 Chapter 9 Mr. Fenger will see you now. Mr. Fenger, general manager, had been a long time about it. This heel-cooling experience was new to Fanny Brandeis. It had always been her privilege to keep others waiting. Still, she felt no resentment as she sat in Michael Fenger's outer office. For as she sat there waiting, she was getting a distinct impression of this unseen man whose voice she could just hear as he talked over the telephone in his inner office. It was characteristic of Michael Fenger that his personality reached out and touched you before you came into actual contact with the man. Fanny had heard of him long before she came to Haines Cooper. He was the genie of that glittering lamp. All through the gigantic plant, she had already met department heads, buyers, merchandise managers. One heard his name and felt the impress of his mind. You'll have to see Mr. Fenger about that. Yes, pointing to a new conveyor perhaps, that has just been installed. It's a great help to us. Doubles our shipping room efficiency. We used to use baskets pulled by a rope. It's Mr. Fenger's idea. Fenger had made it a slogan in the Haines Cooper plant, long before the German nation forced it into our everyday vocabulary. Michael Fenger was system. He could take a muddle of orders, a jungle of unfilled contracts, a horde of incompetent workers, and of them make a smooth running and effective unit. Untangling snarls was his pastime, as free decor was his sibilith. Order and management his idols, and his war cry was results. It was eleven o'clock when Fanny came into his outer office. The very atmosphere was vibrant with his personality. There hung about the place an air of repressed expectancy. The room was electrically charged with the high voltage of the man in the inner office. His secretary was a spare, middle-aged, anxious-looking woman in snuff brown and yellow heels. His stenographer, a blonde young man, also spectacled and anxious. His office boy, a stern youth in knickers, who bore no relation to the slangy, gum-chewing red-headed office boy of the comic sections. The low-pitched, high-powered voice went on inside, talking over the long-distance telephone. Fenger was the kind of man who was always talking to New York when he is in Chicago, and to Chicago when he is in New York. Trains with the word limited after them were invented for him and his type. A buzzer sounded. It galvanized the office boy into instant action. It brought the anxious-looking stenographer to the doorway, notebook in hand, ready. It sent the lean secretary out and up to Fanny. Tempor, Fanny said to herself, or horribly nervous and high-keyed, they jumped like a set of puppets on a string. It was then that the lean secretary had said, Mr. Fenger will see you now. Fanny was aware of a pleasant little tingle of excitement. She entered the inner office. It was characteristic of Michael Fenger that he employed no cheap tricks. He was not writing as Fanny Brandeis came in. He was not telephoning. He was not doing anything but standing at his desk, waiting for Fanny Brandeis. As she came in he looked at her, through her, and she seemed to feel her mental processes laid open to him as a skilled surgeon cuts through skin and flesh and fat to lay bare the muscles and nerves and vital organs beneath. He put out his hand. Fanny extended hers. They met in a silent grip. It was like a meeting between two men. Even as he indexed her, Fanny's alert mind was busy docketing, numbering, cataloging him. They had in common a certain force, a driving power. Fanny seated herself opposite him in obedience to a gesture. He crossed his legs comfortably and sat back in his big desk chair. A great-bodied man with powerful square shoulders, a long head, a rugged crest of a nose, the kind you see on the type of Englishman who has the imagination and initiative to go to Canada or Australia or America. He wore spectacles, not the fashionable horn-rim sort, but the kind with gold ear-pieces. They were becoming, and gave a certain humanness to a face that otherwise would have been too rugged, too strong. A man of forty-five, perhaps. He spoke first. You're younger than I thought. So are you. Old inside. So am I. He uncrossed his legs, leaned forward, folded his arms on the desk. You've been through the plant, Miss Brandeis? Yes, twice. Once with a regular tourist party, and once with the special guide. Good. Go through the plant whenever you can. Don't stick to your own department. It narrows one. He paused a moment. Did you think that this opportunity to come to Hans Cooper, as assistant to the Infants Ware department buyer, was just a piece of luck, augmented by a little pulling on your part? Yes. It wasn't. You were carefully picked by me, and I don't expect to find I've made a mistake. I suppose you know very little about buying and selling Infants Ware? Less than about almost any other article in the world, at least in the department store or mail order world. I thought so, and it doesn't matter. I pretty well know your history, which means I know your training. You're young, you're ambitious, you're experienced, you're imaginative. There's no length you can't go with these. It just depends on how far-sighted your mental vision is. Now listen, Miss Brandeis. I'm not going to talk to you in millions. The guides do enough of that. But you know we do buy and sell in terms of millions, don't you? Well, our Infants Ware department isn't helping to roll up the millions, and it ought to, because there are millions of babies born every year, and the golden spoon kind are in the minority. I've decided that the department needs a woman, your kind of woman. Now, as a rule, I never employ a woman when I can use a man. There's only one other woman filling a really important position in the merchandise end of this business. That's Ella Monahan, head of the glove department, and she's a genius. She's a woman who is limited in every other respect, just average. But she knows glove materials in a way that's uncanny. I'd rather have a man in her place. But I don't happen to know any men glove geniuses. Tell me, what do you think of that etching? Fanny tried, and successfully, not to show the jolt her mind had received. As she turned to look at the picture to which his finger pointed, she got up and strolled over to it, and she was glad her suit fitted and hung as it did in the back. I don't like it particularly. I like it less than any other etching you have here. The walls were hung with them. Of course you understand I know nothing about them. But it's too flowery, isn't it, to be good, too many lines, like a writer who spoils his effect by using too many words. Fanger came over and stood beside her, staring at the black-and-white engraving in its frame. I felt that way, too. He stared down at her then. Jew, he asked. A breathless instant. No, said Fanny Brandeis. Michael Fanger smiled for the first time. Fanny Brandeis would have given everything she had, everything she hoped to be, to be able to take back that monosyllable. She was gripped with horror at what she had done. She had spoken almost mechanically. And yet that monosyllable must have been the fruit of all these months of inward struggle and thought. Now I begin to understand you, Fanger went on. You've decided to lop off all the extra senses, eh? Well, I can't say that I blame you. A woman in business is handicapped enough by the fact of her sex. He stared at her again. Too bad you're so pretty. I'm not, said Fanny Hotley, like a schoolgirl. That's a thing that can't be argued, child. Beauty's subjective, you know. I don't see what difference it makes anyway. Oh, yes, you do. He stopped. Or perhaps you don't, after all. I forget how young you are. Well, now, Miss Brandeis, you and your woman's mind and your masculine business experience and sense are to be turned loose on our infant's wear department. The buyer, Mr. Slosson, is going to resent you. Naturally. I don't know whether we'll get results from you in a month or six months or a year or ever. But something tells me we're going to get them. You've lived in a small town most of your life, and we want that small town viewpoint. Do you think you've got it? Fanny was on her own ground here. If knowing the Wisconsin small town woman and the Wisconsin farmer woman and man too for that matter means knowing the Oregon and Wyoming and Pennsylvania and Iowa people of the same class, then I've got it. Good. Michael Fanger stood up. I'm not going to load you down with instructions or advice. I think I'll let you grow up your own way around and bump your head a few times. Then you'll learn where the low places are. And Miss Brandeis, remember that suggestions are welcome in this plant. We take suggestions all the way from the elevator starter to the president. His tone was kindly, but not hopeful. Fanny was standing too, her mental eye on the door. But now she turned to face him squarely. Do you mean that? Absolutely. Well then, I've won to make. Your stock boys and stock girls walk miles and miles every day on every floor of this fifteen-story building. I watched them yesterday filling up the bins, carrying orders, covering those enormous distances from one bin to another, up one aisle and down the next, to the office, back again. Your floors are concrete or cement or some such mixture, aren't they? I just happened to think of the boy who used to deliver our paper on Nara Street in Winnebago, Wisconsin. He covered his route on roller skates. It saved him an hour. Why don't you put roller skates on your stock boys and girls? Fanger stared at her. You could almost hear that mind of his working, like a thing on ball bearings. Roller skates. It wasn't an exclamation. It was a decision. He pressed a buzzer, the snuff-brown secretary buzzer. Tell Clancy I want him, now. He had not glanced up or taken his eyes from Fanny. She was aware of feeling a little uncomfortable, but elated, too. She moved toward the door. Fanger stood at his desk. Wait a minute. Fanny waited. Still Fanger did not speak. Finally, I suppose you know you've earned six months' salary in the last five minutes. Fanny eyed him coolly. Considering the number of your stock force, the time, energy, and labor saved, including wear and tear on the department heads and their assistants, I should say that was a conservative statement. And she nodded pleasantly and left him. Two days later, every stock clerk in the vast plant was equipped with lightweight roller skates. They made a sort of carnival of it at first. There were some spills, too, going around corners, and a little too much hilarity. That wore off in a week. In two weeks their roller skates were part of them, just shop labor savers. The report presented to Fanger was this. Time and energy saved, fifty-five percent. Stock staff decreased by one-third. The picturesqueness of it and the almost ludicrous simplicity of the idea appealed to the entire plant. It tickled the humor sense of every one of the ten thousand employees in that vast organization. In the first week of her association with Haynes Cooper, Fanny Brandeis was actually more widely known than men who had worked there for years. The President, Nathan Haynes himself, sent for her, chuckling. Nathan Haynes, but then why stop for him? Nathan Haynes had been swallowed long ago by this monster plant that he himself had innocently created. You must have visited it, this gargantuan thing that sprawls its length in the very center of Chicago, the giant son of a surprised father. It is one of the city's showplaces, like the stockyards, the Art Institute, and fields. Fifteen years before a building had been erected to accommodate a prosperous mail-order business, it had been built large and roomy with plenty of seams, planned amply, it was thought, to allow the boy to grow. It would do for twenty-five years, surely. In ten years Haynes Cooper was bursting its seams. In twelve it was shamelessly naked, its arms and legs sticking out of its inadequate garments. New red brick buildings. Another. Another. Five stories added to this one. Six stories to that. A new fifteen-story merchandise building. The firm began to talk in tens of millions. Its stock became guilt-edged, unattainable. Lucky ones who had bought of it differently, discreetly, with modest visions of four and a half percent in their unimaginative minds saw their dividends, doubling, trebling, quadrupling, finally soaring gymnastically beyond all reason. Listen to the old guide who, at fifteen a week, takes groups of odd visitors through the great plant, how he juggles figures, how grandly they roll off his tongue, how glib he is with Nathan Haynes millions. This, ladies and gentlemen, is our mail department. From two thousand to twenty-five hundred pounds of mail, comprising over one hundred thousand letters, are received here every day. Yes, madam, I said every day. About half of these letters are orders. Last year the banking department counted one hundred and thirty millions of dollars. One hundred and thirty millions. He stands there in his ill-fitting coat and his star, and rubs one bony hand over the other. Dear me! says a lady tourist from Idaho rather inadequately, and yet not so inadequately. What exclamation is there, please, that fits a sum like one hundred and thirty millions of anything? Fanny Brandeis, fresh from Winnebago, Wisconsin, slipped into the great scheme of things at the Haynes Cooper Plant, like part of a perfectly planned blueprint. It was as though she had been thought out and shaped for this particular corner. And the reason for it was, primarily, Winnebago, Wisconsin. For Haynes Cooper grew and thrived on just such towns, with their surrounding farms and villages. Haynes Cooper had their fingers on the pulse and heart of the country, as did no other industry. They were close, close. When rugs began to take the place of ingrained carpets, it was Haynes Cooper who first sensed the change. Oh, they had had them in New York years before, certainly. But after all, it isn't New York's artistic progress that shows the development of this nation. It