost at once, to begin work June
+first.
+
+Two conversations that took place before she left are
+perhaps worth recording.  One was with Father Fitzpatrick of
+St. Ignatius Catholic Church.  The other with Rabbi Emil
+Thalmann of Temple Emanu-el.
+
+An impulse brought her into Father Fitzpatrick's study.  It
+was a week before her departure.  She was tired.  There had
+been much last signing of papers, nailing of boxes,
+strapping of trunks.  When things began to come too thick
+and fast for her she put on her hat and went for a walk at
+the close of the May day.  May, in Wisconsin, is a thing all
+fragrant, and gold, and blue; and white with cherry
+blossoms; and pink with apple blossoms; and tremulous with
+budding things.
+
+Fanny struck out westward through the neat streets of the
+little town, and found herself on the bridge over the ravine
+in which she had played when a little girl--the ravine that
+her childish imagination had peopled with such pageantry of
+redskin, and priests, and voyageurs, and cavaliers.  She
+leaned over the iron railing and looked down.  Where grass,
+and brook, and wild flower had been there now oozed great
+eruptions of ash heaps, tin cans, broken bottles, mounds of
+dirt.  Winnebago's growing pains had begun.  Fanny
+turned away with a little sick feeling.  She went on across
+the bridge past the Catholic church.  Just next the church
+was the parish house where Father Fitzpatrick lived.  It
+always looked as if it had been scrubbed, inside and out,
+with a scouring brick.  Its windows were a reproach and a
+challenge to every housekeeper in Winnebago.
+
+Fanny wanted to talk to somebody about that ravine.  She was
+full of it.  Father Fitzpatrick's study over-looked it. 
+Besides, she wanted to see him before she left Winnebago.  A
+picture came to her mind of his handsome, ruddy face,
+twinkling with humor as she had last seen it when he had
+dropped in at Brandeis' Bazaar for a chat with her mother. 
+She turned in at the gate and ran up the immaculate, gray-
+painted steps, that always gleamed as though still wet with
+the paint brush.
+
+"I shouldn't wonder if that housekeeper of his comes out
+with a pail of paint and does 'em every morning before
+breakfast," Fanny said to herself as she rang the bell.
+
+Usually it was that sparse and spectacled person herself who
+opened the parish house door, but to-day Fanny's ring was
+answered by Father Casey, parish assistant.  A sour-faced
+and suspicious young man, Father Casey, thick-spectacled,
+and pointed of nose.  Nothing of the jolly priest about him. 
+He was new to the town, but he recognized Fanny and surveyed
+her darkly.
+
+"Father Fitzpatrick in?  I'm Fanny Brandeis."
+
+"The reverend father is busy," and the glass door began to
+close.
+
+"Who is it?" boomed a voice from within.  "Who're you
+turning away, Casey?"
+
+"A woman, not a parishioner."  The door was almost shut now. 
+
+
+Footsteps down the hall.  "Good!  Let her in."  The door
+opened ever so reluctantly.  Father Fitzpatrick loomed up
+beside his puny assistant, dwarfing him.  He looked sharply
+at the figure on the porch.  "For the love of--!  Casey,
+you're a fool!  How you ever got beyond being an altar-boy
+is more than I can see.  Come in, child.  Come in!  The
+man's cut out for a jailor, not a priest."
+
+Fanny's two hands were caught in one of his big ones, and
+she was led down the hall to the study.  It was the room of
+a scholar and a man, and the one spot in the house that
+defied the housekeeper's weapons of broom and duster.  A
+comfortable and disreputable room, full of books, and
+fishing tackle, and chairs with sagging springs, and a sofa
+that was dented with friendly hollows.  Pipes on the
+disorderly desk.  A copy of "Mr. Dooley" spread face down on
+what appeared to be next Sunday's sermon, rough-drafted.
+
+"I just wanted to talk to you."  Fanny drifted to the
+shelves, book-lover that she was, and ran a finger over a
+half-dozen titles.  "Your assistant was justified, really,
+in closing the door on me.  But I'm glad you rescued me." 
+She came over to him and stood looking up at him.  He seemed
+to loom up endlessly, though hers was a medium height.  "I
+think I really wanted to talk to you about that ravine,
+though I came to say good-by."
+
+"Sit down, child, sit down!"  He creaked into his great
+leather-upholstered desk chair, himself.  "If you had left
+without seeing me I'd have excommunicated Casey.  Between
+you and me the man's mad.  His job ought to be duenna to a
+Spanish maiden, not assistant to a priest with a leaning
+toward the flesh."
+
+Now, Father Fitzpatrick talked with a--no, you couldn't call
+it a brogue.  It was nothing so gross as that.  One does not
+speak of the flavor of a rare wine; one calls attention
+to its bouquet.  A subtle, teasing, elusive something that
+just tickles the senses instead of punching them in the
+ribs.  So his speech was permeated with a will-o'-the-wisp,
+a tingling richness that evaded definition.  You will have
+to imagine it.  There shall be no vain attempt to set it
+down.  Besides, you always skip dialect.
+
+"So you're going away.  I'd heard.  Where to?"
+
+"Chicago, Haynes-Cooper.  It's a wonderful chance.  I don't
+see yet how I got it.  There's only one other woman on their
+business staff--I mean working actually in an executive way
+in the buying and selling end of the business.  Of course
+there are thousands doing clerical work, and that kind of
+thing.  Have you ever been through the plant?  It's--it's
+incredible."
+
+Father Fitzpatrick drummed with his fingers on the arm of
+his chair, and looked at Fanny, his handsome eyes half shut.
+
+"So it's going to be business, h'm?  Well, I suppose it's
+only natural.  Your mother and I used to talk about you
+often.  I don't know if you and she ever spoke seriously of
+this little trick of drawing, or cartooning, or whatever it
+is you have.  She used to think about it.  She said once to
+me, that it looked to her more than just a knack.  An
+authentic gift of caricature, she called it--if it could
+only be developed.  But of course Theodore took everything. 
+That worried her."
+
+"Oh, nonsense!  That!  I just amuse myself with it."
+
+"Yes.  But what amuses you might amuse other people. 
+There's all too few amusing things in the world.  Your
+mother was a smart woman, Fanny.  The smartest I ever knew."
+
+"There's no money in it, even if I were to get on with it. 
+What could I do with it?  Who ever heard of a woman
+cartoonist!  And I couldn't illustrate.  Those pink
+cheesecloth pictures the magazines use.  I want to earn
+money.  Lots of it.  And now."
+
+She got up and went to the window, and stood looking down
+the steep green slope of the ravine that lay, a natural
+amphitheater, just below.
+
+"Money, h'm?" mused Father Fitzpatrick.  "Well, it's popular
+and handy.  And you look to me like the kind of girl who'd
+get it, once you started out for it.  I've never had much
+myself.  They say it has a way of turning to dust and ashes
+in the mouth, once you get a good, satisfying bite of it. 
+But that's only talk, I suppose."
+
+Fanny laughed a little, still looking down at the ravine. 
+"I'm fairly accustomed to dust and ashes by this time.  It
+won't be a new taste to me."  She whirled around suddenly. 
+"And speaking of dust and ashes, isn't this a shame?  A
+crime?  Why doesn't somebody stop it?  Why don't you stop
+it?"  She pointed to the desecrated ravine below.  Her eyes
+were blazing, her face all animation.
+
+Father Fitzpatrick came over and stood beside her.  His face
+was sad.  "It's a--"  He stopped abruptly, and looked down
+into her glowing face.  He cleared his throat.  "It's a
+perfectly natural state of affairs," he said smoothly. 
+"Winnebago's growing.  Especially over there on the west
+side, since the new mill went up, and they've extended the
+street car line.  They need the land to build on.  It's
+business.  And money."
+
+"Business!  It's a crime!  It's wanton!  Those ravines are
+the most beautiful natural spots in Wisconsin.  Why, they're
+history, and romance, and beauty!"
+
+"So that's the way you feel about it?"
+
+"Of course.  Don't you?  Can't you stop it?  Petitions--"
+
+"Certainly I feel it's an outrage.  But I'm just a poor fool
+of a priest, and sentimental, with no head for
+business.  Now you're a business woman, and different."
+
+"I!  You're joking."
+
+"Say, listen, m' girl.  The world's made up of just two
+things: ravines and dump heaps.  And the dumpers are forever
+edging up, and squeedging up, and trying to grab the ravines
+and spoil 'em, when nobody's looking.  You've made your
+choice, and allied yourself with the dump heaps.  What right
+have you to cry out against the desecration of the ravines?"
+
+"The right that every one has that loves them."
+
+"Child, you're going to get so used to seeing your ravines
+choked up at Haynes-Cooper that after a while you'll prefer
+'em that way."
+
+Fanny turned on him passionately.  "I won't!  And if I do,
+perhaps it's just as well.  There's such a thing as too much
+ravine.  What do you want me to do?  Stay here, and grub
+away, and become a crabbed old maid like Irma Klein,
+thankful to be taken around by the married crowd, joining
+the Aid Society and going to the card parties on Sunday
+nights?  Or I could marry a traveling man, perhaps, or Lee
+Kohn of the Golden Eagle.  I'm just like any other ambitious
+woman with brains--"
+
+"No you're not.  You're different.  And I'll tell you why. 
+You're a Jew."
+
+"Yes, I've got that handicap."
+
+"That isn't a handicap, Fanny.  It's an asset.  Outwardly
+you're like any other girl of your age.  Inwardly you've
+been molded by occupation, training, religion, history,
+temperament, race, into something--"
+
+"Ethnologists have proved that there is no such thing as a
+Jewish race," she interrupted pertly.
+
+"H'm.  Maybe.  I don't know what you'd call it, then.  You
+can't take a people and persecute them for thousands of
+years, hounding them from place to place, herding them in
+dark and filthy streets, without leaving some sort of
+brand on them--a mark that differentiates.  Sometimes it
+doesn't show outwardly.  But it's there, inside.  You know,
+Fanny, how it's always been said that no artist can became a
+genius until he has suffered.  You've suffered, you Jews,
+for centuries and centuries, until you're all artists--quick
+to see drama because you've lived in it, emotional,
+oversensitive, cringing, or swaggering, high-strung,
+demonstrative, affectionate, generous.
+
+"Maybe they're right.  Perhaps it isn't a race.  But what do
+you call the thing, then, that made you draw me as you did
+that morning when you came to ten o'clock mass and did a
+caricature of me in the pulpit.  You showed up something
+that I've been trying to hide for twenty years, till I'd
+fooled everybody, including myself.  My church is always
+packed.  Nobody else there ever saw it.  I'll tell you,
+Fanny, what I've always said: the Irish would be the
+greatest people in the world--if it weren't for the
+Jews."
+
+They laughed together at that, and the tension was relieved.
+
+"Well, anyway," said Fanny, and patted his great arm, "I'd
+rather talk to you than to any man in the world."
+
+"I hope you won't be able to say that a year from now, dear
+girl."
+
+And so they parted.  He took her to the door himself, and
+watched her slim figure down the street and across the
+ravine bridge, and thought she walked very much like her
+mother, shoulders squared, chin high, hips firm.  He went
+back into the house, after surveying the sunset largely, and
+encountered the dour Casey in the hall.
+
+"I'll type your sermon now, sir--if it's done."
+
+"It isn't done, Casey.  And you know it.  Oh, Casey,"--(I
+wish your imagination would supply that brogue, because it
+was such a deliciously soft and racy thing)--"Oh,
+Casey, Casey! you're a better priest than I am--but a poorer
+man."
+
+Fanny was to leave Winnebago the following Saturday.  She
+had sold the last of the household furniture, and had taken
+a room at the Haley House.  She felt very old and
+experienced--and sad.  That, she told herself, was only
+natural.  Leaving things to which one is accustomed is
+always hard.  Queerly enough, it was her good-by to Aloysius
+that most unnerved her.  Aloysius had been taken on at
+Gerretson's, and the dignity of his new position sat heavily
+upon him.  You should have seen his ties.  Fanny sought him
+out at Gerretson's.
+
+"It's flure-manager of the basement I am," he said, and
+struck an elegant attitude against the case of misses'-
+ready-to-wear coats.  "And when you come back to Winnebago,
+Miss Fanny,--and the saints send it be soon--I'll bet ye'll
+see me on th' first flure, keepin' a stern but kindly eye on
+the swellest trade in town. Ev'ry last thing I know I learned
+off yur poor ma."
+
+"I hope it will serve you here, Aloysius."
+
+"Sarve me!"  He bent closer.  "Meanin' no offense, Miss
+Fanny; but say, listen:  Oncet ye get a Yiddish business
+education into an Irish head, and there's no limit to the
+length ye can go.  If I ain't a dry-goods king be th' time
+I'm thirty I hope a packin' case'll fall on me."
+
+The sight of Aloysius seemed to recall so vividly all that
+was happy and all that was hateful about Brandeis' Bazaar;
+all the bravery and pluck, and resourcefulness of the
+bright-eyed woman he had admiringly called his boss, that
+Fanny found her self-control slipping.  She put out her hand
+rather blindly to meet his great red paw (a dressy striped
+cuff seemed to make it all the redder), murmured a word of
+thanks in return for his fervent good wishes, and fled up
+the basement stairs.
+
+On Friday night (she was to leave next day) she went to the
+temple.  The evening service began at seven.  At half past
+six Fanny had finished her early supper.  She would drop in
+at Doctor Thalmann's house and walk with him to temple, if
+he had not already gone.
+
+"Nein, der Herr Rabbi ist noch hier--sure," the maid said
+in answer to Fanny's question.  The Thalmann's had a German
+maid--one Minna--who bullied the invalid Mrs. Thalmann, was
+famous for her cookies with walnuts on the top, and who made
+life exceedingly difficult for unlinguistic callers.
+
+Rabbi Thalmann was up in his study.  Fanny ran lightly up
+the stairs.
+
+"Who is it, Emil?  That Minna!  Next Monday her week is up. 
+She goes."
+
+"It's I, Mrs. Thalmann.  Fanny Brandeis."
+
+"Na, Fanny!  Now what do you think!"
+
+In the brightly-lighted doorway of his little study appeared
+Rabbi Thalmann, on one foot a comfortable old romeo, on the
+other a street shoe.  He held out both hands.  "Only at
+supper we talked about you.  Isn't that so, Harriet?"  He
+called into the darkened room.
+
+"I came to say good-by.  And I thought we might walk to
+temple together.  How's Mrs. Thalmann tonight?"
+
+The little rabbi shook his head darkly, and waved a dismal
+hand.  But that was for Fanny alone.  What he said was: 
+"She's really splendid to-day.  A little tired, perhaps; but
+what is that?"
+
+"Emil!" from the darkened bedroom.  "How can you say that? 
+But how!  What I have suffered to-day, only!  Torture!  And
+because I say nothing I'm not sick."
+
+"Go in," said Rabbi Thalmann.
+
+So Fanny went in to the woman lying, yellow-faced, on
+the pillows of the dim old-fashioned bedroom with its walnut
+furniture, and its red plush mantel drape.  Mrs. Thalmann
+held out a hand.  Fanny took it in hers, and perched herself
+on the edge of the bed.  She patted the dry, devitalized
+hand, and pressed it in her own strong, electric grip.  Mrs.
+Thalmann raised her head from the pillow.
+
+"Tell me, did she have her white apron on?"
+
+"White apron?"
+
+"Minna, the girl."
+
+"Oh!"  Fanny's mind jerked back to the gingham-covered
+figure that had opened the door for her.  "Yes," she lied,
+"a white one--with crochet around the bottom.  Quite grand."
+
+Mrs. Thalmann sank back on the pillow with a satisfied sigh. 
+"A wonder."  She shook her head.  "What that girl wastes
+alone, when I am helpless here."
+
+Rabbi Thalmann came into the room, both feet booted now, and
+placed his slippers neatly, toes out, under the bed.  "Ach,
+Harriet, the girl is all right.  You imagine.  Come, Fanny." 
+He took a great, fat watch out of his pocket.  "It is time
+to go."
+
+Mrs. Thalmann laid a detaining hand on Fanny's arm.  "You
+will come often back here to Winnebago?"
+
+"I'm afraid not.  Once a year, perhaps, to visit my graves."
+
+The sick eyes regarded the fresh young face.  "Your mother,
+Fanny, we didn't understand her so well, here in Winnebago,
+among us Jewish ladies.  She was different."
+
+Fanny's face hardened.  She stood up.  "Yes, she was
+different."
+
+"She comes often into my mind now, when I am here alone,
+with only the four walls.  We were aber dumm, we women--
+but how dumm!  She was too smart for us, your mother.  Too
+smart.  Und eine sehr brave frau."
+
+And suddenly Fanny, she who had resolved to set her face
+against all emotion, and all sentiment, found herself with
+her glowing cheek pressed against the withered one, and it
+was the weak old hand that patted her now.  So she lay for a
+moment, silent.  Then she got up, straightened her hat,
+smiled.
+
+"Auf Wiedersehen," she said in her best German.  "Und
+gute Besserung."
+
+But the rabbi's wife shook her head.  "Good-by."
+
+From the hall below Doctor Thalmann called to her.  "Come,
+child, come!"  Then, "Ach, the light in my study!  I forgot
+to turn it out, Fanny, be so good, yes?"
+
+Fanny entered the bright little room, reached up to turn off
+the light, and paused a moment to glance about her.  It was
+an ugly, comfortable, old-fashioned room that had never
+progressed beyond the what-not period.  Fanny's eye was
+caught by certain framed pictures on the walls.  They were
+photographs of Rabbi Thalmann's confirmation classes. 
+Spindling-legged little boys in the splendor of patent-
+leather buttoned shoes, stiff white shirts, black broadcloth
+suits with satin lapels; self-conscious and awkward little
+girls--these in the minority--in white dresses and stiff
+white hair bows.  In the center of each group sat the little
+rabbi, very proud and alert.  Fanny was not among these. 
+She had never formally taken the vows of her creed.  As she
+turned down the light now, and found her way down the
+stairs, she told herself that she was glad this was so.
+
+It was a matter of only four blocks to the temple.  But they
+were late, and so they hurried, and there was little
+conversation.  Fanny's arm was tucked comfortably in his. 
+It felt, somehow, startlingly thin, that arm.  And as they
+hurried along there was a jerky feebleness about his gait. 
+It was with difficulty that Fanny restrained herself from
+supporting him when they came to a rough bit of walk or
+a sudden step.  Something fine in her prompted her not to. 
+But the alert mind in that old frame sensed what was going
+on in her thoughts.
+
+"He's getting feeble, the old rabbi, h'm?"
+
+"Not a bit of it.  I've got all I can do to keep up with
+you.  You set such a pace."
+
+"I know.  I know.  They are not all so kind, Fanny.  They
+are too prosperous, this congregation of mine.  And some
+day, `Off with his head!'  And in my place there will step a
+young man, with eye-glasses instead of spectacles.  They are
+tired of hearing about the prophets.  Texts from the Bible
+have gone out of fashion.  You think I do not see them
+giggling, h'm?  The young people.  And the whispering in the
+choir loft.  And the buzz when I get up from my chair after
+the second hymn.  `Is he going to have a sermon?  Is he? 
+Sure enough!'  Na, he will make them sit up, my successor. 
+Sex sermons!  Political lectures.  That's it.  Lectures." 
+They were turning in at the temple now.  "The race is to the
+young, Fanny.  To the young.  And I am old."
+
+She squeezed the frail old arm in hers.  "My dear!" she
+said.  "My dear!"  A second breaking of her new resolutions.
+
+One by one, two by two, they straggled in for the Friday
+evening service, these placid, prosperous people, not
+unkind, but careless, perhaps, in their prosperity.
+
+"He's worth any ten of them," Fanny said hotly to herself,
+as she sat in her pew that, after to-morrow, would no longer
+be hers.  "The dear old thing.  `Sex sermons.'  And the race
+is to the young.  How right he is.  Well, no one can say I'm
+not getting an early start."
+
+The choir had begun the first hymn when there came down the
+aisle a stranger.  There was a little stir among the
+congregation.  Visitors were rare.  He was dark and very
+slim--with the slimness of steel wire.  He passed down the
+aisle rather uncertainly.  A traveling man, Fanny thought,
+dropped in, as sometimes they did, to say Kaddish for a
+departed father or mother.  Then she changed her mind.  Her
+quick eye noted his walk; a peculiar walk, with a spring in
+it.  Only one unfamiliar with cement pavements could walk
+like that.  The Indians must have had that same light,
+muscular step.  He chose an empty pew halfway down the aisle
+and stumbled into it rather awkwardly.  Fanny thought he was
+unnecessarily ugly, even for a man.  Then he looked up, and
+nodded and smiled at Lee Kohn, across the aisle.  His teeth
+were very white, and the smile was singularly sweet.  Fanny
+changed her mind again.  Not so bad-looking, after all. 
+Different, anyway.  And then--why, of course!  Little
+Clarence Heyl, come back from the West.  Clarence Heyl, the
+cowardy-cat.
+
+Her mind went back to that day of the street fight.  She
+smiled.  At that moment Clarence Heyl, who had been screwing
+about most shockingly, as though searching for some one,
+turned and met her smile, intended for no one, with a
+startlingly radiant one of his own, intended most plainly
+for her.  He half started forward in his pew, and then
+remembered, and sat back again, but with an effect of
+impermanence that was ludicrous.  It had been years since he
+had left Winnebago.  At the time of his mother's death they
+had tried to reach him, and had been unable to get in touch
+with him for weeks.  He had been off on some mountain
+expedition, hundreds of miles from railroad or telegraph. 
+Fanny remembered having read about him in the Winnebago
+Courier.  He seemed to be climbing mountains a great
+deal--rather difficult mountains, evidently, from the fuss
+they made over it.  A queer enough occupation for a cowardy-
+cat.  There had been a book, too.  About the Rockies. 
+She had not read it.  She rather disliked these nature
+books, as do most nature lovers.  She told herself that when
+she came upon a flaming golden maple in October she was
+content to know it was a maple, and to warm her soul at its
+blaze.
+
+There had been something in the Chicago Herald, though--
+oh, yes; it had spoken of him as the brilliant young
+naturalist, Clarence Heyl.  He was to have gone on an
+expedition with Roosevelt.  A sprained ankle, or some such
+thing, had prevented.  Fanny smiled again, to herself.  His
+mother, the fussy person who had been responsible for his
+boyhood reefers and too-shiny shoes, and his cowardice too,
+no doubt, had dreamed of seeing her Clarence a rabbi.
+
+From that point Fanny's thoughts wandered to the brave old
+man in the pulpit.  She had heard almost nothing of the
+service.  She looked at him now--at him, and then at his
+congregation, inattentive and palpably bored.  As always
+with her, the thing stamped itself on her mind as a picture. 
+She was forever seeing a situation in terms of its human
+value.  How small he looked, how frail, against the
+background of the massive Ark with its red velvet curtain. 
+And how bravely he glared over his blue glasses at the two
+Aarons girls who were whispering and giggling together, eyes
+on the newcomer.
+
+So this was what life did to you, was it?  Squeezed you dry,
+and then cast you aside in your old age, a pulp, a bit of
+discard.  Well, they'd never catch her that way.
+
+Unchurchly thoughts, these.  The little place was very
+peaceful and quiet, lulling one like a narcotic.  The
+rabbi's voice had in it that soothing monotony bred of years
+in the pulpit.  Fanny found her thoughts straying back to
+the busy, bright little store on Elm Street, then forward,
+to the Haynes-Cooper plant and the fight that was
+before her.  There settled about her mouth a certain grim
+line that sat strangely on so young a face.  The service
+marched on.  There came the organ prelude that announced the
+mourners' prayer.  Then Rabbi Thalmann began to intone the
+Kaddish.  Fanny rose, prayer book in hand.  At that Clarence
+Heyl rose too, hurriedly, as one unaccustomed to the
+service, and stood with unbowed head, looking at the rabbi
+interestedly, thoughtfully, reverently.  The two stood
+alone.  Death had been kind to Congregation Emanu-el this
+year.  The prayer ended.  Fanny winked the tears from her
+eyes, almost wrathfully.  She sat down, and there swept over
+her a feeling of finality.  It was like the closing of Book
+One in a volume made up of three parts.
+
+She said to herself:  "Winnebago is ended, and my life here. 
+How interesting that I should know that, and feel it.  It is
+like the first movement in one of the concertos Theodore was
+forever playing.  Now for the second movement!  It's got to
+be lively.  Fortissimo!  Presto!"
+
+For so clever a girl as Fanny Brandeis, that was a stupid
+conclusion at which to arrive.  How could she think it
+possible to shed her past life, like a garment?  Those
+impressionable years, between fourteen and twenty-four,
+could never be cast off.  She might don a new cloak to cover
+the old dress beneath, but the old would always be there,
+its folds peeping out here and there, its outlines plainly
+to be seen.  She might eat of things rare, and drink of
+things costly, but the sturdy, stocky little girl in the
+made-over silk dress, who had resisted the Devil in
+Weinberg's pantry on that long-ago Day of Atonement, would
+always be there at the feast.  Myself, I confess I am tired
+of these stories of young women who go to the big city,
+there to do battle with failure, to grapple with temptation,
+sin and discouragement.  So it may as well be admitted
+that Fanny Brandeis' story was not that of a painful hand-
+over-hand climb.  She was made for success.  What she
+attempted, she accomplished.  That which she strove for, she
+won.  She was too sure, too vital, too electric, for
+failure.  No, Fanny Brandeis' struggle went on inside.  And
+in trying to stifle it she came near making the blackest
+failure that a woman can make.  In grubbing for the pot of
+gold she almost missed the rainbow.
+
+Rabbi Thalmann raised his arms for the benediction.  Fanny
+looked straight up at him as though stamping a picture on
+her mind.  His eyes were resting gently on her--or perhaps
+she just fancied that he spoke to her alone as he began the
+words of the ancient closing prayer:
+
+"May the blessings of the Lord Our God rest upon you.  God
+bless thee and keep thee.  May He cause His countenance to
+shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee.  May God lift up
+His countenance unto thee . . ."
+
+At the last word she hurried up the aisle, and down the
+stairs, into the soft beauty of the May night.  She felt she
+could stand no good-bys.  In her hotel room she busied
+herself with the half-packed trunks and bags.  So it was she
+altogether failed to see the dark young man who hurried
+after her eagerly, and who was stopped by a dozen welcoming
+hands there in the temple vestibule.  He swore a deep inward
+"Damn!" as he saw her straight, slim figure disappear down
+the steps and around the corner, even while he found himself
+saying, politely, "Why, thanks!  It's good to BE back." 
+And, "Yes, things have changed.  All but the temple, and
+Rabbi Thalmann."
+
+Fanny left Winnebago at eight next morning.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINE
+
+"Mr. Fenger will see you now."  Mr. Fenger, general manager,
+had been a long time about it.  This heel-cooling experience
+was new to Fanny Brandeis.  It had always been her privilege
+to keep others waiting.  Still, she felt no resentment as
+she sat in Michael Fenger's outer office.  For as she sat
+there, waiting, she was getting a distinct impression of
+this unseen man whose voice she could just hear as he talked
+over the telephone in his inner office.  It was
+characteristic of Michael Fenger that his personality
+reached out and touched you before you came into actual
+contact with the man.  Fanny had heard of him long before
+she came to Haynes-Cooper.  He was the genie of that
+glittering lamp.  All through the gigantic plant (she had
+already met department heads, buyers, merchandise managers)
+one heard his name, and felt the impress of his mind:
+
+"You'll have to see Mr. Fenger about that."
+
+"Yes,"--pointing to a new conveyor, perhaps,--"that has just
+been installed.  It's a great help to us.  Doubles our
+shipping-room efficiency.  We used to use baskets, pulled by
+a rope.  It's Mr. Fenger's idea."
+
+Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.  Fenger had made it a
+slogan in the Haynes-Cooper plant long before the German
+nation forced it into our everyday vocabulary.  Michael
+Fenger was System.  He could take a muddle of orders, a
+jungle of unfilled contracts, a horde of incompetent
+workers, and of them make a smooth-running and effective
+unit.  Untangling snarls was his pastime.  Esprit de corps
+was his shibboleth.  Order and management his
+idols.  And his war-cry was "Results!"
+
+It was eleven o'clock when Fanny came into his outer office. 
+The very atmosphere was vibrant with his personality.  There
+hung about the place an air of repressed expectancy.  The
+room was electrically charged with the high-voltage of the
+man in the inner office.  His secretary was a spare, middle-
+aged, anxious-looking woman in snuff-brown and spectacles;
+his stenographer a blond young man, also spectacled and
+anxious; his office boy a stern youth in knickers, who bore
+no relation to the slangy, gum-chewing, redheaded office boy
+of the comic sections.
+
+The low-pitched, high-powered voice went on inside, talking
+over the long-distance telephone.  Fenger was the kind of
+man who is always talking to New York when he is in Chicago,
+and to Chicago when he is in New York.  Trains with the word
+Limited after them were invented for him and his type.  A
+buzzer sounded.  It galvanized the office boy into instant
+action.  It brought the anxious-looking stenographer to the
+doorway, notebook in hand, ready.  It sent the lean
+secretary out, and up to Fanny.
+
+"Temper," said Fanny, to herself, "or horribly nervous and
+high-keyed.  They jump like a set of puppets on a string."
+
+It was then that the lean secretary had said, "Mr. Fenger
+will see you now."
+
+Fanny was aware of a pleasant little tingle of excitement. 
+She entered the inner office.
+
+It was characteristic of Michael Fenger that he employed no
+cheap tricks.  He was not writing as Fanny Brandeis came in. 
+He was not telephoning.  He was not doing anything but
+standing at his desk, waiting for Fanny Brandeis.  As she
+came in he looked at her, through her, and she seemed to
+feel her mental processes laid open to him as a skilled
+surgeon cuts through skin and flesh and fat, to lay
+bare the muscles and nerves and vital organs beneath.  He
+put out his hand.  Fanny extended hers.  They met in a
+silent grip.  It was like a meeting between two men.  Even
+as he indexed her, Fanny's alert mind was busy docketing,
+numbering, cataloguing him.  They had in common a certain
+force, a driving power.  Fanny seated herself opposite him,
+in obedience to a gesture.  He crossed his legs comfortably
+and sat back in his big desk chair.  A great-bodied man,
+with powerful square shoulders, a long head, a rugged crest
+of a nose--the kind you see on the type of Englishman who
+has the imagination and initiative to go to Canada, or
+Australia, or America.  He wore spectacles, not the
+fashionable horn-rimmed sort, but the kind with gold ear
+pieces.  They were becoming, and gave a certain humanness to
+a face that otherwise would have been too rugged, too
+strong.  A man of forty-five, perhaps.
+
+He spoke first.  "You're younger than I thought."
+
+"So are you."
+
+"Old inside."
+
+"So am I."
+
+He uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, folded his arms on
+the desk.
+
+"You've been through the plant, Miss Brandeis?"
+
+"Yes.  Twice.  Once with a regular tourist party.  And once
+with the special guide."
+"Good.  Go through the plant whenever you can.  Don't stick
+to your own department.  It narrows one."  He paused a
+moment.  "Did you think that this opportunity to come to
+Haynes-Cooper, as assistant to the infants' wear department
+buyer was just a piece of luck, augmented by a little
+pulling on your part?" 
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It wasn't.  You were carefully picked by me, and I don't
+expect to find I've made a mistake.  I suppose you know
+very little about buying and selling infants' wear?"
+
+"Less than about almost any other article in the world--at
+least, in the department store, or mail order world."
+
+"I thought so.  And it doesn't matter.  I pretty well know
+your history, which means that I know your training.  You're
+young; you're ambitious, you're experienced; you're
+imaginative.  There's no length you can't go, with these. 
+It just depends on how farsighted your mental vision is. 
+Now listen, Miss Brandeis:  I'm not going to talk to you in
+millions.  The guides do enough of that.  But you know we do
+buy and sell in terms of millions, don't you?  Well, our
+infants' wear department isn't helping to roll up the
+millions; and it ought to, because there are millions of
+babies born every year, and the golden-spoon kind are in the
+minority.  I've decided that that department needs a woman,
+your kind of woman.  Now, as a rule, I never employ a woman
+when I can use a man.  There's only one other woman filling
+a really important position in the merchandise end of this
+business.  That's Ella Monahan, head of the glove
+department, and she's a genius.  She is a woman who is
+limited in every other respect--just average; but she knows
+glove materials in a way that's uncanny.  I'd rather have a
+man in her place; but I don't happen to know any men glove-
+geniuses.  Tell me, what do you think of that etching?"
+
+Fanny tried--and successfully--not to show the jolt her mind
+had received as she turned to look at the picture to which
+his finger pointed.  She got up and strolled over to it, and
+she was glad her suit fitted and hung as it did in the back.
+
+"I don't like it particularly.  I like it less than any
+other etching you have here."  The walls were hung with
+them.  "Of course you understand I know nothing about
+them.  But it's too flowery, isn't it, to be good?  Too many
+lines.  Like a writer who spoils his effect by using too
+many words."
+
+Fenger came over and stood beside her, staring at the black
+and white and gray thing in its frame.  "I felt that way,
+too."  He stared down at her, then.  "Jew?" he asked.
+
+A breathless instant.  "No," said Fanny Brandeis.
+
+Michael Fenger smiled for the first time.  Fanny Brandeis
+would have given everything she had, everything she hoped to
+be, to be able to take back that monosyllable.  She was
+gripped with horror at what she had done.  She had spoken
+almost mechanically.  And yet that monosyllable must have
+been the fruit of all these months of inward struggle and
+thought.  "Now I begin to understand you," Fenger went on. 
+"You've decided to lop off all the excrescences, eh?  Well,
+I can't say that I blame you.  A woman in business is
+handicapped enough by the very fact of her sex."  He stared
+at her again.  "Too bad you're so pretty."
+
+"I'm not!" said Fanny hotly, like a school-girl.
+
+"That's a thing that can't be argued, child.  Beauty's
+subjective, you know."
+
+"I don't see what difference it makes, anyway."
+
+"Oh, yes, you do."  He stopped.  "Or perhaps you don't,
+after all.  I forget how young you are.  Well, now, Miss
+Brandeis, you and your woman's mind, and your masculine
+business experience and sense are to be turned loose on our
+infants' wear department.  The buyer, Mr. Slosson, is going
+to resent you.  Naturally.  I don't know whether we'll get
+results from you in a month, or six months or a year.  Or
+ever.  But something tells me we're going to get them. 
+You've lived in a small town most of your life.  And we want
+that small-town viewpoint.  D'you think you've got it?"
+
+Fanny was on her own ground here.  "If knowing the
+Wisconsin small-town woman, and the Wisconsin farmer woman--
+and man too, for that matter--means knowing the Oregon, and
+Wyoming, and Pennsylvania, and Iowa people of the same
+class, then I've got it."
+
+"Good!" Michael Fenger stood up.  "I'm not going to load you
+down with instructions, or advice.  I think I'll let you
+grope your own way around, and bump your head a few times. 
+Then you'll learn where the low places are.  And, Miss
+Brandeis, remember that suggestions are welcome in this
+plant.  We take suggestions all the way from the elevator
+starter to the president."  His tone was kindly, but not
+hopeful.
+
+Fanny was standing too, her mental eye on the door.  But now
+she turned to face him squarely.
+
+"Do you mean that?"
+
+"Absolutely."
+
+"Well, then, I've one to make.  Your stock boys and stock
+girls walk miles and miles every day, on every floor of this
+fifteen-story building.  I watched them yesterday, filling
+up the bins, carrying orders, covering those enormous
+distances from one bin to another, up one aisle and down the
+next, to the office, back again.  Your floors are concrete,
+or cement, or some such mixture, aren't they?  I just
+happened to think of the boy who used to deliver our paper
+on Norris Street, in Winnebago, Wisconsin.  He covered his
+route on roller skates.  It saved him an hour.  Why don't
+you put roller skates on your stock boys and girls?"
+
+Fenger stared at her.  You could almost hear that mind of
+his working, like a thing on ball bearings.  "Roller
+skates."  It wasn't an exclamation.  It was a decision.  He
+pressed a buzzer--the snuff-brown secretary buzzer.  "Tell
+Clancy I want him.  Now."  He had not glanced up, or taken
+his eyes from Fanny.  She was aware of feeling a little
+uncomfortable, but elated, too.  She moved toward the door. 
+Fenger stood at his desk.  "Wait a minute."  Fanny
+waited.  Still Fenger did not speak.  Finally, "I suppose
+you know you've earned six months' salary in the last five
+minutes."
+
+Fanny eyed him coolly.  "Considering the number of your
+stock force, the time, energy, and labor saved, including
+wear and tear on department heads and their assistants, I
+should say that was a conservative statement."  And she
+nodded pleasantly, and left him.
+
+Two days later every stock clerk in the vast plant was
+equipped with light-weight roller skates.  They made a sort
+of carnival of it at first.  There were some spills, too,
+going around corners, and a little too much hilarity.  That
+wore off in a week.  In two weeks their roller skates were
+part of them; just shop labor-savers.  The report presented
+to Fenger was this:  Time and energy saved, fifty-five per
+cent; stock staff decreased by one third.  The
+picturesqueness of it, the almost ludicrous simplicity of
+the idea appealed to the entire plant.  It tickled the humor
+sense in every one of the ten thousand employees in that
+vast organization.  In the first week of her association
+with Haynes-Cooper Fanny Brandeis was actually more widely
+known than men who had worked there for years.  The
+president, Nathan Haynes himself, sent for her, chuckling.
+
+Nathan Haynes--but then, why stop for him?  Nathan Haynes
+had been swallowed, long ago, by this monster plant that he
+himself had innocently created.  You must have visited it,
+this Gargantuan thing that sprawls its length in the very
+center of Chicago, the giant son of a surprised father.  It
+is one of the city's show places, like the stockyards, the
+Art Institute, and Field's.  Fifteen years before, a
+building had been erected to accommodate a prosperous mail
+order business.  It had been built large and roomy, with
+plenty of seams, planned amply, it was thought, to allow the
+boy to grow.  It would do for twenty-five years,
+surely.  In ten years Haynes-Cooper was bursting its seams. 
+In twelve it was shamelessly naked, its arms and legs
+sticking out of its inadequate garments.  New red brick
+buildings--another--another.  Five stories added to this
+one, six stories to that, a new fifteen story merchandise
+building.
+
+The firm began to talk in tens of millions.  Its stock
+became gilt-edged, unattainable.  Lucky ones who had bought
+of it diffidently, discreetly, with modest visions of four
+and a half per cent in their unimaginative minds, saw their
+dividends doubling, trebling, quadrupling, finally soaring
+gymnastically beyond all reason.  Listen to the old guide
+who (at fifteen a week) takes groups of awed visitors
+through the great plant.  How he juggles figures; how
+grandly they roll off his tongue.  How glib he is with
+Nathan Haynes's millions.
+
+"This, ladies and gentlemen, is our mail department.  From
+two thousand to twenty-five hundred pounds of mail,
+comprising over one hundred thousand letters, are received
+here every day.  Yes, madam, I said every day.  About half
+of these letters are orders.  Last year the banking
+department counted one hundred and thirty millions of
+dollars.  One hundred and thirty millions!"  He stands there
+in his ill-fitting coat, and his star, and rubs one bony
+hand over the other.
+
+"Dear me!" says a lady tourist from Idaho, rather
+inadequately.  And yet, not so inadequately.  What
+exclamation is there, please, that fits a sum like one
+hundred and thirty millions of anything?
+
+Fanny Brandeis, fresh from Winnebago, Wisconsin, slipped
+into the great scheme of things at the Haynes-Cooper plant
+like part of a perfectly planned blue print.  It was as
+though she had been thought out and shaped for this
+particular corner.  And the reason for it was, primarily,
+Winnebago, Wisconsin.  For Haynes-Cooper grew and
+thrived on just such towns, with their surrounding farms and
+villages.  Haynes-Cooper had their fingers on the pulse and
+heart of the country as did no other industry.  They were
+close, close.  When rugs began to take the place of ingrain
+carpets it was Haynes-Cooper who first sensed the change. 
+Oh, they had had them in New York years before, certainly. 
+But after all, it isn't New York's artistic progress that
+shows the development of this nation.  It is the thing they
+are thinking, and doing, and learning in Backwash, Nebraska,
+that marks time for these United States.  There may be a
+certain significance in the announcement that New York has
+dropped the Russian craze and has gone in for that quaint
+Chinese stuff.  My dear, it makes the loveliest hangings and
+decorations.  When Fifth Avenue takes down its filet lace
+and eyelet embroidered curtains, and substitutes severe
+shantung and chaste net, there is little in the act to
+revolutionize industry, or stir the art-world.  But when the
+Haynes-Cooper company, by referring to its inventory
+ledgers, learns that it is selling more Alma Gluck than
+Harry Lauder records; when its statistics show that
+Tchaikowsky is going better than Irving Berlin, something
+epochal is happening in the musical progress of a nation. 
+And when the orders from Noose Gulch, Nevada, are for those
+plain dimity curtains instead of the cheap and gaudy
+Nottingham atrocities, there is conveyed to the mind a fact
+of immense, of overwhelming significance.  The country has
+taken a step toward civilization and good taste.
+
+So.  You have a skeleton sketch of Haynes-Cooper, whose
+feelers reach the remotest dugout in the Yukon, the most
+isolated cabin in the Rockies, the loneliest ranch-house in
+Wyoming; the Montana mining shack, the bleak Maine farm, the
+plantation in Virginia.
+
+And the man who had so innocently put life into this
+monster?  A plumpish, kindly-faced man; a bewildered,
+gentle, unimaginative and somewhat frightened man, fresh-
+cheeked, eye-glassed.  In his suite of offices in the new
+Administration Building--built two years ago--marble and oak
+throughout--twelve stories, and we're adding three already;
+offices all two-toned rugs, and leather upholstery, with
+dim, rich, brown-toned Dutch masterpieces on the walls, he
+sat helpless and defenseless while the torrent of millions
+rushed, and swirled, and foamed about him.  I think he had
+fancied, fifteen years ago, that he would some day be a
+fairly prosperous man; not rich, as riches are counted
+nowadays, but with a comfortable number of tens of thousands
+tucked away.  Two or three hundred thousand; perhaps five
+hundred thousand!--perhaps a--but, nonsense!  Nonsense!
+
+And then the thing had started.  It was as when a man idly
+throws a pebble into a chasm, or shoves a bit of ice with
+the toe of his boot, and starts a snow-slide that grows as
+it goes.  He had started this avalanche of money, and now it
+rushed on of its own momentum, plunging, rolling, leaping,
+crashing, and as it swept on it gathered rocks, trees,
+stones, houses, everything that lay in its way.  It was
+beyond the power of human hand to stop this tumbling,
+roaring slide.  In the midst of it sat Nathan Haynes,
+deafened, stunned, terrified at the immensity of what he had
+done.
+
+He began giving away huge sums, incredible sums.  It piled
+up faster than he could give it away.  And so he sat there
+in the office hung with the dim old masterpieces, and tried
+to keep simple, tried to keep sane, with that austerity that
+only mad wealth can afford--or bitter poverty.  He caused
+the land about the plant to be laid out in sunken gardens
+and baseball fields and tennis courts, so that one
+approached this monster of commerce through enchanted
+grounds, glowing with tulips and heady hyacinths in
+spring, with roses in June, blazing with salvia and golden-
+glow and asters in autumn.  There was something apologetic
+about these grounds.
