Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2007 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcliive.org/details/fannylierselfbyedOOferbricli FANNY HERSELF 'She loved luxury. She smiled and flashed at the hand- some old priest opposite her." —Page 198 FANNY HERSELF BY EDNA FERBER AUTHOR OF DAWN O'HARA, ROAST BEEF MEDIUM, EMMA McCHESNEY & CO., Etc. ILLUSTRATED BY J. HENRY GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK Made m the United State* o( America <€?^-eels in w«;ll^i??g. She was what might be called a very defirjte person. But first you remarked her eyes. WDlybu Cor- cede 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 snatch- > ing 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 va- riety that could be got nowhere else this side of Chi- cago. 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 HERSELF 8 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 aU 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 noth- ing. She knew that the farmer women who stood out- side 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. Bran- deis, and when to be modem. 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'U 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 impres- sion 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 extraordi- 4 FANNY HERSELF narily 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 col- umn 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 Winne- bago, 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-break- ing business, that, but broadening. She knew nothing of the art of buying and selling at the time of her mar- riage, but as the years went by she learned uncon- sciously 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. Ferdi- nand 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 un- successfully, ever to learn another. He did not make friends with the genial traveling salesmen who breezed FANNY HERSELF S' in, slapped him on the back, offered him a cigar, in- quired 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 cer- tain 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 rumi- natively about, his shrewd little German eyes apprais- ''^' ing the stock. He would hum a Httle 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 put- ting 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 be- hind 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 6 FANNY HERSELF 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 hsid 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 nau- seous 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 con- signed to its long summer's sleep. It had seen three towns, and many changes. The four dollars that Ferdi- nand Brandeis had invested in it still remained un- turned. 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 mo- ment, 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. FANNY HERSELF 7 "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 Christ- mas 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 i 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 be- fore 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 mourn- j ing. Others of the townspeople called, too; men and women who had known and respected Ferdinand Bran- deis. And the shock they got was this: Mrs. Bran- deis 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 en- tered 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 undisci- plined gossip. At eight-ten Molly Brandeis walked briskly up to the plush photograph album, whisked 8 FANNY HERSELF off its six-dollar price mark, and stuck in its place a neatly printed card bearing these figures: "To-day — • 79c!" 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 j her I find her mother plucking at my sleeve. There comes to my mind the picture of Mrs. Brandeis turn- ing down Norris Street at quarter to eight every morn- ing, 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 win- dow. 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 de- tect comers 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 out- side 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 .9. 10 FANNY. HERSELF 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. t 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 kiUed 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 neg- lected — 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. I But remember that this was fifteen years or more ago, I before women had invaded the world of business by the I 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. FANNY HERSELF 11 stenographers, school teachers, bookkeepers. The pa- per 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, con- structive citizens, clannish, but not so much so as their city cousins, mingling socially with their Gentile neigh- bors, 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 teU you, did not work thus. Their t; husbands worked for them, or their sons, or their | brothers. V- '. ^^ < ei ^^ "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 p fields for her living, and yet the neighbors didn't talk. 4 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 afi^airs to care. That Christmas season following 12 FANNX HERSELF hef 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-cov- ered 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. i 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 fin- ger 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 cor- ner 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 buy- ing 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 de- FANNY HERSELF IS pended 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 im- agination. 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 handker- chief, or some such trifle, which she accepted re- luctantly, 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 know- ingness, 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 secre- taries. No, she was Mrs. Brandeis, of Brandeis' Ba- zaar, to the end. The bills she bought were ridicu- lously 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. U FANNY HERSELF. 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 hun- dred 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. Bran- deis 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 teU 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, uncon- sciously, 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 chew- ing their cigars somewhat wildly when Mrs. Brandeis FANNY HERSELF 15 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 comers (there were no czars in blue to regu- late traffic in those days), older and more sophisticated pedestrians experienced various emotions while nego- tiating the comer 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 fa- tigue 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 MoUy 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 ^ 16 FANNY HERSELF pulled out in a wild fluff in front, her mother's old mar- ten-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. Per- haps 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 Bander & 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 im- ported bit of china or glassware, with French opera glasses or cunning toys and dolls, from the great New York and Chicago showrooms of that com- pany. Young Bauder himself was waiting on Mrs. Bran- I 'deis, and he was frowning because he hated to sell women. Young Bauder was being broken into the Chi- cago end of the business, and he was not taking grace- fully 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 Bander's gaze followed hers, puzzled. The figures were from five inches to a foot high, in crude, effective blues, and gold, FANNY HERSELF 17 and crimson, and white. All the saints were there in assorted sizes, the Piet^, the cradle in the manger. There were probably two hundred or more of the little figures. "Oh, those!" said yovmg 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, pleas- antly, 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 can- cel my order, including the Limoges. I want those fig- ures." ' 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, stiU dusty and shelf-worn. Mrs. Brandeis and Sadie and Pearl sat on up-ended boxes at the rear of the store, in the big bam-like room in which newly arrived goods were unpacked. As Aloy- sius dived deep into the crate and brought up figure after figure, the three women plunged them into warm 18 FANNY HERSELF and soapy water and proceeded to bathe and scour th twenty-four hours. So it was in the face of disap- proval that Fanny, making deep inroads into the steak FANNY HERSELF 2T 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. J "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 al- ready buttery morsel, and chewed it with an air of conscious virtue. I "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 wefit on conscientiously eating as she ex- plained. "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]| -j thoughtful gaze. "But that isn't the object in fast- ing, Fanny — ^just to see if you can. If you're going to think of food all through the Yom Kippur ser- vices " "I sha'n't.?" protested Fanny passionately. "Theo- dore 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 some- thing disturbingly, harrowingly beautiful. They did not know that they were listening to genius. . Molly Brandeis, in her second best dress, walked to 28 fanny; herself. 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 poig- pnantly beautiful service, move her too deeply. It was ( the first since her husband's death, and Rabbi Thal- mann 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 con- gregation. 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 slen- der, dapper, pale brown cigars that looked as if they had been expressly cut and rolled to fit him. I The evening service was at seven. The congregation, rustling in silks, was approaching the little temple from vaU directions. Inside, there was a low-toned buzz of ■conversation. The Brandeis' seat was weU 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 lu- minous. 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, an^ the red FANNY HERSELF 29 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 glis- tened 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 bom 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 tliird 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 ser- mon. Rabbi Thalmann and his congregation would need their strength for to-morrow's trial. The Brandeises walked home through the soft Sep- 30 FANNY HERSELF tember 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 supe- riority, went to bed. She had willed to sleep late, for gastronomic rea- sons, 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 I Saturday mornings when she left early for the store 1 and Fanny slept late. This morning Fanny's black I 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 at- tempted. Fanny awoke at half past seven, and her nostrils di- lated to that most exquisite, tantalizing and fragrant of smells — the aroma of simmering coffee. It per- meated 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 FANNY HERSELF 81 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 stock- ings, with the all-enveloping apron covering her sturdy j 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 1 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. *'0f course not," replied Fanny disdainfully. ^^Do -f] 82 FANNY HERSELF you think I'd eat old breakfast when I said I was goir»g to fast all day?" Then, with sudden suspicion, "Did you?" "No !" stoutly. And they entered, and took their seats. It was fas- cinating to watch the other members of the congrega- tion come in, the women rustling, the men subduetl in the unaccustomed dignity of black on a week day. One glance at the yellow pews was like reading a complete psocial and financial register. The seating arrangement of the temple was the Almanach de Gotha of Congre- gation 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, un- dimmed by years, and a startling and unexpected dim- ple in one cheek that gave him a mischievous and boy- ish look. Behind this dignitary sat his sons, and their wives, and his daughters and their husbands, and their chil- dren, 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-bom 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-syUable Ger- man 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 win- dow glass cast upon the face of the vain and over- dressed Mrs. Nathan Pereles. From time to time Bella FANNY HERSELF 33 would turn to bestow upon her a look Intended to con- vey intense suffering and a resolute though dying con- dition. 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 compara- tive ease of second-best silks. Mrs. Brandeis, absent from her business throughout this holy day, came hur- rying 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, beckon- ing 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 ser- vice 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. BelU^ a rather 84 FANNY HERSELF 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 rela- tions as guests at the evening meal, and Mrs. Wein- berg had outdone herself. "Oh!" exclaimed Fanny in a sort of agony and de- light. "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 sift- ing of powdered sugar. There were others whose cen- ters 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 be- neath — 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 freslily-baked bread — twisted loaf, with poppy seed freckling its braid, and its sides glistening with the FANNY HERSELF 35 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 gener- ously, so that her white little teeth met in the very mid- dle 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. No- body'U 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 mor- sel 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 be- tween 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 per- haps 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 time* 36 FANNY HERSELF 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 un- shed 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 re- marked 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 posi- tion. 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 Traiimerei. And then, above the cracked voice of the organ, rose the clear, poignant wail of a violin. Theodore Brandeis had be- gun 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 real- FANNY HERSELF 37 ized 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 ^dolin. And he who makes us feel all this has that indefinable, magic, glorious thing known as Grenius. 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 wis- dom. "Thou hast implanted in us the capacity for sin, but not sin itself !" (£»(ft«ii^ Fanny stirred. She had learned that a brief half ^ hour ago. The service marched on, a moving and har- rowing 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, al- $^ ways 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 quaver- ing 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. 38 FANNY HERSELF. As Rabbi Thalmann began to intone it in its monot- onous 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 tem- ple 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 plat- form, seemed somehow very far away and vague. The scent of clove apples and ammonia salts filled the air. The atmosphere seemed strangely wavering and lu- fanny: herself so minous. 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 gra- cious 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 dis- persed 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 Wein- berg's pantry. But now something within her — some- thing fine, bom 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 40 FANNY HERSELF 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 sun- shine. 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 pleas- ant 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 sensual- ist!) and there, huddled in a chair, dreamily and al- most 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 Mau- passant, 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 41 , 42 FANNY HERSELF 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 N^ 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 disap- provingly, and had hesitated a moment before stamping the card. "Is this fer 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 FANNY HERSELF 48 Norris Street and ran full-tilt, Into a yowling, taunt- ing, 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 other- wise 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 hol- low-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 thin- ner 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 j you behold Our Hero. He staggered to his feet now, as Fanny came up. His school reefer was mud-bespattered. His stock- ings 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 impo- tently, 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: 44 FANNY HERSELF "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 httle 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 sudden- \ ness of rage. She kicked, and scratched, and bit, and I clawed and spat. She seemed not to feel the defensive i 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 rusliing at her again. "Cowardy-cats ! Five of you fighting one girl," cried Fanny, her lower lip trembling ever so little. "Come on ! Hit me ! J^f raid to fight anything but girls ! Cow- ardy-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 busi- ness 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. Be- sides, he's a billion times better than any of you, any- way." FANNY HERSELF 45 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 din- 46 FANNY HERSELF ing-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 idrawn. 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, any- thing. 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 HERSELF 47 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 daugh- ter 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, mov- ing about in the kitchen or in her corner room up- stairs. 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 over- wrought 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 48 FANNY HERSELF always insisted that the children go too, though they often won an extra half hour by protesting and teas- ing. 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 knowl- edge 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. ? I "Fanny ! Theodore ! Come now ! Not another min- ute!" ' 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 win- dows, 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 sleep- ing, the children sweetly and dreamlessly, the tired FANNY HERSELF 49 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, X'^ 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, fas- cinated, 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 attend- ant Aloysius would strip the paper wrappings and dis- close 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 com- pleting 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 in- 50 FANNY HERSELF 51 formation. 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 be- gin, "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 hand- work 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 rib- bons 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 52 FANNY HERSELF a sled or a doll's go-cart in her best style. But vre cannot stop for Aloysius. He is irrelevant, and ir- relevant 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 Con- gregational 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 appre- ciate the best and set out to acquire it for them- selves. 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 Hono- lulu, 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. FANNY HERSELF 53 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 un- precedented 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 Bran- deis; 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 Scha- belitz. 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. 54 FANNY HERSELF "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. Ac- cording 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, some- how, 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 ! Grenius !' 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 remark- ably 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 FANNY HERSELF 55 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 Wolf- sohn." 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 mo- ment 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 teU ! 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, breath- less, as though expecting an immediate solution. His 56 FANNY HERSELF 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 eve- ning don't you think it would be a good idea to squan- der 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 adver- tisement. 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 of- fered 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. Bran- deis 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 FANNY HERSELF 57 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 bej only too happy, too proud. But it doesn't seem fair vy 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 aU 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!" MoUy Brandeis looked down at her apron. 58 FANNY HERSELF 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. Man- ville Smith, in an evening gown whose decoUetage was discussed from the Haley House to Gerretson's depart- ment 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 Theo- dore as his pupil and Schabelitz's proteg^. 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 shirt- waist 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 t trips. Shirtwaists had just come in, and with them j 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. FANNY HERSELF 59 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 sleeve- lets 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 vir- tuoso. 