 CHAPTER XIII From now on Fanny Brandeis's life became such a swift-flowing thing that your trilogist would have regarded her with disgust. Here was no slow unfolding, petal by petal. Here were two processes going on side by side. Fanny, the woman of business, flourished and throed like a weed, arrogantly flaunting its head above the timid white flower that lay close to the soil and crept and spread and multiplied. Between the two the fight went on silently. Fate or chance, or whatever it is that directs our movements, was forever throwing tragic or comic little life-groups in her path, and then, pointing an arresting finger at her, implying, this means you. Fanny stepped over those obstructions, or walked around them, or stared straight through them. She had told herself that she would observe the first anniversary of her mother's death with none of those ancient customs by which your pious Jew honors his dead. There would be no yarsight light burning for twenty-four hours. She would not go to temple for Kiddish prayer. But the thing was too strong for her, too anciently inbred. Her ancestors would have lighted a candle, or an oil lamp. Fanny, coming home at six, found herself turning on the shaded electric lamp in her hall. She went through to the kitchen. Princess, when you come in to-morrow morning you'll find a light in the hall. Don't turn it off until to-morrow evening at six. All day long, Miss Fan! My six! What foe! It's just a religious custom. Did no you had no religion, Miss Fan? These sways I never could figure. I haven't," said Fanny shortly. Dinner ready soon, Princess? I'm starved. She had entered a Jewish house of worship only once in this year. It was the stately white-columned edifice on Grand Boulevard that housed the congregation presided over by the famous Kirsh. She had heard of him, naturally. She was there out of curiosity like any other newcomer to Chicago. The beauty of the auditorium enchanted her. A magnificently proportioned room, and restful without being in the least gloomy. Then she had been interested in the congregation as it wrestled in. She thought she had never seen so many modestly-gowned women in one room in all her life. The men were sleetly broadcloth, but they lacked the well-dressed air somehow. The women were slimly elegant in tailored suits and furs. They all looked as if they had been turned out by the same tailor. An artist in his line, but of limited imagination. Dr. Kirsh, sociologist and savant, aqualine, semi-bold, grimly satiric, sat in his splendid high-backed chair, surveying his silk and flock through half-clothed lids. He looked tired and rather ill, Fanny thought, but distinctly a personage. She wondered if he held them or they him. That recalled to her the little Winnebago Temple and Rabbi Thalman. She remembered the frequent rudeness and open in attention of that congregation. No doubt Mrs. Nathan Perelis had her counterpart here, and the hypocritical Bella Weinberg, too, and the giggling Aaron's girls and old Ben Reitman. Here Dr. Kirsh had risen, and coming forward had paused to lean over his desk and, with an awful geniality, had looked down upon two rustling exquisitely gowned latecomers. They sank into their seats, cowed. Fanny grinned. He began his lecture, something about modern politics. Fanny was fascinated and resentful by turns. His brilliant satire probed, cut, jabbed like a surgeon's scalpel, or he railed, scolded, snarled like a dispeptic schoolmaster. Often he was in wretched taste. He mimicked, postured, sneered. But he had this millionaire congregation of his in hand. Fanny found herself smiling up at him, delightedly. Perhaps this wasn't religion, as she had been taught to look upon it, but it certainly was tonic. She told herself that she would have come to the same conclusion if Kirsh had occupied a Methodist pulpit. There were no Kiddish prayers in Kirsh's temple. On the Friday following the first anniversary of Molly Brandeis's death, Fanny did not go home after working hours, but took a bite of supper in a neighborhood restaurant. Then she found her way to one of the Orthodox Russian Jewish synagogues on the west side. It was a dim, odorous, bare little place this house of worship. Fanny had never seen one like it before. She was herded up into the gallery where the women sat, and when the patriarchal rabbi began to intone the prayer for the dead, Fanny threw the gallery into wide panic by rising for it, a thing that no woman is allowed to do in an Orthodox Jewish church. She stood calmly, though the beshalled woman to right and left of her yanked at her coat. In January, Fanny discovered New York. She went as selector for her department. Here after, Slosson would only do the actual buying. Styles, prices and materials would be decided by her. Ella Monaghan accompanied her, it being the time for her monthly trip. Fanny openly envied her her knowledge of New York's wholesale district. Ella offered to help. No, Fanny had replied, I think not, thanks. You have your own work, and besides, I know pretty well what I want and where to go to get it. It's making them give it to me that will be hard. They went to the same hotel and took connecting rooms, each when her own way, not seeing the other from morning until night, but they often found kimono comfort in each other's presence. Fanny had spent weeks outlining her plan of attack. She had determined to retain the cheap grades but to add a finer line as well. She recalled those lace beddeck bundles that the farmer women and mill hands had borne so tenderly in their arms. Here was one direction in which they allowed extravagance of free reign. As a canny businesswoman, she would trade on her knowledge of their weakness. A Haines Cooper order is never a thing to be despised by a wholesaler. Fanny, knowing this, had made up her mind to go straight to Horn and Udale. Now Horn and Udale are responsible for the bloomers your small daughter wears under her play frock in place of the troublesome and extravagant petticoat of the old days. It was they who introduced smocked pinafores to you and those modest patent leather belts for children at which your grandmothers would have raised horrified hands. They taught you that an inch of hand embroidery is worth a yard of cheap lace, and as for style, cut, line, you can tell a Horn and Udale child from among a flock of thirty. Fanny, entering their office, felt much as Molly Brandeis had felt that January many, many years before when she had made that first terrifying trip to the Chicago market. The engagement had been made days before. Fanny never knew the shock that her youthful expectant face gave old Sid Udale. He turned from his desk to greet her, his polite smile of greeting, giving way to a look of bewilderment. But you are not the buyer, are you, Miss Brandeis? No, Mr. Slosson buys. I thought so. But I select for my entire department. I decide on our styles, materials, and prices, six months in advance. Then Mr. Slosson does the actual bulk buying. Something new fangled, inquired Sid Udale. Of course, we've never sold much to you people. Our stuff is—yes, I know, but you'd like to, wouldn't you? Our class of goods isn't exactly suited to your wants. Yes, it is. Exactly. That's why I'm here. We'll be doing business of a million and a quarter in my department in another two years. No firm, not even Horn and Udale, can afford to ignore an account like that. Sid Udale smiled a little. You've made up your mind to that million and a quarter, young lady? Yes. Well, I've dealt with buyers for a quarter of a century or more, and I'd say that you're going to get it. Whereupon Fanny began to talk. Ten minutes later Udale interrupted her to summon Horn, whose domain was the factory. When came, was introduced, looked doubtful. Fanny had statistics, Fanny had arguments, she had determination. And what we want, she went on in her quiet, assured way, is style. The Horn and Udale clothes have chic. Now material can't be imitated successfully, but style can. Our goods lack just that. I could copy any model you have, turn the idea over to a cheap manufacturer, and get a million just like it at one fifth the price. That isn't a threat, it's just a business statement that you know to be true. I can sketch from memory anything I've seen once. What I want to know is this. Will you make it necessary for me to do that? Or will you undertake to furnish us with cheaper copies of your high price designs? We could use your entire output. I know the small town woman of the poorer class, and I know she'll wear a shawl in order to give her child a cloth coat with fancy buttons and a velvet collar. And Horn and Udale, whose attitude at first had been that of two seasoned businessmen dealing with a precocious child, found themselves quoting prices to her, shipments, materials, quality, quantities. Then came the question of time. We'll get out a special catalog for the summer, Fanny said, a small one to start them our way. Then the big fall catalog 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 work room, put on extra hands? It's worth it. They might, under normal conditions. But there was this strike talk, its ugly head bobbing up in a hundred places, and their goods were the kind that required high-class workers. Their girls earned all the way from twelve to twenty-five dollars. But Fanny knew she had driven home the entering wedge. She left them after making an engagement for the following day. The Horn and Udale factory was in New York's newer loft building section, around Madison, Fifth Avenue, and the Her hotel was very near. She walked up Fifth Avenue a little way, and as she walked she wondered why she did not feel more elated. Her day's work had exceeded her expectations. It was a brilliant January afternoon, with a snap in the air that was almost western. Fifth Avenue flowed up, flowed down, and Fanny fought the impulse to stare after every second or third woman she passed. They were so invariably well-dressed. There was none of the occasional shabbiness or doubtiness of Michigan Avenue. Every woman seemed to have emerged fresh from the hands of masseuse and maid. Their hair was quaffed to suit the angle of the hat, and the hat had been chosen to enhance the contour of the head, and the head was carried with regard for the dark furs that encircled the throat. They were amazingly well shod. Their white gloves were white, a fact remarkable to any soot-haunted Chicagoan. Their coloring rivaled the roseleaf, and nobody's nose was red. Goodness knows I've never pretended to be a beauty, Fanny said that evening in conversation with Ella Monaghan. But I've always thought I had my good points. By the time I'd reach 42nd Street I wouldn't have given two cents for my chances of winning a caveman on a desert island. She made up her mind that she would go back to the hotel, get a thick coat, and ride outside one of those fascinating Fifth Avenue buses. It struck her as an ideal way to see this amazing street. She was back at her hotel in ten minutes. Ella had not yet come in. Their rooms were on the tenth floor. Fanny got her coat, peered at her own reflection in the mirror, sighed, shook her head, and was off down the hall toward the elevators. The great hall window looked toward Fifth Avenue, but between it and the avenue rose a yellow brick building that housed tier on tier of manufacturing lofts. Cloaks, suits, blouses, petticoats, hats, dresses. It was just such a building as Fanny had come from when she had left the offices of Horn and 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 handwork. But not as women are accustomed to sew with leisurely stitches, stopping to pat a seam here to run a calculating eye along a hem or ruffle. It was dreadful mechanical motion that sewing, a machine-like relentless motion, with no waste in it, no pause. Fanny's mind leaped back to Winnebago with its pleasant porches on which leisurely women sat stitching peacefully at a fine seam. What was it she had said to Udell? Can't you speed