+
+This, then, was the environment that Fanny Brandeis had
+chosen.  On the face of things you would have said she had
+chosen well.  The inspiration of the roller skates had not
+been merely a lucky flash.  That idea had been part of the
+consistent whole.  Her mind was her mother's mind raised to
+the nth power, and enhanced by the genius she was trying
+to crush.  Refusing to die, it found expression in a hundred
+brilliant plans, of which the roller skate idea was only
+one.
+
+Fanny had reached Chicago on Sunday.  She had entered the
+city as a queen enters her domain, authoritatively, with no
+fear upon her, no trepidation, no doubts.  She had gone at
+once to the Mendota Hotel, on Michigan Avenue, up-town, away
+from the roar of the loop.  It was a residential hotel, very
+quiet, decidedly luxurious.  She had no idea of making it
+her home.  But she would stay there until she could find an
+apartment that was small, bright, near the lake, and yet
+within fairly reasonable transportation facilities for her
+work.  Her room was on the ninth floor, not on the Michigan
+Avenue side, but east, overlooking the lake.  She spent
+hours at the windows, fascinated by the stone and steel city
+that lay just below with the incredible blue of the sail-
+dotted lake beyond, and at night, with the lights spangling
+the velvety blackness, the flaring blaze of Thirty-first
+Street's chop-suey restaurants and moving picture houses at
+the right; and far, far away, the red and white eye of the
+lighthouse winking, blinking, winking, blinking, the rumble
+and clank of a flat-wheeled Indiana avenue car, the sound of
+high laughter and a snatch of song that came faintly up to
+her from the speeding car of some midnight joy-riders!
+
+But all this had to do with her other side.  It had no
+bearing on Haynes-Cooper, and business.  Business!  That was
+it.  She had trained herself for it, like an athlete.  Eight
+hours of sleep.  A cold plunge on arising.  Sane food.  Long
+walks.  There was something terrible about her earnestness.
+
+On Monday she presented herself at the Haynes-Cooper plant. 
+Monday and Tuesday were spent in going over the great works. 
+It was an exhausting process, but fascinating beyond belief. 
+It was on Wednesday that she had been summoned for the talk
+with Michael Fenger.  Thursday morning she was at her desk
+at eight-thirty.  It was an obscure desk, in a dingy corner
+of the infants' wear department, the black sheep section of
+the great plant.  Her very presence in that corner seemed to
+change it magically.  You must remember how young she was,
+how healthy, how vigorous, with the freshness of the small
+town still upon her.  It was health and youth, and vigor
+that gave that gloss to her hair (conscientious brushing
+too, perhaps), that color to her cheeks and lips, that
+brightness to her eyes.  But crafty art and her dramatic
+instinct were responsible for the tailored severity of her
+costume, for the whiteness of her blouse, the trim common-
+sense expensiveness of her shoes and hat and gloves.
+
+Slosson, buyer and head of the department, came in at nine. 
+Fanny rose to greet him.  She felt a little sorry for
+Slosson.  In her mind she already knew him for a doomed man.
+
+"Well, well!"--he was the kind of person who would say,
+well, well!--"You're bright and early, Miss--ah--"
+
+"Brandeis."
+
+"Yes, certainly; Miss Brandeis.  Well, nothing like making a
+good start."
+
+"I wanted to go through the department by myself," said
+Fanny.  "The shelves and bins, and the numbering system.  I
+see that your new maternity dresses have just come in."
+
+"Oh, yes.  How do you like them?"
+
+"I think they're unnecessarily hideous, Mr. Slosson."
+
+"My dear young lady, a plain garment is what they want. 
+Unnoticeable."
+
+"Unnoticeable, yes; but becoming.  At such a time a woman is
+at her worst.  If she can get it, she at least wants a dress
+that doesn't add to her unattractiveness."
+
+"Let me see--you are not--ah--married, I believe, Miss
+Brandeis?"
+
+"No."
+
+"I am.  Three children.  All girls."  He passed a nervous
+hand over his head, rumpling his hair a little.  "An
+expensive proposition, let me tell you, three girls.  But
+there's very little I don't know about babies, as you may
+imagine."
+
+But there settled over Fanny Brandeis' face the mask of
+hardness that was so often to transform it.
+
+The morning mail was in--the day's biggest grist, deluge of
+it, a flood.  Buyer and assistant buyer never saw the actual
+letters, or attended to their enclosed orders.  It was only
+the unusual letter, the complaint or protest that reached
+their desk.  Hundreds of hands downstairs sorted, stamped,
+indexed, filed, after the letter-opening machines had slit
+the envelopes.  Those letter-openers!  Fanny had hung over
+them, enthralled.  The unopened envelopes were fed into
+them.  Flip!  Zip!  Flip!  Out!  Opened!  Faster than eye
+could follow.  It was uncanny.  It was, somehow, humorous,
+like the clever antics of a trained dog.  You could not
+believe that this little machine actually performed what
+your eyes beheld.  Two years later they installed the sand-
+paper letter-opener, marvel of simplicity.  It made the
+old machine seem cumbersome and slow.  Guided by Izzy, the
+expert, its rough tongue was capable of licking open six
+hundred and fifty letters a minute.
+
+Ten minutes after the mail came in the orders were being
+filled; bins, shelves, warehouses, were emptying their
+contents.  Up and down the aisles went the stock clerks;
+into the conveyors went the bundles, down the great spiral
+bundle chute, into the shipping room, out by mail, by
+express, by freight.  This leghorn hat for a Nebraska
+country belle; a tombstone for a rancher's wife; a plow,
+brave in its red paint; coffee, tea, tinned fruit, bound for
+Alaska; lace, muslin, sheeting, toweling, all intended for
+the coarse trousseau of a Georgia bride.
+
+It was not remarkable that Fanny Brandeis fitted into this
+scheme of things.  For years she had ministered to the wants
+of just this type of person.  The letters she saw at Haynes-
+Cooper's read exactly as customers had worded their wants at
+Brandeis' Bazaar.  The magnitude of the thing thrilled her,
+the endless possibilities of her own position.
+
+During the first two months of her work there she was as
+unaggressive as possible.  She opened the very pores of her
+mind and absorbed every detail of her department.  But she
+said little, followed Slosson's instructions in her position
+as assistant buyer, and suggested no changes.  Slosson's
+wrinkle of anxiety smoothed itself away, and his manner
+became patronizingly authoritative again.  Fanny seemed to
+have become part of the routine of the place.  Fenger did
+not send for her.  June and July were insufferably hot. 
+Fanny seemed to thrive, to expand like a flower in the heat,
+when others wilted and shriveled.  The spring catalogue was
+to be made up in October, as always, six months in advance. 
+The first week in August Fanny asked for an interview with
+Fenger.  Slosson was to be there.  At ten o'clock she
+entered Fenger's inner office.  He was telephoning--
+something about dinner at the Union League Club.  His voice
+was suave, his tone well modulated, his accent correct, his
+English faultless.  And yet Fanny Brandeis, studying the
+etchings on his wall, her back turned to him, smiled to
+herself.  The voice, the tone, the accent, the English, did
+not ring true They were acquired graces, exquisite
+imitations of the real thing.  Fanny Brandeis knew.  She was
+playing the same game herself.  She understood this man now,
+after two months in the Haynes-Cooper plant.  These
+marvelous examples of the etcher's art, for example.  They
+were the struggle for expression of a man whose youth had
+been bare of such things.  His love for them was much the
+same as that which impels the new made millionaire to buy
+rare pictures, rich hangings, tapestries, rugs, not so much
+in the desire to impress the world with his wealth as to
+satisfy the craving for beauty, the longing to possess that
+which is exquisite, and fine, and almost unobtainable.  You
+have seen how a woman, long denied luxuries, feeds her
+starved senses on soft silken things, on laces and gleaming
+jewels, for pure sensuous delight in their feel and look.
+
+Thus Fanny mused as she eyed these treasures--grim, deft,
+repressed things, done with that economy of line which is
+the test of the etcher's art.
+
+Fenger hung up the receiver.
+
+"So it's taken you two months, Miss Brandeis.  I was awfully
+afraid, from the start you made, that you'd be back here in
+a week, bursting with ideas."
+
+Fanny smiled, appreciatively.  He had come very near the
+truth.  "I had to use all my self-control, that first week. 
+After that it wasn't so hard."
+
+Fenger's eyes narrowed upon her.  "Pretty sure of yourself,
+aren't you?"
+
+"Yes," said Fanny.  She came over to his desk.
+
+"I wish we needn't have Mr. Slosson here this morning. 
+After all, he's been here for years, and I'm practically an
+upstart.  He's so much older, too.  I--I hate to hurt him. 
+I wish you'd--"
+
+But Fenger shook his head.  "Slosson's due now.  And he has
+got to take his medicine.  This is business, Miss Brandeis. 
+You ought to know what that means.  For that matter, it may
+be that you haven't hit upon an idea.  In that case, Slosson
+would have the laugh, wouldn't he?"
+
+Slosson entered at that moment.  And there was a chip on his
+shoulder.  It was evident in the way he bristled, in the way
+he seated himself.  His fingers drummed his knees.  He was
+like a testy, hum-ha stage father dealing with a willful
+child.
+
+Fenger took out his watch.
+
+"Now, Miss Brandeis."
+
+Fanny took a chair facing the two men, and crossed her trim
+blue serge knees, and folded her hands in her lap.  A deep
+pink glowed in her cheeks.  Her eyes were very bright.  All
+the Molly Brandeis in her was at the surface, sparkling
+there.  And she looked almost insultingly youthful.
+
+"You--you want me to talk?"
+
+"We want you to talk.  We have time for just three-quarters
+of an hour of uninterrupted conversation.  If you've got
+anything to say you ought to say it in that time.  Now, Miss
+Brandeis, what's the trouble with the Haynes-Cooper infants'
+wear department?"
+
+And Fanny Brandeis took a long breath
+
+"The trouble with the Haynes-Cooper infants' wear department
+is that it doesn't understand women.  There are millions of
+babies born every year.  An incredible number of them are
+mail order babies.  I mean by that they are born to tired,
+clumsy-fingered immigrant women, to women in mills and
+factories, to women on farms, to women in remote
+villages.  They're the type who use the mail order method. 
+I've learned this one thing about that sort of woman: she
+may not want that baby, but either before or after it's born
+she'll starve, and save, and go without proper clothing, and
+even beg, and steal to give it clothes--clothes with lace on
+them, with ribbon on them, sheer white things.  I don't know
+why that's true, but it is.  Well, we're not reaching them. 
+Our goods are unattractive.  They're packed and shipped
+unattractively.  Why, all this department needs is a little
+psychology--and some lace that doesn't look as if it had
+been chopped out with an ax.  It's the little, silly,
+intimate things that will reach these women.  No, not silly,
+either.  Quite understandable.  She wants fine things for
+her baby, just as the silver-spoon mother does.  The thing
+we'll have to do is to give her silver-spoon models at
+pewter prices."
+
+"It can't be done," said Slosson.
+
+"Now, wait a minute, Slosson," Fenger put in, smoothly. 
+"Miss Brandeis has given us a very fair general statement. 
+We'll have some facts.  Are you prepared to give us an
+actual working plan?"
+
+"Yes.  At least, it sounds practical to me.  And if it does
+to you--and to Mr. Slosson--"
+
+"Humph!" snorted that gentleman, in expression of defiance,
+unbelief, and a determination not to be impressed.
+
+It acted as a goad to Fanny.  She leaned forward in her
+chair and talked straight at the big, potent force that sat
+regarding her in silent attention.
+
+"I still say that we can copy the high-priced models in low-
+priced materials because, in almost every case, it isn't the
+material that makes the expensive model; it's the line, the
+cut, the little trick that gives it style.  We can get that. 
+We've been giving them stuff that might have been made by
+prison labor, for all the distinction it had.  Then 
+I think we ought to make a feature of the sanitary 
+methods used in our infants' department.
+Every article intended for a baby's use should
+be wrapped or boxed as it lies in the bin or on the shelf. 
+And those bins ought to be glassed.  We would advertise
+that, and it would advertise itself.  Our visitors would
+talk about it.  This department hasn't been getting a square
+deal in the catalogue.  Not enough space.  It ought to have
+not only more catalogue space, but a catalogue all its own--
+the Baby Book.  Full of pictures.  Good ones.  Illustrations
+that will make every mother think her baby will look like
+that baby, once it is wearing our No. 29E798--chubby babies,
+curly-headed, and dimply.  And the feature of that catalogue
+ought to be, not separate garments, but complete outfits. 
+Outfits boxed, ready for shipping, and ranging in price all
+the way from twenty-five dollars to three-ninety-eight--"
+
+"It can't be done!" yelled Slosson.  "Three-ninety-eight! 
+Outfits!"
+
+"It can be done.  I've figured it out, down to a packet of
+assorted size safety pins.  We'll call it our emergency
+outfit.  Thirty pieces.  And while we're about it, every
+outfit over five dollars ought to be packed in a pink or a
+pale blue pasteboard box.  The outfits trimmed in pink, pink
+boxes; the outfits trimmed in blue, blue boxes.  In eight
+cases out of ten their letters will tell us whether it's a
+pink or blue baby.  And when they get our package, and take
+out that pink or blue box, they'll be as pleased as if we'd
+made them a present.  It's the personal note--"
+
+"Personal slop!" growled Slosson.  "It isn't business.  It's
+sentimental slush!"
+
+"Sentimental, yes," agreed Fanny pleasantly, "but then,
+we're running the only sentimental department in this
+business.  And we ought to be doing it at the rate of a
+million and a quarter a year.  If you think these last
+suggestions sentimental, I'm afraid the next one--"
+
+"Let's have it, Miss Brandeis," Fenger encouraged her
+quietly.
+
+"It's"--she flashed a mischievous smile at Slosson--"it's a
+mother's guide and helper, and adviser.  A woman who'll
+answer questions, give advice.  Some one they'll write to,
+with a picture in their minds of a large, comfortable,
+motherly-looking person in gray.  You know we get hundreds
+of letters asking whether they ought to order flannel bands,
+or the double-knitted kind.  That sort of thing.  And who's
+been answering them?  Some sixteen-year-old girl in the
+mailing department who doesn't know a flannel band from a
+bootee when she sees it.  We could call our woman something
+pleasant and everydayish, like Emily Brand.  Easy to
+remember.  And until we can find her, I'll answer those
+letters myself.  They're important to us as well as to the
+woman who writes them.  And now, there's the matter of
+obstetrical outfits.  Three grades, packed ready for
+shipment, practical, simple, and complete.  Our drug section
+has the separate articles, but we ought to--"
+
+"Oh, lord!" groaned Slosson, and slumped disgustedly in his
+seat.
+
+But Fenger got up, came over to Fanny, and put a hand on her
+shoulder for a moment.  He looked down at her.  "I knew
+you'd do it."  He smiled queerly.  "Tell me, where did you
+learn all this?"
+
+"I don't know," faltered Fanny happily.  "Brandeis' Bazaar,
+perhaps.  It's just another case of plush photograph album."
+
+"Plush--?"
+
+Fanny told him that story.  Even the discomfited Slosson
+grinned at it.
+
+But after ten minutes more of general discussion Slosson
+left.  Fenger, without putting it in words, had
+conveyed that to him.  Fanny stayed.  They did things
+that way at Haynes-Cooper.  No waste.  No delay.  That she
+had accomplished in two months that which ordinarily takes
+years was not surprising.  They did things that way, too, at
+Haynes-Cooper.  Take the case of Nathan Haynes himself.  And
+Michael Fenger too who, not so many years before, had been a
+machine-boy in a Racine woolen mill.
+
+For my part, I confess that Fanny Brandeis begins to lose
+interest for me.  Big Business seems to dwarf the finer
+things in her.  That red-cheeked, shabby little schoolgirl,
+absorbed in Zola and peanut brittle in the Winnebago
+library, was infinitely more appealing than this glib and
+capable young woman.  The spitting wildcat of the street
+fight so long ago was gentler by far than this cool person
+who was so deliberately taking his job away from Slosson. 
+You, too, feel that way about her?  That is as it should be. 
+It is the penalty they pay who, given genius, sympathy, and
+understanding as their birthright, trade them for the tawdry
+trinkets money brings.
+
+Perhaps the last five minutes of that conference between
+Fanny and Michael Fenger reveals a new side, and presents
+something of interest.  It was a harrowing and unexpected
+five minutes.
+
+You may remember how Michael Fenger had a way of looking at
+one, silently.  It was an intent and concentrated gaze that
+had the effect of an actual physical hold.  Most people
+squirmed under it.  Fanny, feeling it on her now, frowned
+and rose to leave.
+
+"Shall you want to talk these things over again?  Of course
+I've only outlined them, roughly.  You gave me so little
+time."
+
+Fenger, at his desk, did not answer, or turn away his gaze. 
+A little blaze of wrath flamed into Fanny's face.
+
+"General manager or not," she said, very low-voiced,
+"I wish you wouldn't sit and glower at me like that.  It's
+rude, and it's disconcerting," which was putting it
+forthrightly.
+
+"I beg your pardon!" Fenger came swiftly around the desk,
+and over to her.  "I was thinking very hard.  Miss Brandeis,
+will you dine with me somewhere tonight?  Then to-morrow
+night?  But I want to talk to you."
+
+"Here I am.  Talk."
+
+"But I want to talk to--you."
+
+It was then that Fanny Brandeis saved an ugly situation. 
+For she laughed, a big, wholesome, outdoors sort of laugh. 
+She was honestly amused.
+
+"My dear Mr. Fenger, you've been reading the murky
+magazines.  Very bad for you."
+
+Fenger was unsmiling:  "Why won't you dine with me?"
+
+"Because it would be unconventional and foolish.  I respect
+the conventions.  They're so sensible.  And because it would
+be unfair to you, and to Mrs. Fenger, and to me."
+
+"Rot!  It's you who have the murky magazine viewpoint, as
+you call it, when you imply--"
+
+"Now, look here, Mr. Fenger," Fanny interrupted, quietly. 
+"Let's be square with each other, even if we're not being
+square with ourselves.  You're the real power in this plant,
+because you've the brains.  You can make any person in this
+organization, or break them.  That sounds melodramatic, but
+it's true.  I've got a definite life plan, and it's as
+complete and detailed as an engineering blue print.  I don't
+intend to let you spoil it.  I've made a real start here. 
+If you want to, I've no doubt you can end it.  But before
+you do, I want to warn you that I'll make a pretty stiff
+fight for it.  I'm no silent sufferer.  I'll say things. 
+And people usually believe me when I talk."
+
+Still the silent, concentrated gaze.  With a little
+impatient exclamation Fanny walked toward the door. 
+Fenger, startlingly light and agile for his great height,
+followed.
+
+"I'm sorry, Miss Brandeis, terribly sorry.  You see, you
+interest me very much.  Very much."
+
+"Thanks," dryly.
+
+"Don't go just yet.  Please.  I'm not a villain.  Really. 
+That is, not a deliberate villain.  But when I find
+something very fine, very intricate, very fascinating and
+complex--like those etchings, for example--I am intrigued. 
+I want it near me.  I want to study it."
+
+Fanny said nothing.  But she thought, "This is a dangerously
+clever man.  Too clever for you.  You know so little about
+them."  Fenger waited.  Most women would have found refuge
+in words.  The wrong words.  It is only the strong who can
+be silent when in doubt.
+
+"Perhaps you will dine with Mrs. Fenger and me at our home
+some evening?  Mrs. Fenger will speak to you about it."
+
+"I'm afraid I'm usually too tired for further effort at the
+end of the day.  I'm sorry----"
+
+"Some Sunday night perhaps, then.  Tea."
+
+"Thank you."  And so out, past the spare secretary, the
+anxious-browed stenographer, the academic office boy, to the
+hallway, the elevator, and finally the refuge of her own
+orderly desk.  Slosson was at lunch in one of the huge
+restaurants provided for employees in the building across
+the street.  She sat there, very still, for some minutes;
+for more minutes than she knew.  Her hands were clasped
+tightly on the desk, and her eyes stared ahead in a puzzled,
+resentful, bewildered way.  Something inside her was saying
+over and over again:
+
+"You lied to him on that very first day.  That placed you. 
+That stamped you.  Now he thinks you're rotten all the way
+through.  You lied on the very first day."
+
+Ella Monahan poked her head in at the door.  The Gloves
+were on that floor, at the far end.  The two women rarely
+saw each other, except at lunch time.
+
+"Missed you at lunch," said Ella Monahan.  She was a pink-
+cheeked, bright-eyed woman of forty-one or two, prematurely
+gray and therefore excessively young in her manner, as women
+often are who have grown gray before their time.
+
+Fanny stood up, hurriedly.  "I was just about to go."
+
+"Try the grape pie, dear.  It's delicious."  And strolled
+off down the aisle that seemed to stretch endlessly ahead.
+
+Fanny stood for a moment looking after her, as though
+meaning to call her back.  But she must have changed her
+mind, because she said, "Oh, nonsense!" aloud.  And went
+across to lunch.  And ordered grape pie.  And enjoyed it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TEN
+
+The invitation to tea came in due time from Mrs. Fenger.  A
+thin, querulous voice over the telephone prepared one for
+the thin, querulous Mrs. Fenger herself.  A sallow,
+plaintive woman, with a misbehaving valve.  The valve, she
+confided to Fanny, made any effort dangerous.  Also it made
+her susceptible to draughts.  She wore over her shoulders a
+scarf that was constantly slipping and constantly being
+retrieved by Michael Fenger.  The sight of this man, a
+physical and mental giant, performing this task ever so
+gently and patiently, sent a little pang of pity through
+Fanny, as Michael Fenger knew it would.  The Fengers lived
+in an apartment on the Lake Shore Drive--an apartment such
+as only Chicago boasts.  A view straight across the lake,
+rooms huge and many-windowed, a glass-enclosed sun-porch gay
+with chintz and wicker, an incredible number of bathrooms. 
+The guests, besides Fanny, included a young pair, newly
+married and interested solely in rents, hangings, linen
+closets, and the superiority of the Florentine over the
+Jacobean for dining room purposes; and a very scrubbed
+looking, handsome, spectacled man of thirty-two or three who
+was a mechanical engineer.  Fanny failed to catch his name,
+though she learned it later.  Privately, she dubbed him
+Fascinating Facts, and he always remained that.  His
+conversation was invariably prefaced with, "Funny thing
+happened down at the works to-day."  The rest of it sounded
+like something one reads at the foot of each page of a
+loose-leaf desk calendar.
+
+At tea there was a great deal of silver, and lace, but Fanny
+thought she could have improved on the chicken a la king. 
+It lacked paprika and personality.  Mrs. Fenger was
+constantly directing one or the other of the neat maids in
+an irritating aside.
+
+After tea Michael Fenger showed Fanny his pictures, not
+boastfully, but as one who loves them reveals his treasures
+to an appreciative friend.  He showed her his library, too,
+and it was the library of a reader.  Fanny nibbled at it,
+hungrily.  She pulled out a book here, a book there, read a
+paragraph, skimmed a page.  There was no attempt at
+classification.  Lever rubbed elbows with Spinoza; Mark
+Twain dug a facetious thumb into Haeckel's ribs.  Fanny
+wanted to sit down on the floor, legs crossed, before the
+open shelves, and read, and read, and read.  Fenger,
+watching the light in her face, seemed himself to take on a
+certain glow, as people generally did who found this girl in
+sympathy with them.
+
+They were deep in book talk when Fascinating Facts strolled
+in, looking aggrieved, and spoiled it with the thoroughness
+of one who never reads, and is not ashamed of it.
+
+"My word, I'm having a rotten time, Fenger," he said,
+plaintively.  "They've got a tape-measure out of your wife's
+sewing basket, those two in there, and they're down on their
+hands and knees, measuring something.  It has to do with
+their rug, over your rug, or some such rot.  And then you
+take Miss Brandeis and go off into the library."
+
+"Then stay here," said Fanny, "and talk books."
+
+"My book's a blue-print," admitted Fascinating Facts,
+cheerfully.  "I never get time to read.  There's enough
+fiction, and romance, and adventure in my job to give me all
+the thrill I want.  Why, just last Tuesday--no, Thursday it
+was--down at the works----"
+
+Between Fanny and Fenger there flashed a look made up of
+dismay, and amusement, and secret sympathy.  It was a
+look that said, "We both see the humor of this.  Most people
+wouldn't.  Our angle is the same."  Such a glance jumps the
+gap between acquaintance and friendship that whole days of
+spoken conversation cannot cover.
+
+"Cigar?" asked Fenger, hoping to stay the flood.
+
+"No, thanks.  Say, Fenger, would there be a row if I smoked
+my pipe?"
+
+"That black one?  With the smell?"
+
+"The black one, yes."
+
+"There would."  Fenger glanced in toward his wife, and
+smiled, dryly.
+Fascinating Facts took his hand out of his pocket,
+regretfully.
+
+"Wouldn't it sour a fellow on marriage!  Wouldn't it!  First
+those two in there, with their damned linen closets, and
+their rugs--I beg your pardon, Miss Brandeis!  And now your
+missus objects to my pipe.  You wouldn't treat me like that,
+would you, Miss Brandeis?"
+
+There was about him something that appealed--something
+boyish and likeable.
+
+"No, I wouldn't.  I'd let you smoke a nargileh, if you
+wanted to, surrounded by rolls of blue prints."
+
+"I knew it.  I'm going to drive you home for that."
+
+And he did, in his trim little roadster.  It is a fairy road
+at night, that lake drive between the north and south sides. 
+Even the Rush street bridge cannot quite spoil it.  Fanny
+sat back luxuriously and let the soft splendor of the late
+August night enfold her.  She was intelligently
+monosyllabic, while Fascinating Facts talked.  At the door
+of her apartment house (she had left the Mendota weeks
+before) Fascinating Facts surprised her.
+
+"I--I'd like to see you again, Miss Brandeis.  If you'll let
+me."
+
+"I'm so busy," faltered Fanny.  Then it came to her that
+perhaps he did not know.  "I'm with Haynes-Cooper, you
+know.  Assistant buyer in the infants' wear department."
+
+"Yes, I know.  I suppose a girl like you couldn't be
+interested in seeing a chap like me again, but I thought
+maybe----"
+
+"But I would," interrupted Fanny, impulsively.  "Indeed I
+would."
+
+"Really!  Perhaps you'll drive, some evening.  Over to the
+Bismarck Gardens, or somewhere.  It would rest you."
+
+"I'm sure it would.  Suppose you telephone me."
+
+That was her honest, forthright, Winnebago Wisconsin self
+talking.  But up in her apartment the other Fanny Brandeis,
+the calculating, ambitious, determined woman, said:  "Now
+why did I say that!  I never want to see the boy again.
+
+"Use him.  Experiment with him.  Evidently men are going to
+enter into this thing.  Michael Fenger has, already.  And
+now this boy.  Why not try certain tests with them as we
+used to follow certain formulae in the chemistry laboratory
+at high school?  This compound, that compound, what
+reaction?  Then, when the time comes to apply your
+knowledge, you'll know."
+
+Which shows how ignorant she was of this dangerous phase of
+her experiment.  If she had not been, she must have known
+that these were not chemicals, but explosives with which she
+proposed to play.
+
+The trouble was that Fanny Brandeis, the creative, was not
+being fed.  And the creative fire requires fuel.  Fanny
+Brandeis fed on people, not things.  And her work at Haynes-
+Cooper was all with inanimate objects.  The three months
+since her coming to Chicago had been crowded and eventful. 
+Haynes-Cooper claimed every ounce of her energy, every atom
+of her wit and resourcefulness.  In return it gave--salary. 
+Not too much salary.  That would come later, perhaps. 
+Unfortunately, Fanny Brandeis did not thrive on that
+kind of fare.  She needed people.  She craved contact. 
+All these millions whom she served--these unseen, unheard
+men and women, and children--she wanted to see them.  She
+wanted to touch them.  She wanted to talk with them.  It was
+as though a lover of the drama, eager to see his favorite
+actress in her greatest part, were to find himself viewing
+her in a badly constructed film play.
+
+So Fanny Brandeis took to prowling.  There are people who
+have a penchant for cities--more than that, a talent for
+them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and
+pulse-beats, as others have a highly developed music sense,
+or color reaction.  It is a thing that cannot be acquired. 
+In Fanny Brandeis there was this abnormal response to the
+color and tone of any city.  And Chicago was a huge,
+polyglot orchestra, made up of players in every possible
+sort of bizarre costume, performing on every known
+instrument, leaderless, terrifyingly discordant, yet with an
+occasional strain, exquisite and poignant, to be heard
+through the clamor and din.
+
+A walk along State street (the wrong side) or Michigan
+avenue at five, or through one of the city's foreign
+quarters, or along the lake front at dusk, stimulated her
+like strong wine.  She was drunk with it.  And all the time
+she would say to herself, little blind fool that she was:
+
+"Don't let it get you.  Look at it, but don't think about
+it.  Don't let the human end of it touch you.  There's
+nothing in it."
+
+And meanwhile she was feasting on those faces in the crowds. 
+Those faces in the crowds!  They seemed to leap out at her. 
+They called to her.  So she sketched them, telling herself
+that she did it by way of relaxation, and diversion.  One
+afternoon she left her desk early, and perched herself on
+one of the marble benches that lined the sunken garden just
+across from the main group of Haynes-Cooper buildings. 
+She wanted to see what happened when those great buildings
+emptied.  Even her imagination did not meet the actuality. 
+At 5:30 the streets about the plant were empty, except for
+an occasional passerby.  At 5:31 there trickled down the
+broad steps of building after building thin dark streams of
+humanity, like the first slow line of lava that crawls down
+the side of an erupting volcano.  The trickle broadened into
+a stream, spread into a flood, became a torrent that
+inundated the streets, the sidewalks, filling every nook and
+crevice, a moving mass.  Ten thousand people!  A city! 
+Fanny found herself shaking with excitement, and something
+like terror at the immensity of it.  She tried to get a
+picture of it, a sketch, with the gleaming windows of the
+red brick buildings as a background.  Amazingly enough, she
+succeeded in doing it.  That was because she tried for broad
+effects, and relied on one bit of detail for her story.  It
+was the face of a girl--a very tired and tawdry girl, of
+sixteen, perhaps.  On her face the look that the day's work
+had stamped there was being wiped gently away by another
+look; a look that said release, and a sweetheart, and an
+evening at the movies.  Fanny, in some miraculous way, got
+it.
+
+She prowled in the Ghetto, and sketched those patient Jewish
+faces, often grotesque, sometimes repulsive, always mobile. 
+She wandered down South Clark street, flaring with purple-
+white arc-lights, and looked in at its windows that
+displayed a pawnbroker's glittering wares, or, just next
+door, a flat-topped stove over which a white-capped magician
+whose face smacked of the galley, performed deft tricks with
+a pancake turner.  "Southern chicken dinner," a lying sign
+read, "with waffles and real maple syrup, 35@."  Past these
+windows promenaded the Clark street women, hard-eyed, high-
+heeled, aigretted; on the street corners loafed the Clark
+street men, blue-shaven, wearing checked suits, soiled
+faun-topped shoes, and diamond scarf pins.  And even as she
+watched them, fascinated, they vanished.  Clark street
+changed overnight, and became a business thoroughfare, lined
+with stately office buildings, boasting marble and gold-leaf
+banks, filled with hurrying clerks, stenographers, and
+prosperous bond salesmen.  It was like a sporting man who,
+thriving in middle age, endeavors to live down his shady
+past.
+
+Fanny discovered Cottage Grove avenue, and Halsted street,
+and Jefferson, and South State, where she should never have
+walked.  There is an ugliness about Chicago's ugly streets
+that, for sheer, naked brutality, is equaled nowhere in the
+world.  London has its foul streets, smoke-blackened,
+sinister.  But they are ugly as crime is ugly--and as
+fascinating.  It is like the ugliness of an old hag who has
+lived a life, and who could tell you strange tales, if she
+would.  Walking through them you think of Fagin, of Children
+of the Ghetto, of Tales of Mean Streets.  Naples is
+honeycombed with narrow, teeming alleys, grimed with the
+sediment of centuries, colored like old Stilton, and
+smelling much worse.  But where is there another Cottage
+Grove avenue!  Sylvan misnomer!  A hideous street, and
+sordid.  A street of flat-wheeled cars, of delicatessen
+shops and moving picture houses, of clanging bells, of
+frowsy women, of men who dart around corners with pitchers,
+their coat collars turned up to hide the absence of linen. 
+One day Fanny found herself at Fifty-first street, and there
+before her lay Washington Park, with its gracious meadow,
+its Italian garden, its rose walk, its lagoon, and drooping
+willows.  But then, that was Chicago.  All contrast.  The
+Illinois Central railroad puffed contemptuous cinders into
+the great blue lake.  And almost in the shadow of the City
+Hall nestled Bath-House John's groggery.
+
+Michigan Avenue fascinated her most.  Here was a street
+developing before one's eyes.  To walk on it was like
+being present at a birth.  It is one of the few streets in
+the world.  New York has two, Paris a hundred, London none,
+Vienna one.  Berlin, before the war, knew that no one walked
+Unter den Linden but American tourists and German
+shopkeepers from the provinces, with their fat wives.  But
+this Michigan Boulevard, unfinished as Chicago itself,
+shifting and changing daily, still manages to take on a
+certain form and rugged beauty.  It has about it a gracious
+breadth.  As you turn into it from the crash and thunder of
+Wabash there comes to you a sense of peace.  That's the
+sweep of it, and the lake just beyond, for Michigan avenue
+is a one-side street.  It's west side is a sheer mountain
+wall of office buildings, clubs, and hotels, whose ground
+floors are fascinating with specialty shops.  A milliner
+tantalizes the passer-by with a single hat stuck knowingly
+on a carved stick.  An art store shows two etchings, and a
+vase.  A jeweler's window holds square blobs of emeralds, on
+velvet, and perhaps a gold mesh bag, sprawling limp and
+invertebrate, or a diamond and platinum la valliere,
+chastely barbaric.  Past these windows, from Randolph to
+Twelfth surges the crowd: matinee girls, all white fox, and
+giggles and orchids; wise-eyed saleswomen from the smart
+specialty shops, dressed in next week's mode; art students,
+hugging their precious flat packages under their arms;
+immigrants, in corduroys and shawls, just landed at the
+Twelfth street station; sightseeing families, dazed and
+weary, from Kansas; tailored and sabled Lake Shore Drive
+dwellers; convention delegates spilling out of the
+Auditorium hotel, red-faced, hoarse, with satin badges
+pinned on their coats, and their hats (the wrong kind) stuck
+far back on their heads; music students to whom Michigan
+Avenue means the Fine Arts Building.  There you have the
+west side.  But just across the street the walk is as
+deserted as though a pestilence lurked there.  Here the Art
+Institute rears its smoke-blackened face, and Grant
+Park's greenery struggles bravely against the poisonous
+breath of the Illinois Central engines.
+
+Just below Twelfth street block after block shows the solid
+plate glass of the automobile shops, their glittering wares
+displayed against an absurd background of oriental rugs,
+Tiffany lamps, potted plants, and mahogany.  In the windows
+pose the salesmen, no less sleek and glittering than their
+wares.  Just below these, for a block or two, rows of
+sinister looking houses, fallen into decay, with slatternly
+women lolling at their windows, and gas jets flaring blue in
+dim hallways.  Below Eighteenth still another change, where
+the fat stone mansions of Chicago's old families (save the
+mark!) hide their diminished heads behind signs that read:
+
+"Marguerite.  Robes et Manteaux."  And, "Smolkin.  Tailor."
+
+Now, you know that women buyers for mail order houses do not
+spend their Saturday afternoons and Sundays thus, prowling
+about a city's streets.  Fanny Brandeis knew it too, in her
+heart.  She knew that the Ella Monahans of her world spent
+their holidays in stayless relaxation, manicuring, mending a
+bit, skimming the Sunday papers, massaging crows'-feet
+somewhat futilely.  She knew that women buyers do not, as a
+rule, catch their breath with delight at sight of the pock-
+marked old Field Columbian museum in Jackson Park, softened
+and beautified by the kindly gray chiffon of the lake mist,
+and tinted by the rouge of the sunset glow, so that it is a
+thing of spectral loveliness.  Successful mercantile women,
+seeing the furnace glare of the South Chicago steel mills
+flaring a sullen red against the lowering sky, do not draw a
+disquieting mental picture of men toiling there, naked to
+the waist, and glistening with sweat in the devouring heat
+of the fires.
+
+I don't know how she tricked herself.  I suppose she
+said it was the city's appeal to the country dweller,
+but she lied, and she knew she was lying.  She must have
+known it was the spirit of Molly Brandeis in her, and of
+Molly Brandeis' mother, and of her mother's mother's mother,
+down the centuries to Sarah; repressed women, suffering
+women, troubled, patient, nomadic women, struggling now in
+her for expression.
+
+And Fanny Brandeis went doggedly on, buying and selling
+infants' wear, and doing it expertly.  Her office desk would
+have interested you.  It was so likely to be littered with
+the most appealing bits of apparel--a pair of tiny,
+crocheted bootees, pink and white; a sturdy linen smock; a
+silken hood so small that one's doubled fist filled it.
+
+The new catalogue was on the presses.  Fanny had slaved over
+it, hampered by Slosson.  Fenger had given her practically a
+free hand.  Results would not come in for many days.  The
+Christmas trade would not tell the tale, for that was always
+a time of abnormal business.  The dull season following the
+holiday rush would show the real returns.  Slosson was
+discouragement itself.  His attitude was not resentful; it
+was pitying, and that frightened Fanny.  She wished that he
+would storm a little.  Then she read her department
+catalogue proof sheets, and these reassured her.  They were
+attractive.  And the new baby book had turned out very well,
+with a colored cover that would appeal to any one who had
+ever been or seen a baby.
+
+September brought a letter from Theodore.  A letter from
+Theodore meant just one thing.  Fanny hesitated a moment
+before opening it.  She always hesitated before opening
+Theodore's letters.  While she hesitated the old struggle
+would rage in her.
+
+"I don't owe him anything," the thing within her would say. 
+"God knows I don't.  What have I done all my life but give,
+and give, and give to him!  I'm a woman.  He's a man. 
+Let him work with his hands, as I do.  He's had his share. 
+More than his share."
+
+Nevertheless she had sent him one thousand of the six
+thousand her mother had bequeathed to her.  She didn't want
+to do it.  She fought doing it.  But she did it.
+
+Now, as she held this last letter in her hands, and stared
+at the Bavarian stamp, she said to herself:
+
+"He wants something.  Money.  If I send him some I can't
+have that new tailor suit, or the furs.  And I need them. 
+I'm going to have them."
+
+She tore open the letter.
+
+"Dear Old Fan:
+
+"Olga and I are back in Munich, as you see.  I think we'll
+be here all winter, though Olga hates it.  She says it isn't
+lustig.  Well, it isn't Vienna, but I think there's a
+chance for a class here of American pupils.  Munich's
+swarming with Americans--whole families who come here to
+live for a year or two.  I think I might get together a very
+decent class, backed by Auer's recommendations.  Teaching! 
+Good God, how I hate it!  But Auer is planning a series of
+twenty concerts for me.  They ought to be a success, if
+slaving can do it.  I worked six hours a day all summer.  I
+wanted to spend the summer--most of it, that is--in
+Holzhausen Am Ammersee, which is a little village, or
+artist's colony in the valley, an hour's ride from here, and
+within sight of the Bavarian Alps.  We had Kurt Stein's
+little villa for almost nothing.  But Olga was bored, and
+she wasn't well, poor girl, so we went to Interlaken and it
+was awful.  And that brings me to what I want to tell you.
+
+"There's going to be a baby.  No use saying I'm glad,
+because I'm not, and neither is Olga.  About February,
+I think.  Olga has been simply wretched, but the doctor says
+she'll feel better from now on.  The truth of it is she
+needs a lot of things and I can't give them to her.  I told
+you I'd been working on this concerto of mine.  Sometimes I
+think it's the real thing, if only I could get the leisure
+and the peace of mind I need to work on it.  You don't know
+what it means to be eaten up with ambition and to be
+handicapped "
+
+"Oh, don't I!" said Fanny Brandeis, between her teeth, and
+crumpled the letter in her strong fingers.  "Don't I!"  She
+got up from her chair and began to walk up and down her
+little office, up and down.  A man often works off his
+feelings thus; a woman rarely.  Fenger, who had not been
+twice in her office since her coming to the Haynes-Cooper
+plant, chose this moment to visit her, his hands full of
+papers, his head full of plans.  He sensed something wrong
+at once, as a highly organized human instrument responds to
+a similarly constructed one.
+
+"What's wrong, girl?"
+
+"Everything.  And don't call me girl."
+
+Fenger saw the letter crushed in her hand.
+
+"Brother?"  She had told him about Theodore and he had been
+tremendously interested.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Money again, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes, but----"
+
+"You know your salary's going up, after Christmas."
+
+"Catalogue or no catalogue?"
+
+"Catalogue or no catalogue."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because you've earned it."
+
+Fanny faced him squarely.  "I know that Haynes-Cooper isn't
+exactly a philanthropic institution.  A salary raise
+here usually means a battle.  I've only been here three
+months."
+Fenger seated himself in the chair beside her desk and ran a
+cool finger through the sheaf of papers in his hand.  "My
+dear girl--I beg your pardon.  I forgot.  My good woman
+then--if you like that better--you've transfused red blood
+into a dying department.  It may suffer a relapse after
+Christmas, but I don't think so.  That's why you're getting
+more money, and not because I happen to be tremendously
+interested in you, personally."
+
+Fanny's face flamed scarlet.  "I didn't mean that."
+
+"Yes you did.  Here are those comparative lists you sent me. 
+If I didn't know Slosson to be as honest as Old Dog Tray I'd
+think he had been selling us to the manufacturers.  No
+wonder this department hasn't paid.  He's been giving 'em
+top prices for shoddy.  Now what's this new plan of yours?"
+
+In an instant Fanny forgot about Theodore, the new winter
+suit and furs, everything but the idea that was clamoring to
+be born.  She sat at her desk, her fingers folding and
+unfolding a bit of paper, her face all light and animation
+as she talked.
+
+"My idea is to have a person known as a selector for each
+important department.  It would mean a boiling down of the
+products of every manufacturer we deal with, and skimming
+the cream off the top.  As it is now a department buyer has
+to do the selecting and buying too.  He can't do both and
+get results.  We ought to set aside an entire floor for the
+display of manufacturers' samples.  The selector would make
+his choice among these, six months in advance of the season. 
+The selector would go to the eastern markets too, of course. 
+Not to buy.  Merely to select.  Then, with the line chosen
+as far as style, quality, and value is concerned, the buyer
+would be free to deal directly with the manufacturer as to
+quantity, time, and all that.  You know as well as I
+that that's enough of a job for any one person, with the
+labor situation what it is.  He wouldn't need to bother
+about styles or colors, or any of that.  It would all have
+been done for him.  The selector would have the real
+responsibility.  Don't you see the simplicity of it, and the
+way it would grease the entire machinery?"