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 inter- esting woman in Winnebago — " he bowed to Mrs. Bran- deis — "wiU 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 joUied him just like I did Sam Bloom, of Ganz & Pick, Novel- ties, 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 Schabe- litz, 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 mis- taken. 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 60 FANNY HERSELF settle down with a cat and a teakettle.' At that he just threw back his head and roared. And when Mrs. Bran- deis 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. Tearl, 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, com- ing 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. Some- times their careening career was threatened with dis- aster in the form of a clump of brooms or a stack of galvanized pails. But Schabelitz would scramble for- ward 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 wind- mill 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." FANNY HERSELF 61 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 hke a boy. Fanny, standing behind the wrap- ping counter, and leaning on it with her elbows the bet- ter to see this great man, smiled too, as her flexible spirii 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 comer of her mouth. Her head was cocked to one side. She was rapidly sketching a crude and startling likeness of Levine Schabehtz 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 mto the eyes of the visiting superintendent, who was a married man. Quite innocently and uncon- sciously she had caught the adoring look in the eyes of Miss McCook, the teacher, and that lady, happen- ing upon the sketch later, had dealt with Fanny in a 62 FANNY HERSELF 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 de- lighted with the crude toy in his hand. And she put it down eagerly, wetting her pencil between her lips, shad- ing here, erasing there. Mrs. Brandeis, bustling up to the desk for a cus- tomer'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 ex- pertly 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 FANNY HERSELF 63 exactly — ^like my manager, Weber, when the box-ofSce 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 sur- prise, and appreciation. And did not apologize. "And who is this young lady with the sense of humor.'*" "This is my Httle 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 i 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 64 FANNY HERSELF 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. — ^MoUy — Bran- deis!" 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 cevti^^ repeated Fanny help- lessly, and looked at her mother. Mrs. Brandeis reached for tji^ 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 FANNY HERSELF 65 and sleek, went off to meet Emil Bauer. Mrs. Bran- deis had looked him over, and had said, "Your nails !" and sent liim back to the bathroom, and she had re- sisted 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 plaster- ing a wall. If A does his room in 9^/^ days, the room being IS feet high, 20 feet long, and 15% feet wide, how long will it take B to do a room 14« feet higli^ 11% 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 be- gan to talk very soberly. Fanny, red-cheeked and 66 FANNY HERSELF bright-eyed from her recent mental struggles, listened interestedly, then intently, then absorbedly. She at- tempted 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, some- I times, whether it was worth while to keep on, and what ^ \ it was all for. And now I know. Theodore is going to T^ ' 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 four- teen. 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 FANNY HERSELF 67 time, rt 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 educa- tion, and you ought to have them. They're your right, j 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 Fer- dinand 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 se- cret 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 our- selves, 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 reaUy 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 63 fanny; herself 69 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 I" 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 door- way. 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 con- cert. I didn't mean to stay. And then Bauer intro- duced 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. May- be 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 Theo- 70 FANNY HERSELF dore 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 busi- ness 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 din- ner, 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 j (in the train), and she kissed him only twice, and no I 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 ''i 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 reso- lutions 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. ^o 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 fannt: herself 71 Masons." 'At which Fanny grinned. No one appre- ciated 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, T. 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 Winne- bago 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 every- thing." 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 sleigh- ing 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 72 FANNY HERSELF are quoted as being of a piece with what Winnebago termed her queemess. 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 meet- ings. 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, too !" 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 Winne- bago 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. FANNY HERSELF 7a 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 Win- nebago 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. "V^Hien 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 ofj 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' Kest Hotel. They did not write at all during the following semes- ter, and when he came back for the long summer vaca- tion they met on the street one day and exchanged a few rather forced pleasantries. It suddenly dawned 74 FANIS^Y HERSELF 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 cor- f^'-" ner, and bobbed a curtsy right there on Elm Street, in front of the Courier office and walked off, lea\ang I -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 dif- ferent. Each member of the graduating class was allowed to choose a theme for a thesis. Fanny Bran- deis 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 FANNY HERSELF 75 about their heaxls 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 Winne- bago Paper Company's mill and she had watched, fas- cinated, while a pair of soiled and greasy old blue over- alls 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, mirac- ulously, in the form of rolls of crisp, white paper. On the first day of the Easter vacation Fanny Bran- deis walked down to the office of the Winnebago Paper Company's mill and applied at the superintendent's office for a j ob. She got it. They were generally short- handed in the rag-room. When Mrs. Brandeis heard of it there followed one of the few stormy scenes be- tween 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 ter- ribly in earnest, and rather excited. "But I don't want to write about the paper business as a process." "WeU, then, what do you want.?" "I want to write about the overalls on some railroad engineer, perhaps ; or the blue calico wrapper that be- longed, 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 76 FANNY HERSELF 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 accus- tomed path, finds himself confronting a new and hith- erto unsuspected vista, formed by a peculiar arrange- ment 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. FANNY HERSELF 77 ^'Whcre 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 Da\as 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 ques- tion. "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. Bran- ^. \ deis'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. "Fm sorry," said Professor Henning, and rose; but at the door he turned and said something highly unpro- fessorial. "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 princi- pal 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, prac- tically owns the Courier?** Professor Henning passed a hand over his hair, rue- 78 FANNY HERSELF fully, 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 per- fect 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 I in their adolescence. No cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy- FANNY HERSELF 79 consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings for read- ing, 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,i 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 pro- tracted 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 Maas, the butcher, with a moist little packet of meat in his hand, and lurching ever so slightly, and looking about defiantly. Oh, Fanny prob- ably never realized how much she saw and absorbed, sitting there on Brandeis' front porch, watching Win- nebago go by to supper. At Christmas time she helped in the store, after- noons and evenings. Then, one Christmas, Mrs. Bran- deis 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. 80 FANNY HERSELF 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 wrathfuUy 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- FANNY HERSELF 81 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 incred- ible, 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 lojal following of these women. It was before the day when every farmhouse boasted an automobile, a tele- phone, 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 comer 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, unwhole- some food. Ignorant women, and terribly lonely, with 'the dumb, lack-luster eyes that bespeak monotony. When they smiled they showed blue-white, glassily per- fect 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 montonous drudgery of house- work. Everything went to make his work easier — new harrows, plows, tractors, wind mills, reapers, barns, 82 FANNY HERSELF , 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 unac- customed idleness in her lap. Fanny learned, too, that the woman with the shawl, and with her money tied in a comer of her handker- chief, 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 ex- / plained by her honesty and her sympathy. She was so square with them. When Minnie Mahler, out Center- ville way, got married, she knew there would be no redundancy of water sets, hanging lamps, or pickle dishes. "I thought like Fd 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 FANNY HERSELF 83' 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 !" -ri The store was paying, now. Not magnificently, but|j well enough. Most of the money went to Theodore, in ) Dresden. He was progressing, though not so meteoric- ally 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 Winne- bago 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 I Fanny Brandeis admired intensely. She was a travel- ing 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. Bran- deis 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. 84 FANNY HERSELF "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 sched- ule so as to spend a Sunday in Winnebago, and the three alert, humor-loving women, grown wise and tol- erant 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 thou- sand 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 expres- sive eyes were eager and interested. "Don't you think I've thought of that, Emma.'^ A thousand times.'* But FANNY HERSELF 85 I'm — I'm afraid. There's too much at stake. Sup- pose 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 think- ing 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 tre- mendously 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 towns- people." "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 never -^ ^ lived in Winnebago, Wisconsin. I'm a working woman, j . 4"^ o 86 FANNY HERSELF and a Jew, and we haven't any money or social posi- tion. 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 Bran- deis 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 do- ing 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, know- ingly, 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 FANNY. HERSELF 87 over the crops, and he saw her. * Who's the new dam- sel?' he asked. 'The peach?'" "Fanny Brandeis, aren't you ashamed?" "But, Mother, that's what it says in the Bible, actu- ally, *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 atten- tion to them than if they had never existed. He married Ruth, and she led society. Just a little careful schem- ing, that's all." "I should say you have been reading, Fanny Bran- deis," 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 geeing 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 uncon- sciously 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 be- lieve he actually sees anything of these cities — their people, and the queer houses, and the streets. I sup- pose a n^w city means nothing to him but another plat- form, 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 FANNY HERSELF 89 awful collar! Why, his very features look German, don't they? I suppose it's the effect of that haber- dashery." A month after the photograph, came a letter an- nouncing 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 m^^self 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 elec- tric qualities. It was an almost imperceptible letting »0 FANNY HERSELF 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, hke her mother. She even went to the Haley House to buy, when necessary, and Win- nebagoans, 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 fol- lowing. 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 her- self 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. FANNY HERSELF 91 **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 Hne. 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. had been no card, so who could have guessed that they i 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 Aloy- sius 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, hope- lessly, 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 in- sisted 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 104 FANNY HERSELF 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, re- spectful 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 FANNY HERSELF 105 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, in- stead 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 des- perately 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. Peo- ple were constantly popping in at the back door with napkin-covered trays, and dishes and baskets. A won- derful and beautiful thing, that homely small-town sym- pathy 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 sea- son 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 Bran- deis'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, f^'No. Why should he? He has his work." 106 FANN^ HERSELF "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 docu- ment, that gave "to Fanny Brandeis, my daughter," the six-thousand-dollar insurance, the stock, good-will and fixtures of Brandeis' Bazaar, the house furnish- ings, the few pieces of jewelry in their old-fashioned setting. To Theodore was left the sum of fifteen hun- dred dollars. He had received his share in the years of his musical education. Fanny Brandeis did not go to Chicago that Janu- ary. She took inventory of Brandeis' Bazaar, care- fully 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 work- ing, 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 tinder 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 FANNY HERSELF 107 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 — no- body. 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 suc- cess, and to whom success would mean money and posi- tion. 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 108 FANNY HERSELF road. Generous, spontaneous, impulsive, warm- hearted, she would be cold, calculating, deliberate, she told herself. (S) Thousands of years of persecution behind her made ^v^V^^er 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 J^.6f^' 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 dehght in wan- dering 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 kitchen- ware 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, far- sighted traveling man who had wearied of the road FANNY HERSELF 100 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 ■ ^JJ 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 gar* ments, 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 ging^- ham apron, blue and white. It was the kind of apron women don when they perform some very special house- hold 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 dis- colored in many places with the brown and reddish , stains of fruit juices. It had been Moll}' 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 110 FANNY HERSELE 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 cook- ing 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'U 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 pre- serves, as Father Fitzpatrick, and Aloysius, and Doc- tor 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. FANNY HERSELF 111 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 dis- colored 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 steam- ling kettle from the stove with the apron's corner, spoke to her with eloquent lips. That apron had be- come 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 some^ thing," 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 lessor in the cruel and rigid course of mental training she had mapped out for herself. 112 FANNY HERSELF Leaving Winnebago was not easy. There is some- thing about a small town that holds you. Your life is so intimately interwoven with that of your neigh- bor. 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 win- dows, 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 contemptu- ously 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 ©fibers 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 FANNY HERSELF 113 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. Ex- perience, 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 acci- dental, 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, roaid-weary, skill- ful 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 Winner bago?" "Yes." 114 FANNY HERSELF "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 fore- finger. "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 . ito keep up. But I've got something they haven't got u I — 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 "I'm sure you do," said Fanny politely, and took a I little step forward, as though to end the conversation. j *'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 T^as 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 FANNY HERSELF 115 small-town merchant hates the mall-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 experi- ence." i 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-Coop- er, giant among mail-order houses, was said to eat a small-town merchant every morning for break- fast. "There's a Haynes-Cooper catalogue in every farm- er'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 bump-; 116 FANNY HERSELF : iiig and rattling down the old corduroy road. Ex- i press, breakage, risk, loyalty to his own region — all i these arguments left him cold. ^ In May, after much manipulation, correspondence, : two interviews, came a definite offer from the Haynes- j 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 j 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. I 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 bud- ding 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 voy- ageurs, 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. Win- FANNY HERSELF 117 nebago'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 Fitz- patrick 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 al- most shut now. 118 FANNY HERSELF 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 ddwn 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 justi- fied, 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 FANNY HERSELF 119 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 rich- ness 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 actu- ally 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 car- tooning, 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 carica- ture, 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. 120 FANNY HERSELi: 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 look- ing 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 ra- vines are the most beautiful natural spots in Wis- consin. 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? Peti- tions — " "Certainly I feel it's an outrage. But I'm just a poor fool of a priest, and sentimental, with no head FANNy; HERSELF 121 for business. Now you're a business woman, and dif- ferent." "I! You're joking." "Say, listen, m' girl. The world's made up of just two things: ravines and dump heaps. And the dump- ers are forever edging up, and squeedging up, and try- ing to grab the ravines and spoil 'em, when nobody's looking. You've made your choice, and allied yourself with the dimnp 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^r^ could marry a traveling man, perhaps, or Lee Kohn I 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 j^^ you why. You're a Jew." ^^iii, J "Yes, I've got that handicap.'* "That isn't a handicap, Fanny. It's an assetA 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, with- 122 FANNY HERSELF out 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 al- ways 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, over- sensitive, cringing, or swaggering, high-strung, demon- strative, affectionate, generous. "Maybe they're right. Perhaps it isn't a race. But what do you caU 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, includ- ing 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 — it 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 him- self, 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 survey- ing 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 FANNY HERSELF 123 racy thing) — "Oh, Casey, Casey ! you're a better priest than I am — ^but a poorer man." Fanny was to leave Winnebago the following Satur- day. 