is the thing they are thinking and doing and learning in backwash Nebraska that marks time for these United States. There may be a certain significance in the announcement that New York has dropped the Russian craze and has gone in for that quaint Chinese stuff. My dear, it makes the loveliest hangings and decorations. When Fifth Avenue takes down its filet lace and islet embroidered curtains and substitutes Sevier, Shantung, and Chastnet, there is little in the act to revolutionize industry or stir the art world. But when the Haynes Cooper Company, by referring to its inventory ledgers, learns that it is selling more Alma-Gluck than Harry Lauder records, when its statistics show that Tchaikovsky is going better than Irving Berlin, something epical is happening in the musical progress of a nation. And when the orders from New Sculch, Nevada, are for those plain, dimity curtains, instead of the cheap and gaudy Nottingham atrocities, there is conveyed to the mind a fact of immense of overwhelming significance. The country has taken a step toward civilization and good taste. So you have a skeleton sketch of Haynes Cooper, whose feelers reach the remotest dugout in the Yukon, the most isolated cabin in the Rockies, the loneliest ranch house in Wyoming, the Montana mining shack, the bleak main farm, the plantation in Virginia, and the man who so innocently put life into this monster, a plumpish, kindly-faced man, a bewildered, gentle, unimaginative, and somewhat frightened man, fresh cheeked, eyeglast. In his suite of offices in the new administration building, built two years ago, marble and oak throughout, twelve stories, and were adding three already, offices all two-toned rugs and leather upholstery with dim, rich, brown-toned Dutch masterpieces on the walls, he sat helpless and defenseless, while the torrent of millions rushed and swirled and foamed about him. I think he had fancied fifteen years ago that he would someday be a fairly prosperous man, not rich, as riches are counted nowadays, but with a comfortable number of tens of thousands tucked away. Two or three hundred thousand, perhaps five hundred thousand, perhaps a—but nonsense, nonsense. And then the thing had started. It was as when a man idly throws a pebble into a chasm, or shoves a bit of ice with the toe of his boot, and starts a snow slide that grows as it goes. He had started this avalanche of money, and now it rushed on of its own momentum, plunging, rolling, leaping, crashing, and as it swept on it gathered rocks, trees, stones, houses, everything that lay in its way. It was beyond the power of human hand to stop this tumbling, roaring slide. In the midst of it sat Nathan Haynes, deafened, stunned, terrified at the immensity of what he had done. He began giving away huge sums, incredible sums. It piled up faster than he could give it away. And so he sat there in the office hung with the dim old masterpieces, and tried to keep simple, tried to keep sane, with that austerity that only mad wealth can afford, or bitter poverty. He caused the land about the plant to be laid out in sunken gardens and baseball fields and tennis courts, so that one approached this monster of commerce through enchanting grounds, glowing with tulips and heady hyacinths in the spring, with roses in June, blazing with salvia and golden glow with asters in autumn. There was something apologetic about these grounds. This, then, was the environment that Fanny Brandeis had chosen. On the face of things you would have said she had chosen well. The inspiration of the roller skates had not been merely a lucky flash. That idea had been part of the consistent hull. Her mind was her mother's mind raised to the nth power, and enhanced by the genius she was trying to crush. Refusing to die, it found expression in a hundred brilliant plans, of which the roller-skate idea was only one. Fanny had reached Chicago on Sunday. She had entered the city as a queen enters her domain, authoritatively, with no fear upon her, no trepidation, no doubts. She had gone at once to the Mendota Hotel on Michigan Avenue, Uptown, away from the roar of the loop. It was a residential hotel, very quiet, decidedly luxurious. She had no idea of making it her home, but she would stay here until she could find an apartment that was small, bright, near the lake, and yet within fairly reasonable transportation facilities for her work. Her room was on the ninth floor, not on the Michigan Avenue side, but east, overlooking the lake. She spent hours at the windows, fascinated by the stone and steel city that lay just below with the incredible blue of the sail-dotted lake beyond, and at night, with the lights spangling the velvety blackness, the flaring blaze of thirty-first streets chop suey restaurants, and moving picture houses at the right, and far, far away, the red and white eye of the lighthouse, winking, blinking, winking, blinking, the rumble and clank of a flat-wield Indiana Avenue car, the sound of laughter, and a snatch of song that came faintly up to her from the speeding car of some midnight joy riders. But all this had to do with her other side. It had no bearing on Haynes Cooper in business. Business, that was it. She had trained herself for it like an athlete. Eight hours of sleep, a cold plunge on a rising, sane food, long walks. There was something terrible about her earnestness. On Monday she presented herself at the Haynes Cooper plant. Monday and Tuesday were spent in going over the Great Works. It was an exhausting process, but fascinating beyond belief. It was on Wednesday that she had been summoned for the talk with Michael Fenger. Thursday morning she was at her desk at 8.30. It was an obscure desk in a dingy corner of the Infants' Ware Department, the black sheep section of the Great Plant. Her very presence in that corner seemed to change it magically. You must remember how young she was, how healthy, how vigorous, with the freshness of the small town still upon her. It was health and youth and vigor that gave that gloss to her hair. Conscientious brushing, too, perhaps. That color to her cheeks and lips, that brightness to her eyes. But crafty art and her dramatic instinct were responsible for the tailored severity of her costume, for the whiteness of her blouse, the trim common sense-expensiveness of her shoes and hat and gloves. Slosson, buyer and head of the department, came in at nine. Fanny rose to greet him. She felt a little sorry for Slosson. In her mind she already knew him for a doomed man. Well, well. He was the kind of person who would say, well, well. You're bright and early, Miss—uh—Brandice. Yes, certainly, Miss Brandice. Well, nothing like making a good start. I wanted to go through the department by myself, said Fanny, the shelves and bins and the numbering system. I see that your new maternity dresses have just come in. Oh, yes, how do you like them? I think they're unnecessarily hideous, Mr. Slosson. My dear young lady, a plain garment is what they want—unnoticeable. Unnoticeable, yes, but becoming. At such a time a woman is at her worst. If she can get it, she at least wants a dress that doesn't add to her unattractiveness. Let me see. You are not, uh, married, I believe, Miss Brandice. No. I am. Three children, all girls. He passed a nervous hand over his head, rumpling his hair a little. An expensive proposition, let me tell you, three girls. But there's very little I don't know about babies, as you may imagine. But they're settled over Fanny Brandice's face the mask of hardness that was so often to transform it. The morning mail was in, the day's biggest grist, deluge of it, a flood. Buyer and assistant buyer never saw the actual letters or attended to their enclosed orders. It was only the unusual letter, the complaint or protest that reached their desk. Hundreds of hands downstairs, sorted, stamped, indexed, filed, after the letter-opening machines had slit the envelopes. Those letter-openers, Fanny had hung over them and thralled. The unopened envelopes were fed into them. Flip, zip, flip out, opened, faster than the eye could follow. It was uncanny. It was somehow humorous, like the clever antics of a trained dog. You could not believe that this little machine actually performed what your eyes beheld. Two years later they installed the sandpaper letter opener, marvel of simplicity. It made the old machine seem cumbersome and slow. Guided by Izzy, the expert, its rough tongue was capable of licking open 650 letters a minute. Ten minutes after the mail came in, the orders were being filled. Bins, shelves, warehouses were emptying their contents. Up and down the aisles went the stock clerks, into the conveyors went the bundles, down the great spiral bundle chute, into the shipping room, out by mail, by express, by freight. This leg-horn hat for a Nebraska country bell, a tombstone for a rancher's wife, a plow brave in its red paint, quaffee tea, tinned fruit bound for Alaska, lace, muslin, sheeting, tallying, all intended for the coarse trousseau of a Georgia bride. It was not remarkable that Fanny Brandeis fitted into this scheme of things. For years she had ministered to the wants of just this type of person. The letter she saw at Haynes Cooper's read exactly as customers had worded their wants at Brandeis's Bazaar. The magnitude of the thing thrilled her, the endless possibilities of her own position. During the first two months of her work there she was as unaggressive as possible. She opened the very pores of her mind and absorbed every detail of her department. But she said little, followed Slosson's instructions in her position as assistant buyer, and suggested no changes. Slosson's wrinkle of anxiety smoothed itself away and his manner became patronizingly authoritative again. Fanny seemed to have become part of the routine of the place. Fanger did not send for her. June and July were insufferably hot. Fanny seemed to thrive, to expand like a flower in the heat when others wilted and shriveled. The spring catalog was to be made up in October, as always, six months in advance. The first week in August Fanny asked for an interview with Fanger. Slosson was to be there. At ten o'clock she entered Fanger's inner office. He was telephoning, something about dinner at the Union League Club. His voice was suave, his tone well modulated, his accent correct, his English faultless. And yet Fanny Brandeis, studying the etchings on his wall, her back turned to him, smiled to herself. The voice, the tone, the accent, the English, did not ring true. They were acquired graces, exquisite imitations of the real thing. Fanny Brandeis knew she was playing the same game herself. She understood this man now, after two months in the Haines Cooper plant, these marvellous examples of the etchers' art, for example. They were the struggle for expression of a man whose youth had been bare of such things. His love for them was much the same as that which impelled the new-made millionaire to buy rare pictures, rich hangings, tapestries, rugs, not so much in the desire to impress the world with his wealth as to satisfy the craving for beauty, the longing to possess that which is exquisite and fine and almost unobtainable. You have seen how a woman, long denied luxuries, feeds her starved senses on soft, silken things, on laces and gleaming jewels, for pure sensuous delight in their feel and look. Thus Fanny mused as she eyed these treasures, grim, deft, repressed things, done with that economy of line which is the test of the etchers' art. Fanger hung up the receiver. So it's taken you two months, Miss Brandeis. I was awfully afraid from the start you made that you'd be back here in a week bursting with ideas. Fanny smiled appreciatively. He had come very near the truth. I had to use all my self-control that first week. After that it wasn't so hard. Fanger's eyes narrowed upon her. Pretty sure of yourself, aren't you? Yes, said Fanny. She came over to his desk. I wish we didn't have Mr. Slosson here this morning. After all, he's been here for years, and I'm practically an upstart. He's so much older too. I hate to hurt him. I wish you'd—but Fanger shook his head. Slosson's due now, and he has to take his medicine. This is business, Miss Brandeis. You ought to know what that means. For that matter it may be that you haven't hit upon an idea. In that case, Slosson would have to laugh, wouldn't he? Slosson entered at that moment, and there was a chip on his shoulder. It was evident in the way he bristled in the way he seated himself. His fingers drummed his knees. He was like a testy, humha stage-father dealing with a willful child. Fanger took out his watch. Now, Miss Brandeis. Fanny took a chair facing the two men and crossed her trim blue, surged knees, and folded her hands in her lap. A deep pink glowed in her cheeks. Her eyes were very bright. All the Molly Brandeis in her was at the surface, sparkling there, and she looked almost insultingly youthful. You want me to talk? We want you to talk. We have time for just three-quarters of an hour of uninterrupted conversation. If you've got anything to say, you ought to say it in that time. Now, Miss Brandeis, what's the trouble with the Haynes Cooper Infantswear Department? And Fanny Brandeis took a long breath. The trouble with the Haynes Cooper Infantswear Department is that it doesn't understand women. There are millions of babies born every year. An incredible number of them are male-order babies. I mean by that they are born to tired, clumsy-fingered immigrant women, to women in mills and factories, to women on farms, to women in remote villages. They are the type who use the male-order method. I've learned this one thing about that sort of woman. She may not want that baby, but either before or after it's born she'll starve and save and go without proper clothing and even beg and steal to give it clothes. Clothes with lace on them, with ribbon on them, sheer white things. I don't know why that's true, but it is. Well, we're not reaching them. Our goods are unattractive. They're packed and shipped unattractively. Why, all this department needs is