Fanny Herself
by Edna Ferber
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

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.