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 imnerved 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 stem 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'U fall on me." The sight of Aloysius seemed to recall so vividly all that was happy and all that was hateful about Bran- deis' Bazaar; all the bravery and pluck, and resource- fulness of the bright-eyed woman he had admiringly called his boss, that Fanny found her self-control slip- ping. 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. 124 FANNY HERSELF, 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 al- ready gone. ''Neiriy der Herr Rabbi ist nocU hier — sure," the maid said in answer to Fanny's question. The Thal- mann'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 exceed- ingly 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 to- night?" 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, onl}^ 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. FANNY, HERSELF 125 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 \he6Ld from the pillow. "Tell me, did she have her white apron on?'* \ "White apron?'' *'Minna, the girl." ^ *'0h!" Fanny's mind jerked back to the gingham- covered figure that had opened the door for her. "Yes," she hed, "a white one — ^with crochet around the bottom. Quite grand." Mrs. Thalmann sank back on the pillow with a satis- fied 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." I 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 dif- ferent." 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 aher dwmm, we women — but how dnmim! She was too smart for us, your mother. Too smart. Und eirw sehr brave fraur 126 FANNY HERSELF 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 with- ered 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 httle boys in the splendor of patent-leather but- toned 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 com- fortably 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 FANNY HERSELF 127 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 3^ou. 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 wiU 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 P* 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 peo- ple, not unkind, but careless, perhaps, in their pros- . perity, s^ "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 128 FANNY HERSELF 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 travel- ing 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 t^eth were very white, and the smile was singularly sweet. Fanny changed her mind again. Not so bad-looking, after all. Different, any- way. 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, in- tended 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 FANNY HERSELF 129 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 per- son 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 see- ing 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 to- gether, 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 130 FANNY HERSELF 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 unaccus- tomed to the service, and stood with unbpwed head, looking at the rabbi interestedly, thoughtfully, rev- erently. The two stood alone. Death had been kind to Congregation Emanu-el this year. The prayer ended. Fanny winked the tears from her eyes, al- most 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 ad- FANNY HERSELF 131 mitted that Fanny Brandeis' story was not that of a painful hand-over-hand cHmb. She was made for success. What she attempted, she accomphshed. 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 benedic- tion. Fanny looked straight up at him as though stamping a picture on her mind. His eyes were rest- ing 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 comer, even while he found him- self saying, politely, "Why, thanks! It's good to he 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 Bran- deis. 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 vo- cabulary. 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. 132 fanny; herself 133 Order and management his idols. And his war-cry was "Results!" It was eleven o'clock when Fanny came into his out^r 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, anx- ious-looking woman in snuff-brown and spectacles ; his stenographer a blond young man, also spectacled and anxious; his office boy a stem youth in knickers, who bore no relation to the slangy, gum-chewing, red- headed 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 door- way, notebook in hand, ready. It sent the lean secre- tary out, and up to Fanny. "Temper," said Fanny, to herself, "or horribly nervous and high-keyed. They jump like a set of pup- pets on a string." It was then that the lean secretary had said, "Mr. Fenger wiU see you now." Fanny was aware of a pleasant little tingle of ex- citement. She entered the inner office. It was characteristic of Michael Fenger that he em- ployed 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 134 FANNY HERSELF 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 in- dexed her, Fanny's alert mind was busy docketing, numbering, cataloguing him. They had in common a certain force, a driving power. Fanny seated her- self 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, per- haps. 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 op^ portunity 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 svip^ fanny; herself 135 pose 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 mil- lions. The guides do enough of that. But you know we do buy and sell in terms of millions, don't youi* 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. **0f course jou understand I know noth- 136 FANNY HERSELF ing 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, every- thing 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. Beau- . ty'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. Nat- urally. 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 FANNY HERSELF 137 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 go- ing 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." '^Vell, 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 an* other, 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 N orris 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 sec- retary 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 138 FANNY HERSELF ^t his desk. "Walt a minute." Fanny waited. Still Fenger did not speak. Finally, "I suppose you know you've earned six months' salary in the last five min- utes." 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 state- ment." 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 comers, 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 busi- ness. It had been built large and roomy, with plenty of seams, planned amply, it was thought, to allow the FANNY HERSELF 139 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, quad- rupling, finally soaring gymnastically beyond all rea- son. 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 mil- lions. "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, sKpped 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 comer. And the reason for it was, primarily, Winnebago, Wisconsin. For 140 FANNY HERSELF 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 Ithe 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, j and learning in Backwash, Nebraska, that marks time ' for these United States. There may be a certain sig- nificance 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 com- pany, 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 Ithe mind a fact of immense, of overwhelming signifi- cance. The country has taken a step toward civiliza- tion 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 FANNY HERSELF 141 this monster? A plumpish, kindly-faced man; a be- wildered, gentle, unimaginative and somewhat fright- ened 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 help- less 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, 6ls riches are counted nowadays, but with a comfortable number of tens of thousands tucked away. Two or three hun- dred thousand; perhaps five hundred thousand! — per- haps 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. i 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 mas- terpieces, 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 142 FANNY HERSELF 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 Bran- deis 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 nih power, and enhanced by the genius she was trying to crush. Refusing to die, it found expression in a hundred bril- liant 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, authori- tatively, 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, de- cidedly 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 fa- cilities for her work. Her room was on the ninth floor, not on the Michigan Avenue side, but east, over- looking 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 Indi- ana avenue car, the sound of high laughter and a snatch of song that came faintly up to her from the speed- ing car of some midnight joy-riders! FANNY HERSELF 143 But all this had to do with her other side. It had no bearing on Haynes-Cooper, and business. Busi- ness! 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 comer 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 brush- ing 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 my* 144 FANNY HERSELF self," 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. Slos- son." "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 unattrac- tiveness." "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. I The morning mail was in — the day's biggest grist, a 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 fol- low. 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 fanny; herself. us made the old machine seem cumbersome and slow. Guided by Izzy, the expert, its rough tongue was ca- pable 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, towel- ing, 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 min- istered 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 de- partment. But she said little, followed Slosson's in- structions in her position as assistant buyer, and sug- gested no changes. Slosson's wrinkle of anxiety smoothed itself away, and his manner became pat- ronizingly 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, ^^ 146 FANNY HERSELF Slosson was to be there. At ten o'clock she entered ^:^ Fenger's inner office. He was telephoning — something J. 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 Eng- , lish, did not ring true. They were acquired graces, ^ I exquisite imitations of the real thing. Fanny Bran- deis knew. She was playing the same game herself. She understood this man now, after two months in the Haynes-Cooper plant. These marvelous exam- ples 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, tapes- tries, 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. FANNY HERSELF 147 **I wish we needn't have Mr. Slosson here this morn- ing. After all, he's been here for years, and I'm prac- tically 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 al- most 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 conversa- tion. 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 depart- ment.?" 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 OB 148 FANNY HERSELF 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 bom 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 de- partment 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 un- derstandable. 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 im- pressed. 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 ail the dis- 'Now^ Miss Brandeis, what's the trouble with the Haynes- Cooper infants' wear department?' " —Page lJi.7 c c c c • « ••« c FANNY HERSELF 149 tmction 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 cata- logue 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 wiU 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 busi- ness. 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 150 FANNY HERSELF 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 de- partment 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'D. 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 com- plete. Our drug section has the separate articles, but we ought to — " "Oh, lord!" groaned Slosson, and slumped disgust- edly 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. "Bran- deis' 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 FANNY HERSELF 151 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 Fen- ger 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 spit- ting 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 be- tween Fanny and Michael Fenger reveals a new side, and presents something of interest. It was a harrow- ing and unexpected five minutes. You may remember how Michael Fenger had a way of looking at one, silently. It was an intent and con- centrated gaze that had the effect of an actual phys- ical 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. 152 FANNY HERSELF "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 to- night? 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 unconventionfeil 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 view- point, 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 brealk' them. That sounds melodramatic, but it's true. I've got a definite life plan, and it's as complete and de- tailed 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 stiiF 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 im- FANNY HERSELF 153 patient 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. Fm not a villain. Really. That is, not a deliberate villain. But when I find something very fine, very intricate, very fascinat- ing 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 secre- tary, 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 154* FANNY HERSELF 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 end- lessly 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, *'0h, 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 tele- phone 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 suscep- tible to draughts. She wore over her shoulders a scarf that was constantly slipping and constantly being re- trieved 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 Fenger s 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^ 155 156 FANNY HERSELF ' 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 gen- erally 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 some- thing. 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 Tues- day — 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. FANNY HERSELF 157 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 Bran- deis! 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 sur- prised her. "1[ — 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 Haynea- 158 FANNY HERSELF 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 maj^be " "But I would," interrupted Fanny, impulsively. "In- deed 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 Wis- consin self talking. But up in her apartment the other Fanny Brandeis, the calculating, ambitious, deter- mined 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 com- pound, that compound, what reaction? Then, when the time comes to apply your knowledge, you'll know." Which shows how ignorant she was of this danger-' ous 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 ob- jects. 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 FANNY HERSELF 159 kind of fare. She needed people. She craved con- tact. 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 sree 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 de- veloped 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, leader- less, 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) ov Michi- gan 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 relaxa- tion, 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 160 FANNY HERSELF group of Haynes-Cooper buildings. She waiated 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 side- walks, 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 tned for broad effects, and relied on one bit of detail for her story. It was the face of a girl — a very tired and taw- dry 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, al- ways 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 vthe Clark street men, blue-shaven, wearing checked FANNY HERSELF 161 suits, soiled faun-topped shoes, and diamond scarf pins. And even as she watched them, fascinated, they van- ished. Clark street changed overnight, and became a business thoroughfare, lined with stately office build- ings, 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 Chi- cago'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 wha 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 honey- combed with narrow, teeming alleys, grimed witb the sediment of centuries, colored like old Stilton, and smelling much worse. But where is there another Cot- tage Grove avenue! Sylvan misnomer! A hideous street, and sordid. A street of flat- wheeled cars, of delicatessen shops and moving picture houses, of clang- ing bells, of frowsy women, of men who dart around comers with pitchers, their coat collars turned up to hide the absence of linen. One day Fanny found her- self at Fifty-first street, and there before her lay Wash- ( ington Park, with its gracious meadow, its Italian gar- den, its rose walk, its lagoon, and drooping willows. But then, that was Chicago. All contrast. The Illi- nois 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 ^ 162 FANNY HERSELF like being present at a birth. It is one of the few streets in the world. New York has two, Paris a hun- dred, London none, Vienna one. Berlin, before the war, knew that no one walked Unter den Linden but Ameri- can tourists and German shopkeepers from the prov- inces, with their fat wives. But this Michigan Boule- vard, unfinished as Chicago itself, shifting and changing daily, still manages to take on a certain form and rug- ged 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 tan- talizes the passer-by with a single hat stuck know- ingly on a carved stick. An art store shows two etch- ings, 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 valhere, chastely barbaric. Past these win- dows, 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 ho- tel, 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 Ave- nue 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 FANNY HERSELF 163 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 back- ground 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 Sun- days 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, skim- ming the Sunday papers, massaging crows'-feet some- what 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 sun- set 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 :^-c)5P'"^ „,xW0* 164 FANNY HERSELF 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, if ^ and of Molly Brandeis' mother, and of her mother's mother's mother, down the centuries to Sarah; re- pressed women, suffering women, troubled, patient, nomadic women, struggling now in her for expres- , sion. ^ 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 bft' 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 busi- ness. The dull season following the holiday rush would show the real returns. Slosson was discouragement it- ' self. 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 at- tractive. And the new baby book had turned out very well, with a colored cover that would appeal to jiny one who had ever been or seen a baby. September brought a letter from Theodore. A let- ter from Theodore meant just one thing. Fanny hesi- tated a moment before opening it. She always hesi- tated 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 FANNY HERSELF 165 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 suc- cess, 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 166 FANNY HERSELF 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 Christ- mas." "Catalogue or no catalogue .?" "Catalogue or no catalogue." "Why?" "Because you've earned it.'* Fanny faced him squarely. *^ know that Haynes- Cooper isn't exactly a philanthropic institution^ A FANNY HERSELF 16T 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, person- aUy." 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 .?" |v In an instant Fanny forgot about Theodore, the new i winter suit and furs, everything but the idea that was 1 clamoring to be bom. 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 manufactur- ers' samples. The selector would make his choice among these, six months in advance of the season. The selec- tor 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 manu- facturer as to quantity, time, and all that. You know 168 FANNY HERSELF 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 thatt It would all have been done for him. The selector would have the real responsibility. Don't you see the simplic ity of it, and the way it would grease the entire ma- chinery .?" I Something very like jealousy came into Michael Fen- ger'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.'* Wednes- day, 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 / 1 don't want to go." "Then let me send you my car." "Car ! No, thanks. That's not my idea of the coun- try." "It was just a suggestion. What do you call go- ing to the country, then.?" "Tramping all day, and getting lost, if possible. Lying down under a tree for hours, and letting the ants FANNY HERSELF 169 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 illu- minating 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 be- lieve 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 tre- mendously enlightening for Fanny. She looked up at him now. ''Thanks for the vacation suggestion, I may go oflP! 170 FANNY HERSELF somewhere. Just a last-mmute leap. It usually turns out better, that way. I'll be ready for the Wednesday discussion." She sounded very final and busy. The crumpled let- ter lay on her desk. She smoothed it out, and the crum- ple 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 con- veyed 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 girl- hood. 