a little psychology, and some lace that doesn't look as if it's been chopped out with an ax. It's the little silly intimate things that will reach these women. No, not silly, either. Quite understandable. She wants fine things for her baby, just as the Silver Spoon mother does. The thing we'll have to do is to give her Silver Spoon models at pewter prices. It can't be done, said Slosson. Now wait a minute, Slosson. Hanger put in smoothly. This Brandeis has given us a very fair general statement. We'll have some facts. Are you prepared to give us an actual working plan? Yes, at least it sounds practical to me. And if it does to you and to Mr. Slosson, it's not of that gentleman an expression of defiance, unbelief, and a determination not to be impressed. It acted as a goat to Fanny. She leaned forward in her chair and talked straight at the big potent force that sat regarding her in silent attention. I still say that we can copy the high price models in low price materials because, in almost every case, it isn't the material that makes the expensive model, it's the line, the cut, the little trick that gives its style. We can get that. We've been giving them stuff that might have been made by prison labor for all the distinction it had. Then I think we ought to make a feature of the sanitary methods used in our Infants Department. Every article intended for a baby's use should be wrapped or boxed as it lies in the bin or on the shelf. And those bins ought to be glassed. We would advertise that. And it would advertise itself. Our visitors would talk about it. This department hasn't been getting a square deal in the catalogue, not enough space. It ought to have not only more catalogue space, but a catalogue all its own, the baby book, full of pictures, good ones. Illustrations that will make every mother think her baby will look like that baby, once it is wearing our number 29E798, chubby babies, curly-haired and dimpley. And the feature of the catalogue ought to be not separate garments, but complete outfits, outfits boxed, ready for shipping, and ranging in price all the way from twenty-five dollars to 398. It can't be done, yelled Slosson. 398, outfits! It can be done. I figured it out down to a packet of assorted size safety pins. We'll call it our emergency outfit, thirty pieces. And while we're about it, every outfit over five dollars ought to be packed in a pink or pale blue pasteboard box. The outfit's trimmed in pink, pink boxes. The outfit's trimmed in blue, blue boxes. In eight cases out of ten, their letters will tell us whether it is a pink or blue baby. And when they get our package and take out that pink or blue box, they'll be as pleased as if we've made them a present. It's the personal note. Personal Slop, grouts Slosson. It isn't business, it's sentimental slush. Sentimental, yes, agreed Fanny pleasantly, but then we're running the only sentimental department in this business, and we ought to be doing it at the rate of a million and a quarter a year. If you think these last suggestions sentimental, I'm afraid the next one. Let's have it, Miss Brandeis. Fanger encouraged her quietly. It's—she flashed a mischievous smile at Slosson. It's a mother's guide and helper and advisor. A woman who'll answer questions, give advice. Someone they'll write to with a picture in their minds of a large, comfortable, motherly-looking person in gray. You know we get hundreds of letters asking whether they ought to order flannel bands or the double-knitted kind, that sort of thing. And who's been answering them? Some sixteen-year-old girl in the mailing department who doesn't know a flannel band from a booty when she sees it. We could call our woman something pleasant in every dayish like Emily Brande. Easy to remember. And until we can find her, I'll answer those letters myself. They're important to us, as well as to the woman who writes them. And now there's the matter of obstetrical outfits. Three grades, packed ready for shipment, practical, simple, and complete. Our drug section has the separate articles, but we ought to— Oh, Lord! Grown sloshing and slumped disgustedly in his seat. But Fanger got up, came over to Fanny, and put a hand on her shoulder for a moment. He looked down at her. I knew you'd do it. He smiled clearly. Tell me, where did you learn all this? I don't know, faltered Fanny happily. Brande is his bizarre, perhaps. It's just another case of Plush photograph album. Plush? Fanny told him that story. Even the discomfort is lost and grinned at it. But after ten minutes more of general discussion, Slosson left. Fanger, without putting it in words, had conveyed that to him. Fanny stayed. They did things that way at Haines Cooper. No waste, no delay. That she had accomplished in two months that which ordinarily takes years was not surprising. They did things that way, too, at Haines Cooper. Take the case of Nathan Haines himself. And Michael Fanger, too, who, not so many years before, had been a machine boy in her Racine Willen Mill. For my part, I confess that Fanny Brandeis begins to lose interest for me. Big business seems to dwarf the finer things in her. That red-cheeked, shabby little schoolgirl, absorbed in Zola and peanut brittle in the Winnebago Library, was infinitely more appealing than this glib, capable young woman. The spitting wildcat of the street fight, so long ago, was gentler by far than this cool person who was so deliberately taking his job away from Slosson. You, too, feel that way about her? That is as it should be. It is the penalty they pay who, given genius, sympathy, and understanding as their birthright, trade them for the tawdry trinkets money brings. Perhaps the last five minutes of that conference between Fanny and Michael Fanger reveals a new side and presents something of interest. It was a harrowing and unexpected five minutes. You may remember how Michael Fanger had a way of looking at one, silently. It was an intent and concentrated gaze that had the effect of an actual physical hold. Most people squirmed under it. Fanny, feeling it on her now, frowned and rose to leave. Shall you want to talk these things over again? Of course I've only outlined them roughly. You gave me so little time. Fanger, at his desk, did not answer or turn away his gaze. A little blaze of wrath flamed into Fanny's face. General manager or not, she said, very low voice. I wish you wouldn't sit there and glower at me like that. It's rude and it's disconcerting. Which was putting it forthrightly. I beg your pardon. Fanger came swiftly around the desk and over to her. I was thinking very hard. Miss Brandeis, will you dine with me somewhere to-night? Then to-morrow night? But I want to talk to you. Here I am. Talk. It was then that Fanny Brandeis saved an ugly situation, for she laughed, a big wholesome outdoor sort of laugh. She was honestly amused. My dear Mr. Fanger, you've been reading the murky magazines very bad for you. Fanger was unsmiling. Why won't you dine with me? Because it would be unconventional and foolish. I respect the conventions. They're so sensible. And because it would be unfair to you and to Mrs. Fanger and to me. Rot. It's you who have the murky magazine viewpoint, as you call it, when you imply. Now look here, Mr. Fanger. Fanny interrupted quietly. Let's be square with each other, even if we're not being square with ourselves. You're the real power in this plant, because you've got the brains. You can make any person in this organization or break them. That sounds melodramatic, but it's true. I've got a definite life plan, and it's as complete and detailed as an engineering blueprint. I don't intend to let you spoil it. I've made a real start here. If you want to, I've no doubt you can end it. But before you do, I want to warn you that I'll make a pretty stiff fight for it. I'm no silent sufferer. I'll say things, and people usually believe me when I talk. Still the silent, concentrated gaze. With a little impatient exclamation, Fanny walked toward the door. Fanger, startlingly light and agile for his great height, followed. I'm sorry, Miss Brandeis. Terribly sorry. You see, you interest me very much. Very much. Thanks. Dryly. Don't go just yet. Please. I'm not a villain, really. That is, not a deliberate villain. But when I find something very fine, very intricate, very fascinating and complex, like these etchings, for example, I am intrigued. I want it near me. I want to study it. Fanny said nothing, but she thought, This is a dangerously clever man, too clever for you. You know so little about them. Fanger waited. Most women would have found refuge in words, the wrong words. It is only the strong who can be silent when in doubt. Perhaps you will dine with Mrs. Fanger and me at our home some evening. Mrs. Fanger will speak to you about it. I'm afraid I'm usually too tired for further effort at the end of the day. I'm sorry. Some Sunday night, perhaps, then. Tea. Thank you. And so out passed the spare secretary, the anxious proud sonographer, the academic office boy, to the hallway, the elevator, and finally the refuge of her own orderly desk. Slosson was at lunch in one of the huge restaurants provided for employees in the building across the street. She sat there very still for some minutes, for more minutes than she knew. Her hands were clasped tightly on the desk, and her eyes stared ahead in a puzzled, resentful, bewildered way. Something inside her was saying over and over again. You lied to him on that very first day that placed you, that stamped you. Now he thinks you're rotten all the way through. You lied on the very first day. Ella Monaghan poked her head in at the door. The gloves were on that floor at the far end. The two women rarely saw each other except at lunchtime. Missed you at lunch, said Ella Monaghan. She was a pink-jaked, bright-eyed woman of forty-one or two, prematurely gray and therefore excessively young in her manner, as women often are who have grown gray before their time. Fanny stood up hurriedly. I was just about to go. Try the grape pie, dear. It's delicious. And strolled off down the aisle that seemed to stretch endlessly ahead. Fanny stood for a moment looking after her as though meaning to call her back. But she must have changed her mind because she said, oh, nonsense, allowed, and went across to lunch, and ordered grape pie, and enjoyed it. CHAPTER X The invitation to tea came in due time for Mrs. Fanger. A thin, quarrelous voice over the telephone prepared one for the thin, quarrelous Mrs. Fanger herself. A sallow, plaintive woman with a misbehaving valve. The valve, she confided to Fanny, made any effort dangerous. Also it made her susceptible to drafts. She wore over her shoulders a scarf that was constantly slipping and constantly being retrieved by Michael Fanger. The sight of this man, a physical and mental giant, performing this task ever so gently and patiently, sent a little pang of pity through Fanny, as Michael Fanger knew it would. The Fangers lived in an apartment on Lakeshore Drive, an apartment such as only Chicago Bose. A view, straight across the lake, rooms huge and many windowed, a glass-enclosed sun porch gay with chints and wicker, an incredible number of bathrooms. The guests, besides Fanny, included a young pair newly married and interested solely in rents, hangings, linen closets, and the superiority of the Florentine over the Jacobian for dining-room purposes. And a very scrub-looking, handsome, spectacled man of thirty-two or three who was a mechanical engineer. Fanny failed to catch his name, though she learned it later. Privately she dubbed him Fascinating Facts, and he always remained that. His conversation was invariably prefaced with, funny thing happened down at the works today. The rest of it sounded like something one reads at the foot of each page of a loose-leaf desk calendar. At tea there was a great deal of silver and lace, but Fanny thought she could have improved on the Chickenala King. It lacked propica and personality. Mrs. Fanger was constantly directing one or the other of the neat maids in an irritating aside. After tea, Michael Fanger showed Fanny his pictures, not boastfully, but as one who loves them reveals his treasures to an appreciative friend. He showed her his library, too, and it was the library of a reader. Fanny nibbled at it, hungrily. She pulled out a book here, a book there, read a paragraph, skimmed a page. There was no attempt at classification. Lever rubbed elbows with Spinoza, Mark Twain dug a facetious thumb into Hackle's ribs. Fanny wanted to sit down on the floor, legs crossed, before the open shelves, and read and read and read. Fanger, watching the light in her face, seemed himself to take on a certain glow, as people generally did who found this girl in sympathy with them. They were deep in book talk when fascinating facts strolled in, looking aggrieved, and spoiled it with the thoroughness of one who never reads and is not ashamed of it. My word, I'm having a rotten time, Fanger, he said plaintively. They've got a tape measure out of your wife's sewing basket, those two in there, and they're down on their hands and knees, measuring something. It has to do with their rug, over your rug or some such rot. And then you take Miss Brandeis off and go to the library. Then stay here, said Fanny, and talk books. My book's a blueprint, admitted fascinating facts cheerfully. I never get time to read. There's enough fiction and romance and adventure in my job to give me all the thrill I want. Why, just last Tuesday, no Thursday it was, down at the works. Between Fanny and Fanger there flashed a look made up of dismay and amusement and secret sympathy. It was a look that said, We both see the humor of this. Most people wouldn't. Our angle is the same. Such a glance jumps the gap between acquaintance and friendship that whole days of spoken conversation cannot cover. Cigar, said Fanger, hoping to stay the flood. No thanks, say Fanger, would there be a row if I smoked my pipe? That black one, with the smell? The black one, yes. There would. Fanger glanced in towards his wife and smiled