+
+Something very like jealousy came into Michael Fenger's face
+as he looked at her.  But it was gone in an instant.  "Gad! 
+You'll have my job away from me in two years.  You're a
+super-woman, do you know that?"
+
+"Super nothing!  It's just a perfectly good idea, founded on
+common sense and economy."
+
+"M-m-m, but that's all Columbus had in mind when he started
+out to find a short cut to India."
+
+Fanny laughed out at that.  "Yes, but see where he landed!"
+
+But Fenger was serious.  "We'll have to have a meeting on
+this.  Are you prepared to go into detail on it, before Mr.
+Haynes and the two Coopers, at a real meeting in a real
+mahogany directors' room?  Wednesday, say?"
+
+"I think so."
+
+Fenger got up.  "Look here, Miss Brandeis.  You need a day
+in the country.  Why don't you run up to your home town over
+Sunday?  Wisconsin, wasn't it?"
+
+"Oh, no! No.  I mean yes it was Wisconsin, but no I don't
+want to go."
+
+"Then let me send you my car."
+
+"Car!  No, thanks.  That's not my idea of the country."
+
+"It was just a suggestion.  What do you call going to the
+country, then?"
+
+"Tramping all day, and getting lost, if possible.  Lying
+down under a tree for hours, and letting the ants amble
+over you.  Dreaming.  And coming back tired, hungry, dusty,
+and refreshed."
+
+"It sounds awfully uncomfortable.  But I wish you'd try it,
+this week."
+
+"Do I look such a wreck?" Fanny demanded, rather pettishly.
+
+"You!" Fenger's voice was vibrant.  "You're the most
+splendidly alive looking woman I ever saw.  When you came
+into my office that first day you seemed to spark with
+health, and repressed energy, and electricity, so that you
+radiated them.  People who can do that, stimulate.  That's
+what you are to me--a stimulant."
+
+What can one do with a man who talks like that?  After all,
+what he said was harmless enough.  His tone was quietly
+sincere.  One can't resent an expression of the eyes.  Then,
+too, just as she made up her mind to be angry she remembered
+the limp and querulous Mrs. Fenger, and the valve and the
+scarf.  And her anger became pity.  There flashed back to
+her the illuminating bit of conversation with which
+Fascinating Facts had regaled her on the homeward drive that
+night of the tea.
+
+"Nice chap, Fenger.  And a wiz in business.  Get's a king's
+salary; Must be hell for a man to be tied, hand and foot,
+the way he is."
+
+"Tied?"
+
+"Mrs. Fenger's a semi-invalid.  At that I don't believe
+she's as helpless as she seems.  I think she just holds him
+by that shawl of hers, that's forever slipping.  You know he
+was a machine boy in her father's woolen mill.  She met him
+after he'd worked his way up to an office job.  He has
+forged ahead like a locomotive ever since."
+
+That had been their conversation, gossipy, but tremendously
+enlightening for Fanny.  She looked up at him now.
+
+"Thanks for the vacation suggestion.  I may go off
+somewhere.  Just a last-minute leap.  It usually turns
+out better, that way.  I'll be ready for the Wednesday
+discussion."
+
+She sounded very final and busy.  The crumpled letter lay on
+her desk.  She smoothed it out, and the crumple transferred
+itself to her forehead.  Fenger stood a moment, looking down
+at her.  Then he turned, abruptly and left the office. 
+Fanny did not look up.
+
+That was Friday.  On Saturday her vacation took a personally
+conducted turn.  She had planned to get away at noon, as
+most office heads did on Saturday, during the warm weather. 
+When her 'phone rang at eleven she answered it mechanically
+as does one whose telephone calls mean a row with a tardy
+manufacturer, an argument with a merchandise man, or a
+catalogue query from the printer's.
+
+The name that came to her over the telephone conveyed
+nothing to her.
+
+"Who?"  Again the name.  "Heyl?"  She repeated the name
+uncertainly.  "I'm afraid I--O, of course!  Clarence Heyl. 
+Howdy-do."
+
+"I want to see you," said the voice, promptly.
+
+There rose up in Fanny's mind a cruelly clear picture of the
+little, sallow, sniveling school boy of her girlhood.  The
+little boy with the big glasses and the shiny shoes, and the
+weak lungs.
+
+"Sorry," she replied, promptly, "but I'm afraid it's
+impossible.  I'm leaving the office early, and I'm swamped." 
+Which was a lie.
+
+"This evening?"
+
+"I rarely plan anything for the evening.  Too tired, as a
+rule."
+
+"Too tired to drive?"
+
+"I'm afraid so."
+
+A brief silence.  Then, "I'm coming out there to see you." 
+
+"Where?  Here?  The plant!  That's impossible, Mr. Heyl. 
+I'm terribly sorry, but I can't----"
+
+"Yes, I know.  Also terribly sure that if I ever get to you
+it will be over your office boy's dead body.  Well, arm him. 
+I'm coming.  Good-by."
+
+"Wait a minute!  Mr. Heyl!  Clarence!  Hello!  Hello!"
+
+A jiggling of the hook.  "Number, please?" droned the voice
+of the operator.
+
+Fanny jammed the receiver down on the hook and turned to her
+work, lips compressed, a frown forming a double cleft
+between her eyes.
+
+Half an hour later he was there.  Her office boy brought in
+his card, as she had rehearsed him to do.  Fanny noted that
+it was the wrong kind of card.  She would show him what
+happened to pushers who pestered business women during
+office hours.
+
+"Bring him in in twenty minutes," she said, grimly.  Her
+office boy (and slave) always took his cue from her.  She
+hoped he wouldn't be too rude to Heyl, and turned back to
+her work again.  Thirty-nine seconds later Clarence Heyl
+walked in.
+
+"Hello, Fan!" he said, and had her limp hand in a grip that
+made her wince.
+
+"But I told----"
+
+"Yes, I know.  But he's a crushed and broken office boy by
+now.  I had to be real harsh with him."
+
+Fanny stood up, really angry now.  She looked up at Clarence
+Heyl, and her eyes were flashing.  Clarence Heyl looked down
+at her, and his eyes were the keenest, kindest, most gently
+humorous eyes she had ever encountered.  You know that
+picture of Lincoln that shows us his eyes with much that
+expression in them?  That's as near as I can come to
+conveying to you the whimsical pathos in this man.  They
+were the eyes of a lonely little boy grown up.  And they had
+seen much in the process.
+
+Fanny felt her little blaze of anger flicker and die.
+
+"That's the girl," said Heyl, and patted her hand.  "You'll
+like me--presently.  After you've forgotten about that
+sniveling kid you hated."  He stepped back a pace and threw
+back his coat senatorially.  "How do I look?" he demanded.
+
+"Look?" repeated Fanny, feebly.
+
+"I've been hours preparing for this.  Years!  And now
+something tells me--This tie, for instance."
+
+Fanny bit her lip in a vain effort to retain her solemnity. 
+Then she gave it up and giggled, frankly.  "Well, since you
+ask me, that tie!----"
+
+"What's the matter with it?"
+
+Fanny giggled again.  "It's red, that's what."
+
+"Well, what of it!  Red's all right.  I've always considered
+red one of our leading colors."
+
+"But you can't wear it."
+
+"Can't!  Why can't I?"
+
+"Because you're the brunest kind of brunette.  And dark
+people have a special curse hanging over them that makes
+them want to wear red.  It's fatal.  That tie makes you look
+like a Mafia murderer dressed for business."
+
+"I knew it," groaned Heyl.  "Something told me."  He sank
+into a chair at the side of her desk, a picture of mock
+dejection.  "And I chose it.  Deliberately.  I had black
+ones, and blue ones, and green ones.  And I chose--this." 
+He covered his face with a shaking hand.
+
+Fanny Brandeis leaned back in her chair, and laughed, and
+laughed, and laughed.  Surely she hadn't laughed like that
+in a year at least.
+
+"You're a madman," she said, finally.
+
+At that Heyl looked up with his singularly winning smile. 
+"But different.  Concede that, Fanny.  Be fair, now. 
+Refreshingly different."
+
+"Different," said Fanny, "doesn't begin to cover it.  Well,
+now you're here, tell me what you're doing here."
+
+"Seeing you."
+
+"I mean here, in Chicago."
+
+"So do I.  I'm on my way from Winnebago to New York, and I'm
+in Chicago to see Fanny Brandeis."
+
+"Don't expect me to believe that."
+
+Heyl put an arm on Fanny's desk and learned forward, his
+face very earnest.  "I do expect you to believe it.  I
+expect you to believe everything I say to you.  Not only
+that, I expect you not to be surprised at anything I say. 
+I've done such a mass of private thinking about you in the
+last ten years that I'm likely to forget I've scarcely seen
+you in that time.  Just remember, will you, that like the
+girl in the sob song, `You made me what I am to-day?'"
+
+"I!  You're being humorous again."
+
+"Never less so in my life.  Listen, Fan.  That cowardly,
+sickly little boy you fought for in the street, that day in
+Winnebago, showed every sign of growing up a cowardly,
+sickly man.  You're the real reason for his not doing so. 
+Now, wait a minute.  I was an impressionable little kid, I
+guess.  Sickly ones are apt to be.  I worshiped you and
+hated you from that day.  Worshiped you for the blazing,
+generous, whole-souled little devil of a spitfire that you
+were.  Hated you because--well, what boy wouldn't hate a
+girl who had to fight for him.  Gosh!  It makes me sick to
+think of it, even now.  Pasty-faced rat!"
+
+"What nonsense!  I'd forgotten all about it."
+
+"No you hadn't.  Tell me, what flashed into your mind when
+you saw me in Temple that night before you left Winnebago? 
+The truth, now."
+
+She learned, later, that people did not lie to him.  She
+tried it now, and found herself saying, rather shamefacedly,
+"I thought `Why, it's Clarence Heyl, the Cowardy-Cat!'"
+
+"There!  That's why I'm here to-day.  I knew you were
+thinking that.  I knew it all the time I was in
+Colorado, growing up from a sickly kid, with a bum
+lung, to a heap big strong man.  It forced me to do things I
+was afraid to do.  It goaded me on to stunts at the very
+thought of which I'd break out in a clammy sweat.  Don't you
+see how I'll have to turn handsprings in front of you, like
+the school-boy in the McCutcheon cartoon?  Don't you see how
+I'll have to flex my muscles--like this--to show you how
+strong I am?  I may even have to beat you, eventually.  Why,
+child, I've chummed with lions, and bears, and wolves, and
+everything, because of you, you little devil in the red cap! 
+I've climbed unclimbable mountains.  I've frozen my feet in
+blizzards.  I've wandered for days on a mountain top, lost,
+living on dried currants and milk chocolate,--and Lord! how
+I hate milk chocolate!  I've dodged snowslides, and slept in
+trees; I've endured cold, and hunger and thirst, through
+you.  It took me years to get used to the idea of passing a
+timber wolf without looking around, but I learned to do it--
+because of you.  You made me.  They sent me to Colorado, a
+lonely kid, with a pretty fair chance of dying, and I would
+have, if it hadn't been for you.  There!  How's that for a
+burst of speech, young woman!  And wait a minute.  Remember,
+too, my name was Clarence.  I had that to live down."
+
+Fanny was staring at him eyes round, lips parted.  "But
+why?" she said, faintly.  "Why?"
+
+Heyl smiled that singularly winning smile of his.  "Since
+you force me to it, I think I'm in love with that little,
+warm-hearted spitfire in the red cap.  That's why."
+
+Fanny sat forward now.  She had been leaning back in her
+chair, her hands grasping its arms, her face a lovely,
+mobile thing, across which laughter, and pity, and sympathy
+and surprise rippled and played.  It hardened now, and set. 
+She looked down at her hands, and clasped them in her lap,
+then up at him.  "In that case, you can forsake the
+strenuous life with a free conscience.  You need never climb
+another mountain, or wrestle with another--er--hippopotamus. 
+That little girl in the red cap is dead."
+
+"Dead?"
+
+"Yes.  She died a year ago.  If the one who has taken her
+place were to pass you on the street today, and see you
+beset by forty thieves, she'd not even stop.  Not she. 
+She'd say, `Let him fight it out alone.  It's none of your
+business.  You've got your own fights to handle.'"
+
+"Why--Fanny.  You don't mean that, do you?  What could have
+made her like that?"
+
+"She just discovered that fighting for others didn't pay. 
+She just happened to know some one else who had done that
+all her life and--it killed her."
+
+"Her mother?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+A little silence.  "Fanny, let's play outdoors tomorrow,
+will you?  All day."
+
+Involuntarily Fanny glanced around the room.  Papers,
+catalogues, files, desk, chair, typewriter.  "I'm afraid
+I've forgotten how."
+
+"I'll teach you.  You look as if you could stand a little of
+it."
+
+"I must be a pretty sight.  You're the second man to tell me
+that in two days."
+
+Heyl leaned forward a little.  "That so?  Who's the other
+one?"
+
+"Fenger, the General Manager."
+
+"Oh!  Paternal old chap, I suppose.  No?  Well, anyway, I
+don't know what he had in mind, but you're going to spend
+Sunday at the dunes of Indiana with me."
+
+"Dunes?  Of Indiana?"
+
+"There's nothing like them in the world.  Literally.  In
+September that combination of yellow sand, and blue
+lake, and the woods beyond is--well, you'll see what it is. 
+It's only a little more than an hour's ride by train.  And
+it will just wipe that tired look out of your face, Fan." 
+He stood up.  "I'll call for you tomorrow morning at eight,
+or thereabouts.  That's early for Sunday, but it's going to
+be worth it."
+
+"I can't.  Really.  Besides, I don't think I even want to. 
+I----"
+
+"I promise not to lecture on Nature, if that's what's
+worrying you."  He took her hand in a parting grip.  "Bring
+some sandwiches, will you?  Quite a lot of 'em.  I'll have
+some other stuff in my rucksack.  And wear some clothes you
+don't mind wrecking.  I suppose you haven't got a red tam o'
+shanter?"
+
+"Heavens, no!"
+
+"I just thought it might help to keep me humble."  He was at
+the door, and so was she, somehow, her hand still in his. 
+"Eight o'clock.  How do you stand it in this place, Fan? 
+Oh, well--I'll find that out to-morrow.  Good-by."
+
+Fanny went back to her desk and papers.  The room seemed all
+at once impossibly stuffy, her papers and letters dry,
+meaningless things.  In the next office, separated from her
+by a partition half glass, half wood, she saw the top of
+Slosson's bald head as he stood up to shut his old-fashioned
+roll-top desk.  He was leaving.  She looked out of the
+window.  Ella Monahan, in hat and suit, passed and came back
+to poke her head in the door.
+
+"Run along!" she said.  "It's Saturday afternoon.  You'll
+work overtime enough when the Christmas rush begins.  Come
+on, child, and call it a day!"
+
+And Fanny gathered papers, figures, catalogue proofs into a
+glorious heap, thrust them into a drawer, locked the drawer,
+pushed back her chair, and came.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER ELEVEN
+
+Fanny told herself, before she went to bed Saturday night,
+that she hoped it would rain Sunday morning from seven to
+twelve.  But when Princess woke her at seven-thirty, as per
+instructions left in penciled scrawl on the kitchen table,
+she turned to the window at once, and was glad, somehow, to
+find it sun-flooded.  Princess, if you're mystified, was
+royal in name only--a biscuit-tinted lady, with a very black
+and no-account husband whose habits made it necessary for
+Princess to let herself into Fanny's four-room flat at seven
+every morning, and let herself out at eight every evening. 
+She had an incredibly soft and musical voice, had Princess,
+and a cooking hand.  She kept Fanny mended, fed and
+comfortable, and her only cross was that Fanny's taste in
+blouses (ultimately her property) ran to the severe and
+tailored.
+
+"Mawnin', Miss Fanny.  There's a gep'mun waitin' to see
+yo'."
+
+Fanny choked on a yawn.  "A what!"
+
+"Gep'mun.  Says yo-all goin' picnickin'.  He's in the
+settin' room, a-lookin' at yo' pictchah papahs.  Will Ah fry
+yo' up a li'l chicken to pack along?  San'wiches ain't no
+eatin' fo' Sunday."
+
+Fanny flung back her covers, swung around to the side of the
+bed, and stood up, all, seemingly, in one sweeping movement. 
+"Do you mean to tell me he's in there, now?"
+
+From the sitting room.  "I think I ought to tell you I can
+hear everything you're saying.  Say. Fanny, those sketches
+of yours are----  Why, Gee Whiz!  I didn't know
+you did that kind of thing.  This one here, with that girl's
+face in the crowd----"
+
+"For heaven's sake!" Fanny demanded, "what are you doing
+here at seven-thirty?  And I don't allow people to look at
+those sketches.  You said eight-thirty."
+
+"I was afraid you'd change your mind, or something. 
+Besides, it's now twenty-two minutes to eight.  And will you
+tell the lady that's a wonderful idea about the chicken? 
+Only she'd better start now."
+
+Goaded by time bulletins shouted through the closed door,
+Fanny found herself tubbed, clothed, and ready for breakfast
+by eight-ten.  When she opened the door Clarence was
+standing in the center of her little sitting room, waiting,
+a sheaf of loose sketches in his hand.
+
+"Say, look here!  These are the real thing.  Why, they're
+great!  They get you.  This old geezer with the beard,
+selling fish and looking like one of the Disciples.  And
+this.  What the devil are you doing in a mail order house,
+or whatever it is?  Tell me that!  When you can draw like
+this!"
+
+"Good morning," said Fanny, calmly.  "And I'll tell you
+nothing before breakfast.  The one thing that interests me
+this moment is hot coffee.  Will you have some breakfast? 
+Oh, well, a second one won't hurt you.  You must have got up
+at three, or thereabouts."  She went toward the tiny
+kitchen.  "Never mind, Princess.  I'll wait on myself.  You
+go on with that chicken."
+
+Princess was the kind of person who can fry a chicken, wrap
+it in cool, crisp lettuce leaves, box it, cut sandwiches,
+and come out of the process with an unruffled temper and an
+immaculate kitchen.  Thanks to her, Fanny and Heyl found
+themselves on the eight fifty-three train, bound for the
+dunes.
+
+Clarence swung his rucksack up to the bundle rack.  He took
+off his cap, and stuffed it into his pocket.  He was
+grinning like a schoolboy.  Fanny turned from the window and
+smiled at what she saw in his face.  At that he gave an
+absurd little bounce in his place, like an overgrown child,
+and reached over and patted her hand.
+
+"I've dreamed of this for years."
+
+"You're just fourteen, going on fifteen," Fanny reproved
+him.
+
+"I know it.  And it's great!  Won't you be, too?  Forget
+you're a fair financier, or whatever they call it.  Forget
+you earn more in a month than I do in six.  Relax.  Unbend. 
+Loosen up.  Don't assume that hardshell air with me.  Just
+remember that I knew you when the frill of your panties
+showed below your skirt."
+
+"Clarence Heyl!"
+
+But he was leaning past her, and pointing out of the window. 
+"See that curtain of smoke off there?  That's the South
+Chicago, and the Hammond and Gary steel mills.  Wait till
+you see those smokestacks against the sky, and the iron
+scaffoldings that look like giant lacework, and the slag
+heaps, and the coal piles, and those huge, grim tanks.  Gad! 
+It's awful and beautiful.  Like the things Pennell does."
+"I came out here on the street car one day," said Fanny,
+quietly.  "One Sunday."
+
+"You did!"  He stared at her.
+
+"It was hot, and they were all spilling out into the street. 
+You know, the women in wrappers, just blobs of flesh trying
+to get cool.  And the young girls in their pink silk dresses
+and white shoes, and the boys on the street corners, calling
+to them.  Babies all over the sidewalks and streets, and the
+men who weren't in the mills--you know how they look in
+their Sunday shirtsleeves, with their flat faces, and high
+cheekbones, and their great brown hands with the broken
+nails.  Hunkies.  Well, at five the motor cars began
+whizzing by from the country roads back to Chicago. 
+You have to go back that way.  Just then the five o'clock
+whistles blew and the day shift came off.  There was a great
+army of them, clumping down the road the way they do.  Their
+shoulders were slack, and their lunch pails dangled, empty,
+and they were wet and reeking with sweat.  The motor cars
+were full of wild phlox and daisies and spiderwort."
+
+Clarence was still turned sideways, looking at her.  "Get a
+picture of it?"
+
+"Yes.  I tried, at least."
+
+"Is that the way you usually spend your Sundays?"
+
+"Well, I--I like snooping about."
+
+"M-m," mused Clarence.  Then, "How's business, Fanny?"
+
+"Business?"  You could almost feel her mind jerk back.  "Oh,
+let's not talk about business on Sunday."
+
+"I thought so," said Clarence, enigmatically.  "Now listen
+to me, Fanny."
+
+"I'll listen," interrupted she, "if you'll talk about
+yourself.  I want to know what you're doing, and why you're
+going to New York.  What business can a naturalist have in
+New York, anyway?"
+
+"I didn't intend to be a naturalist.  You can tell that by
+looking at me.  But you can't have your very nose rubbed up
+against trees, and rocks, and mountains, and snow for years
+and years without learning something about 'em.  There were
+whole weeks when I hadn't anything to chum with but a
+timber-line pine and an odd assortment of mountain peaks. 
+We just had to get acquainted."
+
+"But you're going back, aren't you?  Don't they talk about
+the spell of the mountains, or some such thing?"
+"They do.  And they're right.  And I've got to have them six
+months in the year, at least.  But I'm going to try spending
+the other six in the bosom of the human race.  Not only
+that, I'm going to write about it.  Writing's my job,
+really.  At least, it's the thing I like best."
+
+"Nature?"
+
+"Human nature.  I went out to Colorado just a lonesome
+little kid with a bum lung.  The lung's all right, but I
+never did quite get over the other.  Two years ago, in the
+mountains, I met Carl Lasker, who owns the New York Star. 
+It's said to be the greatest morning paper in the country. 
+Lasker's a genius.  And he fries the best bacon I ever
+tasted.  I took him on a four-weeks' horseback trip through
+the mountains.  We got pretty well acquainted.  At the end
+of it he offered me a job.  You see, I'd never seen a chorus
+girl, or the Woolworth building, or a cabaret, or a broiled
+lobster, or a subway.  But I was interested and curious
+about all of them.  And Lasker said, `A man who can humanize
+a rock, or a tree, or a chipmunk ought to be able to make
+even those things seem human.  You've got what they call the
+fresh viewpoint.  New York's full of people with a scum over
+their eyes, but a lot of them came to New York from
+Winnebago, or towns just like it, and you'd be surprised at
+the number of them who still get their home town paper.  One
+day, when I came into Lee Kohl's office, with stars, and
+leading men, and all that waiting outside to see him, he was
+sitting with his feet on the desk reading the Sheffield,
+Illinois, Gazette.'  You see, the thing he thinks I can do
+is to give them a picture of New York as they used to see
+it, before they got color blind.  A column or so a day,
+about anything that hits me.  How does that strike you as a
+job for a naturalist?"
+
+"It's a job for a human naturalist.  I think you'll cover
+it."
+
+If you know the dunes, which you probably don't, you know
+why they did not get off at Millers, with the crowd, but
+rode on until they were free of the Sunday picnickers. 
+Then they got off, and walked across the tracks, past
+saloons, and a few huddled houses, hideous in yellow paint,
+and on, and on down a road that seemed endless.  A stretch
+of cinders, then dust, a rather stiff little hill, a great
+length of yellow sand and--the lake!  We say, the lake! like
+that, with an exclamation point after it, because it wasn't
+at all the Lake Michigan that Chicagoans know.  This vast
+blue glory bore no relation to the sullen, gray, turbid
+thing that the city calls the lake.  It was all the blues of
+which you've ever heard, and every passing cloud gave it a
+new shade.  Sapphire.  No, cobalt.  No, that's too cold. 
+Mediterranean.  Turquoise.  And the sand in golden contrast. 
+Miles of sand along the beach, and back of that the dunes. 
+Now, any dictionary or Scotchman will tell you that a dune
+is a hill of loose sand.  But these dunes are done in
+American fashion, lavishly.  Mountains of sand, as far as
+the eye can see, and on the top of them, incredibly, great
+pine trees that clutch at their perilous, shifting foothold
+with frantic root-toes.  And behind that, still more
+incredibly, the woods, filled with wild flowers, with
+strange growths found nowhere else in the whole land, with
+trees, and vines, and brush, and always the pungent scent of
+the pines.  And there you have the dunes--blue lake, golden
+sand-hills, green forest, in one.
+
+Fanny and Clarence stood there on the sand, in silence, two
+ridiculously diminutive figures in that great wilderness of
+beauty.  I wish I could get to you, somehow, the clear
+sparkle of it, the brilliance of it, and yet the peace of
+it.  They stood there a long while, those two, without
+speaking.  Then Fanny shut her eyes, and I think her lower
+lip trembled just a little.  And Clarence patted her hand
+just twice.
+
+"I thank you," he said, "in the name of that much-abused
+lady known as Nature."
+
+Said Fanny, "I want to scramble up to the top of one of
+those dunes--the high one--and just sit there."
+
+And that is what they did.  A poor enough Sunday, I suppose,
+in the minds of those of you who spend yours golfing at the
+club, or motoring along grease-soaked roads that lead to a
+shore dinner and a ukulele band.  But it turned Fanny
+Brandeis back a dozen years or more, so that she was again
+the little girl whose heart had ached at sight of the pale
+rose and, orange of the Wisconsin winter sunsets.  She
+forgot all about layettes, and obstetrical outfits, and
+flannel bands, and safety pins; her mind was a blank in the
+matter of bootees, and catalogues, and our No. 29E8347, and
+those hungry bins that always yawned for more.  She forgot
+about Michael Fenger, and Theodore, and the new furs.  They
+scrambled up dunes, digging into the treacherous sand with
+heels, toes, and the side of the foot, and clutching at
+fickle roots with frantic fingers.  Forward a step, and back
+two--that's dune climbing.  A back-breaking business, unless
+you're young and strong, as were these two.  They explored
+the woods, and Heyl had a fascinating way of talking about
+stones and shrubs and trees as if they were endowed with
+human qualities--as indeed they were for him.  They found a
+hill-slope carpeted with dwarf huckleberry plants, still
+bearing tiny clusters of the blue-black fruit.  Fanny's
+heart was pounding, her lungs ached, her cheeks were
+scarlet, her eyes shining.  Heyl, steel-muscled, took the
+hills like a chamois.  Once they crossed hands atop a dune
+and literally skated down it, right, left, right, left,
+shrieking with laughter, and ending in a heap at the bottom.
+"In the name of all that's idiotic!" shouted Heyl.  "Silk
+stockings!  What in thunder made you wear silk stockings! 
+At the sand dunes!  Gosh!"
+
+They ate their dinner in olympic splendor, atop a dune. 
+Heyl produced unexpected things from the rucksack--things
+that ranged all the way from milk chocolate to
+literature, and from grape juice to cigarettes.  They ate
+ravenously, but at Heyl's thrifty suggestion they saved a
+few sandwiches for the late afternoon.  It was he, too, who
+made a little bonfire of papers, crusts, and bones, as is
+the cleanly habit of your true woodsman.  Then they
+stretched out, full length, in the noon sun, on the warm,
+clean sand.
+
+"What's your best price on one-sixth doz. flannel vests?"
+inquired Heyl.
+
+And, "Oh, shut up!" said Fanny, elegantly.  Heyl laughed as
+one who hugs a secret.
+
+"We'll work our way down the beach," he announced, "toward
+Millers.  There'll be northern lights to-night; did you know
+that?  Want to stay and see them?"
+
+"Do I want to!  I won't go home till I have."
+
+These were the things they did on that holiday; childish,
+happy, tiring things, such as people do who love the
+outdoors.
+
+The charm of Clarence Heyl--for he had charm--is difficult
+to transmit.  His lovableness and appeal lay in his
+simplicity.  It was not so much what he said as in what he
+didn't say.  He was staring unwinkingly now at the sunset
+that had suddenly burst upon them.  His were the eyes of one
+accustomed to the silent distances.
+
+"Takes your breath away, rather, doesn't it?  All that
+color?" said Fanny, her face toward the blaze.
+
+"Almost too obvious for my taste.  I like 'em a little more
+subdued, myself."  They were atop a dune, and he stretched
+himself flat on the sand, still keeping his bright brown
+eyes on lake and sky.  Then he sat up, excitedly.  "Heh, try
+that!  Lie flat.  It softens the whole thing.  Like this. 
+Now look at it.  The lake's like molten copper flowing in. 
+And you can see that silly sun going down in jerks, like a
+balloon on a string."
+
+They lay there, silent, while the scarlet became orange, the
+orange faded to rose, the rose to pale pink, to salmon, to
+mauve, to gray.  The first pale star came out, and the
+brazen lights of Gary, far to the north, defied it.
+Fanny sat up with a sigh and a little shiver.
+
+"Fasten up that sweater around your throat," said Heyl. 
+"Got a pin?"  They munched their sandwiches, rather soggy by
+now, and drank the last of the grape juice.  "We'll have a
+bite of hot supper in town, at a restaurant that doesn't
+mind Sunday trampers.  Come on, Fan.  We'll start down the
+beach until the northern lights begin to show."
+
+"It's been the most accommodating day," murmured Fanny. 
+"Sunshine, sunset, northern lights, everything.  If we were
+to demand a rainbow and an eclipse they'd turn those on,
+too."
+
+They started to walk down the beach in the twilight, keeping
+close to the water's edge where the sand was moist and firm. 
+It was hard going.  They plunged along arm in arm, in
+silence.  Now and again they stopped, with one accord, and
+looked out over the great gray expanse that lay before them,
+and then up at the hills and the pines etched in black
+against the sky.  Nothing competitive here, Fanny thought,
+and took a deep breath.  She thought of to-morrow's work,
+with day after to-morrow's biting and snapping at its heels.
+
+Clarence seemed to sense her thoughts.  "Doesn't this make
+you feel you want to get away from those damned bins that
+you're forever feeding?  I watched those boys for a minute,
+the other day, outside your office.  Jove!"
+
+Fanny dug a heel into the sand, savagely.  "Some days I feel
+that I've got to walk out of the office, and down the
+street, without a hat, and on, and on, walking and walking,
+and running now and then, till I come to the horizon. 
+That's how I feel, some days."
+
+"Then some day, Fanny, that feeling will get too strong for
+you, and you'll do it.  Now listen to me.  Tuck this away in
+your subconscious mind, and leave it there until you need
+it.  When that time comes get on a train for Denver.  From
+Denver take another to Estes Park.  That's the Rocky
+Mountains, and they're your destination, because that's
+where the horizon lives and has its being.  When you get
+there ask for Heyl's place.  They'll just hand you from one
+to the other, gently, until you get there.  I may be there,
+but more likely I shan't.  The key's in the mail box, tied
+to a string.  You'll find a fire already laid, in the
+fireplace, with fat pine knots that will blaze up at the
+touch of a match.  My books are there, along the walls.  The
+bedding's in the cedar chest, and the lamps are filled. 
+There's tinned stuff in the pantry.  And the mountains are
+there, girl, to make you clean and whole again.  And the
+pines that are nature's prophylactic brushes.  And the sky. 
+And peace.  That sounds like a railway folder, but it's
+true.  I know."  They trudged along in silence for a little
+while.  "Got that?"
+
+"M-m," replied Fanny, disinterestedly, without looking at
+him.
+
+Heyl's jaw set.  You could see the muscles show white for an
+instant.  Then he said:  "It has been a wonderful day,
+Fanny, but you haven't told me a thing about yourself.  I'd
+like to know about your work.  I'd like to know what you're
+doing; what your plan is.  You looked so darned definite up
+there in that office.  Whom do you play with?  And who's
+this Fenger--wasn't that the name?--who saw that you looked
+tired?"
+
+"All right, Clancy.  I'll tell you all about it," Fanny
+agreed, briskly.
+
+"All right--who!"
+
+"Well, I can't call you Clarence.  It doesn't fit.  So just
+for the rest of the day let's make it Clancy, even if
+you do look like one of the minor Hebrew prophets, minus the
+beard."
+
+And so she began to tell him of her work and her aims.  I
+think that she had been craving just this chance to talk. 
+That which she told him was, unconsciously, a confession. 
+She told him of Theodore and his marriage; of her mother's
+death; of her coming to Haynes-Cooper, and the changes she
+had brought about there.  She showed him the infinite
+possibilities for advancement there.  Slosson she tossed
+aside.  Then, rather haltingly, she told him of Fenger, of
+his business genius, his magnetic qualities, of his career. 
+She even sketched a deft word-picture of the limp and
+irritating Mrs. Fenger.
+
+"Is this Fenger in love with you?" asked Heyl, startlingly.
+
+Fanny recoiled at the idea with a primness that did credit
+to Winnebago.
+
+"Clancy!  Please!  He's married."
+
+"Now don't sneak, Fanny.  And don't talk like an ingenue. 
+So far, you've outlined a life-plan that makes Becky Sharp
+look like a cooing dove.  So just answer this straight, will
+you?"
+
+"Why, I suppose I attract him, as any man of his sort, with
+a wife like that, would be attracted to a healthily alert
+woman, whose ideas match his.  And I wish you wouldn't talk
+to me like that.  It hurts."
+
+"I'm glad of that.  I was afraid you'd passed that stage. 
+Well now, how about those sketches of yours?  I suppose you
+know that they're as good, in a crude, effective sort of
+way, as anything that's being done to-day."
+
+"Oh, nonsense!"  But then she stopped, suddenly, and put
+both hands on his arm, and looked up at him, her face
+radiant in the gray twilight.  "Do you really think they're
+good!"
+
+"You bet they're good.  There isn't a newspaper in the
+country that couldn't use that kind of stuff.  And there
+aren't three people in the country who can do it.  It isn't
+a case of being able to draw.  It's being able to see life
+in a peculiar light, and to throw that light so that others
+get the glow.  Those sketches I saw this morning are life,
+served up raw.  That's your gift, Fanny.  Why the devil
+don't you use it!"
+
+But Fanny had got herself in hand again.  "It isn't a gift,"
+she said, lightly.  "It's just a little knack that amuses
+me.  There's no money in it.  Besides, it's too late now. 
+One's got to do a thing superlatively, nowadays, to be
+recognized.  I don't draw superlatively, but I do handle
+infants' wear better than any woman I know.  In two more
+years I'll be getting ten thousand a year at Haynes-Cooper. 
+In five years----"
+
+"Then what?"
+
+Fanny's hands became fists, gripping the power she craved. 
+"Then I shall have arrived.  I shall be able to see the
+great and beautiful things of this world, and mingle with
+the people who possess them."
+
+"When you might be making them yourself, you little fool. 
+Don't glare at me like that.  I tell you that those pictures
+are the real expression of you.  That's why you turn to them
+as relief from the shop grind.  You can't help doing them. 
+They're you."
+
+"I can stop if I want to.  They amuse me, that's all."
+
+"You can't stop.  It's in your blood.  It's the Jew in you."
+
+"The----  Here, I'll show you.  I won't do another sketch
+for a year.  I'll prove to you that my ancestors' religion
+doesn't influence my work, or my play."
+
+"Dear, you can't prove that, because the contrary has been
+proven long ago.  You yourself proved it when you did that
+sketch of the old fish vender in the Ghetto.  The one with
+the beard.  It took a thousand years of suffering and
+persecution and faith to stamp that look on his face,
+and it took a thousand years to breed in you the genius to
+see it, and put it down on paper.  Fan, did you ever read
+Fishberg's book?"
+
+"No," said Fanny, low-voiced.
+
+"Sometime, when you can snatch a moment from the
+fascinations of the mail order catalogue, read it.  Fishberg
+says--I wish I could remember his exact words--`It isn't the
+body that marks the Jew.  It's his Soul.  The type is not
+anthropological, or physical; it's social or psychic.  It
+isn't the complexion, the nose, the lips, the head.  It's
+his Soul which betrays his faith.  Centuries of Ghetto
+confinement, ostracism, ceaseless suffering, have produced a
+psychic type.  The thing that is stamped on the Soul seeps
+through the veins and works its way magically to the
+face----'"
+
+"But I don't want to talk about souls!  Please!  You're
+spoiling a wonderful day."
+
+"And you're spoiling a wonderful life.  I don't object to
+this driving ambition in you.  I don't say that you're wrong
+in wanting to make a place for yourself in the world.  But
+don't expect me to stand by and let you trample over your
+own immortal soul to get there.  Your head is busy enough on
+this infants' wear job, but how about the rest of you--how
+about You?  What do you suppose all those years of work, and
+suppression, and self-denial, and beauty-hunger there in
+Winnebago were meant for!  Not to develop the mail order
+business.  They were given you so that you might recognize
+hunger, and suppression, and self-denial in others.  The
+light in the face of that girl in the crowd pouring out of
+the plant.  What's that but the reflection of the light in
+you!  I tell you, Fanny, we Jews have got a money-grubbing,
+loud-talking, diamond-studded, get-there-at-any-price
+reputation, and perhaps we deserve it.  But every now and
+then, out of the mass of us, one lifts his head and stands
+erect, and the great white light is in his face.  And that
+person has suffered, for suffering breeds genius.  It
+expands the soul just as over-prosperity shrivels it.  You
+see it all the way from Lew Fields to Sarah Bernhardt; from
+Mendelssohn to Irving Berlin; from Mischa Elman to Charlie
+Chaplin.  You were a person set apart in Winnebago.  Instead
+of thanking your God for that, you set out to be something
+you aren't.  No, it's worse than that.  You're trying not to
+be what you are.  And it's going to do for you."
+
+"Stop!" cried Fanny.  "My head's whirling.  It sounds like
+something out of `Alice in Wonderland.'"
+
+"And you," retorted Heyl, "sound like some one who's afraid
+to talk or think about herself.  You're suppressing the
+thing that is you.  You're cutting yourself off from your
+own people--a dramatic, impulsive, emotional people.  By
+doing those things you're killing the goose that lays the
+golden egg.  What's that old copy-book line?  `To thine own
+self be true,' and the rest of it."
+
+"Yes; like Theodore, for example," sneered Fanny.
+
+At which unpleasant point Nature kindly supplied a
+diversion.  Across the black sky there shot two luminous
+shafts of lights.  Northern lights, pale sisters of the
+chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still weirdly
+beautiful.  Fanny and Heyl stopped short, faces upturned. 
+The ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like
+celestial searchlights.  Suddenly, from the tip of each
+shaft, there burst a cluster of slender, pin-point lines,
+like aigrettes set in a band of silver.  Then these slowly
+wavered, faded, combined to form a third and fourth slender
+shaft of light.  It was like the radiance one sees in the
+old pictures of the Holy Family.  Together Fanny and Heyl
+watched it in silence until the last pale glimmer faded and
+was gone, and only the brazen lights of Gary, far, far down
+the beach, cast a fiery glow against the sky.
+
+They sighed, simultaneously.  Then they laughed, each at the
+other.
+
+"Curtain," said Fanny.  They raced for the station, despite
+the sand.  Their car was filled with pudgy babies lying limp
+in parental arms; with lunch baskets exuding the sickly
+scent of bananas; with disheveled vandals whose moist palms
+grasped bunches of wilted wild flowers.  Past the belching
+chimneys of Gary, through South Chicago, the back yard of a
+metropolis, past Jackson Park that breathed coolly upon
+them, and so to the city again.  They looked at it with the
+shock that comes to eyes that have rested for hours on long
+stretches of sand and sky and water.  Monday, that had
+seemed so far away, became an actuality of to-morrow.
+
+Tired as they were, they stopped at one of those frank
+little restaurants that brighten Chicago's drab side
+streets.  Its windows were full of pans that held baked
+beans, all crusty and brown, and falsely tempting, and of
+baked apples swimming in a pool of syrup.  These flanked by
+ketchup bottles and geometrical pyramids of golden grape-
+fruit.
+
+Coffee and hot roast beef sandwiches, of course, in a place
+like that.  "And," added Fanny, "one of those baked apples. 
+Just to prove they can't be as good as they look."
+
+They weren't, but she was too hungry to care.  Not too
+hungry, though, to note with quick eye all that the little
+restaurant held of interest, nor too sleepy to respond to
+the friendly waitress who, seeing their dusty boots, and the
+sprig of sumac stuck in Fanny's coat, said, "My, it must
+have been swell in the country today!" as her flapping
+napkin precipitated crumbs into their laps.
+
+"It was," said Fanny, and smiled up at the girl with her
+generous, flashing smile.  "Here's a bit of it I brought
+back for you."  And she stuck the scarlet sumac sprig into
+the belt of the white apron.
+
+They finished the day incongruously by taking a taxi
+home, Fanny yawning luxuriously all the way.  "Do you know,"
+she said, as they parted, "we've talked about everything
+from souls to infants' wear.  We're talked out.  It's a
+mercy you're going to New York.  There won't be a next
+time."
+
+"Young woman," said Heyl, forcefully, "there will.  That
+young devil in the red tam isn't dead.  She's alive.  And
+kicking.  There's a kick in every one of those Chicago
+sketches in your portfolio upstairs.  You said she wouldn't
+fight anybody's battles to-day.  You little idiot, she's
+fighting one in each of those pictures, from the one showing
+that girl's face in the crowd, to the old chap with the
+fish-stall.  She'll never die that one.  Because she's the
+spirit.  It's the other one who's dead--and she doesn't know
+it.  But some day she'll find herself buried.  And I want to
+be there to shovel on the dirt."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER TWELVE
+
+From the first of December the floor of the Haynes-Cooper
+mail room looked like the New York Stock Exchange, after a
+panic.  The aisles were drifts of paper against which a
+squad of boys struggled as vainly as a gang of snow-
+shovelers against a blizzard.  The guide talked in terms of
+tons of mail, instead of thousands.  And smacked his lips
+after it.  The Ten Thousand were working at night now,
+stopping for a hasty bite of supper at six, then back to
+desk, or bin or shelf until nine, so that Oklahoma and
+Minnesota might have its Christmas box in time.
+
+Fanny Brandeis, working under the light of her green-shaded
+desk lamp, wondered, a little bitterly, if Christmas would
+ever mean anything to her but pressure, weariness, work. 
+She told herself that she would not think of that Christmas
+of one year ago.  One year!  As she glanced around the
+orderly little office, and out to the stock room beyond,
+then back to her desk again, she had an odd little feeling
+of unreality.  Surely it had been not one year, but many
+years--a lifetime--since she had elbowed her way up and down
+those packed aisles of the busy little store in Winnebago--
+she and that brisk, alert, courageous woman.
+
+"Mrs. Brandeis, lady wants to know if you can't put this
+blue satin dress on the dark-haired doll, and the pink
+satin. . . .  Well, I did tell her, but she said for me to
+ask you, anyway."
+
+"Mis' Brandeis, this man says he paid a dollar down on a go-
+cart last month and he wants to pay the rest and take it
+home with him."
+
+And then the reassuring, authoritative voice, "Coming!  I'll
+be right there."
+
+"Coming!"  That had been her whole life.  Service.  And now
+she lay so quietly beneath the snow of the bitter northern
+winter.