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 Hrive?'' "I'm afraid so." A brief silence. Then, "I'm coming out there to see you." FANNY HERSELF 171 **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 en- countered. 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. 172 FANNY HERSELF ^^"^^ 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 con- sidered 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 heidn'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.** FANNY HERSELE 173 "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 for- ward, his face very earnest. "I do expect you to be- lieve 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 re- member, 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 cow- ardly, 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 im- pressionable 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 be- cause — 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." I 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 174 FANNY HERSELF 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 mus- cles — 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 every- thing, 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 FANNY. HERSELF 175 case, you can forsake the strenuous life with a free conscience. You need never climb another mountain, or wrestle with another — er — hippopotamus. That lit- tle 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 to- day, 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 to- morrow, will you? All day." Involuntarily Fanny glanced around the room. Pa- pers, 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. 176 FANNY HERSELF 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 to- morrow 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 hinnble." 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-mor- row. Good-by." Fanny went back to her desk and papers. The room seemed all at once impossibly stuffy, her papers and let- ters dry, meaningless things. In the next office, sepa- rated 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 leav- ing. 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 Satur- day 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 neces- sary 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'j 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, these sketches of yours are Why, Gree Whiz! I 178 FANNY HERSELF 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, *Vhat 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 some- thing. Besides, it's now twenty-two minutes to eighC. 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 Dis- ciples. 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. J 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 FANNY HERSELF 179 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 dreaimed 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 beauti- ful. Like the things Pennell does." "I came out here on the street car one - "Yes, it is. Exactly. That's why I'm here. We'll \\ ^ be doing a business of a million and a quarter in my ^ ..^ department in another two years. No firm, not even ^ ^ Horn & Udell, can afford to ignore an account like J ' ^ that." J Sid Udell smiled a little. "You've made up your ^. % mind to that million and a quarter, young lady ?" r^:- "Yes." .^;.' "Well, I've dealt with buyers for a quarter of a cen- i r tury or more. And I'd say that you're going to get ^ t it-" ^ """^ Whereupon Fanny began to talk. Ten minutes later t ^ Udell interrupted her to summon Horn, whose domain ^A was the factory. Horn came, was introduced, looked I jS^ doubtful. Fanny had statistics. Fanny had argu- '''' -ments. She had determination. "And what we want," - she went on, in her quiet, assured way, "is style. The Horn & Udell clothes have chic. Now, material can't be imitated successfully, but style can. Our goods lack just that. I could copy any model you have, turn the idea over to a cheap manufacturer, and get a million j just like it, at one-fifth the price. That isn't a threat. I It's just a business statement that you know to be true. I can sketch from memory anything I've seen once. What I want to know is this : Will you make it necessary for me to do that, or will you undertake to furnish us with cheaper copies of your high-priced designs? We could use your entire output. I know FANNY HERSELF 205 the small-town woman of the poorer class, and I know she'll wear a shawl in order to give her child a cloth coat with fancy buttons and a velvet collar." And Horn & Udell, whose attitude at first had been that of two seasoned business men dealing with a preco- cious child, found themselves quoting prices to her, shipments, materials, quality, quantities. Then came the question of time. ''We'll get out a special catalogue for the summer," Fanny said. "A small one, to start them our way. Then the big Fall catalogue will contain the entire line." "That doesn't give us time !" exclaimed both men, in a breath. "But you must manage, somehow. Can't you speed up the workroom.^ Put on extra hands? It's worth % i They might, under normal conditions. But there J>*^ was this strike-talk, its ugly head bobbing up in a hun- dred plates. Aild their goods were the kind that re- quired high-class workers. Their girls earned all the way from twelve to twenty-five dollars. But Fanny knew she had driven home the entering wedge. She left them after making an engagement for the following day. The Horn & Udell factory was in New York's newer loft-building section, around Madi- son, Fifth avenue, and the Thirties. Her hotel was very near. She walked up Fifth avenue a little way, and as she walked she wondered why she did not feel more elated. Her day's work had exceeded her ex- pectations. It was a brilliant January afternoon, with a snap in the air that was almost western. Fifth ave- nue flowed up, flowed down, and Fanny fought the impulse to stare after every second or third woman she passed. They were so invariably well-dressed. There was none of the occasional shabbiness or dowdiness of Michigan Avenue. Every woman seemed to have emerged fresh from the hands of masseuse and maid. 206 FANNY HERSELF Their hair was coiifed to suit the angle of the hat, and the hat had been chosen to enhance the contour of the head, and the head was carried with regard for the dark furs that encircled the throat. They were amaz- ingly well shod. Their white gloves were white. (A fact remarkable to any soot-haunted Chicagoan.) Their coloring rivaled the rose leaf. And nobody's nose was red. ' "Goodness knows I've never pretended to be a beauty," Fanny said that evening, in conversation with Ella Monahan. "But I've always thought I had my good points. By the time I'd reached Forty-second street I wouldn't have given two cents for my chances of winning a cave man on a desert island." She made up her mind that she would go back to the hotel, get a thick coat, and ride outside one of those fascinating Fifth avenue 'buses. It struck her as an ideal way to see this amazing street. She was back at her hotel in ten minutes. Ella had not yet come in. Their rooms were on the tenth floor. Fanny got her coat, peered at her own reflection in the mirror, sighed, shook her head, and was off down the hall toward the elevators. The great hall window looked toward Fifth avenue, but between it and the avenue rose a yellow- brick building that housed tier on tier of manufactur- ing lofts. Cloaks, suits, blouses, petticoats, hats, dresses — it was just such a building as Fanny had come from when she left the offices of Horn & Udell* It might be their very building, for all she knew. She looked straight into its windows as she stood waiting for the lift. And window after window showed women, sewing. They were sewing at machines, and at hand- work, but not as women are accustomed to sew, with leisurely stitches, stopping to pat a seam here, to run a calculating eye along hem or ruffle. It was a dread- ful, mechanical motion, that sewing, a machine-like, re- lentless motion, with no waste in it, no pause. Fanny'* FANNY HERSELF 207 mind leaped back to Winnebago, with its pleasant porches on which leisurely women sat stitching peace- fully at a fine seam. What was it she had said to Udell? **Can't you speed up the workroom? It's worth it." Fanny turned abruptly from the window as the door of the bronze and mirrored lift opened for her. She walked over to Fifth avenue again and up to Forty- fifth street. Then she scrambled up the spiral stairs of a Washington Square 'bus. The air was crisp, clear, intoxicating. To her Chicago eyes the buildings, the streets, the very sky looked startlingly fresh and new- washed. As the 'bus lurched down Fifth avenue she leaned over the raihng to stare, fascinated, at the col- orful, shifting, brilhant panorama of the most amazing street in the world. Block after block, as far as the eye could see, the gorgeous procession moved up, moved down, and the great, gleaming motor cars crept, and crawled, and writhed in and out, like nothing so much as swollen angle worms in a fishing can, Fanny thought. Her eye was caught by one limousine that stood out, even in that crush of magnificence. It was all black, as though scorning to attract the eye with vulgar color, and it was lined with white. Fanny thought it looked very much like Siegel & Cowan's hearse, back in Winnebago. In it sat a woman, all furs, and orchids, and complexion. She was holding up to the window a little dog with a wrinkled and weary face, like that of an old, old man. He was sticking his little evil, eager red tongue out at the world. And he wore a very smart and woolly white sweater, of the im- ported kind — with a monogram done in black. The traffic policeman put up his hand. The 'bus rumbled on down the street. Names that had always been remotely mythical to her now met her eye and became realities. Maillard's. And that great red stone castle was the Waldorf. Almost historic, and it looked 208 FANNY HERSELF newer than the smoke-grimed Blackstone. And straight ahead — why, that must be the Flatiron build- ing! It loomed up like the giant prow of an unim- aginable ship. Brentano's. The Holland House. Madison Square. Why there never was anything so terrifying, and beautiful, and palpitating, and ex- quisite as this Fifth avenue in the late winter after- noon, with the sky ahead a rosy mist, and the golden lights just beginning to spangle the gray. At Madison Square she decided to walk. She negotiated the 'bus steps with surprising skill for a novice, and scurried along the perilous crossing to the opposite side. She entered Madison Square. But why hadn't O. Henry emphasized its beauty, instead of its squalor? It lay, a purple pool of shadow, surrounded by the great, gleaming, many-windowed office buildings, like an ame- thyst sunk in a circle of diamonds. "It's a fairyland !" Panny told herself. "Who'd have thought a city could be so beautiful!" And then, at her elbow, a voice said, "Oh, lady, for the lova God!" She turned with a jerk and looked up into the unshaven face of a great, blue-eyed giant who pulled off his cap and stood twisting it in his swollen blue fingers. '*Lady, I'm cold. I'm hungry. I been sittin' here hours." Fanny clutched her bag a little fearfully. She looked at his huge frame. "Why don't you work?" "Work!" He laughed. "There ain't any. Looka this !" He turned up his foot, and you saw the bare sole, blackened and horrible, and fringed, comically, by the tattered leather upper. "Oh — my dear !" said Fanny. And at that the man began to cry, weakly, sickeningly, like a little boy. "Don't do that ! Don't ! Here." She was emptying her purse, and something inside her was saying, "You fool, he's only a professional beggar." And then the man wiped his face with his cap, and FANNY HERSELF 209 swallowed hard, and said, "I don't want all you got. I ain't holdin' you up. Just gimme that. I been sittin' here, on that bench, lookin' at that sign across the street. Over there. It says, *EAT.' It goes off an' on. Seemed like it was drivin' me crazy." Fanny thrust a crumpled five-dollar bill into his hand. And was off. She fairly flew along, so that it was not until she had reached Thirty-third street that she said aloud, as was her way when moved, "I don't care. Don't blame me. It was that miserable little beast of a dog in the white sweater that did it." It was almost seven when she reached her room. A maid, in neat black and white, was just coming out with an armful of towels. **I just brought you a couple of extra towels. We were short this morning," she said. The room was warm, and quiet, and bright. In her bathroom, that glistened with blue and white tiling, were those redundant towels. Fanny stood in the door- way and counted them, whimsically. Four great fuzzy bath towels. Eight glistening hand towels. A blue and white bath rug hung at the side of the tub. Her tele- phone rang. It was Ella. "Where in the world have you been, child? I was Worried about you. I thought you were lost in the streets of New York." "I took a 'bus ride," Fanny explained. ''See anything of New York?" "I saw all of it," replied Fanny. EUa laughed at that, but Fanny's face was serious. "How did you make out at Horn & Udell's? Never mind, I'm coming in for a minute; can I?" "Please do. I need you." A moment later Ella bounced in, fresh as to blouse, pink as to cheeks, her whole appearance a testimony to the revivifying effects of a warm bath, a brief nap, clean clothes. 210 PANNY HERSELF "Dear child, you look tired. I'm not going to stay. You get dressed and I'll meet you for dinner. Or do you want yours up here?" «0h, no!" " 'Phone me when you're dressed. But tell me, isn't it a wonder, this town? I'll never forget my first trip here. I spent one whole evening standing in front of the mirror trying to make those little spit-curls the women were wearing then. I'd seen 'em on Fifth ave- nue, and it seemed I'd die if I couldn't have 'em, too. And I dabbed on rouge, and touched up my eyebrows. I don't know. It's a kind of a crazy feeling gets you. I; The minute I got on the train for Chicago I washed my V" face and took my hair down and did it plain again." jjf>^ ^ "Why, that's the way I felt!" laughed Fanny. «I D i' . didn't care anything about infants' wear, or Haynes- ifc I ^^®P^r> ^^ anything. I just wanted to be beautiful, ^ 'as they all were." "Sure! It gets us all!" ^. Fanny twisted her hair into the relentless knob women assume preparatory to bathing. "It seems to me you have to come from Winnebago, or thereabouts, to get New York — really get it, I mean." "That's so," agreed Ella. "There's a man on the New York Star who writes a column every day that everybody reads. If he isn't a small-town man then we're both wrong." Fanny, bathward bound, turned to stare at Ella. "A column about what?" "Oh, everything. New York, mostly. Say,, it's the humanest stuff. He says the kind of thing we'd all say, if we knew how. Reading him is like getting a letter from home. I'll bet he went to a country school and wore his mittens sewed to a piece of tape that ran through his coat sleeves." "You're right," said Fanny; "he did. That man's from Winnebago, Wisconsin." FANNIC HERSELF , 211 "No!" ' "Yes.^ "Do you mean you know him? Honestly? What's he like?" But Fanny had vanished. "I'm a tired business woman," she called, above the splashing that followed, "and I won't converse until I'm fed." "But how about Horn & Udell?" demanded Ella, her mouth against the crack. "Practically mine," boasted Fanny. "You mean — landed !" "Well, hooked, at any rate, and putting up a very poor struggle." "Why, you clever little divil, you ! You'U be making me look like a stock girl next." Fanny did not telephone Heyl until the day she left New York. She had told herself she would not tele- phone him at all. He had sent her his New York ad- dress and telephone number months before, after that Sunday at the dunes. Ella Monahan had finished her work and had gone back to Chicago four days before Fanny was ready to leave. In those four days Fanny had scoured the city from the Palisades to Pell street. I don't know how she found her way about. It was a sort of instinct with her. She seemed to scent the pic- turesque. She never for a moment neglected her work. I But she had found it was often impossible to see these New York business men until ten — sometimes eleven — o'clock. She awoke at seven, a habit formed in her Winnebago days. Eight-thirty one morning found her staring up at the dim vastness of the dome of the ca- thedral of St. John the Divine. The great gray pile, mountainous, almost ominous, looms up in the midst of the dingy commonplaceness of Amsterdam avenue and 110th street. New Yorkers do not know this, or if they know it, the fact does not interest them. New .Yorkers do not go to stare up into the murky shadows 212 FANNY HERSELF of this glorious edifice. They would if it were situate in Rome. Bare, crude, unfinished, chaotic, it gives rich promise of magnificent fulfillment. In an age when great structures are thrown up to-day, to be torn down to-morrow, this slow-moving giant is at once a re- proach and an example. Twenty-five years in building, twenty-five more for completion, it has elbowed its way, stone by stone, into such company as St. Peter's at Rome, and the marvel at Milan. Fanny found her way down the crude cinder paths that made an alley-like approach to the cathedral. She entered at the side door that one found by following arrows posted on the rough wooden fence. Once inside she stood a moment, awed by the immensity of the half-finished nave. A« she stood there, hands clasped, her face turned raptly up to where the massive granite columns reared their height to frame the choir, she was, for the moment, as devout as any Episcopalian whose money had helped make the great building. Not only devout, but prayer- ful, ecstatic. That was partly due to the effect of the pillars, the lights, the tapestries, the great, unfinished chunks of stone that loomed out from the side walls, and the purple shadow cast by the window above the chapels at the far end ; and partly to the actress in her that responded magically to any mood, and always to surroundings. Later she walked softly down the de- serted nave, past the choir, to the cluster of chapels, set like gems at one end, and running from north to south, in a semi-circle. A placard outside one said, **St. Saviour's chapel. For those who wish to rest and pray." All white marble, this little nook, gleam- ing softly in the gray half-light. Fanny entered, and sat down. She was quite alone. The roar and crash of the Eighth avenue L, the Amsterdam cars, the mo- tors drumming up Momingside hill, were softened here to a soothing hum. For those who wish to rest and pray. FANNY HERSELF 213 Fanny Brandeis had neither rested nor prayed since that hideous day when she had hurled her prayer of defiance at Him. But something within her now be- gan a groping for words ; for words that should follow an ancient plea beginning, "O God of my Fathers " But at that the picture of the room came back to her mental vision — ^the room so quiet except for the breath- ing of the woman on the bed ; the woman with the toler- ant, humorous mouth, and the straight, clever nose, and the softly bright brown eyes, all so strangely pinched and shrunken-looking now Fanny got to4her feet, with a noisy scraping of the chair on the stone floor. The vague, half-formed prayeif died at birth. She found her way out of the dim, quiet little chapel, up the long aisle and out the great door. She shivered a little in the cold of the early January morning as she hurried toward the Broadway subway. At nine-thirty she was standing at a counter in the infants' wear section at Best's, making mental notes while the unsuspecting saleswoman showed her how the pink ribbon in this year's models was brought under the beading, French fashion, instead of weaving through it, as heretofore. At ten-thirty she was saying to Sid Udell, "I think a written contract is always best. Then we'll all know just where we stand. Mr. Fenger will be on next week to arrange the details, but just now a very brief written understanding to show him on my return would do." And she got it, and tucked it away in her bag, in triumph. She tried to leave New York without talking to Heyl, but some quiet, insistent force impelled her to act contrary to her resolution. It was, after all, the urge of the stronger wish against the weaker. When he heard her voice over the telephone Heyl did not say, "Who is this.?" Neither did he put those in* 214 FANNY HERSELF evitable questions of the dweller to the transient, "Where are you? How long have you been here?" What he said was, **How're you going to avoid dining with me to-night?" To which Fanny replied, promptly, "By taking the Twentieth Century back to Chicago to-day." A little silence. A hurt silence. Then, "When they get the Twentieth Century habit they're as good as lost. How's the infants' wear business, Fanny?" "Booming, thank you. I want to tell you I've read the column every day. It's wonderful stuff." "It's a wonderful job. I'm a lucky boy. I'm doing the thing I'd rather do than anything else in the world. There are mighty few who can say that." There was another silence, awkward, heavy. Then, "Fanny, you're not really leaving to-day?" "I'll be in Chicago to-morrow, barring wrecks." "You might have let me show you our more or less fair city." "I've shown it to myself. I've seen Riverside Drive at sunset, and at night. That alone would have been enough. But I've seen Fulton market, too, and the Grand street stalls, and Washington Square, and Cen- tral Park, and Lady Duff-Gordon's inner showroom, and the Night Court, and the Grand Central subway horror at six p. m., and the gambling on the Curb, and the bench sleepers in Madison Square Oh, Clancy, the misery " "Heh, wait