dryly. Fascinating facts took his hand out of his pocket regretfully. Wouldn't it sour a fellow on marriage? Wouldn't it? First those two in there with their damn linen closets and their rugs. I beg your pardon, Miss Brandeis, and now your missus objects to my pipe. You wouldn't treat me like that, would you, Miss Brandeis? There was something about him that appealed, something boyish and likable. No, I wouldn't. I'd let you smoke a nargola if you wanted to, surrounded by rolls of blueprints. I knew it. I'm going to drive you home for that. And he did, in his trim little roadster. It is a fairy road at night, that lake drive between the north and south sides. Even the rust street bridge cannot quite spoil it. Fanny sat back luxuriously and let the soft splendor of the late August night enfold her. She was intelligently, mono-syllabic, while fascinating facts talked. At the door of her apartment house, she had left the Mendota weeks before, fascinating facts surprised her. I—I'd like to see you again, Miss Brandeis, if you'll let me. I'm so busy, faltered Fanny. Then it came to her that perhaps he did not know. I'm with Hans Cooper, you know, assistant buyer in the Infants Ware Department. Yes, I know. I suppose a girl like you couldn't be interested in seeing a chap like me again. But I thought maybe. But I would, interrupted Fanny impulsively. Indeed, I would. Really? Perhaps you'll drive some evening, over to the Bismarck Gardens or somewhere. It would rest you. I'm sure it would. Suppose you telephone me. That was her honest, forthright Winnebago Wisconsin self-talking. But up in her apartment the other Fanny Brandeis, the calculating, ambitious, determined woman, said, Now why did I say that? I never want to see the boy again. Use him. Experiment with him. Evidently men are going to enter into this thing. Michael Fenger has, already, and now this boy. Why not try certain tests with them as we used to follow a certain formulae in the chemistry laboratory at high school. This compound, that compound, what reaction? Then when the time comes to apply your knowledge, you'll know. Which shows how ignorant she was of this dangerous phase of her experiment. If she had not been, she must have known that these were not chemicals, but explosives with which she proposed to play. The trouble was that Fanny Brandeis, the creative, was not being fed, and the creative fire requires fuel. Fanny Brandeis fed on people, not things, and her work at Haynes Cooper was all with inanimate objects. The three months since her coming to Chicago had been crowded and eventful. Haynes Cooper claimed every ounce of her energy, every atom of her wit and resourcefulness. In return it gave salary. Not too much salary. That would come later, perhaps. Unfortunately Fanny Brandeis did not thrive on that kind of fair. She needed people. She craved contact. All these millions whom she served, these unseen, unheard men and women and children, she wanted to see them. She wanted to touch them. She wanted to talk with them. It was as though a lover of the drama, eager to see his favorite actress in her greatest part, were to find himself viewing her in a badly constructed film play. So Fanny Brandeis took to prowling. There are people who have a penchant for cities, more than that a talent for them, a gift of sensing them, of feeling their rhythm and pulse beats, as others have a highly developed music sense or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot be acquired. In Fanny Brandeis there was this abnormal response to the color and tone of any city. And Chicago was a huge polyglot orchestra made up of players in every possible sort of bizarre costume, performing on every known instrument, leaderless, terrifyingly discordant, yet with an occasional strain, exquisite and poignant, to be heard through the clamor and din. A walk along State Street, the wrong side, or Michigan Avenue at five, or through one of the city's foreign quarters, or along the lakefront at dusk, stimulated her like strong wine. She was drunk with it, and all the time she would say to herself, little blind fool that she was, don't let it get to you. Look at it, but don't think about it. Don't let the human end of it touch you. There's nothing in it. And meanwhile she was feasting on those faces in the crowds, those faces in the crowds. They seemed to leap out at her, they called to her, so she sketched them, telling herself that she did it by way of relaxation and diversion. One afternoon she left her desk early, and perched herself on one of the marble benches that lined the sunken garden just across from the main group of Haynes Cooper buildings. She wanted to see what happened when those great buildings emptied. Even her imagination did not meet the actuality. At 5.30 the streets about the plant were empty, except for an occasional passerby. At 5.31 there trickled down the broad steps of building after building thin, dark streams of humanity, like the first slow line of lava that crawls down the side of an erupting volcano. The trickle broadened into a stream, spread into a flood, became a torrent that inundated the streets, the sidewalks, filling every nook and crevice, a moving mass, ten thousand people, a city. Fanny found herself shaking with excitement, and something like terror at the immensity of it. She tried to get a picture of it, a sketch, with the gleaming windows of the red brick buildings as a background. Amazingly enough she succeeded in doing it. That was because she tried for broad effects, and relied on one bit of detail for her story. It was the face of a girl, a very tired and tawdry girl of sixteen, perhaps. On her face the look that the day's work had stamped there was being wiped gently away by another look, a look that said release and a sweetheart and an evening at the movies. Fanny, in some miraculous way, got it. She prowled in the ghetto, and sketched those patient Jewish faces, often grotesque, sometimes repulsive, always mobile. She wandered down South Clark Street, flaring with purple white arc lights, and looked in at its windows that displayed a pawnbroker's glittering wares, or just next door, a flat top stove over which a white cap magician, whose face smacked of the galley, performed deaf tricks with a pancake turner. Southern chicken dinner, a lying signed red, with waffles and real maple syrup, thirty-five cents. Past these windows promenaded the Clark Street women, hard-eyed, high-heeled, agreded. On the street corners loafed the Clark Street men, blue shaven, wearing check suits, soiled flantop shoes, and diamond scarf pins. And even as she watched them fascinated, they vanished. Clark Street changed overnight, and became a business thoroughfare, lined with stately office buildings, boasting marble and gold leaf banks, filled with hurrying clerks, stenographers, and prosperous bond salesmen. It was like a sporting man who, thriving in middle age, endeavors to live down his shady past. Fannie discovered Cottage Grove Avenue and Halstead Street, and Jefferson and South State, where she should never have walked. There is an ugliness about Chicago's ugly streets that, for sheer naked brutality, is equaled nowhere in the world. London has its foul streets, smoke-blackened, sinister, but they are ugly as crime is ugly, and as fascinating. It is like the ugliness of an old hag who has lived a life, and who could tell you strange tales if she would. Walking through them you think of Fagan, of children of the ghetto, of tales of mean streets. Naples is honeycombed with narrow, teeming alleys, grind with the sediment of centuries, covered like old Stilton, and smelling much worse. And where is there another Cottage Grove Avenue, Sylvan Miss Nomer, a hideous street, and sorted, a street of flat wheeled cars, of delicatessen shops, and moving picture houses, of clanging bells of frowsy women, of men who dart around corners with pitchers, their coat-colors turned up to hide the absence of linen. One day Fanny found herself at Fifty First Street, and there before her lay Washington Park, with its gracious meadow, its Italian garden, its rose walk, its lagoon, and drooping willows. But then that was Chicago, all contrast. The Illinois Central Railroad puffed contemptuous cinders into the Great Blue Lake, and almost in the shadow of the city hall nestled Bath House John's Gruggery. Michigan Avenue fascinated her most. Here was a street developing before one's eyes. To walk on it was like being present at a birth. It is one of the few streets in the world. New York has two, Paris a hundred, London none, Vienna one. Berlin, before the war, knew that no one walked unter den Linden but American tourists and German shopkeepers from the provinces, with their fat wives. But this Michigan Boulevard, unfinished as Chicago itself, shifting and changing daily, still manages to take on a certain form and rugged beauty. It has about it a gracious breath. As you turn into it from the crash and thunder of Wabash there comes to you a sense of peace. That's the sweep of it, and the lake just beyond, for Michigan Avenue is a one-side street. Its west side is a sheer mountain wall of office buildings, clubs and hotels, whose ground floors are fascinating with specialty shops. A milliner tantalizes the passerby with a single hat stuck knowingly on a carved stick. An art store shows two etchings and a vase. A jeweler's window holds square blobs of emeralds on velvet and perhaps a gold mesh bag sprawling limp and invertebrate or a diamond and platinum la veillière, chastely barbaric. Pass these windows from Randolph to Twelfth surges the crowd, matinee girls, all white fox, and giggles and orchids, wise-eyed saleswomen from the smart specialty shops, dressed in next week's mode, art students hugging their precious flat packages under their arms, immigrants in corduroy's and shoals just landed at the Twelfth Street Station, sightseeing families dazed and weary from Kansas, tailored and sabled lakeshore drive-dwellers, convention delegates spilling out of the auditorium hotel, red-faced horse with satin badges pinned to their coat, and their hats, the wrong kind, stuck far back on their heads. Music students to whom Michigan Avenue means the fine arts building, there you have the west side, but just across the street the walk is as deserted as though a pestilence lurked there. Here the Art Institute rears its smoke-blackened face and Grant Park's greenery struggles bravely against the poisonous breath of the Illinois Central Engines. Just below Twelfth Street, block after block, shows the solid plate glass of the automobile shops. Their glittering wares displayed against an absurd background of Oriental rugs, Tiffany lamps, potted plants, and mahogany. In these windows pose the salesmen, no less sleek in glittering than their wares. Just below these, for a block or two, rows of sinister-looking houses fallen into decay, with slateringly women lolling at their windows and gas jets flaring blue in dim hallways. Below Eighteenth, still another change, where the fat stone mansions of Chicago's old families, save the mark, hide their diminished heads behind signs that read, Marguerite, Roby Montau, and Smolken, Taylor. Now you know that women buyers for male order houses do not spend their Saturday afternoons and Sundays thus, prowling about as city streets. Fanny Brandeis knew it, too, in her heart. She knew that the Elamonna hands of her world spent their holidays in stainless relaxation, manicuring, mending a bit, skimming the Sunday papers, massaging crow's feet somewhat futile. She knew that women buyers do not, as a rule, catch their breath with delight at the sight of the pockmarked old Field Colombian Museum in Jackson Park, softened and beautified by the kindly gray chiffon of the Lake Mist, and tinted by the rouge of the sunset glow, so that it is a thing of spectral loveliness. Successful mercantile women, seeing their furnace glare of the South Chicago steel mills, flaring a sullen red against the lowering sky, do not draw a disquieting mental picture of men toiling there, naked to the waist, and glistening with sweat in the devouring heat of the fires. I don't know how she tricked herself. I suppose she said it was the city's appeal to the country-dweller, but she lied, and she knew she was lying. She must have known it was the spirit of Molly Brandeis in her, and of Molly Brandeis' mother, and of her mother's mother's mother down the centuries to Sarah, repressed women, suffering women, troubled, patient, nomadic women, struggling now in her for expression. And Fanny Brandeis went doggedly on, buying and selling infant's wear, and doing it expertly. Her office desk would have interested you. It was so likely to be littered with the most appealing bits of apparel. A pair of tiny, crocheted booties, pink and white, a sturdy linen smock, a silken hood so small that one's doubled fist filled it. The new catalog was on the presses. Fanny had slaved over it, hampered by slosson. Fanger had given her practically a free hand. Results would not come in for many days. The Christmas trade would not tell the tale, for that was always a time of abnormal business. The dull season following the holiday rush would show the real returns. Slosson was discouragement itself. His attitude was not resentful, it was pitying, and that frightened Fanny. She wished he would storm a little. Then she read her department catalog proof sheets, and these reassured her. They were attractive, and the new baby book had turned out very well, with a colored cover that would appeal to anyone who had ever been or seen a baby. September brought a letter from Theodore. A letter from Theodore meant just one thing. Fanny hesitated a moment before opening it. She always hesitated before opening Theodore's letters. While she hesitated, the old struggle would rage in her. I don't owe him anything, the thing within her would say. God knows I don't. What if I'd done all my life but give and give and give to him? I'm a woman. He's a man. Let him work with his hands, as I do. He's had his share, more than his