+
+At that point Fanny's fist would come down hard on her desk,
+and the quick, indrawn breath of mutinous resentment would
+hiss through her teeth.
+
+She kept away from the downtown shops and their crowds.  She
+scowled at sight of the holly and mistletoe wreaths, with
+their crimson streamers.  There was something almost
+ludicrous in the way she shut her eyes to the holiday
+pageant all around her, and doubled and redoubled her work. 
+It seemed that she had a new scheme for her department every
+other day, and every other one was a good one.
+
+Slosson had long ago abandoned the attempt to keep up with
+her.  He did not even resent her, as he had at first.  "I'm
+a buyer," he said, rather pathetically, "and a pret-ty good
+one, too.  But I'm not a genius, and I never will be.  And I
+guess you've got to be a genius, these days, to keep up.  It
+used to be enough for an infants' wear buyer to know
+muslins, cottons, woolens, silks, and embroideries.  But
+that's old-fashioned now.  These days, when you hire an
+office boy you don't ask him if he can read and write.  You
+tell him he's got to have personality, magnetism, and
+imagination.  Makes me sick!"
+
+The Baby Book came off the presses and it was good.  Even
+Slosson admitted it, grudgingly.  The cover was a sunny,
+breezy seashore picture, all blue and gold, with plump,
+dimpled youngsters playing, digging in the sand, romping
+(and wearing our No. 13E1269, etc., of course).  Inside were
+displayed the complete baby outfits, with a smiling mother,
+and a chubby, crowing baby as a central picture, and each
+piece of each outfit separately pictured.  Just below this,
+the outfit number and price, and a list of the pieces
+that went to make it up.  From the emergency outfit at $3.98
+to the outfit de luxe (for Haynes-Cooper patrons) at $28.50,
+each group was comprehensive, practical, complete.  In the
+back of the book was a personal service plea.  "Use us," it
+said.  "We are here to assist you, not only in the matter of
+merchandise, but with information and advice.  Mothers in
+particular are in need of such service.  This book will save
+you weariness and worry.  Use us."
+
+Fanny surveyed the book with pardonable pride.  But she was
+not satisfied.  "We lack style," she said.  "The practical
+garments are all right.  But what we need is a little snap. 
+That means cut and line.  And I'm going to New York to get
+it."  That had always been Slosson's work.
+
+She and Ella Monahan were to go to the eastern markets
+together.  Ella Monahan went to New York regularly every
+three weeks.  Fanny had never been east of Chicago.  She
+envied Ella her knowledge of the New York wholesalers and
+manufacturers.  Ella had dropped into Fanny's office for a
+brief moment.  The two women had little in common, except
+their work, but they got on very well, and each found the
+other educating.
+
+"Seems to me you're putting an awful lot into this,"
+observed Ella Monahan, her wise eyes on Fanny's rather tense
+face.
+
+"You've got to," replied Fanny, "to get anything out of it."
+
+"I guess you're right," Ella agreed, and laughed a rueful
+little laugh.  "I know I've given 'em everything I've got--
+and a few things I didn't know I had.  It's a queer game--
+life.  Now if my old father hadn't run a tannery in Racine,
+and if I hadn't run around there all the day, so that I got
+so the smell and feel of leather and hides were part of me,
+why, I'd never be buyer of gloves at Haynes-Cooper. 
+And you----"
+
+"Brandeis' Bazaar."  And was going on, when her office boy
+came in with a name.  Ella rose to go, but Fanny stopped
+her.  "Father Fitzpatrick!  Bring him right in!  Miss
+Monahan, you've got to meet him.  He's"--then, as the great
+frame of the handsome old priest filled the doorway--"he's
+just Father Fitzpatrick.  Ella Monahan."
+
+The white-haired Irishman, and the white-haired Irish woman
+clasped hands.
+
+"And who are you, daughter, besides being Ella Monahan?"
+
+"Buyer of gloves at Haynes-Cooper, Father."
+
+"You don't tell me, now!"  He turned to Fanny, put his two
+big hands on her shoulders, and swung her around to face the
+light.  "Hm," he murmured, noncommittally, after that.
+
+"Hm--what?" demanded Fanny.  "It sounds unflattering,
+whatever it means."
+"Gloves!" repeated Father Fitzpatrick, unheeding her. 
+"Well, now, what d'you think of that!  Millions of dollars'
+worth, I'll wager, in your time."
+
+"Two million and a half in my department last year," replied
+Ella, without the least trace of boastfulness.  One talked
+only in terms of millions at Haynes-Cooper's.
+
+"What an age it is!  When two slips of women can earn
+salaries that would make the old kings of Ireland look like
+beggars."  He twinkled upon the older woman.  "And what a
+feeling it must be--independence, and all."
+
+"I've earned my own living since I was seventeen," said Ella
+Monahan.  "I'd hate to tell you how long that is."  A murmur
+from the gallant Irishman.  "Thanks, Father, for the
+compliment I see in your eyes.  But what I mean is this: 
+You're right about independence.  It is a grand thing.  At
+first.  But after a while it begins to pall on you.  Don't
+ask me why.  I don't know.  I only hope you won't think I'm a
+wicked woman when I say I could learn to love any man who'd hang a
+silver fox scarf and a string of pearls around my neck, and ask me
+if I didn't feel a draft."
+
+"Wicked!  Not a bit of it, my girl.  It's only natural, and
+commendable--barrin' the pearls."
+
+"I'd forego them," laughed Ella, and with a parting
+handshake left the two alone.
+
+Father Fitzpatrick looked after her.  "A smart woman, that." 
+He took out his watch, a fat silver one.  "It's eleven-
+thirty.  My train leaves at four.  Now, Fanny, if you'll get
+on your hat, and arrange to steal an hour or so from this
+Brobdingnagian place a grand word that, my girl, and nearer
+to swearing than any word I know--I'll take you to the
+Blackstone, no less, for lunch.  How's that for a poor
+miserable old priest!"
+
+"You dear, I couldn't think of it.  Oh, yes, I could get
+away, but let's lunch right here at the plant, in the
+grill----"
+
+"Never!  I couldn't.  Don't ask it of me.  This place scares
+me.  I came up in the elevator with a crowd and a guide, and
+he was juggling millions, that chap, the way a newsboy flips
+a cent.  I'm but a poor parish priest, but I've got my
+pride.  We'll go to the Blackstone, which I've passed,
+humbly, but never been in, with its rose silk shades and its
+window boxes.  And we'll be waited on by velvet-footed
+servitors, me girl.  Get your hat."
+
+Fanny, protesting, but laughing, too, got it.  They took the
+L. Michigan avenue, as they approached it from Wabash, was
+wind-swept and bleak as only Michigan avenue can be in
+December.  They entered the warm radiance of the luxurious
+foyer with a little breathless rush, as wind-blown
+Chicagoans generally do.  The head waiter must have thought
+Father Fitzpatrick a cardinal, at least, for he seated them
+at a window table that looked out upon the icy street,
+with Grant Park, crusted with sooty snow, just across the
+way, and beyond that the I. C. tracks and the great gray
+lake.  The splendid room was all color, and perfume, and
+humming conversation.  A fountain tinkled in the center, and
+upon its waters there floated lily pads and blossoms,
+weirdly rose, and mauve, and lavender.  The tables were
+occupied by deliciously slim young girls and very self-
+conscious college boys, home for the holidays, and marcelled
+matrons, furred and aigretted.  The pink in Fanny's cheeks
+deepened.  She loved luxury.  She smiled and flashed at the
+handsome old priest opposite her.
+
+"You're a wastrel," she said, "but isn't it nice!"  And
+tasted the first delicious sip of soup.
+
+"It is.  For a change.  Extravagance is good for all of us,
+now and then."  He glanced leisurely about the brilliant
+room, then out to the street, bleakly windswept.  He leaned
+back and drummed a bit with his fingers on the satin-smooth
+cloth.  "Now and then.  Tell me, Fanny, what would you say,
+off-hand, was the most interesting thing you see from here? 
+You used to have a trick of picking out what they call the
+human side.  Your mother had it, too."
+
+Fanny, smiling, glanced about the room, her eyes
+unconsciously following the track his had taken.  About the
+room, and out, to the icy street.  "The most interesting
+thing?"  Back to the flower-scented room, with its music,
+and tinkle, and animation.  Out again, to the street.  "You
+see that man, standing at the curb, across the street.  He's
+sort of crouched against the lamp post.  See him?  Yes,
+there, just this side of that big gray car?  He's all drawn
+up in a heap.  You can feel him shivering.  He looks as if
+he were trying to crawl inside himself for warmth.  Ever
+since we came in I've noticed him staring straight across at
+these windows where we're all sitting so grandly, lunching. 
+I know what he's thinking, don't you?  And I wish I
+didn't feel so uncomfortable, knowing it.  I wish we hadn't
+ordered lobster thermidor.  I wish--there! the policeman's
+moving him on."
+
+Father Fitzpatrick reached over and took her hand, as it lay
+on the table, in his great grasp.  "Fanny, girl, you've told
+me what I wanted to know.  Haynes-Cooper or no Haynes-
+Cooper, millions or no millions, your ravines aren't choked
+up with ashes yet, my dear.  Thank God."
+
+
+CHAPTER THIRTEEN
+
+From now on Fanny Brandeis' life became such a swift-moving
+thing that your trilogist would have regarded her with
+disgust.  Here was no slow unfolding, petal by petal.  Here
+were two processes going on, side by side.  Fanny, the woman
+of business, flourished and throve like a weed, arrogantly
+flaunting its head above the timid, white flower that lay
+close to the soil, and crept, and spread, and multiplied. 
+Between the two the fight went on silently.
+
+Fate, or Chance, or whatever it is that directs our
+movements, was forever throwing tragic or comic little life-
+groups in her path, and then, pointing an arresting finger
+at her, implying, "This means you!"  Fanny stepped over
+these obstructions, or walked around them, or stared
+straight through them.
+
+She had told herself that she would observe the first
+anniversary of her mother's death with none of those ancient
+customs by which your pious Jew honors his dead.  There
+would be no Yahrzeit light burning for twenty-four hours. 
+She would not go to Temple for Kaddish prayer.  But the
+thing was too strong for her, too anciently inbred.  Her
+ancestors would have lighted a candle, or an oil lamp. 
+Fanny, coming home at six, found herself turning on the
+shaded electric lamp in her hall.  She went through to the
+kitchen.
+
+"Princess, when you come in to-morrow morning you'll find a
+light in the hall.  Don't turn it off until to-morrow
+evening at six."
+
+"All day long, Miss Fan!  Mah sakes, wa' foh?"
+
+"It's just a religious custom."
+
+"Didn't know yo' had no relijin, Miss Fan.  Leastways, Ah
+nevah could figgah----"
+
+"I haven't," said Fanny, shortly.  "Dinner ready soon,
+Princess?  I'm starved."
+
+She had entered a Jewish house of worship only once in this
+year.  It was the stately, white-columned edifice on Grand
+Boulevard that housed the congregation presided over by the
+famous Kirsch.  She had heard of him, naturally.  She was
+there out of curiosity, like any other newcomer to Chicago. 
+The beauty of the auditorium enchanted her--a magnificently
+proportioned room, and restful without being in the least
+gloomy.  Then she had been interested in the congregation as
+it rustled in.  She thought she had never seen so many
+modishly gowned women in one room in all her life.  The men
+were sleekly broadclothed, but they lacked the well-dressed
+air, somehow.  The women were slimly elegant in tailor suits
+and furs.  They all looked as if they had been turned out by
+the same tailor.  An artist, in his line, but of limited
+imagination.  Dr. Kirsch, sociologist and savant, aquiline,
+semi-bald, grimly satiric, sat in his splendid, high-backed
+chair, surveying his silken flock through half-closed lids. 
+He looked tired, and rather ill, Fanny thought, but
+distinctly a personage.  She wondered if he held them or
+they him.  That recalled to her the little Winnebago Temple
+and Rabbi Thalmann.  She remembered the frequent rudeness
+and open inattention of that congregation.  No doubt Mrs.
+Nathan Pereles had her counterpart here, and the
+hypocritical Bella Weinberg, too, and the giggling Aarons
+girls, and old Ben Reitman.  Here Dr. Kirsch had risen, and,
+coming forward, had paused to lean over his desk and, with
+an awful geniality, had looked down upon two rustling,
+exquisitely gowned late-comers.  They sank into their seats,
+cowed.  Fanny grinned.  He began his lecture
+something about modern politics.  Fanny was fascinated
+and resentful by turns.  His brilliant satire probed, cut,
+jabbed like a surgeon's scalpel; or he railed, scolded,
+snarled, like a dyspeptic schoolmaster.  Often he was in
+wretched taste.  He mimicked, postured, sneered.  But he had
+this millionaire congregation of his in hand.  Fanny found
+herself smiling up at him, delightedly.  Perhaps this wasn't
+religion, as she had been taught to look upon it, but it
+certainly was tonic.  She told herself that she would have
+come to the same conclusion if Kirsch had occupied a
+Methodist pulpit.
+
+There were no Kaddish prayers in Kirsch's Temple.  On the
+Friday following the first anniversary of Molly Brandeis's
+death Fanny did not go home after working hours, but took a
+bite of supper in a neighborhood restaurant.  Then she found
+her way to one of the orthodox Russian Jewish synagogues on
+the west side.  It was a dim, odorous, bare little place,
+this house of worship.  Fanny had never seen one like it
+before.  She was herded up in the gallery, where the women
+sat.  And when the patriarchal rabbi began to intone the
+prayer for the dead Fanny threw the gallery into wild panic
+by rising for it--a thing that no woman is allowed to do in
+an orthodox Jewish church.  She stood, calmly, though the
+beshawled women to right and left of her yanked at her coat.
+
+In January Fanny discovered New York.  She went as selector
+for her department.  Hereafter Slosson would do only the
+actual buying.  Styles, prices, and materials would be
+decided by her.  Ella Monahan accompanied her, it being the
+time for her monthly trip.  Fanny openly envied her her
+knowledge of New York's wholesale district.  Ella offered to
+help her.
+
+"No," Fanny had replied, "I think not, thanks.  You've your
+own work.  And besides I know pretty well what I want, and
+where to go to get it.  It's making them give it to me that
+will be hard."
+
+They went to the same hotel, and took connecting rooms. 
+Each went her own way, not seeing the other from morning
+until night, but they often found kimonoed comfort in each
+other's presence.
+
+Fanny had spent weeks outlining her plan of attack.  She had
+determined to retain the cheap grades, but to add a finer
+line as well.  She recalled those lace-bedecked bundles that
+the farmer women and mill hands had born so tenderly in
+their arms.  Here was one direction in which they allowed
+extravagance free rein.  As a canny business woman, she
+would trade on her knowledge of their weakness.
+
+At Haynes-Cooper order is never a thing to be despised by a
+wholesaler.  Fanny, knowing this, had made up her mind to go
+straight to Horn & Udell.  Now, Horn & Udell are responsible
+for the bloomers your small daughter wears under her play
+frock, in place of the troublesome and extravagant petticoat
+of the old days.  It was they who introduced smocked
+pinafores to you; and those modish patent-leather belts for
+children at which your grandmothers would have raised
+horrified hands.  They taught you that an inch of hand
+embroidery is worth a yard of cheap lace.  And as for style,
+cut, line--you can tell a Horn & Udell child from among a
+flock of thirty.
+
+Fanny, entering their office, felt much as Molly Brandeis
+had felt that January many, many years before, when she had
+made that first terrifying trip to the Chicago market.  The
+engagement had been made days before.  Fanny never knew the
+shock that her youthfully expectant face gave old Sid Udell. 
+He turned from his desk to greet her, his polite smile of
+greeting giving way to a look of bewilderment.
+
+"But you are not the buyer, are you, Miss Brandeis?"
+
+"No, Mr. Slosson buys."
+
+"I thought so."  
+
+"But I select for my entire department.  I decide on our
+styles, materials, and prices, six months in advance.  Then
+Mr. Slosson does the actual bulk buying."
+
+"Something new-fangled?" inquired Sid Udell.  "Of course,
+we've never sold much to you people.  Our stuff is----"
+
+"Yes, I know.  But you'd like to, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Our class of goods isn't exactly suited to your wants."
+
+"Yes, it is.  Exactly.  That's why I'm here.  We'll be doing
+a business of a million and a quarter in my department in
+another two years.  No firm, not even Horn & Udell, can
+afford to ignore an account like that."
+
+Sid Udell smiled a little.  "You've made up your mind to
+that million and a quarter, young lady?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, I've dealt with buyers for a quarter of a century or
+more.  And I'd say that you're going to get it."
+
+Whereupon Fanny began to talk.  Ten minutes later Udell
+interrupted her to summon Horn, whose domain was the
+factory.  Horn came, was introduced, looked doubtful.  Fanny
+had statistics.  Fanny had arguments.  She had
+determination.  "And what we want," she went on, in her
+quiet, assured way, "is style.  The Horn & Udell clothes
+have chic.  Now, material can't be imitated successfully,
+but style can.  Our goods lack just that.  I could copy any
+model you have, turn the idea over to a cheap manufacturer,
+and get a million just like it, at one-fifth the price. 
+That isn't a threat.  It's just a business statement that
+you know to be true.  I can sketch from memory anything I've
+seen once.  What I want to know is this:  Will you make it
+necessary for me to do that, or will you undertake to
+furnish us with cheaper copies of your high-priced designs? 
+We could use your entire output.  I know the small-town
+woman of the poorer class, and I know she'll wear a shawl in
+order to give her child a cloth coat with fancy buttons and
+a velvet collar."
+
+And Horn & Udell, whose attitude at first had been that of
+two seasoned business men dealing with a precocious child,
+found themselves quoting prices to her, shipments,
+materials, quality, quantities.  Then came the question of
+time.
+
+"We'll get out a special catalogue for the summer," Fanny
+said.  "A small one, to start them our way.  Then the big
+Fall catalogue will contain the entire line."
+
+"That doesn't give us time!" exclaimed both men, in a
+breath.
+
+"But you must manage, somehow.  Can't you speed up the
+workroom?  Put on extra hands?  It's worth it."
+
+They might, under normal conditions.  But there was this
+strike-talk, its ugly head bobbing up in a hundred places. 
+And their goods were the kind that required high-class
+workers.  Their girls earned all the way from twelve to
+twenty-five dollars.
+But Fanny knew she had driven home the entering wedge.  She
+left them after making an engagement for the following day. 
+The Horn & Udell factory was in New York's newer loft-
+building section, around Madison, Fifth avenue, and the
+Thirties.  Her hotel was very near.  She walked up Fifth
+avenue a little way, and as she walked she wondered why she
+did not feel more elated.  Her day's work had exceeded her
+expectations.  It was a brilliant January afternoon, with a
+snap in the air that was almost western.  Fifth avenue
+flowed up, flowed down, and Fanny fought the impulse to
+stare after every second or third woman she passed.  They
+were so invariably well-dressed.  There was none of the
+occasional shabbiness or dowdiness of Michigan Avenue. 
+Every woman seemed to have emerged fresh from the hands of
+masseuse and maid.  Their hair was coiffed to suit the
+angle of the hat, and the hat had been chosen to enhance the
+contour of the head, and the head was carried with regard
+for the dark furs that encircled the throat.  They were
+amazingly well shod.  Their white gloves were white.  (A
+fact remarkable to any soot-haunted Chicagoan.)  Their
+coloring rivaled the rose leaf.  And nobody's nose was red.
+
+"Goodness knows I've never pretended to be a beauty," Fanny
+said that evening, in conversation with Ella Monahan.  "But
+I've always thought I had my good points.  By the time I'd
+reached Forty-second street I wouldn't have given two cents
+for my chances of winning a cave man on a desert island."
+
+She made up her mind that she would go back to the hotel,
+get a thick coat, and ride outside one of those fascinating
+Fifth avenue 'buses.  It struck her as an ideal way to see
+this amazing street.  She was back at her hotel in ten
+minutes.  Ella had not yet come in.  Their rooms were on the
+tenth floor.  Fanny got her coat, peered at her own
+reflection in the mirror, sighed, shook her head, and was
+off down the hall toward the elevators.  The great hall
+window looked toward Fifth avenue, but between it and the
+avenue rose a yellow-brick building that housed tier on tier
+of manufacturing lofts.  Cloaks, suits, blouses, petticoats,
+hats, dresses--it was just such a building as Fanny had come
+from when she left the offices of Horn & Udell.  It might be
+their very building, for all she knew.  She looked straight
+into its windows as she stood waiting for the lift.  And
+window after window showed women, sewing.  They were sewing
+at machines, and at hand-work, but not as women are
+accustomed to sew, with leisurely stitches, stopping to pat
+a seam here, to run a calculating eye along hem or ruffle. 
+It was a dreadful, mechanical motion, that sewing, a
+machine-like, relentless motion, with no waste in it, no
+pause.  Fanny's mind leaped back to Winnebago, with its
+pleasant porches on which leisurely women sat stitching
+peacefully at a fine seam.
+
+What was it she had said to Udell?  "Can't you speed up the
+workroom?  It's worth it."
+
+Fanny turned abruptly from the window as the door of the
+bronze and mirrored lift opened for her.  She walked over to
+Fifth avenue again and up to Forty-fifth street.  Then she
+scrambled up the spiral stairs of a Washington Square 'bus. 
+The air was crisp, clear, intoxicating.  To her Chicago eyes
+the buildings, the streets, the very sky looked startlingly
+fresh and new-washed.  As the 'bus lurched down Fifth avenue
+she leaned over the railing to stare, fascinated, at the
+colorful, shifting, brilliant panorama of the most amazing
+street in the world.  Block after block, as far as the eye
+could see, the gorgeous procession moved up, moved down, and
+the great, gleaming motor cars crept, and crawled, and
+writhed in and out, like nothing so much as swollen angle
+worms in a fishing can, Fanny thought.  Her eye was caught
+by one limousine that stood out, even in that crush of
+magnificence.  It was all black, as though scorning to
+attract the eye with vulgar color, and it was lined with
+white.  Fanny thought it looked very much like Siegel &
+Cowan's hearse, back in Winnebago.  In it sat a woman, all
+furs, and orchids, and complexion.  She was holding up to
+the window a little dog with a wrinkled and weary face, like
+that of an old, old man.  He was sticking his little evil,
+eager red tongue out at the world.  And he wore a very smart
+and woolly white sweater, of the imported kind--with a
+monogram done in black.
+
+The traffic policeman put up his hand.  The 'bus rumbled on
+down the street.  Names that had always been remotely
+mythical to her now met her eye and became realities. 
+Maillard's.  And that great red stone castle was the
+Waldorf.  Almost historic, and it looked newer than the
+smoke-grimed Blackstone.  And straight ahead--why, that must
+be the Flatiron building!  It loomed up like the giant prow
+of an unimaginable ship.  Brentano's.  The Holland House. 
+Madison Square.  Why there never was anything so terrifying,
+and beautiful, and palpitating, and exquisite as this Fifth
+avenue in the late winter afternoon, with the sky ahead a
+rosy mist, and the golden lights just beginning to spangle
+the gray.  At Madison Square she decided to walk.  She
+negotiated the 'bus steps with surprising skill for a
+novice, and scurried along the perilous crossing to the
+opposite side.  She entered Madison Square.  But why hadn't
+O. Henry emphasized its beauty, instead of its squalor?  It
+lay, a purple pool of shadow, surrounded by the great,
+gleaming, many-windowed office buildings, like an amethyst
+sunk in a circle of diamonds.  "It's a fairyland!" Fanny
+told herself.  "Who'd have thought a city could be so
+beautiful!"
+
+And then, at her elbow, a voice said, "Oh, lady, for the
+lova God!"  She turned with a jerk and looked up into the
+unshaven face of a great, blue-eyed giant who pulled off his
+cap and stood twisting it in his swollen blue fingers. 
+"Lady, I'm cold.  I'm hungry.  I been sittin' here hours."
+
+Fanny clutched her bag a little fearfully.  She looked at
+his huge frame.  "Why don't you work?"
+
+"Work!"  He laughed.  "There ain't any.  Looka this!"  He
+turned up his foot, and you saw the bare sole, blackened and
+horrible, and fringed, comically, by the tattered leather
+upper.
+
+"Oh--my dear!" said Fanny.  And at that the man began to
+cry, weakly, sickeningly, like a little boy.
+
+"Don't do that!  Don't!  Here."  She was emptying her purse,
+and something inside her was saying, "You fool, he's only a
+professional beggar."
+
+And then the man wiped his face with his cap, and
+swallowed hard, and said, "I don't want all you got.  I
+ain't holdin' you up.  Just gimme that.  I been sittin'
+here, on that bench, lookin' at that sign across the street. 
+Over there.  It says, `EAT.'  It goes off an' on.  Seemed
+like it was drivin' me crazy."
+
+Fanny thrust a crumpled five-dollar bill into his hand.  And
+was off.  She fairly flew along, so that it was not until
+she had reached Thirty-third street that she said aloud, as
+was her way when moved, "I don't care.  Don't blame me.  It
+was that miserable little beast of a dog in the white
+sweater that did it."
+
+It was almost seven when she reached her room.  A maid, in
+neat black and white, was just coming out with an armful of
+towels.
+
+"I just brought you a couple of extra towels.  We were short
+this morning," she said.
+
+The room was warm, and quiet, and bright.  In her bathroom,
+that glistened with blue and white tiling, were those
+redundant towels.  Fanny stood in the doorway and counted
+them, whimsically.  Four great fuzzy bath towels.  Eight
+glistening hand towels.  A blue and white bath rug hung at
+the side of the tub.  Her telephone rang.  It was Ella.
+
+"Where in the world have you been, child?  I was worried
+about you.  I thought you were lost in the streets of New
+York."
+
+"I took a 'bus ride," Fanny explained.
+
+"See anything of New York?"
+
+"I saw all of it," replied Fanny.  Ella laughed at that, but
+Fanny's face was serious.
+
+"How did you make out at Horn & Udell's?  Never mind, I'm
+coming in for a minute; can I?"
+
+"Please do.  I need you."
+
+A moment later Ella bounced in, fresh as to blouse, pink as
+to cheeks, her whole appearance a testimony to the
+revivifying effects of a warm bath, a brief nap, clean
+clothes.
+
+"Dear child, you look tired.  I'm not going to stay.  You
+get dressed and I'll meet you for dinner.  Or do you want
+yours up here?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"'Phone me when you're dressed.  But tell me, isn't it a
+wonder, this town?  I'll never forget my first trip here.  I
+spent one whole evening standing in front of the mirror
+trying to make those little spit-curls the women were
+wearing then.  I'd seen 'em on Fifth avenue, and it seemed
+I'd die if I couldn't have 'em, too.  And I dabbed on rouge,
+and touched up my eyebrows.  I don't know.  It's a kind of a
+crazy feeling gets you.  The minute I got on the train for
+Chicago I washed my face and took my hair down and did it
+plain again."
+
+"Why, that's the way I felt!" laughed Fanny.  "I didn't care
+anything about infants' wear, or Haynes-Cooper, or anything. 
+I just wanted to be beautiful, as they all were."
+
+"Sure!  It gets us all!"
+
+Fanny twisted her hair into the relentless knob women assume
+preparatory to bathing.  "It seems to me you have to come
+from Winnebago, or thereabouts, to get New York--really get
+it, I mean."
+
+"That's so," agreed Ella.  "There's a man on the New York
+Star who writes a column every day that everybody reads. 
+If he isn't a small-town man then we're both wrong."
+
+Fanny, bathward bound, turned to stare at Ella.  "A column
+about what?"
+
+"Oh, everything.  New York, mostly.  Say, it's the humanest
+stuff.  He says the kind of thing we'd all say, if we knew
+how.  Reading him is like getting a letter from home.  I'll
+bet he went to a country school and wore his mittens sewed
+to a piece of tape that ran through his coat sleeves."
+
+"You're right," said Fanny; "he did.  That man's from
+Winnebago, Wisconsin."
+
+"No!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you mean you know him?  Honestly?  What's he like?"
+
+But Fanny had vanished.  "I'm a tired business woman," she
+called, above the splashing that followed, "and I won't
+converse until I'm fed."
+
+"But how about Horn & Udell?" demanded Ella, her mouth
+against the crack.
+
+"Practically mine," boasted Fanny.
+
+"You mean--landed!"
+
+"Well, hooked, at any rate, and putting up a very poor
+struggle."
+
+"Why, you clever little divil, you!  You'll be making me
+look like a stock girl next."
+
+Fanny did not telephone Heyl until the day she left New
+York.  She had told herself she would not telephone him at
+all.  He had sent her his New York address and telephone
+number months before, after that Sunday at the dunes.  Ella
+Monahan had finished her work and had gone back to Chicago
+four days before Fanny was ready to leave.  In those four
+days Fanny had scoured the city from the Palisades to Pell
+street.  I don't know how she found her way about.  It was a
+sort of instinct with her.  She seemed to scent the
+picturesque.  She never for a moment neglected her work. 
+But she had found it was often impossible to see these New
+York business men until ten--sometimes eleven--o'clock.  She
+awoke at seven, a habit formed in her Winnebago days. 
+Eight-thirty one morning found her staring up at the dim
+vastness of the dome of the cathedral of St. John the
+Divine.  The great gray pile, mountainous, almost ominous,
+looms up in the midst of the dingy commonplaceness of
+Amsterdam avenue and 110th street.  New Yorkers do not know
+this, or if they know it, the fact does not interest them. 
+New Yorkers do not go to stare up into the murky shadows
+of this glorious edifice.  They would if it were
+situate in Rome.  Bare, crude, unfinished, chaotic, it gives
+rich promise of magnificent fulfillment.  In an age when
+great structures are thrown up to-day, to be torn down to-
+morrow, this slow-moving giant is at once a reproach and an
+example.  Twenty-five years in building, twenty-five more
+for completion, it has elbowed its way, stone by stone, into
+such company as St. Peter's at Rome, and the marvel at
+Milan.  Fanny found her way down the crude cinder paths that
+made an alley-like approach to the cathedral.  She entered
+at the side door that one found by following arrows posted
+on the rough wooden fence.  Once inside she stood a moment,
+awed by the immensity of the half-finished nave.  As she
+stood there, hands clasped, her face turned raptly up to
+where the massive granite columns reared their height to
+frame the choir, she was, for the moment, as devout as any
+Episcopalian whose money had helped make the great building. 
+Not only devout, but prayerful, ecstatic.  That was partly
+due to the effect of the pillars, the lights, the
+tapestries, the great, unfinished chunks of stone that
+loomed out from the side walls, and the purple shadow cast
+by the window above the chapels at the far end; and partly
+to the actress in her that responded magically to any mood,
+and always to surroundings.  Later she walked softly down
+the deserted nave, past the choir, to the cluster of
+chapels, set like gems at one end, and running from north to
+south, in a semi-circle.  A placard outside one said, "St.
+Saviour's chapel.  For those who wish to rest and pray." 
+All white marble, this little nook, gleaming softly in the
+gray half-light.  Fanny entered, and sat down.  She was
+quite alone.  The roar and crash of the Eighth avenue L, the
+Amsterdam cars, the motors drumming up Morningside hill,
+were softened here to a soothing hum.
+
+For those who wish to rest and pray.
+
+Fanny Brandeis had neither rested nor prayed since that
+hideous day when she had hurled her prayer of defiance at
+Him.  But something within her now began a groping for
+words; for words that should follow an ancient plea
+beginning, "O God of my Fathers----"  But at that the
+picture of the room came back to her mental vision--the room
+so quiet except for the breathing of the woman on the bed;
+the woman with the tolerant, humorous mouth, and the
+straight, clever nose, and the softly bright brown eyes, all
+so strangely pinched and shrunken-looking now----
+
+Fanny got to her feet, with a noisy scraping of the chair on
+the stone floor.  The vague, half-formed prayer died at
+birth.  She found her way out of the dim, quiet little
+chapel, up the long aisle and out the great door.  She
+shivered a little in the cold of the early January morning
+as she hurried toward the Broadway subway.
+
+At nine-thirty she was standing at a counter in the infants'
+wear section at Best's, making mental notes while the
+unsuspecting saleswoman showed her how the pink ribbon in
+this year's models was brought under the beading, French
+fashion, instead of weaving through it, as heretofore.  At
+ten-thirty she was saying to Sid Udell, "I think a written
+contract is always best.  Then we'll all know just where we
+stand.  Mr. Fenger will be on next week to arrange the
+details, but just now a very brief written understanding to
+show him on my return would do."
+
+And she got it, and tucked it away in her bag, in triumph.
+
+She tried to leave New York without talking to Heyl, but
+some quiet, insistent force impelled her to act contrary to
+her resolution.  It was, after all, the urge of the stronger
+wish against the weaker.
+
+When he heard her voice over the telephone Heyl did not say,
+"Who is this?"  Neither did he put those inevitable
+questions of the dweller to the transient, "Where are you? 
+How long have you been here?"  What he said was, "How're you
+going to avoid dining with me to-night?"
+
+To which Fanny replied, promptly, "By taking the Twentieth
+Century back to Chicago to-day."
+
+A little silence.  A hurt silence.  Then, "When they get the
+Twentieth Century habit they're as good as lost.  How's the
+infants' wear business, Fanny?"
+
+"Booming, thank you.  I want to tell you I've read the
+column every day.  It's wonderful stuff."
+
+"It's a wonderful job.  I'm a lucky boy.  I'm doing the
+thing I'd rather do than anything else in the world.  There
+are mighty few who can say that."  There was another
+silence, awkward, heavy.  Then, "Fanny, you're not really
+leaving to-day?"
+
+"I'll be in Chicago to-morrow, barring wrecks."
+
+"You might have let me show you our more or less fair city."
+
+"I've shown it to myself.  I've seen Riverside Drive at
+sunset, and at night.  That alone would have been enough. 
+But I've seen Fulton market, too, and the Grand street
+stalls, and Washington Square, and Central Park, and Lady
+Duff-Gordon's inner showroom, and the Night Court, and the
+Grand Central subway horror at six p. m., and the gambling
+on the Curb, and the bench sleepers in Madison Square-- Oh,
+Clancy, the misery----"
+
+"Heh, wait a minute!  All this, alone?"
+
+"Yes.  And one more thing.  I've landed Horn & Udell, which
+means nothing to you, but to me it means that by Spring my
+department will be a credit to its stepmother; a real
+success."
+
+"I knew it would be a success.  So did you.  Anything you
+might attempt would be successful.  You'd have made a
+successful lawyer, or cook, or actress, or hydraulic
+engineer, because you couldn't do a thing badly.  It
+isn't in you.  You're a superlative sort of person.  But
+that's no reason for being any of those things.  If you
+won't admit a debt to humanity, surely you'll acknowledge
+you've an obligation to yourself."
+
+"Preaching again.  Good-by."
+
+"Fanny, you're afraid to see me."
+
+"Don't be ridiculous.  Why should I be?"
+
+"Because I say aloud the things you daren't let yourself
+think.  If I were to promise not to talk about anything but
+flannel bands----"
+
+"Will you promise?"
+
+"No.  But I'm going to meet you at the clock at the Grand
+Central Station fifteen minutes before train time.  I don't
+care if every infants' wear manufacturer in New York had a
+prior claim on your time.  You may as well be there, because
+if you're not I'll get on the train and stay on as far as
+Albany.  Take your choice."
+
+He was there before her.  Fanny, following the wake of a
+redcap, picked him at once from among the crowd of clock-
+waiters.  He saw her at the same time, and started forward
+with that singularly lithe, springy step which was, after
+all, just the result of perfectly trained muscles in
+coordination.  He was wearing New York clothes--the right
+kind, Fanny noted.
+
+Their hands met.  "How well you look," said Fanny, rather
+lamely.
+
+"It's the clothes," said Heyl, and began to revolve slowly,
+coyly, hands out, palms down, eyelids drooping, in delicious
+imitation of those ladies whose business it is to revolve
+thus for fashion.
+
+"Clancy, you idiot!  All these people!  Stop it!"
+
+"But get the grace!  Get the easy English hang, at once so
+loose and so clinging."
+
+Fanny grinned, appreciatively, and led the way through the
+gate to the train.  She was surprisingly glad to be
+with him again.  On discovering that, she began to talk
+rapidly, and about him.
+
+"Tell me, how do you manage to keep that fresh viewpoint? 
+Everybody else who comes to New York to write loses his
+identity.  The city swallows him up.  I mean by that, that
+things seem to strike you as freshly as they did when you
+first came.  I remember you wrote me an amazing letter."
+
+"For one thing, I'll never be anything but a foreigner in
+New York.  I'll never quite believe Broadway.  I'll never
+cease to marvel at Fifth avenue, and Cooper Union, and the
+Bronx.  The time may come when I can take the subway for
+granted, but don't ask it of me just yet."
+
+"But the other writers--and all those people who live down
+in Washington Square?"
+
+"I never see them.  It's sure death.  Those Greenwichers are
+always taking out their own feelings and analyzing them, and
+pawing them over, and passing them around.  When they get
+through with them they're so thumb-marked and greasy that no
+one else wants them.  They don't get enough golf, those
+Greenwichers.  They don't get enough tennis.  They don't get
+enough walking in the open places.  Gosh, no!  I know better
+than to fall for that kind of thing.  They spend hours
+talking to each other, in dim-lighted attics, about Souls,
+and Society, and the Joy of Life, and the Greater Good.  And
+they know all about each other's insides.  They talk
+themselves out, and there's nothing left to write about.  A
+little of that kind of thing purges and cleanses.  Too much
+of it poisons, and clogs.  No, ma'am!  When I want to talk I
+go down and chin with the foreman of our composing room. 
+There's a chap that has what I call conversation.  A
+philosopher, and knows everything in the world.  Composing
+room foremen always are and do.  Now, that's all of that. 
+How about Fanny Brandeis?  Any sketches?  Come on. 
+Confess.  Grand street, anyway."
+
+"I haven't touched a pencil, except to add up a column of
+figures or copy an order, since last September, when you
+were so sure I couldn't stop."
+
+"You've done a thousand in your head.  And if you haven't
+done one on paper so much the better.  You'll jam them back,
+and stifle them, and screw the cover down tight on every
+natural impulse, and then, some day, the cover will blow off
+with a loud report.  You can't kill that kind of thing,
+Fanny.  It would have to be a wholesale massacre of all the
+centuries behind you.  I don't so much mind your being
+disloyal to your tribe, or race, or whatever you want to
+call it.  But you've turned your back on yourself; you've
+got an obligation to humanity, and I'll nag you till you pay
+it.  I don't care if I lose you, so long as you find
+yourself.  The thing you've got isn't merely racial.  God,
+no!  It's universal.  And you owe it to the world.  Pay up,
+Fanny!  Pay up!"
+
+"Look here!" began Fanny, her voice low with anger; "the
+last time I saw you I said I'd never again put myself in a
+position to be lectured by you, like a schoolgirl.  I mean
+it, this time.  If you have anything else to say to me, say
+it now.  The train leaves"--she glanced at her wrist--"in
+two minutes, thank Heaven, and this will be your last
+chance."
+
+"All right," said Heyl.  "I have got something to say.  Do
+you wear hatpins?"
+
+"Hatpins!" blankly.  "Not with this small hat, but what----"
+
+"That means you're defenseless.  If you're going to prowl
+the streets of Chicago alone get this:  If you double your
+fist this way, and tuck your thumb alongside, like that, and
+aim for this spot right here, about two inches this side of
+the chin, bringing your arm back, and up, quickly, like a
+piston, the person you hit will go down, limp.  There's a
+nerve right here that communicates with the brain. 
+That blow makes you see stars, bright lights, and fancy
+colors.  They use it in the comic papers."
+
+"You ARE crazy," said Fanny, as though at last assured of
+a long-suspected truth.  The train began to move, almost
+imperceptibly.  "Run!" she cried.
+
+Heyl sped up the aisle.  At the door he turned.  "It's
+called an uppercut," he shouted to the amazement of the
+other passengers.  And leaped from the train.
+
+Fanny sank into her seat, weakly.  Then she began to laugh,
+and there was a dash of hysteria in it.  He had left a paper
+on the car seat.  It was the Star.  Fanny crumpled it,
+childishly, and kicked it under the seat.  She took off her
+hat, arranged her belongings, and sat back with eyes closed. 
+After a few moments she opened them, fished about under the
+seat for the crumpled copy of the Star, and read it,
+turning at once to his column.  She thought it was a very
+unpretentious thing, that column, and yet so full of
+insight, and sagacity, and whimsical humor.  Not a guffaw in
+it, but a smile in every fifth line.  She wondered if those
+years of illness, and loneliness, with weeks of reading, and
+tramping, and climbing in the Colorado mountains had kept
+him strangely young, or made him strangely old.
+
+She welcomed the hours that lay between New York and
+Chicago.  They would give her an opportunity to digest the
+events of the past ten days.  In her systematic mind she
+began to range them in the order of their importance.  Horn
+& Udell came first, of course, and then the line of
+maternity dresses she had selected to take the place of the
+hideous models carried under Slosson's regime.  And then the
+slip-over pinafores.  But somehow her thoughts became
+jumbled here, so that faces instead of garments filled her
+mind's eye.  Again and again there swam into her ken the
+face of that woman of fifty, in decent widow's weeds, who
+had  stood there in the Night Court, charged with
+drunkenness on the streets.  And the man with the frost-
+bitten fingers in Madison Square.  And the dog in the
+sweater.  And the feverish concentration of the piece-work
+sewers in the window of the loft building.
+
+She gave it up, selected a magazine, and decided to go in to
+lunch.
+
+There was nothing spectacular about the welcome she got on
+her return to the office after this first trip.  A firm that
+counts its employees by the thousands, and its profits in
+tens of millions, cannot be expected to draw up formal
+resolutions of thanks when a heretofore flabby department
+begins to show signs of red blood.
+
+Ella Monahan said, "They'll make light of it--all but
+Fenger.  That's their way."
+
+Slosson drummed with his fingers all the time she was giving
+him the result of her work in terms of style, material,
+quantity, time, and price.  When she had finished he said,
+"Well, all I can say is we seem to be going out of the mail
+order business and into the imported novelty line, de luxe. 
+I suppose by next Christmas the grocery department will be
+putting in artichoke hearts, and truffles and French
+champagne by the keg for community orders."
+
+To which Fanny had returned, sweetly, "If Oregon and Wyoming
+show any desire for artichokes and champagne I don't see why
+we shouldn't."
+
+Fenger, strangely enough, said little.  He was apt to be
+rather curt these days, and almost irritable.  Fanny
+attributed it to the reaction following the strain of the
+Christmas rush.
+
+One did not approach Fenger's office except by appointment. 
+Fanny sent word to him of her return.  For two days she
+heard nothing from him.  Then the voice of the snuff-brown
+secretary summoned her.  She did not have to wait this time,
+but passed directly through the big bright outer room
+into the smaller room.  The Power House, Fanny called it.
+
+Fenger was facing the door.  "Missed you," he said.
+
+"You must have," Fanny laughed, "with only nine thousand
+nine hundred and ninety-nine to look after."
+
+"You look as if you'd been on a vacation, instead of a test
+trip."