a minute! All this, alone?" "Yes. And one more thing. I've landed Horn Si Udell, which means nothing to you, but to me it means that by Spring my department will be a credit to its stepmother; a real success." "I knew it would be a success. So did you. Any- thing you might attempt would be successful. You'd have made a successful lawyer, or cook, or actress, or hydraulic engineer, because you couldn't do a thing FANNY HERSELF 215 badly. It isn't in you. You're a superlative sort of person. But that's no reason for being any of those things. If you won't admit a debt to humanity, surely you'll acknowledge you've an obligation to your- self." ^'Preaching again. Good-by." *'Fanny, you're afraid to see me." "Don't be ridiculous. Why should I be?" "Because I say aloud the things you daren't let yourself think. If I were to promise not to talk about anything but flannel bands " "Will you promise?" **No. But I'm going to meet you at the clock at the Grand Central Station fifteen minutes before train time. I don't care if every infants' wear manufacturer in New York had a prior claim on your time. You may as well be there, because if you're not I'll get on the train and stay on as far as Albany. Take your choice." He was there before her. Fanny, following the wake of a redcap, picked him at once from among the crowd of clock-waiters. He saw her at the same time, and started forward with that singularly lithe, springy step which was, after all, just the result of perfectly trained muscles in coordination. He was wearing New York clothes — the right kind, Fanny noted. Their hands met. "How well you look," said Fanny, rather lamely. "It's the clothes," said Heyl, and began to revolve slowly, coyly, hands out, palms down, eyelids droop- ing, in delicious imitation of those ladies whose busi- ness it is to revolve thus for fashion. "Clancy, you idiot ! All these people ! Stop it !" "But get the grace! Get the easy English hang, at once so loose and so clinging." Fanny grinned, appreciatively, and led the way through the gate to the train. She was surprisingly 216 FANNY HERSELF glad to be with him again. On discovering that, she began to talk rapidly, and about him. "Tell me, how do you manage to keep that fresh viewpoint? Everybody else who comes to New York to write loses his identity. The city swallows him up. I mean by that, that things seem to strike you as freshly as they did when you first came. I remember you . wrote me an amazing letter." "For one thing, I'll never be anything but a for- eigner in New York. I'll never quite believe Broadway. I'll never cease to marvel at Fifth avenue, and Cooper Union, and the Bronx. The time may come when I can take the subway for granted, but don't ask it of me just yet." "But the other writers — and all those people who live down in Washington Square?" "I never see them. It's sure death. Those Green- wichers are always taking out their own feelings and analyzing them, and pawing them over, and passing them around. When they get through with them they're so thumb-marked and greasy that no one else wants them. They don't get enough golf, those Green- wichers. They don't get enough tennis. They don't get enough walking in the open places. Gosh, no! I know better than to fall for that kind of thing. They spend hours talking to each other, in dim-lighted at- tics, about Souls, and Society, and the Joy of Life, and the Greater Good. And they know all about each other's insides. They talk themselves out, and there's nothing left to write about. A little of that kind of thing purges and cleanses. Too much of it poisons, and clogs. No, ma'am! When I want to talk I go down and chin with the foreman of our composing room. There's a chap that has what I call conversation. A philosopher, and knows everything in the world. Com- posing room foremen always are and do. Now, that's all of that. How about Fanny Brandeis? Any FANNY HERSELF 217 sketches ? Come on. Confess. Grand street, anyway.'* "I haven't touched a pencil, except to add up a col- umn of figures or copy an order, since last September, ^ when you were so sure I couldn't stop." "You've done a thousand in your head. And if you haven't done one on paper so much the better. You'll jam them back, and stifle them, and screw the cover down tight on every natural impulse, and then, some day, the cover will blow off with a loud report. You can't kill that kind of thing, Fanny. It would have to be a wholesale massacre of all the centuries behind you., I don't so much mind your being disloyal to your tribe, or race, or whatever you want to call it. But you've turned your back on yourself ; you've got an obligation to humanity, and I'll nag you till you pay it. I don't care if I lose you, so long as you find yourself. The thing you've got isn't merely racial. God, no! It's universal. And you owe it to the world. Pay up, Fanny! Pay up!" "Look here !" began Fanny, her voice low with anger ; "the last time I saw you I said I'd never again put my- self in a position to be lectured by you, like a school- girl. I mean it, this time. If you have anything else to say to me, say it now. The train leaves" — she glanced at her wrist — "in two minutes, thank Heaven, and this will be your last chance." "All right," said Heyl. "I have got something to say. Do you wear hatpins?" "Hatpins !" blankly. "Not with this small hat, but what " "That means you're defenseless. If you're going to prowl the streets of Chicago alone get this: If you double your fist this way, and tuck your thumb along- side, like that, and aim for this spot right here, about two inches this side of the chin, bringing your arm back, and up, quickly, like a piston, the person you hit will go down, limp. There's a nerve right here that 218 FANNY HERSELF communicates with the brain. That blow makes you see stars, bright lights, and fancy colors. They use it in the comic papers." "You are crazy," said Fanny, as though at last as- sured of a long-suspected truth. The train began to move, almost imperceptibly. "Run!" she cried. Heyl sped up the aisle. At the door he turned. "It's called an uppercut," he shouted to the amazement of the other passengers. And leaped from the train. Fanny sank into her seat, weakly. Then she began to laugh, and there was a dash of hysteria in it. He had left a paper on the car seat. It was the Star. Fanny crumpled it, childishly, and kicked it under the seat. She took off her hat, arranged her belongings, and sat back with eyes closed. After a few moments she opened them, fished about under the seat for the crumpled copy of the Star, and read it, turning at once to his column. She thought it was a very unpre- tentious thing, that column, and yet so full of insight, and sagacity, and whimsical humor. Not a guffaw in it, but a smile in every fifth line. She wondered if those years of illness, and loneliness, with weeks of reading, and tramping, and climbing in the Colorado mountains had kept him strangely young, or made him strangely old. She welcomed the hours that lay between New York and Chicago. They would give her an opportunity to digest the events of the past ten days. In her syste- matic mind she began to range them in the order of their importance. Horn & Udell came first, of course, and then the line of maternjty dresses she had selected to take the place of the hideous models carried under Slosson's regime. And then the slip-over pinafores. But somehow her thoughts became jumbled here, so that faces instead of garments filled her mind's eye. Again and again there swam into her ken the face of that woman of fifty, in decent widow's weeds, who had fanny: herself 219 stood there in the Night Court, charged with drunken- ness on the streets. And the man with the frost-bitten fingers in Madison Square. And the dog in the sweater. And the feverish concentration of the piece-work sew- ers in the window of the loft building. She gave it up, selected a magazine, and decided to go in to lunch. There was nothing spectacular about the welcome she got on her return to the office after this first trip. A firm that counts its employees by the thousands, and \ its profits in tens of millions, cannot be expected to " draw up formal resolutions of thanks when a hereto- fore flabby department begins to show signs of red blood. Ella Monahan said, "They'll make light of it — all but Fenger. That's their way." Slosson drummed with his fingers all the time she was giving him the result of her work in terms of style, material, quantity, time, and price. When she had finished he said, "Well, all I can say is we seem to be going out of the mail order business and into the im- ported novelty line, de luxe. I suppose by next Christ- mas the grocery department will be putting in arti- choke hearts, and truffles and French champagne by the keg for community orders." To which Fanny had returned, sweetly, "If Oregon and Wyoming show any desire for artichokes and cham- pagne I don't see why we shouldn't." Fenger, strangely enough, said little. He was apt to be rather curt these days, and almost irritable. Fanny attributed it to the reaction following the strain of the Christmas rush. One did not approach Fenger's office except by ap- pointment. Fanny sent word to him of her return. For two days she heard nothing from him. Then the voice of the snuff-brown secretary summoned her. She did not have to wait this time, but passed directly 220 FANNY HERSELF through the big bright outer room into the smaller room. The Power House, Fanny called it. Fenger was facing the door. "Missed you," he said. "You must have," Fanny laughed, "with only nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine to look after." "You look as if you'd been on a vacation, instead of a test trip." "So I have. Why didn't you warn me that busi- ness, as transacted in New York, is a series of social rites? I didn't have enough white kid gloves to go round. No one will talk business in an office. I don't see what they use offices for, except as places in which to receive their mail. You utter the word 'Business,' and the other person immediately says, 'Lunch.' No wholesaler seems able to quote you his prices until he has been sustained by half a dozen Cape Cods. I don't want to see a restaurant or a rose silk shade for weeks." Fenger tapped the little pile of papers on his desk. "I've read your reports. If you can do that on lunches, I'd like to see what you could put over in a series of dinners." "Heaven forbid," said Fanny, fervently. Then, for a very concentrated fifteen minutes they went over the reports together. Fanny's voice grew dry and lifeless as she went into figures, "You don't sound particularly enthusiastic," Fen- ger said, when they had finished, "considering that you've accomplished what you set out to do." "That's just it," quickly. "I like the uncertainty. It was interesting to deal directly with those people, to stack one's arguments, and personality, and men- tality and power over theirs, until they had to give way. But after that ! Well, you can't expect me to be vitally interested in gross lots, and carloads and dating." "It's part of business." FANNY HERSELF 221 "It's the part I hate.'^ Fenger stacked the papers neatly. "You came in June, didn't jou?" "Yes." "It has been a remarkable eight-months' record, even at Haynes-Cooper's, where records are the rule. Have you been through the plant since the time you first went through.?" "Through it ! Goodness, no ! It would take a day." "Then I wish you'd take it. I like to have the heads of departments go through the plant at least twice a year. You'll find the fourteenth floor has been cleared and is being used entirely by the selectors. The manu- facturers' samples are spread on the tables in the vari- ous sections. You'll find your place ready for you. You'll be amused at Daly's section. He took your sug- gestion about trying the blouses on live models instead of selecting them as he used to. You remember you said that one could tell about the lines and style of a dress merely by looking at it, but that a blouse is just a limp rag until it's on." "It's true of the flimsy Georgette things women want now. They may be lovely in the box and hideously un- becoming when worn. If Daly's going in for the higher grade stuff he can't risk choosing unbecoming models." "Wait till you see him !" smiled Fenger, "sitting there like a sultan while the pinks and blues, and whites and plaids parade before him." He turned to his desk again. "That's all. Miss Brandeis. Thank you." Then, at a sudden thought. "Do you know that all your suggestions have been human suggestions ? I mean they all have had to do with people. Tell me, how do you happen to have learned so much about what peo- ple feel and think, in such a short time?" The thing that Clarence Heyl had said flashed through her mind, and she was startled to find herself quoting it. "It hasn't been a short time," she said. '^J^222 FANNY HERSELF Jh" / "It took a thousand years." And left Fenger staring, puzzled. She took next morning for her tour of the plant as Fenger had suggested. She went through it, not as the startled, wide-eyed girl of eight months before had gone, but critically, and with a little unconscious air of authority. For, this organization, vast though it was, actually showed her imprint. She could have put ^ her finger on this spot, and that, saying, "Here is the mark of my personality." And she thought, as she passed from department to department, "Ten thousand a year, if you keep on as you've started." Up one aisle and down the next. Bundles, bundles, bundles. And ever3rwhere you saw the yellow order-slips. In the hands of the stock boys whizzing by on roller skates; in the filing department ; in the traffic department. The very air seemed jaundiced with those clouds of yellow order-slips. She stopped a moment, fascinated as al- ways before the main spiral gravity chute down which the bundles — hundreds of them, thousands of them daily — chased each other to — to what? Fanny asked her- self. She knew, vaguely, that hands caught these bun- dles halfway, and redirected them toward the proper channel, where they were assembled and made ready for shipping or mailing. She turned to a stock boy. "Where does this empty?" she asked. "Floor below," said the boy, "on the platform." Fanny walked down a flight of iron stairs, and around to face the spiral chute again. In front of the chute, and connected with it by a great metal lip, was a platform perhaps twelve feet above the floor and looking very much like the pilot's deck of a ship. A little flight of steps led up to it — very steep steps, that trembled a little under a repetition of shocks that came from above. Fanny climbed them warily, gained the top, and found herself standing next to the girl whose face had gleamed out at her from among those thou- FANNY HERSELF 223 sands in the crowd pouring out of the plant. The girl glanced up at Fanny for a second — no, for the fraction of a second. Her job was the kind that permitted no more than that. Fanny watched her for one breath- less moment. In that moment she understood the look that had been stamped on the girl's face that night ; the look that had cried : "Release !" For this platform, shaking under the thud of bundles, bundles, bundles, was the stomach of the Haynes-Cooper plant. Sixty per cent of the forty-five thousand daily orders passed through the hands of this girl and her assistants. Down the chutes swished the bimdles, stamped with their sec- tion mark, and here they were caught deftly and hurled into one of the dozen conveyers that flowed out from this main stream. The wrong bundle into the wrong conveyer? Confusion in the shipping room. It only took a glance of the eye and a motion of the arms. But that glance and that motion had been boiled down to the very concentrated essence of economy. They seemed to be working with fury, but then, so does a pile- driver until you get the simplicity of it. Fanny bent over the girl (it was a noisy corner) and put a question. The girl did not pause in her work as she answered it. She caught a bundle with one hand, hurled one into a conveyer with the other. "Seven a week," she said. And deftly caught the next slithering bundle. Fanny watched her for another moment. Then she , turned and went down the steep stairs. **None of your business," she said to herself, and continued her tour. "None of your business." She went up to the new selectors' floor, and found the plan run- ning as smoothly as if it had been part of the plant's system for years The elevator whisked her up to the top floor, where she met the plant's latest practical fad, the new textile chemist — a charming youth, disguised in bone-rimmed glasses, who did the honors of his little 224. FANNY HERSELF labratory with all the manner of a Harvard host. This was the fusing oven for silks. Here was the drying oven. This delicate scale weighed every ounce of the cloth swatches that came in for inspection, to get the percentage of wool and cotton. Not a chance for the manufacturer to slip shoddy into his goods, now. "Mm," said Fanny, politely. She hated complicated processes that had to do with scales, and weights, and pounds, and acids. She crossed over to the Adminis- tration Building, and stopped at the door marked, "Mrs. Knowles." If you had been an employee of the Haynes-Cooper company, and had been asked to de- fine Mrs. Knowles's position the chances are that you would have found yourself floundering, wordless. Haynes-Cooper was reluctant to acknowledge the need of Mrs. Knowles. Still, when you employ ten thousand people, and more than half of these are girls, and fifty per cent of these girls are unskilled, ignorant, and ter- ribly human you find that a Mrs. Knowles saves the equivalent of ten times her salary in wear and tear and general prevention. She could have told you tragic stories, could Mrs. Knowles, and sordid stories, and comic too ; she knew how to deal with terror, and shame, and stubborn silence, and hopeless misery. Gray-haired and motherly? Not at all. An astonishingly young, pleasingly plumpish woman, with nothing remarkable about her except a certain splendid calm. Four years out of Vassar, and already she had learned that if you fold your hands in your lap and wait, quietly, asking no questions, almost any one will tell you almost any- thing. "Hello!" called Fanny. "How are our morals this morning?" "Going up !" answered Esther Knowles, '^considering that it's Tuesday. Come in. How's the infant prod- igy? I lunched with Ella Monahan, and she told me FANNY HERSELF 225 your first New York trip was a whirlwind. Congratu- lations r "Thanks. I can't stop. I haven't touched my desk to-day. I just want to ask you if you know the name of that girl who has charge of the main chute in the merchandise building." "Good Lord, child ! There are thousands of girls." "But this one's rather special. She is awfully pretty, and rather different looking. Exquisite coloring, a dis- contented expression, and a blouse that's too low in the neck." "Which might be a description of Fanny Brandeis herself, barring the blouse," laughed Mrs. Knowles. Then, at the startled look in Fanny's face, "Do for- give me. And don't look so horrified. I think I know which one you mean. Her name is Sarah Sapinsky — yes, isn't it a pity! — and it's queer that you should ask me about her because I've been having trouble with that particular girl." ^ .j i ^ "Trouble?" ^^ "She knows she's pretty, and she knows she's differ- ent, and she knows she's handicapped, and that ac- counts for the discontented expression. That, and some other things. She gets seven a week here, and they take just about all of it at home. She says she's sick of it. She has left home twice. I don't blame the child, but I've always managed to bring her back. Some day there'll be a third time — and I'm afraid of it. She's not bad. She's really rather splendid, and she has a certain dreadful philosophy of her own. Her theory is that there are only two kinds of people in the world. Those that give, and those that take. And she's tired of giving. Sarah didn't put it just that way; but you know what she means, don't you.'*" "I know what she means," said Fanny, grimly. So it was Sarah she saw above all else in her trip throu^ the gigantic plant; Sarah's face shone out -?.- 226 FANNY HERSELF from among the thousands; the thud-thud of Sarah's bundle-chute beat a dull accompaniment to the hum of the big hive; above the rustle of those myriad yellow order-slips, through the buzz of the busy mail room; beneath the roar of the presses in the printing build- ing, the crash of the dishes in the cafeteria, ran the leid-motif of Sarah-at-seven-a-week. Back in her office once more Fanny dictated a brief observation-report for Fenger's perusal. "It seems to me there's room for improvement in our card index file system. It's thorough, but unwieldy. It isn't a system any more. It's a ceremony. Can't you get a corps of system sharks to simplify things there?" She went into detail and passed on to the next sug- gestion. "If the North American Cloak & Suit Company can sell mail order dresses that are actually smart and in good taste, I don't see why we have to go on carrying only the most hideous crudities in our women's dress department. I know that the majority of our women customers wouldn't wear a plain, good looking little blue serge dress with a white collar, and some tailored buttons. They want cerise satin revers on a plirni- colored foulard, and that's what we've been giving them. But there are plenty of other women living miles from anywhere who know what's being worn on Fifth avenue. I don't know how they know it, but they do. And they want it. Why can't we reach those women, as well as their shoddier sisters? The North American people do it. I'd wear one of their dresses myself. I wouldn't be found dead in one of ours. Here's a sug- gestion : "Why can't we get Camille to design half a dozen models a season for us? Now don't roar at that. And don't think that the women on western ranches haven't heard of Camille. They have. They may know nothing FANNY HERSELF 227 of Mrs. Pankhurst, and Lillian Russell may be a myth to them, but I'll swear that every one of them knows that Camille is a dressmaker who makes super-dresses. She is as much a household word among them as Roose- velt used to be to their men folks. And if we can prom- ise them a Camille-designed dress for $7.85 (which we could) then why don't we?" At the very end, to her stenographer's mystification, she added this irrevelant line. "^-C/ "Seven dollars a week is not a living wage.'