share. Nevertheless, she had sent him one thousand of the six thousand her mother had bequeathed to her. She didn't want to do it. She fought doing it. But she did it. Now, as she held this last letter in her hands, and stared at the Bavarian stamp, she said to herself, He wants something, money. If I send him some, I can't have that new Taylor suit, or the furs, and I need them. I'm going to have them. She tore open the letter. Dear old fan, Olga and I are back in Munich, as you see. I think we'll be here all winter, though Olga hates it. She says it isn't listing. Well, it isn't Vienna, but I think there's a chance for a class here of American pupils. Munich's swarming with Americans, all families who come here to live for a year or two. I think I might get together a very decent class, backed by ours recommendations. Teaching! Good God, how I hate it! But our is planning a series of twenty concerts for me. They ought to be a success if slaving can do it. I work six hours a day all summer. I want to dispend the summer, most of it, that is, in Holtzhausen M. Amersie, which is a little village or artist colony in the valley, an hour's ride from here, and within sight of the Bavarian Alps. We had Kurt Stein's little villa for almost nothing, but Olga was bored, and she wasn't well, poor girl, so we went to Interlaken, and it was awful, and that brings me to what I want to tell you. There's going to be a baby. No use saying I'm glad because I'm not, and neither is Olga. About February, I think. Olga has been simply wretched, but the doctor says she'll feel better from now on. The truth of it is she needs a lot of things, and I can't give them to her. I told you I'd been working on this concerto of mine. Sometimes I think it's the real thing. If only I could get the leisure and the peace of mind I need to work on it. You don't know what it means to be eaten up with ambition and to be handicapped. Oh, don't I, said Fanny Brandeis, between her teeth, and crumpled a letter in her strong fingers. Don't I? She got up from her chair and began to walk up and down her little office, up and down. A man often works off his feelings thus, a woman rarely. Fanger, who had not been twice in her office since her coming to the Haines Cooper plant, chose this moment to visit her, his hands full of papers, his head full of plans. He sent something wrong at once, as a highly organized human instrument responds to a similarly constructed one. What's wrong, girl? Everything, and don't call me girl. Fanger saw the letter crushed in her hand. Brother? She had told him about Theodore, and he had been tremendously interested. Yes. Money again, I suppose? Yes, but you know your salary's going up after Christmas. Catalog or no catalog? Catalog or no catalog? Why? Because you've earned it. Fanny faced him squarely. I know that Haines Cooper isn't exactly a philanthropic institution. A salary raise here usually means a battle. I've only been here three months. Fanger seated himself in the chair beside her desk, and ran a cool finger through the sheaf of papers in his hand. My dear girl, I beg your pardon, I forgot. My good woman, then, if you like that better, you've transfused red blood into a dying department. It may suffer a relapse after Christmas, but I don't think so. That's why you're getting more money, and not because I happen to be tremendously interested in you, personally. Fanny's face flames Scarlet. I didn't mean that. Yes, you did. Here are those comparative lists you sent me. If I didn't know Slosson to be as honest as Old Dog Trey, I'd think he'd been selling us to the manufacturers. No wonder this department hasn't paid. He's been giving them top prices for Shadi. Now what's this new plan of yours? In an instant, Fanny forgot about Theodore, the new winter suit and furs, everything but the idea that was clamoring to be born. She sat at her desk, her fingers folding and unfolding a bit of paper, her face all light and animation, as she talked. My idea is to have a person known as a selector for each important department. It would mean a boiling down of the products of every manufacturer we deal with, and skimming the cream off the top. As it is now, a department buyer has to do the selecting and buying too. He can't do both and get results. We ought to set aside an entire floor for the display of manufacturer's samples. The selector would make his choice among these, six months in advance of the season. The selector would go to the eastern markets too, of course, not to buy, merely to select. Then, with the line chosen as far as style, quality, and value is concerned, the buyer would be free to deal directly with the manufacturer, as to quantity, time, and all that. You know, as well as I, that that's enough of a job for any one person, with the labor situation what it is. He wouldn't need to bother about styles or colors or any of that. It would have been all done for him. The selector would have the real responsibility. Don't you see the simplicity of it, the way it would grease the entire machinery? Something very like jealousy came into Michael Fenger's face as he looked at her, but it was gone in an instant. Gadd, you'll have my job away for me in two years. You're a superwoman, do you know that? Super nothing. It was just a perfectly good idea, founded on common sense and economy. But that's all Columbus had in mind when he started out to find a shortcut to India. Fanny laughed out at that. Yes, but see where he landed. But Fenger was serious. We'll have to have a meeting on this. Are you prepared to go into detail on it, before Mr. Haynes and the two Coopers, at a real meeting in a real mahogany director's room, Wednesday, say? I think so. Fenger got up. Look here, Miss Brandeis. You need a day in the country. Why don't you run up to your hometown over Sunday? Wisconsin, wasn't it? Oh no. No. I mean, yes, it was Wisconsin, but no, I don't want to go. Then let me send you my car. Car? No thanks. That's not my idea of the country. It was just a suggestion. What do you call going to the country, then? Tramping all day and getting lost, if possible. Lying down under a tree for hours and letting the ants amble over you, dreaming, and coming back tired, hungry, dusty, and refreshed. It sounds awfully uncomfortable, but I wish you'd try it, this week. Do I look such a wreck? Fanny demanded, rather pettishly. You? Fenger's voice was vibrant. You're the most splendidly alive-looking woman I ever saw. When you came into my office that first day you seemed to spark with health and repressed energy and electricity so that you radiated them. People who can do that stimulate. That's what you are to me, a stimulant. What can one do with a man who talks like that? After all, what he said was harmless enough, his tone was quietly sincere. One can't resent an expression of the eyes. Then, too, just as she made up her mind to be angry, she remembered the limp and quarrelless Mrs. Fenger and the valve and the scarf, and her anger became pity. Their flash back to her, the illuminating bit of conversation, with which fascinating facts had regaled her on the homeward drive that night of the tea. Nice chap, Fenger, and a whiz in business, gets a king's salary, must be hell for a man to be tied hand and foot the way he is. Tied? Mrs. Fenger's a semi-invalid. At that, I don't believe she's as helpless as she seems. I think she just holds him by that shawl of hers that's forever slipping. You know he was a machine boy in her father's woolen mill. She met him after he'd worked his way up to an office job. He has forged ahead like a locomotive ever since. That had been their conversation, gossipy, but tremendously enlightening for Fanny. She looked up at him now. Thanks for the vacation suggestion. I may go off somewhere. Just a last minute leap. It usually turns out better that way. I'll be ready for the Wednesday discussion. She sounded very final and busy. The crumpled letter lay on her desk. She smoothed it out and the crumple transferred itself to her forehead. Fenger stood a moment looking down at her. Then he turned abruptly and left the office. Fanny did not look up. That was Friday. On Saturday her vacation took a personally conducted turn. She had planned to get away at noon, as most office heads did on Saturday during the warm weather. When her phone rang at eleven, she answered it mechanically, as does one whose telephone calls mean a row with a tardy manufacturer, an argument with a merchandise man, or a catalog query from the printers. The name that came to her over the telephone conveyed nothing to her. Who? Again the name. Hale? She repeated the name uncertainly. I'm afraid I—oh, of course, Clarence Hale, how'd he do? I want to see you, said the voice promptly. There rose up in Fanny's mind a cruelly clear picture of the little sallow, sniveling schoolboy of her girlhood, the little boy with the big glasses and the shiny shoes and the weak lungs. Sorry, she replied promptly, but I'm afraid it's impossible. I'm leaving the office early and I'm swamped, which was a lie. This evening? I rarely plan anything for the evening, too tired as a rule. Too tired to drive? I'm afraid so. A brief silence. Then, I'm coming out there to see you. Where? Here? The plant? That's impossible, Mr. Hale. I'm terribly sorry, but I can't. Yes, I know. Also terribly sure that if I ever get to you, it will be over your office boy's dead body. Well, arm him. I'm coming. Goodbye. Wait a minute, Mr. Hale! Clarence! Hello? Hello? A jiggling of the hook. Number, please. Drone the voice of the operator. Fanny jammed the receiver down on the hook and turned to her work, lips compressed, a frown forming a double cleft between her eyes. Half an hour later, he was there. Her office boy brought in his card as she had rehearsed him to do. Fanny noted that it was the wrong kind of card. She would show him what happened to pushers who pestered business women during office hours. Bring him in in twenty minutes, she said grimly. Her office boy and slave always took his cue from her. She hoped he wouldn't be too rude to Hale and turned back to her work. Thirty-nine seconds later, Clarence Hale walked in. Hello, Fanny, he said, and had her limp hand in a grip that made her wince. But I told. Yes, I know, but he's a crushed and broken office boy by now. I had to be real harsh with him. Fanny stood up, really angry now. She looked up at Clarence Hale and her eyes were flashing. Clarence Hale looked down at her, and his eyes were the keenest, kindest, most gently humorous eyes she had ever encountered. You know that picture of Lincoln that shows us his eyes with much that expression in them? That's as near as I can come to conveying to you the whimsical pathos in this man. They were the eyes of a lonely little boy grown up, and they had seen much in the process. Fanny felt her little blaze of anger flicker and die. That's the girl, said Hale, and patted her hand. You'll like me presently, after you've forgotten about that sniveling kid you hated. He stepped back a pace and threw back his coat senatorially. How do I look, he demanded. Look, repeated Fanny feebly. I've been hours preparing for this, years! And now something tells me, this tie, for instance. Fanny bit her lip in a vain effort to retain her solemnity. Then she gave it up and giggled frankly. Well, since you asked me that tie. What's the matter with it? Fanny giggled again. It's red, that's what. Well, what of it? Red's all right. I've always considered red one of our leading colors. But you can't wear it. Can't? Why can't I? Because you're the brunous kind of brunette, and dark people have a special curse hanging over them that makes them want to wear red, it's fatal. That tie makes you look like a mafia murderer dressed for business. I knew it, groaned Hale. Something told me. He sank into a chair at the side of her desk, a picture of mocked ejection. And I chose it deliberately. I had black ones, and blue ones, and green ones. And I chose this. He covered his face with a shaking hand. Fanny Brandeis leaned back in her chair and laughed and laughed and laughed. Surely she hadn't laughed like that in a year, at least. You're a madman, she said finally. At that Hale looked up with a singularly winning smile. But different concede that Fanny be fair now, refreshingly different. Different, said Fanny, doesn't begin to cover it. Well, now you're here. Tell me what you're doing here. Seeing you. I mean here in Chicago. So do I. I'm on my way from Winnebago to New York, and I'm in Chicago to see Fanny Brandeis. Don't expect me to believe that. Hale put an arm on Fanny's desk and leaned forward, his face very earnest. I do expect you to believe it. I expect you to believe everything I say to you. Not only that, I expect you not to be surprised at anything I say. I've done such a massive private thinking about you in the last ten years, that I'm likely to forget I've scarcely seen you in that time. Just remember, will you, that like the girl in the sob song, you made me what I am today? I, you're being humorous again. Never less so in my life. Listen, fan, that cowardly, sickly little boy you fought for in the street that day in Winnebago showed every sign of growing up a cowardly, sickly man. You're the reason for his not doing so. Now, wait a minute. I was an impressionable little kid, I guess. Sickly ones are apt to be. I worshiped you and hated you from that day. Worshiped you for the blazing, generous, whole-soul little devil of a spitfire that you were. Hated you because, well, what boy wouldn't hate a girl who had to fight for him? Gosh, it makes me sick to think of it even now, pasty-faced rat. What nonsense! I'd forgotten all about it. No, you hadn't. Tell me, what flashed into your mind when you saw me in Temple that night before you left Winnebago? The truth now. She learned later that people did not lie to him. She tried it now, and found herself saying rather shame-facedly, I thought, why it's Clarence Hale, the cowardly cat. There! That's why I'm here today. I knew you were thinking that. I knew it all the time I was