theodore came home at twelve o'clock that night. he had gone to bauer's studio party after all. it was the first time he had deliberately disobeyed his mother in a really big thing. mrs. brandeis and fanny had nibbled fudge all evening (it had turned out deliciously velvety) and had gone to bed at their usual time. at half past ten mrs. brandeis had wakened with the instinctive feeling that theodore was not in the house. she lay there, wide awake, staring into the darkness until eleven. then she got up and went into his room, though she knew he was not there. she was not worried as to his whereabouts or his well-being. that same instinctive feeling told her where he was. she was very angry, and a little terrified at the significance of his act. she went back to bed again, and she felt the blood pounding in her head. molly brandeis had a temper, and it was surging now, and beating against the barriers of her self-control.
she told herself, as she lay there, that she must deal with him coolly and firmly, though she wanted to spank him. the time for spankings was past. some one was coming down the street with a quick, light step. she sat up in bed, listening. the steps passed the house, went on. a half hour passed. some one turned the corner, whistling blithely. but, no, he would not be whistling, she told herself. he would sneak in, quietly. it was a little after twelve when she heard the front door open (winnebago rarely locked its doors). she was surprised to feel her heart beating rapidly. he was trying to be quiet, and was making a great deal of noise about it. his shoes and the squeaky fifth stair alone would have convicted him. the imp of perversity in molly brandeis made her smile, angry as she was, at the thought of how furious he must be at that stair.
“theodore!” she called quietly, just as he was tip-toeing past her room.
“yeh.”
“come in here. and turn on the light.”
he switched on the light and stood there in the doorway. molly brandeis, sitting up in bed in the chilly room, with her covers about her, was conscious of a little sick feeling, not at what he had done, but that a son of hers should ever wear the sullen, defiant, hang-dog look that disfigured theodore's face now.
“bauer's?”
a pause. “yes.”
“why?”
“i just stopped in there for a minute after the concert. i didn't mean to stay. and then bauer introduced me around to everybody. and then they asked me to play, and—”
“and you played badly.”
“well, i didn't have my own violin.”
“no football game saturday. and no pocket money this week. go to bed.”
he went, breathing hard, and muttering a little under his breath. at breakfast next morning fanny plied him with questions and was furious at his cool uncommunicativeness.
“was it wonderful, theodore? did he play—oh—like an angel?”
“played all right. except the `swan' thing. maybe he thought it was too easy, or something, but i thought he murdered it. pass the toast, unless you want it all.”
it was not until the following autumn that theodore went to new york. the thing that had seemed so impossible was arranged. he was to live in brooklyn with a distant cousin of ferdinand brandeis, on a business basis, and he was to come into new york three times a week for his lessons. mrs. brandeis took him as far as chicago, treated him to an extravagant dinner, put him on the train and with difficulty stifled the impulse to tell all the other passengers in the car to look after her theodore. he looked incredibly grown up and at ease in his new suit and the hat that they had wisely bought in chicago. she did not cry at all (in the train), and she kissed him only twice, and no man can ask more than that of any mother.
molly brandeis went back to winnebago and the store with her shoulders a little more consciously squared, her jaw a little more firmly set. there was something almost terrible about her concentrativeness. together she and fanny began a life of self-denial of which only a woman could be capable. they saved in ways that only a woman's mind could devise; petty ways, that included cream and ice, and clothes, and candy. it was rather fun at first. when that wore off it had become a habit. mrs. brandeis made two resolutions regarding fanny. one was that she should have at least a high school education, and graduate. the other that she should help in the business of the store as little as possible. to the first fanny acceded gladly. to the second she objected.
“but why? if you can work, why can't i? i could help you a lot on saturdays and at christmas time, and after school.”
“i don't want you to,” mrs. brandeis had replied, almost fiercely. “i'm giving my life to it. that's enough. i don't want you to know about buying and selling. i don't want you to know a bill of lading from a sales slip when you see it. i don't want you to know whether f. o. b. is a wireless signal or a branch of the masons.” at which fanny grinned. no one appreciated her mother's humor more than she.
