"Marguerite. Robes et Manteaux." And, "Smolkin. Tailor."

Now, you know that women buyers for mail order houses do not spend their Saturday afternoons and Sundays thus, prowling about a city's streets. Fanny Brandeis knew it too, in her heart. She knew that the Ella Monahans of her world spent their holidays in stayless relaxation, manicuring, mending a bit, skimming the Sunday papers, massaging crows'-feet somewhat futilely. She knew that women buyers do not, as a rule, catch their breath with delight at sight of the pock-marked old Field Columbian museum in Jackson Park, softened and beautified by the kindly gray chiffon of the lake mist, and tinted by the rouge of the sunset glow, so that it is a thing of spectral loveliness. Successful mercantile women, seeing the furnace glare of the South Chicago steel mills flaring a sullen red against the lowering sky, do not draw a disquieting mental picture of men toiling there, naked to the waist, and glistening with sweat in the devouring heat of the fires.

I don't know how she tricked herself. I suppose she said it was the city's appeal to the country dweller, but she lied, and she knew she was lying. She must have known it was the spirit of Molly Brandeis in her, and of Molly Brandeis' mother, and of her mother's mother's mother, down the centuries to Sarah; repressed women, suffering women, troubled, patient, nomadic women, struggling now in her for expression.

And Fanny Brandeis went doggedly on, buying and selling infants' wear, and doing it expertly. Her office desk would have interested you. It was so likely to be littered with the most appealing bits of apparel—a pair of tiny, crocheted bootees, pink and white; a sturdy linen smock; a silken hood so small that one's doubled fist filled it.

The new catalogue was on the presses. Fanny had slaved over it, hampered by Slosson. Fenger had given her practically a free hand. Results would not come in for many days. The Christmas trade would not tell the tale, for that was always a time of abnormal business. The dull season following the holiday rush would show the real returns. Slosson was discouragement itself. His attitude was not resentful; it was pitying, and that frightened Fanny. She wished that he would storm a little. Then she read her department catalogue proof sheets, and these reassured her. They were attractive. And the new baby book had turned out very well, with a colored cover that would appeal to any one who had ever been or seen a baby.

September brought a letter from Theodore. A letter from Theodore meant just one thing. Fanny hesitated a moment before opening it. She always hesitated before opening Theodore's letters. While she hesitated the old struggle would rage in her.

"I don't owe him anything," the thing within her would say. "God knows I don't. What have I done all my life but give, and give, and give to him! I'm a woman. He's a man. Let him work with his hands, as I do. He's had his share. More than his share."

Nevertheless she had sent him one thousand of the six thousand her mother had bequeathed to her. She didn't want to do it. She fought doing it. But she did it.

Now, as she held this last letter in her hands, and stared at the Bavarian stamp, she said to herself:

"He wants something. Money. If I send him some I can't have that new tailor suit, or the furs. And I need them. I'm going to have them."

She tore open the letter.

"Dear Old Fan:

"Olga and I are back in Munich, as you see. I think we'll be here all winter, though Olga hates it. She says it isn't lustig. Well, it isn't Vienna, but I think there's a chance for a class here of American pupils. Munich's swarming with Americans—whole families who come here to live for a year or two. I think I might get together a very decent class, backed by Auer's recommendations. Teaching! Good God, how I hate it! But Auer is planning a series of twenty concerts for me. They ought to be a success, if slaving can do it. I worked six hours a day all summer. I wanted to spend the summer—most of it, that is—in Holzhausen Am Ammersee, which is a little village, or artist's colony in the valley, an hour's ride from here, and within sight of the Bavarian Alps. We had Kurt Stein's little villa for almost nothing. But Olga was bored, and she wasn't well, poor girl, so we went to Interlaken and it was awful. And that brings me to what I want to tell you.

"There's going to be a baby. No use saying I'm glad, because I'm not, and neither is Olga. About February, I think. Olga has been simply wretched, but the doctor says she'll feel better from now on. The truth of it is she needs a lot of things and I can't give them to her. I told you I'd been working on this concerto of mine. Sometimes I think it's the real thing, if only I could get the leisure and the peace of mind I need to work on it. You don't know what it means to be eaten up with ambition and to be handicapped."

"Oh, don't I!" said Fanny Brandeis, between her teeth, and crumpled the letter in her strong fingers. "Don't I!" She got up from her chair and began to walk up and down her little office, up and down. A man often works off his feelings thus; a woman rarely. Fenger, who had not been twice in her office since her coming to the Haynes-Cooper plant, chose this moment to visit her, his hands full of papers, his head full of plans. He sensed something wrong at once, as a highly organized human instrument responds to a similarly constructed one.

"What's wrong, girl?"

"Everything. And don't call me girl."

Fenger saw the letter crushed in her hand.

"Brother?" She had told him about Theodore and he had been tremendously interested.

"Yes."

"Money again, I suppose?"

"Yes, but——"

"You know your salary's going up, after Christmas."

"Catalogue or no catalogue?"

"Catalogue or no catalogue."

"Why?"

"Because you've earned it."

Fanny faced him squarely. "I know that Haynes-Cooper isn't exactly a philanthropic institution. A salary raise here usually means a battle. I've only been here three months." Fenger seated himself in the chair beside her desk and ran a cool finger through the sheaf of papers in his hand. "My dear girl—I beg your pardon. I forgot. My good woman then—if you like that better—you've transfused red blood into a dying department. It may suffer a relapse after Christmas, but I don't think so. That's why you're getting more money, and not because I happen to be tremendously interested in you, personally."

Fanny's face flamed scarlet. "I didn't mean that."

"Yes you did. Here are those comparative lists you sent me. If I didn't know Slosson to be as honest as Old Dog Tray I'd think he had been selling us to the manufacturers. No wonder this department hasn't paid. He's been giving 'em top prices for shoddy. Now what's this new plan of yours?"

In an instant Fanny forgot about Theodore, the new winter suit and furs, everything but the idea that was clamoring to be born. She sat at her desk, her fingers folding and unfolding a bit of paper, her face all light and animation as she talked.

"My idea is to have a person known as a selector for each important department. It would mean a boiling down of the products of every manufacturer we deal with, and skimming the cream off the top. As it is now a department buyer has to do the selecting and buying too. He can't do both and get results. We ought to set aside an entire floor for the display of manufacturers' samples. The selector would make his choice among these, six months in advance of the season. The selector would go to the eastern markets too, of course. Not to buy. Merely to select. Then, with the line chosen as far as style, quality, and value is concerned, the buyer would be free to deal directly with the manufacturer as to quantity, time, and all that. You know as well as I that that's enough of a job for any one person, with the labor situation what it is. He wouldn't need to bother about styles or colors, or any of that. It would all have been done for him. The selector would have the real responsibility. Don't you see the simplicity of it, and the way it would grease the entire machinery?"

Something very like jealousy came into Michael Fenger's face as he looked at her. But it was gone in an instant. "Gad! You'll have my job away from me in two years. You're a super-woman, do you know that?"

"Super nothing! It's just a perfectly good idea, founded on common sense and economy."

"M-m-m, but that's all Columbus had in mind when he started out to find a short cut to India."

Fanny laughed out at that. "Yes, but see where he landed!"

But Fenger was serious. "We'll have to have a meeting on this. Are you prepared to go into detail on it, before Mr. Haynes and the two Coopers, at a real meeting in a real mahogany directors' room? Wednesday, say?"

"I think so."

Fenger got up. "Look here, Miss Brandeis. You need a day in the country. Why don't you run up to your home town over Sunday? Wisconsin, wasn't it?"

"Oh, no! No. I mean yes it was Wisconsin, but no I don't want to go."

"Then let me send you my car."

"Car! No, thanks. That's not my idea of the country."

"It was just a suggestion. What do you call going to the country, then?"

"Tramping all day, and getting lost, if possible. Lying down under a tree for hours, and letting the ants amble over you. Dreaming. And coming back tired, hungry, dusty, and refreshed."

"It sounds awfully uncomfortable. But I wish you'd try it, this week."

"Do I look such a wreck?" Fanny demanded, rather pettishly.

"You!" Fenger's voice was vibrant. "You're the most splendidly alive looking woman I ever saw. When you came into my office that first day you seemed to spark with health, and repressed energy, and electricity, so that you radiated them. People who can do that, stimulate. That's what you are to me—a stimulant."

What can one do with a man who talks like that? After all, what he said was harmless enough. His tone was quietly sincere. One can't resent an expression of the eyes. Then, too, just as she made up her mind to be angry she remembered the limp and querulous Mrs. Fenger, and the valve and the scarf. And her anger became pity. There flashed back to her the illuminating bit of conversation with which Fascinating Facts had regaled her on the homeward drive that night of the tea.

"Nice chap, Fenger. And a wiz in business. Get's a king's salary; Must be hell for a man to be tied, hand and foot, the way he is."

"Tied?"

"Mrs. Fenger's a semi-invalid. At that I don't believe she's as helpless as she seems. I think she just holds him by that shawl of hers, that's forever slipping. You know he was a machine boy in her father's woolen mill. She met him after he'd worked his way up to an office job. He has forged ahead like a locomotive ever since."

That had been their conversation, gossipy, but tremendously enlightening for Fanny. She looked up at him now.

"Thanks for the vacation suggestion. I may go off somewhere. Just a last-minute leap. It usually turns out better, that way. I'll be ready for the Wednesday discussion."

She sounded very final and busy. The crumpled letter lay on her desk. She smoothed it out, and the crumple transferred itself to her forehead. Fenger stood a moment, looking down at her. Then he turned, abruptly and left the office. Fanny did not look up.

That was Friday. On Saturday her vacation took a personally conducted turn. She had planned to get away at noon, as most office heads did on Saturday, during the warm weather. When her 'phone rang at eleven she answered it mechanically as does one whose telephone calls mean a row with a tardy manufacturer, an argument with a merchandise man, or a catalogue query from the printer's.

The name that came to her over the telephone conveyed nothing to her.