in Colorado. Growing up from a sickly kid with a bum lung, to a heap-big strong man, it forced me to do things I was afraid to do. It goaded me on to stunts at the very thought of which I'd break out in a clammy sweat. Don't you see how I'll have to turn handsprings in front of you, like the schoolboy in the McCutcheon cartoon? Don't you see how I'll have to flex my muscles, like this, to show you how strong I am? I may even have to beat you, eventually. Why, child, I've chummed with lions and bears and wolves and everything because of you, you little devil in the red cap. I've climbed unclimbable mountains. I've frozen my feet in blizzards. I've wandered for days on a mountaintop, lost, living on dried currants and milk chocolate, and lord, how I hate milk chocolate. I've dodged snowslides and slept in trees. I've endured cold and hunger and thirst through you. It took me years to get used to the idea of passing a timber-wolf without looking round, but I learned to do it because of you, you made me. They sent me to Colorado, a lonely kid, with a pretty fair chance of dying, and I would have if it hadn't been for you. There, how's that for a burst of speech, young woman? And wait a minute, remember, too, my name was Clarence. I had that to live down. Fanny was staring at him, eyes round, lips parted. But why, she said faintly. Why? Hale smiled with that singularly winning smile of his. Since you forced me to it, I think I'm in love with that little warm-hearted spitfire in the red cap, that's why. Fanny sat forward now. She had been leaning back in her chair, her hands grasping its arms, her face a lovely mobile thing, across which laughter and pity and sympathy and surprise rippled and played. It hardened now and set. She looked down at her hands and clasped them in her lap and then up at him. In that case you can forsake the strenuous life with a free conscience. You need never climb another mountain or wrestle with another or hippopotamus. That little girl in the red cap is dead. Dead? Yes, she died a year ago. If the one who has taken her place were to pass you on the street today and see you beset by forty thieves she'd not even stop, not she, she'd say, let him fight it out alone, it's none of your business, you've got your own fights to handle. Why, Fanny, you don't mean that, do you? What could have made her like that? She's just discovered that fighting for others didn't pay. She just happened to know someone else who had done that all her life and it killed her. Her mother? Yes. A little silence. Fanny, let's play outdoors tomorrow, will you? All day. Involuntarily Fanny glanced around the room. Papers, catalogs, files, desks, chair, typewriter. I'm afraid I've forgotten how. I'll teach you, you look as if you could stand a little of it. I must be a pretty sight, you're the second man to tell me that in two days. Hale leaned forward a little. That's so, who's the other one? Fanger, the general manager. Oh, paternal old chap, I suppose. No? Well anyway, I don't know what he had in mind, but you're going to spend Sunday at the dunes of Indiana with me. Dunes of Indiana? There's nothing like them in the world, literally. In September that combination of yellow sand and blue lake and the woods beyond is, well, you'll see what it is. It's only a little more than an hour's ride by train, and it will just swipe that tired look out of your face, Fan. He stood up. I'll call for you tomorrow morning at eight, or thereabouts. That's early for Sunday, but it's going to be worth it. I can't, really. Besides, I don't think I even want to. I— I promise not to lecture on nature if that's what's worrying you. He took her hand in a parting grip. Bring some sandwiches, will you? Quite a lot of them. I'll have some other stuff in my rucksack, and wear some clothes you don't mind wrecking. I suppose you haven't got a red tamishanter. Heaven's no! I just thought it might help to keep me humble. He was at the door, and so was she, somehow, her hand still in his. Eight o'clock. How do you stand it in this place, Fan? Oh well, I'll find that out to-morrow. Good-bye. Fanny went back to her desk and papers. The room seemed, all at once, impossibly stuffy. Her papers and letters dry, meaningless things. In the next office, separated from her by a partition, half-glass, half-wood, she saw the top of Slosson's bald head as he stood up to shut his old-fashioned roll-top desk. He was leaving. She looked out of the window. Ella Monaghan in hat and suit, passed, and came back to poke her head in at the door. Run along! she said. It's Saturday afternoon. You'll work overtime enough when the Christmas rush begins. Come on, child, and call it a day. And Fanny gathered papers, figures, catalog-proofs into a glorious heap, thrust them into a drawer, locked the drawer, pushed back her chair, and came. End of Chapter 10 Chapter 11 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 11 Fanny told herself, before she went to bed Saturday night, that she hoped it would rain Sunday morning from 7 to 12. But when Princess woke her at 7.30, as per instructions left in pencil scrawl on the kitchen table, she turned to the window at once and was glad, somehow, to find it sun flooded. Princess, if you're mystified, was royal and name only, a biscuit-tinted lady with a very black and no-account husband, whose habits made it necessary for Princess to let herself into Fanny's four-room flat at 7 every morning, and let herself out at 8 every evening. She had an incredibly soft and musical voice, had Princess, and a cooking hand. She kept Fanny mended, fed, and comfortable, and her only cross was that Fanny's taste in blouses, ultimately her property, ran to the severe and tailored. Morning, Miss Fanny, there's a Jepman waiting to see you. Fanny choked on a yawn. A what? Jepman, says you all go and picnic in. He's in the satin room, and a looking at your picture papers. Will I fry you up a little chicken to pack along? Sandwiches ain't no eatin' for Sunday. Fanny flung back her covers, swung around to the side of the bed, and stood up, all seemingly in one sweeping movement. Do you mean to tell me he's in there now? From the sitting room. I think I ought to tell you I can hear everything you're saying. Say, Fanny, those sketches of yours are. Why, gee whiz. I didn't know you did that kind of thing. This one here, with that girl's face in the crowd. For heaven's sake, Fanny demanded, what are you doing here at seven-thirty? And I don't allow people to look at those sketches. You said, eight-thirty. I was afraid you'd change your mind or something. Besides, it's now twenty-two minutes to eight. And will you tell the lady that's a wonderful idea about the chicken? Only she'd better start now. Goaded by time bulletins, shouted through the closed door, Fanny found herself tubbed, clothed, and ready for breakfast by eight-ten. When she opened the door, Clarence was standing in the center of her little sitting-room, waiting, a sheaf of loose sketches in his hand. Say, look here, these are the real thing. Why, they're great. They get you. This old geezer with the beard selling fish and looking like one of the disciples. And this, what the devil are you doing in a mail-water house or whatever it is? Tell me that, when you can draw like this. Good morning, said Fanny calmly. And I'll tell you nothing before breakfast. The one thing that interests me this moment is hot coffee. Will you have some breakfast? Oh, well, a second time won't hurt you. You must have got up at three or thereabouts. She went toward the tiny kitchen. Never mind, Princess, I'll wait on myself. You go on with that chicken. Princess was the kind of person who can fry a chicken, wrap it in cool, crisp lettuce leaves, box it, cut sandwiches, and come out of the process with an unruffled temper and an immaculate kitchen. Thanks to her, Fanny and Hale found themselves on the eight-fifty-three train bound for the dunes. Clarence swung his rucksack up to the bundle-rack. He took off his cap and stuffed it into his pocket. He was grinning like a schoolboy. Fanny turned from the window and smiled at what she saw in his face. At that he gave an absurd little bounce in his place, like an overgrown child, and reached over and patted her hand. I've dreamed of this for years. You are just fourteen going on fifteen, Fanny reproved him. I know it, and it's great. Won't you be too? Forget you're a fair financier or whatever they call it. Forget you earn more in a month than I do in six. Relax, unbend, loosen up. Don't assume that hardshell air with me. Just remember that I knew you when the frill of your panties showed below your skirt. Clarence Hale But he was leaning past her and pointing out of the window. See that curtain of smoke off there? That's the South Chicago and the Hammond and Gray steel mills. Wait till you see those smokestacks against the sky. And the iron scaffoldings that looked like giant lacework, and the slag heaps, and the coal piles, and those huge, groomed tanks, gad, it's awful and beautiful, like the things Penel does. I came out here on a streetcar one day, said Fanny quietly, one Sunday. You did? he stared at her. It was hot, and they were all spilling out into the street. You know, the woman in wrappers just blobs of flesh trying to get cool, and the young girls in their pink silk dresses and white shoes, and the boys on the street corners calling to them. Babies all over the sidewalks and streets, and the men who weren't in the mills, you know how they look in their Sunday shirt sleeves, with their flat faces and high cheekbones, and their great brown hands with the broken nails? Hunkies. Well, at five the motorcars began whizzing by from the country roads back to Chicago. You have to go back that way. Just when the five o'clock whistles blew and the day shift came off. There was a great army of them clumping down the road the way they do. Their shoulders were slack and their lunch pails dangled empty, and they were wet and reeking with sweat. The motorcars were full of wild flocks and daisies and spider-wort. Clarence was still turned sideways, looking at her. Get a picture of it? Yes, I tried at least. Is that the way you usually spend your Sundays? Well, I like snooping about. Hmm. Muse Clarence. Then, how's business, Fanny? Business. You could almost feel her mind jerk back. Oh, let's not talk about business on Sunday. I thought so, said Clarence enigmatically. Now listen to me, Fanny. I'll listen, interrupted she, if you'll talk about yourself. I want to know what you're doing and why you're going to New York. What business can a naturalist have in New York anyway? I didn't intend to be a naturalist. You can tell that by looking at me. But you can't have your very nose rubbed up against trees and rocks and mountains and snow for years and years, without learning something about them. There were whole weeks when I hadn't anything to chum with but a timber-lined pine and an odd assortment of mountain peaks. We just had to get acquainted. But you're going back, aren't you? Don't they talk about the spell of the mountains or some such thing? They do, and they're right. And I've got to have them six months in the year, at least. But I'm going to try spending the other six in the bosom of the human race. Not only that, I'm going to write about it. Writing's my job, really. At least it's the thing I like best. Nature. Human nature. I went out to Colorado, just a lonesome little kid with a bum lung. The lung's all right, but I never did quite get over the other. Two years ago, in the mountains, I met Carl Lasker, who owns the New York Star. It's said to be the greatest morning paper in the country. Lasker's a genius. And he fries the best bacon I ever tasted. I took him on a four-weeks horseback trip through the mountains. We got pretty well acquainted. At the end of it, he offered me a job. You see, I'd never seen a chorus girl, or the Woolworth building, or a cabaret, or a boiled lobster, or a subway. But I was interested and curious about all of them. And Lasker said, A man who can humanize a rock, or a tree, or a chipmunk ought to be able to make even those things seem human. You've got what they call the fresh viewpoint. New York's full of people with a scum over their eyes. But a lot of them came to New York from Winnebago, or towns just like it. And you'd be surprised at the number of them who still get their hometown paper. One day, when I went into Lee Cole's office, with stars and leading men and all that waiting outside to see him, he was sitting with his feet on the desk reading the Sheffield, Illinois Gazette. You see, the thing he thinks I can do is to give them a picture of New York as they used to see it before they got colorblind. A column or so a day, about anything that hits me. How does that strike you as a job for a naturalist? It's a job for a human naturalist. I think you'll cover it. If you know the dunes, which you probably don't, you know why they did not get off at Millers with the crowd, but rode on until they were free of the Sunday picnickers. Then they got off and walked across the tracks, past saloons and a few huddled houses, hideous in yellow paint, and on and on down a road that seemed endless. A stretch of cinders then dust, a rather stiff little hill, a great length of yellow sand, and the lake. We say the lake, like that, was an exclamation point after it, because it wasn't at all the Lake Michigan that Chicagoans know. This vast blue glory bore no relation to the sullen gray turbid thing that the city calls the lake. It was all the blues of which you've ever heard, and every passing cloud gave it a new shade. Sapphire, no cobalt, no that's too cold, Mediterranean, turquoise, and the sand in golden contrast. Miles of sand along the beach, and back of that the dunes. Now any dictionary or scotchman will tell you that a dune is a hill of loose sand. But these dunes are done in American fashion, lavishly. Mountains of sand, as far as the eye can see, and on top of them, incredibly, great pine trees that clutch at their perilous shifting foothold with frantic