“but i do know already. the other day when that fat man was selling you those go-carts i heard him say. `f. o. b. buffalo,' and i asked aloysius what it meant and he told me.”
it was inevitable that fanny brandeis should come to know these things, for the little household revolved about the store on elm street. by the time she was eighteen and had graduated from the winnebago high school, she knew so many things that the average girl of eighteen did not know, and was ignorant of so many things that the average girl of eighteen did know, that winnebago was almost justified in thinking her queer. she had had a joyous time at school, in spite of algebra and geometry and physics. she took the part of the heroine in the senior class play given at the winnebago opera house, and at the last rehearsal electrified those present by announcing that if albert finkbein (who played the dashing southern hero) didn't kiss her properly when the curtain went down on the first act, just as he was going into battle, she'd rather he didn't kiss her at all.
“he just makes it ridiculous,” she protested. “he sort of gives a peck two inches from my nose, and then giggles. everybody will laugh, and it'll spoil everything.”
with the rather startled elocution teacher backing her she rehearsed the bashful albert in that kiss until she had achieved the effect of realism that she thought the scene demanded. but when, on the school sleighing parties and hay rides the boy next her slipped a wooden and uncertain arm about her waist while they all were singing “jingle bells, jingle bells,” and “good night ladies,” and “merrily we roll along,” she sat up stiffly and unyieldingly until the arm, discouraged, withdrew to its normal position. which two instances are quoted as being of a piece with what winnebago termed her queerness.
not that fanny brandeis went beauless through school. on the contrary, she always had some one to carry her books, and to take her to the school parties and home from the friday night debating society meetings. her first love affair turned out disastrously. she was twelve, and she chose as the object of her affections a bullet-headed boy named simpson. one morning, as the last bell rang and they were taking their seats, fanny passed his desk and gave his coarse and stubbly hair a tweak. it was really a love tweak, and intended to be playful, but she probably put more fervor into it than she knew. it brought the tears of pain to his eyes, and he turned and called her the name at which she shrank back, horrified. her shock and unbelief must have been stamped on her face, for the boy, still smarting, had snarled, “ya-as, i mean it.”
it was strange how she remembered that incident years after she had forgotten important happenings in her life. clarence heyl, whose very existence you will have failed to remember, used to hover about her uncertainly, always looking as if he would like to walk home with her, but never summoning the courage to do it. they were graduated from the grammar school together, and clarence solemnly read a graduation essay entitled “where is the horse?” automobiles were just beginning to flash plentifully up and down elm street. clarence had always been what winnebago termed sickly, in spite of his mother's noodle soup, and coddling. he was sent west, to colorado, or to a ranch in wyoming, fanny was not quite sure which, perhaps because she was not interested. he had come over one afternoon to bid her good-by, and had dangled about the front porch until she went into the house and shut the door.
when she was sixteen there was a blond german boy whose taciturnity attracted her volubility and vivacity. she mistook his stolidness for depth, and it was a long time before she realized that his silence was not due to the weight of his thoughts but to the fact that he had nothing to say. in her last year at high school she found herself singled out for the attentions of harmon kent, who was the beau nash of the winnebago high school. his clothes were made by schwartze, the tailor, when all the other boys of his age got theirs at the spring and fall sales of the golden eagle clothing store. it was always nip and tuck between his semester standings and his track team and football possibilities. the faculty refused to allow flunkers to take part in athletics.
he was one of those boys who have definite charm, and manner, and poise at seventeen, and who crib their exams off their cuffs. he was always at the head of any social plans in the school, and at the dances he rushed about wearing in his coat lapel a ribbon marked floor committee. the teachers all knew he was a bluff, but his engaging manner carried him through. when he went away to the state university he made fanny solemnly promise to write; to come down to madison for the football games; to be sure to remember about the junior prom. he wrote once—a badly spelled scrawl—and she answered. but he was the sort of person who must be present to be felt. he could not project his personality. when he came home for the christmas holidays fanny was helping in the store. he dropped in one afternoon when she was selling whisky glasses to mike hearn of the farmers' rest hotel.