+
+"So I have.  Why didn't you warn me that business, as
+transacted in New York, is a series of social rites?  I
+didn't have enough white kid gloves to go round.  No one
+will talk business in an office.  I don't see what they use
+offices for, except as places in which to receive their
+mail.  You utter the word `Business,' and the other person
+immediately says, `Lunch.'  No wholesaler seems able to
+quote you his prices until he has been sustained by half a
+dozen Cape Cods.  I don't want to see a restaurant or a rose
+silk shade for weeks."
+
+Fenger tapped the little pile of papers on his desk.  "I've
+read your reports.  If you can do that on lunches, I'd like
+to see what you could put over in a series of dinners."
+
+"Heaven forbid," said Fanny, fervently.  Then, for a very
+concentrated fifteen minutes they went over the reports
+together.  Fanny's voice grew dry and lifeless as she went
+into figures.
+
+"You don't sound particularly enthusiastic," Fenger said,
+when they had finished, "considering that you've
+accomplished what you set out to do."
+
+"That's just it," quickly.  "I like the uncertainty.  It was
+interesting to deal directly with those people, to stack
+one's arguments, and personality, and mentality and power
+over theirs, until they had to give way.  But after that! 
+Well, you can't expect me to be vitally interested in gross
+lots, and carloads and dating."
+
+"It's part of business."
+
+"It's the part I hate."
+
+Fenger stacked the papers neatly.  "You came in June, didn't
+you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It has been a remarkable eight-months' record, even at
+Haynes-Cooper's, where records are the rule.  Have you been
+through the plant since the time you first went through?"
+
+"Through it!  Goodness, no!  It would take a day."
+
+"Then I wish you'd take it.  I like to have the heads of
+departments go through the plant at least twice a year. 
+You'll find the fourteenth floor has been cleared and is
+being used entirely by the selectors.  The manufacturers'
+samples are spread on the tables in the various sections. 
+You'll find your place ready for you.  You'll be amused at
+Daly's section.  He took your suggestion about trying the
+blouses on live models instead of selecting them as he used
+to.  You remember you said that one could tell about the
+lines and style of a dress merely by looking at it, but that
+a blouse is just a limp rag until it's on."
+
+"It's true of the flimsy Georgette things women want now. 
+They may be lovely in the box and hideously unbecoming when
+worn.  If Daly's going in for the higher grade stuff he
+can't risk choosing unbecoming models."
+
+"Wait till you see him!" smiled Fenger, "sitting there like
+a sultan while the pinks and blues, and whites and plaids
+parade before him."  He turned to his desk again.  "That's
+all, Miss Brandeis.  Thank you."  Then, at a sudden thought. 
+"Do you know that all your suggestions have been human
+suggestions?  I mean they all have had to do with people. 
+Tell me, how do you happen to have learned so much about
+what people feel and think, in such a short time?"
+
+The thing that Clarence Heyl had said flashed through her
+mind, and she was startled to find herself quoting it.  "It
+hasn't been a short time," she said.
+
+"It took a thousand years."  And left Fenger staring,
+puzzled.
+
+She took next morning for her tour of the plant as Fenger
+had suggested.  She went through it, not as the startled,
+wide-eyed girl of eight months before had gone, but
+critically, and with a little unconscious air of authority. 
+For, this organization, vast though it was, actually showed
+her imprint.  She could have put her finger on this spot,
+and that, saying, "Here is the mark of my personality."  And
+she thought, as she passed from department to department,
+"Ten thousand a year, if you keep on as you've started."  Up
+one aisle and down the next.  Bundles, bundles, bundles. 
+And everywhere you saw the yellow order-slips.  In the hands
+of the stock boys whizzing by on roller skates; in the
+filing department; in the traffic department.  The very air
+seemed jaundiced with those clouds of yellow order-slips. 
+She stopped a moment, fascinated as always before the main
+spiral gravity chute down which the bundles--hundreds of
+them, thousands of them daily--chased each other to--to
+what? Fanny asked herself.  She knew, vaguely, that hands
+caught these bundles halfway, and redirected them toward the
+proper channel, where they were assembled and made ready for
+shipping or mailing.  She turned to a stock boy.
+
+"Where does this empty?" she asked.
+
+"Floor below," said the boy, "on the platform."
+
+Fanny walked down a flight of iron stairs, and around to
+face the spiral chute again.  In front of the chute, and
+connected with it by a great metal lip, was a platform
+perhaps twelve feet above the floor and looking very much
+like the pilot's deck of a ship.  A little flight of steps
+led up to it--very steep steps, that trembled a little under
+a repetition of shocks that came from above.  Fanny climbed
+them warily, gained the top, and found herself standing next
+to the girl whose face had gleamed out at her from among
+those thousands in the crowd pouring out of the plant. 
+The girl glanced up at Fanny for a second--no, for the
+fraction of a second.  Her job was the kind that permitted
+no more than that.  Fanny watched her for one breathless
+moment.  In that moment she understood the look that had
+been stamped on the girl's face that night; the look that
+had cried:  "Release!"  For this platform, shaking under the
+thud of bundles, bundles, bundles, was the stomach of the
+Haynes-Cooper plant.  Sixty per cent of the forty-five
+thousand daily orders passed through the hands of this girl
+and her assistants.  Down the chutes swished the bundles,
+stamped with their section mark, and here they were caught
+deftly and hurled into one of the dozen conveyers that
+flowed out from this main stream.  The wrong bundle into the
+wrong conveyer?  Confusion in the shipping room.  It only
+took a glance of the eye and a motion of the arms.  But that
+glance and that motion had been boiled down to the very
+concentrated essence of economy.  They seemed to be working
+with fury, but then, so does a pile-driver until you get the
+simplicity of it.
+
+Fanny bent over the girl (it was a noisy corner) and put a
+question.  The girl did not pause in her work as she
+answered it.  She caught a bundle with one hand, hurled one
+into a conveyer with the other.
+
+"Seven a week," she said.  And deftly caught the next
+slithering bundle.
+
+Fanny watched her for another moment.  Then she turned and
+went down the steep stairs.
+
+"None of your business," she said to herself, and continued
+her tour.  "None of your business."  She went up to the new
+selectors' floor, and found the plan running as smoothly as
+if it had been part of the plant's system for years. 
+The elevator whisked her up to the top floor, where she met
+the plant's latest practical fad, the new textile chemist--a
+charming youth, disguised in bone-rimmed glasses, who did
+the honors of his little labratory with all the manner
+of a Harvard host.  This was the fusing oven for silks. 
+Here was the drying oven.  This delicate scale weighed every
+ounce of the cloth swatches that came in for inspection, to
+get the percentage of wool and cotton.  Not a chance for the
+manufacturer to slip shoddy into his goods, now.
+
+"Mm," said Fanny, politely.  She hated complicated processes
+that had to do with scales, and weights, and pounds, and
+acids.  She crossed over to the Administration Building, and
+stopped at the door marked, "Mrs. Knowles."  If you had been
+an employee of the Haynes-Cooper company, and had been asked
+to define Mrs. Knowles's position the chances are that you
+would have found yourself floundering, wordless.  Haynes-
+Cooper was reluctant to acknowledge the need of Mrs.
+Knowles.  Still, when you employ ten thousand people, and
+more than half of these are girls, and fifty per cent of
+these girls are unskilled, ignorant, and terribly human you
+find that a Mrs. Knowles saves the equivalent of ten times
+her salary in wear and tear and general prevention.  She
+could have told you tragic stories, could Mrs. Knowles, and
+sordid stories, and comic too; she knew how to deal with
+terror, and shame, and stubborn silence, and hopeless
+misery.  Gray-haired and motherly?  Not at all.  An
+astonishingly young, pleasingly plumpish woman, with nothing
+remarkable about her except a certain splendid calm.  Four
+years out of Vassar, and already she had learned that if you
+fold your hands in your lap and wait, quietly, asking no
+questions, almost any one will tell you almost anything.
+
+"Hello!" called Fanny.  "How are our morals this morning?"
+
+"Going up!" answered Esther Knowles, "considering that it's
+Tuesday.  Come in.  How's the infant prodigy, I lunched with
+Ella Monahan, and she told me your first New York trip
+was a whirlwind.  Congratulations!"
+
+"Thanks.  I can't stop.  I haven't touched my desk to-day. 
+I just want to ask you if you know the name of that girl who
+has charge of the main chute in the merchandise building."
+
+"Good Lord, child!  There are thousands of girls."
+
+"But this one's rather special.  She is awfully pretty, and
+rather different looking.  Exquisite coloring, a
+discontented expression, and a blouse that's too low in the
+neck."
+
+"Which might be a description of Fanny Brandeis herself,
+barring the blouse," laughed Mrs. Knowles.  Then, at the
+startled look in Fanny's face, "Do forgive me.  And don't
+look so horrified.  I think I know which one you mean.  Her
+name is Sarah Sapinsky--yes, isn't it a pity!--and it's
+queer that you should ask me about her because I've been
+having trouble with that particular girl."
+
+"Trouble?"
+
+"She knows she's pretty, and she knows she's different, and
+she knows she's handicapped, and that accounts for the
+discontented expression.  That, and some other things.  She
+gets seven a week here, and they take just about all of it
+at home.  She says she's sick of it.  She has left home
+twice.  I don't blame the child, but I've always managed to
+bring her back.  Some day there'll be a third time--and I'm
+afraid of it.  She's not bad.  She's really rather splendid,
+and she has a certain dreadful philosophy of her own.  Her
+theory is that there are only two kinds of people in the
+world.  Those that give, and those that take.  And she's
+tired of giving.  Sarah didn't put it just that way; but you
+know what she means, don't you?"
+
+"I know what she means," said Fanny, grimly.
+
+So it was Sarah she saw above all else in her trip through
+the gigantic plant; Sarah's face shone out from among
+the thousands; the thud-thud of Sarah's bundle-chute beat a
+dull accompaniment to the hum of the big hive; above the
+rustle of those myriad yellow order-slips, through the buzz
+of the busy mail room; beneath the roar of the presses in
+the printing building, the crash of the dishes in the
+cafeteria, ran the leid-motif of Sarah-at-seven-a-week. 
+Back in her office once more Fanny dictated a brief
+observation-report for Fenger's perusal.
+
+"It seems to me there's room for improvement in our, card
+index file system.  It's thorough, but unwieldy.  It isn't a
+system any more.  It's a ceremony.  Can't you get a corps of
+system sharks to simplify things there?"
+
+She went into detail and passed on to the next suggestion.
+
+"If the North American Cloak & Suit Company can sell mail
+order dresses that are actually smart and in good taste, I
+don't see why we have to go on carrying only the most
+hideous crudities in our women's dress department.  I know
+that the majority of our women customers wouldn't wear a
+plain, good looking little blue serge dress with a white
+collar, and some tailored buttons.  They want cerise satin
+revers on a plum-colored foulard, and that's what we've been
+giving them.  But there are plenty of other women living
+miles from anywhere who know what's being worn on Fifth
+avenue.  I don't know how they know it, but they do.  And
+they want it.  Why can't we reach those women, as well as
+their shoddier sisters?  The North American people do it. 
+I'd wear one of their dresses myself.  I wouldn't be found
+dead in one of ours.  Here's a suggestion:
+
+"Why can't we get Camille to design half a dozen models a
+season for us?  Now don't roar at that.  And don't think
+that the women on western ranches haven't heard of Camille. 
+They have.  They may know nothing of Mrs. Pankhurst,
+and Lillian Russell may be a myth to them, but I'll swear
+that every one of them knows that Camille is a dressmaker
+who makes super-dresses.  She is as much a household word
+among them as Roosevelt used to be to their men folks.  And
+if we can promise them a Camille-designed dress for $7.85
+(which we could) then why don't we?"
+
+At the very end, to her stenographer's mystification, she
+added this irrevelant line.
+
+"Seven dollars a week is not a living wage."
+
+The report went to Fenger.  He hurdled lightly over the
+first suggestion, knowing that the file system was as simple
+as a monster of its bulk could be.  He ignored the third
+hint.  The second suggestion amused, then interested, then
+convinced him.  Within six months Camille's name actually
+appeared in the Haynes-Cooper catalogue.  Not that alone,
+the Haynes-Cooper company broke its rule as to outside
+advertising, and announced in full-page magazine ads the
+news of the $7.85 gowns designed by Camille especially for
+the Haynes-Cooper company.  There went up a nationwide shout
+of amusement and unbelief, but the announcement continued. 
+Camille (herself a frump with a fringe) whose frocks were
+worn by queens, and dancers and matrons with millions, and
+debutantes; Camille, who had introduced the slouch, revived
+the hoop, discovered the sunset chiffon, had actually
+consented to design six models every season for the mail
+order millions of the Haynes-Cooper women's dress
+department--at a price that made even Michael Fenger wince.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FOURTEEN
+
+Fanny Brandeis' blouses showed real Cluny now, and her hats
+were nothing but line.  A scant two years before she had
+wondered if she would ever reach a pinnacle of success lofty
+enough to enable her to wear blue tailor suits as smart as
+the well-cut garments worn by her mother's friend, Mrs. Emma
+McChesney.  Mrs. McChesney's trig little suits had cost
+fifty dollars, and had looked sixty.  Fanny's now cost one
+hundred and twenty-five, and looked one hundred and twenty-
+five.  Her sleeves alone gave it away.  If you would test
+the soul of a tailor you have only to glance at shoulder-
+seam, elbow and wrist.  Therein lies the wizardry.  Fanny's
+sleeve flowed from arm-pit to thumb-bone without a ripple. 
+Also she moved from the South side to the North side, always
+a sign of prosperity or social ambition, in Chicago.  Her
+new apartment was near the lake, exhilaratingly high,
+correspondingly expensive.  And she was hideously lonely. 
+She was earning a man-size salary now, and she was working
+like a man.  A less magnificently healthy woman could not
+have stood the strain, for Fanny Brandeis was working with
+her head, not her heart.  When we say heart we have come to
+mean something more than the hollow muscular structure that
+propels the blood through the veins.  That, in the
+dictionary, is the primary definition.  The secondary
+definition has to do with such words as emotion, sympathy,
+tenderness, courage, conviction.  She was working, now, as
+Michael Fenger worked, relentlessly, coldly, indomitably,
+using all the material at hand as a means to an end, with
+never a thought of the material itself, as a
+builder reaches for a brick, or stone, and fits it into
+place, smoothly, almost without actually seeing the brick
+itself, except as something which will help to make a
+finished wall.  She rarely prowled the city now.  She told
+herself she was too tired at night, and on Sundays and
+holidays, and I suppose she was.  Indeed, she no longer saw
+things with her former vision.  It was as though her soul
+had shriveled in direct proportion to her salary's
+expansion.  The streets seldom furnished her with a rich
+mental meal now.  When she met a woman with a child, in the
+park, her keen eye noted the child's dress before it saw the
+child itself, if, indeed, she noticed the child at all.
+
+Fascinating Facts, the guileless, pink-cheeked youth who had
+driven her home the night of her first visit to the Fengers,
+shortly after her coming to Haynes-Cooper's, had proved her
+faithful slave, and she had not abused his devotion. 
+Indeed, she hardly considered it that.  The sex side of her
+was being repressed with the artist side.  Most men found
+her curt, brisk, businesslike manner a little repellent,
+though interesting.  They never made love to her, in spite
+of her undeniable attractiveness.  Fascinating Facts drove
+her about in his smart little roadster and one night he
+established himself in her memory forever as the first man
+who had ever asked her to marry him.  He did it haltingly,
+painfully, almost grudgingly.  Fanny was frankly amazed. 
+She had enjoyed going about with him.  He rested and soothed
+her.  He, in turn, had been stimulated by her energy, her
+humor, her electric force.  Nothing was said for a minute
+after his awkward declaration.
+
+"But," he persisted, "you like me, don't you?"
+
+"Of course I do.  Immensely."
+
+"Then why?"
+
+"When a woman of my sort marries it's a miracle.  I'm
+twenty-six, and intelligent and very successful.  A
+frightful combination.  Unmarried women of my type
+aren't content just to feel.  They must analyze their
+feelings.  And analysis is death to romance."
+
+"Great Scott!  You expect to marry somebody sometime, don't
+you, Fanny?"
+
+"No one I know now.  When I do marry, if I do, it will be
+with the idea of making a definite gain.  I don't mean
+necessarily worldly gain, though that would be a factor,
+too."
+Fascinating Facts had been staring straight ahead, his hands
+gripping the wheel with unnecessary rigidity.  He relaxed a
+little now, and even laughed, though not very successfully. 
+Then he said something very wise, for him.
+
+"Listen to me, girl.  You'll never get away with that
+vampire stuff.  Talons are things you have to be born with. 
+You'll never learn to grab with these."  He reached over,
+and picked up her left hand lying inertly in her lap, and
+brought it up to his lips, and kissed it, glove and all. 
+"They're built on the open-face pattern--for giving.  You
+can't fool me.  I know."
+
+A year and a half after her coming to Haynes-Cooper Fanny's
+department was doing a business of a million a year.  The
+need had been there.  She had merely given it the impetus. 
+She was working more or less directly with Fenger now, with
+an eye on every one of the departments that had to do with
+women's clothing, from shoes to hats.  Not that she did any
+actual buying, or selling in these departments.  She still
+confined her actual selecting of goods to the infants' wear
+section, but she occupied, unofficially, the position of
+assistant to the General Merchandise Manager.  They worked
+well together, she and Fenger, their minds often marching
+along without the necessity of a single spoken word.  There
+was no doubt that Fenger's mind was a marvelous piece of
+mechanism.  Under it the Haynes-Cooper plant functioned with
+the clockwork regularity of a gigantic automaton.  System
+and Results--these were his twin gods.  With his mind
+intent on them he failed to see that new gods, born of
+spiritual unrest, were being set up in the temples of Big
+Business.  Their coming had been rumored for many years. 
+Words such as Brotherhood, Labor, Rights, Humanity, Hours,
+once regarded as the special property of the street corner
+ranter, were creeping into our everyday vocabulary.  And
+strangely enough, Nathan Haynes, the gentle, the bewildered,
+the uninspired, heard them, and listened.  Nathan Haynes had
+begun to accustom himself to the roar of the flood that had
+formerly deafened him.  He was no longer stunned by the
+inrush of his millions.  The report sheet handed him daily
+had never ceased to be a wildly unexpected thing, and he
+still shrank from it, sometimes.  It was so fantastic, so
+out of all reason.  But he even dared, now and then, to put
+out a tentative hand to guide the flood.  He began to
+realize, vaguely, that Italian Gardens, and marble pools,
+educational endowments and pet charities were but poor,
+ineffectual barriers of mud and sticks, soon swept away by
+the torrent.  As he sat there in his great, luxurious
+office, with the dim, rich old portraits gleaming down on
+him from the walls, he began, gropingly, to evolve a new
+plan; a plan by which the golden flood was to be curbed,
+divided, and made to form a sub-stream, to be utilized for
+the good of the many; for the good of the Ten Thousand, who
+were almost Fifteen Thousand now, with another fifteen
+thousand in mills and factories at distant points, whose
+entire output was swallowed up by the Haynes-Cooper plant. 
+Michael Fenger, Super-Manager, listened to the plan, smiled
+tolerantly, and went on perfecting an already miraculous
+System.  Sarah Sapinsky, at seven a week, was just so much
+untrained labor material, easily replaced by material
+exactly like it.  No, Michael Fenger, with his head in the
+sand, heard no talk of new gods.  He only knew that the
+monster plant under his management was yielding the
+greatest possible profit under the least possible outlay.
+
+In Fanny Brandeis he had found a stimulating, energizing
+fellow worker.  That had been from the beginning.  In the
+first month or two of her work, when her keen brain was
+darting here and there, into forgotten and neglected
+corners, ferreting out dusty scraps of business waste and
+holding them up to the light, disdainfully, Fenger had
+watched her with a mingling of amusement and a sort of fond
+pride, as one would a precocious child.  As the months went
+on the pride and amusement welded into something more than
+admiration, such as one expert feels for a fellow-craftsman. 
+Long before the end of the first year he knew that here was
+a woman such as he had dreamed of all his life and never
+hoped to find.  He often found himself sitting at his office
+desk, or in his library at home, staring straight ahead for
+a longer time than he dared admit, his papers or book
+forgotten in his hand.  His thoughts applied to her
+adjectives which proved her a paradox:  Generous,
+sympathetic, warm-hearted, impulsive, imaginative; cold,
+indomitable, brilliant, daring, intuitive.  He would rouse
+himself almost angrily and force himself to concentrate
+again upon the page before him.  I don't know how he thought
+it all would end--he whose life-habit it was to follow out
+every process to its ultimate step, whether mental or
+mechanical.  As for Fanny, there was nothing of the
+intriguant about her.  She was used to admiration.  She was
+accustomed to deference from men.  Brandeis' Bazaar had
+insured that.  All her life men had taken orders from her,
+all the way from Aloysius and the blithe traveling men of
+whom she bought goods, to the salesmen and importers in the
+Chicago wholesale houses.  If they had attempted,
+occasionally, to mingle the social and personal with the
+commercial Fanny had not resented their attitude.  She had
+accepted their admiration and refused their invitations
+with equal good nature, and thus retained their friendship. 
+It is not exaggeration to say that she looked upon Michael
+Fenger much as she had upon these genial fellow-workers.  A
+woman as straightforward and direct as she has what is known
+as a single-track mind in such matters.  It is your soft and
+silken mollusc type of woman whose mind pursues a slimy and
+labyrinthine trail.  But it is useless to say that she did
+not feel something of the intense personal attraction of the
+man.  Often it used to puzzle and annoy her to find that as
+they sat arguing in the brisk, everyday atmosphere of office
+or merchandise room the air between them would suddenly
+become electric, vibrant.  They met each other's eyes with
+effort.  When their hands touched, accidentally, over papers
+or samples they snatched them back.  Fanny found herself
+laughing uncertainly, at nothing, and was furious.  When a
+silence fell between them they would pounce upon it,
+breathlessly, and smother it with talk.
+
+Do not think that any furtive love-making went on,
+sandwiched between shop talk.  Their conversation might have
+taken place between two men.  Indeed, they often were
+brutally frank to each other.  Fanny had the vision, Fenger
+the science to apply it.  Sometimes her intuition leaped
+ahead of his reasoning.  Then he would say, "I'm not sold on
+that," which is modern business slang meaning, "You haven't
+convinced me."  She would go back and start afresh, covering
+the ground more slowly.
+
+Usually her suggestions were practical and what might be
+termed human.  They seemed to be founded on an uncanny
+knowledge of people's frailties.  It was only when she
+touched upon his beloved System that he was adamant.
+
+"None of that socialistic stuff," he would say.  "This isn't
+a Benevolent Association we're running.  It's the biggest
+mail order business in the world, and its back-bone is
+System.  I've been just fifteen years perfecting that
+System.  It's my job.  Hands off."
+
+"A fifteen year old system ought to be scrapped," Fanny
+would retort, boldly.  "Anyway, the Simon Legree thing has
+gone out."
+
+No one in the plant had ever dared to talk to him like that. 
+He would glare down at Fanny for a moment, like a mastiff on
+a terrier.  Fanny, seeing his face rage-red, would flash him
+a cheerful and impudent smile.  The anger, fading slowly,
+gave way to another look, so that admiration and resentment
+mingled for a moment.
+
+"Lucky for you you're not a man."
+
+"I wish I were."
+
+"I'm glad you're not."
+
+Not a very thrilling conversation for those of you who are
+seeking heartthrobs.
+
+In May Fanny made her first trip to Europe for the firm.  It
+was a sudden plan.  Instantly Theodore leaped to her mind
+and she was startled at the tumult she felt at the thought
+of seeing him and his child.  The baby, a girl, was more
+than a year old.  Her business, a matter of two weeks,
+perhaps, was all in Berlin and Paris, but she cabled
+Theodore that she would come to them in Munich, if only for
+a day or two.  She had very little curiosity about the woman
+Theodore had married.  The memory of that first photograph
+of hers, befrizzed, bejeweled, and asmirk, had never effaced
+itself.  It had stamped her indelibly in Fanny's mind.
+
+The day before she left for New York (she sailed from there)
+she had a letter from Theodore.  It was evident at once that
+he had not received her cable.  He was in Russia, giving a
+series of concerts.  Olga and the baby were with him.  He
+would be back in Munich in June.  There was some talk of
+America.  When Fanny realized that she was not to see him
+she experienced a strange feeling that was a mixture of
+regret and relief.  All the family love in her, a
+racial trait, had been stirred at the thought of again
+seeing that dear blond brother, the self-centered, willful,
+gifted boy who had held the little congregation rapt, there
+in the Jewish house of worship in Winnebago.  But she had
+recoiled a little from the meeting with this other unknown
+person who gave concerts in Russia, who had adopted Munich
+as his home, who was the husband of this Olga person, and
+the father of a ridiculously German looking baby in a very
+German looking dress, all lace and tucks, and wearing
+bracelets on its chubby arms, and a locket round its neck. 
+That was what one might expect of Olga's baby.  But not of
+Theodore's.  Besides, what business had that boy with a
+baby, anyway?  Himself a baby.
+
+Fenger had arranged for her cabin, and she rather resented
+its luxury until she learned later, that it is the buyers
+who always occupy the staterooms de luxe on ocean liners. 
+She learned, too, that the men in yachting caps and white
+flannels, and the women in the smartest and most subdued of
+blue serge and furs were not millionaires temporarily
+deprived of their own private seagoing craft, but buyers
+like herself, shrewd, aggressive, wise and incredibly
+endowed with savoir faire.  Merely to watch one of them
+dealing with a deck steward was to know for all time the
+superiority of mind over matter.
+
+Most incongruously, it was Ella Monahan and Clarence Heyl
+who waved good-by to her as her ship swung clear of the
+dock.  Ella was in New York on her monthly trip.  Heyl had
+appeared at the hotel as Fanny was adjusting her veil and
+casting a last rather wild look around the room.  Molly
+Brandeis had been the kind of woman who never misses a train
+or overlooks a hairpin.  Fanny's early training had proved
+invaluable more than once in the last two years. 
+Nevertheless, she was rather flustered, for her, as the
+elevator took her down to the main floor.  She told
+herself it was not the contemplation of the voyage itself
+that thrilled her.  It was the fact that here was another
+step definitely marking her progress.
+Heyl, looking incredibly limp, was leaning against a gaudy
+marble pillar, his eyes on the downcoming elevators.  Fanny
+saw him just an instant before he saw her, and in that
+moment she found herself wondering why this boy (she felt
+years older than he) should look so fantastically out of
+place in this great, glittering, feverish hotel lobby.  Just
+a shy, rather swarthy Jewish boy, who wore the right kind of
+clothes in the wrong manner--then Heyl saw her and came
+swiftly toward her.
+
+"Hello, Fan!"
+
+"Hello, Clancy!"  They had not seen each other in six
+months.
+
+"Anybody else going down with you?"
+
+"No.  Ella Monahan had a last-minute business appointment,
+but she promised to be at the dock, somehow, before the boat
+leaves.  I'm going to be grand, and taxi all the way."
+
+"I've an open car, waiting."
+
+"But I won't have it!  I can't let you do that."
+
+"Oh, yes you can.  Don't take it so hard.  That's the
+trouble with you business women.  You're killing the
+gallantry of a nation.  Some day one of you will get up and
+give me a seat in a subway----"
+
+"I'll punish you for that, Clancy.  If you want the Jane
+Austen thing I'll accommodate.  I'll drop my handkerchief,
+gloves, bag, flowers and fur scarf at intervals of five
+minutes all the way downtown.  Then you may scramble around
+on the floor of the cab and feel like a knight."
+
+Fanny had long ago ceased to try to define the charm of this
+man.  She always meant to be serenely dignified with him. 
+She always ended by feeling very young, and, somehow,
+gloriously carefree and lighthearted.  There was about him a
+naturalness, a simplicity, to which one responded in kind.
+
+Seated beside her he turned and regarded her with
+disconcerting scrutiny.
+
+"Like it?" demanded Fanny, pertly.  And smoothed her veil,
+consciously.
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, for a man who looks negligee even in evening clothes
+aren't you overcritical?"
+
+"I'm not criticizing your clothes.  Even I can see that that
+hat and suit have the repressed note that means money.  And
+you're the kind of woman who looks her best in those plain
+dark things."
+
+"Well, then?"
+
+"You look like a buyer.  In two more years your face will
+have that hard finish that never comes off."
+
+"I am a buyer."
+
+"You're not.  You're a creator.  Remember, I'm not
+belittling your job.  It's a wonderful job--for Ella
+Monahan.  I wish I had the gift of eloquence.  I wish I had
+the right to spank you.  I wish I could prove to you,
+somehow, that with your gift, and heritage, and racial right
+it's as criminal for you to be earning your thousands at
+Haynes-Cooper's as it would have been for a vestal virgin to
+desert her altar fire to stoke a furnace.  Your eyes are
+bright and hard, instead of tolerant.  Your mouth is losing
+its graciousness.  Your whole face is beginning to be
+stamped with a look that says shrewdness and experience, and
+success."
+
+"I am successful.  Why shouldn't I look it?"
+
+"Because you're a failure.  I'm sick, I tell you--sick with
+disappointment in you.  Jane Addams would have been a
+success in business, too.  She was born with a humanity
+sense, and a value sense, and a something else that can't be
+acquired.  Ida Tarbell could have managed your whole Haynes-
+Cooper plant, if she'd had to.  So could a dozen other
+women I could name.  You don't see any sign of what you call
+success on Jane Addams's face, do you?  You wouldn't say, on
+seeing her, that here was a woman who looked as if she might
+afford hundred-dollar tailor suits and a town car.  No.  All
+you see in her face is the reflection of the souls of all
+the men and women she has worked to save.  She has covered
+her job--the job that the Lord intended her to cover.  And
+to me she is the most radiantly beautiful woman I have ever
+seen."
+
+Fanny sat silent.  She was twisting the fingers of one hand
+in the grip of the other, as she had since childhood, when
+deeply disturbed.  And suddenly she began to cry--silently,
+harrowingly, as a man cries, her shoulders shaking, her face
+buried in her furs.
+
+"Fanny!  Fanny girl!"  He was horribly disturbed and
+contrite.  He patted her arm, awkwardly.  She shook free of
+his hand, childishly.  "Don't cry, dear.  I'm sorry.  It's
+just that I care so much.  It's just----"
+
+She raised an angry, tear-stained face.  "It's just that you
+have an exalted idea of your own perceptions.  It's just
+that you've grown up from what they used to call a bright
+little boy to a bright young man, and you're just as
+tiresome now as you were then.  I'm happy enough, except
+when I see you.  I'm getting the things I starved for all
+those years.  Why, I'll never get over being thrilled at the
+idea of being able to go to the theater, or to a concert,
+whenever I like.  Actually whenever I want to.  And to be
+able to buy a jabot, or a smart hat, or a book.  You don't
+know how I wanted things, and how tired I got of never
+having them.  I'm happy!  I'm happy!  Leave me alone!"
+
+"It's an awful price to pay for a hat, and a jabot, and a
+book and a theater ticket, Fan."
+
+Ella Monahan had taken the tube, and was standing in the
+great shed, watching arrivals with interest, long
+before they bumped over the cobblestones of Hoboken. 
+The three descended to Fanny's cabin.  Ella had sent
+champagne--six cosy pints in a wicker basket.
+
+"They say it's good for seasickness," she announced,
+cheerfully, "but it's a lie.  Nothing's good for
+seasickness, except death, or dry land.  But even if you do
+feel miserable--and you probably will--there's something
+about being able to lie in your berth and drink champagne
+alone, by the spoonful, that's sort of soothing."
+
+Heyl had fallen silent.  Fanny was radiant again, and
+exclamatory over her books and flowers.
+
+"Of course it's my first trip," she explained, "and an event
+in my life, but I didn't suppose that anybody else would
+care.  What's this?  Candy?  Glace fruit."  She glanced
+around the luxurious little cabin, then up at Heyl,
+impudently.  "I may be a coarse commercial person, Clancy,
+but I must say I like this very, very much.  Sorry."
+
+They went up on deck.  Ella, a seasoned traveler, was full
+of parting instructions.  "And be sure to eat at
+Kempinski's, in Berlin.  Twenty cents for lobster.  And
+caviar!  Big as hen's eggs, and as cheap as codfish.  And
+don't forget to order mai-bowle.  It tastes like
+champagne, but isn't, and it has the most delicious dwarf
+strawberries floating on top.  This is just the season for
+it.  You're lucky.  If you tip the waiter one mark he's
+yours for life.  Oh, and remember the plum compote. 
+You'll be disappointed in their Wertheim's that they're
+always bragging about.  After all, Field's makes 'em all
+look like country stores."
+
+"Wertheim's?  Is that something to eat, too?"
+
+"No, idiot.  It's their big department store."  Ella turned
+to Heyl, for whom she felt mingled awe and liking.  "If this
+trip of hers is successful, the firm will probably send her
+over three or four times a year.  It's a wonderful chance
+for a kid like her."
+
+"Then I hope," said Heyl, quietly, "that this trip may be a
+failure."
+
+Ella smiled, uncertainly.
+
+"Don't laugh," said Fanny, sharply.  "He means it."
+
+Ella, sensing an unpleasant something in which she had no
+part, covered the situation with another rush of
+conversation.
+
+"You'll get the jolt of your life when you come to Paris and
+find that you're expected to pay for the lunches, and all
+the cab fares, and everything, of those shrimpy little
+commissionaires.  Polite little fellows, they are, in
+frock coats, and mustaches, and they just stand aside, as
+courtly as you please, while you pay for everything.  Their
+house expects it.  I almost passed away, the first time, but
+you get used to it.  Say, imagine one of our traveling men
+letting you pay for his lunch and taxi."
+
+She rattled on, genially.  Heyl listened with unfeigned
+delight.  Ella found herself suddenly abashed before those
+clear, far-seeing eyes.  "You think I'm a gabby old girl,
+don't you?"
+
+"I think you're a wonderful woman," said Heyl.  "Very wise,
+and very kind."
+
+"Why--thanks," faltered Ella.  "Why--thanks."
+
+They said their good-bys.  Ella hugged Fanny warm-heartedly. 
+Then she turned away, awkwardly.  Heyl put his two hands on
+Fanny's shoulders and looked down at her.  For a breathless
+second she thought he was about to kiss her.  She was amazed
+to find herself hoping that he would.  But he didn't. 
+"Good-by," he said, simply.  And took her hand in his steel
+grip a moment, and dropped it.  And turned away.  A
+messenger boy, very much out of breath, came running up to
+her, a telegram in his hand.
+
+"For me?" Fanny opened it, frowned, smiled.  "It's from Mr.
+Fenger.  Good wishes.  As if all those flowers weren't
+enough."
+
+"Mm," said Ella.  She and Heyl descended the gang-way, and
+stood at the dock's edge, looking rather foolish and
+uncertain, as people do at such times.  There followed a few
+moments of scramble, of absurdly shouted last messages, of
+bells, and frantic waving of handkerchiefs.  Fanny, at the
+rail, found her two among the crowd, and smiled down upon
+them, mistily.  Ella was waving energetically.  Heyl was
+standing quite still, looking up.  The ship swung clear,
+crept away from the dock.  The good-bys swelled to a roar. 
+Fanny leaned far over the rail and waved too, a sob in her
+throat.  Then she saw that she was waving with the hand that
+held the yellow telegram.  She crumpled it in the other
+hand, and substituted her handkerchief.  Heyl still stood,
+hat in hand, motionless.
+
+"Why don't you wave good-by?" she called, though he could
+not possibly hear.  "Wave good-by!"  And then the hand with
+the handkerchief went to her face, and she was weeping.  I
+think it was that old drama-thrill in her, dormant for so
+long.  But at that Heyl swung his hat above his head, three
+times, like a schoolboy, and, grasping Ella's plump and
+resisting arm, marched abruptly away.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER FIFTEEN
+
+The first week in June found her back in New York.  That
+month of absence had worked a subtle change.  The two weeks
+spent in crossing and recrossing had provided her with a
+let-down that had been almost jarring in its completeness. 
+Everything competitive had seemed to fade away with the
+receding shore, and to loom up again only when the skyline
+became a thing of smoke-banks, spires, and shafts.  She had
+had only two weeks for the actual transaction of her
+business.  She must have been something of a revelation to
+those Paris and Berlin manufacturers, accustomed though they
+were to the brisk and irresistible methods of the American
+business woman.  She was, after all, absurdly young to be
+talking in terms of millions, and she was amazingly well
+dressed.  This last passed unnoticed, or was taken for
+granted in Paris, but in Berlin, home of the frump and the
+flour-sack figure, she was stared at, appreciatively.  Her
+business, except for one or two unimportant side lines, had
+to do with two factories on whose product the Haynes-Cooper
+company had long had a covetous eye.  Quantity, as usual,
+was the keynote of their demand, and Fanny's task was that
+of talking in six-figure terms to these conservative and
+over-wary foreign manufacturers.  That she had successfully
+accomplished this, and that she had managed to impress them
+also with the important part that time and promptness in
+delivery played in a swift-moving machine like the Haynes-
+Cooper concern, was due to many things beside her natural
+business ability.  Self-confidence was there, and
+physical vigor, and diplomacy.  But above all
+there was that sheer love of the game; the dramatic sense
+that enabled her to see herself in the part.  That alone
+precluded the possibility of failure.  She knew how youthful
+she looked, and how glowing.  She anticipated the look that
+came into their faces when she left polite small-talk behind
+and soared up into the cold, rarefied atmosphere of
+business.  She delighted in seeing the admiring and tolerant
+smirk vanish and give way to a startled and defensive
+attentiveness.
+
+It might be mentioned that she managed, somehow, to spend
+almost half a day in Petticoat Lane, and its squalid
+surroundings, while in London.  She actually prowled, alone,
+at night, in the evil-smelling, narrow streets of the poorer
+quarter of Paris, and how she escaped unharmed is a mystery
+that never bothered her, because she had never known fear of
+streets.  She had always walked on the streets of Winnebago,
+Wisconsin, alone.  It never occurred to her not to do the
+same in the streets of Chicago, or New York, or London, or
+Paris.  She found Berlin, with its Adlon, its appalling
+cleanliness, its overfed populace, and its omnipresent
+Kaiser forever scudding up and down Unter den Linden in his
+chocolate-colored car, incredibly dull, and unpicturesque. 
+Something she had temporarily lost there in the busy
+atmosphere of the Haynes-Cooper plant, seemed to have
+returned, miraculously.
+
+New York, on her return, was something of a shock.  She
+remembered how vividly fresh it had looked to her on the day
+of that first visit, months before.  Now, to eyes fresh from
+the crisp immaculateness of Paris and Berlin, Fifth avenue
+looked almost grimy, and certainly shabby in spots.
+
+Ella Monahan, cheerful, congratulatory, beaming, met her at
+the pier, and Fanny was startled at her own sensation of
+happiness as she saw that pink, good-natured face looking up
+at her from the crowd below.  The month that had gone
+by since last she saw Ella standing just so, seemed to slip
+away and fade into nothingness.
+
+"I waited over a day," said Ella, "just to see you.  My, you
+look grand!  I know where you got that hat.  Galeries
+Lafayette.  How much?"
+
+"I don't expect you to believe it.  Thirty-five francs. 
+Seven dollars.  I couldn't get it for twenty-five here."
+
+They were soon clear of the customs.  Ella had engaged a
+room for her at the hotel they always used.  As they rode
+uptown together, happily, Ella opened her bag and laid a
+little packet of telegrams and letters in Fanny's lap.
+
+"I guess Fenger's pleased, all right, if telegrams mean
+anything.  Not that I know they're from him.  But he said--"
+
+But Fanny was looking up from one of them with a startled
+expression.
+"He's here.  Fenger's here."
+
+"In New York?" asked Ella, rather dully.
+
+"Yes."  She ripped open another letter.  It was from
+Theodore.  He was coming to New York in August.  The Russian
+tour had been a brilliant success.  They had arranged a
+series of concerts for him in the United States.  He could
+give his concerto there.  It was impossible in Russia,
+Munich, even Berlin, because it was distinctly Jewish in
+theme--as Jewish as the Kol Nidre, and as somber.  They
+would have none of it in Europe.  Prejudice was too strong. 
+But in America!  He was happier than he had been in years. 
+Olga objected to coming to America, but she would get over
+that.  The little one was well, and she was learning to
+talk.  Actually!  They were teaching her to say Tante Fanny.
+
+"Well!" exclaimed Fanny, her eyes shining.  She read bits of
+the letter aloud to Ella.  Ella was such a satisfactory
+sort of person to whom to read a letter aloud.  She
+exclaimed in all the right places.  Her face was as radiant
+as Fanny's.  They both had forgotten all about Fenger, their
+Chief.  But they had been in their hotel scarcely a half
+hour, and Ella had not done exclaiming over the bag that
+Fanny had brought her from Paris, when his telephone call
+came.
+
+He wasted very little time on preliminaries.
+
+"I'll call for you at four.  We'll drive through the park,
+and out by the river, and have tea somewhere."
+
+"That would be wonderful.  That is, if Ella's free.  I'll
+ask her."
+
+"Ella?"
+
+"Yes.  She's right here.  Hold the wire, will you?"  She
+turned away from the telephone to face Ella.  "It's Mr.
+Fenger.  He wants to take us both driving this afternoon. 
+You can go, can't you?"
+
+"I certainly CAN," replied Miss Monahan, with what might
+have appeared to be undue force.
+
+Fanny turned back to the telephone.  "Yes, thanks.  We can
+both go.  We'll be ready at four."
+
+Fanny decided that Fenger's muttered reply couldn't have
+been what she thought it was.
+
+Ella busied herself with the unpacking of a bag.  She showed
+a disposition to spoil Fanny.  "You haven't asked after your
+friend, Mr. Heyl.  My land!  If I had a friend like that--"
+"Oh, yes," said Fanny, vaguely.  "I suppose you and he are
+great chums by this time.  He's a nice boy."
+
+"You don't suppose anything of the kind," Ella retorted,
+crisply.  "That boy, as you call him--and it isn't always
+the man with the biggest fists that's got the most fight in
+him--is about as far above me as--as--" she sat down on the
+floor, ponderously, beside the open bag, and gesticulated
+with a hairbrush, at loss for a simile "as an eagle is above
+a waddling old duck.  No, I don't mean that, either,
+because I never did think much of the eagle, morally.  But
+you get me.  Not that he knows it, or shows it.  Heyl, I
+mean.  Lord, no!  But he's got something--something kind of
+spiritual in him that makes you that way, too.  He doesn't
+say much, either.  That's the funny part of it.  I do all
+the talking, seems, when I'm with him.  But I find myself
+saying things I didn't know I knew.  He makes you think
+about things you're afraid to face by yourself.  Big things. 
+Things inside of you."  She fell silent a moment, sitting
+cross-legged before the bag.  Then she got up, snapped the
+bag shut, and bore it across the room to a corner.  "You
+know he's gone, I s'pose."
+
+"Gone?"
+
+"To those mountains, or wherever it is he gets that look in
+his eyes from.  That's my notion of a job.  They let him go
+for the whole summer, roaming around being a naturalist,
+just so's he'll come back in the winter."