up the workroom? It's worth it. Fanny turned abruptly from the window as the door of the bronze and mirrored lift opened for her. She walked over to Fifth Avenue again and up to 45th Street. Then she scrambled up the spiral stairs of a Washington Square bus. The air was crisp, clear, intoxicating. To her Chicago eyes, the buildings, the streets, the very sky looked startlingly fresh and new-washed. As the bus lurched down Fifth Avenue, she leaned over the railing to stare, fascinated, at the colorful, shifting, brilliant panorama of the most amazing street in the world. Block after block, as far as the eye could see, the gorgeous procession moved up, moved down, and the great gleaming motor cars crept, and crawled, and writhed in and out, like nothing so much as swollen angle worms in a fishing can, Fanny thought. Her eye was caught by one limousine that stood out, even in that crush of magnificence. It was all black as though scorning to attract the eye with vulgar color, and it was lined with white. Fanny thought it looked very much like Siegel and Cohen's hearse back in Winnebago. In it sat a woman, all furs and orchids in complexion. She was holding up to the window a little dog with a wrinkled and weary face, like that of an old, old man. He was sticking his little evil, eager red tongue out at the world. And he wore a very smart and woolly white sweater of the imported kind with a monogram done in black. The traffic policeman put up his hand. The bus rumbled on down the street. Names that had always been remotely mythical to her now met her eye and became realities, mailards, and that great red stone castle was the Waldorf, almost historic, and it looked newer than the smoke-grimed black stone. And straight ahead, why, that must be the flat iron building. It loomed up like the giant prowl of an unimaginable ship, Brentanos, the Holland House, Madison Square. Why, there never was anything so terrifying and beautiful and palpitating and exquisite as this Fifth Avenue in the late winter afternoon, with the sky ahead a rosy mist, and the golden lights just beginning to spangle the gray. At Madison Square she decided to walk. She negotiated the bus steps with surprising skill for a novice, and scurried along the perilous crossing to the opposite side. She entered Madison Square. But why hadn't O'Henry emphasized its beauty instead of its squalor? It lay a purple pool of shadow surrounded by the great gleaming many windowed office buildings, like an amethyst sunk in a circle of diamonds. It's a fairyland," Fanny told herself. Who'd have thought a city could be so beautiful? And then at her elbow a voice said, Oh, lady, for the love of 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've been sitting here hours. Fanny clutched her bag a little fearfully. She looked at his huge frame. Why don't you work? Work! You laughed. There ain't any. Look at this! He turned up his foot, and you saw the bare sole, blackened and horrible and fringed comically by the tattered leather upper. Oh, my dear! said Fanny, and at that the man began to cry, weakly, sickeningly, like a little boy. Don't do that! Don't! Here! She was emptying her purse and something inside her was saying, You fool! He's only a professional beggar. And then the man wiped his face with his cap and swallowed hard and said, I don't want all you got. I ain't holding you up. Just give me that. I've been sitting here on that bench, looking at that sign across the street. Over there it says, eat. It goes off and on, seeming like it was driving me crazy. Fanny thrust a crumpled five-dollar bill into his hand, and was off. She fairly flew along, so that it was not until she had reached thirty-third street that she said aloud, as was her way when moved. I don't care. Don't blame me. It was that miserable little beast of a dog in the white sweater that did it. It was almost seven when she reached her room. A maid in neat black and white was just coming out with an armful of towels. I just brought you a couple of extra towels. We were short this morning, she said. The room was warm and quiet and bright. In her bathroom that glistened with blue and white tiling were those redundant towels. Fanny stood in the doorway and counted them whimsically. Four great fuzzy bath towels. Eight glistening hand towels. A blue and white bath rug hung at the side of the tub. Her telephone rang. It was Ella. Where in the world have you been, child? I was worried about you. I thought you were lost in the streets of New York. I took a bus ride, Fanny explained. See anything of New York? I saw all of it," replied Fanny. Ella laughed at that, but Fanny's face was serious. How did you make out at Horn and Udall's? Never mind. I'm coming in for a minute, can I? Please do. I need you. A moment later Ella bounced in, fresh as to blouse, pink as to cheeks. Her whole appearance a testimony to the revivifying effects of a warm bath, a brief nap, clean clothes. Dear child, you look tired. I'm not going to stay. You get dressed and I'll meet you for dinner, or do you want yours up here? Oh, no! Follow 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 them on Fifth Avenue, and it seemed I'd die if I couldn't have them too, and I dabbed on rouge and touched up my eyebrows. I don't know. It's the kind of crazy feeling gets you. The minute I got on the train for Chicago I washed my face and took my hair down and did it plain again. Why, that's the way I felt, laughed Fanny. I didn't care anything about Infantswear, or Haines Cooper, or anything. I just wanted to be beautiful as they all were. Sure, it gets us all. Fanny twisted her hair into the relentless knob women assumed 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, bathbound, turned to stare at Ella. A column about what? Oh, everything. New York, mostly, says it's the humanist stuff. He says the kind of thing we'd all say if we knew how. Reading him is like getting a letter from home. I'll bet he went to a country school and wore his mittens sewed to a piece of tape that ran through his coat sleeves. You're right, said Fanny. He did. That man's from Winnebago, Wisconsin. No. Yes. Do you mean you know him? Honestly, what's he like? But Fanny had vanished. I'm a tired businesswoman, she called back, above the splashing that followed, and I won't converse until I'm fed. But how about Horn and Udall? 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 devil-you, you'll be making me look like a stock girl next. Fanny did not telephone Hale until the day she left New York. She had told herself she would not telephone him at all. He had sent her his New York address and telephone number months before, after that Sunday at the Dunes. Ella Monaghan 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 sort of instinct with her. She seemed to scent the picturesque. She never for a moment neglected her work. But she had found it was often impossible to see these New York businessmen until ten, sometimes eleven o'clock. She awoke at seven, a habit formed in her Winnebago days. Eight-thirty-one morning found her staring up at the dim vastness of the dome of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The great gray pile, mountainous, almost ominous, looms up in the midst of the dingy, common-placeness of Amsterdam Avenue and 110th Street. New Yorkers do not know this, or if they know it, the fact does not interest them. New Yorkers do not go to stare up into the murky shadows of this glorious edifice. They would if it were situate in Rome. Bear, crude, unfinished, chaotic, it gives rich promise of magnificent fulfillment. In an age when great structures are thrown up to-day to be torn down to-morrow, this slow-moving giant is at once a reproach and an example. Twenty-five years in building, twenty-five more for completion, it has elbowed its way, stone by stone, into such company as St. Peter's at Rome and the marvel at Milan. Fanny found her way down the crude cinder pass that made an alley-like approach to the Cathedral. She entered at the side door that one found by following arrows posted on the rough wooden fence. Once inside she stood a moment, awed by the immensity of the half-finished nave. As she stood there, hands clasped, her face turned rapidly up to where the massive granite columns reared their height to frame the choir, she was, for the moment, as devout as any Episcopalian whose money had helped make the great building. Not only devout, but prayerful, ecstatic. That was partly due to the effect of the pillars, the lights, the tapestries, the great unfinished chunks of stone that loomed out from the side walls, and the purple shadow cast by the window above the chapels at the far end, and partly to the actress in her that responded magically to any mood and always to surroundings. Later she walked softly down the deserted nave past the choir to the cluster of chapels set like gems at one end and running from north to south in a semi-circle. A placard outside one said, St. Saviour's Chapel, for those who wish to rest and pray. All white marble this little nook gleaming softly in the grey half-light. Fanny entered and sat down. She was quite alone. The roar and crash of the Eighth Avenue L, the Amsterdam cars, the motors drumming up Morningside Hill were softened here to a soothing hum. For those who wish to rest and pray. Fanny Brandeis had neither rested nor prayed since that hideous day when she had hurled her prayer of defiance at him. But something within her now began agroping for words, for words that should follow an ancient plea beginning, O God of my fathers! But at that the picture of the room came back to her mental vision, the room so quiet except for the breathing of the woman on the bed, the woman with the tolerant, humorous mouth, and the straight, clever nose and the softly bright brown eyes also strangely pinched and shrunken looking now. Fanny got to her feet with a noisy scraping of the chair on the stone floor. The vague, half-formed prayer died at birth. She found her way out of the dim, quiet little chapel up the long aisle and out the great door. She shivered a little in the cold of the early January morning as she hurried toward the Broadway subway. At nine-thirty she was standing at a counter in the infant's wear section at Beth'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 here to four. 