"Who?" Again the name. "Heyl?" She repeated the name uncertainly. "I'm afraid I—O, of course! Clarence Heyl. Howdy-do."

"I want to see you," said the voice, promptly.

There rose up in Fanny's mind a cruelly clear picture of the little, sallow, sniveling school boy of her girlhood. The little boy with the big glasses and the shiny shoes, and the weak lungs.

"Sorry," she replied, promptly, "but I'm afraid it's impossible. I'm leaving the office early, and I'm swamped." Which was a lie.

"This evening?"

"I rarely plan anything for the evening. Too tired, as a rule."

"Too tired to drive?"

"I'm afraid so."

A brief silence. Then, "I'm coming out there to see you."

"Where? Here? The plant! That's impossible, Mr. Heyl. I'm terribly sorry, but I can't——"

"Yes, I know. Also terribly sure that if I ever get to you it will be over your office boy's dead body. Well, arm him. I'm coming. Good-by."

"Wait a minute! Mr. Heyl! Clarence! Hello! Hello!"

A jiggling of the hook. "Number, please?" droned the voice of the operator.

Fanny jammed the receiver down on the hook and turned to her work, lips compressed, a frown forming a double cleft between her eyes.

Half an hour later he was there. Her office boy brought in his card, as she had rehearsed him to do. Fanny noted that it was the wrong kind of card. She would show him what happened to pushers who pestered business women during office hours.

"Bring him in in twenty minutes," she said, grimly. Her office boy (and slave) always took his cue from her. She hoped he wouldn't be too rude to Heyl, and turned back to her work again. Thirty-nine seconds later Clarence Heyl walked in.

"Hello, Fan!" he said, and had her limp hand in a grip that made her wince.

"But I told——"

"Yes, I know. But he's a crushed and broken office boy by now. I had to be real harsh with him."

Fanny stood up, really angry now. She looked up at Clarence Heyl, and her eyes were flashing. Clarence Heyl looked down at her, and his eyes were the keenest, kindest, most gently humorous eyes she had ever encountered. You know that picture of Lincoln that shows us his eyes with much that expression in them? That's as near as I can come to conveying to you the whimsical pathos in this man. They were the eyes of a lonely little boy grown up. And they had seen much in the process.

Fanny felt her little blaze of anger flicker and die.

"That's the girl," said Heyl, and patted her hand. "You'll like me—presently. After you've forgotten about that sniveling kid you hated." He stepped back a pace and threw back his coat senatorially. "How do I look?" he demanded.

"Look?" repeated Fanny, feebly.

"I've been hours preparing for this. Years! And now something tells me—This tie, for instance."

Fanny bit her lip in a vain effort to retain her solemnity. Then she gave it up and giggled, frankly. "Well, since you ask me, that tie!——"

"What's the matter with it?"

Fanny giggled again. "It's red, that's what."

"Well, what of it! Red's all right. I've always considered red one of our leading colors."

"But you can't wear it."

"Can't! Why can't I?"

"Because you're the brunest kind of brunette. And dark people have a special curse hanging over them that makes them want to wear red. It's fatal. That tie makes you look like a Mafia murderer dressed for business."

"I knew it," groaned Heyl. "Something told me." He sank into a chair at the side of her desk, a picture of mock dejection. "And I chose it. Deliberately. I had black ones, and blue ones, and green ones. And I chose—this." He covered his face with a shaking hand.

Fanny Brandeis leaned back in her chair, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed. Surely she hadn't laughed like that in a year at least.

"You're a madman," she said, finally.

At that Heyl looked up with his singularly winning smile. "But different. Concede that, Fanny. Be fair, now. Refreshingly different."

"Different," said Fanny, "doesn't begin to cover it. Well, now you're here, tell me what you're doing here."

"Seeing you."

"I mean here, in Chicago."

"So do I. I'm on my way from Winnebago to New York, and I'm in Chicago to see Fanny Brandeis."

"Don't expect me to believe that."

Heyl put an arm on Fanny's desk and learned forward, his face very earnest. "I do expect you to believe it. I expect you to believe everything I say to you. Not only that, I expect you not to be surprised at anything I say. I've done such a mass of private thinking about you in the last ten years that I'm likely to forget I've scarcely seen you in that time. Just remember, will you, that like the girl in the sob song, 'You made me what I am to-day?'"

"I! You're being humorous again."

"Never less so in my life. Listen, Fan. That cowardly, sickly little boy you fought for in the street, that day in Winnebago, showed every sign of growing up a cowardly, sickly man. You're the real reason for his not doing so. Now, wait a minute. I was an impressionable little kid, I guess. Sickly ones are apt to be. I worshiped you and hated you from that day. Worshiped you for the blazing, generous, whole-souled little devil of a spitfire that you were. Hated you because—well, what boy wouldn't hate a girl who had to fight for him. Gosh! It makes me sick to think of it, even now. Pasty-faced rat!"

"What nonsense! I'd forgotten all about it."

"No you hadn't. Tell me, what flashed into your mind when you saw me in Temple that night before you left Winnebago? The truth, now."

She learned, later, that people did not lie to him. She tried it now, and found herself saying, rather shamefacedly, "I thought 'Why, it's Clarence Heyl, the Cowardy-Cat!'"

"There! That's why I'm here to-day. I knew you were thinking that. I knew it all the time I was in Colorado, growing up from a sickly kid, with a bum lung, to a heap big strong man. It forced me to do things I was afraid to do. It goaded me on to stunts at the very thought of which I'd break out in a clammy sweat. Don't you see how I'll have to turn handsprings in front of you, like the school-boy in the McCutcheon cartoon? Don't you see how I'll have to flex my muscles—like this—to show you how strong I am? I may even have to beat you, eventually. Why, child, I've chummed with lions, and bears, and wolves, and everything, because of you, you little devil in the red cap! I've climbed unclimbable mountains. I've frozen my feet in blizzards. I've wandered for days on a mountain top, lost, living on dried currants and milk chocolate,—and Lord! how I hate milk chocolate! I've dodged snowslides, and slept in trees; I've endured cold, and hunger and thirst, through you. It took me years to get used to the idea of passing a timber wolf without looking around, but I learned to do it—because of you. You made me. They sent me to Colorado, a lonely kid, with a pretty fair chance of dying, and I would have, if it hadn't been for you. There! How's that for a burst of speech, young woman! And wait a minute. Remember, too, my name was Clarence. I had that to live down."

Fanny was staring at him eyes round, lips parted. "But why?" she said, faintly. "Why?"

Heyl smiled that singularly winning smile of his. "Since you force me to it, I think I'm in love with that little, warm-hearted spitfire in the red cap. That's why."

Fanny sat forward now. She had been leaning back in her chair, her hands grasping its arms, her face a lovely, mobile thing, across which laughter, and pity, and sympathy and surprise rippled and played. It hardened now, and set. She looked down at her hands, and clasped them in her lap, then up at him. "In that case, you can forsake the strenuous life with a free conscience. You need never climb another mountain, or wrestle with another—er—hippopotamus. That little girl in the red cap is dead."

"Dead?"

"Yes. She died a year ago. If the one who has taken her place were to pass you on the street today, and see you beset by forty thieves, she'd not even stop. Not she. She'd say, 'Let him fight it out alone. It's none of your business. You've got your own fights to handle.'"

"Why—Fanny. You don't mean that, do you? What could have made her like that?"

"She just discovered that fighting for others didn't pay. She just happened to know some one else who had done that all her life and—it killed her."

"Her mother?"

"Yes."

A little silence. "Fanny, let's play outdoors tomorrow, will you? All day."

Involuntarily Fanny glanced around the room. Papers, catalogues, files, desk, chair, typewriter. "I'm afraid I've forgotten how."

"I'll teach you. You look as if you could stand a little of it."

"I must be a pretty sight. You're the second man to tell me that in two days."

Heyl leaned forward a little. "That so? Who's the other one?"

"Fenger, the General Manager."

"Oh! Paternal old chap, I suppose. No? Well, anyway, I don't know what he had in mind, but you're going to spend Sunday at the dunes of Indiana with me."

"Dunes? Of Indiana?"

"There's nothing like them in the world. Literally. In September that combination of yellow sand, and blue lake, and the woods beyond is—well, you'll see what it is. It's only a little more than an hour's ride by train. And it will just wipe that tired look out of your face, Fan." He stood up. "I'll call for you tomorrow morning at eight, or thereabouts. That's early for Sunday, but it's going to be worth it."

"I can't. Really. Besides, I don't think I even want to. I——"

"I promise not to lecture on Nature, if that's what's worrying you." He took her hand in a parting grip. "Bring some sandwiches, will you? Quite a lot of 'em. I'll have some other stuff in my rucksack. And wear some clothes you don't mind wrecking. I suppose you haven't got a red tam o' shanter?"

"Heavens, no!"

"I just thought it might help to keep me humble." He was at the door, and so was she, somehow, her hand still in his. "Eight o'clock. How do you stand it in this place, Fan? Oh, well—I'll find that out to-morrow. Good-by."

Fanny went back to her desk and papers. The room seemed all at once impossibly stuffy, her papers and letters dry, meaningless things. In the next office, separated from her by a partition half glass, half wood, she saw the top of Slosson's bald head as he stood up to shut his old-fashioned roll-top desk. He was leaving. She looked out of the window. Ella Monahan, in hat and suit, passed and came back to poke her head in the door.

"Run along!" she said. "It's Saturday afternoon. You'll work overtime enough when the Christmas rush begins. Come on, child, and call it a day!"

And Fanny gathered papers, figures, catalogue proofs into a glorious heap, thrust them into a drawer, locked the drawer, pushed back her chair, and came.