root-toes. And behind that, still more incredibly, the woods, filled with wildflowers, with strange growths found nowhere else in the whole land, with trees and vines and brush, and always the pungent scent of the pines. And there you have the dunes, Blue Lake, Golden Sandhills, Green Forest, in one. Fanny and Clarence stood there on the sand in silence, two ridiculously diminutive figures in that great wilderness of beauty. I wish I could get to you, somehow, the clear sparkle of it, the brilliance of it, and yet the peace of it. They stood there a long time, those two, without speaking. Then Fanny shut her eyes, and I think her lower lip trembled just a little, and Clarence pattered her hand just twice. I thank you, he said, in the name of that much-abused lady known as Nature. Said Fanny, I want to scramble up to the top of one of those dunes, the high one, and just sit there. And that is what they did. A poor enough Sunday, I suppose, in the minds of those of you who spend yours golfing at the club or motoring along grease-soaked roads that lead to a shore dinner and a ukulele band. But it turned Fanny Brandeis back a dozen years or more, so that she was again the little girl whose heart had ached at the sight of the pale rose and orange of the Wisconsin winter sunsets. She forgot all about layettes and obstetrical outfits and flannel bands and safety pins. Her mind was a blank in the matter of booties and catalogs, and our number 29E-8347, and those hungry bins that always yawned for more. She forgot about Michael Fenger and Theodore and the new furs. They scrambled up dunes, digging into the treacherous sand with heels, toes, and the sight of the foot, clutching at fickle roots with frantic fingers. Forward a step, and back two. That's dune climbing. A back-breaking business, unless you're young and strong, as were these two. They explored the woods, and Hale had a fascinating way of talking about stones and shrubs and trees, as if they were endowed with human qualities, as indeed they were for him. They found a hill slope carpeted with dwarf huckleberry plants, still bearing tiny clusters of the blue-black fruit. Fanny's heart was pounding, her lungs ached, her cheeks were scarlet, her eyes shining. Hale, steel-muscled, took the hills like a shammy. Once they crossed hands atop a dune and literally skated down it, right-left, right-left, shrieking with laughter, and ending in a heap at the bottom. In the name of all that's idiotic, shouted Hale, silk stockings! What in thunder made you wear silk stockings at the sand dunes? Gosh! They ate their dinner in Olympic Splendor atop a dune. Hale produced unexpected things from the rucksack—things that ranged all the way from milk chocolate to literature and from grape juice to cigarettes. They ate ravenously, but at Hale's thrifty suggestion they saved a few sandwiches for the late afternoon. It was he, too, who made a little bonfire of paper, crusts, and bones, as is the cleanly habit of your true woodsman. Then they stretched out full length in the noon sun on the warm, clean sand. What's your best price on one-six-dozen flannel vests, inquired Hale? And—oh, shut up! said Fanny elegantly. Hale laughed as one who hugs a secret. We'll work our way down the beach, he announced, toward Millers. There'll be northern lights to-night. Did you know that? Want to stay and see them? Do I want to? I won't go home till I have. These were the things they did on that holiday—childish, happy, tiring things, such as people do, who love the outdoors. The charm of Clarence Hale, for he had charm, is difficult to transmit. His loveliness and appeal lay in his simplicity. It was not so much what he said as in what he didn't say. He was staring unwinkingly now at the sunset that had suddenly burst upon them. His were the eyes of one accustomed to the silent distances. Takes your breath away, rather, doesn't it? All that color, said Fanny, are faced toward the blaze. Almost too obvious for my taste, I like them a little more subdued myself. They were atop a dune, and he stretched himself flat on the sand, still keeping his bright brown eyes on lake and sky. Then he sat up excitedly. Try that, lie flat, it softens the whole thing, like this. Now look at it, the lake's like molten copper flowing in, and you can see that silly sun going down in jerks, like a balloon on a string. They lay there silent while the scarlet became orange, the orange faded to rose, the rose to pale pink, to salmon, to mauve, to gray. The first pale star came out, and the brazen lights of Gary far to the north defied it. Fanny sat up with a sigh and a little shiver. Fasten that sweater around your throat, said Hale, got a pin? They munched their sandwiches, rather soggy by now, and drank the last of the grape juice. We'll have a bite of hot supper in town at a restaurant that doesn't mind Sunday trampers. Come on, fan, we'll start down the beach until the Northern Lights begin to show. It's been the most accommodating day, murmured Fanny. Sunshine, sunset, Northern Lights, everything. If we were to demand a rainbow and an eclipse, they turned those on, too. They started to walk down the beach in the twilight, keeping close to the water's edge, where the sand was moist and firm. It was hard going. They plunged along, arm in arm, in silence. Now and again they stopped, with one accord, and looked out over the great gray expanse that lay before them, and then up at the hills and the pines etched in black against the sky. Nothing competitive here, Fanny thought, and took a deep breath. She thought of tomorrow's work, with day after tomorrow's biting and snapping at its heels. Clarence seemed to sense her thoughts. Doesn't this make you feel like you want to get away from those damned bins that you're forever feeding? I watched those boys for a minute the other day outside your office. Chove! Fanny dug a heel into the sand, savagely. Some days I feel that I've got to walk out of the office and down the street, without a hat, and on and on, walking and walking, and running now and then, till I come to the horizon. That's how I feel, some days. Then some day, Fanny, that feeling will get too strong for you and you'll do it. Now listen to me. Tuck this away in your subconscious mind and leave it there until you need it. When that time comes, get on a train for Denver. From Denver, take another to Estes Park. That's the Rocky Mountains, and they're your destination, because that's where the horizon lives and has its being. When you get there, ask for Hale's place. They'll just hand you from one to the other gently, until you get there. I may be there, but more likely I shan't. The keys in the mailbox tie to a string. You'll find a fire already laid in the fireplace, with fat pine-nuts that will blaze up at the touch of a match. My books are there along the walls, the beddings in the cedar chest, and the lamps are filled. There's tin stuff in the pantry, and the mountains are there, girl, to make you clean and whole again, and the pines that are nature's prophylactic brushes, and the sky, and peace. That sounds like a railway folder, but it's true, I know. They trudged along in silence for a while. Got that?" replied Fanny, disinterestedly, without looking at him. Hale's jaw set. You could see the muscles show white for an instant. Then he said, It has been a wonderful day, Fanny, but you haven't told me a thing about yourself. I'd like to know about your work. I'd like to know what you're doing, what your plan is. You look so darn definite up there in that office. Whom do you play with, and who's this finger? Wasn't that the name? Who said you look tired? All right, Clancy, I'll tell you about it. Fanny agreed briskly. All right, who? Well, I can't call you Clarence. It doesn't fit. So just for the rest of the day, let's make it Clancy, even if you do look like one of the minor Hebrew prophets, minus the beard. And so she began to tell him of her work and her aims. I think that she had been craving just this chance to talk. That which she told him was, unconsciously, a confession. She told him of Theodore and his marriage, of her mother's death, of her coming to Haines Cooper, and the changes she had brought about there. She showed him the infinite possibilities for advancement there. Slosson, she tossed aside. Then, rather haltingly, she told him of fangor, of his business genius, his magnetic qualities, of his career. She even sketched a deaf word picture of the limp and irritating Mrs. Fanger. Is this Fanger in love with you? asked Hale startlingly. Fanny recoiled at the idea with a primeness that did credit to Winnebago. Clancy, please, he's married. Now don't sneak, Fanny, and don't talk like an ingenue. So far you've outlined a life plan that makes Becky Sharp look like a cooing dove. So just answer this straight, will you? Why, I suppose I attract him as any man of his sort, with a wife like that, would be attracted to a healthy, alert woman whose ideas match his. And I wish you wouldn't talk to me like that. It hurts. I'm glad of that. I was afraid you'd pass that stage. Well, now, how about those sketches of yours? I suppose you know that they're as good in a crude, effective sort of way as anything that's being done today. Oh, nonsense! But then she stopped suddenly and put both hands on his arm and looked up at him, her face radiant in the gray twilight. Do you really think they're good? You bet they're good. There isn't a newspaper in the country that couldn't use that kind of stuff. And there aren't three people in the country who can do it. It isn't a case of being able to draw. It's being able to see life in a peculiar light, and to throw that light so that others get the glow. Those sketches I saw this morning are life served up raw. That's your gift, Fanny. Why the devil don't you use it? But Fanny had got herself in hand again. It isn't a gift, she said lightly. It's just a little knack that amuses me. There's no money in it. Besides, it's too late now. One's got to do a thing superlatively nowadays to be recognized. I don't draw superlatively, but I do handle infant swear better than any woman I know. In two more years I'll be getting ten thousand a year at Haines Cooper, in five years. Then what? Fanny's hands became fists, gripping the power she craved. Then I shall have arrived. I shall be able to see the great and beautiful things of this world, and mingle with the people who possess them. When you might be making them yourself, you little fool, don't glare at me like that. I tell you that those pictures are the real expression of you. That's why you turn to them as relief from the shop grind. You can't help doing them. They're you. I can stop if I want to. They amuse me, that's all. You can't stop. It's in your blood. It's the Jew in you. The—here, I'll show you. I won't do another sketch for a year. I'll prove to you that my ancestor's religion doesn't influence my work or my play. Dear, you can't prove that because the contrary has been proven long ago. You yourself proved it when you did that sketch of the old fish-vendor in the ghetto, the one with the beard. It took a thousand years of suffering and persecution and faith to stamp that look on his face, and it took a thousand years to read in you the genius to see it and put it down on paper. Fan, did you ever read Fishburg's book? No, said Fanny, low-voiced. Sometime when you can snatch a moment from the fascinations of the mail-order catalogue, read it. Fishburg says, I wish I could remember his exact words. It isn't the body that marks the Jew, it's his soul. The type is not anthropological or physical. It's social or psychic. It isn't the complexion, the nose, the lips, the head. It's his soul which portrays his faith. Centuries of ghetto confinement, ostracism, ceaseless suffering have produced a psychic type. The thing that is stamped on the soul seeps through the veins and works its way magically to the face. But I don't want to talk about souls. Please, you're spoiling a wonderful day. And you're spoiling a wonderful life. I don't object to this driving ambition in you. I don't say that you're wrong in wanting to make a place for yourself in the world. But don't expect me to stand by and let you trample over your own immortal soul to get there. Your head is busy enough on this infant's wear job, but how about the rest of you? How about you? What do you suppose all those years of work and suppression and self-denial and beauty-hunger there in Winnebago were meant for, not to develop the mail-order business? They were given you so that you might recognize hunger and suppression and self-denial and others. The light in the face of that girl in the crowd pouring out of the plant. What's that but the reflection of the light in you? I tell you, Fanny, we Jews have got a money-grubbing, loud-talking, diamond-studded, get there at any price reputation. And perhaps we deserve it. But every now and then, out of the mass of us, one lifts his head and stands erect, and the great white light is in his face. And that person has suffered, for suffering, breeds genius. It expands the soul, just as overprosperity shrivels it. You see it all the way from Lou Fields to Sarah Bernhardt, from Mendelssohn to Irving Berlin, from Mishka Elman to Charlie Chaplin. You were a person set apart in Winnebago. Instead of thanking your God for that, you set out to be something you aren't. No, it's worse than that. You're trying not to be what you are. And it's going to do for you. Stop, cried Fanny, my head's whirling. It sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland. And you, retorted Hale, sound like someone who's afraid to talk or think about herself. You're suppressing the thing that is you. You're cutting yourself off from your own people. A dramatic, impulsive, emotional people. By doing those things, you're killing the goose that lays the golden egg. What's that old copy-book line? To thine own self be true and the rest of it? Yes, like Theodore, for example, sneered Fanny. At which unpleasant point, nature kindly supplied a diversion. Across the