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. Fanker will be out 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 Hale, 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, Hale did not say, Who is this? Neither did he put those inevitable questions of the dweller to the transient. Where are you? How long have you been here? What he said was, How are you going to avoid dining with me tonight? To which Fanny replied promptly, by taking the twentieth century back to Chicago today. A little silence. A hurt silence. Then, when they get the twentieth century habit they're as good as lost. How's the infant swear 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 today. I'll be in Chicago tomorrow, barring wrecks. You might have let me show you our more or less fair city. I've shown it to myself. I've seen Riverside Drive at sunset and at night. That alone would have been enough. But I've seen Fulton Market too, and the Grand Street stalls, and Washington Square and Central Park, and Lady Duff Gordon's inner showroom, and the Night Court, and the Grand Central Subway horror at 6 p.m., and the gambling on the curb, and the bench sleepers in Madison Square. Oh, Clancy, the misery. Hey, wait a minute, all this alone? Yes. And one more thing. I've landed Horn and Udell, which means nothing to you, but to me it means that by spring my department will be a credit to its stepmother, a real success. I knew it would be a success, so did you. Anything you might attempt would be successful. You'd have made a successful lawyer, or cook, or actress, or hydraulic engineer, because you couldn't do a thing badly. It isn't in you. You're a superlative sort of person. But that's no reason for being any of those things. If you won't admit a debt to humanity, surely you'll acknowledge you've an obligation to yourself. Preaching again. Goodbye. Fanny, you're afraid to see me. Don't be ridiculous. Why should I be? Because I say out loud the things you dare not 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 15 minutes before train time. I don't care if every infant's 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 red cap, picked him at once from among the crowd of clock waiters. He saw her at the same time and started forward with that singularly life 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 Hale, and began to revolve slowly, coyly, hands out, palms down, islands drooping, and delicious imitation of those ladies whose business it is to revolve thus for fashion. Clancy, you idiot! All these people! Stop it! But get the grace! Get the easy English hang at once so loose and so clinging. Fanny grinned appreciatively and led the way through the gate to the train. She was surprisingly glad to be with him again. On discovering that, she began to talk rapidly and about him. Tell me, how do you manage to keep that fresh viewpoint? Everybody else who comes to New York to write loses his identity. The city swallows him up. I mean by that, that things seem to struck you as freshly as they did when you first came. I remember you wrote me an amazing letter. For one thing, I've never been anything but a foreigner in New York. I'll never quite believe Broadway. I'll never cease to marvel at Fifth Avenue and Cooper Union and the Bronx. The time may come when I can take the subway for granted, but don't ask it of me just yet. But the other writers, and all those people who live down in Washington Square? I never see them. It's sure death. Those granatures are always taking out their own feelings and analyzing them and pulling 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 granatures. They don't get enough tennis. They don't get enough walking in the open spaces. Gosh, no. I know better than to fall for that kind of thing. They spend hours talking to each other in dim-lighted attics about souls and society and the joy of life and the greater good, and they know all about each other's insides. They talk themselves out and there's nothing left to write about. A little of that kind of thing purges and cleanses. Too much of it poisons and clogs. No, ma'am. When I want to talk, I go down and chin with the foreman of our composing room. There's a chap that has what I call conversation, a philosopher, and knows everything in the world. Composing room foreman always are and do. Now that's all of that. How about Fanny Brandeis? Any sketches? Come on, confess. Grand Street, anyway. I haven't touched a pencil except to add up a column of figures or copy and 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, someday, 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 you're 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 know. It's universal. And you owe it to the world. Pay up, Fanny. Pay up. Look here, began Fanny, her voice low with anger. The last time I saw you, I said I'd never again put myself in a position to be lectured by you like a schoolgirl. I mean it this time. If you have anything else to say to me, say it now. The train leaves. She glanced at her wrist. In two minutes, thank heaven, and this will be your last chance. All right, said Hale, I've 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 fists this way and tuck your thumb alongside like that, and aim for this spot right here, about two inches this side of the chin, bringing your arm back and up quickly like a piston, the person you hit will go down limp. There's a nerve right there that communicates with the brain. That blow makes you see stars, bright lights, and fancy colors. They use it in the comic papers. You are crazy, said Fanny, as though at last assured of a long suspected truth. The train began to move almost imperceptibly. Run, she cried. Hale 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 weekly. 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 minutes she opened them, fished about under the seat for the crumpled copy of the star, and read it, turning it once to his column. She thought it was a very unpretentious thing that column, and yet so full of insight and sagacity and whimsical humor. Not a guffaw in it, but a smile in every fifth line. She wondered if those years of illness and loneliness, with weeks of reading and tramping and climbing in the Colorado mountains, had kept him strangely young or made him strangely old. She welcomed the hours that lay between New York and Chicago. They would give her an opportunity to digest the events of the past ten days. In her systematic mind she began to range them in the order of their importance. Horn and Udell came first, of course, and then the line of maternity dresses she had selected to take the place of the hideous models carried under Slosson's regime, and then the slip-over pinafores. But somehow her thoughts became jumbled here, so that faces instead of garments filled her mind's eye. Again and again there swam into her can the face of that woman of fifty indecent widow's weeds who had stood there in the night court charged with drunkenness on the streets, and the man with the frost-bitten fingers in Madison Square, and the dog in the sweater, and the feverish concentration of the piecework sewers in the window of the loft building. She gave it up, selected a magazine, and decided to go into lunch. CHAPTER XIII. 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 the tens of millions cannot be expected to draw up formal resolutions of thanks when a heretofore flabby department begins to show signs of red blood. Ella Monaghan said, they'll make light of it all but finger, that's their way. Slosson drummed with his fingers all the time she was giving him the result of her work in terms of style, material, quantity, time, and price. When she had finished, he said, well, all I can say is we seem to be going out of the mail-order business and into the imported novelty line, deluxe. I suppose by next Christmas the grocery department will be putting in artichoke arts and truffles, and French champagne by the keg for community orders. To which Fanny had returned sweetly. If Oregon and Wyoming show any desire for artichokes and champagne, I don't see why we shouldn't. Fanger, 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 Fanger's office except by appointment. Fanny sent word to him of her return. For two days she heard nothing from him. Then the voice of the snuff-brown secretary summoned her. She did not have to wait this time but passed directly through the big bright outer room into the smaller room. The powerhouse, Fanny called it. Fanger 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've been on a vacation instead of a test trip. So I have. Why didn't you warn me that business, as transacted in New York, is a series of social rights? 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. Fanger tapped a 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 the figures. You don't sound particularly enthusiastic, Fanger said, when they had finished, considering that you've accomplished what you set out to do. That's just it. Quickly, I like the uncertainty. It was interesting to deal directly with those people, to stack one's arguments and personality and mentality and power over theirs until they had to give way. But after that, well, you can't expect me to be vitally interested in gross slots and carloads and dating. It's part of business. It's the part I hate. Fanger stacked the papers neatly. You came in June, didn't you? Yes. It has been a remarkable eight months record, even at Haynes Cooper's, where records are the rule. Have you been through the plant since the time you first went through? Through it. Goodness no, it would take a day. Then I wish you'd take it. I like to have the heads of departments go through the plant at least twice a year. You'll find the 14th floor has been cleared and is being used entirely by the selectors. The manufacturer samples are spread on the tables in the various sections. You'll find your place ready for you. You'll be amused at daily section. He took your suggestion about trying the blouses on live models instead of selecting them as he used to. You remember you said that one could tell about the lines and style of address merely by looking at it, but that a blouse is just a limp rag until it's on? It's true of the flimsy georgett things women want now. They may be lovely in the box and hideously unbecoming when worn. If daily's going for the higher grade stuff, he can't risk choosing unbecoming models. Wait until you see him, smiled Fenger, sitting there like a sultan while the pinks and blues and whites and plaids parade before him. He turned to his desk again. That's all, Miss Brandeis. Thank you. Then at a sudden thought, do you know that all your suggestions have been human suggestions? I mean they all have had to do with people. Tell me, how do you happen to have learned so much about what people feel and think in such a short time? The thing that Clarence Hale had said flashed her mind and she was startled to find herself quoting it. It hasn't been a short time, she said. It took a thousand years and left Fenger staring puzzled. She took next morning for her tour of the plant as Fenger had suggested. She went through it not as the startled, wide-eyed girl of eight months before had gone, but critically and with a little unconscious air of authority. For this organization, Vass, though it was, actually showed her imprint. She could have put her finger on this spot and that, saying, Here is the mark of my personality. And she thought as she passed from department to department, Ten thousand a year if you keep on as you've started. Up one aisle and down the next. Bundles, bundles, bundles. And everywhere you saw the yellow order slips, in the hands of the stock boys whizzing by on roller skates, in the filing department, in the traffic department. The very air seemed jaundiced with those clouds of yellow order slips. She stopped a moment fascinated, as always, before the main spiral gravity chute down which the bundles, hundreds of them, thousands of them daily, chased each other to, to what, Fanny asked herself. She knew vaguely that hands caught these bundles halfway and redirected them toward the proper channel, where they were assembled and made ready for shipping or mailing. She turned to a stock boy. Where does this empty? She asked. Floor below, said the boy, on the platform. Fanny walked down a flight of iron stairs and around to face the spiral chute again. In front of the chute and connected with it by a great metal lip was a platform perhaps twelve feet above the floor and looking very much like the pilot's deck of a ship. A little flight of stairs led up to it, very steep stairs that trembled a little under a repetition of shocks that came from above. Fanny climbed them warily, gained the top, and found herself standing next to the girl whose face had gleamed out at her from among those thousands in the crowd pouring out of the plant. The girl glanced up at Fanny for a second, no, for the fraction of a second. Her job was the kind that permitted no more than that. Fanny watched her for one breathless moment. In that moment she understood the look that had been stamped on the girl's face that night, the look that had cried, release. For this platform, shaking under the thought of bundles, bundles, bundles was the stomach of the Haines Cooper plant. Sixty percent of the forty-five thousand daily orders passed through the hands of this girl and her assistants. Down the chutes swished the bundles, stamped with their section mark, and here they were caught deftly and hurled into one of the dozen conveyors that flowed out from this main stream. The wrong bundle into the wrong conveyor, 