CHAPTER ELEVEN

Fanny told herself, before she went to bed Saturday night, that she hoped it would rain Sunday morning from seven to twelve. But when Princess woke her at seven-thirty, as per instructions left in penciled scrawl on the kitchen table, she turned to the window at once, and was glad, somehow, to find it sun-flooded. Princess, if you're mystified, was royal in name only—a biscuit-tinted lady, with a very black and no-account husband whose habits made it necessary for Princess to let herself into Fanny's four-room flat at seven every morning, and let herself out at eight every evening. She had an incredibly soft and musical voice, had Princess, and a cooking hand. She kept Fanny mended, fed and comfortable, and her only cross was that Fanny's taste in blouses (ultimately her property) ran to the severe and tailored.

"Mawnin', Miss Fanny. There's a gep'mun waitin' to see yo'."

Fanny choked on a yawn. "A what!"

"Gep'mun. Says yo-all goin' picnickin'. He's in the settin' room, a-lookin' at yo' pictchah papahs. Will Ah fry yo' up a li'l chicken to pack along? San'wiches ain't no eatin' fo' Sunday."

Fanny flung back her covers, swung around to the side of the bed, and stood up, all, seemingly, in one sweeping movement. "Do you mean to tell me he's in there, now?"

From the sitting room. "I think I ought to tell you I can hear everything you're saying. Say. Fanny, those sketches of yours are——Why, Gee Whiz! I didn't know you did that kind of thing. This one here, with that girl's face in the crowd——"

"For heaven's sake!" Fanny demanded, "what are you doing here at seven-thirty? And I don't allow people to look at those sketches. You said eight-thirty."

"I was afraid you'd change your mind, or something. Besides, it's now twenty-two minutes to eight. And will you tell the lady that's a wonderful idea about the chicken? Only she'd better start now."

Goaded by time bulletins shouted through the closed door, Fanny found herself tubbed, clothed, and ready for breakfast by eight-ten. When she opened the door Clarence was standing in the center of her little sitting room, waiting, a sheaf of loose sketches in his hand.

"Say, look here! These are the real thing. Why, they're great! They get you. This old geezer with the beard, selling fish and looking like one of the Disciples. And this. What the devil are you doing in a mail order house, or whatever it is? Tell me that! When you can draw like this!"

"Good morning," said Fanny, calmly. "And I'll tell you nothing before breakfast. The one thing that interests me this moment is hot coffee. Will you have some breakfast? Oh, well, a second one won't hurt you. You must have got up at three, or thereabouts." She went toward the tiny kitchen. "Never mind, Princess. I'll wait on myself. You go on with that chicken."

Princess was the kind of person who can fry a chicken, wrap it in cool, crisp lettuce leaves, box it, cut sandwiches, and come out of the process with an unruffled temper and an immaculate kitchen. Thanks to her, Fanny and Heyl found themselves on the eight fifty-three train, bound for the dunes.

Clarence swung his rucksack up to the bundle rack. He took off his cap, and stuffed it into his pocket. He was grinning like a schoolboy. Fanny turned from the window and smiled at what she saw in his face. At that he gave an absurd little bounce in his place, like an overgrown child, and reached over and patted her hand.

"I've dreamed of this for years."

"You're just fourteen, going on fifteen," Fanny reproved him.

"I know it. And it's great! Won't you be, too? Forget you're a fair financier, or whatever they call it. Forget you earn more in a month than I do in six. Relax. Unbend. Loosen up. Don't assume that hardshell air with me. Just remember that I knew you when the frill of your panties showed below your skirt."

"Clarence Heyl!"

But he was leaning past her, and pointing out of the window. "See that curtain of smoke off there? That's the South Chicago, and the Hammond and Gary steel mills. Wait till you see those smokestacks against the sky, and the iron scaffoldings that look like giant lacework, and the slag heaps, and the coal piles, and those huge, grim tanks. Gad! It's awful and beautiful. Like the things Pennell does." "I came out here on the street car one day," said Fanny, quietly. "One Sunday."

"You did!" He stared at her.

"It was hot, and they were all spilling out into the street. You know, the women in wrappers, just blobs of flesh trying to get cool. And the young girls in their pink silk dresses and white shoes, and the boys on the street corners, calling to them. Babies all over the sidewalks and streets, and the men who weren't in the mills—you know how they look in their Sunday shirtsleeves, with their flat faces, and high cheekbones, and their great brown hands with the broken nails. Hunkies. Well, at five the motor cars began whizzing by from the country roads back to Chicago. You have to go back that way. Just then the five o'clock whistles blew and the day shift came off. There was a great army of them, clumping down the road the way they do. Their shoulders were slack, and their lunch pails dangled, empty, and they were wet and reeking with sweat. The motor cars were full of wild phlox and daisies and spiderwort."

Clarence was still turned sideways, looking at her. "Get a picture of it?"

"Yes. I tried, at least."

"Is that the way you usually spend your Sundays?"

"Well, I—I like snooping about."

"M-m," mused Clarence. Then, "How's business, Fanny?"

"Business?" You could almost feel her mind jerk back. "Oh, let's not talk about business on Sunday."

"I thought so," said Clarence, enigmatically. "Now listen to me, Fanny."

"I'll listen," interrupted she, "if you'll talk about yourself. I want to know what you're doing, and why you're going to New York. What business can a naturalist have in New York, anyway?"

"I didn't intend to be a naturalist. You can tell that by looking at me. But you can't have your very nose rubbed up against trees, and rocks, and mountains, and snow for years and years without learning something about 'em. There were whole weeks when I hadn't anything to chum with but a timber-line pine and an odd assortment of mountain peaks. We just had to get acquainted."

"But you're going back, aren't you? Don't they talk about the spell of the mountains, or some such thing?" "They do. And they're right. And I've got to have them six months in the year, at least. But I'm going to try spending the other six in the bosom of the human race. Not only that, I'm going to write about it. Writing's my job, really. At least, it's the thing I like best."

"Nature?"

"Human nature. I went out to Colorado just a lonesome little kid with a bum lung. The lung's all right, but I never did quite get over the other. Two years ago, in the mountains, I met Carl Lasker, who owns the New York Star. It's said to be the greatest morning paper in the country. Lasker's a genius. And he fries the best bacon I ever tasted. I took him on a four-weeks' horseback trip through the mountains. We got pretty well acquainted. At the end of it he offered me a job. You see, I'd never seen a chorus girl, or the Woolworth building, or a cabaret, or a broiled lobster, or a subway. But I was interested and curious about all of them. And Lasker said, 'A man who can humanize a rock, or a tree, or a chipmunk ought to be able to make even those things seem human. You've got what they call the fresh viewpoint. New York's full of people with a scum over their eyes, but a lot of them came to New York from Winnebago, or towns just like it, and you'd be surprised at the number of them who still get their home town paper. One day, when I came into Lee Kohl's office, with stars, and leading men, and all that waiting outside to see him, he was sitting with his feet on the desk reading the Sheffield, Illinois, Gazette.' You see, the thing he thinks I can do is to give them a picture of New York as they used to see it, before they got color blind. A column or so a day, about anything that hits me. How does that strike you as a job for a naturalist?"

"It's a job for a human naturalist. I think you'll cover it."

If you know the dunes, which you probably don't, you know why they did not get off at Millers, with the crowd, but rode on until they were free of the Sunday picnickers. Then they got off, and walked across the tracks, past saloons, and a few huddled houses, hideous in yellow paint, and on, and on down a road that seemed endless. A stretch of cinders, then dust, a rather stiff little hill, a great length of yellow sand and—the lake! We say, the lake! like that, with an exclamation point after it, because it wasn't at all the Lake Michigan that Chicagoans know. This vast blue glory bore no relation to the sullen, gray, turbid thing that the city calls the lake. It was all the blues of which you've ever heard, and every passing cloud gave it a new shade. Sapphire. No, cobalt. No, that's too cold. Mediterranean. Turquoise. And the sand in golden contrast. Miles of sand along the beach, and back of that the dunes. Now, any dictionary or Scotchman will tell you that a dune is a hill of loose sand. But these dunes are done in American fashion, lavishly. Mountains of sand, as far as the eye can see, and on the top of them, incredibly, great pine trees that clutch at their perilous, shifting foothold with frantic root-toes. And behind that, still more incredibly, the woods, filled with wild flowers, with strange growths found nowhere else in the whole land, with trees, and vines, and brush, and always the pungent scent of the pines. And there you have the dunes—blue lake, golden sand-hills, green forest, in one.

Fanny and Clarence stood there on the sand, in silence, two ridiculously diminutive figures in that great wilderness of beauty. I wish I could get to you, somehow, the clear sparkle of it, the brilliance of it, and yet the peace of it. They stood there a long while, those two, without speaking. Then Fanny shut her eyes, and I think her lower lip trembled just a little. And Clarence patted her hand just twice.

"I thank you," he said, "in the name of that much-abused lady known as Nature."

Said Fanny, "I want to scramble up to the top of one of those dunes—the high one—and just sit there."

And that is what they did. A poor enough Sunday, I suppose, in the minds of those of you who spend yours golfing at the club, or motoring along grease-soaked roads that lead to a shore dinner and a ukulele band. But it turned Fanny Brandeis back a dozen years or more, so that she was again the little girl whose heart had ached at sight of the pale rose and, orange of the Wisconsin winter sunsets. She forgot all about layettes, and obstetrical outfits, and flannel bands, and safety pins; her mind was a blank in the matter of bootees, and catalogues, and our No. 29E8347, and those hungry bins that always yawned for more. She forgot about Michael Fenger, and Theodore, and the new furs. They scrambled up dunes, digging into the treacherous sand with heels, toes, and the side of the foot, and clutching at fickle roots with frantic fingers. Forward a step, and back two—that's dune climbing. A back-breaking business, unless you're young and strong, as were these two. They explored the woods, and Heyl had a fascinating way of talking about stones and shrubs and trees as if they were endowed with human qualities—as indeed they were for him. They found a hill-slope carpeted with dwarf huckleberry plants, still bearing tiny clusters of the blue-black fruit. Fanny's heart was pounding, her lungs ached, her cheeks were scarlet, her eyes shining. Heyl, steel-muscled, took the hills like a chamois. Once they crossed hands atop a dune and literally skated down it, right, left, right, left, shrieking with laughter, and ending in a heap at the bottom. "In the name of all that's idiotic!" shouted Heyl. "Silk stockings! What in thunder made you wear silk stockings! At the sand dunes! Gosh!"