* ^ ^ The report went to Fenger. He hurdled lightly over the first suggestion, knowing that the file system was as simple as a monster of its bulk could be. He ignored the third hint. The second suggestion amused, then interested, then convinced him. Within six months Camille's name actually appeared in the Haynes-Coop- er catalogue. Not that alone, the Haynes-Cooper company broke its rule as to outside advertising, and announced in full-page magazine ads the news of the $7.85 gowns designed by Camille especially for the Haynes-Cooper company. There went up a nation- wide shout of amusement and unbelief, but the an- nouncement continued. Camille (herself a frump with a fringe) whose frocks were worn by queens, and dan- cers and matrons with millions, and debutantes ; Camille, who had introduced the slouch, revived the hoop, dis- covered the sunset chifFon, had actually consented to design six models every season for the mail order mil- lions of the Haynes-Cooper women's dress department — at a price that made even Michael Fenger wince. CHAPTER FOURTEEN - FANNY BRANDEIS' blouses showed real Cluny now, and her hats were nothing but line. A scant two years before she had "pondered if she would fiver reach a pinnacle of success lofty enough to enable her to wear blue tailor suits as smart as the well-cut garments worn by her mother's frienj, Mrs. Emma McChesney. Mrs. McChesney's trig little suits had cost fifty dollars, and had looked sixty. Fanny's now cost one hundred and twenty-five, and looked one hundred and twenty- five. Her sleeves alone gave it away. If you would test the soul of a tailor you have only to glance at shoulder- seam, elbow and wrist. Therein lies the wizardry. Fanny's sleeve flowed from arm-pit to thumb-bone with- rOut a ripple. Also she moved from the South side to xhe North side, always a sign of prosperity or social ambition, in Chicago. Her new apartment was near the lake, exhilaratingly high, correspondingly expen- ive. And she was hideously lonely. She was earning a man-size salary now, and she was working like a man. A less magnificently healthy woman could not have stood the strain, for Fanny Brandeis was working with her head, not her heart. When we say heart we have come to mean something more than the hollow muscular structure that propels the blood through the veins. That, in the dictionary, is the primary definition. The secondary definition has to do with such words as emo- tion, sympathy, tenderness, courage, conviction. She was working, now, as Michael Fenger worked, relent- lessly, coldly, indomitably, using all the material at hand as a means to an end, with never a thought of the FANNY HERSELF 229 material itself, as a builder reaches for a brick, or stone, and fits it into place, smoothly, almost without actually seeing the brick itself, except as something which will help to make a finished wall. She rarely prowled the city now. She told herself she was too tired at night, and on Sundays and holidays, and I suppose she was. Indeed, she no longer saw things with her former vision. It was as though her soul had shriveled in direct pro-' portion to her salary's expansion. The streets seldom furnished her with a rich mental meal now. When she met a woman with a child, in the park, her keen eye noted the child's dress before it saw the child itself, if, indeed, she noticed the child at all. Fascinating Facts, the guileless, pink-cheeked youth who had driven her home the night of her first visit to the Fengers, shortly after her coming to Haynes-Coo- per's, had proved her faithful slave, and she had not abused his devotion. Indeed, she hardly considered it that. The sex side of her was being repressed with the artist side. Most men found her curt, brisk, busi- nesslike manner a little repellent, though interesting. They never made love to her, in spite of her undeniable attractiveness. Fascinating Facts drove her about in his smart little roadster and one night he established himself in her memory forever as the first man who had ever asked her to marry him. He did it haltingly, pain- fully, almost grudgingly. Fanny was frankly amazed. She had enjoyed going about with him. He rested and soothed her. He, in turn, had been stimulated by her energy, her humor, her electric force. Nothing was said for a minute after his awkward declaration. "But," he persisted, "you like me, don't youi"' *'0f course I do. Immensely." "Then why.?" "When a woman of my sort marries it's a miracle. I'm twenty-six, and intelligent and very successful. A frightful combination. Unmarried women of my type 230 FANNY HERSELF aren't content just to feel. They must analyze thedr feelings. And analysis is death to romance." "Great Scott! You expect to marry somebody sometime, don't you, Fanny.?" "No one I know now. When I do marry, if I do, it will be with the idea of making a definite gain. I don't mean necessarily worldly gain, though that would be a factor, too." Fascinating Facts had been staring straight ahead, his hands gripping the wheel with unnecessary rigidity. He relaxed a little now, and even laughed, though not very successfully. Then he said something very wise, for him. "Listen to me, girl. You'll never get away with that Tampire stuff. Talons are things you have to be born with. You'll never learn to grab with these." He reached over, and picked up her left hand lying inertly in her lap, and brought it up to his lips, and kissed it, glove and all. "They're built on the open-face pattern — for giving. You can't fool me. I know." A year and a half after her coming to Haynes-Coop- er Fanny's department was doing a business of a mil- lion a year. The need had been there. She had merely given it the impetus. She was working more or less di- rectly with Fenger now, with an eye on every one of the departments that had to do with women's clothing, from shoes to hats. Not that she did any actual buying, or selling in these departments. She still confined her actual selecting of goods to the infants' wear section, but she occupied, unofficially, the position of assistant to the General Merchandise Manager. They worked well together, she and Fenger, their minds often march- ing along without the necessity of a single spoken word. There was no doubt that Fenger's mind was a mar- velous piece of mechanism. Under it the Haynes-Coo- per plant functioned with the clockwork regularity of -a gigantic automaton. System and Results — these fanny: herself 231 were his twin gods. With his mind intent on them he failed to see that new gods, born of spiritual unrest, were being set up in the temples of Big Business. Their coming had been rumored for many years. Words such as Brotherhood, Labor, Rights, Humanity, Hours, once regarded as the special property of the street corner ranter, were creeping into our everyday vocabu- lary. And strangely enough, Nathan Haynes, the gen- tle, the bewildered, the uninspired, heard them, and lis- tened. Nathan Haynes had begun to accustom himself to the roar of the flood that had formerly deafened him. He was no longer stunned by the inrush of his millions. The report sheet handed him daily had never ceased to be a wildly unexpected thing, and he still shrank from it, sometimes. It was so fantastic, so out of all reason. But he even dared, now and then, to put out a tentative hand to guide the flood. He began to realize, vaguely, that Italian Gardens, and marble pools, educational endowments and pet charities were but poor, ineffectual barriers of mud and sticks, soon swept away by the torrent. As he sat there in his great, luxurious office, with the dim, rich old portraits gleaming down on him from the walls, he began, gropingly, to evolve a new plan ; a plan by which the golden flood was to be curbed, divided, and made to form a sub-stream, to be utilized for the good of the many; for the good of the Ten Thousand, who were almost Fifteen Thousand now, with another fifteen thousand in mills and factories at dis- tant points, whose entire output was swallowed up by the Haynes-Cooper plant. Michael Fenger, Super- Manager, listened to the plan, smiled tolerantly, and went on perfecting an already miraculous System. Sarah Sapinsky, at seven a week, was just so much un- trained labor material, easily replaced by material ex- actly like it. No, Michael Fenger, with his head in the sand, heard no talk of new gods. He only knew that the monster plant under his management was yielding 232 FANNY HERSELF the greatest possible profit under the least possible out- lay. In Fanny Brandeis he had found a stimulating, en- ergizing fellow worker. That had been from the be- ginning. In the first month or two of her work, when her keen brain was darting here and there, into for- gotten and neglected corners, ferreting out dusty scraps of business waste and holding them up to the light, dis- dainfully, Fenger had watched her with a mingling of amusement and a sort of fond pride, as one would a precocious child. As the months went on the pride and amusement welded into something more than ad- miration, such as one expert feels for a fellow-crafts- man. Long before the end of the first year he knew that here was a woman such as he had dreamed of all his life and never hoped to find. He often found him- self sitting at his office desk, or in his library at home, staring straight ahead for a longer time than he dared admit, his papers or book forgotten in his hand. His thoughts applied to her adjectives which proved her a paradox: Generous, sympathetic, warm-hearted, im- pulsive, imaginative; cold, indomitable, brilliant, dar- ing, intuitive. He would rouse himself almost angrily and force himself to concentrate again upon the page before him. I don't know how he thought it all would end — he whose life-habit it was to follow out every proc- ess to its ultimate step, whether mental or mechanical. As for Fanny, there was nothing of the intriguant about her. She was used to admiration. She was ac- customed to deference from men. Brandeis' Bazaar had insured that. All her life men had taken orders from her, all the way from Aloysius and the blithe trav- eling men of whom she bought goods, to the salesmen and importers in the Chicago wholesale houses. If they had attempted, occasionally, to mingle the social and personal with the commercial Fanny had not re- sented their attitude. She had accepted their admira- FANNY HERSELF 233 tion and refused their invitations with equal good na- ture, and thus retained their friendship. It is not ex- aggeration to say that she looked upon Michael Fenger much as she had upon these genial fellow-workers. A woman as straightforward and direct as she has what is known as a single-track mind in such matters. It is your soft and silken mollusc type of woman whose mind pursues a slimy and labyrinthine trail. But it is \ useless to say that she did not feel something of the in- tense personal attraction of the man. Often it used to puzzle and annoy her to find that as they sat arguing in the brisk, everyday atmosphere of office or merchan- dise room the air between them would suddenly become electric, vibrant. They met each other's eyes with effort. When their hands touched, accidentally, over papers or samples they snatched them back. Fanny found herself laughing uncertainly, at nothing, and was furious. When a silence fell between them they would pounce upon it, breathlessly, and smother it with talk. Do not think that any furtive love-making went on. sandwiched between shop talk. Their conversation might have taken place between two men. Indeed, they often were brutally frank to each other. Fanny had the vision, Fenger the science to apply it. Sometimes her intuition leaped ahead of his reasoning. Then he would say, "I'm not sold on that," which is modern business slang meaning, "You haven't convinced me." She would go back and start afresh, covering the ground more slowly. Usually her suggestions were practical and what might be termed human. They seemed to be founded on an uncanny knowledge of people's frailties. It was only when she touched upon his beloved System that he was adamant. "~~| "None of that socialistic stuff," he would say. "This I isn't a Benevolent Association we're running. It's the ' biggest mail order business in the world, and its back- 234 fanny: herself bone is System. I've been just fifteen years perfecting cthat System, It's my job. Hands off." "A fifteen year old system ought to be scrapped," Fanny would retort, boldly. "Anyway, the Simon Le- gree thing has gone out." No one in the plant had ever dared to talk to him like that. He would glare down at Fanny for a moment, like a mastiff on a terrier. Fanny, seeing his face rage- red, would flash him a cheerful and impudent smile. The anger, fading slowly, gave way to another look, so that admiration and resentment mingled for a moment. "Lucky for you you're not a man." "I wish I were." "I'm glad you're not." Not a very thrilling conversation for those of you who are seeking heartthrobs. In May Fanny made her first trip to Europe for the firm. It was a sudden plan. Instantly Theodore leaped to her mind and she was startled at the tumult she felt at the thought of seeing him and his child. The baby, a girl, was more than a year old. Her busi- ness, a matter of two weeks, perhaps, was all in Berlin and Paris, but she cabled Theodore that she would come to them in Munich, if only for a day or two. She had very little curiosity about the woman Theodore had married. The memory of that first photograph of hers, befrizzed, be jeweled, and asmirk, had never ef- faced itself. It had stamped her indelibly in Fanny's mind. I The day before she left for New York (she sailed from there) she had a letter from Theodore. It was evident at once that he had not received her cable. He was in Russia, giving a series of concerts. Olga and the baby were with him. He would be back in Munich in June. There was some talk of America. When Fanny realized that she was not to see him she experi- enced a strange feeling that was a mixture of regret and FANNY HERSELF 235 relief. All the family love in her, a racial trait, had been stirred at the thought of again seeing that dear blond brother, the self-centered, willful, gifted boy who had held the little congregation rapt, there in the Jew- ish house of worship in Winnebago. But she had re- coiled a little from the meeting with this other un- known person who gave concerts in Russia, who had adopted Munich as his home, who was the husband of this Olga person, and the father of a ridiculously Ger- man looking baby in a very German looking dress, all lace and tucks, and wearing bracelets on its chubby arms, and a locket round its neck. That was what one might expect of Olga's baby. But not of Theo- dore's. Besides, what business had that boy with a baby, anyway ? Himself a baby. Fenger had arranged for her cabin, and she rather resented its luxury until she learned later, that it is the buyers who always occupy the staterooms de luxe on ocean liners. She learned, too, that the men in yachting caps and white flannels, and the women in the smartest and most subdued of blue serge and furs were not mil- lionaires temporarily deprived of their own private sea- going craft, but buyers like herself, shrewd, aggressive, wise and incredibly endowed with savoir faire. Merely to watch one of them dealing with a deck steward was to know for all time the superiority of mind over mat- ter. Most incongruously, it was Ella Monahan and Clar- ence Heyl who waved good-by to her as her ship swung clear of the dock. Ella was in New York on her monthly trip. Heyl had appeared at the hotel as Fanny was adjusting her veil and casting a last rather wild look around the room. Molly Brandeis had been the kind of woman who never misses a train or over- looks a hairpin. Fanny's early training had proved invaluable more than once in the last two years. Never- theless, she was rather flustered, for her, as the elevator '236 FANNY HERSELF took her down to the main floor. She told herself it was not the contemplation of the voyage itself that thrilled her. It was the fact that here was another step defin- itely marking her progress. Heyl, looking incredibly limp, was leaning against a gaudy marble pillar, his eyes on the downcoming eleva- tors. Fanny saw him just an instant before he saw her, and in that moment she found herself wondering why this boy (she felt years older than he) should look JBO fantastically out of place in this great, glittering, feverish hotel lobby. Just a shy, rather swarthy Jew- ish boy, who wore the right kind of clothes in the wrong manner — then Heyl saw her and came swiftly toward her. "Hello, Fan!" "Hello, Clancy!" They had not seen each other in six months. "Anybody else going down with you?" "No. Ella Monahan had a last-minute business ap- pointment, but she promised to be at the dock, some- how, before the boat leaves. I'm going to be grand, and taxi all the way." "I've an open car, waiting." "But I won't have it ! I can't let you do that." "Oh, yes you can. Don't take it so hard. That's the trouble with you business women. You're killing the gallantry of a nation. Some day one of you will get up and give me a seat in a subway " "I'll punish you for that, Clancy. If you want the Jane Austen thing I'll accommodate. I'll drop my handkerchief, gloves, bag, flowers and fur scarf at in- tervals of five minutes all the way downtown. Then you may scramble around on the floor of the cab and feel like a knight." Fanny had long ago ceased to try to define the charm of this man. She always meant to be serenely digni- fied with him. She always ended by feeling very young, FANNY. HERSELF 237 and, somehow, gloriously carefree and lighthearted. There was about him a naturalness, a simplicity, to which one responded in kind. Seated beside her he turned and regarded her with disconcerting scrutiny. "Like it.?" demanded Fanny, pertly. And smoothed her veil, consciously. "No." "Well, for a man who looks negligee even in evening clothes aren't you overcritical?" "I'm not criticizing your clothes. Even I can see that that hat and suit have the repressed note that means money. And you're the kind of woman who looks her best in those plain dark things." "Well, then.?" "You look like a buyer. In two more years your face will have that hard finish that never comes off." "I am a buyer." "You're not. You're a creator. Remember, I'm not belittling your job. It's a wonderful jol> — for Ella Monahan. I wish I had the gift of eloquence. I wish I had the right to spank you. I wish I could prove to you, somehow, that with your gift, and heritage, and racial right it's as criminal for you to be earning your thousands at Haynes-Cooper's as it would have been for a vestal virgin to desert her altar fire to stoke a furnace. Your eyes are bright and hard, instead of tolerant. Your mouth is losing its graciousness. Your whole face is beginning to be stamped with a look that says shrewdness and experience, and success." "I am successful. Why shouldn't I look it.?" "Because you're a failure. I'm sick, I tell you — sick with disappointment in you. Jane Addams would have been a success in business, too. She was born with a humanity sense, and a value sense, and a something else that can't be acquired. Ida Tarbell could have managed your whole Haynes-Cooper plant, if she'd 238 FANNY HERSELF had to. So could a dozen other women I could name. You don't see any sign of what you call success on Jane Addams's face, do you? You wouldn't say, on seeing her, that here was a woman who looked as if she might afford hundred-dollar tailor suits and a town car. No. All you see in her face is the reflection of the souls of all the men and women she has worked to save. She has covered her job — the job that the Lord intended her to cover. And to me she is the most radi- antly beautiful woman I have ever seen." Fanny sat silent. She was twisting the fingers of one hand in the grip of the other, as she had since childhood, when deeply disturbed. And suddenly she began to cry — silently, harrowingly, as a man cries, •jj^' j her shoulders shaking, her face buried in her furs. "Fanny! Fanny girl!" He was horribly disturbed and contrite. He patted her arm, awkwardly. She shook free of his hand, childishly. "Don't cry, dear. I'm sorry. It's just that I care so much. It's just '' She raised an angry, tear-stained face. "It's just that you have an exalted idea of your own perceptions. It's just that you've grown up from what they used to call a bright little boy to a bright young man, and you're just as tiresome now as you were then. I'm happy enough, except when I see you. I'm getting the things I starved for all those years. Why, I'll never get over being thrilled at the idea of being able to go to the theater, or to a concert, whenever I like. Actually whenever I want to. And to be able to buy a jabot, or a smart hat, or a book. You don't know how I wanted things, and how tired I got of never having them. I'm happy ! I'm happy ! Leave me alone !" "It's an awful price to pay for a hat, and a jabot, and a book and a theater ticket. Fan." Ella Monahan had taken the tube, and was standing in the great shed, watching arrivals with interest, long fanny: herself 239 before they bumped over the cobblestones of Hoboken. The three descended to Fanny's cabin. Ella had sent champagne — six cosy pints in a wicker basket. "They say it's good for seasickness," she announced, cheerfully, "but it's a lie. Nothing's good for seasick- ness, except death, or dry land. But even if you do feel miserable — and you probably will — there's some- thing about being able to lie in your berth and drink champagne alone, by the spoonful, that's sort of sooth- ing." Heyl had fallen silent. Fanny was radiant again, and exclamatory over her books and flowers. "Of course it's my first trip," she explained, "and an event in my life, but I didn't suppose that anybody else would care. What's this.? Candy.? Glace fruit." She glanced around the luxurious little cabin, then up at Heyl, impudently. "I may be a coarse commercial person, Clancy, but I must say I like this very, very much. Sorry." They went up on deck. Ella, a seasoned traveler, was full of parting instructions. "And be sure to eat at Kempinski's, in Berlin. Twenty cents for lobster. J And caviar! Big as hen's eggs, and as cheap as cod- fish. And don't forget to order mai-bowle. It tastes like champagne, but isn't, and it has the most delicious dwarf strawberries floating on top. This is just the season for it. You're lucky. If you tip the waiter one mark he's yours for life. Oh, and remember the plum compote. You'll be disappointed in their Wertheim's that they're always bragging about. After all, Field's makes 'em all look like country stores." "Wertheim's.? Is that something to eat, too.?" "No, idiot. It's their big dej>artment store." Ella turned to Heyl, for whom she felt mingled awe and lik- ing. "If this trip of hers is successful, the firm will probably send her over three or four times a year. It's a wonderful chance for a kid like her." 240 FANNY HERSELF. "Then I hope," said Heyl, quietly, "that this trip taay be a failure." Ella smiled, uncertainly. "Don't laugh," said Fanny, sharply. "He means it.'