+
+"And the column?" Fanny asked.  "Do they let that go, too?"
+
+"I guess he's going to do some writing for them up there. 
+After all, he's the column.  It doesn't make much difference
+where he writes from.  Did you know it's being syndicated
+now, all over the country?  Well, it is.  That's the secret
+of its success, I suppose.  It isn't only a column written
+about New York for a New York paper.  It's about everything,
+for anybody.  It's the humanest stuff.  And he isn't afraid
+of anything.  New York's crazy about him.  They say he's
+getting a salary you wouldn't believe.  I'm a tongue-tied
+old fool when I'm with him, but then, he likes to talk about
+you, mostly, so it doesn't matter."
+
+Fanny turned swiftly from the dressing-table, where she was
+taking the pins out of her vigorous, abundant hair.
+
+"What kind of thing does he say about me, Ellen girl.  H'm? 
+What kind of thing?"
+
+"Abuse, mostly.  I'll be running along to my own room now. 
+I'll be out for lunch, but back at four, for that airing
+Fenger's so wild to have me take.  If I were you I'd lie
+down for an hour, till you get your land-legs."  She poked
+her head in at the door again.  "Not that you look as if you
+needed it.  You've got a different look, somehow.  Kind of
+rested.  After all, there's nothing like an ocean voyage."
+
+She was gone.  Fanny stood a moment, in the center of the
+room.  There was nothing relaxed or inert about her.  Had
+you seen her standing there, motionless, you would still
+have got a sense of action from her.  She looked so
+splendidly alive.  She walked to the window, now, and stood
+looking down upon New York in early June.  Summer had not
+yet turned the city into a cauldron of stone and steel. 
+From her height she could glimpse the green of the park,
+with a glint of silver in its heart, that was the lake.  Her
+mind was milling around, aimlessly, in a manner far removed
+from its usual orderly functioning.  Now she thought of
+Theodore, her little brother--his promised return.  It had
+been a slow and painful thing, his climb.  Perhaps if she
+had been more ready to help, if she had not always waited
+until he asked the aid that she might have volunteered--she
+thrust that thought out of her mind, rudely, and slammed the
+door on it. . . .  Fenger.  He had said, "Damn!" when she
+had told him about Ella.  And his voice had been--well--she
+pushed that thought outside her mind, too. . . .  Clarence
+Heyl. . . .  "He makes you think about things you're afraid
+to face by yourself.  Big things.  Things inside of
+you. . . ."
+
+Fanny turned away from the window.  She decided she must be
+tired, after all.  Because here she was, with everything to
+make her happy:  Theodore coming home; her foreign trip a
+success; Ella and Fenger to praise her and make much of
+her; a drive and tea this afternoon (she wasn't above these
+creature comforts)--and still she felt unexhilarated, dull. 
+She decided to go down for a bit of lunch, and perhaps a
+stroll of ten or fifteen minutes, just to see what Fifth
+avenue was showing.  It was half-past one when she reached
+that ordinarily well-regulated thoroughfare.  She found its
+sidewalks packed solid, up and down, as far as the eye could
+see, with a quiet, orderly, expectant mass of people. 
+Squads of mounted police clattered up and down, keeping the
+middle of the street cleared.  Whatever it was that had
+called forth that incredible mass, was scheduled to proceed
+uptown from far downtown, and that very soon.  Heads were
+turned that way.  Fanny, wedged in the crowd, stood a-
+tiptoe, but she could see nothing.  It brought to her mind
+the Circus Day of her Winnebago childhood, with Elm street
+packed with townspeople and farmers, all straining their
+eyes up toward Cherry street, the first turn in the line of
+march.  Then, far away, the blare of a band.  "Here they
+come!"  Just then, far down the canyon of Fifth avenue,
+sounded the cry that had always swayed Elm street,
+Winnebago.  "Here they come!"
+
+"What is it?" Fanny asked a woman against whom she found
+herself close-packed.  "What are they waiting for?"
+
+"It's the suffrage parade," replied the woman.  "The big
+suffrage parade.  Don't you know?"
+
+"No.  I haven't been here."  Fanny was a little
+disappointed.  The crowd had surged forward, so that it was
+impossible for her to extricate herself.  She found herself
+near the curb.  She could see down the broad street now, and
+below Twenty-third street it was a moving, glittering mass,
+pennants, banners, streamers flying. The woman next her
+volunteered additional information.
+
+"The mayor refused permission to let them march.  But
+they fought it, and they say it's the greatest suffrage
+parade ever held.  I'd march myself, only--"
+
+"Only what?"
+
+"I don't know.  I'm scared to, I think.  I'm not a New
+Yorker."
+
+"Neither am I," said Fanny.  Fanny always became friendly
+with the woman next her in a crowd.  That was her mother in
+her.  One could hear the music of the band, now.  Fanny
+glanced at her watch.  It was not quite two.  Oh, well, she
+would wait and see some of it.  Her mind was still too
+freshly packed with European impressions to receive any real
+idea of the value of this pageant, she told herself.  She
+knew she did not feel particularly interested.  But she
+waited.
+
+Another surging forward.  It was no longer, "Here they
+come!" but, "Here they are!"
+
+And here they were.
+
+A squad of mounted police, on very prancy horses.  The men
+looked very ruddy, and well set-up and imposing.  Fanny had
+always thrilled to anything in uniform, given sufficient
+numbers of them.  Another police squad.  A brass band, on
+foot.  And then, in white, on a snow-white charger, holding
+a white banner aloft, her eyes looking straight ahead, her
+face very serious and youthful, the famous beauty and
+suffrage leader, Mildred Inness.  One of the few famous
+beauties who actually was a beauty.  And after that women,
+women, women!  Hundreds of them, thousands of them, a river
+of them flowing up Fifth avenue to the park.  More bands. 
+More horses.  Women!  Women!  They bore banners.  This
+section, that section.  Artists.  School teachers.  Lawyers. 
+Doctors.  Writers.  Women in college caps and gowns.  Women
+in white, from shoes to hats.  Young women.  Girls.  Gray-
+haired women.  A woman in a wheel chair, smiling.  A man
+next to Fanny began to jeer.  He was a red-faced young man,
+with a coarse, blotchy skin, and thick lips.  He smoked
+a cigar, and called to the women in a falsetto voice,
+"Hello, Sadie!" he called.  "Hello, kid!"  And the women
+marched on, serious-faced, calm-eyed.  There came floats;
+elaborate affairs, with girls in Greek robes.  Fanny did not
+care for these.  More solid ranks.  And then a strange and
+pitiful and tragic and eloquent group.  Their banner said,
+"Garment Workers.  Infants' Wear Section."  And at their
+head marched a girl, carrying a banner.  I don't know how
+she attained that honor.  I think she must have been one of
+those fiery, eloquent leaders in her factory clique.  The
+banner she carried was a large one, and it flapped
+prodigiously in the breeze, and its pole was thick and
+heavy.  She was a very small girl, even in that group of
+pale-faced, under-sized, under-fed girls.  A Russian Jewess,
+evidently.  Her shoes were ludicrous.  They curled up at the
+toes, and the heels were run down.  Her dress was a sort of
+parody on the prevailing fashion.  But on her face, as she
+trudged along, hugging the pole of the great pennant that
+flapped in the breeze, was stamped a look.--well, you see
+that same look in some pictures of Joan of Arc.  It wasn't
+merely a look.  It was a story.  It was tragedy.  It was the
+history of a people.  You saw in it that which told of
+centuries of oppression in Russia.  You saw eager groups of
+student Intellectuals, gathered in secret places for low-
+voiced, fiery talk.  There was in it the unspeakable misery
+of Siberia.  It spoke eloquently of pogroms, of massacres,
+of Kiev and its sister-horror, Kishineff.  You saw mean and
+narrow streets, and carefully darkened windows, and, on the
+other side of those windows the warm yellow glow of the
+seven-branched Shabbos light.  Above this there shone the
+courage of a race serene in the knowledge that it cannot
+die.  And illuminating all, so that her pinched face,
+beneath the flapping pennant, was the rapt, uplifted
+countenance of the Crusader, there blazed the great glow of
+hope.  This woman movement, spoken of so glibly as
+Suffrage, was, to the mind of this over-read, under-fed,
+emotional, dreamy little Russian garment worker the glorious
+means to a long hoped for end.  She had idealized it, with
+the imagery of her kind.  She had endowed it with promise
+that it would never actually hold for her, perhaps.  And so
+she marched on, down the great, glittering avenue, proudly
+clutching her unwieldy banner, a stunted, grotesque,
+magnificent figure.  More than a figure.  A symbol.
+
+Fanny's eyes followed her until she passed out of sight. 
+She put up her hand to her cheek, and her face was wet.  She
+stood there, and the parade went on, endlessly, it seemed,
+and she saw it through a haze.  Bands.  More bands. 
+Pennants.  Floats.  Women.  Women.  Women.
+
+"I always cry at parades," said Fanny, to the woman who
+stood next her--the woman who wanted to march, but was
+scared to.
+"That's all right," said the woman.  "That's all right." 
+And she laughed, because she was crying, too.  And then she
+did a surprising thing.  She elbowed her way to the edge of
+the crowd, past the red-faced man with the cigar, out to the
+street, and fell into line, and marched on up the street,
+shoulders squared, head high.
+
+Fanny glanced down at her watch.  It was quarter after four. 
+With a little gasp she turned to work her way through the
+close-packed crowd.  It was an actual physical struggle,
+from which she emerged disheveled, breathless, uncomfortably
+warm, and minus her handkerchief, but she had gained the
+comparative quiet of the side street, and she made the short
+distance that lay between the Avenue and her hotel a matter
+of little more than a minute.  In the hotel corridor stood
+Ella and Fenger, the former looking worried, the latter
+savage.
+
+"Where in the world--" began Ella. 
+
+"Caught in the jam.  And I didn't want to get out.  It was--
+it was--glorious!"  She was shaking hands with Fenger, and
+realizing for the first time that she must be looking
+decidedly sketchy and that she had lost her handkerchief. 
+She fished for it in her bag, hopelessly, when Fenger
+released her hand.  He had not spoken.  Now he said:
+
+"What's the matter with your eyes?"
+
+"I've been crying," Fanny confessed cheerfully.
+
+"Crying!"
+
+"The parade.  There was a little girl in it--" she stopped. 
+Fenger would not be interested in that little girl.  Now
+Clancy would have--but Ella broke in on that thought.
+
+"I guess you don't realize that out in front of this hotel
+there's a kind of a glorified taxi waiting, with the top
+rolled back, and it's been there half an hour.  I never
+expect to see the time when I could enjoy keeping a taxi
+waiting.  It goes against me."
+
+"I'm sorry.  Really.  Let's go.  I'm ready."
+
+"You are not.  Your hair's a sight; and those eyes!"
+
+Fenger put a hand on her arm.  "Go on up and powder your
+nose, Miss Brandeis.  And don't hurry.  I want you to enjoy
+this drive."
+
+On her way up in the elevator Fanny thought, "He has lost
+his waistline.  Now, that couldn't have happened in a month. 
+Queer I didn't notice it before.  And he looks soft.  Not
+enough exercise."
+
+When she rejoined them she was freshly bloused and gloved
+and all traces of the tell-tale red had vanished from her
+eyelids.  Fifth avenue was impossible.  Their car sped up
+Madison avenue, and made for the Park.  The Plaza was a jam
+of tired marchers.  They dispersed from there, but there
+seemed no end to the line that still flowed up Fifth avenue. 
+Fenger seemed scarcely to see it.  He had plunged at once
+into talk of the European trip.  Fanny gave him every
+detail, omitting nothing.  She repeated all that her
+letters and cables had told.  Fenger was more excited than
+she had ever seen him.  He questioned, cross-questioned,
+criticized, probed, exacted an account of every
+conversation.  Usually it was not method that interested
+him, but results.  Fanny, having accomplished the thing she
+had set out to do, had lost interest in it now.  The actual
+millions so glibly bandied in the Haynes-Cooper plant had
+never thrilled her.  The methods by which they were made
+possible had.
+
+Ella had been listening with the shrewd comprehension of one
+who admires the superior art of a fellow craftsman.
+
+"I'll say this, Mr. Fenger.  If I could make you look like
+that, by going to Europe and putting it over those foreign
+boys, I'd feel I'd earned a year's salary right there, and
+quit.  Not to speak of the cross-examination you're putting
+her through."
+
+Fenger laughed, a little self-consciously.  "It's just that
+I want to be sure it's real.  I needn't tell you how
+important this trick is that Miss Brandeis has just turned." 
+He turned to Fanny, with a boyish laugh.  "Now don't pose. 
+You know you can't be as bored as you look."
+
+"Anyway," put in Ella, briskly, "I move that the witness
+step down.  She may not be bored, but she certainly must be
+tired, and she's beginning to look it.  Just lean back,
+Fanny, and let the green of this park soak in.  At that, it
+isn't so awfully green, when you get right close, except
+that one stretch of meadow.  Kind of ugly, Central Park,
+isn't it?  Bare."
+
+Fanny sat forward.  There was more sparkle in her face than
+at any time during the drive.  They were skimming along
+those green-shaded drives that are so sophisticatedly
+sylvan.
+
+"I used to think it was bare, too, and bony as an old maid,
+with no soft cuddly places like the parks at home; no
+gracious green stretches, and no rose gardens.  But somehow,
+it grows on you.  The reticence of it.  And that stretch of
+meadow near the Mall, in the late afternoon, with the mist
+on it, and the sky faintly pink, and that electric sign--
+Somebody's Tires or other--winking off and on--"
+
+"You're a queer child," interrupted Fenger.  "As wooden as
+an Indian while talking about a million-a-year deal, and
+lyrical over a combination of electric sign, sunset, and
+moth-eaten park.  Oh, well, perhaps that's what makes you as
+you are."
+
+Even Ella looked a little startled at that.
+
+They had tea at Claremont, at a table overlooking the river
+and the Palisades.  Fenger was the kind of man to whom
+waiters always give a table overlooking anything that should
+be overlooked.  After tea they drove out along the river and
+came back in the cool of the evening.  Fanny was very quiet
+now.  Fenger followed her mood.  Ella sustained the
+conversation, somewhat doggedly.  It was almost seven when
+they reached the plaza exit.  And there Fanny, sitting
+forward suddenly, gave a little cry.
+
+"Why--they're marching yet!" she said, and her voice was
+high with wonder.  "They're marching yet!  All the time
+we've been driving and teaing, they've been marching."
+
+And so they had.  Thousands upon thousands, they had flowed
+along as relentlessly, and seemingly as endlessly as a
+river.  They were marching yet.  For six hours the thousands
+had poured up that street, making it a moving mass of white. 
+And the end was not yet.  What pen, and tongue, and sense of
+justice had failed to do, they were doing now by sheer,
+crude force of numbers.  The red-faced hooligan, who had
+stood next to Fanny in the crowd hours before, had long ago
+ceased his jibes and slunk away, bored, if not impressed. 
+After all, one might jeer at ten, or fifty, or a hundred
+women, or even five hundred.  But not at forty
+thousand.
+
+Their car turned down Madison Avenue, and Fenger twisted
+about for a last look at the throng in the plaza.  He was
+plainly impressed.  The magnitude of the thing appealed to
+him.  To a Haynes-Cooper-trained mind, forty thousand women,
+marching for whatever the cause, must be impressive.  Forty
+thousand of anything had the respect of Michael Fenger.  His
+eyes narrowed, thoughtfully.
+
+"They seem to have put it over," he said.  "And yet, what's
+the idea?  Oh, I'm for suffrage, of course.  Naturally.  And
+all those thousands of women, in white--still, a thing as
+huge as this parade has to be reduced to a common
+denominator, to be really successful.  If somebody could
+take the whole thing, boil it down, and make the country see
+what this huge demonstration stands for."
+
+Fanny leaned forward suddenly.  "Tell the man to stop.  I
+want to get out."
+
+Fenger and Ella stared.  "What for?"  But Fenger obeyed.
+
+"I want to get something at this stationer's shop."  She had
+jumped down almost before the motor had stopped at the curb.
+
+"But let me get it."
+
+"No.  You can't.  Wait here."  She disappeared within the
+shop.  She was back in five minutes, a flat, loosely wrapped
+square under her arm.  "Cardboard," she explained briefly,
+in answer to their questions.
+
+Fenger, about to leave them at their hotel, presented his
+plans for the evening.  Fanny, looking up at him, her head
+full of other plans, thought he looked and sounded very much
+like Big Business.  And, for the moment at least, Fanny
+Brandeis loathed Big Business, and all that it stood for.
+
+"It's almost seven," Fenger was saying.  "We'll be
+rubes in New York, this evening.  You girls will just
+have time to freshen up a bit--I suppose you want to--and
+then we'll have dinner, and go to the theater, and to supper
+afterward.  What do you want to see?"
+
+Ella looked at Fanny.  And Fanny shook her head, "Thanks. 
+You're awfully kind.  But--no."
+
+"Why not?" demanded Fenger, gruffly.
+
+"Perhaps because I'm tired.  And there's something else I
+must do."
+
+Ella looked relieved.  Fenger's eyes bored down upon Fanny,
+but she seemed not to feel them.  She held out her hand.
+
+"You're going back to-morrow?" Fenger asked.  "I'm not
+leaving until Thursday."
+
+"To-morrow, with Ella.  Good-by.  It's been a glorious
+drive.  I feel quite rested."
+
+"You just said you were tired."
+
+The elevator door clanged, shutting out the sight of
+Fenger's resentful frown.
+
+"He's as sensitive as a soubrette," said Ella.  "I'm glad
+you decided not to go out.  I'm dead, myself.  A kimono for
+the rest of the evening."
+
+Fanny seemed scarcely to hear her.  With a nod she left
+Ella, and entered her own room.  There she wasted no time. 
+She threw her hat and coat on the bed.  Her suitcase was on
+the baggage stand.  She turned on all the lights, swung the
+closed suitcase up to the table, shoved the table against
+the wall, up-ended the suitcase so that its leather side
+presented a smooth surface, and propped a firm sheet of
+white cardboard against the impromptu rack.  She brought her
+chair up close, fumbled in her bag for the pens she had just
+purchased.  Her eyes were on the blank white surface of the
+paper.  The table was the kind that has a sub-shelf.  It
+prevented Fanny from crossing her legs under it, and that
+bothered her.  While she fitted her pens, and blocked her
+paper, she kept on barking her shins in unconscious
+protest against the uncomfortable conditions under which she
+must work.
+
+She sat staring at the paper now, after having marked it off
+into blocks, with a pencil.  She got up, and walked across
+the room, aimlessly, and stood there a moment, and came
+back.  She picked up a thread on the floor.  Sat down again. 
+Picked up her pencil, rolled it a moment in her palms, then,
+catching her toes behind either foreleg of her chair, in an
+attitude that was as workmanlike as it was ungraceful, she
+began to draw, nervously, tentatively at first, but gaining
+in firmness and assurance as she went on.
+
+If you had been standing behind her chair you would have
+seen, emerging miraculously from the white surface under
+Fanny's pencil, a thin, undersized little figure in sleazy
+black and white, whose face, under the cheap hat, was
+upturned and rapturous.  Her skirts were wind-blown, and the
+wind tugged, too, at the banner whose pole she hugged so
+tightly in her arms.  Dimly you could see the crowds that
+lined the street on either side.  Vaguely, too, you saw the
+faces and stunted figures of the little group of girls she
+led.  But she, the central figure, stood out among all the
+rest.  Fanny Brandeis, the artist, and Fanny Brandeis, the
+salesman, combined shrewdly to omit no telling detail.  The
+wrong kind of feet in the wrong kind of shoes; the absurd
+hat; the shabby skirt--every bit of grotesquerie was there,
+serving to emphasize the glory of the face.  Fanny Brandeis'
+face, as the figure grew, line by line, was a glorious
+thing, too.
+
+She was working rapidly.  She laid down her pencil, now, and
+leaned back, squinting her eyes critically.  She looked
+grimly pleased.  Her hair was rather rumpled, and her cheeks
+very pink.  She took up her pen, now, and began to ink her
+drawing with firm black strokes.  As she worked a little
+crow of delight escaped her--the same absurd crow of triumph
+that had sounded that day in Winnebago, years and years
+before, when she, a school girl in a red tam o' shanter, had
+caught the likeness of Schabelitz, the peasant boy, under
+the exterior of Schabelitz, the famous.
+There sounded a smart little double knock at her door. 
+Fanny did not heed it.  She did not hear it.  Her toes were
+caught behind the chair-legs again.  She was slumped down on
+the middle of her spine.  She had brought the table, with
+its ridiculously up-ended suitcase, very near, so that she
+worked with a minimum of effort.  The door opened.  Fanny
+did not turn her head.  Ella Monahan came in, yawning.  She
+was wearing an expensive looking silk kimono that fell in
+straight, simple folds, and gave a certain majesty to her
+ample figure.
+
+"Well, what in the world--" she began, and yawned again,
+luxuriously.  She stopped behind Fanny's chair and glanced
+over her shoulder.  The yawn died.  She craned her neck a
+little, and leaned forward.  And the little girl went
+marching by, in her cheap and crooked shoes, and her short
+and sleazy skirt, with the banner tugging, tugging in the
+breeze.  Fanny Brandeis had done her with that economy of
+line, and absence of sentimentality which is the test
+separating the artist from the draughtsman.
+
+Silence, except for the scratching of Fanny Brandeis's pen.
+
+"Why--the poor little kike!" said Ella Monahan.  Then, after
+another moment of silence, "I didn't know you could draw
+like that."
+
+Fanny laid down her pen.  "Like what?"  She pushed back her
+chair, and rose, stiffly.  The drawing, still wet, was
+propped up against the suitcase.  Fanny walked across the
+room.  Ella dropped into her chair, so that when Fanny came
+back to the table it was she who looked over Ella's
+shoulder.  Into Ella's shrewd and heavy face there had come
+a certain look.
+
+"They don't get a square deal, do they?  They don't get a
+square deal."
+
+The two looked at the girl a moment longer, in silence. 
+Then Fanny went over to the bed, and picked up her hat and
+coat.  She smoothed her hair, deftly, powdered her nose with
+care, and adjusted her hat at the smart angle approved by
+the Galeries Lafayette.  She came back to the table, picked
+up her pen, and beneath the drawing wrote, in large print:
+
+                             THE MARCHER.
+
+
+She picked up the drawing, still wet, opened the door, and
+with a smile at the bewildered Ella, was gone.
+
+It was after eight o'clock when she reached the Star
+building.  She asked for Lasker's office, and sent in her
+card.  Heyl had told her that Lasker was always at his desk
+at eight.  Now, Fanny Brandeis knew that the average young
+woman, standing outside the office of a man like Lasker,
+unknown and at the mercy of office boy or secretary,
+continues to stand outside until she leaves in
+discouragement.  But Fanny knew, too, that she was not an
+average young woman.  She had, on the surface, an air of
+authority and distinction.  She had that quiet assurance of
+one accustomed to deference.  She had youth, and beauty, and
+charm.  She had a hat and suit bought in Paris, France; and
+a secretary is only human.
+
+Carl Lasker's private office was the bare, bright,
+newspaper-strewn room of a man who is not only a newspaper
+proprietor, but a newspaper man.  There's a difference. 
+Carl Lasker had sold papers on the street when he was ten. 
+He had slept on burlap sacks, paper stuffed, in the basement
+of a newspaper office.  Ink flowed with the blood in his
+veins.  He could operate a press.  He could manipulate a
+linotype machine (that almost humanly intelligent piece of
+mechanism).  He could make up a paper single handed,
+and had done it.  He knew the newspaper game, did Carl
+Lasker, from the composing room to the street, and he was a
+very great man in his line.  And so he was easy to reach,
+and simple to talk to, as are all great men.
+
+A stocky man, decidedly handsome, surprisingly young, well
+dressed, smooth shaven, direct.
+
+Fanny entered.  Lasker laid down her card.  "Brandeis. 
+That's a good name."  He extended his hand.  He wore evening
+clothes, with a white flower in his buttonhole.  He must
+have just come from a dinner, or he was to attend a late
+affair, somewhere.  Perhaps Fanny, taken aback,
+unconsciously showed her surprise, because Lasker grinned,
+as he waved her to a chair.  His quick mind had interpreted
+her thought.
+
+"Sit down, Miss Brandeis.  You think I'm gotten up like the
+newspaper man in a Richard Harding Davis short story, don't
+you?  What can I do for you?"
+
+Fanny wasted no words.  "I saw the parade this afternoon.  I
+did a picture.  I think it's good.  If you think so too, I
+wish you'd use it."
+
+She laid it, face up, on Lasker's desk.  Lasker picked it up
+in his two hands, held it off, and scrutinized it.  All the
+drama in the world is concentrated in the confines of a
+newspaper office every day in the year, and so you hear very
+few dramatic exclamations in such a place.  Men like Lasker
+do not show emotion when impressed.  It is too wearing on
+the mechanism.  Besides, they are trained to self-control. 
+So Lasker said, now:
+
+"Yes, I think it's pretty good, too."  Then, raising his
+voice to a sudden bellow, "Boy!"  He handed the drawing to a
+boy, gave a few brief orders, and turned back to Fanny. 
+"To-morrow morning every other paper in New York will have
+pictures showing Mildred Inness, the beauty, on her snow-
+white charger, or Sophronisba A. Bannister, A.B., Ph.D., in
+her cap and gown, or Mrs. William Van der Welt as
+Liberty.  We'll have that little rat with the banner, and
+it'll get 'em.  They'll talk about it."  His eyes narrowed a
+little.  "Do you always get that angle?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"There isn't a woman cartoonist in New York who does that
+human stuff.  Did you know that?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Want a job?"
+
+"N-no."
+
+His knowing eye missed no detail of the suit, the hat, the
+gloves, the shoes.
+
+"What's your salary now?"
+
+"Ten thousand."
+
+"Satisfied?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You've hit the heart of that parade.  I don't know whether
+you could do that every day, or not.  But if you struck
+twelve half the time, it would be enough.  When you want a
+job, come back."
+
+"Thanks," said Fanny quietly.  And held out her hand.
+
+She returned in the subway.  It was a Bronx train, full of
+sagging faces, lusterless eyes, grizzled beards; of heavy,
+black-eyed girls in soiled white shoes; of stoop-shouldered
+men, poring over newspapers in Hebrew script; of smells and
+sounds and glaring light.
+
+And though to-morrow would bring its reaction, and common
+sense would have her again in its cold grip, she was radiant
+to-night and glowing with the exaltation that comes with
+creation.  And over and over a voice within her was saying:
+
+These are my people!  These are my people!
+
+
+CHAPTER SIXTEEN
+
+The ship that brought Theodore Brandeis to America was the
+last of its kind to leave German ports for years.  The day
+after he sailed from Bremen came the war.  Fanny Brandeis
+was only one of the millions of Americans who refused to
+accept the idea of war.  She took it as a personal affront. 
+It was uncivilized, it was old fashioned, it was
+inconvenient.  Especially inconvenient.  She had just come
+from Europe, where she had negotiated a million-dollar deal. 
+War would mean that she could not get the goods ordered. 
+Consequently there could be no war.
+
+Theodore landed the first week in August.  Fanny stole two
+days from the ravenous bins to meet him in New York.  I
+think she must have been a very love-hungry woman in the
+years since her mother's death.  She had never admitted it. 
+But only emotions denied to the point of starvation could
+have been so shaken now at the thought of the feast before
+them.  She had trained herself to think of him as Theodore
+the selfish, Theodore the callous, Theodore the voracious. 
+"An unsuccessful genius," she told herself.  "He'll be
+impossible.  They're bad enough when they're successful."
+
+But now her eyes, her thoughts, her longings, her long-pent
+emotions were straining toward the boat whose great prow was
+looming toward her, a terrifying bulk.  The crowd awaiting
+the ship was enormous.  A dramatic enough scene at any time,
+the great Hoboken pier this morning was filled with an
+unrehearsed mob, anxious, thrilled, hysterical.  The morning
+papers had carried wireless news that the ship had been
+chased by a French gunboat and had escaped only through
+the timely warning of the Dresden, a German gunboat.  That
+had added the last fillip to an already tense situation. 
+Tears were streaming down half the faces upturned toward the
+crowded decks.  And from every side:
+
+"Do you see her?"
+
+"That's Jessie.  There she is!  Jessie!"
+
+"Heh!  Jim, old boy!  Come on down!"
+
+Fanny's eyes were searching the packed rails.  "Ted!" she
+called, and choked back a sob.  "Teddy!"  Still she did not
+see him.  She was searching, womanlike, for a tall, blondish
+boy, with a sulky mouth, and humorous eyes, and an unruly
+lock of hair that would insist on escaping from the rest and
+straggling down over his forehead.  I think she was even
+looking for a boy with a violin in his arms.  A boy in
+knickers.  Women lose all sense of time and proportion at
+such times.  Still she did not see him.  The passengers were
+filing down the gangplank now; rushing down as quickly as
+the careful hands of the crew would allow them, and hurling
+themselves into the arms of friends and family crowded
+below.  Fanny strained her eyes toward that narrow
+passageway, anxious, hopeful, fearful, heartsick.  For the
+moment Olga and the baby did not exist for her.  And then
+she saw him.
+
+She saw him through an unimaginable disguise.  She saw him,
+and knew him in spite of the fact that the fair-haired,
+sulky, handsome boy had vanished, and in his place walked a
+man.  His hair was close-cropped, German-fashion; his face
+careworn and older than she had ever thought possible; his
+bearing, his features, his whole personality stamped with an
+unmistakable distinction.  And his clothes were appallingly,
+inconceivably German.  So she saw him, and he was her
+brother, and she was his sister, and she stretched out her
+arms to him.
+
+"Teddy!"  She hugged him close, her face buried in his
+shoulder.  "Teddy, you--you Spitzbube you!"  She laughed
+at that, a little hysterically.  "Not that I know what a
+Spitzbube is, but it's the Germanest word I can think of." 
+That shaven head.  Those trousers.  That linen.  The awful
+boots.  The tie!  "Oh, Teddy, and you're the Germanest thing
+I ever saw."  She kissed him again, rapturously.
+
+He kissed her, too, wordlessly at first.  They moved aside a
+little, out of the crowd.  Then he spoke for the first time.
+
+"God!  I'm glad to see you, Fanny."  There was tragedy, not
+profanation in his voice.  His hand gripped hers.  He
+turned, and now, for the first time, Fanny saw that at his
+elbow stood a buxom, peasant woman, evidently a nurse, and
+in her arms a child.  A child with Molly Brandeis' mouth,
+and Ferdinand Brandeis' forehead, and Fanny Brandeis' eyes,
+and Theodore Brandeis' roseleaf skin, and over, and above
+all these, weaving in and out through the whole, an
+expression or cast--a vague, undefinable thing which we call
+a resemblance--that could only have come from the woman of
+the picture, Theodore Brandeis' wife, Olga.
+
+"Why--it's the baby!" cried Fanny, and swung her out of the
+nurse's protesting arms.  Such a German-looking baby.  Such
+an adorably German-looking baby.  "Du kleine, du!"  Fanny
+kissed the roseleaf cheek.  "Du suszes--"  She turned
+suddenly to Theodore.  "Olga--where's Olga?"
+
+"She did not come."
+
+Fanny tightened her hold of the little squirming bundle in
+her arms.  "Didn't come?"
+
+Theodore shook his head, dumbly.  In his eyes was an agony
+of pain.  And suddenly all those inexplicable things in his
+face were made clear to Fanny.  She placed the little Mizzi
+in the nurse's arms again.  "Then we'll go, dear.  They
+won't be a minute over your trunks, I'm sure.  Just follow
+me."
+
+Her arm was linked through Theodore's.  Her hand was on his. 
+Her head was up.  Her chin was thrust out, and she never
+knew how startlingly she resembled the Molly Brandeis who
+used to march so bravely down Norris street on her way to
+Brandeis' Bazaar.  She was facing a situation, and she
+recognized it.  There was about her an assurance, a
+composure, a blithe capability that imparted itself to the
+three bewildered and helpless ones in her charge.  Theodore
+felt it, and the strained look in his face began to lift
+just a little.  The heavy-witted peasant woman felt it, and
+trudged along, cheerfully.  The baby in her arms seemed to
+sense it, and began to converse volubly and unintelligibly
+with the blue uniformed customs inspector.
+
+They were out of the great shed in an incredibly short time. 
+Fanny seemed equal to every situation.  She had taken the
+tube to Hoboken, but now she found a commodious open car,
+and drove a shrewd bargain with the chauffeur.  She bundled
+the three into it.  Of the three, perhaps Theodore seemed
+the most bewildered and helpless.  He clung to his violin
+and Fanny.
+
+"I feel like an immigrant," he said.  "Fan, you're a wonder. 
+You don't know how much you look and act like mother.  I've
+been watching you.  It's startling."
+
+Fanny laughed and took his hand, and held his hand up to her
+breast, and crushed it there.  "And you look like an
+illustration out of the Fliegende Blaetter.  It isn't only
+your clothes.  Your face is German.  As for Mizzi here--"
+she gathered the child in her arms again--"you've never
+explained that name to me.  Why, by the way, Mizzi?  Of all
+the names in the world."
+
+Theodore smiled a wry little smile.  "Mizzi is named after
+Olga's chum.  You see, in Vienna every other--well, chorus
+girl I suppose you'd call them--is named Mizzi.  Like
+all the Gladyses and Flossies here in America.  Well, Olga's
+special friend Mizzi--"
+
+"I see," said Fanny quietly.  "Well, anything's better than
+Fanny.  Always did make me think of an old white horse." 
+And at that the small German person in her arms screwed her
+mouth into a fascinating bunch, and then unscrewed it and,
+having made these preparations said, "Tante Fanny.  Shecago. 
+Tante Fanny."
+
+"Why, Mizzi Brandeis, you darling!  Teddy, did you hear
+that!  She said `Tante Fanny' and `Chicago' just as
+plainly!"
+"Did I hear it?  Have I heard anything else for weeks?"
+
+The plump person on the opposite seat, who had been shaking
+her head violently all this time here threatened to burst if
+not encouraged to speak.  Fanny nodded to her.  Whereupon
+the flood broke.
+
+"Wunderbar, nicht war!  Ich kuss' die handt, gnadiges
+Fraulein."  She actually did it, to Fanny's consternation. 
+"Ich hab' ihr das gelernt, Gnadige.  Selbst.  Ist es nicht
+ganz entzuckend!  Tante Fanny.  Auch Shecago."
+
+Fanny nodded a number of times, first up and down,
+signifying assent, then sideways, signifying unbounded
+wonder and admiration.  She made a gigantic effort to summon
+her forgotten German.
+
+"Was ist Ihre Name?" she managed to ask.
+
+"Otti."
+
+"Oh, my!" exclaimed Fanny, weakly.  "Mizzi and Otti.  It
+sounds like the first act of the `Merry Widow.'"  She turned
+to Theodore.  "I wish you'd sit back, and relax, and if you
+must clutch that violin case, do it more comfortably.  I
+don't want you to tell me a thing, now.  New York is ghastly
+in August.  We'll get a train out of here to-morrow.  My
+apartment in Chicago is cool, and high, and quiet, and the
+lake is in the front yard, practically.  To-night, perhaps,
+we'll talk about--things.  And, oh, Teddy, how glad I
+am to see you--to have you--to--" she put out a hand and
+patted his thin cheek--"to touch you."
+
+And at that the man became a boy again.  His face worked a
+moment, painfully and then his head came down in her lap
+that held the baby, and so she had them both for a moment,
+one arm about the child, one hand smoothing the boy's close-
+cropped hair.  And in that moment she was more splendidly
+maternal than either of the women who had borne these whom
+she now comforted.
+
+It was Fanny who attended to the hotel rooms, to the baby's
+comfort, to the railroad tickets, to the ordering of the
+meals.  Theodore was like a stranger in a strange land.  Not
+only that, he seemed dazed.
+
+"We'll have it out to-night," Fanny said to herself.  "He'll
+never get that look off his face until he has told it all. 
+I knew she was a beast."
+
+She made him lie down while she attended to schedules,
+tickets, berths.  She was gone for two hours.  When she
+returned she found him looking amused, terrified and
+helpless, all at once, while three men reporters and one
+woman special writer bombarded him with questions.  The
+woman had brought a staff artist with her, and he was now
+engaged in making a bungling sketch of Theodore's face, with
+its ludicrous expression.
+
+Fanny sensed the situation and saved it.  She hadn't sold
+goods all these years without learning the value of
+advertising.  She came forward now, graciously (but not too
+graciously).  Theodore looked relieved.  Already he had
+learned that one might lean on this sister who was so
+capable, so bountifully alive.
+
+"Teddy, you're much too tired to talk.  Let me talk for
+you."
+
+"My sister, Miss Brandeis," said Teddy, and waved a rather
+feeble hand in an inclusive gesture at the interrogatory
+five.
+
+Fanny smiled.  "Do sit down," she said, "all of you.  Tell
+me, how did you happen to get on my brother's trail?"
+
+One of the men explained.  "We had a list of ship's
+passengers, of course.  And we knew that Mr. Brandeis was a
+German violinist.  And then the story of the ship being
+chased by a French boat.  We just missed him down at the
+pier--"
+
+"But he isn't a German violinist," interrupted Fanny. 
+"Please get that straight.  He's American.  He is THE
+American violinist--or will be, as soon as his concert tour
+here is well started.  It was Schabelitz himself who
+discovered my brother, and predicted his brilliant career. 
+Here"--she had been glancing over the artist's shoulder--
+"will you let me make a sketch for you--just for the fun of
+the thing?  I do that kind of thing rather decently.  Did
+you see my picture called `The Marcher,' in the Star, at
+the time of the suffrage parade in May?  Yes, that was mine. 
+Just because he has what we call a butcher haircut, don't
+think he's German, because he isn't.  You wouldn't call
+Winnebago, Wisconsin, Germany, would you?"
+
+She was sketching him swiftly, daringly, masterfully.  She
+was bringing out the distinction, the suffering, the
+boyishness in his face, and toning down the queer little
+foreign air he had.  Toning it, but not omitting it
+altogether.  She was too good a showman for that.  As she
+sketched she talked, and as she talked she drew Theodore
+into the conversation, deftly, and just when he was needed. 
+She gave them what they had come for--a story.  And a good
+one.  She brought in Mizzi and Otti, for color, and she saw
+to it that they spelled those names as they should be
+spelled.  She managed to gloss over the question of Olga. 
+Ill.  Detained.  Last minute.  Too brave to sacrifice her
+husband's American tour.  She finished her sketch and gave
+it to the woman reporter.  It was an amazingly compelling
+little piece of work--and yet, not so amazing, perhaps,
+when you consider the thing that Fanny Brandeis had put into
+it.  Then she sent them away, tactfully.  They left, knowing
+all that Fanny Brandeis had wanted them to know; guessing
+little that she had not wanted them to guess.  More than
+that no human being can accomplish, without the advice of
+his lawyer.
+
+"Whew!" from Fanny, when the door had closed.
+
+"Gott im Himmel!" from Theodore.  "I had forgotten that
+America was like that."
+
+"But America IS like that.  And Teddy, we're going to
+make it sit up and take notice."
+
+At that Theodore drooped again.  Fanny thought that he
+looked startlingly as she remembered her father had looked
+in those days of her childhood, when Brandeis' Bazaar was
+slithering downhill.  The sight of him moved her to a sudden
+resolve.  She crossed swiftly to him, and put one heartening
+hand on his shoulder.
+
+"Come on, brother.  Out with it.  Let's have it all now."
+
+He reached up for her hand and held it, desperately.  "Oh,
+Fan!" began Theodore, "Fan, I've been through hell."
+
+Fanny said nothing.  She only waited, quietly,
+encouragingly.  She had learned when not to talk.  Presently
+he took up his story, plunging directly into it, as though
+sensing that she had already divined much.
+
+"She married me for a living.  You'll think that's a joke,
+knowing what I was earning there, in Vienna, and how you and
+mother were denying yourselves everything to keep me.  But
+in a city that circulates a coin valued at a twentieth of a
+cent, an American dollar looms up big.  Besides, two of the
+other girls had got married.  Good for nothing officers. 
+She was jealous, I suppose.  I didn't know any of that.  I
+was flattered to think she'd notice me.  She was awfully
+popular.  She has a kind of wit.  I suppose you'd call it
+that.  The other girls were just coarse, and heavy,
+and--well--animal.  You can't know the rottenness of life
+there in Vienna.  Olga could keep a whole supper table
+laughing all evening.  I can see, now, that that isn't
+difficult when your audience is made up of music hall girls,
+and stupid, bullet-headed officers, with their damned high
+collars, and their gold braid, and their silly swords, and
+their corsets, and their glittering shoes and their
+miserable petty poverty beneath all the show.  I thought I
+was a lucky boy.  I'd have pitied everybody in Winnebago, if
+I'd ever thought of anybody in Winnebago.  I never did,
+except once in a while of you and mother when I needed
+money.  I kept on with my music.  I had sense enough left,
+for that.  Besides, it was a habit, by that time.  Well, we
+were married."
+
+He laughed, an ugly, abrupt little laugh that ended in a
+moan, and turned his head and buried his face in Fanny's
+breast.  And Fanny's arm was there, about his shoulder. 
+"Fanny, you don't--I can't--"  He stopped.  Another silence. 
+Fanny's arm tightened its hold.  She bent and kissed the top
+of the stubbly head, bowed so low now.  "Fan, do you
+remember that woman in `The Three Musketeers'?  The hellish
+woman, that all men loved and loathed?  Well, Olga's like
+that.  I'm not whining.  I'm not exaggerating.  I'm just
+trying to make you understand.  And yet I don't want you to
+understand.  Only you don't know what it means to have you
+to talk to.  To have some one who"--he clutched her hand,
+fearfully--"You do love me, don't you, Fanny?  You do, don't
+you, Sis?"
+
+"More than any one in the world," Fanny reassured him,
+quietly.  "The way mother would have, if she had lived."
+
+A sigh escaped him, at that, as though a load had lifted
+from him.  He went on, presently.  "It would have been all
+right if I could have earned just a little more money." 
+Fanny shrank at that, and shut her eyes for a sick
+moment.  "But I couldn't.  I asked her to be patient.  But
+you don't know the life there.  There is no real home life. 
+They live in the cafes.  They go there to keep warm, in the
+winter, and to meet their friends, and gossip, and drink
+that eternal coffee, and every coffee house--there are
+thousands--is a rendezvous.  We had two rooms, comfortable
+ones, for Vienna, and I tried to explain to her that if I
+could work hard, and get into concert, and keep at the
+composing, we'd be rich some day, and famous, and happy, and
+she'd have clothes, and jewels.  But she was too stupid, or
+too bored.  Olga is the kind of woman who only believes what
+she sees.  Things got worse all the time.  She had a temper. 
+So have I--or I used to have.  But when hers was aroused it
+was--horrible.  Words that--that--unspeakable words.  And
+one day she taunted me with being a ---- with my race.  The
+first time she called me that I felt that I must kill her. 
+That was my mistake.  I should have killed her.  And I
+didn't."