They ate their dinner in olympic splendor, atop a dune. Heyl produced unexpected things from the rucksack—things that ranged all the way from milk chocolate to literature, and from grape juice to cigarettes. They ate ravenously, but at Heyl's thrifty suggestion they saved a few sandwiches for the late afternoon. It was he, too, who made a little bonfire of papers, crusts, and bones, as is the cleanly habit of your true woodsman. Then they stretched out, full length, in the noon sun, on the warm, clean sand.

"What's your best price on one-sixth doz. flannel vests?" inquired Heyl.

And, "Oh, shut up!" said Fanny, elegantly. Heyl laughed as one who hugs a secret.

"We'll work our way down the beach," he announced, "toward Millers. There'll be northern lights to-night; did you know that? Want to stay and see them?"

"Do I want to! I won't go home till I have."

These were the things they did on that holiday; childish, happy, tiring things, such as people do who love the outdoors.

The charm of Clarence Heyl—for he had charm—is difficult to transmit. His lovableness and appeal lay in his simplicity. It was not so much what he said as in what he didn't say. He was staring unwinkingly now at the sunset that had suddenly burst upon them. His were the eyes of one accustomed to the silent distances.

"Takes your breath away, rather, doesn't it? All that color?" said Fanny, her face toward the blaze.

"Almost too obvious for my taste. I like 'em a little more subdued, myself." They were atop a dune, and he stretched himself flat on the sand, still keeping his bright brown eyes on lake and sky. Then he sat up, excitedly. "Heh, try that! Lie flat. It softens the whole thing. Like this. Now look at it. The lake's like molten copper flowing in. And you can see that silly sun going down in jerks, like a balloon on a string."

They lay there, silent, while the scarlet became orange, the orange faded to rose, the rose to pale pink, to salmon, to mauve, to gray. The first pale star came out, and the brazen lights of Gary, far to the north, defied it. Fanny sat up with a sigh and a little shiver.

"Fasten up that sweater around your throat," said Heyl. "Got a pin?" They munched their sandwiches, rather soggy by now, and drank the last of the grape juice. "We'll have a bite of hot supper in town, at a restaurant that doesn't mind Sunday trampers. Come on, Fan. We'll start down the beach until the northern lights begin to show."

"It's been the most accommodating day," murmured Fanny. "Sunshine, sunset, northern lights, everything. If we were to demand a rainbow and an eclipse they'd turn those on, too."

They started to walk down the beach in the twilight, keeping close to the water's edge where the sand was moist and firm. It was hard going. They plunged along arm in arm, in silence. Now and again they stopped, with one accord, and looked out over the great gray expanse that lay before them, and then up at the hills and the pines etched in black against the sky. Nothing competitive here, Fanny thought, and took a deep breath. She thought of to-morrow's work, with day after to-morrow's biting and snapping at its heels.

Clarence seemed to sense her thoughts. "Doesn't this make you feel you want to get away from those damned bins that you're forever feeding? I watched those boys for a minute, the other day, outside your office. Jove!"

Fanny dug a heel into the sand, savagely. "Some days I feel that I've got to walk out of the office, and down the street, without a hat, and on, and on, walking and walking, and running now and then, till I come to the horizon. That's how I feel, some days."

"Then some day, Fanny, that feeling will get too strong for you, and you'll do it. Now listen to me. Tuck this away in your subconscious mind, and leave it there until you need it. When that time comes get on a train for Denver. From Denver take another to Estes Park. That's the Rocky Mountains, and they're your destination, because that's where the horizon lives and has its being. When you get there ask for Heyl's place. They'll just hand you from one to the other, gently, until you get there. I may be there, but more likely I shan't. The key's in the mail box, tied to a string. You'll find a fire already laid, in the fireplace, with fat pine knots that will blaze up at the touch of a match. My books are there, along the walls. The bedding's in the cedar chest, and the lamps are filled. There's tinned stuff in the pantry. And the mountains are there, girl, to make you clean and whole again. And the pines that are nature's prophylactic brushes. And the sky. And peace. That sounds like a railway folder, but it's true. I know." They trudged along in silence for a little while. "Got that?"

"M-m," replied Fanny, disinterestedly, without looking at him.

Heyl's jaw set. You could see the muscles show white for an instant. Then he said: "It has been a wonderful day, Fanny, but you haven't told me a thing about yourself. I'd like to know about your work. I'd like to know what you're doing; what your plan is. You looked so darned definite up there in that office. Whom do you play with? And who's this Fenger—wasn't that the name?—who saw that you looked tired?"

"All right, Clancy. I'll tell you all about it," Fanny agreed, briskly.

"All right—who!"

"Well, I can't call you Clarence. It doesn't fit. So just for the rest of the day let's make it Clancy, even if you do look like one of the minor Hebrew prophets, minus the beard."

And so she began to tell him of her work and her aims. I think that she had been craving just this chance to talk. That which she told him was, unconsciously, a confession. She told him of Theodore and his marriage; of her mother's death; of her coming to Haynes-Cooper, and the changes she had brought about there. She showed him the infinite possibilities for advancement there. Slosson she tossed aside. Then, rather haltingly, she told him of Fenger, of his business genius, his magnetic qualities, of his career. She even sketched a deft word-picture of the limp and irritating Mrs. Fenger.

"Is this Fenger in love with you?" asked Heyl, startlingly.

Fanny recoiled at the idea with a primness that did credit to Winnebago.

"Clancy! Please! He's married."

"Now don't sneak, Fanny. And don't talk like an ingenue. So far, you've outlined a life-plan that makes Becky Sharp look like a cooing dove. So just answer this straight, will you?"

"Why, I suppose I attract him, as any man of his sort, with a wife like that, would be attracted to a healthily alert woman, whose ideas match his. And I wish you wouldn't talk to me like that. It hurts."

"I'm glad of that. I was afraid you'd passed that stage. Well now, how about those sketches of yours? I suppose you know that they're as good, in a crude, effective sort of way, as anything that's being done to-day."

"Oh, nonsense!" But then she stopped, suddenly, and put both hands on his arm, and looked up at him, her face radiant in the gray twilight. "Do you really think they're good!"

"You bet they're good. There isn't a newspaper in the country that couldn't use that kind of stuff. And there aren't three people in the country who can do it. It isn't a case of being able to draw. It's being able to see life in a peculiar light, and to throw that light so that others get the glow. Those sketches I saw this morning are life, served up raw. That's your gift, Fanny. Why the devil don't you use it!"

But Fanny had got herself in hand again. "It isn't a gift," she said, lightly. "It's just a little knack that amuses me. There's no money in it. Besides, it's too late now. One's got to do a thing superlatively, nowadays, to be recognized. I don't draw superlatively, but I do handle infants' wear better than any woman I know. In two more years I'll be getting ten thousand a year at Haynes-Cooper. In five years——"

"Then what?"

Fanny's hands became fists, gripping the power she craved. "Then I shall have arrived. I shall be able to see the great and beautiful things of this world, and mingle with the people who possess them."

"When you might be making them yourself, you little fool. Don't glare at me like that. I tell you that those pictures are the real expression of you. That's why you turn to them as relief from the shop grind. You can't help doing them. They're you."

"I can stop if I want to. They amuse me, that's all."

"You can't stop. It's in your blood. It's the Jew in you."

"The——Here, I'll show you. I won't do another sketch for a year. I'll prove to you that my ancestors' religion doesn't influence my work, or my play."

"Dear, you can't prove that, because the contrary has been proven long ago. You yourself proved it when you did that sketch of the old fish vender in the Ghetto. The one with the beard. It took a thousand years of suffering and persecution and faith to stamp that look on his face, and it took a thousand years to breed in you the genius to see it, and put it down on paper. Fan, did you ever read Fishberg's book?"

"No," said Fanny, low-voiced.

"Sometime, when you can snatch a moment from the fascinations of the mail order catalogue, read it. Fishberg says—I wish I could remember his exact words—'It isn't the body that marks the Jew. It's his Soul. The type is not anthropological, or physical; it's social or psychic. It isn't the complexion, the nose, the lips, the head. It's his Soul which betrays his faith. Centuries of Ghetto confinement, ostracism, ceaseless suffering, have produced a psychic type. The thing that is stamped on the Soul seeps through the veins and works its way magically to the face——'"

"But I don't want to talk about souls! Please! You're spoiling a wonderful day."

"And you're spoiling a wonderful life. I don't object to this driving ambition in you. I don't say that you're wrong in wanting to make a place for yourself in the world. But don't expect me to stand by and let you trample over your own immortal soul to get there. Your head is busy enough on this infants' wear job, but how about the rest of you—how about You? What do you suppose all those years of work, and suppression, and self-denial, and beauty-hunger there in Winnebago were meant for! Not to develop the mail order business. They were given you so that you might recognize hunger, and suppression, and self-denial in others. The light in the face of that girl in the crowd pouring out of the plant. What's that but the reflection of the light in you! I tell you, Fanny, we Jews have got a money-grubbing, loud-talking, diamond-studded, get-there-at-any-price reputation, and perhaps we deserve it. But every now and then, out of the mass of us, one lifts his head and stands erect, and the great white light is in his face. And that person has suffered, for suffering breeds genius. It expands the soul just as over-prosperity shrivels it. You see it all the way from Lew Fields to Sarah Bernhardt; from Mendelssohn to Irving Berlin; from Mischa Elman to Charlie Chaplin. You were a person set apart in Winnebago. Instead of thanking your God for that, you set out to be something you aren't. No, it's worse than that. You're trying not to be what you are. And it's going to do for you."

"Stop!" cried Fanny. "My head's whirling. It sounds like something out of 'Alice in Wonderland.'"

"And you," retorted Heyl, "sound like some one who's afraid to talk or think about herself. You're suppressing the thing that is you. You're cutting yourself off from your own people—a dramatic, impulsive, emotional people. By doing those things you're killing the goose that lays the golden egg. What's that old copy-book line? 'To thine own self be true,' and the rest of it."