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 when 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 conveyor 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 selector's floor and found the plant running as smoothly as if it had been part of the plant's system for years. The elevator whisked her up to the top floor where she met the plant's latest practical fad, the new textile chemist, a charming youth disguised in bone-rimmed glasses, who did the honors of his little laboratory with all the manner of a Harvard host. This was the fusing oven for silks. Here was the drying oven. This delicate scale wed 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. "'Hmm,' said Fanny politely. She hated complicated processes that had to do with scales and weights and pounds and acids. She crossed over to the administration building and stopped at the door marked Mrs. Knowles. If you had been an employee of the Haines Cooper Company and had been asked to define Mrs. Knowles' position, the chances are you would have found yourself floundering, wordless. Haines 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 percent of these girls are unskilled, ignorant, and terribly human, you find that a Mrs. Knowles saves the equivalent of ten times her salary in wear and tear and general prevention. She could have told you tragic stories could Mrs. Knowles and sordid stories and comic, too. She knew how to deal with terror and shame and stubborn silence and hopeless misery. Gray-haired and motherly, not at all, an astonishingly young, pleasantly 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 anyone will tell you almost anything. Hello, called Fanny, how are our morals this morning? Going up, answered Esther Knowles, considering that it's Tuesday. Come in. How's the infant prodigy? I lunched with Elemonahan, and she told me your first New York trip was a whirlwind. Congratulations! Thanks! I can't stop. I haven't touched my desk today. I just wanted to ask you if you know the name of that girl who has charge of the main chute in the merchandise building. Good Lord, child! There are thousands of girls. But this one's rather special. She is awfully pretty and rather different-looking, exquisite coloring, a discontented expression, and a blouse that's too low in the neck. Which might be a description of Fanny Brandeis herself barring the blouse, laughed Mrs. Knowles. Then, at the startled look in Fanny's face, do forgive me, and don't look so horrified. I think I know which one you mean. Her name is Sarah Sapinski. Yes, isn't it a pity? And it's clear that you should ask me about her, because I've been having trouble with that particular girl. Trouble? She knows she's pretty and she knows she's different, and she knows she's handicapped, and that accounts for the discontented expression. That and some other things. She gets seven a week here, and they take just about all of it at home. She says she's sick of it. She has left home twice. I don't blame the child, but I've always managed to bring her back. Someday 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 Grimley. So it was Sarah she saw above all else in her trip to the gigantic plant. Sarah's face shone out from among the thousands. The thud-thud of Sarah's bundle-shoot beat a dull accompaniment to the hum of the big hive, above the rustle of those myriad yellow-water slips, through the buzz of the busy mailroom, beneath the roar of the presses in the printing building, the crash of the dishes in the cafeteria, ran the lead motif of Sarah at seven a week. Back in her office, once more, Fanny dictated a brief observation report for Fanger'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 core of system sharks to simplify things there? She went into detail and passed on to the next suggestion. If the North American cloak and suit company can sell male-water 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 the majority of our women customers wouldn't wear a plain, good-looking, little blue-sherge dress with a white collar and some tailored buttons. They want Sarisat and Revvers on a plum-colored fallard, and that's what we've been giving them. But there are plenty of other women living miles from anywhere who know what's being worn on Fifth Avenue. I don't know how they know it, but they do, and they want it. Why can't we reach those women as well as their shoddier sisters? The North American people do it. I'd wear one of their dresses myself. I wouldn't be found dead in one of ours. Here's a suggestion. Why can't we get Camille to design half a dozen models of season for us? Now, don't roar at that, and don't think that the women on Western ranches haven't heard of Camille. They have. They may know nothing of Mrs. Pankhurst, and Lillian Russell may be a myth to them. But I'll swear that every one of them knows that Camille is a dressmaker who makes super dresses. She is as much a household word among them as Roosevelt used to be to their men-folks. And if we can promise them a Camille-designed dress for seven dollars and eighty-five cents, which we could, then why don't we? At the very end, to her stenographer's mystification, she added this irrelevant line. Seven dollars a week is not a living wage. The report went to Fenger. He hurdled lightly over the first suggestion, knowing that the file system was as simple as a monster of its bulk could be. He ignored the third hint. The second suggestion amused, then interested, then convinced him. Within six months, Camille's name actually appeared in the Haines Cooper catalog. Not that alone. The Haines Cooper Company broke its rule as to outside advertising and announced in full-page magazine ads the news of the seven dollar and eighty-five cent gowns designed by Camille, especially for the Haines Cooper Company. There went up a nationwide shout of amusement and unbelief, but the announcement continued. Camille, herself a frump with a fringe, whose frocks were worn by queens and dancers and matrons with millions and debutants. Camille, who had introduced the slouch, revived the hoop, discovered the sunset chiffon, had actually consented to design six models every season for the mail-order millions of the Haines Cooper Women's Dress Department, at a price that made even Michael Fenger wince. CHAPTER XIV OF FANNY HERSELF This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. FANNY HERSELF BY EDNA FERBER CHAPTER XIV Fanny Brandeis's blouses showed real cloney now, and her hats were nothing but line. A scant two years before, she had wondered if she would ever reach a pinnacle of success, lofty enough to enable her to wear blue-tailor suits as smart as the well-cut garments worn by her mother's friend, Mrs. Emma McChesney. Mrs. McChesney's trig little suits had cost fifty dollars and had looked sixty. Fanny's now cost one hundred and twenty-five and looked one hundred and twenty-five. Her sleeves alone gave it away. If you attest the sole of a tailor, you have only to glance at shoulder seam, elbow, and wrist. Therein lies the wizardry. Fanny's sleeve flowed from armpit to thumb bone without a ripple. Also she moved from the south side to the north side, always a sign of prosperity or social ambition in Chicago. Her new apartment was near the lake, exhilaratingly high, correspondingly expensive. And she was hideously lonely. She was earning a man-sized salary now, and she was working like a man. A less magnificently healthy woman could not have stood the strain, for Fanny Brandeis was working with her head, not her heart. When we say heart, we have come to mean something more than the hollow muscular structure that propels the blood through the veins. That in the dictionary is the primary definition. The secondary definition has to do with such words as emotion, sympathy, tenderness, courage, conviction. She was working now, as Michael Fenger worked, relentlessly, coldly, indomitably, using all the material at hand as a means to an end, with never a thought of the material itself, as a builder reaches for a brick or stone and fits it into place smoothly, almost without actually seeing the brick itself, except as something which will help to make a finished wall. She rarely proud the city now. She told herself she was too tired at night, and on Sundays and holidays, and I suppose she was. Indeed she no longer saw things with her former vision. It was as though her soul had shriveled in direct proportion to her salary's expansion. The street 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 cheek youth who had driven her home the night of her first visit to the Fengers, shortly after her coming to Haines Cooper's, had proved her faithful slave, and she had not abused his devotion. Indeed she hardly considered it that. The sex side of her was being repressed with the artist side. Most men found her curt, brisk, businesslike manner a little repellent, though interesting. They never made love to her in spite of her undeniable attractiveness. Fascinating facts drove her about in his smart little roadster, and one night he established himself in her memory forever as the first man who had ever asked her to marry him. He did it haltingly, painfully, almost grudgingly. Fanny was frankly amazed. She had enjoyed going about with him. He rested and soothed her. He in turn had been stimulated by her energy, her humor, her electric force. Nothing was said for a minute after his awkward declaration. But he persisted. You like me, don't you? Of course I do, immensely. Then why? When a woman of my sort marries, it's a miracle. I am 26, an intelligent and very successful, a frightful combination. Unmarried women of my type aren't content just to feel. They must analyze their feelings. An analysis is death to romance. Great Scott, you expect to marry somebody sometime, don't you, Fanny? No one I know now. When I do marry, if I do, it will be with the idea of making a definite gain. I don't mean necessarily worldly gain, though that would be a factor, too. Fascinating facts had been staring straight ahead, his hands gripping the wheel with unnecessary rigidity. He relaxed a little now and even laughed, though not very successfully. Then he said something very wise for him. Listen to me, girl. You'll never get away with that vampire stuff. Talons are things you have to be born with. You'll never learn to grab with these. He reached over and picked up her left hand, lying inertly in her lap, and brought it up to his lips and kissed it, love and all. They're built on the open-face pattern for giving. You can't fool me. I know. A year and a half after her coming to Haynes Cooper, Fanny's department was doing a business of a million a year. The need had been there. She had merely given it the impetus. She was working more or less directly with Fanger 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 infant's wear section, but she occupied unofficially the position of assistant to the general merchandise manager. They worked well together, she and Fanger, their minds often marching along without the necessity of a single spoken word. There was no doubt that Fanger's mind was a marvelous piece of mechanism. Under it the Haynes Cooper plant functioned with the clockwork regularity of a gigantic automaton. System and results, these were his twin gods. With his mind intent on them he failed to see that new gods, born of spiritual unrest, were being set up in the temples of big business. Their coming had been rumored for many years. Words such as brotherhood, labor, rights, humanity, hours, once regarded as the special property of the street-corner ranter, were creeping into our everyday vocabulary. And strangely enough, Nathan Haynes, the gentle, the bewildered, the uninspired, heard them and listened. Nathan Haynes had begun to accustom himself to the roar of the flood that had formally deafened him. He was no longer stunned by the inrush of his millions. The report sheath handed him daily had never ceased to be a wildly unexpected thing, and he still shrank from it sometimes. It was so