* Ella, sensing an unpleasant something in which she had no part, covered the situation with another rush of conversation. "You'll get the jolt of your life when you come to Paris and find that you're expected to pay for the lunches, and all the cab fares, and everything, of those shrimpy little commissionaires. Polite little fellows, they are, in frock coats, and mustaches, and they just stand aside, as courtly as you please, while you pay for everything. Their house expects it. I almost passed away, the first time, but you get used to it. Say, imagine one of our traveling men letting you pay for his lunch and taxi," She rattled on, genially. Heyl listened with un- feigned delight. Ella found herself suddenly abashed before those clear, far-seeing eyes. "You think I'm a gabby old girl, don't you?" "I think you're a wonderful woman," said Heyl. "Very wise, and very kind." "Why— thanks," faltered Ella. "Why— thanks." They said their good-bys. Ella hugged Fanny warm- heartedly. Then she turned away, awkwardly. Heyl put his two hands on Fanny's shoulders and looked down at her. For a breathless second she thought he was about to kiss her. She was amazed to find herself hoping that he would. But he didn't. "Good-by," he said, simply. And took her hand in his steel grip a moment, and dropped it. And turned away. A mes- senger boy, very much out of breath, came running up to her, a telegram in his hand. "For me?" Fanny opened it, frowned, smiled. "It's from Mr. Fenger. Good wishes. As if all those flow- ers weren't enough." FANNY HERSELF 241 **Mm," said Ella. She and Heyl descended the gang* way, and stood at the dock's edge, looking rather fool- ish and uncertain, as people do at such times. There followed a few moments of scramble, of p.bsurdly shouted last messages, of bells, and frantic waving of handkerchiefs. Fanny, at the rail, found her two among the crowd, and smiled down upon them, mistily. Ella was waving energetically. Heyl was standing quite still, looking up. The ship swung clear, crept away from the dock. The good-bys swelled to a roar. Fanny leaned far over the rail and waved too, a sob in her throat. Then she saw that she was waving with the hand that held the yellow telegram. She crumpled it in the other hand, and substituted her handkerchief. Heyl still stood, hat in hand, motionless. *'Why don't you wave good-by?" she called, though he could not possibly hear. "Wave good-by!" And then the hand with the handkerchief went to her face, and she was weeping. I think it was that old drama- thrill in her, dormant for so long. But at that Heyl swung his hat above his head, three times, like a s^'hool- boy, and, grasping Ella's plump and resisting wrm. marched abruptly away. CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE first week in June found her back in New York. That month of absence had worked a subtle change. The two weeks spent in crossing and recross- ing had provided her with a let-down that had been ' almost jarring in its completeness. Everything com- petitive had seemed to fade away with the receding shore, and to loom up again only when the skyline be- came a thing of smoke-banks, spires, and shafts. She had had only two weeks for the actual transaction of her business. She must have been something of a reve- lation to those Paris and Berlin manufacturers, accus- tomed though they were to the brisk and irresistible methods of the American business woman. She was, after all, absurdly young to be talking in terms of millions, and she was amazingly well dressed. This last passed unnoticed, or was taken for granted in Paris, but in Berlin, home of the frump and the flour-sack figure, she was stared at, appreciatively. Her business, except for one or two unimportant side lines, had to do l with two factories on whose product the Haynes-Coo- per company had long had a covetous eye. Quantity, » as usual, was the keynote of their demand, and Fanny's task was that of talking in six-figure terms to these conservative and over-wary foreign manufacturers. That she had successfully accomplished this, and that she had managed to impress them also with the impor- tant part that time and promptness in delivery played in a swift-moving machine like the Haynes-Cooper con- cern, was due to many things beside her natural busi- ness ability. Self-confidence was there, and physical 242 FANNY HERSELF 243 Vigor, and diplomacy. But above all there was that sheer love of the game ; the dramatic sense that enabled her to see herself in the part. That alone precluded the possibility of failure. She knew how youthful she looked, and how glowing. She anticipated the look that f came into their faces when she left polite small-talk • behind and soared up into the cold, rarefied atmosphere of business. She delighted in seeing the admiring and > tolerant smirk vanish and give way to a startled and . defensive attentiveness. It might be mentioned that she managed, somehow, to spend almost half a day in Petticoat Lane, and its squalid surroundings, while in London. She actually prowled, alone, at night, in the evil-smelling, narrow streets of the poorer quarter of Paris, and how she escaped unharmed is a mystery that never bothered her, because she had never known fear of streets. She had always walked on the streets of Winnebago, Wisconsin, alone. It never occurred to her not to do the same in the streets of Chicago, or New York, or London, or Paris. She found Berlin, with its Adlon, its appalling cleanliness, its overfed populace, and its omnipresent Kaiser forever scudding up and down Unter den Linden in his chocolate-colored car, incredibly dull, and un- picturesque. Something she had temporarily lost there in the busy atmosphere of the Haynes-Cooper plant, seemed to have returned, miraculously. New York, on her return, was something of a shock. • She remembered how vividly fresh it had looked to her on the day of that first visit, months before. Now, to eyes fresh from the crisp immaculateness of Paris and Berlin, Fifth avenue looked almost grimy, and certainly shabby in spots. Ella Monahan, cheerful, congratulatory, beaming, met her at the pier, and Fanny was startled at her own sensation of happiness as she saw that pink, good- natured face looking up at her from the crowd below. 244 FANNY HERSELF The month that had gone by since last she saw Ella i standing just so, seemed to slip away and fade into nothingness. I "I waited over a day," said Ella, "just to see you. i My, you look grand ! I know where you got that hat. Galeries Lafayette. How much?" I "I don't expect you to believe it. Thirty-five francs. ' Seven dollars. I couldn't get it for twenty-five here." \ They were soon clear of the customs. Ella had engaged a room for her at the hotel they always used. I As they rode uptown together, happily, Ella opened I her bag and laid a little packet of telegrams and letters ! in Fanny's lap. "\ j *'I guess Fenger's pleased, all right, if telegrams mean ; anything. Not that I know they're from him. But he I said— " ; \ But Fanny was looking up from one of them withi] ! a startled expression. "He's here. Fenger's here." "In New York?" asked Ella, rather dully. "Yes." She ripped open another letter. It was from Theodore. He was coming to New York in August. The Russian tour had been a brilliant success. They had arranged a series of concerts for him in the United States. He could give his concerto there. It was impossible in Russia, Munich, even Berlin, because it I was distinctly Jewish in theme — as Jewish as the Kcl Nidre, and as somber. They would have none of it in Europe. Prejudice was too strong. But in America! He was happier than he had been in years. Olga ob- jected to coming to America, but she would get over that. The little one was well, and she was learning to talk. Actually! They were teaching her to say Tante Fanny. "Well!" exclaimed Fanny, her eyes shining. She read bits of the letter aloud to Ella, Ella was such a FANNY HERSELF 245 satisfactory sort of person to whom to read a letter aloud. She exclaimed in all the right places. Her face was as radiant as Fanny's. They both had forgotten all about Fenger, their Chief. But they had been in their hotel scarcely a half hour, and Ella had not done exclaiming over the bag that Fanny had brought her from Paris, when his telephone call came. He wasted very little time on preliminaries. "I'll call for you at four. We'll drive through the park, and out by the river, and have tea somewhere." "That would be wonderful. That is, if Ella's free. I'U ask her." "EUa.?" "Yes. She's right here. Hold the wire, will you.?" She turned away from the telephone to face Ella. "It's Mr. Fenger. He wants to take us both driving this afternoon. You can go, can't you.^*" "I certainly caw," replied Miss Monahan, with what might have appeared to be undue force. Fanny turned back to the telephone. ''Yes, thanks. We can both go. We'll be ready at four." Fanny decided that Fenger's muttered reply couldn't have been what she thought it was. Ella busied herself with the unpacking of a bag. She showed a disposition to spoil Fanny. "You haven't asked after your friend, Mr. Heyl. My land ! If I had a friend like that — " "Oh, yes," said Fanny, vaguely. "I suppose you and he are great chums by this time. He's a nice boy." "You don't suppose anything of the kind," Ella retorted, crisply. "That boy, as you call him — and it isn't always the man with the biggest fists that's got the most fight in him — ^is about as far above me as — as — " she sat down on the floor, ponderously, beside the open bag, and gesticulated with a hairbrush, at loss for a simile — "as an eagle is above a waddling old 246 FANNY HERSELF duck. No, I don't mean that, either, because I never did think much of the eagle, morally. But you get me. Not that he knows it, or shows it. Heyl, I mean. Lord, no ! But he's got something — something kind of spir- itual in him that makes you that way, too. He doesn't say much, either. That's the funny part of it. I do all the talking, seems, when I'm with him. But I find myself saying things I didn't know I knew. He makes you think about things you're afraid to face by your- self. Big things. Things inside of you." She fell silent a moment, sitting cross-legged before the bag. Then she got up, snapped the bag shut, and bore it across the room to a corner. "You know he's gone, I s'pose." "Gone.?" "To those mountains, or wherever It is he gets that look in his eyes from. That's my notion of a job. They let him go for the whole summer, roaming around being a naturalist, just so's he'll come back in the winter." "And the column.?" Fanny asked. *'Do they let that go, too.?" "I guess he's going to do some writing for them up there. After all, he's the column. It doesn't make much difference where he writes from. Did you know it's being syndicated now, all over the country.? Well, it is. That's the secret of its success, I suppose. It isn't only a column written about New York for a New York paper. It's about everything, for an3^body. It's the humanest stuff. And he isn't afraid of anything. New York's crazy about him. They say he's getting a salary you wouldn't believe. I'm a tongue-tied old fool when I'm with him, but then, he likes to talk about you, mostly, so it doesn't matter." Fanny turned swiftly from the dressing-table, where she was taking the pins out of her vigorous, abundant hair. FANNY HERSELF 247 **Whal kind of thing does he say about me, Ellen girl. H'm? What kind of thing?" "Abuse, mostly. I'll be running along to my own room now. I'll be out for lunch, but back at four, for that airing Fenger's so wild to have me take. If I were you I'd lie down for an hour, till you get your land-legs." She poked her head in at the door again. "Not that you look as if you needed it. You've got a different look, somehow. Kind of rested. After all, there's nothing like an ocean voyage." She was gone. Fanny stood a moment, in the center of the room. There was nothing relaxed or inert about her. Had you seen her standing there, motionless, you would still have got a sense of action from her. She looked so splendidly alive. She walked to the window, now, and stood looking down upon New York in early June. Summej" had not yet turned the city into a cauldron of stone and steel. From her height she could glimpse the green of the park, with a glint of silver in its heart, that was the lake. Her mind was milling around, aimlessly, in a manner far removed from its usual orderly functioning. Now she thought of Theo- dore, her little brother — his promised return. It had been a slow and painful thing, his climb. Perhaps if she had been more ready to help, if she had not always waited until he asked the aid that she might have volunteered — she thrust that thought out of her mind, rudely, and slammed the door on it. . . . Fenger. He had said, "Damn !" when she had told him about Ella. And his voice had been — well — she pushed that thought outside her mind, too. ... Clarence Heyl. . . . "He makes you think about things you're afraid to face by yourself. Big things. Things inside of you. . . ." Fanny turned away from the window. She decided she must be tired, after all. Because here she was, with everything to make her happy: Theodore coming home ; her foreign trip a success ; Ella and Fenger to 24,8 FANNY HERSELF praise her and make much of her ; a drive and tea this afternoon (she wasn't above these creature comforts) — and still she felt unexhilarated, dull. She decided to go down for a bit of lunch, and perhaps a stroll of ten or fifteen minutes, just to see what Fifth avenue was showing. It was half-past one when she reached that ordinarily well-regulated thoroughfare. She found its sidewalks packed solid, up and down, as far as the eye could see, with a quiet, orderly, expectant mass of people. Squads of mounted police clattered up and down, keeping the middle of the street cleared. What- ever it was that had called forth that incredible mass, was scheduled to proceed uptown from far downtown, and that very soon. Heads were turned that way. Fanny, wedged in the crowd, stood a-tiptoe, but she could see nothing. It brought to her mind the Circus Day of her Winnebago childhood, with Elm street packed with townspeople and farmers, all straining their eyes up toward Cherry street, the first turn in the line of march. Then, far away, the blare of a band. "Here they come!" Just then, far down the canyon of Fifth avenue, sounded the cry that had always swayed Elm street, Winnebago. *'Here they come !" "What is it?" Fanny asked a woman against whom she found herself close-packed. "What are they wait- ing for?" "It's the suffrage parade," replied the woman. "The big suffrage parade. Don't you know?" "No. I haven't been here." Fanny was a little dis- appointed. The crowd had surged forward, so that it was impossible for her to extricate herself. She found herself near the curb. She could see down the broad street now, and below Twenty-third street it was a mov- ing, glittering mass, pennants, banners, streamers fly- ing. The woman next her volunteered additional information. "The mayor refused permission to let them march. fanny; herself 249 But they fought it, and they say it's the greatest suf- frage parade ever held. I'd march myself, only — " "Only what?" "I don't know. I'm scared to, I think. I'm not a New Yorker." "Neither am I," said Fanny. Fanny always became friendly with the woman next her in a crowd. That was her mother in her. One could hear the music of the band, now. Fanny glanced at her watch. It was not quite two. Oh, well, she would wait and see some of it. Her mind was still too freshly packed with European impressions to receive any real idea of the value of this pageant, she told herself. She knew she did not feel particularly interested. But she waited. Another surging forward. It was no longer, "Here they come !" but, "Here they are !" And here they were. A squad of mounted pohce, on very prancy horses. The men looked very ruddy, and well set-up and im- posing. Fanny had always thrilled to anything in uniform, given sufficient numbers of them. Another police squad. A brass band, on foot. And then, in white, on a snow-white charger, holding a white banner aloft, her eyes looking straight ahead, her face very serious and youthful, the famous beauty and suffrage leader, Mildred Inness. One of the few famous beauties who actually was a beauty. And after that women, women, women! Hundreds of them, thousands of them, a river of them flowing up Fifth avenue to the park. More bands. More horses. Women ! Women ! They bore banners. This section, that section. Artists. School teachers. Lawyers. Doctors. Writers. Women in college caps and gowns. Women in white, from shoes to hats. Young women. Girls. Gray-haired women. A woman in a wheel chair, smiling. A man next to Fanny began to jeer. He was a red-faced young man, with a coarse, blotchy skin, and thick lips. 250 FANNY HERSELF He smokeH a cigar, and called to the women in a falsetto voice, "Hello, Sadie!" he called. "Hello, kid!" And the women marched on, serious-faced, calm-eyed. There came floats; elaborate affairs, with girls in Greek robes. Fanny did not care for these. More solid ranks. And then a strange and pitiful and tragic ;^^m SH «f^[^H Wl \'WKi^ 1 ^^ 'You nervy little devil, you!' —Page SOI FANNY HERSELF 309 That IS within our province. In the first place, they made her hungry. That was the crisp, heady air. The mountain road, to one who has never traveled it, is a thing of delicious thrills and near-terror, A narrow, perilous ribbon of road, cut in the side of the rock it- self; a road all horseshoe curves and hairpin twists. Fanny found herself gasping. But that passed after a time. Big Thompson canyon leaves no room for petty terror. And the pongee person was so competent, so quietly sure, so angularly graceful among his brakes and levers. Fanny stole a side glance at him now and then. He looked straight ahead. When you drive a mountain steamer you do look straight ahead. A glance to the right or left is so likely to mean death, or at best a sousing in the Thompson that foams and rushes below. Fanny ventured a question. "Do you know Mr. Heyl?" "Heyl.? Took him down day before yesterday." "Down.?" "To the village. He's gone back east.'* Fanny was not quite sure whether the pang she felt was relief or consternation. At Estes village the blond god handed her over to a twin charioteer who would drive her up the mountain road to the Inn that nestled in a valley nine thousand feet up the mountain. It was a drive Fanny never for- got. Fenger, Ted, Haynes-Cooper, her work, her plans, her ambitions, seemed to dwindle to puny insig- nificance beside the vast grandeur that unfolded before her at every fresh turn in the road. Up they went, and up, and up, and the air was cold, but without a sting in it. It was dark when the lights of the Inn twinkled out at them. The door was thrown open as they swung up the curve to the porch. A great log fire glowed in the fireplace. The dining room held only a dozen people, or thereabouts — a dozen weary, healthy 810 FANNY HERSELF people, in corduroys and sweaters and boots, whose cleanly talk was all about climbing and fishing, and horseback rides and trails. And it was fried chicken night at the Inn. Fanny thought she was too utterly tired to eat, until she began to eat, and then she thought she was too hungry ever to stop. After dinner she sat, for a moment, before the log fire in the low- ceilinged room, with its log walls, its rustic benches, and its soft-toned green and brown cushions. She for- got to be unhappy. She forgot to be anything but deliciously drowsy. And presently she climbed the winding stair whose newel post was a fire-marked tree trunk, richly colored, and curiously twisted. And so to her lamp-lighted room, very small, very clean, very quiet. She opened her window and looked out at the towering mass that was Long's Peak, and at the stars, and she heard the busy little brook that scurries through the Inn yard on its way from the mountain to the valley. She undressed quickly, and crept into bed, meaning to be very, very miserable indeed. And the next thing she knew it was morning. A blue and gold October morning. And the mountains! — but there is no describing a mountain. One uses words, and they are futile. Fanny viewed them again, from her win- dow, between pauses in dressing. And she meant, pri- vately, to be miserable again. But she could only think, somehow, of bacon and eggs, and coffee, and muffins. CHAPTER NINETEEN HEYL'S place. Fanny stood before it, key in hand (she had found it in the mail box, tied to a string), and she had a curious and restful feeling, as if she had come home, after long wanderings. She smiled, whimsically, and repeated her lesson to herself: "The fire's laid in the fireplace with fat pine knots that will blaze up at the touch of a match. My books are there, along the wall. The bedding's in the cedar chest, and the lamps are filled. There's tinned stuff in the pantry. And the mountains are there, girl, to make you clean and whole again. ..." She stepped up to the little log-pillared porch and turned the key in the lock. She opened the door wide, and walked in. And then she shut her eyes for a mo- ment. Because, if it shouldn't be true But there was a fire laid with fat pine knots. She walked straight over to it, and took her box of matches from her bag, struck one, and held it to the wood. They blazed like a torch. Books! Along the four walls, books. Fat, comfortable, used-looking books. Hundreds of them. A lamp on the table, and beside it a pipe, blackened from much use. Fanny picked it up, smiling. She held it a moment in her hand, as though she expected to find it still warm. "It's like one of the fairy tales," she thought, "the kind that repeats and repeats. The kind that says, *and she went into the next room, and it was as the good fairy had said.' " There's tinned stuff in the pantry. She went into the tiny kitchen and opened the pantry door cautiously, 312 FANNY HERSELF being wary of mice. But it met her eye in spotless array. Orderly rows of tins. Orderly rows of bottles. Coffee. Condensed milk. Beans. Spaghetti. Flour. Peaches. Pears. Off the bedroom there was an absurdly adequate little bathroom, with a zinc tub and an elaborate wa- ter-heating arrangement. Fanny threw back her head and laughed as she hadn't laughed in months. "Wild life in .the Rockies," she said aloud. She went back to the book-lined living room. The fire was crackling gloriously. It was a many-windowed room, and each window framed an en- chanting glimpse of mountain, flaming with aspens up to timber-line, and snow-capped at the top. Fanny decided to wait until the fire had died down to a coal- bed. Then she banked it carefully, put on a heavy sweater and a cap, and made for the outdoors. She struck out briskly, tenderfoot that she was. In five minutes she was panting. Her heart was hammering suffocatingly. Her lungs ached. She stopped, trem- bling. Then she remembered. The altitude, of course. Heyl had boasted that his cabin stood at an altitude of over nine thousand feet. Well, she would have to get used to it. But she was soon striding forward as briskly as before. She was a natural mountain dweller. The air, the altitude, speeded up her heart, her lungs, sent the blood dancing through her veins. Figura- tively, she was on tip-toe. They had warned her, at the Inn, to take it slowly for the first few days. They had asked no questions. Fanny learned to heed their advice. She learned many more things in the next few days. She learned how to entice the chipmunks that crossed her path, streak o' sunshine, streak o' shadow. She learned to broil bacon over a fire, with a forked stick. She learned to ride trail ponies, and to bask in a sun-warmed spot on a wind-swept hill; and to tell time by the sun, and to give FANNY HERSELF. 