"Yes; like Theodore, for example," sneered Fanny.

At which unpleasant point Nature kindly supplied a diversion. Across the black sky there shot two luminous shafts of lights. Northern lights, pale sisters of the chromatic glory one sees in the far north, but still weirdly beautiful. Fanny and Heyl stopped short, faces upturned. The ghostly radiance wavered, expanded, glowed palely, like celestial searchlights. Suddenly, from the tip of each shaft, there burst a cluster of slender, pin-point lines, like aigrettes set in a band of silver. Then these slowly wavered, faded, combined to form a third and fourth slender shaft of light. It was like the radiance one sees in the old pictures of the Holy Family. Together Fanny and Heyl watched it in silence until the last pale glimmer faded and was gone, and only the brazen lights of Gary, far, far down the beach, cast a fiery glow against the sky.

They sighed, simultaneously. Then they laughed, each at the other.

"Curtain," said Fanny. They raced for the station, despite the sand. Their car was filled with pudgy babies lying limp in parental arms; with lunch baskets exuding the sickly scent of bananas; with disheveled vandals whose moist palms grasped bunches of wilted wild flowers. Past the belching chimneys of Gary, through South Chicago, the back yard of a metropolis, past Jackson Park that breathed coolly upon them, and so to the city again. They looked at it with the shock that comes to eyes that have rested for hours on long stretches of sand and sky and water. Monday, that had seemed so far away, became an actuality of to-morrow.

Tired as they were, they stopped at one of those frank little restaurants that brighten Chicago's drab side streets. Its windows were full of pans that held baked beans, all crusty and brown, and falsely tempting, and of baked apples swimming in a pool of syrup. These flanked by ketchup bottles and geometrical pyramids of golden grape-fruit.

Coffee and hot roast beef sandwiches, of course, in a place like that. "And," added Fanny, "one of those baked apples. Just to prove they can't be as good as they look."

They weren't, but she was too hungry to care. Not too hungry, though, to note with quick eye all that the little restaurant held of interest, nor too sleepy to respond to the friendly waitress who, seeing their dusty boots, and the sprig of sumac stuck in Fanny's coat, said, "My, it must have been swell in the country today!" as her flapping napkin precipitated crumbs into their laps.

"It was," said Fanny, and smiled up at the girl with her generous, flashing smile. "Here's a bit of it I brought back for you." And she stuck the scarlet sumac sprig into the belt of the white apron.

They finished the day incongruously by taking a taxi home, Fanny yawning luxuriously all the way. "Do you know," she said, as they parted, "we've talked about everything from souls to infants' wear. We're talked out. It's a mercy you're going to New York. There won't be a next time."

"Young woman," said Heyl, forcefully, "there will. That young devil in the red tam isn't dead. She's alive. And kicking. There's a kick in every one of those Chicago sketches in your portfolio upstairs. You said she wouldn't fight anybody's battles to-day. You little idiot, she's fighting one in each of those pictures, from the one showing that girl's face in the crowd, to the old chap with the fish-stall. She'll never die that one. Because she's the spirit. It's the other one who's dead—and she doesn't know it. But some day she'll find herself buried. And I want to be there to shovel on the dirt."



CHAPTER TWELVE

From the first of December the floor of the Haynes-Cooper mail room looked like the New York Stock Exchange, after a panic. The aisles were drifts of paper against which a squad of boys struggled as vainly as a gang of snow-shovelers against a blizzard. The guide talked in terms of tons of mail, instead of thousands. And smacked his lips after it. The Ten Thousand were working at night now, stopping for a hasty bite of supper at six, then back to desk, or bin or shelf until nine, so that Oklahoma and Minnesota might have its Christmas box in time.

Fanny Brandeis, working under the light of her green-shaded desk lamp, wondered, a little bitterly, if Christmas would ever mean anything to her but pressure, weariness, work. She told herself that she would not think of that Christmas of one year ago. One year! As she glanced around the orderly little office, and out to the stock room beyond, then back to her desk again, she had an odd little feeling of unreality. Surely it had been not one year, but many years—a lifetime—since she had elbowed her way up and down those packed aisles of the busy little store in Winnebago—she and that brisk, alert, courageous woman.

"Mrs. Brandeis, lady wants to know if you can't put this blue satin dress on the dark-haired doll, and the pink satin.... Well, I did tell her, but she said for me to ask you, anyway."

"Mis' Brandeis, this man says he paid a dollar down on a go-cart last month and he wants to pay the rest and take it home with him."

And then the reassuring, authoritative voice, "Coming! I'll be right there."

"Coming!" That had been her whole life. Service. And now she lay so quietly beneath the snow of the bitter northern winter.

At that point Fanny's fist would come down hard on her desk, and the quick, indrawn breath of mutinous resentment would hiss through her teeth.

She kept away from the downtown shops and their crowds. She scowled at sight of the holly and mistletoe wreaths, with their crimson streamers. There was something almost ludicrous in the way she shut her eyes to the holiday pageant all around her, and doubled and redoubled her work. It seemed that she had a new scheme for her department every other day, and every other one was a good one.

Slosson had long ago abandoned the attempt to keep up with her. He did not even resent her, as he had at first. "I'm a buyer," he said, rather pathetically, "and a pret-ty good one, too. But I'm not a genius, and I never will be. And I guess you've got to be a genius, these days, to keep up. It used to be enough for an infants' wear buyer to know muslins, cottons, woolens, silks, and embroideries. But that's old-fashioned now. These days, when you hire an office boy you don't ask him if he can read and write. You tell him he's got to have personality, magnetism, and imagination. Makes me sick!"

The Baby Book came off the presses and it was good. Even Slosson admitted it, grudgingly. The cover was a sunny, breezy seashore picture, all blue and gold, with plump, dimpled youngsters playing, digging in the sand, romping (and wearing our No. 13E1269, etc., of course). Inside were displayed the complete baby outfits, with a smiling mother, and a chubby, crowing baby as a central picture, and each piece of each outfit separately pictured. Just below this, the outfit number and price, and a list of the pieces that went to make it up. From the emergency outfit at $3.98 to the outfit de luxe (for Haynes-Cooper patrons) at $28.50, each group was comprehensive, practical, complete. In the back of the book was a personal service plea. "Use us," it said. "We are here to assist you, not only in the matter of merchandise, but with information and advice. Mothers in particular are in need of such service. This book will save you weariness and worry. Use us."

Fanny surveyed the book with pardonable pride. But she was not satisfied. "We lack style," she said. "The practical garments are all right. But what we need is a little snap. That means cut and line. And I'm going to New York to get it." That had always been Slosson's work.

She and Ella Monahan were to go to the eastern markets together. Ella Monahan went to New York regularly every three weeks. Fanny had never been east of Chicago. She envied Ella her knowledge of the New York wholesalers and manufacturers. Ella had dropped into Fanny's office for a brief moment. The two women had little in common, except their work, but they got on very well, and each found the other educating.

"Seems to me you're putting an awful lot into this," observed Ella Monahan, her wise eyes on Fanny's rather tense face.

"You've got to," replied Fanny, "to get anything out of it."

"I guess you're right," Ella agreed, and laughed a rueful little laugh. "I know I've given 'em everything I've got—and a few things I didn't know I had. It's a queer game—life. Now if my old father hadn't run a tannery in Racine, and if I hadn't run around there all the day, so that I got so the smell and feel of leather and hides were part of me, why, I'd never be buyer of gloves at Haynes-Cooper. And you——"

"Brandeis' Bazaar." And was going on, when her office boy came in with a name. Ella rose to go, but Fanny stopped her. "Father Fitzpatrick! Bring him right in! Miss Monahan, you've got to meet him. He's"—then, as the great frame of the handsome old priest filled the doorway—"he's just Father Fitzpatrick. Ella Monahan."

The white-haired Irishman, and the white-haired Irish woman clasped hands.

"And who are you, daughter, besides being Ella Monahan?"

"Buyer of gloves at Haynes-Cooper, Father."

"You don't tell me, now!" He turned to Fanny, put his two big hands on her shoulders, and swung her around to face the light. "Hm," he murmured, noncommittally, after that.

"Hm—what?" demanded Fanny. "It sounds unflattering, whatever it means." "Gloves!" repeated Father Fitzpatrick, unheeding her. "Well, now, what d'you think of that! Millions of dollars' worth, I'll wager, in your time."

"Two million and a half in my department last year," replied Ella, without the least trace of boastfulness. One talked only in terms of millions at Haynes-Cooper's.

"What an age it is! When two slips of women can earn salaries that would make the old kings of Ireland look like beggars." He twinkled upon the older woman. "And what a feeling it must be—independence, and all."

"I've earned my own living since I was seventeen," said Ella Monahan. "I'd hate to tell you how long that is." A murmur from the gallant Irishman. "Thanks, Father, for the compliment I see in your eyes. But what I mean is this: You're right about independence. It is a grand thing. At first. But after a while it begins to pall on you. Don't ask me why. I don't know. I only hope you won't think I'm a wicked woman when I say I could learn to love any man who'd hang a silver fox scarf and a string of pearls around my neck, and ask me if I didn't feel a draft."

"Wicked! Not a bit of it, my girl. It's only natural, and commendable—barrin' the pearls."

"I'd forego them," laughed Ella, and with a parting handshake left the two alone.

Father Fitzpatrick looked after her. "A smart woman, that." He took out his watch, a fat silver one. "It's eleven-thirty. My train leaves at four. Now, Fanny, if you'll get on your hat, and arrange to steal an hour or so from this Brobdingnagian place a grand word that, my girl, and nearer to swearing than any word I know—I'll take you to the Blackstone, no less, for lunch. How's that for a poor miserable old priest!"