fantastic, so out of all reason. But he even dared, now and then, to put out a tentative hand to guide the flood. He began to realize vaguely that Italian gardens and marble pools, educational endowments and pet charities were but poor, ineffectual barriers of mud and sticks, soon swept away by the torrent. As he sat there in his great, luxurious office with the dim, rich old portraits gleaming down on him from the walls, he began, gropingly, to evolve a new plan, a plan by which the golden flood was to be curbed, divided, and made to form a sub-stream to be utilized for the good of the many, for the good of the ten thousand, who were almost fifteen thousand now, with another fifteen thousand in mills and factories at distant points, whose entire output was swallowed up by the Haynes Cooper plant. Michael Fanger, super-manager, listened to the plan, smiled tolerantly, and went on perfecting an already miraculous system. Sarah Sapinski, at seven a week, was just so much untrained labor material, easily replaced by material exactly like it. No, Michael Fanger, with his head in the sand, heard no talk of new gods. He only knew that the monster plant under his management was yielding the greatest possible profit under the least possible outlay. In Fanny Brandeis he found a stimulating, energizing fellow worker. That had been from the beginning. In the first month or two of her work, when her keen brain was darting here and there into forgotten and neglected corners, ferreting out dusty scraps of business waste and holding them up to the light disdainfully, Fanger had watched her with a mingling of amusement and a sort of fond pride as one would a precocious child. As the months went on, the pride and amusement welded into something more than admiration, such as one expert feels for a fellow craftsman. Long before the end of the first year, he knew that here was a woman such as he had dreamed of all his life and never hoped to find. He often found himself sitting at his office desk or in his library at home, staring straight ahead for a longer time than he dared admit, his papers or book forgotten in his hand. His thoughts applied to her adjectives which proved her a paradox. Generous, sympathetic, warm-hearted, impulsive, imaginative, cold, indomitable, brilliant, daring, intuitive. He would rouse himself almost angrily and force himself to concentrate again upon the page before him. I don't know how he thought it all would end, he whose life habit it was to follow out every process to its ultimate step, whether mental or mechanical. As for Fanny, there was nothing of the intrigue about her. She was used to admiration. She was accustomed to deference from men. Brandeis's bazaar had ensured that. All her life men had taken orders from her, all the way from Aloysius and the blithe traveling men of whom she bought goods to the salesmen and importers in the Chicago wholesale houses. If they had attempted occasionally to mingle the social and personal with the commercial, Fanny had not resented their attitude. She had accepted their admiration and refused their invitations with equal good-nature, and thus retained their friendship. It is not exaggeration to say that she looked upon Michael Fanger 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 mine in such matters. It is your soft and silken mollusk type of woman whose mind pursues a slimy and labyrinth trail. But it is useless to say that she did not feel something of the intense personal attraction of the man. Often it used to puzzle and annoy her, to find that as they sat arguing in the brisk, everyday atmosphere of office or merchandise room, the air between them would suddenly become electric, vibrant. They met each other's eyes with effort. When their hands touched accidentally over papers or samples they snatched them back. Fanny found herself laughing uncertainly at nothing and was furious. When a silence fell between them they would pounce upon it breathlessly and smother it with talk. Do not think that any furtive love-making went on sandwiched between shop talk. Their conversation might have taken place between two men. Indeed they often were brutally frank to each other. Fanny had the vision, Fanger the science to apply it. Sometimes her intuition leaped ahead of his reasoning. Then he would say, I'm not sold on that, which is modern business slang meaning you haven't convinced me. She would go back and start afresh, covering the ground more slowly. Usually her suggestions were practical and what might be termed human. They seemed to be founded on an uncanny knowledge of people's frailties. It was only when she touched upon his beloved system that he was adamant. None of that socialistic stuff, he would say. This isn't a benevolent association we're running. It's the biggest mail order business in the world and its backbone is system. I've been just fifteen years perfecting that system. It's my job, hands off. A fifteen-year-old system ought to be scrapped, Fanny would retort boldly. Anyway, the Simon Legree thing has gone out. No one in the plant had ever dared to talk to him like that. He would glare down at Fanny for a moment like a mastiff on a terrier. Fanny, seeing his face rage red, would flash him a cheerful and impudent smile. The anger fading slowly gave way to another look, so that admiration and resentment mingled for a moment. Lucky for you, you're not a man. I wish I were. I'm glad you're not. Not a very thrilling conversation for those of you who are seeking heart-throbs. In May Fanny made her first trip to Europe for the firm. It was a sudden plan. Instantly theatre leaped to her mind and she was startled at the tumult she felt at the thought of seeing him and his child. The baby, a girl, was more than a year old. Her business, a matter of two weeks perhaps, was all in Berlin and Paris, but she cabled theatre that she would come to them in Munich if only for a day or two. She had very little curiosity about the woman theatre had married. The memory of that first photograph of hers, the frizz bejeweled and a smirk, had never effaced itself. It had stamped her indebtably in Fanny's mind. The day before she left for New York, she sailed from there, she had a letter from Theodore. It was evident at once that he had not received her cable. He was in Russia giving a series of concerts. Olga and the baby were with him. He would be back in Munich in June. There was some talk of America. When Fanny realized that she was not to see him, she experienced a strange feeling that was a mixture of regret and relief. All the family loving 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 a little congregation wrapped there in the Jewish house of worship in Winnebago. But she had recoiled a little from the meeting with this other unknown person, who gave concerts in Russia, who had adopted Munich as his home, who was the husband of this Olga person, and the father of a ridiculously German-looking baby in a very German-looking dress, all lace and tux, 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 Theodors. Besides, what business had that boy with a baby anyway, himself a baby? Fanger had arranged for her cabin, and she rather resented its luxury, until she learned later that it is the buyers who always occupy the state room's deluxe 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 surge and furs, were not millionaires temporarily deprived of their own private seagoing craft, but buyers like herself shrewd, aggressive, wise, and incredibly endowed with savoir-faire. Merely to watch one of them dealing with a deck steward was to know for all time the superiority of mind over matter. Most incongruously it was Ella Monahan and Clarence Hale, who waved goodbye to her as her ship swung clear of the dock. Ella was in New York on her monthly trip. Hale had appeared at the hotel as Fanny was adjusting her veil and casting a last rather wild look around the room. Molly Brandeis had been the kind of woman who never misses a train or overlooks a hairpin. Fanny's early training had proved invaluable more than once in the last two years. Nevertheless, she was rather flustered for her as the elevator took her down to the main floor. She told herself it was not the contemplation of the voyage itself that thrilled her. It was the fact that here was another step, definitely marking her progress. Hale, looking incredibly limp, was leaning against a gaudy marble pillar, his eyes on the down-coming elevators. Fanny saw him just an instant before he saw her, and in that moment she found herself wondering why this boy, she felt years older than he, should look so fantastically out of place in this great, glittering, feverish hotel lobby. Just a shy, rather swarthy, Jewish boy who wore the right kind of clothes in the wrong manner. Then Hale 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 Monaghan had a last-minute business appointment, but she promised to be at the dock somehow before the boat leaves. I'm going to be grand and taxi all the way. I've an open car waiting. But I won't have it. I can't let you do that. Oh, yes you can. Don't take it so hard. That's the trouble with you businesswomen. You're killing the gallantry of a nation. Someday 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 Austin thing, I'll accommodate. I'll drop my handkerchief, gloves, bag, flowers, and first scarf at intervals of five minutes all the way downtown. Then you may scramble around on the floor of the cab and feel like a knight. Fanny had long ago ceased to try to define the charm of this man. She always meant to be serenely dignified with him. She always ended by feeling very young and somehow gloriously carefree and light-hearted. 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 over-critical? I'm not criticizing your clothes. Even I can see that that hat and suit have the repressed note that means money, and you're the kind of woman who looks her best in those plain dark things. Well, then? You look like a buyer. In two more years your face will have that hard finish that never comes off. I am a buyer. You're not. You're a creator. Remember, I'm not belittling your job. It's a wonderful job for Ella Monaghan. 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 says 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 Adams would have been a success in business, too. She was born with a humanity sense and a value sense and as something else that can't be acquired, Ida Tarbell could have managed your whole Haynes Cooper plant if she'd had to. So could a dozen other women I could name. You don't see any sign of what you call success on Jane Adams's face, do you? You wouldn't say unseeing her that here was a woman who looked as if she might afford hundred-dollar tailor suits in a town car. No. All you see in her face is the reflection of the souls of all the men and women she has worked to save. She has covered her job, the job that the Lord intended her to cover, and to me she is the most radiantly beautiful woman I have ever seen. Fanny sat silent. She was twisting the fingers of one hand in the grip of the other, as she had since childhood when deeply disturbed, and suddenly she began to cry, silently, harrowingly, as a man cries, her shoulders shaking, her face buried in her furs. Fanny! Fanny, girl! He was horribly disturbed and contrite. He patted her arm awkwardly. She shook free of his hand childishly. Don't cry, dear. I'm sorry. It's just that I care so much. It's just— She raised an angry, tear-stained face. It's just that you have an exalted idea of your own perceptions. It's just that you've grown up from what they used to call a bright little boy to a bright young man, and you're just as tiresome now as you were then. I'm happy enough, except when I see you. I'm getting the things I starved for all those years. Why, I'll never get over being thrilled at the idea of being able to go to the theatre 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 theatre ticket fan. Ella Monahan had taken the tube