+
+"Teddy boy!  Don't, brother!  You're tired.  You're excited
+and worn out."
+
+"No, I'm not.  Just let me talk.  I know what I'm saying. 
+There's something clean about killing."  He brooded a moment
+over that thought.  Then he went on, doggedly, not raising
+his voice.  His hands were clasped loosely.  "You don't know
+about the intolerance and the anti-Semitism in Prussia, I
+suppose.  All through Germany, for that matter.  In Bavaria
+it's bitter.  That's one reason why Olga loathed Munich so. 
+The queer part of it is that all that opposition seemed to
+fan something in me; something that had been smoldering for
+a long time."  His voice had lost its dull tone now.  It had
+in it a new timbre.  And as he talked he began to interlard
+his English with bits of German, the language to which his
+tongue had accustomed itself in the past ten years.  His
+sentences, too, took on a German construction, from time to
+time.  He was plainly excited now.  "My playing began
+to improve.  There would be a ghastly scene with Olga--
+sickening--degrading.  Then I would go to my work, and I
+would play, but magnificently!  I tell you, it would be
+playing.  I know.  To fool myself I know better.  One
+morning, after a dreadful quarrel I got the idea for the
+concerto, and the psalms.  Jewish music.  As Jewish as the
+Kol Nidre.  I wanted to express the passion, and fire, and
+history of a people.  My people.  Why was that?  Tell me. 
+Selbst, weiss ich nicht.  I felt that if I could put into
+it just a millionth part of their humiliation, and their
+glory; their tragedy and their triumph; their sorrow, and
+their grandeur; their persecution, their weldtschmerz. 
+Volkschmerz.  That was it.  And through it all, weaving in
+and out, one great underlying motif.  Indestructibility. 
+The great cry which says, `We cannot be destroyed!'"
+
+He stood up, uncertainly.  His eyes were blazing.  He began
+to walk up and down the luxurious little room.  Fanny's eyes
+matched his.  She was staring at him, fascinated, trembling.
+
+She moistened her lips a little with her tongue.  "And
+you've done it?  Teddy!  You've done--that!"
+
+Theodore Brandeis stood up, very straight and tall.  "Yes,"
+he said, simply.  "Yes, I've done that."
+
+She came over to him then, and put her two hands on his
+shoulders.  "Ted--dear--will you ever forgive me?  I'll try
+to make up for it now.  I didn't know.  I've been blind. 
+Worse than blind.  Criminal."  She was weeping now, broken-
+heartedly, and he was patting her with little comforting
+love pats, and whispering words of tenderness.
+
+"Forgive you?  Forgive you what?"
+
+"The years of suffering.  The years you've had to spend with
+her.  With that horrible woman--"
+
+"Don't--"  He sucked his breath between his teeth.  His face
+had gone haggard again.  Fanny, direct as always, made
+up her mind that she would have it all.  And now.
+
+"There's something you haven't told me.  Tell me all of it. 
+You're my brother and I'm your sister.  We're all we have in
+the world."  And at that, as though timed by some miraculous
+and supernatural stage manager, there came a cry from the
+next room; a sleepy, comfortable, imperious little cry. 
+Mizzi had awakened.  Fanny made a step in the direction of
+the door.  Then she turned back.  "Tell me why Olga didn't
+come.  Why isn't she here with her husband and baby?"
+
+"Because she's with another man."
+
+"Another--"
+
+"It had been going on for a long time.  I was the last to
+know about it.  It's that way, always, isn't it?  He's an
+officer.  A fool.  He'll have to take off his silly corsets
+now, and his velvet collar, and his shiny boots, and go to
+war.  Damn him!  I hope they'll kill him with a hundred
+bayonets, one by one, and leave him to rot on the field. 
+She had been fooling me all the time, and they had been
+laughing at me, the two of them.  I didn't find it out until
+just before this American trip.  And when I confronted her
+with it she laughed in my face.  She said she hated me.  She
+said she'd rather starve than leave him to come to America
+with me.  She said I was a fiddling fool.  She--" he was
+trembling and sick with the shame of it--"God! I can't tell
+you the things she said.  She wanted to keep Mizzi.  Isn't
+that strange?  She loves the baby.  She neglects her, and
+spoils her, and once I saw her beat her, in a rage.  But she
+says she loves my Mizzi, and I believe she does, in her own
+dreadful way.  I promised her, and lied to her, and then I
+ran away with Mizzi and her nurse."
+
+"Oh, I thank God for that!" Fanny cried.  "I thank God for
+that!  And now, Teddy boy, we'll forget all about those
+miserable years.  We'll forget all about her, and the
+life she led you.  You're going to have your chance here. 
+You're going to be repaid for every minute of suffering
+you've endured.  I'll make it up to you.  And when you see
+them applauding you, calling for you, adoring you, all those
+hideous years will fade from your mind, and you'll be
+Theodore Brandeis, the successful, Theodore Brandeis, the
+gifted, Theodore Brandeis, the great!  You need never think
+of her again.  You'll never see her again.  That beast! 
+That woman!"
+
+And at that Theodore's face became distorted and dreadful
+with pain.  He raised two impotent, shaking arms high above
+his head.  "That's just it!  That's just it!  You don't know
+what love is.  You don't know what hate is.  You don't know
+how I hate myself.  Loathe myself.  She's all that's
+miserable, all that's unspeakable, all that's vile.  And if
+she called me to-day I'd come.  That's it."  He covered his
+shamed face with his two hands, so that the words came from
+him slobberingly, sickeningly.  "I hate her!  I hate her! 
+And I want her.  I want her.  I want her!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
+
+If Fanny Brandeis, the deliberately selfish, the
+calculatingly ambitious, was aghast at the trick fate had
+played her, she kept her thoughts to herself.  Knowing her,
+I think she must have been grimly amused at finding herself
+saddled with a helpless baby, a bewildered peasant woman,
+and an artist brother both helpless and bewildered.
+
+It was out of the question to house them in her small
+apartment.  She found a furnished apartment near her own,
+and installed them there, with a working housekeeper in
+charge.  She had a gift for management, and she arranged all
+these details with a brisk capability that swept everything
+before it.  A sunny bedroom for Mizzi.  But then, a bright
+living room, too, for Theodore's hours of practice.  No
+noise.  Chicago's roar maddened him.  Otti shied at every
+new contrivance that met her eye.  She had to be broken in
+to elevators, electric switches, hot and cold faucets,
+radiators.
+
+"No apartment ever built could cover all the requirements,"
+Fanny confided to Fenger, after the first harrowing week. 
+"What they really need is a combination palace, houseboat,
+sanatorium, and creche."
+
+"Look here," said Fenger.  "If I can help, why--" a sudden
+thought struck him.  "Why don't you bring 'em all down to my
+place in the country?  We're not there half the time.  It's
+too cool for my wife in September.  Just the thing for the
+child, and your brother could fiddle his head off."
+
+The Fengers had a roomy, wide-verandaed house near
+Lake Forest; one of the many places of its kind that dot the
+section known as the north shore.  Its lawn sloped gently
+down to the water's edge.  The house was gay with striped
+awnings, and scarlet geraniums, and chintz-covered chairs. 
+The bright, sparkling, luxurious little place seemed to
+satisfy a certain beauty-sense in Fenger, as did the
+etchings on the walls in his office.  Fanny had spent a
+week-end there in July, with three or four other guests,
+including Fascinating Facts.  She had been charmed with it,
+and had announced that her energies thereafter would be
+directed solely toward the possession of just such a house
+as this, with a lawn that was lipped by the lake, awnings
+and geraniums to give it a French cafe air; books and
+magazines enough to belie that.
+
+"And I'll always wear white," she promised, gayly, "and
+there'll be pitchers on every table, frosty on the outside,
+and minty on the inside, and you're all invited."
+
+They had laughed at that, and so had she, but she had been
+grimly in earnest just the same.
+
+She shook her head now at Fenger's suggestion.  "Imagine
+Mrs. Fenger's face at sight of Mizzi, and Theodore with his
+violin, and Otti with her shawls and paraphernalia. 
+Though," she added, seriously, "it's mighty kind of you, and
+generous--and just like a man."
+
+"It isn't kindness nor generosity that makes me want to do
+things for you."
+
+"Modest," murmured Fanny, wickedly, "as always."
+
+Fenger bent his look upon her.  "Don't try the ingenue on
+me, Fanny."
+
+Theodore's manager, Kurt Stein, was to have followed him in
+ten days.  The war changed that.  The war was to change many
+things.  Fanny seemed to sense the influx of musicians that
+was to burst upon the United States following the first few
+weeks of the catastrophe, and she set about forestalling it. 
+Advertising.  That was what Theodore needed.  She had
+faith enough in his genius.  But her business sense told her
+that this genius must be enhanced by the proper setting. 
+She set about creating this setting.  She overlooked no
+chance to fix his personality in the kaleidoscopic mind of
+the American public--or as much of it as she could reach. 
+His publicity man was a dignified German-American whose
+methods were legitimate and uninspired.  Fanny's enthusiasm
+and superb confidence in Theodore's genius infected Fenger,
+Fascinating Facts, even Nathan Haynes himself.  Nathan
+Haynes had never posed as a patron of the arts, in spite of
+his fantastic millions.  But by the middle of September
+there were few of his friends, or his wife's friends, who
+had not heard of this Theodore Brandeis.  In Chicago,
+Illinois, no one lives in houses, it is said, except the
+city's old families, and new millionaires.  The rest of the
+vast population is flat-dwelling.  To say that Nathan
+Haynes' spoken praise reached the city's house-dwellers
+would carry with it a significance plain to any Chicagoan.
+
+As for Fanny's method; here is a typical example of her
+somewhat crude effectiveness in showmanship.  Otti had
+brought with her from Vienna her native peasant costume.  It
+is a costume seen daily in the Austrian capital, on the
+Ring, in the Stadt Park, wherever Viennese nurses convene
+with their small charges.  To the American eye it is a
+musical comedy costume, picturesque, bouffant, amazing. 
+Your Austrian takes it quite for granted.  Regardless of the
+age of the nurse, the skirt is short, coming a few inches
+below the knees, and built like a lamp shade, in color
+usually a bright scarlet, with rows of black velvet ribbon
+at the bottom.  Beneath it are worn skirts and skirts, and
+skirts, so that the opera-bouffe effect is complete.  The
+bodice is black velvet, laced over a chemise of white.  The
+head-gear a soaring winged affair of stiffly starched
+white, that is a pass between the Breton peasant
+woman's cap and an aeroplane.  Black stockings and slippers
+finish the costume.
+
+Otti and Mizzi spent the glorious September days in Lincoln
+park, Otti garbed in staid American stripes and apron, Mizzi
+resplendent in smartest of children's dresses provided for
+her lavishly by her aunt.  Her fat and dimpled hands
+smoothed the blue, or pink or white folds with a complacency
+astonishing in one of her years.  "That's her mother in
+her," Fanny thought.
+
+One rainy autumn day Fanny entered her brother's apartment
+to find Otti resplendent in her Viennese nurse's costume. 
+Mizzi had been cross and fretful, and the sight of the
+familiar scarlet and black and white, and the great winged
+cap seemed to soothe her.
+
+"Otti!" Fanny exclaimed.  "You gorgeous creature!  What is
+it?  A dress rehearsal?"  Otti got the import, if not the
+English.
+
+"So gehen wir im Wien," she explained, and struck a killing
+pose.
+
+"Everybody?  All the nurses?  Alle?"
+
+"Aber sure," Otti displayed her half dozen English words
+whenever possible.
+
+Fanny stared a moment.  Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. 
+"To-morrow's Saturday," she said, in German.  "If it's fair
+and warm you put on that costume and take Mizzi to the
+park. . . .  Certainly the animal cages, if you want to.  If
+any one annoys you, come home.  If a policeman asks you why
+you are dressed that way tell him it is the costume worn by
+nurses in Vienna.  Give him your name.  Tell him who your
+master is.  If he doesn't speak German--and he won't, in
+Chicago--some one will translate for you."
+
+Not a Sunday paper in Chicago that did not carry a startling
+picture of the resplendent Otti and the dimpled and smiling
+Mizzi.  The omnipresent staff photographer seemed to sniff
+his victim from afar.  He pounced on Theodore Brandeis'
+baby daughter, accompanied by her Viennese nurse (in
+costume) and he played her up in a Sunday special that was
+worth thousands of dollars, Fanny assured the bewildered and
+resentful Theodore, as he floundered wildly through the
+billowing waves of the Sunday newspaper flood.
+Theodore's first appearance was to be in Chicago as soloist
+with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in the season's opening
+program in October.  Any music-wise Chicagoan will tell you
+that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is not only a musical
+organization functioning marvelously (when playing
+Beethoven).  It is an institution.  Its patrons will admit
+the existence, but not the superiority of similar
+organizations in Boston, Philadelphia and New York.  On
+Friday afternoons, during the season, Orchestra Hall,
+situate on Michigan Boulevard, holds more pretty girls and
+fewer men than one might expect to see at any one gathering
+other than, perhaps, a wholesale debutante tea crush.  A
+Friday afternoon ticket is as impossible of attainment for
+one not a subscriber as a seat in heaven for a sinner. 
+Saturday night's audience is staider, more masculine, less
+staccato.  Gallery, balcony, parquet, it represents the
+city's best.  Its men prefer Beethoven to Berlin.  Its women
+could wear pearl necklaces, and don't.  Between the audience
+and the solemn black-and-white rows on the platform there
+exists an entente cordiale.  The Konzert-Meister bows to
+his friend in the third row, as he tucks his violin under
+his chin.  The fifth row, aisle, smiles and nods to the
+sausage-fingered 'cellist.
+
+"Fritz is playing well to-night."
+
+In a rarefied form, it is the atmosphere that existed
+between audience and players in the days of the old and
+famous Daly stock company.
+
+Such was the character of the audience Theodore was to face
+on his first appearance in America.  Fanny explained
+its nature to him.  He shrugged his shoulders in a gesture
+as German as it was expressive.
+
+Theodore seemed to have become irrevocably German during the
+years of his absence from America.  He had a queer stock of
+little foreign tricks.  He lifted his hat to men
+acquaintances on the street.  He had learned to smack his
+heels smartly together and to bow stiffly from the waist,
+and to kiss the hand of the matrons--and they adored him for
+it.  He was quite innocent of pose in these things.  He
+seemed to have imbibed them, together with his queer German
+haircut, and his incredibly German clothes.
+
+Fanny allowed him to retain the bow, and the courtly hand-
+kiss, but she insisted that he change the clothes and the
+haircut.
+
+"You'll have to let it grow, Ted.  I don't mean that I want
+you to have a mane, like Ysaye.  But I do think you ought to
+discard that convict cut.  Besides, it isn't becoming.  And
+if you're going to be an American violinist you'll have to
+look it--with a foreign finish."
+He let his hair grow.  Fanny watched with interest for the
+appearance of the unruly lock which had been wont to
+straggle over his white forehead in his schoolboy days.  The
+new and well-cut American clothes effected surprisingly
+little change.  Fanny, surveying him, shook her head.
+
+"When you stepped off the ship you looked like a German in
+German clothes.  Now you look like a German in American
+clothes.  I don't know--I do believe it's your face, Ted.  I
+wouldn't have thought that ten years or so in any country
+could change the shape of one's nose, and mouth and
+cheekbones.  Do you suppose it's the umlauts?"
+
+"Cut it out!" laughed Ted, that being his idea of modern
+American slang.  He was fascinated by these crisp phrases,
+but he was ten years or so behind the times, and he
+sometimes startled his hearers by an exhibition of slang so
+old as to be almost new.  It was all the more startling in
+contrast with his conversational English, which was as
+carefully correct as a born German's.
+
+As for the rest, it was plain that he was interested, but
+unhappy.  He practiced for hours daily.  He often took Mizzi
+to the park and came back storming about the dirt, the
+noise, the haste, the rudeness, the crowds, the
+mismanagement of the entire city.  Dummheit, he called it. 
+They profaned the lake.  They allowed the people to trample
+the grass.  They threw papers and banana skins about.  And
+they wasted!  His years in Germany had taught him to regard
+all these things as sacrilege, and the last as downright
+criminal.  He was lonesome for his Germany.  That was plain. 
+He hated it, and loved it, much as he hated and loved the
+woman who had so nearly spoiled his life.  The maelstrom
+known as the southwest corner of State and Madison streets
+appalled him.
+
+"Gott!" he exclaimed.  "Es ist unglaublich!  Aber ganz
+unglaublich!  Ich werde bald veruckt."  He somehow lapsed
+into German when excited.
+
+Fanny took him to the Haynes-Cooper plant one day, and it
+left him dazed, and incredulous.  She quoted millions at
+him.  He was not interested.  He looked at the office
+workers, the mail-room girls, and shook his head, dumbly. 
+They were using bicycles now, with a bundle rack in the
+front, in the vast stock rooms, and the roller skates had
+been discarded as too slow.  The stock boys skimmed around
+corners on these lightweight bicycles, up one aisle, and
+down the next, snatching bundles out of bins, shooting
+bundles into bins, as expertly as players in a gymkhana.
+
+Theodore saw the uncanny rapidity with which the letter-
+opening machines did their work.  He watched the great
+presses that turned out the catalogue--the catalogue
+whose message meant millions; he sat in Fenger's office and
+stared at the etchings, and said, "Certainly," with
+politeness, when Fenger excused himself in the midst of a
+conversation to pick up the telephone receiver and talk to
+their shoe factory in Maine.  He ended up finally in Fanny's
+office, no longer a dingy and undesirable corner, but a
+quietly brisk center that sent out vibrations over the
+entire plant.  Slosson, incidentally, was no longer of the
+infants' wear.  He had been transferred to a subordinate
+position in the grocery section.
+
+"Well," said Fanny, seating herself at her desk, and smiling
+radiantly upon her brother.  "Well, what do you think of
+us?"
+
+And then Theodore Brandeis, the careless, the selfish, the
+blind, said a most amazing thing.
+
+"Fanny, I'll work.  I'll soon get some of these millions
+that are lying about everywhere in this country.  And then
+I'll take you out of this.  I promise you."
+
+Fanny stared at him, a picture of ludicrous astonishment.
+
+"Why, you talk as if you were--sorry for me!"
+
+"I am, dear.  God knows I am.  I'll make it up to you,
+somehow."
+
+It was the first time in all her dashing and successful
+career that Fanny Brandeis had felt the sting of pity.  She
+resented it, hotly.  And from Theodore, the groper, the-- 
+"But at any rate," something within her said, "he has always
+been true to himself."
+
+Theodore's manager arrived in September, on a Holland boat,
+on which he had been obliged to share a stuffy inside cabin
+with three others.  Kurt Stein was German born, but American
+bred, and he had the American love of luxurious travel.  He
+was still testy when he reached Chicago and his charge.
+
+"How goes the work?" he demanded at once, of Theodore.  He
+eyed him sharply.  "That's better.  You have lost some
+of the look you had when you left Wien.  The ladies would
+have liked that look, here in America.  But it is bad for
+the work."
+
+He took Fanny aside before he left.  His face was serious. 
+It was plain that he was disturbed.  "That woman," he began. 
+"Pardon me, Mrs. Brandeis.  She came to me.  She says she is
+starving.  She is alone there, in Vienna.  Her--well, she is
+alone.  The war is everywhere.  They say it will last for
+years.  She wept and pleaded with me to take her here."
+
+"No!" cried Fanny.  "Don't let him hear it.  He mustn't
+know.  He----"
+
+"Yes, I know.  She is a paradox, that woman.  I tell you,
+she almost prevailed on me.  There is something about her;
+something that repels and compels."  That struck him as
+being a very fine phrase indeed, and he repeated it
+appreciatively.
+
+"I'll send her money, somehow," said Fanny.
+
+"Yes.  But they say that money is not reaching them over
+there.  I don't know what becomes of it.  It vanishes."  He
+turned to leave.  "Oh, a message for you.  On my boat was
+Schabelitz.  It looks very much as if his great fortune, the
+accumulation of years, would be swept away by this war. 
+Already they are tramping up and down his lands in Poland. 
+His money--much of it--is invested in great hotels in Poland
+and Russia, and they are using them for barracks and
+hospitals."
+
+"Schabelitz!  You mean a message for Theodore?  From him? 
+That's wonderful."
+
+"For Theodore, and for you, too."
+
+"For me!  I made a picture of him once when I was a little
+girl.  I didn't see him again for years.  Then I heard him
+play.  It was on his last tour here.  I wanted to speak to
+him.  But I was afraid.  And my face was red with weeping."
+
+"He remembers you.  And he means to see Theodore and you. 
+He can do much for Theodore in this country, and I
+think he will.  His message for you was this:  `Tell her I
+still have the picture that she made of me, with the jack-
+in-the-box in my hand, and that look on my face.  Tell her I
+have often wondered about that little girl in the red cap
+and the black curls.  I've wondered if she went on, catching
+that look back of people's faces.  If she did, she should be
+more famous than her brother."'
+
+"He said that!  About me!"
+
+"I am telling you as nearly as I can.  He said, `Tell her it
+was a woman who ruined Bauer's career, and caused him to end
+his days a music teacher in--in--Gott!  I can't remember the
+name of that town----"
+
+"Winnebago."
+
+"Winnebago.  That was it.  `Tell her not to let the brother
+spoil his life that way.'  So.  That is the message.  He
+said you would understand."
+
+Theodore's face was ominous when she returned to him, after
+Stein had left.
+
+"I wish you and Stein wouldn't stand out there in the hall
+whispering about me as if I were an idiot patient.  What
+were you saying?"
+
+"Nothing, Ted.  Really."
+
+He brooded a moment.  Then his face lighted up with a flash
+of intuition.  He flung an accusing finger at Fanny.
+
+"He has seen her."
+
+"Ted!  You promised."
+
+"She's in trouble.  This war.  And she hasn't any money.  I
+know.  Look here.  We've got to send her money.  Cable it."
+
+"I will.  Just leave it all to me."
+
+"If she's here, in this country, and you're lying to me----"
+
+"She isn't.  My word of honor, Ted."
+
+He relaxed.
+
+Life was a very complicated thing for Fanny these days. 
+Ted was leaning on her; Mizzi, Otti, and now Fenger.  Nathan
+Haynes was poking a disturbing finger into that delicate and
+complicated mechanism of System which Fenger had built up in
+the Haynes-Cooper plant.  And Fenger, snarling, was trying
+to guard his treasure.  He came to Fanny with his grievance. 
+Fanny had always stimulated him, reassured him, given him
+the mental readjustment that he needed.
+
+He strode into her office one morning in late September. 
+Ordinarily he sent for her.  He stood by her desk now, a
+sheaf of papers in his hand, palpably stage props, and
+lifted significant eyebrows in the direction of the
+stenographer busy at her typewriter in the corner.
+
+"You may leave that, Miss Mahin," Fanny said.  Miss Mahin, a
+comprehending young woman, left it, and the room as well. 
+Fenger sat down.  He was under great excitement, though he
+was quite controlled.  Fanny, knowing him, waited quietly. 
+His eyes held hers.
+
+"It's come," Fenger began.  "You know that for the last year
+Haynes has been milling around with a herd of sociologists,
+philanthropists, and students of economics.  He had some
+scheme in the back of his head, but I thought it was just
+another of his impractical ideas.  It appears that it
+wasn't.  Between the lot of them they've evolved a savings
+and profit-sharing plan that's founded on a kind of
+practical universal brotherhood dream.  Haynes's millions
+are bothering him.  If they actually put this thing through
+I'll get out.  It'll mean that everything I've built up will
+be torn down.  It will mean that any six-dollar-a-week
+girl----"
+
+"As I understand it," interrupted Fanny, "it will mean that
+there will be no more six-dollar-a-week girls."
+
+"That's it.  And let me tell you, once you get the ignorant,
+unskilled type to believing they're actually capable of
+earning decent money, actually worth something, they're
+worse than useless.  They're dangerous."
+
+"You don't believe that."
+
+"I do."
+
+"But it's a theory that belongs to the Dark Ages.  We've
+disproved it.  We've got beyond that."
+
+"Yes.  So was war.  We'd got beyond it.  But it's here.  I
+tell you, there are only two classes: the governing and the
+governed.  That has always been true.  It always will be. 
+Let the Socialists rave.  It has never got them anywhere.  I
+know.  I come from the mucker class myself.  I know what
+they stand for.  Boost them, and they'll turn on you.  If
+there's anything in any of them, he'll pull himself up by
+his own bootstraps."
+
+"They're not all potential Fengers."
+
+"Then let 'em stay what they are."
+
+Fanny's pencil was tracing and retracing a tortured and
+meaningless figure on the paper before her.  "Tell me, do
+you remember a girl named Sarah Sapinsky?"
+
+"Never heard of her."
+
+"That's fitting.  Sarah Sapinsky was a very pretty, very
+dissatisfied girl who was a slave to the bundle chute.  One
+day there was a period of two seconds when a bundle didn't
+pop out at her, and she had time to think.  Anyway, she
+left.  I asked about her.  She's on the streets."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Thanks to you and your system."
+
+"Look here, Fanny.  I didn't come to you for that kind of
+talk.  Don't, for heaven's sake, give me any sociological
+drivel to-day.  I'm not here just to tell you my troubles. 
+You know what my contract is here with Haynes-Cooper.  And
+you know the amount of stock I hold.  If this scheme of
+Haynes's goes in, I go out.  Voluntarily.  But at my own
+price.  The Haynes-Cooper plant is at the height of its
+efficiency now."  He dropped his voice.  "But the mail order
+business is in its infancy.  There's no limit to what can be
+done with it in the next few years.  Understand?  Do you get
+what I'm trying to tell you?"  He leaned forward, tense and
+terribly in earnest.
+
+Fanny stared at him.  Then her hand went to her head in a
+gesture of weariness.  "Not to-day.  Please.  And not here. 
+Don't think I'm ungrateful for your confidence.  But--this
+month has been a terrific strain.  Just let me pass the
+fifteenth of October.  Let me see Theodore on the way----"
+
+Fenger's fingers closed about her wrist.  Fanny got to her
+feet angrily.  They glared at each other a moment.  Then the
+humor of the picture they must be making struck Fanny.  She
+began to laugh.  Fenger's glare became a frown.  He turned
+abruptly and left the office.  Fanny looked down at her
+wrist ruefully.  Four circlets of red marked its smooth
+whiteness.  She laughed again, a little uncertainly this
+time.
+
+When she got home that night she found, in her mail, a
+letter for Theodore, postmarked Vienna, and stamped with the
+mark of the censor.  Theodore had given her his word of
+honor that he would not write Olga, or give her his address. 
+Olga was risking Fanny's address.  She stood looking at the
+letter now.  Theodore was coming in for dinner, as he did
+five nights out of the week.  As she stood in the hallway,
+she heard the rattle of his key in the lock.  She flew down
+the hall and into her bedroom, her letters in her hand.  She
+opened her dressing table drawer and threw them into it,
+switched on the light and turned to face Theodore in the
+doorway.
+
+"'Lo, Sis."
+
+"Hello, Teddy.  Kiss me.  Phew!  That pipe again.  How'd the
+work go to-day?"
+
+"So--so.  Any mail for me?" 
+
+"No."
+
+That night, when he had gone, she took out the letter and
+stood turning it over and over in her hands.  She had no
+thought of reading it.  It was its destruction she was
+contemplating.  Finally she tucked it away in her
+handkerchief box.  Perhaps, after the fifteenth of October. 
+Everything depended on that.
+
+And the fifteenth of October came.  It had dragged for
+weeks, and then, at the end, it galloped.  By that time
+Fanny had got used to seeing Theodore's picture and name
+outside Orchestra Hall, and in the musical columns of the
+papers.  Brandeis.  Theodore Brandeis, the violinist.  The
+name sang in her ears.  When she walked on Michigan Avenue
+during that last week she would force herself to march
+straight on past Orchestra Hall, contenting herself with a
+furtive and oblique glance at the announcement board.  The
+advance programs hung, a little bundle of them, suspended by
+a string from a nail on the wall near the box office, so
+that ticket purchasers might rip one off and peruse the
+week's musical menu.  Fanny longed to hear the comment of
+the little groups that were constantly forming and
+dispersing about the box office window.  She never dreamed
+of allowing herself to hover near it.  She thought sometimes
+of the woman in the businesslike gray skirt and the black
+sateen apron who had drudged so cheerfully in the little
+shop so that Theodore Brandeis' name might shine now from
+the very top of the program, in heavy black letters:
+
+Soloist: MR. THEODORE BRANDEIS, Violin
+
+The injustice of it.  Fanny had never ceased to rage at
+that.
+
+In the years to come Theodore Brandeis was to have that
+adulation which the American public, temperamentally so
+cold, gives its favorite, once the ice of its reserve is
+thawed.  He was to look down on that surging, tempestuous
+crowd which sometimes packs itself about the foot of
+the platform in Carnegie Hall, demanding more, more, more,
+after a generous concert is concluded.  He had to learn to
+protect himself from those hysterical, enraptured, wholly
+feminine adorers who swarmed about him, scaling the platform
+itself.  But of all this there was nothing on that Friday
+and Saturday in October.  Orchestra Hall audiences are not,
+as a rule, wildly demonstrative.  They were no exception. 
+They listened attentively, appreciatively.  They talked,
+critically and favorably, on the way home.  They applauded
+generously.  They behaved as an Orchestra Hall audience
+always behaves, and would behave, even if it were confronted
+with a composite Elman-Kreisler-Ysaye soloist.  Theodore's
+playing was, as a whole, perhaps the worst of his career. 
+Not that he did not rise to magnificent heights at times. 
+But it was what is known as uneven playing.  He was torn
+emotionally, nervously, mentally.  His playing showed it.
+
+Fanny, seated in the auditorium, her hands clasped tight,
+her heart hammering, had a sense of unreality as she waited
+for Theodore to appear from the little door at the left.  He
+was to play after the intermission.  Fanny had arrived late,
+with Theodore, that Friday afternoon.  She felt she could
+not sit through the first part of the program.  They waited
+together in the anteroom.  Theodore, looking very slim and
+boyish in his frock coat, walked up and down, up and down. 
+Fanny wanted to straighten his tie.  She wanted to pick an
+imaginary thread off his lapel.  She wanted to adjust the
+white flower in his buttonhole (he jerked it out presently,
+because it interfered with his violin, he said).  She wanted
+to do any one of the foolish, futile things that would have
+served to relieve her own surcharged feelings.  But she had
+learned control in these years.  And she yielded to none of
+them.
+
+The things they said and did were, perhaps, almost
+ludicrous.
+
+"How do I look?" Theodore demanded, and stood up before her.
+
+"Beautiful!" said Fanny, and meant it.
+
+Theodore passed a hand over his cheek.  "Cut myself shaving,
+damn it!"
+
+"It doesn't show."
+
+He resumed his pacing.  Now and then he stopped, and rubbed
+his hands together with a motion we use in washing. 
+Finally:
+
+"I wish you'd go out front," he said, almost pettishly. 
+Fanny rose, without a word.  She looked very handsome. 
+Excitement had given her color.  The pupils of her eyes were
+dilated and they shone brilliantly.  She looked at her
+brother.  He stared at her.  They swayed together.  They
+kissed, and clung together for a long moment.  Then Fanny
+turned and walked swiftly away, and stumbled a little as she
+groped for the stairway.
+
+The bell in the foyer rang.  The audience strolled to the
+auditorium.  They lagged, Fanny thought.  They crawled.  She
+told herself that she must not allow her nerves to tease her
+like that.  She looked about her, with outward calm.  Her
+eyes met Fenger's.  He was seated, alone.  It was he who had
+got a subscription seat for her from a friend.  She had said
+she preferred to be alone.  She looked at him now and he at
+her, and they did not nod nor smile.  The house settled
+itself flutteringly.
+
+A man behind Fanny spoke.  "Who's this Brandeis?"
+
+"I don't know.  A new one.  German, I guess.  They say he's
+good.  Kreisler's the boy who can play for me, though."
+
+The orchestra was seated now.  Stock, the conductor, came
+out from the little side door.  Behind him walked Theodore. 
+There was a little, impersonal burst of applause.  Stock
+mounted his conductor's platform and glanced paternally
+down at Theodore, who stood at the left, violin and bow in
+hand, bowing.  The audience seemed to warm to his
+boyishness.  They applauded again, and he bowed in a little
+series of jerky bobs that waggled his coat-tails.  Heels
+close together, knees close together.  A German bow.  And
+then a polite series of bobs addressed to Stock and his
+orchestra.  Stock's long, slim hands poised in air.  His
+fingertips seemed to draw from the men before him the first
+poignant strains of Theodore's concerto.  Theodore stood,
+slim and straight.  Fanny's face, lifted toward him, was a
+prayerful thing.  Theodore suddenly jerked back the left
+lapel of his coat in a little movement Fanny remembered as
+typical in his boyish days, nuzzled his violin tenderly, and
+began to play.
+
+It is the most excruciating of instruments, the violin, or
+the most exquisite.  I think Fanny actually heard very
+little of his playing.  Her hands were icy.  Her cheeks were
+hot.  The man before her was not Theodore Brandeis, the
+violinist, but Teddy, the bright-haired, knickered schoolboy
+who played to those people seated in the yellow wooden pews
+of the temple in Winnebago.  The years seemed to fade away. 
+He crouched over his violin to get the 'cello tones for
+which he was to become famous, and it was the same hunched,
+almost awkward pose that the boy had used.  Fanny found
+herself watching his feet as his shifted his position.  He
+was nervous.  And he was not taken out of himself.  She knew
+that because she saw the play of his muscles about the jaw-
+bone.  It followed that he was not playing his best.  She
+could not tell that from listening to him.  Her music sense
+was dulled.  She got it from these outward signs.  The woman
+next to her was reading a program absorbedly, turning the
+pages regularly, and with care.  Fanny could have killed her
+with her two hands.  She tried to listen detachedly.  The
+music was familiar to her.  Theodore had played it for
+her, again and again.  The last movement had never
+failed to shake her emotionally.  It was the glorious and
+triumphant cry of a people tried and unafraid.  She heard it
+now, unmoved.
+
+And then Theodore was bowing his little jerky bows, and he
+was shaking hands with Stock, and with the First Violin.  He
+was gone.  Fanny sat with her hands in her lap.  The
+applause continued.  Theodore appeared again.  Bowed.  He
+bent very low now, with his arms hanging straight.  There
+was something gracious and courtly about him.  And foreign. 
+He must keep that, Fanny thought.  They like it.  She saw
+him off again.  More applause.  Encores were against the
+house rules.  She knew that.  Then it meant they were
+pleased.  He was to play again.  A group of Hungarian dances
+this time.  They were wild, gypsy things, rising to frenzy
+at times.  He played them with spirit and poetry.  To listen
+sent the blood singing through the veins.  Fanny found
+herself thinking clearly and exaltedly.
+
+"This is what my mother drudged for, and died for, and it
+was worth it.  And you must do the same, if necessary. 
+Nothing else matters.  What he needs now is luxury.  He's
+worn out with fighting.  Ease.  Peace.  Leisure.  You've got
+to give them to him.  It's no use, Fanny.  You lose."
+
+In that moment she reached a mark in her spiritual career
+that she was to outdistance but once.
+
+Theodore was bowing again.  Fanny had scarcely realized that
+he had finished.  The concert was over.
+
+". . . the group of dances," the man behind her was saying
+as he helped the girl next him with her coat, "but I didn't
+like that first thing.  Church music, not concert."
+
+Fanny found her way back to the ante-room.  Theodore was
+talking to the conductor, and one or two others.  He looked
+tired, and his eyes found Fanny's with appeal and
+relief in them.  She came over to him.  There were
+introductions, congratulations.  Fanny slipped her hand over
+his with a firm pressure.
+
+"Come, dear.  You must be tired."
+
+At the door they found Fenger waiting.  Theodore received
+his well-worded congratulations with an ill-concealed scowl.
+
+"My car's waiting," said Fenger.  "Won't you let me take you
+home?"
+
+A warning pressure from Theodore.  "Thanks, no.  We have a
+car.  Theodore's very tired."
+
+"I can quite believe that."
+
+"Not tired," growled Theodore, like a great boy.  "I'm
+hungry.  Starved.  I never eat before playing."
+
+Kurt Stein, Theodore's manager, had been hovering over him
+solicitously.  "You must remember to-morrow night.  I should
+advise you to rest now, as quickly as possible."  He, too,
+glared at Fenger.
+
+Fenger fell back, almost humbly.  "I've great news for you. 
+I must see you Sunday.  After this is over.  I'll telephone
+you.  Don't try to come to work to-morrow."  All this is a
+hurried aside to Fanny.
+
+Fanny nodded and moved away with Theodore.
+
+Theodore leaned back in the car, but there was no hint of
+relaxation.  He was as tense and vibrant as one of his own
+violin strings.
+
+"It went, didn't it?  They're like clods, these American
+audiences."  It was on the tip of Fanny's tongue to say that
+he had professed indifference to audiences, but she wisely
+refrained.  "Gad! I'm hungry.  What makes this Fenger hang
+around so?  I'm going to tell him to keep away, some day. 
+The way he stares at you.  Let's go somewhere to-night, Fan. 
+Or have some people in.  I can't sit about after I've
+played.  Olga always used to have a supper party, or
+something."
+
+"All right, Ted.  Would you like the theater?"
+
+For the first time in her life she felt a little whisper of
+sympathy for the despised Olga.  Perhaps, after all, she had
+not been wholly to blame.
+
+He was to leave Sunday morning for Cleveland, where he would
+play Monday.  He had insisted on taking Mizzi with him,
+though Fanny had railed and stormed.  Theodore had had his
+way.
+
+"She's used to it.  She likes to travel, don't you, Mizzi? 
+You should have seen her in Russia, and all over Germany,
+and in Sweden.  She's a better traveler than her dad."
+
+Saturday morning's papers were kind, but cool.  They used
+words such as promising, uneven, overambitious, gifted. 
+Theodore crumpled the lot into a ball and hurled them across
+the room, swearing horribly.  Then he smoothed them out,
+clipped them, and saved them carefully.  His playing that
+night was tinged with bravado, and the Saturday evening
+audience rose to it.  There was about his performance a
+glow, a spirit that had been lacking on the previous day.
+
+Inconsistently enough, he missed the antagonism of the
+European critics.  He was puzzled and resentful.
+
+"They hardly say a word about the meaning of the concerto. 
+They accept it as a piece of music, Jewish in theme.  It
+might as well be entitled Springtime."
+
+"This isn't France or Russia," said Fanny.  "Antagonism here
+isn't religious.  It's personal, almost.  You've been away
+so many years you've forgotten.  They don't object to us as
+a sect, or a race, but as a type.  That's the trouble,
+Clarence Heyl says.  We're free to build as many synagogues
+as we like, and worship in them all day, if we want to.  But
+we don't want to.  The struggle isn't racial any more, but
+individual.  For some reason or other one flashy, loud-
+talking Hebrew in a restaurant can cause more ill feeling
+than ten thousand of them holding a religious mass meeting
+in Union Square."
+
+Theodore pondered a moment.  "Then here each one of us is
+responsible.  Is that it?"
+
+"I suppose so."
+
+"But look here.  I've been here ten weeks, and I've met your
+friends, and not one of them is a Jew.  How's that?"
+
+Fanny flushed a little.  "Oh, it just worked out that way."
+
+Theodore looked at her hard.  "You mean you worked it out
+that way?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Fan, we're a couple of weaklings, both of us, to have
+sprung from a mother like ours.  I don't know which is
+worse; my selfishness, or yours."  Then, at the hurt that
+showed in her face, he was all contrition.  "Forgive me,
+Sis.  You've been so wonderful to me, and to Mizzi, and to
+all of us.  I'm a good-for-nothing fiddler, that's all. 
+You're the strong one."
+
+Fenger had telephoned her on Saturday.  He and his wife were
+at their place in the country.  Fanny was to take the train
+out there Sunday morning.  She looked forward to it with a
+certain relief.  The weather had turned unseasonably warm,
+as Chicago Octobers sometimes do.  Up to the last moment she
+had tried to shake Theodore's determination to take Mizzi
+and Otti with him.  But he was stubborn.
+
+"I've got to have her," he said.
+
+Michael Fenger's voice over the telephone had been as
+vibrant with suppressed excitement as Michael Fenger's dry,
+hard tones could be.
+
+"Fanny, it's done--finished," he said.  "We had a meeting
+to-day.  This is my last month with Haynes-Cooper."
+
+"But you can't mean it.  Why, you ARE Haynes-Cooper.  How
+can they let you go?"
+
+"I can't tell you now.  We'll go over it all to-morrow. 
+I've new plans.  They've bought me out.  D'you see?  At
+a price that--well, I thought I'd got used to juggling
+millions at Haynes-Cooper.  But this surprised even me. 
+Will you come?  Early?  Take the eight-ten."
+
+"That's too early.  I'll get the ten."
+
+The mid-October country was a lovely thing.  Fanny, with the
+strain of Theodore's debut and leave-taking behind her, and
+the prospect of a high-tension business talk with Fenger
+ahead, drank in the beauty of the wayside woods gratefully.
+
+Fenger met her at the station.  She had never seen him so
+boyish, so exuberant.  He almost pranced.
+
+"Hop in," he said.  He had driven down in a runabout. 
+"Brother get off all right?  Gad!  He CAN play.  And
+you've made the whole thing possible."  He turned to look at
+her.  "You're a wonder."
+
+"In your present frame of mind and state of being," laughed
+Fanny, "you'd consider any one a wonder.  You're so pleased
+with yourself you're fairly gummy."
+
+Fenger laughed softly and sped the car on.  They turned in
+at the gate.  There was scarlet salvia, now, to take the
+place of the red geraniums.  The gay awnings, too, were
+gone.
+
+"This is our last week," Fenger explained.  "It's too cold
+out here for Katherine.  We're moving into town to-morrow. 
+We're more or less camping out here, with only the Jap to
+take care of us."
+
+"Don't apologize, please.  I'm grateful just to be here,
+after the week I've had.  Let's have the news now."
+
+"We'll have lunch first.  I'm afraid you'll have to excuse
+Katherine.  She probably won't be down for lunch."  The Jap
+had spread the luncheon table on the veranda, but a brisk
+lake breeze had sprung up, and he was busy now transferring
+his table from the porch to the dining room.  "Would you
+have believed it," said Fenger, "when you left town? 
+Good old lake.  Mrs. Fenger coming down?" to the man.
+
+The Jap shook his head.  "Nossa."
+
+Their talk at luncheon was all about Theodore and his
+future.  Fenger said that what Theodore needed was a firm
+and guiding hand.  "A sort of combination manager and slave-
+driver.  An ambitious and intelligent wife would do it. 
+That's what we all need.  A woman to work for, and to make
+us work."
+
+Fanny smiled.  "Mizzi will have to be woman enough, I'm
+afraid.  Poor Ted."
+
+They rose.  "Now for the talk," said Fenger.  But the
+telephone had sounded shrilly a moment before, and the
+omnipresent little Jap summoned Fenger.  He was back in a
+minute, frowning.  "It's Haynes.  I'm sorry.  I'm afraid
+it'll take a half hour of telephoning.  Don't you want to
+take a cat-nap?  Or a stroll down to the lake?"