"You dear, I couldn't think of it. Oh, yes, I could get away, but let's lunch right here at the plant, in the grill——"

"Never! I couldn't. Don't ask it of me. This place scares me. I came up in the elevator with a crowd and a guide, and he was juggling millions, that chap, the way a newsboy flips a cent. I'm but a poor parish priest, but I've got my pride. We'll go to the Blackstone, which I've passed, humbly, but never been in, with its rose silk shades and its window boxes. And we'll be waited on by velvet-footed servitors, me girl. Get your hat."

Fanny, protesting, but laughing, too, got it. They took the L. Michigan avenue, as they approached it from Wabash, was wind-swept and bleak as only Michigan avenue can be in December. They entered the warm radiance of the luxurious foyer with a little breathless rush, as wind-blown Chicagoans generally do. The head waiter must have thought Father Fitzpatrick a cardinal, at least, for he seated them at a window table that looked out upon the icy street, with Grant Park, crusted with sooty snow, just across the way, and beyond that the I. C. tracks and the great gray lake. The splendid room was all color, and perfume, and humming conversation. A fountain tinkled in the center, and upon its waters there floated lily pads and blossoms, weirdly rose, and mauve, and lavender. The tables were occupied by deliciously slim young girls and very self-conscious college boys, home for the holidays, and marcelled matrons, furred and aigretted. The pink in Fanny's cheeks deepened. She loved luxury. She smiled and flashed at the handsome old priest opposite her.

"You're a wastrel," she said, "but isn't it nice!" And tasted the first delicious sip of soup.

"It is. For a change. Extravagance is good for all of us, now and then." He glanced leisurely about the brilliant room, then out to the street, bleakly windswept. He leaned back and drummed a bit with his fingers on the satin-smooth cloth. "Now and then. Tell me, Fanny, what would you say, off-hand, was the most interesting thing you see from here? You used to have a trick of picking out what they call the human side. Your mother had it, too."

Fanny, smiling, glanced about the room, her eyes unconsciously following the track his had taken. About the room, and out, to the icy street. "The most interesting thing?" Back to the flower-scented room, with its music, and tinkle, and animation. Out again, to the street. "You see that man, standing at the curb, across the street. He's sort of crouched against the lamp post. See him? Yes, there, just this side of that big gray car? He's all drawn up in a heap. You can feel him shivering. He looks as if he were trying to crawl inside himself for warmth. Ever since we came in I've noticed him staring straight across at these windows where we're all sitting so grandly, lunching. I know what he's thinking, don't you? And I wish I didn't feel so uncomfortable, knowing it. I wish we hadn't ordered lobster thermidor. I wish—there! the policeman's moving him on."

Father Fitzpatrick reached over and took her hand, as it lay on the table, in his great grasp. "Fanny, girl, you've told me what I wanted to know. Haynes-Cooper or no Haynes-Cooper, millions or no millions, your ravines aren't choked up with ashes yet, my dear. Thank God."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

From now on Fanny Brandeis' life became such a swift-moving thing that your trilogist would have regarded her with disgust. Here was no slow unfolding, petal by petal. Here were two processes going on, side by side. Fanny, the woman of business, flourished and throve like a weed, arrogantly flaunting its head above the timid, white flower that lay close to the soil, and crept, and spread, and multiplied. Between the two the fight went on silently.

Fate, or Chance, or whatever it is that directs our movements, was forever throwing tragic or comic little life-groups in her path, and then, pointing an arresting finger at her, implying, "This means you!" Fanny stepped over these obstructions, or walked around them, or stared straight through them.

She had told herself that she would observe the first anniversary of her mother's death with none of those ancient customs by which your pious Jew honors his dead. There would be no Yahrzeit light burning for twenty-four hours. She would not go to Temple for Kaddish prayer. But the thing was too strong for her, too anciently inbred. Her ancestors would have lighted a candle, or an oil lamp. Fanny, coming home at six, found herself turning on the shaded electric lamp in her hall. She went through to the kitchen.

"Princess, when you come in to-morrow morning you'll find a light in the hall. Don't turn it off until to-morrow evening at six."

"All day long, Miss Fan! Mah sakes, wa' foh?"

"It's just a religious custom."

"Didn't know yo' had no relijin, Miss Fan. Leastways, Ah nevah could figgah——"

"I haven't," said Fanny, shortly. "Dinner ready soon, Princess? I'm starved."

She had entered a Jewish house of worship only once in this year. It was the stately, white-columned edifice on Grand Boulevard that housed the congregation presided over by the famous Kirsch. She had heard of him, naturally. She was there out of curiosity, like any other newcomer to Chicago. The beauty of the auditorium enchanted her—a magnificently proportioned room, and restful without being in the least gloomy. Then she had been interested in the congregation as it rustled in. She thought she had never seen so many modishly gowned women in one room in all her life. The men were sleekly broadclothed, but they lacked the well-dressed air, somehow. The women were slimly elegant in tailor suits and furs. They all looked as if they had been turned out by the same tailor. An artist, in his line, but of limited imagination. Dr. Kirsch, sociologist and savant, aquiline, semi-bald, grimly satiric, sat in his splendid, high-backed chair, surveying his silken flock through half-closed lids. He looked tired, and rather ill, Fanny thought, but distinctly a personage. She wondered if he held them or they him. That recalled to her the little Winnebago Temple and Rabbi Thalmann. She remembered the frequent rudeness and open inattention of that congregation. No doubt Mrs. Nathan Pereles had her counterpart here, and the hypocritical Bella Weinberg, too, and the giggling Aarons girls, and old Ben Reitman. Here Dr. Kirsch had risen, and, coming forward, had paused to lean over his desk and, with an awful geniality, had looked down upon two rustling, exquisitely gowned late-comers. They sank into their seats, cowed. Fanny grinned. He began his lecture something about modern politics. Fanny was fascinated and resentful by turns. His brilliant satire probed, cut, jabbed like a surgeon's scalpel; or he railed, scolded, snarled, like a dyspeptic schoolmaster. Often he was in wretched taste. He mimicked, postured, sneered. But he had this millionaire congregation of his in hand. Fanny found herself smiling up at him, delightedly. Perhaps this wasn't religion, as she had been taught to look upon it, but it certainly was tonic. She told herself that she would have come to the same conclusion if Kirsch had occupied a Methodist pulpit.

There were no Kaddish prayers in Kirsch's Temple. On the Friday following the first anniversary of Molly Brandeis's death Fanny did not go home after working hours, but took a bite of supper in a neighborhood restaurant. Then she found her way to one of the orthodox Russian Jewish synagogues on the west side. It was a dim, odorous, bare little place, this house of worship. Fanny had never seen one like it before. She was herded up in the gallery, where the women sat. And when the patriarchal rabbi began to intone the prayer for the dead Fanny threw the gallery into wild panic by rising for it—a thing that no woman is allowed to do in an orthodox Jewish church. She stood, calmly, though the beshawled women to right and left of her yanked at her coat.

In January Fanny discovered New York. She went as selector for her department. Hereafter Slosson would do only the actual buying. Styles, prices, and materials would be decided by her. Ella Monahan accompanied her, it being the time for her monthly trip. Fanny openly envied her her knowledge of New York's wholesale district. Ella offered to help her.

"No," Fanny had replied, "I think not, thanks. You've your own work. And besides I know pretty well what I want, and where to go to get it. It's making them give it to me that will be hard."

They went to the same hotel, and took connecting rooms. Each went her own way, not seeing the other from morning until night, but they often found kimonoed comfort in each other's presence.

Fanny had spent weeks outlining her plan of attack. She had determined to retain the cheap grades, but to add a finer line as well. She recalled those lace-bedecked bundles that the farmer women and mill hands had born so tenderly in their arms. Here was one direction in which they allowed extravagance free rein. As a canny business woman, she would trade on her knowledge of their weakness.

At Haynes-Cooper order is never a thing to be despised by a wholesaler. Fanny, knowing this, had made up her mind to go straight to Horn & Udell. Now, Horn & Udell are responsible for the bloomers your small daughter wears under her play frock, in place of the troublesome and extravagant petticoat of the old days. It was they who introduced smocked pinafores to you; and those modish patent-leather belts for children at which your grandmothers would have raised horrified hands. They taught you that an inch of hand embroidery is worth a yard of cheap lace. And as for style, cut, line—you can tell a Horn & Udell child from among a flock of thirty.

Fanny, entering their office, felt much as Molly Brandeis had felt that January many, many years before, when she had made that first terrifying trip to the Chicago market. The engagement had been made days before. Fanny never knew the shock that her youthfully expectant face gave old Sid Udell. He turned from his desk to greet her, his polite smile of greeting giving way to a look of bewilderment.

"But you are not the buyer, are you, Miss Brandeis?"

"No, Mr. Slosson buys."

"I thought so."

"But I select for my entire department. I decide on our styles, materials, and prices, six months in advance. Then Mr. Slosson does the actual bulk buying."

"Something new-fangled?" inquired Sid Udell. "Of course, we've never sold much to you people. Our stuff is——"

"Yes, I know. But you'd like to, wouldn't you?"

"Our class of goods isn't exactly suited to your wants."

"Yes, it is. Exactly. That's why I'm here. We'll be doing a business of a million and a quarter in my department in another two years. No firm, not even Horn & Udell, can afford to ignore an account like that."

Sid Udell smiled a little. "You've made up your mind to that million and a quarter, young lady?"

"Yes."

"Well, I've dealt with buyers for a quarter of a century or more. And I'd say that you're going to get it."

Whereupon Fanny began to talk. Ten minutes later Udell interrupted her to summon Horn, whose domain was the factory. Horn came, was introduced, looked doubtful. Fanny had statistics. Fanny had arguments. She had determination. "And what we want," she went on, in her quiet, assured way, "is style. The Horn & Udell clothes have chic. Now, material can't be imitated successfully, but style can. Our goods lack just that. I could copy any model you have, turn the idea over to a cheap manufacturer, and get a million just like it, at one-fifth the price. That isn't a threat. It's just a business statement that you know to be true. I can sketch from memory anything I've seen once. What I want to know is this: Will you make it necessary for me to do that, or will you undertake to furnish us with cheaper copies of your high-priced designs? We could use your entire output. I know the small-town woman of the poorer class, and I know she'll wear a shawl in order to give her child a cloth coat with fancy buttons and a velvet collar."