and was standing in the great shed watching arrivals with interest long before they bumped over the cobblestones of Hoboken. The three descended to Fanny's cabin. Ella had sent champagne, six cozy pints in a wicker basket. They say it's good for seasickness, she announced cheerfully, but it's a lie. Nothing's good for seasickness except death or dry land, but even if you do feel miserable and you probably will, there's something about being able to lie in your birth and drink champagne alone by the spoonful that's sort of soothing. Hale had fallen silent. Fanny was radiant again, 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? Glossy fruit. She glanced around the luxurious little cabin, then up at Hale, 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 traveller, was full of parting instructions. And be sure to eat at Kopinski's in Berlin, twenty cents for lobster and caviar, big as hen's eggs and as cheap as codfish. And don't forget to order Maybowl. It tastes like champagne, but it 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 word himes that they're always bragging about. After all, fields make them all look like country stores. Word himes, is that something to eat, too? No, idiot, it's their big department store. Ella turned to Hale, for whom she felt mingled awe and liking. If this trip of hers is successful, the firm will probably send her over three or four times a year. It's a wonderful chance for a kid like her. Then I hope, said Hale quietly, that this trip may be a failure. Ella smiled uncertainly. Don't laugh, said Fanny sharply. He means it. Ella, sensing an unpleasant something in which she had no part, covered the situation with another rush of conversation. You'll get the jolt of your life when you come to Paris and find that you're expected to pay for the lunches and all the cab fares and everything of those shrimpy little commissionaires. Polite little fellows they are, in frock coats and moustaches, 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. Hale listened with unfeigned delight. Ella found herself suddenly abashed before those clear, far-seeing eyes. You think I'm a gabby old girl, don't you? I think you're a wonderful woman, said Hale, very wise and very kind. Why, thanks, faltered Ella. Why, thanks. They said their goodbyes. Ella hugged Fanny warmheartedly. Then she turned away awkwardly. Hale 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-bye, he said simply, and took her hand in his steel grip a moment and dropped it, and turned away. A messenger boy very much out of breath came running up to her, a telegram in his hand. For me, Fanny opened it, frowned, smiled. It's from Mr. Fanger, good wishes, as if all those flowers weren't enough. Hmm! said Ella. She and Hale descended the gangway and stood at the dock's edge, looking rather foolish and uncertain, as people do at such times. There followed a few moments of scramble, above certainly 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. Hale was standing quite still, looking up. The ship swung clear, crept away from the dock. The good-bye swelled to auror. Fanny leaned far over the rail and waved to, 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. Hale still stood, hat in hand, motionless. Why don't you wave good-bye? she called, though he could not possibly hear. Wave, good-bye! 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, Hale swung his hat above his head three times like a schoolboy, and grasping Ella's plump and resisting arm marched abruptly away. CHAPTER XV The first week in June found her back in New York. That month of absence had worked a subtle change. The two weeks spent in crossing and recrossing had provided her with a let-down that had been almost jarring in its completeness. Everything competitive had seemed to fade away with the receding shore and to loom up again only when the skyline became a thing of smoke banks, spires, and shafts. She had had only two weeks for the actual transaction of her business. She must have been something of a revelation to those Paris and Berlin manufacturers. A custom, though they were, to the brisk and irresistible methods of the American businesswoman. 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 Flower Sack figure, she was stared at appreciatively. Her business, except for one or two unimportant sidelines, had to do with two factories on whose product the Haynes Cooper Company had long had a covetous eye. Quantity, as usual, was the keynote of their demand, and Fanny's task was that of talking in six figure terms to these conservative and over-wary foreign manufacturers. That she had successfully accomplished this and that she had managed to impress them also with the important part that time and promptness and delivery played in a swift moving machine like the Haynes Cooper Concern was due to many things beside her natural business ability. Self-confidence was there and physical vigor and diplomacy. But above all was that sheer love of the game, the dramatic sense that enabled her to see herself in the part. That alone precluded the possibility of failure. She knew how youthful she looked and how glowing. She anticipated the look that came into their faces when she left polite small talk behind and soared up into the cold, rarefied atmosphere of business. She delighted in seeing the admiring and tolerant smirk vanish and give way to a startled and defensive attentiveness. It might be mentioned that she managed somehow to spend almost half a day in Petticoat Lane and its squalid surroundings while in London. She actually prowled alone at night in the evil-smelling narrow streets of the poorer quarter of Paris. And how she escaped unharmed is a mystery that never bothered her because she had never known fear of streets. She had always walked on the streets of Winnebago, Wisconsin alone. It never occurred to her not to do the same in the streets of Chicago or New York or London or Paris. She found Berlin with its Adlon, its appalling cleanliness, its overfed populace, and its omnipresent Kaiser forever scutting up and down unter den Linden in his chocolate-colored car, incredibly dull and unpicturesque. Something she had temporarily lost there in the busy atmosphere of the Haynes Cooper plant seemed to have returned miraculously. New York, on her return, was something of a shock. She remembered how vividly fresh it had looked to her on the day of that first visit months before. Now, to eyes fresh from the crisp immaculateness of Paris and Berlin, Fifth Avenue looked almost grimy and certainly shabby in spots. Ella Monaghan, cheerful, congratulatory, beaming, met her at the pier, and Fanny was startled at her own sensation of happiness, as she saw that pink, good-natured face looking up at her from the crowd below. The month that had gone by, since she last saw Ella standing just so, seemed to slip away and fade into nothingness. I waited over a day, said Ella, just to see you. My, you look grand! I know where you got that hat. Galeries Lafayette, how much? I don't expect you to believe it. Thirty-five francs, seven dollars. I couldn't get it for twenty-five here. They were soon clear of the customs. Ella had engaged a room for her at the hotel they always used. As they rode up town together happily, Ella opened her bag and laid a little packet of telegrams and letters in Fanny's lap. I guess Fengers pleased all right if telegrams mean anything. Not that I know they're from him, but he said, but Fanny was looking up from one of them with a startled expression. He's here. Fengers here. In New York? asked Ella, rather dullly. 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 would give his concerto there. It was impossible in Russia, Munich, even Berlin, because it was distinctly Jewish in theme. As Jewish as the Kohl Niedra, and as somber. They would have none of it in Europe. Prejudice was too strong. But in America. He was happier than he had been in years. Olga objected to coming to America, but she would get over that. The little one was well, and she was learning to talk. Actually, they were teaching her to say, taunt the Fanny. Well! exclaimed Fanny, her eyes shining. She read bits of the letter aloud to Ella. Ella was such a satisfactory sort of person to whom to read a letter aloud. She exclaimed in all the right places. Her face was as radiant as Fanny's. They both had forgotten all about Fanger, their chief. But they had been in their hotel scarcely a half hour, and Ella had not done exclaiming over the bag that Fanny had brought her from Paris when his telephone call came. He wasted very little time on preliminaries. I'll call for you at four. We'll drive through the park and out by the river and have tea somewhere. That would be wonderful. That is, if Ella's free, I'll ask her. Ella? Yes, she's right here. Hold the wire, will you? She turned away from the telephone to face Ella. It's Mr. Fanger. He wants to take us both driving this afternoon. You can go, can't you? I certainly can, replied Miss Monahan, with what might have appeared to be undue force. Fanny turned back to the telephone. Yes, thanks. We can both go. We'll be ready at four. Fanny decided that Fanger'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. Hale, 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 fist 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 hair brush, at loss for a simile. As an eagle is above a waddling old duck. No, I don't mean that, either. Because I never did think much of the eagle morally. But you get me. Not that he knows it or shows it. Hale, I mean. Lord know. But he's got something—something kind of spiritual in him that makes you that way, too. He doesn't say much, either. That's the funny part of it. I do all the talking seems when I'm with him. But I find myself saying things I didn't know I knew. He makes you think about things you're afraid to face by yourself. Big things. Things inside of you. She fell silent a moment, sitting cross-legged before the bag. Then she got up, snapped the bag shut, and bore it across the room to a corner. You know he's gone, I suppose. Gone? To those mountains or wherever it is he gets that look in his eyes from. That's my notion of a job. They'll let him go for the whole summer, roaming around being a naturalist. Just so so come back in the winter. And the column? Fanny asked, do they let that go, too? I guess he's going to do some writing for them up there. After all, he's the column. It doesn't make much difference where he writes from. Did you know it's being syndicated now all over the country? Well, it is. That's the secret of its success, I suppose. It isn't only a column written about New York for a New York paper. It's about everything for anybody. It's the humanist stuff, and he isn't afraid of anything. New York's crazy about him. They say he's getting a salary you wouldn't believe. I'm a tongue-tied old fool when I'm with him. But then he likes to talk about you mostly, so it doesn't matter. Fanny turned swiftly from the dressing-table, where she was taking the pins out of her vigorous, abundant hair. What kind of thing does he say about me, Ellen girl? Hmm? What kind of thing? Abuse, mostly. I'll be running along to my room now. I'll be out for lunch, but back at four for that airing fingers so wild to have me take. If I were you, I'd lie down for an hour till you get your land legs. She poked her head in at the door again. Not that you look as if you needed it. You've got a different look somehow. Kind of rested. After all, there's nothing like an ocean voyage. She was gone. Fanny stood a moment in the center of the room. There was nothing relaxed or inert about her. Had you seen her standing there, motionless, you would still have got a sense of action from her. She looked so splendidly alive. She walked to the window now and stood looking down upon New York in early June. Summer had not yet turned the city into a cauldron of stone and steel. From her height she could glimpse the green of the park with a