+
+"Don't bother about me.  I'll probably take a run outdoors."
+
+"Be back in half an hour."
+
+But when she returned he was still at the telephone.  She
+got a book and stretched luxuriously among the cushions of
+one of the great lounging chairs, and fell asleep.  When she
+awoke Fenger was seated opposite her.  He was not reading. 
+He was not smoking.  He evidently had been sitting there,
+looking at her.
+
+"Oh, gracious!  Mouth open?"
+
+"No."
+
+Fanny fought down an impulse to look as cross as she felt. 
+"What time?  Why didn't you wake me?"  The house was very
+quiet.  She patted her hair deftly, straightened her collar. 
+"Where's everybody?  Isn't Mrs. Fenger down yet?"
+
+"No.  Don't you want to hear about my plans now?"
+
+"Of course I do.  That's what I came for.  I don't see
+why you didn't tell me hours ago.  You're as slow in action
+as a Chinese play.  Out with it."
+
+Fenger got up and began to pace the floor, not excitedly,
+but with an air of repression.  He looked very powerful and
+compelling, there in the low-ceilinged, luxurious room. 
+"I'll make it brief.  We met yesterday in Haynes's office. 
+Of course we had discussed the thing before.  You know that. 
+Haynes knew that I'd never run the plant under the new
+conditions.  Why, it would kill every efficiency rule I've
+ever made.  Here I had trimmed that enormous plant down to
+fighting weight.  There wasn't a useless inch or ounce about
+the whole enormous billionaire bulk of it.  And then to have
+Haynes come along, with his burdensome notions, and his
+socialistic slop.  They'd cripple any business, no matter
+how great a start it had.  I told him all that.  We didn't
+waste much time on argument, though.  We knew we'd never get
+together.  In half an hour we were talking terms.  You know
+my contract and the amount of stock I hold.  Well, we
+threshed that out, and Haynes is settling for two million
+and a half."
+
+He came to a stop before Fanny's chair.
+
+"Two million and a half what?" asked Fanny, feebly.
+
+"Dollars."  He smiled rather grimly.  "In a check."
+
+"One--check?"
+"One check."
+
+Fanny digested that in her orderly mind.  "I thought I was
+used to thinking in millions.  But this--I'd like to touch
+the check, just once."
+
+"You shall."  He drew up a chair near her.  "Now get this,
+Fanny.  There's nothing that you and I can't do with two
+millions and a half.  Nothing.  We know this mail order game
+as no two people in the world know it.  And it's in its
+infancy.  I know the technical side of it.  You know the
+human side of it.  I tell you that in five years' time you
+and I can be a national power.  Not merely the heads of
+a prosperous mail order business, but figures in finance. 
+See what's happened to Haynes-Cooper in the last five years! 
+Why, it's incredible.  It's grotesque.  And it's nothing to
+what you and I can do, working together.  You know people,
+somehow.  You've a genius for sensing their wants, or
+feelings, or emotions--I don't know just what it is.  And I
+know facts.  And we have two million and a half--I can make
+it nearly three millions--to start with.  Haynes, fifteen
+years ago, had a couple of hundred thousand.  In five years
+we can make the Haynes-Cooper organization look as modern
+and competent as a cross-roads store.  This isn't a dream. 
+These are facts.  You know how my mind works.  Like a cold
+chisel.  I can see this whole country--and Europe, too,
+after the war--God, yes!--stretched out before us like a
+patient before expert surgeons.  You to attend to its heart,
+and I to its bones and ligaments.  I can put you where no
+other woman has ever been.  I've a hundred new plans this
+minute, and a hundred more waiting to be born.  So have you. 
+I tell you it's just a matter of buildings.  Of bricks and
+stone, and machinery and people to make the machinery go. 
+Once we get those--and it's only a matter of months--we can
+accomplish things I daren't even dream of.  What was Haynes-
+Cooper fifteen years ago?  What was the North American Cloak
+and Suit Company?  The Peter Johnston Stores, of New York? 
+Wells-Kayser?  Nothing.  They didn't exist.  And this year
+Haynes-Cooper is declaring a twenty-five per cent dividend. 
+Do you get what that means?  But of course you do.  That's
+the wonder of it.  I never need explain things to you. 
+You've a genius for understanding."
+
+Fanny had been sitting back in her chair, crouching almost,
+her eyes fixed upon the man's face, so terrible in its
+earnestness and indomitable strength.  When he stopped
+talking now, and stood looking down at her, she rose,
+too, her eyes still on his face.  She was twisting the
+fingers of one hand in the fingers of the other, in a
+frightened sort of way.
+
+"I'm not really a business woman.  I--wait a minute,
+please--I have a knack of knowing what people are thinking
+and wanting.  But that isn't business."
+"It isn't, eh?  It's the finest kind of business sense. 
+It's the thing the bugs call psychology, and it's as
+necessary to-day as capital was yesterday.  You can get
+along without the last.  You can't without the first.  One
+can be acquired.  The other you've got to be born with."
+
+"But I--you know, of late, it's only the human side of it
+that has appealed to me.  I don't know why.  I seem to have
+lost interest in the actual mechanics of it."
+
+Fenger stood looking at her, his head lowered.  A scarlet
+stripe, that she had never noticed before, seemed to stand
+out suddenly, like a welt, on his forehead.  Then he came
+toward her.  She raised her hand in a little futile gesture. 
+She took an involuntary step backward, encountered the chair
+she had just left, and sank into it coweringly.  She sat
+there, looking up at him, fascinated.  His hand, on the wing
+of the great chair, was shaking.  So, too, was his voice.
+
+"Fanny, Katherine's not here."
+
+Fanny still looked up at him, wordlessly.
+
+"Katherine left here yesterday.  She's in town."  Then, at
+the look in her face, "She was here when I telephoned you
+yesterday.  Late yesterday afternoon she had one of her
+fantastic notions.  She insisted that she must go into town. 
+It was too cold for her here.  Too damp.  Too--well, she
+went.  And I let her go.  And I didn't telephone you again. 
+I wanted you to come."
+
+Fanny Brandeis, knowing him, must have felt a great qualm of
+terror and helplessness.  But she was angry, too, a
+wholesome ingredient in a situation such as this.  The thing
+she said and did now was inspired.  She laughed--a little
+uncertainly, it is true--but still she laughed.  And she
+said, in a matter-of-fact tone:
+
+"Well, I must say that's a rather shabby trick.  Still, I
+suppose the tired business man has got to have his little
+melodrama.  What do I do?  H'm?  Beat my breast and howl? 
+Or pound on the door panel?"
+
+Fenger stood looking at her.  "Don't laugh at me, Fanny."
+
+She stood up, still smiling.  It was rather a brilliant
+piece of work.  Fenger, taken out of himself though he was,
+still was artist enough to appreciate it.
+
+"Why not laugh," she said, "if I'm amused?  And I am.  Come
+now, Mr. Fenger.  Be serious.  And let's get back to the
+billions.  I want to catch the five-fifteen."
+
+"I AM serious."
+"Well, if you expect me to play the hunted heroine, I'm
+sorry."  She pointed an accusing finger at him.  "I know
+now.  You're quitting Haynes-Cooper for the movies.  And
+this is a rehearsal for a vampire film."
+
+"You nervy little devil, you!"  He reached out with one
+great, irresistible hand and gripped her shoulder.  "You
+wonderful, glorious girl!"  The hand that gripped her
+shoulder swung her to him.  She saw his face with veins she
+had never noticed before standing out, in knots, on his
+temples, and his eyes were fixed and queer.  And he was
+talking, rather incoherently, and rapidly.  He was saying
+the same thing over and over again:  "I'm crazy about you. 
+I've been looking for a woman like you--all my life.  I'm
+crazy about you.  I'm crazy----"
+
+And then Fanny's fine composure and self control fled, and
+she thought of her mother.  She began to struggle, too, and
+to say, like any other girl, "Let me go!  Let me go! 
+You're hurting me.  Let me go!  You!  You!"
+
+And then, quite clearly, from that part of her brain where
+it had been tucked away until she should need it, came
+Clarence Heyl's whimsical bit of advice.  Her mind released
+it now, complete.
+
+"If you double your fist this way, and tuck your thumb
+alongside, like that, and aim for this spot right here,
+about two inches this side of the chin, bringing your arm
+back and up quickly, like a piston, the person you hit will
+go down, limp.  There's a nerve right here that communicates
+with the brain.  The blow makes you see stars, and bright
+lights----"
+
+She went limp in his arms.  She shut her eyes, flutteringly. 
+"All men--like you--have a yellow streak," she whispered,
+and opened her eyes, and looked up at him, smiling a little. 
+He relaxed his hold, in surprise and relief.  And with her
+eyes on that spot barely two inches to the side of the chin
+she brought her right arm down, slowly, slowly, fist
+doubled, and then up like a piston--snap!  His teeth came
+together with a sharp little crack.  His face, in that
+second, was a comic mask, surprised, stunned, almost
+idiotic.  Then he went down, as Clarence Heyl had predicted,
+limp.  Not with a crash, but slowly, crumpingly, so that he
+almost dragged her with him.
+
+Fanny stood looking down at him a moment.  Then she wiped
+her mouth with the back of her hand.  She walked out of the
+room, and down the hall.  She saw the little Jap dart
+suddenly back from a doorway, and she stamped her foot and
+said, "S-s-cat!" as if he had been a rat.  She gathered up
+her hat and bag from the hall table, and so, out of the
+door, and down the walk, to the road.  And then she began to
+run.  She ran, and ran, and ran.  It was a longish stretch
+to the pretty, vine-covered station.  She seemed unconscious
+of fatigue, or distance.  She must have been at least a
+half hour on the way.  When she reached the station the
+ticket agent told her there was no train until six.  So she
+waited, quietly.  She put on her hat (she had carried it in
+her hand all the way) and patted her hair into place.  When
+the train came she found a seat quite alone, and sank into
+its corner, and rested her head against her open palm.  It
+was not until then that she felt a stab of pain.  She looked
+at her hand, and saw that the skin of her knuckles was
+bruised and bleeding.
+
+"Well, if this," she said to herself, "isn't the most
+idiotic thing that ever happened to a woman outside a near-
+novel."
+
+She looked at her knuckles, critically, as though the hand
+belonged to some one else.  Then she smiled.  And even as
+she smiled a great lump came into her throat, and the bruise
+blurred before her eyes, and she was crying rackingly,
+relievedly, huddled there in her red plush corner.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
+
+It was eight o'clock when she let herself into her
+apartment.  She had given the maid a whole holiday.  When
+Fanny had turned on the light in her little hallway she
+stood there a moment, against the door, her hand spread flat
+against the panel.  It was almost as though she patted it,
+lovingly, gratefully.  Then she went on into the living
+room, and stood looking at its rosy lamplight.  Then, still
+as though seeing it all for the first time, into her own
+quiet, cleanly bedroom, with its cream enamel, and the
+chaise longue that she had had cushioned in rose because it
+contrasted so becomingly with her black hair.  And there, on
+her dressing table, propped up against the brushes and
+bottles, was the yellow oblong of a telegram.  From Theodore
+of course.  She opened it with a rush of happiness.  It was
+like a loving hand held out to her in need.  It was a day
+letter.
+
+        "We sail Monday on the St. Paul.  Mizzi is with
+    me.  I broke my word to you.  But you lied to me about
+    the letters.  I found them the week before the concert. 
+    I shall bring her back with me or stay to fight for
+    Germany.  Forgive me, dear sister."
+
+
+Just fifty words.  His thrifty German training.
+
+"No!" cried Fanny, aloud.  "No!  No!"  And the cry quavered
+and died away, and another took its place.  and it, too,
+gave way to another, so that she was moaning as she stood
+there with the telegram in her shaking hand.  She read it
+again, her lips moving, as old people sometimes
+read.  Then she began to whimper, with her closed fist over
+her mouth, her whole body shaking.  All her fine courage
+gone now; all her rigid self-discipline; all her iron
+determination.  She was not a tearful woman.  And she had
+wept much on the train.  So the thing that wrenched and
+shook her now was all the more horrible because of its
+soundlessness.  She walked up and down the room, pushing her
+hair back from her forehead with the flat of her hand.  From
+time to time she smoothed out the crumpled yellow slip of
+paper and read it again.  Her mind, if you could have seen
+into it, would have presented a confused and motley picture. 
+Something like this:  But his concert engagements? . . .
+That was what had happened to Bauer. . . .  How silly he had
+looked when her fist met his jaw. . . .  It had turned cold;
+why didn't they have steam on?  The middle of
+October. . . .  Teddy, how could you do it!  How could you
+do it! . . .  Was he still lying in a heap on the floor? 
+But of course the sneaking little Jap had found him. . . . 
+Somebody to talk to.  That was what she wanted.  Some one to
+talk to. . . .
+
+Some one to talk to.  She stood there, in the middle of her
+lamp-lighted living room, and she held out her hands in
+silent appeal.  Some one to talk to.  In her mind she went
+over the list of those whose lives had touched hers in the
+last few crowded years.  Fenger, Fascinating Facts, Ella
+Monahan, Nathan Haynes; all the gay, careless men and women
+she had met from time to time through Fenger and Fascinating
+Facts.  Not one of them could she turn to now.
+
+Clarence Heyl.  She breathed a sigh of relief.  Clarence
+Heyl.  He had helped her once, to-day.  And now, for the
+second time, something that he had said long before came
+from its hiding place in her subconscious mind.  She had
+said:
+
+"Some days I feel I've got to walk out of the office,
+and down the street, without a hat, and on and on,
+walking and walking, and running and running till I come to
+the horizon."
+
+And Heyl had answered, in his quiet, reassuring way:  "Some
+day that feeling will get too strong for you.  When that
+time comes get on a train marked Denver.  From there take
+another to Estes Park.  That's the Rocky Mountains, where
+the horizon lives and has its being.  Ask for Heyl's place. 
+They'll hand you from one to the other.  I may be there, but
+more likely I shan't.  The key's in the mail box, tied to a
+string.  You'll find a fire laid with fat pine knots.  My
+books are there.  The bedding's in the cedar chest.  And the
+mountains will make you clean and whole again; and the
+pines . . ."
+
+Fanny went to the telephone.  Trains for Denver.  She found
+the road she wanted, and asked for information.  She was on
+her own ground here.  All her life she had had to find her
+own trains, check her own trunks, plan her journeys. 
+Sometimes she had envied the cotton-wool women who had had
+all these things done for them, always.
+
+One-half of her mind was working clearly and coolly.  The
+other half was numb.  There were things to be done.  They
+would take a day.  More than a day, but she would neglect
+most of them.  She must notify the office.  There were
+tickets to be got.  Reservations.  Money at the bank. 
+Packing.  When the maid came in at eleven Fanny had
+suitcases and bags out, and her bedroom was strewn with
+shoes, skirts, coats.
+
+Late Monday afternoon Fenger telephoned.  She did not
+answer.  There came a note from him, then a telegram.  She
+did not read them.  Tuesday found her on a train bound for
+Colorado.  She remembered little of the first half of her
+journey.  She had brought with her books and magazines, and
+she must have read hem, but her mind had evidently retained
+nothing of what she had read.  She must have spent
+hours looking out of the window, for she remembered, long
+afterward, the endlessness and the monotony of the Kansas
+prairies.  They soothed her.  She was glad there were no
+bits of autumnal woodland, no tantalizing vistas, nothing to
+break the flat and boundless immensity of it.  Here was
+something big, and bountiful, and real, and primal.  Good
+Kansas dirt.  Miles of it.  Miles of it.  She felt she would
+like to get out and tramp on it, hard.
+
+"Pretty cold up there in Estes Park," the conductor had
+said.  "Been snowing up in the mountains."
+
+She had arranged to stop in Denver only long enough to
+change trains.  A puffy little branch line was to take her
+from Denver to Loveland, and there, she had been told, one
+of the big mountain-road steam automobiles would take her up
+the mountains to her destination.  For one as mentally alert
+as she normally was, the exact location of that destination
+was very hazy in her mind.  Heyl's place.  That was all. 
+Ordinarily she would have found the thought ridiculous.  But
+she concentrated on it now; clung to it.
+
+At the first glimpse of the foot-hills Fanny's listless gaze
+became interested.  If you have ever traveled on the jerky,
+cleanly, meandering little road that runs between Denver 
+and the Park you know that it winds, and
+curves, so that the mountains seem to leap about, friskily,
+first confronting you on one side of the car window, then
+disappearing and seeming to taunt you from the windows of
+the opposite side.  Fanny laughed aloud.  The mountain
+steam-car was waiting at Loveland.  There were few
+passengers at this time of year.  The driver was a great
+tanned giant, pongee colored from his hair to his puttees
+and boots.  Fanny was to learn, later, that in Estes Park
+the male tourist was likely to be puny, pallid, and
+unattractive when compared to the tall, slim, straight,
+khaki-clad youth, browned by the sun, and the wind, and
+the dust, who drives his steamer up and down the perilous
+mountain roads with more dexterity than the charioteering
+gods ever displayed on Olympus.
+
+Fanny got the seat beside this glorious person.  The steamer
+was a huge vehicle, boasting five rows of seats, and looking
+very much like a small edition of the sightseeing cars one
+finds in tourist-infested cities.
+
+"Heyl's place," said Fanny.  Suppose it failed to work!
+
+Said the blond god, "Stopping at the Inn overnight, I
+s'pose."
+
+"Why--I don't know," faltered Fanny.  "Can't I go right on
+to--to--Heyl's place?"
+
+"Can."  Mountain steamer men are not loquacious.  "Sure. 
+Better not.  You won't get to the Inn till dark.  Better
+stay there over night, and go on up to Heyl's place in the
+morning."
+
+Then he leaned forward, clawed about expertly among what
+appeared to Fanny's eyes to be a maze of handles, brakes,
+valves; and the great car glided smoothly off, without a
+bump, without a jar.  Fanny took a long breath.
+
+There is no describing a mountain.  One uses words, and they
+are futile.  And the Colorado Rockies, in October, when the
+aspens are turning!  Well, aspens turn gold in October. 
+People who have seen an aspen grove in October believe in
+fairies.  And such people need no clumsy descriptive
+passages to aid their fancies.  You others who have not seen
+it?  There shall be no poor weaving together of words. 
+There shall be no description of orange and mauve and flame-
+colored sunsets, no juggling with mists and clouds, and
+sunrises and purple mountains.  Mountain dwellers and
+mountain lovers are a laconic tribe.  They know the futility
+of words.
+
+But the effect of the mountains on Fanny Brandeis.
+That is within our province.  In the first place, they
+made her hungry.  That was the crisp, heady air.  The
+mountain road, to one who has never traveled it, is a thing
+of delicious thrills and near-terror.  A narrow, perilous
+ribbon of road, cut in the side of the rock itself; a road
+all horseshoe curves and hairpin twists.  Fanny found
+herself gasping.  But that passed after a time.  Big
+Thompson canyon leaves no room for petty terror.  And the
+pongee person was so competent, so quietly sure, so
+angularly graceful among his brakes and levers.  Fanny stole
+a side glance at him now and then.  He looked straight
+ahead.  When you drive a mountain steamer you do look
+straight ahead.  A glance to the right or left is so likely
+to mean death, or at best a sousing in the Thompson that
+foams and rushes below.
+
+Fanny ventured a question.  "Do you know Mr. Heyl?"
+
+"Heyl?  Took him down day before yesterday."
+
+"Down?"
+
+"To the village.  He's gone back east."
+
+Fanny was not quite sure whether the pang she felt was
+relief or consternation.
+
+At Estes village the blond god handed her over to a twin
+charioteer who would drive her up the mountain road to the
+Inn that nestled in a valley nine thousand feet up the
+mountain.  It was a drive Fanny never forgot.  Fenger, Ted,
+Haynes-Cooper, her work, her plans, her ambitions, seemed to
+dwindle to puny insignificance beside the vast grandeur that
+unfolded before her at every fresh turn in the road.  Up
+they went, and up, and up, and the air was cold, but without
+a sting in it.  It was dark when the lights of the Inn
+twinkled out at them.  The door was thrown open as they
+swung up the curve to the porch.  A great log fire glowed in
+the fireplace.  The dining room held only a dozen people, or
+thereabouts--a dozen weary, healthy people, in
+corduroys and sweaters and boots, whose cleanly talk was all
+about climbing and fishing, and horseback rides and trails. 
+And it was fried chicken night at the Inn.  Fanny thought
+she was too utterly tired to eat, until she began to eat,
+and then she thought she was too hungry ever to stop.  After
+dinner she sat, for a moment, before the log fire in the
+low-ceilinged room, with its log walls, its rustic benches,
+and its soft-toned green and brown cushions.  She forgot to
+be unhappy.  She forgot to be anything but deliciously
+drowsy.  And presently she climbed the winding stair whose
+newel post was a fire-marked tree trunk, richly colored, and
+curiously twisted.  And so to her lamp-lighted room, very
+small, very clean, very quiet.  She opened her window and
+looked out at the towering mass that was Long's Peak, and at
+the stars, and she heard the busy little brook that scurries
+through the Inn yard on its way from the mountain to the
+valley.  She undressed quickly, and crept into bed, meaning
+to be very, very miserable indeed.  And the next thing she
+knew it was morning.  A blue and gold October morning.  And
+the mountains!--but there is no describing a mountain.  One
+uses words, and they are futile.  Fanny viewed them again,
+from her window, between pauses in dressing.  And she meant,
+privately, to be miserable again.  But she could only think,
+somehow, of bacon and eggs, and coffee, and muffins.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER NINETEEN
+
+Heyl's place.  Fanny stood before it, key in hand (she had
+found it in the mail box, tied to a string), and she had a
+curious and restful feeling, as if she had come home, after
+long wanderings.  She smiled, whimsically, and repeated her
+lesson to herself:
+
+"The fire's laid in the fireplace with fat pine knots that
+will blaze up at the touch of a match.  My books are there,
+along the wall.  The bedding's in the cedar chest, and the
+lamps are filled.  There's tinned stuff in the pantry.  And
+the mountains are there, girl, to make you clean and whole
+again. . . ."
+
+She stepped up to the little log-pillared porch and turned
+the key in the lock.  She opened the door wide, and walked
+in.  And then she shut her eyes for a moment.  Because, if
+it shouldn't be true----
+
+But there was a fire laid with fat pine knots.  She walked
+straight over to it, and took her box of matches from her
+bag, struck one, and held it to the wood.  They blazed like
+a torch.  Books!  Along the four walls, books.  Fat,
+comfortable, used-looking books.  Hundreds of them.  A lamp
+on the table, and beside it a pipe, blackened from much use. 
+Fanny picked it up, smiling.  She held it a moment in her
+hand, as though she expected to find it still warm.
+
+"It's like one of the fairy tales," she thought, "the kind
+that repeats and repeats.  The kind that says, `and she went
+into the next room, and it was as the good fairy had said.'"
+
+There's tinned stuff in the pantry.  She went into the tiny
+kitchen and opened the pantry door cautiously,
+being wary of mice.  But it met her eye in spotless
+array.  Orderly rows of tins.  Orderly rows of bottles. 
+Coffee.  Condensed milk.  Beans.  Spaghetti.  Flour. 
+Peaches.  Pears.
+
+Off the bedroom there was an absurdly adequate little
+bathroom, with a zinc tub and an elaborate water-heating
+arrangement.
+
+Fanny threw back her head and laughed as she hadn't laughed
+in months.  "Wild life in the Rockies," she said aloud.  She
+went back to the book-lined living room.  The fire was
+crackling gloriously.  It was a many-windowed room, and each
+window framed an enchanting glimpse of mountain, flaming
+with aspens up to timber-line, and snow-capped at the top. 
+Fanny decided to wait until the fire had died down to a
+coal-bed.  Then she banked it carefully, put on a heavy
+sweater and a cap, and made for the outdoors.  She struck
+out briskly, tenderfoot that she was.  In five minutes she
+was panting.  Her heart was hammering suffocatingly.  Her
+lungs ached.  She stopped, trembling.  Then she remembered. 
+The altitude, of course.  Heyl had boasted that his cabin
+stood at an altitude of over nine thousand feet.  Well, she
+would have to get used to it.  But she was soon striding
+forward as briskly as before.  She was a natural mountain
+dweller.  The air, the altitude, speeded up her heart, her
+lungs, sent the blood dancing through her veins. 
+Figuratively, she was on tip-toe.
+
+They had warned her, at the Inn, to take it slowly for the
+first few days.  They had asked no questions.  Fanny learned
+to heed their advice.  She learned many more things in the
+next few days.  She learned how to entice the chipmunks that
+crossed her path, streak o' sunshine, streak o' shadow.  She
+learned to broil bacon over a fire, with a forked stick. 
+She learned to ride trail ponies, and to bask in a sun-
+warmed spot on a wind-swept hill, and to tell time by the
+sun, and to give thanks for the beauty of the world
+about her, and to leave the wild flowers unpicked, to put
+out her campfire with scrupulous care, and to destroy all
+rubbish (your true woodsman and mountaineer is as
+painstakingly neat as a French housewife).
+
+She was out of doors all day.  At night she read for a while
+before the fire, but by nine her eyelids were heavy.  She
+walked down to the Inn sometimes, but not often.  One
+memorable night she went, with half a dozen others from the
+Inn, to the tiny one-room cabin of Oscar, the handy man
+about the Inn, and there she listened to one of Oscar's far-
+famed phonograph concerts.  Oscar's phonograph had cost
+twenty-five dollars in Denver.  It stood in one corner of
+his cabin, and its base was a tree stump just five hundred
+years old, as you could tell for yourself by counting its
+rings.  His cabin walls were gorgeous with pictures of
+Maxine Elliott in her palmy days, and blonde and
+sophisticated little girls on vinegar calendars, posing
+bare-legged and self-conscious in blue calico and
+sunbonnets.  You sat in the warm yellow glow of Oscar's lamp
+and were regaled with everything from the Swedish National
+Anthem to Mischa Elman's tenderest crooning.  And Oscar sat
+rapt, his weather-beaten face a rich deep mahogany, his eyes
+bluer than any eyes could ever be except in contrast with
+that ruddy countenance, his teeth so white that you found
+yourself watching for his smile that was so gently sweet and
+childlike.  Oh, when Oscar put on his black pants and issued
+invitations for a musical evening one was sure to find his
+cabin packed.  Eight did it, with squeezing.
+
+This, then, was the atmosphere in which Fanny Brandeis found
+herself.  As far from Haynes-Cooper as anything could be. 
+At the end of the first week she found herself able to think
+clearly and unemotionally about Theodore, and about Fenger. 
+She had even evolved a certain rather crude philosophy out
+of the ruins that had tumbled about her ears.  It was
+so crude, so unformed in her mind that it can hardly be set
+down.  To justify one's own existence.  That was all that
+life held or meant.  But that included all the lives that
+touched on yours.  It had nothing to do with success, as she
+had counted success heretofore.  It was service, really.  It
+was living as--well, as Molly Brandeis had lived, helpfully,
+self-effacingly, magnificently.  Fanny gave up trying to
+form the thing that was growing in her mind.  Perhaps, after
+all, it was too soon to expect a complete understanding of
+that which had worked this change in her from that afternoon
+in Fenger's library.
+
+After the first few days she found less and less difficulty
+in climbing.  Her astonished heart and lungs ceased to
+object so strenuously to the unaccustomed work.  The Cabin
+Rock trail, for example, whose summit found her panting and
+exhausted at first, now seemed a mere stroll.  She grew more
+daring and ambitious.  One day she climbed the Long's Peak
+trail to timberline, and had tea at Timberline Cabin with
+Albert Edward Cobbins.  Albert Edward Cobbins, Englishman,
+erstwhile sailor, adventurer and gentleman, was the keeper
+of Timberline Cabin, and the loneliest man in the Rockies. 
+It was his duty to house overnight climbers bound for the
+Peak, sunrise parties and sunset parties, all too few now in
+the chill October season-end.  Fanny was his first visitor
+in three days.  He was pathetically glad to see her.
+
+"I'll have tea for you," he said, "in a jiffy.  And I baked
+a pan of French rolls ten minutes ago.  I had a feeling."
+
+A magnificent specimen of a man, over six feet tall slim,
+broad-shouldered, long-headed, and scrubbed-looking as only
+an Englishman can be, there was something almost pathetic in
+the sight of him bustling about the rickety little kitchen
+stove.
+
+"To-morrow," said Fanny, over her tea, "I'm going to get an
+early start, reach here by noon, and go on to Boulder Field
+and maybe Keyhole."
+
+"Better not, Miss.  Not in October, when there's likely to
+be a snowstorm up there in a minute's notice."
+
+"You'd come and find me, wouldn't you?  They always do, in
+the books."
+
+"Books are all very well, Miss.  But I'm not a mountain man. 
+The truth is I don't know my way fifty feet from this cabin. 
+I got the job because I'm used to loneliness, and don't mind
+it, and because I can cook, d'you see, having shipped as
+cook for years.  But I'm a seafaring man, Miss.  I wouldn't
+advise it, Miss.  Another cup of tea?"
+
+But Long's Peak, king of the range, had fascinated her from
+the first.  She knew that the climb to the summit would be
+impossible for her now, but she had an overwhelming desire
+to see the terrifying bulk of it from a point midway of the
+range.  It beckoned her and intrigued her, as the difficult
+always did.
+
+By noon of the following day she had left Albert Edward's
+cabin (he stood looking after her in the doorway until she
+disappeared around the bend) and was jauntily following the
+trail that led to Boulder Field, that sea of jagged rock a
+mile across.  Soon she had left the tortured, wind-twisted
+timberline trees far behind.  How pitiful Cabin Rock and
+Twin Sisters looked compared to this.  She climbed easily
+and steadily, stopping for brief rests.  Early in the week
+she had ridden down to the village, where she had bought
+climbing breeches and stout leggings.  She laughed at Albert
+Edward and his fears.  By one o'clock she had reached
+Boulder Field.  She found the rocks glazed with ice.  Just
+over Keyhole, that freakish vent in a wall of rock, the blue
+of the sky had changed to the gray of snow-clouds. 
+Tenderfoot though she was, she knew that the climb over
+Boulder Field would be perilous, if not impossible. 
+She went on, from rock to rock, for half an hour, then
+decided to turn back.  A clap of thunder, that roared and
+crashed, and cracked up and down the canyons and over the
+peaks, hastened her decision.  She looked about her.  Peak
+on peak.  Purple and black and yellow masses, fantastic in
+their hugeness.  Chasms.  Canyons.  Pyramids and minarets. 
+And so near.  So grim.  So ghastly desolate.  And yet so
+threatening.  And then Fanny Brandeis was seized with
+mountain terror.  It is a disease recognized by mountain men
+everywhere, and it is panic, pure and simple.  It is fear
+brought on by the immensity and the silence of the
+mountains.  A great horror of the vastness and ruggedness
+came upon her.  It was colossal, it was crushing, it was
+nauseating.
+
+She began to run.  A mistake, that, when one is following a
+mountain trail, at best an elusive thing.  In five minutes
+she had lost the trail.  She stopped, and scolded herself
+sternly, and looked about her.  She saw the faint trail line
+again, or thought she saw it, and made toward it, and found
+it to be no trail at all.  She knew that she must be not
+more than an hour's walk from Timberline Cabin, and Albert
+Edward, and his biscuits and tea.  Why be frightened?  It
+was absurd.  But she was frightened, horribly, harrowingly. 
+The great, grim rock masses seemed to be shaking with silent
+laughter.  She began to run again.  She was very cold, and a
+piercing wind had sprung up.  She kept on walking, doggedly,
+reasoning with herself quite calmly, and proud of her
+calmness.  Which proves how terrified she really was.  Then
+the snow came, not slowly, not gradually, but a blanket of
+it, as it does come in the mountains, shutting off
+everything.  And suddenly Fanny's terror vanished.  She felt
+quite free from weariness.  She was alive and tingling to
+her fingertips.  The psychology of fear is a fascinating
+thing.  Fanny had reached the second stage.  She was
+quite taken out of herself.  She forgot her stone-
+bruised feet.  She was no longer conscious of cold.  She ran
+now, fleetly, lightly, the ground seeming to spur her on. 
+She had given up the trail completely now.  She told herself
+that if she ran on, down, down, down, she must come to the
+valley sometime.  Unless she was turned about, and headed in
+the direction of one of those hideous chasms.  She stopped a
+moment, peering through the snow curtain, but she could see
+nothing.  She ran on lightly, laughing a little.  Then her
+feet met a projection, she stumbled, and fell flat over a
+slab of wood that jutted out of the ground.  She lay there a
+moment, dazed.  Then she sat up, and bent down to look at
+this thing that had tripped her.  Probably a tree trunk. 
+Then she must be near timberline.  She bent closer.  It was
+a rough wooden slab.  Closer still.  There were words carved
+on it.  She lay flat and managed to make them out painfully.
+
+"Here lies Sarah Cannon.  Lay to rest, and died alone, April
+26, 1893."
+
+Fanny had heard the story of Sarah Cannon, a stern spinster
+who had achieved the climb to the Peak, and who had met with
+mishap on the down trail.  Her guide had left her to go for
+help.  When the relief party returned, hours later, they had
+found her dead.
+
+Fanny sprang up, filled with a furious energy.  She felt
+strangely light and clear-headed.  She ran on, stopped, ran
+again.  Now she was making little short runs here and there. 
+It was snowing furiously, vindictively.  It seemed to her
+that she had been running for hours.  It probably was
+minutes.  Suddenly she sank down, got to her feet again,
+stumbled on perhaps a dozen paces, and sank down again.  It
+was as though her knees had turned liquid.  She lay there,
+with her eyes shut.
+
+"I'm just resting," she told herself.  "In a minute I'll go
+on.  In a minute.  After I've rested."  
+
+"Hallo-o-o-o!" from somewhere on the other side of the snow
+blanket.  "Hallo-o-o-o!"
+Fanny sat up, helloing shrilly, hysterically.  She got to
+her feet, staggeringly.  And Clarence Heyl walked toward
+her.
+
+"You ought to be spanked for this," he said.
+
+Fanny began to cry weakly.  She felt no curiosity as to his
+being there.  She wasn't at all sure that he actually was
+there, for that matter.  At that thought she dug a frantic
+hand into his arm.  He seemed to understand, for he said,
+"It's all right.  I'm real enough.  Can you walk?"
+
+"Yes."  But she tried it and found she could not.  She
+decided she was too tired to care.  "I stumbled over a
+thing--a horrible thing--a gravestone.  And I must have hurt
+my leg.  I didn't know----"
+
+She leaned against him, a dead weight.  "Tell you what,"
+said Heyl, cheerfully.  "You wait here.  I'll go on down to
+Timberline Cabin for help, and come back."
+
+"You couldn't manage it--alone?  If I tried?  If I tried to
+walk?"
+
+"Oh, impossible."  His tone was brisk.  "Now you sit right
+down here."  She sank down obediently.  She felt a little
+sorry for herself, and glad, too, and queer, and not at all
+cold.  She looked up at him dumbly.  He was smiling.  "All
+right?"
+
+She nodded.  He turned abruptly.  The snow hid him from
+sight at once.
+
+"Here lies Sarah Cannon.  Lay to rest and died alone, April
+26, 1893."
+
+She sank down, and pillowed her head on her arms.  She knew
+that this was the end.  She was very drowsy, and not at all
+sad.  Happy, if anything.
+
+"You didn't really think I'd leave you, did you, Fan?"
+
+She opened her eyes.  Heyl was there.  He reached down, and
+lifted her lightly to her feet.  "Timberline Cabin's
+not a hundred yards away.  I just did it to try you."
+
+She had spirit enough left to say, "Beast."
+
+Then he swung her up, and carried her down the trail.  He
+carried her, not in his arms, as they do it in books and in
+the movies.  He could not have gone a hundred feet that way. 
+He carried her over his shoulder, like a sack of meal, by
+one arm and one leg, I regret to say.  Any boy scout knows
+that trick, and will tell you what I mean.  It is the most
+effectual carrying method known, though unromantic.
+
+And so they came to Timberline Cabin, and Albert Edward
+Cobbins was in the doorway.  Heyl put her down gently on the
+bench that ran alongside the table.  The hospitable table
+that bore two smoking cups of tea.  Fanny's lips were
+cracked, and the skin was peeled from her nose, and her hair
+was straggling and her eyes red-rimmed.  She drank the tea
+in great gulps.  And then she went into the tiny bunkroom,
+and tumbled into one of the shelf-bunks, and slept.
+
+When she awoke she sat up in terror, and bumped her head
+against the bunk above, and called, "Clancy!"
+
+"Yep!" from the next room.  He came to the door.  The acrid
+smell of their pipes was incense in her nostrils.  "Rested?"
+
+"What time is it?"
+
+"Seven o'clock.  Dinner time.  Ham and eggs."
+
+She got up stiffly, and bathed her roughened face, and
+produced a powder pad (they carry them in the face of
+danger, death, and dissolution) and dusted it over her scaly
+nose.  She did her hair--her vigorous, abundant hair that
+shone in the lamplight, pulled down her blouse, surveyed her
+torn shoes ruefully, donned the khaki skirt that Albert
+Edward had magically produced from somewhere to take the
+place of her breeches.  She dusted her shoes with a bit of
+rag, regarded herself steadily in the wavering mirror, and
+went in.  
+
+The two men were talking quietly.  Albert Edward was moving
+deftly from stove to table.  They both looked up as she came
+in, and she looked at Heyl.  Their eyes held.
+
+Albert Edward was as sporting a gentleman as the late dear
+king whose name he bore.  He went out to tend Heyl's horse,
+he said.  It was little he knew of horses, and he rather
+feared them, as does a sailing man.  But he went,
+nevertheless.
+
+Heyl still looked at Fanny, and Fanny at him.
+
+"It's absurd," said Fanny.  "It's the kind of thing that
+doesn't happen."
+
+"It's simple enough, really," he answered.  "I saw Ella
+Monahan in Chicago, and she told me all she knew, and
+something of what she had guessed.  I waited a few days and
+came back.  I had to."  He smiled.  "A pretty job you've
+made of trying to be selfish."
+
+At that she smiled, too, pitifully enough, for her lower lip
+trembled.  She caught it between her teeth in a last sharp
+effort at self-control.  "Don't!" she quavered.  And then,
+in a panic, her two hands came up in a vain effort to hide
+the tears.  She sank down on the rough bench by the table,
+and the proud head came down on her arms so that there was a
+little clatter and tinkle among the supper things spread on
+the table.  Then quiet.
+
+Clarence Heyl stared.  He stared, helplessly, as does a man
+who has never, in all his life, been called upon to comfort
+a woman in tears.  Then instinct came to his rescue.  He
+made her side of the table in two strides (your favorite
+film star couldn't have done it better), put his two hands
+on her shoulders and neatly shifted the bowed head from the
+cold, hard surface of the table top to the warm, rough,
+tobacco-scented comfort of his coat.  It rested there quite
+naturally.  Just as naturally Fanny's arm crept up, and
+about his neck.  So they remained for a moment, until he
+bent so that his lips touched her hair.  Her head came
+up at that, sharply, so that it bumped his chin.  They both
+laughed, looking into each other's eyes, but at what they
+saw there they stopped laughing and were serious.
+
+"Dear," said Heyl.  "Dearest."  The lids drooped over
+Fanny's eyes.  "Look at me," said Heyl.  So she tried to
+lift them again, bravely, and could not.  At that he bent
+his head and kissed Fanny Brandeis in the way a woman wants
+to be kissed for the first time by the man she loves.  It
+hurt her lips, that kiss, and her teeth, and the back of her
+neck, and it left her breathless, and set things whirling. 
+When she opened her eyes (they shut them at such times) he
+kissed her again, very tenderly, this time, and lightly, and
+reassuringly.  She returned that kiss, and, strangely
+enough, it was the one that stayed in her memory long, long
+after the other had faded.
+
+"Oh, Clancy, I've made such a mess of it all.  Such a
+miserable mess.  The little girl in the red tam was worth
+ten of me.  I don't see how you can--care for me."
+
+"You're the most wonderful woman in the world," said Heyl,
+"and the most beautiful and splendid."
+
+He must have meant it, for he was looking down at her as he
+said it, and we know that the skin had been peeled off her
+nose by the mountain winds and sun, that her lips were
+cracked and her cheeks rough, and that she was red-eyed and
+worn-looking.  And she must have believed him, for she
+brought his cheek down to hers with such a sigh of content,
+though she said, "But are we at all suited to each other?"
+
+"Probably not," Heyl answered, briskly.  "That's why we're
+going to be so terrifically happy.  Some day I'll be passing
+the Singer building, and I'll glance up at it and think how
+pitiful it would look next to Long's Peak.  And then I'll be
+off, probably, to these mountains " 
+
+"Or some day," Fanny returned, "we'll be up here, and I'll
+remember, suddenly, how Fifth Avenue looks on a bright
+afternoon between four and five.  And I'll be off, probably,
+to the Grand Central station."
+
+And then began one of those beautiful and foolish
+conversations which all lovers have whose love has been a
+sure and steady growth.  Thus:  "When did you first begin to
+care," etc.  And, "That day we spent at the dunes, and you
+said so and so, did you mean this and that?"
+
+Albert Edward Cobbins announced his approach by terrific
+stampings and scufflings, ostensibly for the purpose of
+ridding his boots of snow.  He entered looking casual, and
+very nipped.
+
+"You're here for the night," he said.  "A regular blizzard. 
+The greatest piece of luck I've had in a month."  He busied
+himself with the ham and eggs and the teapot.  "Hungry?"
+
+"Not a bit," said Fanny and Heyl, together.
+
+"H'm," said Albert Edward, and broke six eggs into the
+frying pan just the same.
+
+After supper they aided Albert Edward in the process of
+washing up.  When everything was tidy he lighted his most
+malignant pipe and told them seafaring yarns not necessarily
+true.  Then he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and fell
+asleep there by the fire, effacing himself as effectually as
+one of three people can in a single room.  They talked; low-
+toned murmurings that they seemed to find exquisitely
+meaningful or witty, by turn.  Fanny, rubbing a forefinger
+(his) along her weather-roughened nose, would say, "At least
+you've seen me at my worst."
+
+Or he, mock serious:  "I think I ought to tell you that I'm
+the kind of man who throws wet towels into the laundry
+hamper."
+
+But there was no mirth in Fanny's voice when she said,
+"Dear, do you think Lasker will give me that job?  You
+know he said, `When you want a job, come back.'  Do you
+think he meant it?"
+
+"Lasker always means it."
+
+"But," fearfully, and shyly, too, "you don't think I may
+have lost my drawing hand and my seeing eye, do you?  As
+punishment?"
+
+"I do not.  I think you've just found them, for keeps. 
+There wasn't a woman cartoonist in the country--or man,
+either, for that matter--could touch you two years ago.  In
+two more I'll be just Fanny Brandeis' husband, that's all."
+
+They laughed together at that, so that Albert Edward Cobbins
+awoke with a start and tried to look as if he had not been
+asleep, and failing, smiled benignly and drowsily upon them.
+
+
+
+
+
+The end of Project Gutenberg Etext of "Fanny Herself"
+
+
+
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