And Horn & Udell, whose attitude at first had been that of two seasoned business men dealing with a precocious child, found themselves quoting prices to her, shipments, materials, quality, quantities. Then came the question of time.

"We'll get out a special catalogue for the summer," Fanny said. "A small one, to start them our way. Then the big Fall catalogue will contain the entire line."

"That doesn't give us time!" exclaimed both men, in a breath.

"But you must manage, somehow. Can't you speed up the workroom? Put on extra hands? It's worth it."

They might, under normal conditions. But there was this strike-talk, its ugly head bobbing up in a hundred places. And their goods were the kind that required high-class workers. Their girls earned all the way from twelve to twenty-five dollars. But Fanny knew she had driven home the entering wedge. She left them after making an engagement for the following day. The Horn & Udell factory was in New York's newer loft-building section, around Madison, Fifth avenue, and the Thirties. Her hotel was very near. She walked up Fifth avenue a little way, and as she walked she wondered why she did not feel more elated. Her day's work had exceeded her expectations. It was a brilliant January afternoon, with a snap in the air that was almost western. Fifth avenue flowed up, flowed down, and Fanny fought the impulse to stare after every second or third woman she passed. They were so invariably well-dressed. There was none of the occasional shabbiness or dowdiness of Michigan Avenue. Every woman seemed to have emerged fresh from the hands of masseuse and maid. Their hair was coiffed to suit the angle of the hat, and the hat had been chosen to enhance the contour of the head, and the head was carried with regard for the dark furs that encircled the throat. They were amazingly well shod. Their white gloves were white. (A fact remarkable to any soot-haunted Chicagoan.) Their coloring rivaled the rose leaf. And nobody's nose was red.

"Goodness knows I've never pretended to be a beauty," Fanny said that evening, in conversation with Ella Monahan. "But I've always thought I had my good points. By the time I'd reached Forty-second street I wouldn't have given two cents for my chances of winning a cave man on a desert island."

She made up her mind that she would go back to the hotel, get a thick coat, and ride outside one of those fascinating Fifth avenue 'buses. It struck her as an ideal way to see this amazing street. She was back at her hotel in ten minutes. Ella had not yet come in. Their rooms were on the tenth floor. Fanny got her coat, peered at her own reflection in the mirror, sighed, shook her head, and was off down the hall toward the elevators. The great hall window looked toward Fifth avenue, but between it and the avenue rose a yellow-brick building that housed tier on tier of manufacturing lofts. Cloaks, suits, blouses, petticoats, hats, dresses—it was just such a building as Fanny had come from when she left the offices of Horn & Udell. It might be their very building, for all she knew. She looked straight into its windows as she stood waiting for the lift. And window after window showed women, sewing. They were sewing at machines, and at hand-work, but not as women are accustomed to sew, with leisurely stitches, stopping to pat a seam here, to run a calculating eye along hem or ruffle. It was a dreadful, mechanical motion, that sewing, a machine-like, relentless motion, with no waste in it, no pause. Fanny's mind leaped back to Winnebago, with its pleasant porches on which leisurely women sat stitching peacefully at a fine seam.

What was it she had said to Udell? "Can't you speed up the workroom? It's worth it."

Fanny turned abruptly from the window as the door of the bronze and mirrored lift opened for her. She walked over to Fifth avenue again and up to Forty-fifth street. Then she scrambled up the spiral stairs of a Washington Square 'bus. The air was crisp, clear, intoxicating. To her Chicago eyes the buildings, the streets, the very sky looked startlingly fresh and new-washed. As the 'bus lurched down Fifth avenue she leaned over the railing to stare, fascinated, at the colorful, shifting, brilliant panorama of the most amazing street in the world. Block after block, as far as the eye could see, the gorgeous procession moved up, moved down, and the great, gleaming motor cars crept, and crawled, and writhed in and out, like nothing so much as swollen angle worms in a fishing can, Fanny thought. Her eye was caught by one limousine that stood out, even in that crush of magnificence. It was all black, as though scorning to attract the eye with vulgar color, and it was lined with white. Fanny thought it looked very much like Siegel & Cowan's hearse, back in Winnebago. In it sat a woman, all furs, and orchids, and complexion. She was holding up to the window a little dog with a wrinkled and weary face, like that of an old, old man. He was sticking his little evil, eager red tongue out at the world. And he wore a very smart and woolly white sweater, of the imported kind—with a monogram done in black.

The traffic policeman put up his hand. The 'bus rumbled on down the street. Names that had always been remotely mythical to her now met her eye and became realities. Maillard's. And that great red stone castle was the Waldorf. Almost historic, and it looked newer than the smoke-grimed Blackstone. And straight ahead—why, that must be the Flatiron building! It loomed up like the giant prow of an unimaginable ship. Brentano's. The Holland House. Madison Square. Why there never was anything so terrifying, and beautiful, and palpitating, and exquisite as this Fifth avenue in the late winter afternoon, with the sky ahead a rosy mist, and the golden lights just beginning to spangle the gray. At Madison Square she decided to walk. She negotiated the 'bus steps with surprising skill for a novice, and scurried along the perilous crossing to the opposite side. She entered Madison Square. But why hadn't O. Henry emphasized its beauty, instead of its squalor? It lay, a purple pool of shadow, surrounded by the great, gleaming, many-windowed office buildings, like an amethyst sunk in a circle of diamonds. "It's a fairyland!" Fanny told herself. "Who'd have thought a city could be so beautiful!"

And then, at her elbow, a voice said, "Oh, lady, for the lova God!" She turned with a jerk and looked up into the unshaven face of a great, blue-eyed giant who pulled off his cap and stood twisting it in his swollen blue fingers. "Lady, I'm cold. I'm hungry. I been sittin' here hours."

Fanny clutched her bag a little fearfully. She looked at his huge frame. "Why don't you work?"

"Work!" He laughed. "There ain't any. Looka this!" He turned up his foot, and you saw the bare sole, blackened and horrible, and fringed, comically, by the tattered leather upper.

"Oh—my dear!" said Fanny. And at that the man began to cry, weakly, sickeningly, like a little boy.

"Don't do that! Don't! Here." She was emptying her purse, and something inside her was saying, "You fool, he's only a professional beggar."

And then the man wiped his face with his cap, and swallowed hard, and said, "I don't want all you got. I ain't holdin' you up. Just gimme that. I been sittin' here, on that bench, lookin' at that sign across the street. Over there. It says, 'EAT.' It goes off an' on. Seemed like it was drivin' me crazy."

Fanny thrust a crumpled five-dollar bill into his hand. And was off. She fairly flew along, so that it was not until she had reached Thirty-third street that she said aloud, as was her way when moved, "I don't care. Don't blame me. It was that miserable little beast of a dog in the white sweater that did it."

It was almost seven when she reached her room. A maid, in neat black and white, was just coming out with an armful of towels.

"I just brought you a couple of extra towels. We were short this morning," she said.

The room was warm, and quiet, and bright. In her bathroom, that glistened with blue and white tiling, were those redundant towels. Fanny stood in the doorway and counted them, whimsically. Four great fuzzy bath towels. Eight glistening hand towels. A blue and white bath rug hung at the side of the tub. Her telephone rang. It was Ella.

"Where in the world have you been, child? I was worried about you. I thought you were lost in the streets of New York."

"I took a 'bus ride," Fanny explained.

"See anything of New York?"

"I saw all of it," replied Fanny. Ella laughed at that, but Fanny's face was serious.

"How did you make out at Horn & Udell's? Never mind, I'm coming in for a minute; can I?"

"Please do. I need you."

A moment later Ella bounced in, fresh as to blouse, pink as to cheeks, her whole appearance a testimony to the revivifying effects of a warm bath, a brief nap, clean clothes.

"Dear child, you look tired. I'm not going to stay. You get dressed and I'll meet you for dinner. Or do you want yours up here?"

"Oh, no!"

"'Phone me when you're dressed. But tell me, isn't it a wonder, this town? I'll never forget my first trip here. I spent one whole evening standing in front of the mirror trying to make those little spit-curls the women were wearing then. I'd seen 'em on Fifth avenue, and it seemed I'd die if I couldn't have 'em, too. And I dabbed on rouge, and touched up my eyebrows. I don't know. It's a kind of a crazy feeling gets you. The minute I got on the train for Chicago I washed my face and took my hair down and did it plain again."

"Why, that's the way I felt!" laughed Fanny. "I didn't care anything about infants' wear, or Haynes-Cooper, or anything. I just wanted to be beautiful, as they all were."

"Sure! It gets us all!"

Fanny twisted her hair into the relentless knob women assume preparatory to bathing. "It seems to me you have to come from Winnebago, or thereabouts, to get New York—really get it, I mean."

"That's so," agreed Ella. "There's a man on the New York Star who writes a column every day that everybody reads. If he isn't a small-town man then we're both wrong."

Fanny, bathward bound, turned to stare at Ella. "A column about what?"

"Oh, everything. New York, mostly. Say, it's the humanest stuff. He says the kind of thing we'd all say, if we knew how. Reading him is like getting a letter from home. I'll bet he went to a country school and wore his mittens sewed to a piece of tape that ran through his coat sleeves."

"You're right," said Fanny; "he did. That man's from Winnebago, Wisconsin."

"No!"

"Yes."

"Do you mean you know him? Honestly? What's he like?"

But Fanny had vanished. "I'm a tired business woman," she called, above the splashing that followed, "and I won't converse until I'm fed."

"But how about Horn & Udell?" demanded Ella, her mouth against the crack.

"Practically mine," boasted Fanny.

"You mean—landed!"

"Well, hooked, at any rate, and putting up a very poor struggle."

"Why, you clever little divil, you! You'll be making me look like a stock girl next."