glint of silver in its heart that was the lake. Her mind was milling around aimlessly, in a manner far removed from its usual orderly functioning. Now she thought of Theodore, her little brother, his promised return. It had been a slow and painful thing, his climb. Perhaps if she had been more ready to help, if she had not always waited until he asked the aide that she might have volunteered, she thrust that thought out of her mind rudely and slammed the door on it. Fanger, 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 Hale, he makes you think about the 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 of success, Ella and Fanger to praise her and make much of her, a drive and tea this afternoon. She wasn't above these creature comforts, and still she felt unxilarated, dull. She decided to go down for a bit of lunch and perhaps a stroll of ten or fifteen minutes, just to see what Fifth Avenue was showing. It was half past one when she reached that ordinarily well-regulated thoroughfare. She found its sidewalks packed solid, up and down, as far as the eye could see, with a quiet, orderly, expectant mass of people. Squads of mounted police clattered up and down, keeping the middle of the street cleared. Whatever it was that had called forth that incredible mass was scheduled to proceed uptown from far downtown, and that very soon. Heads were turned that way. Fanny wedged into 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 Blair of Abandoned, here they come! Just then, far down the canyon of Fifth Avenue, sounded the cry that had always swayed Elm Street, Winnebago. Here they come! What is it, Fanny asked a woman, against whom she found herself close packed. What are they waiting for? It's the suffrage parade, replied the woman. The big suffrage parade, don't you know? No, I haven't been here. Fanny was a little disappointed. The crowd had surged forward so that it was impossible for her to extricate herself. She found herself near the curb. She could see down the broad street now, and below twenty-third street it was a moving, glittering mass, pennants, banners, streamers flying. The woman next to her volunteered additional information. The mayor refused permission to let them march, but they fought it, and they say it's the greatest suffrage parade ever held. I'd march myself only. Only what? I don't know, I'm scared to, I think. I'm not a New Yorker. Neither am I, said Fanny. Fanny always became friendly with the woman next to her in a crowd. That was her mother in her. One could hear the music of the band now. Fanny glanced at her watch. It was not quite two. Oh, well, she would wait and see some of it. Her mind was still too freshly packed with European impressions to receive any real idea of the value of this pageant, she told herself. She knew she did not feel particularly interested, but she waited. Another surging forward. It was no longer here they come, but here they are, and here they were. A squad of mounted police on very prancy horses. The men looked very ruddy and well set up and imposing. Fanny had always thrilled to anything in uniform, given sufficient numbers of them. Another police squad, a brass band on foot, and then in white on a snow-white charger holding a white banner aloft, her eyes looking straight ahead of her, her face very serious and youthful, the famous beauty and suffrage leader, Mildred Innis, 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 wheelchair smiling. A man next to Fanny began to jeer. He was a red-faced young man with a coarse blotchy skin and thick lips. He smoked a cigar and called to the women in a falsetto voice. Hello, Sadie! He called. Hello, kid. And the women marched on, serious-faced, calm-eyed. There came floats, elaborate affairs, with girls in Greek robes. Fanny did not care for these. More solid ranks, and then a strange and pitiful and tragic and eloquent group. Their banner said, garment workers in Finnswear section. And at their head marched a girl carrying a banner. I don't know how she attained that honor. I think she must have been one of those fiery, eloquent leaders in her factory clique. The banner she carried was a large one, and it flapped prodigiously in the breeze, and its pole was thick and heavy. She was a very small girl, even in that group of pale-faced, undersized, underfed girls. A Russian-Jewish, evidently. Her shoes were ludicrous. They curled up at the toes, and the heels were run down. Her dress was a sort of parody on the prevailing fashion. But on her face as she trudged along, hugging the pole of the great pennant that flapped in the breeze, was stamped a look. Well, you see that same look in some pictures of Joan of Arc. It wasn't merely a look. It was a story. It was tragedy. It was the history of a people. You saw in it that which told of centuries of oppression in Russia. You saw eager groups of student intellectuals gathered in secret places for low-voiced, fiery talk. There was in it the unspeakable misery of Siberia. It spoke eloquently of pogroms, of massacres, of Kiev and its sister horror, Kyshnev. You saw mean and narrow streets, and carefully darkened windows, and on the other side of those windows the warm yellow glow of the seven branched Shabbos light. Above this there shone the courage of a race serene in the knowledge that it cannot die, and illuminating all, so that her pinched face beneath the flapping pennant was the wrapped, uplifted countenance of the crusader, there blazed the great glow of hope. This woman movement, spoken of so glibly as suffrage, was, to the mind of this over-red, underfed, emotional, dreamy little Russian garment-worker, the glorious means to a long hoped foreend. She had idealized it with the imagery of her kind. She had endowed it with promise that it would never actually hold for her, perhaps. And so she marched on down the great glittering avenue, proudly clutching her unwieldy banner, a stunted, grotesque, magnificent figure, more than a figure, a symbol. Fanny's eyes followed her until she passed out of sight. She put up her hand to her cheek, and her face was wet. She stood there, and the parade went on endlessly, it seemed, and she saw it through a haze. Bands, more bands, penance, floats, women, women, women. I always cry at parades, said Fanny, to the woman who stood next to her, the woman who wanted to march but was scared to. That's all right, said the woman, that's all right. And she laughed, because she was crying, too. And then she did a surprising thing. She elbowed her way to the edge of the crowd, past the red-faced man with a cigar, out to the street, and fell into line, marched on up the street, shoulders squared, head high. Fanny glanced down at her watch. It was quarter after four. With a little gasp, she turned to work her way through the close-packed crowd. It was an actual physical struggle, from which she emerged disheveled, breathless, uncomfortably warm, and minus her handkerchief, but she had gained the comparative quiet of the side street. And she made the short distance that lay between the avenue and her hotel a matter of little more than a minute. In the hotel corridor stood Ella and Fenger, the former looking worried, the latter savage. Where in the world, began Ella? Caught in the jam, and I didn't want to get out. It was—it was glorious! She was shaking hands with Fenger, and realizing for the first time that she must be looking decidedly sketchy and that she had lost her handkerchief. She fished for it in her bag hopelessly when Fenger released her hand. He had not spoken. Now he said, what's the matter with your eyes? I've been crying, Fanny confessed cheerfully. Crying? The parade! There was a little girl in it. She stopped. Fenger would not be interested in that little girl. Now Clancy would have. But Ella broke in on that thought. I guess you don't realize that out in front of this hotel there's a kind of glorified taxi waiting, with the top rolled back, and it's been there half an hour. I never expect to see the time when I could enjoy keeping a taxi waiting. It goes against me. I'm sorry, really. Let's go. I'm ready. You are not. Your hair's a sight in those eyes. Fenger put a hand on her arm. Go on up and powder your nose, Miss Brandeis. And don't hurry. I want you to enjoy this drive. On her way up in the elevator, Fanny thought, he has lost his waistline. Now that couldn't have happened in a month. Queer! I didn't notice it before. And he looked soft, not enough exercise. When she rejoined them she was freshly bloused and gloved, and all traces of the telltale red had vanished from her eyelids. Fifth Avenue was impossible. Their car sped up Madison Avenue and made for the park. The plaza was a jam of tired marchers. They dispersed from there, but there seemed to be no end to the line that still flowed up Fifth Avenue. Fenger seemed scarcely to see it. He had plunged at once into talk of the European trip. Fanny gave him every detail, omitting nothing. She repeated all that her letters and cables had told. Fenger was more excited than she had ever seen him. He questioned, cross-questioned, criticized, probed, exacted an account of every conversation. Usually it was not method that interested him, but results. Fanny, having accomplished the things she had set out to do, had lost interest in it now. The actual millions so glibly bandied in the Haines Cooper plant had never thrilled her, though methods by which they were made possible had. Ella had been listening with the shrewd comprehension of one who admires the superior art of a fellow craftsman. I'll say this, Mr. Fenger, if I could make you look like that, by going to Europe and putting it over those foreign boys, I'd feel I'd earn a year's salary right there and quit, not to speak of the cross-examination you're putting her through. Fenger laughed a little self-consciously. It's just that I want to be sure it's real. I needn't tell you how important this trick is that Ms. Brandeis has just turned. He turned to Fanny with a boyish laugh. Now don't pose. You know you can't be as bored as you look. Anyway, put in Ella briskly. I move that the witness stepped down. She may not be bored, but she certainly must be tired, and she's beginning to look it. Just lean back, Fanny, and let the green of this park soak in. At that it isn't so awfully green when you get right close, except that one stretch of mud-o. Kind of ugly, Central Park, isn't it? Fair. Fanny sat forward. There was more sparkle in her face than at any time during the drive. They were skimming along those green-shaded drives that are so sophisticatedly silven. I used to think it was bear, too, and bony as an old maid, with no soft cuddly places like the parks at home, no gracious green stretches and no rose gardens, but somehow it grows on you, the reticence of it, and that stretch of meadow near the mall in the late afternoon with the mist on it, and the sky faintly pink, and that electric sign, somebody's tires or other, winking on and off. You're a queer child, interrupted Fanger, as wooden as an Indian while talking about a million-a-year deal, and lyrical over a combination of electric sign, sunset, and mothy in park. Oh, well, perhaps that's what makes you as you are. Even Ella looked a little startled at that. They had tea at Claremont, at a table overlooking the river and the palisades. Fanger was the kind of man to whom waiters always give a table overlooking anything that should be overlooked. After tea they drove out along the river and came back in the cool of the evening. Fanny was very quiet now. Fanger followed her mood. Ella sustained the conversation somewhat doggedly. It was almost seven when they reached the plaza exit. And there Fanny, sitting forward suddenly, gave a little cry. Why, they're marching yet, she said, and her voice was high with wonder. They're marching yet. All the time we've been driving and teeing they've been marching. And so they had. Thousands upon thousands they had flowed along as relentlessly and seemingly as endlessly as a river. They were marching yet. For six hours the thousands had poured up that street, making it a moving mass of white. And the end was not yet. What pen and tongue and sense of justice had failed to do they were doing now by sheer crude force of numbers. The red-faced hooligan who had stood next to Fanny in the crowd hours before had long ago ceased his jibes and slunk away bored if not impressed. After all, one might jeer at ten or fifty or a hundred women, or even five hundred, but not at forty thousand. Their car turned down Madison Avenue and Fanger twisted about for a last look at the throng in the plaza. He was plainly impressed. The magnitude of the thing appealed to him. To a Haines Cooper trained mind, forty thousand women marching for whatever the cause must be impressive. Forty thousand of anything had the respect of Michael Fanger. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. They seemed to have put it over, he said. And yet what's the idea? Oh, I'm for suffrage, of course, naturally. And all those thousands of women in white, still. A thing as huge as this parade has to be reduced to a common denominator to be really successful. If somebody could take the whole thing, boil it down, and make the country see what this huge demonstration stands for. Fanny leaned forward suddenly. Tell the man to stop. I want to get out. Fanger and Ellis stared. What for? But Fanger obeyed. I want to get something at this stationer's shop. She had jumped down almost before the motor had stopped at the curb. But let me get it. No, you can't. Wait here. She disappeared within the shop. She was back in five minutes a flat, loosely-wrapped square under her arm. Cardboard, she explained briefly in answer to their questions. Fanger, about to leave them at their hotel, presented his plans for the evening. Fanny, looking up at him, her head full of other plans, thought he looked and sounded very much like big business. And for the moment at least, Fanny Brandeis loathed big business and all that it stood for. It's almost seven, Fanger was saying, we'll be rubes in New York this evening. You girls will just have time to freshen up a bit, I suppose you want to, and then we'll have dinner and go to the theater and to supper afterward. What do you want to see? Ella looked at Fanny, and Fanny shook her head. Thanks, you're awfully kind, but no. Why not? demanded Fanger gruffly. Perhaps because I'm tired, and there's something else I must do. Ella looked relieved. Fanger's eyes bored down upon Fanny, but she seemed not to feel them. She held at her hand. You're going back to-morrow? Fanger asked. I'm not leaving until Thursday. Tomorrow, with Ella. Good-bye. It's been a glorious drive. I feel quite rested. You just said you were tired. The elevator door clanged, shutting out the sight of Fanger's resentful frown. He's as sensitive as a sobrette, said Ella. I'm glad you decided not to go out. I'm dead myself, a kimono for the rest of the evening. Fanny seemed scarcely to hear her. With a nod she left Ella and entered her own room. There she wasted no time. She threw her hat and coat on the bed. Her suitcase was on the baggage stand. She turned on all the lights, swung the closed suitcase up to the table, shoved the table against the wall, upended the suitcase so that its leather side presented a smooth surface, and propped a firm sheet of white cardboard against the impromptu rack. She brought her chair up close, fumbled in her bag for the pens she had just purchased. Her eyes were on the blank white surface of the paper. The table was the kind that has a sub-shelf. It prevented Fanny from crossing her legs under it, and that bothered her. While she fitted her pens and blocked her paper, she kept unbarking her shins in unconscious protest against the uncomfortable conditions under which she must work. She sat staring at the paper now, after having marked it off into blocks with a pencil. She got up and walked across the room aimlessly and stood there a moment and came back. She picked up a thread on the floor, sat down again, picked up her pencil, rolled it a moment in her palms, then catching her toes behind either foreleg of her chair in an attitude that was as workman-like as it was ungraceful. She began to draw nervously, tentatively at first, but gaining in firmness and assurance as she went on. If you had been standing behind her chair, you would have seen emerging miraculously from the white surface under Fanny's pencil, a thin, undersized little figure in sleazy black and white, whose face, under the cheap hat, was upturned and rapturous. Her skirts were wind-blown, and the wind tugged too at the banner whose pull she hugged so tightly in her arms. Dimly you could see the crowds that lined the street on either side. Vagley, too, you saw the faces and stunted figures of the little group of girls she led. But she, the central figure, stood out among all the rest. Fanny brandiced the artist, and Fanny brandiced the salesman, combined shrewdly to omit no telling detail. The wrong kind of feet in the wrong kind of shoes. The absurd hat, the shabby skirt, every bit of grotesquery was there, serving to emphasize the glory of the face. Fanny brandiced his face, as the figure grew, line by line, was a glorious thing, too. She was working rapidly. She laid down her pencil now and leaned back, squinting her eyes critically. She looked grimly pleased. Her hair was rather rumbled, and her cheeks very pink. She took up her pen now and began to ink her drawing with firm black strokes. As she worked, a little crow of delight escaped her. The same absurd crow of triumph that had sounded that day in Winobago years and years before, when she, a schoolgirl and a red tamashanter, had caught the likeness of Chablitz, the peasant boy, under the exterior of Chablitz the famous. There sounded a smart little double knock at her door. Fanny did not heed it. She did not hear it. Her toes were caught behind the chair legs again. She was slumped down on the middle of her spine. She had brought the table with its ridiculously upended suitcase very near, so that she worked with a minimum of effort. The door opened. Fanny did not turn her head. Alamonahan came in, yawning. She was wearing an expensive-looking silk kimono that fell in straight, simple folds and gave a certain majesty to her ample figure. Well, what in the world? She began and yawned again luxuriously. She stopped behind Fanny's chair and glanced over her shoulder. The yawn died. She craned her neck a little and leaned forward. And the little girl went marching by in her cheap and crooked shoes and her short and sleazy skirt, with the banner tugging, tugging in the breeze. Fanny Brandeis had done her with that economy of line and absence of sentimentality, which is the test separating the artist from the draftsman. Silence, except for the scratching of Fanny Brandeis' pen. Why, the poor little kike, said Ella. Then, after a moment of silence, I didn't know you could draw like that. Fanny laid down her pen. Like what? She pushed back her chair and rose stiffly. The drawing, still wet, was propped up against the suitcase. Fanny walked across the room. Ella dropped into her chair so that when Fanny came back to the table it was she who looked over Ella's shoulder. Into Ella's shrewd and heavy face there had come a certain look. They don't get a square deal, do they? They don't get a square deal. The two looked at the girl a moment longer in silence. Then Fanny went over to the bed and picked up her hat and coat. She smoothed her hair deftly, powdered her nose with care, and adjusted her hat at the smart angle approved by the Galerie Lafayette. She came back to the table, picked up her pen, and beneath the drawing wrote, in large print, The Marcher. She picked up the drawing, still wet, opened the door, and with a smile at the bewildered Ella was gone. It was after eight o'clock when she reached the star building. She asked for Lasker's office and sent in her card. Hale had told her that Lasker was always at his desk at eight. Now Fanny Brandeis knew that the average young woman standing outside the office of a man like Lasker, unknown and at the mercy of office boy or secretary, continues to stand outside until she leaves in discouragement. But Fanny knew, too, that she was not an average young woman. She had, on the surface, an air of authority and distinction. She had that quiet assurance of when accustomed to deference. She had youth and beauty and charm. She had a hat and suit bought in Paris, France, and a secretary is only human. Carl Lasker's private office was the bare, bright, newspaper strewn room of a man who is not only a newspaper proprietor, but a newspaper man. There is a difference. Carl Lasker had sold papers on the street when he was ten. He had slept on burlap sacks, paper stuffed in the basement of a newspaper office. Ink flowed with the blood in his veins. He could operate a press. He could manipulate a linotype machine, that almost humanly intelligent piece of mechanism. He could make up a paper single-handed and had done it. He knew the newspaper game did Carl Lasker, from the composing room to the street, and he was a very great man in his line. And so he was easy to reach and simple to talk to, as are all great men. A stocky man, decidedly handsome, surprisingly young, well-dressed, smooth shaven, direct. Fanny entered. Lasker laid down her card. Brandeis, that's a good name. He extended his hand. He wore evening clothes with a white flower in his buttonhole. He must have just come in from a dinner, or he was to attend a late affair somewhere. Perhaps Fanny, taken aback, unconsciously showed her surprise, because Lasker grinned as he waved her to a chair. His quick mind had interpreted her thought. Sit down, Miss Brandeis. You think I'm gotten up like a newspaper man in a Richard Harding Davis short story, don't you? What can I do for you? Fanny wasted no words. I saw the parade this afternoon. I did a picture. I think it's good. If you think so too, I wish you'd use it. She laid it face up on Lasker's desk. Lasker picked it up in his two hands, held it off, and scrutinized it. All the drama in the world is concentrated in the confines of a newspaper office every day in the year, and so you hear very few dramatic exclamations in such a place. Men like Lasker do not show emotion when impressed. It is too wearing on the mechanism. Besides, they are trained to self-control. So Lasker said now, yes, I think it's pretty good too. Then raising his voice to a sudden bellow, boy, he handed the drawing to a boy, gave a few brief orders, and turned back to Fanny. Tomorrow morning every other paper in New York will have pictures showing Mildred Innes the beauty on her snow-white charger, or Sophrenizba A. Bannister, A. B. P. H. D. in her cap and gown, or Mrs. William Vanderwilt as Liberty. We'll have that little rat with the banner, and it'll get them. They'll talk about it. His eyes narrowed a little. Do you always get that angle? Yes. There isn't a woman cartoonist in New York who does that human stuff. Did you know that? Yes. Want a job? No. His knowing eye missed no detail of the suit, the hat, the gloves, the shoes. What's your salary now? Ten thousand. Satisfied? No. You've hit the heart of that parade. I don't know whether you could do that every day or not. But if you struck twelve half the time, it would be enough. When you want a job, come back. Thanks, said Fanny quietly, and held at her hand. She returned in the subway. It was a bronx train, full of sagging faces, lustrous eyes, grizzled beards, of heavy black-eyed girls in soiled white shoes, of stoop-shouldered men pouring over newspapers in Hebrew script, of smells and sounds and glaring light. And though tomorrow would bring its reaction and common sense would have her again in its cold grip, she was radiant tonight and glowing with the exultation that comes with creation, and over and over a voice within her was saying, These are my people. These are my people.