black sky, there shot two luminous shafts of lights. Northen lights, pale sisters of the chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still weirdly beautiful. Fanny and Hale stop short, faces upturned. The ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like celestial searchlights. Suddenly, from the tip of each shaft, there burst a cluster of slender, pinpoint lines, like egrets set in a band of silver. Then these, slowly wavered, faded, combined to form a third and fourth slender shaft of light. It was like the radiance one sees in the old pictures of the Holy Family. Together Fanny and Hale watched it in silence, until the last glimmer faded and was gone, and only the brazen lights of Gary, far, far down the beach, cast a fiery glow against the sky. They sighed simultaneously. Then they laughed each at the other. Curtain said Fanny. They raced for the station despite the sand. Their car was filled with pudgy babies lying limp in parental arms, with lunch baskets exuding the sickly scent of bananas, with disheveled vandals whose moist palms grasped bunches of wilted wildflowers. Past the belching chimneys of Gary, through south Chicago, the backyard of a metropolis, past Jackson Park that breathed coolly upon them, and so to the city again. They looked at it with the shock that comes to eyes that have rested for hours on long stretches of sand and sky and water, Monday that had seemed so far away became an actuality of tomorrow. Tired as they were, they stopped at one of those frank little restaurants that brightened Chicago's drab side streets. Its windows were full of pans that held baked beans, all crusty and brown, and falsely tempting, and of baked apples swimming in a pool of syrup. These flanked by ketchup bottles and geometrical pyramids of golden grapefruit. Coffee and hot roast beef sandwiches, of course, in a place like that. And, added Fanny, one of those baked apples, just to prove they can't be as good as they look. They weren't, but she was too hungry to care. Not too hungry, though, to note with quick eye all that the little restaurant held of interest, nor too sleepy to respond to the friendly waitress who, seeing their dusty boots and the sprig of sumac stuck in Fanny's coat, said, My, it must have been swell in the country today, as her flapping napkin precipitated crumbs into their laps. It was, said Fanny, and smiled up at the girl with her generous flashing smile. Here's a bit of it I brought back for you. And she stuck the scarlet sumac sprig into the belt of the white apron. They finished the day incongruously by taking a taxi home, Fanny yawning luxuriously all the way. Do you know, she said as they parted, We've talked about everything from souls to infantswear. We're talked out. It's a mercy you're going to New York. There won't be a next time. Young woman, said Hale forcefully, There will, that young devil in the red tam isn't dead. She's alive and kicking. There's a kick in every one of those Chicago sketches in your portfolio upstairs. You said she wouldn't fight anybody's battles today, you little idiot. She's fighting one in each of those pictures, from the one showing that girl's face in the crowd to the old chap with the fish stall. She'll never die that one, because she's the spirit. It's the other one who's dead, and she doesn't know it. But some days she'll find herself buried, and I want to be there to shovel on the dirt. Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber CHAPTER XII From the first of December the floor of the Haines Cooper mailroom looked like a New York Stock Exchange after a panic. The aisles were drifts of paper against which a squad of boys struggled as vainly as a gang of snow shovelers against a blizzard. The guide talked in terms of tons of mail instead of thousands, and smacked his lips after it. The ten thousand were working at night now, stopping for a hasty bite of supper at six, then back to the desk or bin or shelf until nine, so that Oklahoma and Minnesota might have its Christmas box in time. Fanny Brandeis, working under the light of her green-shaded desk lamp, wondered a little bitterly if Christmas would ever mean anything to her but pressure, weariness, work. She told herself that she would not think of that Christmas of one year ago. One year. As she glanced around the orderly little office and out to the stock room beyond, then back to her desk again, she had an odd feeling of unreality. Surely it had been not one year, but many years, a lifetime, since she had elbowed her way up and down those packed aisles of the busy little store in Winnebago. She, in that brisk, alert, courageous woman. Mrs. Brandeis, lady wants to know if you can't put this blue satin dress on the dark-haired doll and the pink satin. Well, I did tell her, but she said for me to ask you, anyway. Mrs. Brandeis, this man says he paid a dollar down on a go-cart last month, and he wants to pay the rest and take it home with him. And then the reassuring, authoritative voice, coming, I'll be right there. Coming! That had been her whole life, service, and now she lay so quietly beneath the snow of the bitter northern winter. At that point Fanny's fist would come down hard on her desk, and the quick, indrawn breath of mutinous resentment would hiss through her teeth. She kept away from the downtown shops and their crowds. She scowled at the site of the holly and mistletoe wreaths with their crimson streamers. There was something almost ludicrous in the way she shut her eyes to the holiday pageant all around her, and doubled and redoubled her work. It seemed she had a new scheme for her department every other day, and every other one was a good one. Slosson had long ago abandoned the attempt to keep up with her. He did not even resent her as he had at first. I'm a buyer, he said rather pathetically, and a pretty good one too, but I'm not a genius, and I never will be, and I guess you've got to be a genius these days to keep up. It used to be enough for an infant's wear buyer to know muslins, cottons, woolens, silks, and embroideries. But that's old-fashioned now. These days, when you hire an office boy, you don't ask him if he can read and write. You tell him he's got to have personality, magnetism, and imagination. Makes me sick. The baby book came off the presses, and it was good. Even Slosson admitted it grudgingly. The cover was a sunny, breezy, seashore picture, all blue and gold, with plump, dimpled youngsters playing, digging in the sand, romping, and wearing our number 13 E1269, etc., of course. Inside were displayed the complete baby outfits with a smiling mother and a chubby, crowing baby as the central picture, and each piece of each outfit separately pictured. Just below this, the outfit number and price, and a list of the pieces that went to make it up. From the emergency outfit at $3.98 to the outfit deluxe for Haines Cooper patrons, at $28.50, each group was comprehensive, practical, complete. In the back of the book was a personal service plea. Use us, it said. We are here to assist you, not only in the matter of merchandise, but with information and advice. Mothers in particular are in need of such service. This book will save you weariness and worry. Use us. Fanny surveyed the book with pardonable pride, but she was not satisfied. We lack style, she said. The practical garments are all right, but what we need is a little snap. That means cut and line, and I'm going to New York to get it. That had always been Slosson's work. She and Ella Monahan were to go to the Eastern markets together. Ella Monahan went to New York regularly every three weeks. Fanny had never been east of Chicago. She envied Ella her knowledge of the New York wholesalers and manufacturers. Ella had dropped into Fanny's office for a brief moment. The two women had little in common except their work, but they got on very well, and each found the other educating. Seems to me you're putting an awful lot into this, observed Ella Monahan, her wise eyes on Fanny's rather tense face. You've got to, replied Fanny, to get anything out of it. I guess you're right, Ella agreed, and laughed a rueful little laugh. I know I've given them everything I've got, and a few things I didn't know I had. It's a queer game, life. Now, if my old father hadn't run a tannery in Racine, and if I hadn't run around there all the day, so that I got so that the smell and fail of leather and hides were part of me, why, I'd never be a buyer of gloves at Haines Cooper, and you? Brandeis is bizarre, and was going on when her office boy came in with a name. Ella rose to go, but Fanny stopped her. Father Fitzpatrick! Bring him right in! Miss Monahan, you've got to meet him. He's— Then, as the great frame of the handsome old priest filled the doorway, he's just Father Fitzpatrick! Ella Monahan! The white-haired Irishman, and the white-haired Irishwoman clasped hands. And who are you, daughter, besides Ella Monahan? Buyer of gloves at Haines Cooper, father. You don't tell me now. He turned to Fanny, put his two big hands on her shoulders, and swung her around to face the light. Hmm! he murmured noncommittally after that. Hmm! what! demanded Fanny. It sounds unflattering, whatever it means. Gloves! repeated Father Fitzpatrick, unheeding her. Well, now, what do you think of that? Millions of dollars' worth I'll wager in your time. Two million and a half in my department last year, replied Ella, was at the least traced of boastfulness. One talked only in terms of millions at Haines Cooper's. What an age it is! When two slips of women can earn salaries that would make the old kings of Ireland look like beggars. He twinkled upon the older woman, and what a feeling it must be, independence and all. I've earned my own living since I was seventeen, said Ella Monahan. I'd hate to tell you how long that is. A murmur from the gallant Irishman. Thanks, Father, for the compliment I see in your eyes. But what I mean is this. You're right about independence. It is a grand thing, at first. But after a while it begins to pawl on you. Don't ask me why, I don't know. I only hope you won't think I'm a wicked woman when I say I could learn to love any man who'd hang a silver fox scarf and a string of pearls around my neck, and ask me if I didn't feel a draft. Wicked! Not a bit of it, my girl. It's only natural and commendable, barring the pearls. I'd forego them then, laughed Ella, and with a parting handshake left the two alone. Father Fitzpatrick looked after her. A smart woman that— He took out his watch, a fat silver one. It's eleven-thirty. My train leaves at four. Now, Fanny, if you'll get on your hat and arrange to steal an hour or so from this Brahmin-Nagian place, a grand word that, my girl, and nearer to Swerin than any word I know, I'll take you to the Blackstone, no less, for lunch. How's that for a poor, miserable priest? You, dear, I couldn't think of it. Oh, yes, I could get away, but let's lunch right here at the plant in the grill. Never, I couldn't. Don't ask it of me. This place scares me. I came up in the elevator with a crowd and a guide, and he was juggling millions that chap. The way a newsboy flips a cent. I'm but a poor, parish priest, but I've got my pride. We'll go to the Blackstone, which I've passed, humbly, but never been in, with its rose silk shades and its window-boxes, and we'll be waited on by velvet-footed servitors, my girl. Get your hat. Fanny, protesting, but laughing too, got it. They took the L. Michigan Avenue, as they approached it from Wabash, was wind-swept and bleak, as only Michigan Avenue can be in December. They entered the warm radiance of the luxurious foyer with a little breathless rush, as wind-blown Chicagoans generally do. The head-waiter must have thought Father Fitzpatrick a cardinal at least, for he seated them at a window-table that looked out upon the icy street, with Grant Park crusted with sooty snow just across the way, and beyond that the icy tracks and the great Gray Lake. The splendid room was all color and perfume and humming conversation, a fountain tinkled in the center, and upon its waters there floated lily-pads and blossoms, weirdly rose and mauve and lavender. The tables were occupied by deliciously slim young girls, and very self-conscious college boys home for the holidays, and marshaled matrons furred and agreded. The pink and fanny's cheeks deepened. She loved luxury. She smiled and flashed at the handsome old priest opposite her. You're a waste drill, she said, but isn't it nice? And tasted the first delicious sip of soup. It is, for a change. Extravagance is good for all of us now and then. He glanced leisurely around the brilliant room, then out to the street, bleakly wind-swept. He leaned back and drummed a bit with his fingers on the satin smooth cloth. Now and then. Tell me, fanny, what would you say off-hand? What's the most interesting thing you see from here? You used to have a trick of picking out what they call the human side. Your mother had it, too. Fanny, smiling, glanced about the room, her eyes unconsciously following the track his had taken, about the room and out to the icy street. The most interesting thing? Back to the flower-scented room with its music and tinkle in animation, out again to the street. You see that man standing at the curb across the street? He sort of crouched against the lamppost. See him? Yes, there, just this side of that big gray car. He's all drawn up in a heap. You can feel him shivering. He looks as if he were trying to crawl inside himself for warmth. Ever since we came in, I've noticed him staring straight across at these windows where we're all sitting so grandly lunching. I know what he's thinking, don't you? And I wish I didn't feel so uncomfortable knowing it. I wish we hadn't ordered lobster thermidor. I wish—there!—the policemen's moving him on. Father Fitzpatrick reached over and took her hand. As it lay on the table in his great grasp, Fanny-girl, you've told me what I wanted to know. Haines Cooper or no Haines Cooper, millions or no millions, your ravines aren't choked up with ashes yet, my dear. Thank God.