Fanny did not telephone Heyl until the day she left New York. She had told herself she would not telephone him at all. He had sent her his New York address and telephone number months before, after that Sunday at the dunes. Ella Monahan had finished her work and had gone back to Chicago four days before Fanny was ready to leave. In those four days Fanny had scoured the city from the Palisades to Pell street. I don't know how she found her way about. It was a sort of instinct with her. She seemed to scent the picturesque. She never for a moment neglected her work. But she had found it was often impossible to see these New York business men until ten—sometimes eleven—o'clock. She awoke at seven, a habit formed in her Winnebago days. Eight-thirty one morning found her staring up at the dim vastness of the dome of the cathedral of St. John the Divine. The great gray pile, mountainous, almost ominous, looms up in the midst of the dingy commonplaceness of Amsterdam avenue and 110th street. New Yorkers do not know this, or if they know it, the fact does not interest them. New Yorkers do not go to stare up into the murky shadows of this glorious edifice. They would if it were situate in Rome. Bare, crude, unfinished, chaotic, it gives rich promise of magnificent fulfillment. In an age when great structures are thrown up to-day, to be torn down to-morrow, this slow-moving giant is at once a reproach and an example. Twenty-five years in building, twenty-five more for completion, it has elbowed its way, stone by stone, into such company as St. Peter's at Rome, and the marvel at Milan. Fanny found her way down the crude cinder paths that made an alley-like approach to the cathedral. She entered at the side door that one found by following arrows posted on the rough wooden fence. Once inside she stood a moment, awed by the immensity of the half-finished nave. As she stood there, hands clasped, her face turned raptly up to where the massive granite columns reared their height to frame the choir, she was, for the moment, as devout as any Episcopalian whose money had helped make the great building. Not only devout, but prayerful, ecstatic. That was partly due to the effect of the pillars, the lights, the tapestries, the great, unfinished chunks of stone that loomed out from the side walls, and the purple shadow cast by the window above the chapels at the far end; and partly to the actress in her that responded magically to any mood, and always to surroundings. Later she walked softly down the deserted nave, past the choir, to the cluster of chapels, set like gems at one end, and running from north to south, in a semi-circle. A placard outside one said, "St. Saviour's chapel. For those who wish to rest and pray." All white marble, this little nook, gleaming softly in the gray half-light. Fanny entered, and sat down. She was quite alone. The roar and crash of the Eighth avenue L, the Amsterdam cars, the motors drumming up Morningside hill, were softened here to a soothing hum.

For those who wish to rest and pray.

Fanny Brandeis had neither rested nor prayed since that hideous day when she had hurled her prayer of defiance at Him. But something within her now began a groping for words; for words that should follow an ancient plea beginning, "O God of my Fathers——" But at that the picture of the room came back to her mental vision—the room so quiet except for the breathing of the woman on the bed; the woman with the tolerant, humorous mouth, and the straight, clever nose, and the softly bright brown eyes, all so strangely pinched and shrunken-looking now——

Fanny got to her feet, with a noisy scraping of the chair on the stone floor. The vague, half-formed prayer died at birth. She found her way out of the dim, quiet little chapel, up the long aisle and out the great door. She shivered a little in the cold of the early January morning as she hurried toward the Broadway subway.

At nine-thirty she was standing at a counter in the infants' wear section at Best's, making mental notes while the unsuspecting saleswoman showed her how the pink ribbon in this year's models was brought under the beading, French fashion, instead of weaving through it, as heretofore. At ten-thirty she was saying to Sid Udell, "I think a written contract is always best. Then we'll all know just where we stand. Mr. Fenger will be on next week to arrange the details, but just now a very brief written understanding to show him on my return would do."

And she got it, and tucked it away in her bag, in triumph.

She tried to leave New York without talking to Heyl, but some quiet, insistent force impelled her to act contrary to her resolution. It was, after all, the urge of the stronger wish against the weaker.

When he heard her voice over the telephone Heyl did not say, "Who is this?" Neither did he put those inevitable questions of the dweller to the transient, "Where are you? How long have you been here?" What he said was, "How're you going to avoid dining with me to-night?"

To which Fanny replied, promptly, "By taking the Twentieth Century back to Chicago to-day."

A little silence. A hurt silence. Then, "When they get the Twentieth Century habit they're as good as lost. How's the infants' wear business, Fanny?"

"Booming, thank you. I want to tell you I've read the column every day. It's wonderful stuff."

"It's a wonderful job. I'm a lucky boy. I'm doing the thing I'd rather do than anything else in the world. There are mighty few who can say that." There was another silence, awkward, heavy. Then, "Fanny, you're not really leaving to-day?"

"I'll be in Chicago to-morrow, barring wrecks."

"You might have let me show you our more or less fair city."

"I've shown it to myself. I've seen Riverside Drive at sunset, and at night. That alone would have been enough. But I've seen Fulton market, too, and the Grand street stalls, and Washington Square, and Central Park, and Lady Duff-Gordon's inner showroom, and the Night Court, and the Grand Central subway horror at six p. m., and the gambling on the Curb, and the bench sleepers in Madison Square—Oh, Clancy, the misery——"

"Heh, wait a minute! All this, alone?"

"Yes. And one more thing. I've landed Horn & Udell, which means nothing to you, but to me it means that by Spring my department will be a credit to its stepmother; a real success."

"I knew it would be a success. So did you. Anything you might attempt would be successful. You'd have made a successful lawyer, or cook, or actress, or hydraulic engineer, because you couldn't do a thing badly. It isn't in you. You're a superlative sort of person. But that's no reason for being any of those things. If you won't admit a debt to humanity, surely you'll acknowledge you've an obligation to yourself."

"Preaching again. Good-by."

"Fanny, you're afraid to see me."

"Don't be ridiculous. Why should I be?"

"Because I say aloud the things you daren't let yourself think. If I were to promise not to talk about anything but flannel bands——"

"Will you promise?"

"No. But I'm going to meet you at the clock at the Grand Central Station fifteen minutes before train time. I don't care if every infants' wear manufacturer in New York had a prior claim on your time. You may as well be there, because if you're not I'll get on the train and stay on as far as Albany. Take your choice."

He was there before her. Fanny, following the wake of a redcap, picked him at once from among the crowd of clock-waiters. He saw her at the same time, and started forward with that singularly lithe, springy step which was, after all, just the result of perfectly trained muscles in coordination. He was wearing New York clothes—the right kind, Fanny noted.

Their hands met. "How well you look," said Fanny, rather lamely.

"It's the clothes," said Heyl, and began to revolve slowly, coyly, hands out, palms down, eyelids drooping, in delicious imitation of those ladies whose business it is to revolve thus for fashion.

"Clancy, you idiot! All these people! Stop it!"

"But get the grace! Get the easy English hang, at once so loose and so clinging."

Fanny grinned, appreciatively, and led the way through the gate to the train. She was surprisingly glad to be with him again. On discovering that, she began to talk rapidly, and about him.

"Tell me, how do you manage to keep that fresh viewpoint? Everybody else who comes to New York to write loses his identity. The city swallows him up. I mean by that, that things seem to strike you as freshly as they did when you first came. I remember you wrote me an amazing letter."

"For one thing, I'll never be anything but a foreigner in New York. I'll never quite believe Broadway. I'll never cease to marvel at Fifth avenue, and Cooper Union, and the Bronx. The time may come when I can take the subway for granted, but don't ask it of me just yet."

"But the other writers—and all those people who live down in Washington Square?"

"I never see them. It's sure death. Those Greenwichers are always taking out their own feelings and analyzing them, and pawing them over, and passing them around. When they get through with them they're so thumb-marked and greasy that no one else wants them. They don't get enough golf, those Greenwichers. They don't get enough tennis. They don't get enough walking in the open places. Gosh, no! I know better than to fall for that kind of thing. They spend hours talking to each other, in dim-lighted attics, about Souls, and Society, and the Joy of Life, and the Greater Good. And they know all about each other's insides. They talk themselves out, and there's nothing left to write about. A little of that kind of thing purges and cleanses. Too much of it poisons, and clogs. No, ma'am! When I want to talk I go down and chin with the foreman of our composing room. There's a chap that has what I call conversation. A philosopher, and knows everything in the world. Composing room foremen always are and do. Now, that's all of that. How about Fanny Brandeis? Any sketches? Come on. Confess. Grand street, anyway."

"I haven't touched a pencil, except to add up a column of figures or copy an order, since last September, when you were so sure I couldn't stop."

"You've done a thousand in your head. And if you haven't done one on paper so much the better. You'll jam them back, and stifle them, and screw the cover down tight on every natural impulse, and then, some day, the cover will blow off with a loud report. You can't kill that kind of thing, Fanny. It would have to be a wholesale massacre of all the centuries behind you. I don't so much mind your being disloyal to your tribe, or race, or whatever you want to call it. But you've turned your back on yourself; you've got an obligation to humanity, and I'll nag you till you pay it. I don't care if I lose you, so long as you find yourself. The thing you've got isn't merely racial. God, no! It's universal. And you owe it to the world. Pay up, Fanny! Pay up!"

"Look here!" began Fanny, her voice low with anger; "the last time I saw you I said I'd never again put myself in a position to be lectured by you, like a schoolgirl. I mean it, this time. If you have anything else to say to me, say it now. The train leaves"—she glanced at her wrist—"in two minutes, thank Heaven, and this will be your last chance."

"All right," said Heyl. "I have got something to say. Do you wear hatpins?"

"Hatpins!" blankly. "Not with this small hat, but what——"

"That means you're defenseless. If you're going to prowl the streets of Chicago alone get this: If you double your fist this way, and tuck your thumb alongside, like that, and aim for this spot right here, about two inches this side of the chin, bringing your arm back, and up, quickly, like a piston, the person you hit will go down, limp. There's a nerve right here that communicates with the brain. That blow makes you see stars, bright lights, and fancy colors. They use it in the comic papers."

"You ARE crazy," said Fanny, as though at last assured of a long-suspected truth. The train began to move, almost imperceptibly. "Run!" she cried.