313 thanks for the beauty of the world about her, and to leave the wild flowers unpicked, to put out her camp- fire with scrupulous care, and to destroy all rubbish (your true woodsman and mountaineer is as painstak- ingly neat as a French housewife). She was out of doors all day. At night she read for a while before the fire, but by nine her eyehds were heavy. She walked down to the Inn sometimes, but not often. One memorable night she went, with half a dozen others from the Inn, to the tiny one-room cabin of Oscar, the handy man about the Inn, and there she listened to one of Oscar's far-famed phonograph con- certs. Oscar's phonograph had cost twenty-five dollars in Denver. It stood in one corner of his cabin, and its base was a tree stump just five hundred years old, as you could tell for yourself by counting its rings. His cabin walls were gorgeous with pictures of Maxine Elliott in her palmy days, and blonde and sophisticated little girls on Vinegar calendars, posing bare-legged and self-conscious in blue calico and sunbonnets. You sat in the warm yellow glow of Oscar's lamp and were regaled with everything from the Swedish National Anthem to Mischa Elman's tenderest crooning. And Oscar sat rapt, his weather-beaten face a rich deep mahogany, his eyes bluer than any eyes could ever be except in contrast with that ruddy countenance, his teeth so white that you found yourself watching for his smile that was so gently sweet and childlike. Oh, when Oscar put on his black pants and issued invitations for a musical evening one was sure to find his cabin packed. Eight did it, with squeezing. This, then, was the atmosphere in which Fanny Bran- deis found herself. As far from Haynes-Cooper as anything could be. At the end of the first week she found herself able to think clearly and unemotionally about Theodore, and about Fenger. She had even evolved a certain rather crude philosophy out of the 314 FANNY HERSELF ruins that had tumbled about her ears. It was so crude, so unformed in her mind that it can hardly be set down. To justify one's own existence. That was all that life held or meant. But that included all the lives that touched on yours. It had nothing to do with success, as she had counted success heretofore. It was service, really. It was living as — well, as Molly Bran- deis had lived, helpfully, self-effacingly, magnificently. Fanny gave up trying to form the thing that was grow- ing in her mind. Perhaps, after all, it was too soon to expect a complete understanding of that which had worked this change in her from that afternoon in Fen- ger's library. After the first few days she found less and less diffi- culty in climbing. Her astonished heart and lungs ceased to object so strenuously to the unaccustomed work. The Cabin Rock trail, for example, whose sum- mit found her panting and exhausted at first, now seemed a mere stroll. She grew more daring and am- bitious. One day she climbed the Long's Peak trail to timberline, and had tea at Timberline Cabin with Al- bert Edward Cobbins. Albert Edward Cobbins, Eng- lishman, erstwhile sailor, adventurer and gentleman, was the keeper of Timberline Cabin, and the loneliest man in the Rockies. It was his duty to house over- night climbers bound for the Peak, sunrise parties and sunset parties, all too few now in the chill October season-end. Fanny was his first visitor in three days. He was pathetically glad to see her. "I'll have tea for you," he said, "in a jiiFy. And I baked a pan of French rolls ten minutes ago. I had a feeling." A magnificent specimen of a man, over six feet tall, slim, broad-shouldered, long-headed, and scrubbed- looking as only an Englishman can be, there was some- thing almost pathetic in the sight of him bustling about the rickety little kitchen stove. FANNY HERSELF 815 **To-morrow," said Fanny, over her tea, "I'm going to get an early start, reach here by noon, and go on to Boulder Field and maybe Keyhole." "Better, not. Miss. Not in October, when there's likely to be a snowstorm up there in a minute's notice." "You'd come and find me, wouldn't you.? They al- ways do, in the books." "Books are all very well. Miss. But I'm not a moun- tain man. The truth is I don't know my way fifty feet from this cabin. I got the job because I'm used to loneliness, and don't mind it, and because I can cook, d'you see, having shipped as cook for years. But I'm a seafaring man. Miss. I wouldn't advise it, Miss. Another cup of tea.'^" But Long's Peak, king of the range, had fascinated her from the first. She knew that the climb to the summit would be impossible for her now, but she had an overwhelming desire to see the terrifying bulk of it from a point midway of the range. It beckoned her and intrigued her, as the difficult always did. By noon of the following day she had left Albert Ed- ward's cabin (he stood looking after her in the door- way until she disappeared around the bend) and was jauntily following the trail that led to Boulder Field, that sea of jagged rock a mile across. Soon she had left the tortured, wind-twisted timberline trees far be- hind. How pitiful Cabin Rock and Twin Sisters looked compared to this. She climbed easily and steadily, stopping for brief rests. Early in the week she had ridden down to the village, where she had bought climb- ing breeches and stout leggings. She laughed at Albert Edward and his fears. By one o'clock she had reached Boulder Field. She found the rocks glazed with ice. Just over Keyhole, that freakish vent in a wall of rock, the blue of the sky had changed to the gray of snow- clouds. Tenderfoot though she was, she knew that the climb over Boulder Field would be perilous, if not im- 316 FANNY HERSELF possible. She went on, from rock to rock, for half an hour, then decided to turn back. A clap of thun- der, that roared and crashed, and cracked up and down the canyons and over the peaks, hastened her decision. She looked about her. Peak on peak. Purple and black and yellow masses, fantastic in their hugeness. Chasms. Canyons. Pyramids and minarets. And so near. So grim. So ghastly desolate. And yet so threatening. And then Fanny Brandeis was seized with mountain terror. It is a disease recognized by moun- tain men everywhere, and it is panic, pure and simple. It is fear brought on by the immensity and the silence of the mountains. A great horror of the vastness and ruggedness came upon her. It was colossal, it was crushing, it was nauseating. She began to run. A mistake, that, when one is fol- lowing a mountain trail, at best an elusive thing. In five minutes she had lost the trail. She stopped, and scolded herself sternly, and looked about her. She saw the faint trail line again, or thought she saw it, and made toward it, and found it to be no trail at all. She knew that she must be not more than an hour's walk from Timberline Cabin, and Albert Edward, and his biscuits and tea. Why be frightened.'' It was absurd. But she was frightened, horribly, harrowingly. The great, grim rock masses seemed to be shaking with silent laughter. She began to run again. She was very cold, and a piercing wind had sprung up. She kept on walking, doggedly, reasoning with herself quite calmly, and proud of her calmness. Which proves how terrified she really was. Then the snow came, not slowly, not gradually, but a blanket of it, as it does come in the mountains, shutting off everything. And suddenly Fanny's terror vanished. She felt quite free from weariness. She was alive and tingling to her fingertips. The psychology of fear is a fascinating thing. Fanny had reached the second stage. She was FANNY HERSELF 817 quite taken out of herself. She forgot her stone- bruised feet. She was no longer conscious of cold. She ran now, fleetly, lightly, the ground seeming to spur her on. She had given up the trail completely now. She told herself that if she ran on, down, down, down, she must come to the valley sometime. Unless she was turned about, and headed in the direction of one of those hideous chasms. She stopped a moment, peering through the snow curtain, but she could see nothing. She ran on lightly, laughing a little. Then her feet met a projection, she stumbled, and fell flat over a slab of wood that jutted out of the ground. She lay there a moment, dazed. Then she sat up, and bent down to look at this thing that had tripped her. Probably a tree trunk. Then she must be near timberline. She bent closer. It was a rough wooden slab. Closer still. There were words carved on it. She lay flat and man- aged to make them out painfully. "Here lies Sarah Cannon. Lay to rest, and died alone, April 26, 1893." Fanny had heard the story of Sarah Cannon, a stern spinster who had achieved the climb to the Peak, and who had met with mishap on the down trail. Her guide had left her to go for help. When the relief party re- turned, hours later, they had found her dead. Fanny sprang up, filled with a furious energy. She felt strangely light and clear-headed. She ran on, stopped, ran again. Now she was making little short runs here and there. It was snowing furiously, vin- dictively. It seemed to her that she had been running for hours. It probably was minutes. Suddenly she sank down, got to her feet again, stumbled on perhaps a dozen paces, and sank down again. It was as though her knees had turned liquid. She lay there, with her eyes shut. "I'm just resting," she told herself. "In a minute I'll go on. In a minute. After I've rested." ^ 318 FANNY HERSELF "Hallo-o-o-o !" from somewhere on the other side of the snow blanket. "Hallo-o-o-o !" Fanny sat up, helloing shrilly, hysterically. She got to her feet, staggeringly. And Clarence Heyl walked toward her. "You ought to be spanked for this," he said. Fanny began to cry weakly. She felt no curiosity as to his being there. She wasn't at all sure that he actually was there, for that matter. At that thought she dug a frantic hand into his arm. He seemed to understand, for he said, "It's all right. I'm real enough. Can you walk?" "Yes." But she tried it and found she could not. She decided she was too tired to care. "I stumbled over a thing — a horrible thing — a gravestone. And I must have hurt my leg. I didn't know " She leaned against him, a dead weight. "Tell you what," said Heyl, cheerfully. "You wait here. I'll go on down to Timberline Cabin for help, and come back." "You couldn't manage it — alone.'' If I tried? If I tried to walk?" "Oh, impossible." His tone was brisk. "Now you sit right down here." She sank down obediently. She felt a little sorry for herself, and glad, too, and queer, and not at all cold. She looked up at him dumbly. He was smiling. "All right?" She nodded. He turned abruptly. The snow hid him from sight at once. "Here lies Sarah Cannon. Lay to rest and died alone, April 26, 1893." She sank down, and pillowed her head on her arms. She knew that this was the end. She was very drowsy, and not at all sad. Happy, if anything. "You didn't really think I'd leave you, did you. Fan?" She opened her eyes. Heyl was there. He reached down, and lifted her lightly to her feet. "Timberline FANNY HERSELF 319 Cabin's not a hundred yards away. I just did it to try you." She had spirit enough left to say, *'Beast." Then he swung her up, and carried her down the trail. He carried her, not in his arms, as they do it in books and in the movies. He could not have gone a hundred feet that way. He carried her over his shoul- der, like a sack of meal, by one arm and one leg, I re- gret to say. Any boy scout knows that trick, and will tell you what I mean. It is the most effectual carrying method known, though unromantic. And so they came to Timberline Cabin, and Albert Edward Cobbins was in the doorway. Heyl put her down gently on the bench that ran alongside the table. The hospitable table that bore two smoking cups of tea. Fanny's lips were cracked, and the skin was peeled from her nose, and her hair was straggling and her eyes red-rimmed. She drank the tea in great gulps. And then she went into the tiny bunkroom, and tumbled into one of the shelf-bunks, and slept. When she awoke she sat up in terror, and bumped her head against the bunk above, and called, "Clancy !" "Yep!" from the next room. He came to the door. The acrid smell of their pipes was incense in her nos- trils. "Rested.?" "What time is it.?" "Seven o'clock. Dinner time. Ham and eggs.'' She got up stiffly, and bathed her roughened face, and produced a powder pad (they carry them in the face of danger, death, and dissolution) and dusted it over her scaly nose. She did her hair — her vigorous, abundant hair that shone in the lamplight, pulled down her blouse, surveyed her torn shoes ruefully, donned the khaki skirt that Albert Edward had magically pro- duced from somewhere to take the place of her breeches. She dusted her shoes with a bit of rag, regarded herself steadily in the wavering mirror, and went in. 320 FANNY HERSELF The two men were talking quietly. Albert Edward was moving deftly from stove to table. They both looked up as she came in, and she looked at Heyl. Their eyes held. Albert Edward was as sporting a gentleman as the late dear king whose name he bore. He went out to tend Heyl's horse, he said. It was little he knew of horses, and he rather feared them, as does a sailing man. But he went, nevertheless. Heyl still looked at Fanny, and Fanny at him. "It's absurd," said Fanny. "It's the kind of thing that doesn't happen." "It's simple enough, really," he answered. "I saw Ella Monahan in Chicago, and she told mc all she knew, and something of what she had guessed. I waited a few days and came back. I had to." He smiled. "A pretty job you've made of trying to be selfish." At that she smiled, too, pitifully enough, for her lower lip trembled. She caught it between her teeth in a last sharp effort at self-control. "Don't!" she qua- vered. And then, in a panic, her two hands came up in a vain effort to hide the tears. She sank down on the rough bench by the table, and the proud head came down on her arms so that there was a little clatter and tinkle among the supper things spread on the table. Then quiet. Clarence Heyl stared. He stared, helplessly, as does a man who has never, in all his life, been called upon to comfort a woman in tears. Then instinct came to his rescue. He made her side of the table in two strides (your favorite film star couldn't have done it better), put his two hands on her shoulders and neatly shifted the bowed head from the cold, hard surface of the table top to the warm, rough, tobacco-scented comfort of his coat. It rested there quite naturally. Just as nat- urally Fanny's arm crept up, and about his neck. So they remained for a moment, until he bent so that his» FANNY HERSELF 821 lips touched her hair. Her head came up at that, sharply, so that it bumped his chin. They both laughed, looking into each other's eyes, but at what they saw there they stopped laughing and were serious. "Dear," said Heyl. "Dearest." The lids drooped over Fanny's eyes. "Look at me," said Heyl. So she tried to lift them again, bravely, and could not. At that he bent his head and kissed Fanny Brandeis in the way a woman wants to be kissed for the first time by the man she loves. It hurt her lips, that kiss, and her teeth, and the back of her neck, and it left her breath- less, and set things whirling. When she opened her eyes (they shut them at such times) he kissed her again, very tenderly, this time, and lightly, and reas- suringly. She returned that kiss, and, strangely enough, it was the one that stayed in her memory long, long after the other had faded. "Oh, Clancy, I've made such a mess of it all. SucK a miserable mess. The little girl in the red tarn was worth ten of me. I don't see how you can — care for me." "You're the most wonderful woman in the world," said Heyl, "and the most beautiful and splendid." He must have meant it, for he was looking down at her as he said it, and we know that the skin had been peeled off her nose by the mountain winds and sun, that her lips were cracked and her cheeks rough, and that she was red-eyed and worn-looking. And she must have believed him, for she brought his cheek down to hers with such a sigh of content, though she said, "But are we at all suited to each other?" "Probably not," Heyl answered, briskly. "That's why we're going to be so terrifically happy. Some day I'll be passing the Singer building, and I'll glance up at it and think how pitiful it would look next to Long's Peak. And then I'll be off, probably, to these moun- tains,'* 822 FANNY HERSELF "Or some day," Fanny returned, "we^ll be up here, and I'll remember, suddenly, how Fifth Avenue looks on a bright afternoon between four and five. And I'll be off, probably, to the Grand Central station." And then began one of those beautiful and foolish conversations which all lovers have whose love has been a sure and steady growth. Thus: "When did you first begin to care," etc. And, "That day we spent at the dunes, and you said so and so, did you mean this and that?" Albert Edward Cobbins announced his approach by terrific stampings and scufflings, ostensibly for the pur- pose of ridding his boots of snow. He entered looking casual, and very nipped. "You're here for the night," he said. "A regular blizzard. The greatest piece of luck I've had in a month." He busied himself with the ham and eggs and the teapot. "Hungry.'"' "Not a bit," said Fanny and Heyl, together. "H'm," said Albert Edward, and broke six eggs into the frying pan just the same. After supper they aided Albert Edward in the proc- ess of washing up. When everything was tidy he light- ed his most malignant pipe and told them seafaring yarns not necessarily true. Then he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and fell asleep there by the fire, effacing himself as effectually as one of three people can in a single room. They talked ; low-toned murmurings that they seemed to find exquisitely meaningful or witty, by turn. Fanny, rubbing a forefinger (his) along her weather-roughened nose, would say, "At least you've seen me at my worst.'* Or he, mock serious: "I think I ought to tell you that I'm the kind of man who throws wet towels into the laundry hamper." But there was no mirth in Fanny's voice when she said, "Dear, do you think Lasker will give me that job.'' FANNY HERSELF 82S You know he said, *When you want a job, come back/ Do you think he meant it?" "Lasker always means it." "But," fearfully, and shyly, too, "you don't think I may have lost my drawing hand and my seeing eye, do you? As punishment?" "I do not. I think you've just found them, for keeps. There wasn't a woman cartoonist in the coun- try — or man, either, for that matter — could touch you two years ago. In two more I'll be just Fanny Bran- deis' husband, that's all." They laughed together at that, so that Albert Ed- ward Cobbins awoke with a start and tried to look as if he had not been asleep, and failing, smiled benignly and drowsily upon them. *'The Books You Like to Read at the Price You Like to Pay" There Are Two Sides to Everything — — ^including the wrapper which covers every Grosser & Dunlap book. When you feel in the mood for a good ro- mance, refer to the carefully selected list of modern fiction comprising most of the successes by prominent writers of the day which is printed on the back of every Grosser & Dunlap book wrapper. You will find more than five hundred titles to choose from — books for every mood and every taste and every pocket- book. Dm*f forget the other side, hut in case the wrapper is lost, write to the publishers for a complete catalog. 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