they did not write at all during the following semester, and when he came back for the long summer vacation they met on the street one day and exchanged a few rather forced pleasantries. it suddenly dawned on fanny that he was patronizing her much as the scion of an aristocratic line banters the housemaid whom he meets on the stairs. she bit an imaginary apron corner, and bobbed a curtsy right there on elm street, in front of the courier office and walked off, leaving him staring. it was shortly after this that she began a queer line of reading for a girl—lives of disraeli, spinoza, mendelssohn, mozart—distinguished jews who had found their religion a handicap.
the year of her graduation she did a thing for which winnebago felt itself justified in calling her different. each member of the graduating class was allowed to choose a theme for a thesis. fanny brandeis called hers “a piece of paper.” on winnebago's fox river were located a number of the largest and most important paper mills in the country. there were mills in which paper was made of wood fiber, and others in which paper was made of rags. you could smell the sulphur as soon as you crossed the bridge that led to the flats. sometimes, when the wind was right, the pungent odor of it spread all over the town. strangers sniffed it and made a wry face, but the natives liked it.
the mills themselves were great ugly brick buildings, their windows festooned with dust webs. some of them boasted high detached tower-like structures where a secret acid process went on. in the early days the mills had employed many workers, but newly invented machinery had come to take the place of hand labor. the rag-rooms alone still employed hundreds of girls who picked, sorted, dusted over the great suction bins. the rooms in which they worked were gray with dust. they wore caps over their hair to protect it from the motes that you could see spinning and swirling in the watery sunlight that occasionally found its way through the gray-filmed window panes. it never seemed to occur to them that the dust cap so carefully pulled down about their heads did not afford protection for their lungs. they were pale girls, the rag-room girls, with a peculiarly gray-white pallor.
fanny brandeis had once been through the winnebago paper company's mill and she had watched, fascinated, while a pair of soiled and greasy old blue overalls were dusted and cleaned, and put through this acid vat, and that acid tub, growing whiter and more pulpy with each process until it was fed into a great crushing roller that pressed the moisture out of it, flattened it to the proper thinness and spewed it out at last, miraculously, in the form of rolls of crisp, white paper. on the first day of the easter vacation fanny brandeis walked down to the office of the winnebago paper company's mill and applied at the superintendent's office for a job. she got it. they were generally shorthanded in the rag-room. when mrs. brandeis heard of it there followed one of the few stormy scenes between mother and daughter.
“why did you do it?” demanded mrs. brandeis.
“i had to, to get it right.”
“oh, don't be silly. you could have visited the mill a dozen times.”
fanny twisted the fingers of her left hand in the fingers of her right as was her way when she was terribly in earnest, and rather excited.
“but i don't want to write about the paper business as a process.”
“well, then, what do you want?”
“i want to write about the overalls on some railroad engineer, perhaps; or the blue calico wrapper that belonged, maybe, to a scrub woman. and how they came to be spotted, or faded, or torn, and finally all worn out. and how the rag man got them, and the mill, and how the girls sorted them. and the room in which they do it. and the bins. and the machinery. oh, it's the most fascinating, and—and sort of relentless machinery. and the acid burns on the hands of the men at the vats. and their shoes. and then the paper, so white. and the way we tear it up, or crumple it, and throw it in the waste basket. just a piece of paper, don't you see what i mean? just a piece of paper, and yet all that—” she stopped and frowned a little, and grew inarticulate, and gave it up with a final, “don't you see what i mean, mother? don't you see what i mean?”
molly brandeis looked at her daughter in a startled way, like one who, walking tranquilly along an accustomed path, finds himself confronting a new and hitherto unsuspected vista, formed by a peculiar arrangement of clouds, perhaps, or light, or foliage, or all three blended. “i see what you mean,” she said. “but i wish you wouldn't do it. i—i wish you didn't feel that you wanted to do it.”
“but how can i make it real if i don't?”
“you can't,” said molly brandeis. “that's just it. you can't, ever.”
fanny got up before six every morning of that easter vacation, and went to the mill, lunch box in hand. she came home at night dead-tired. she did not take the street car to and from the mill, as she might have, because she said the other girls in the rag-room walked, some of them from the very edge of town. mrs. brandeis said that she was carrying things too far, but fanny stuck it out for the two weeks, at the end of which period she spent an entire sunday in a hair-washing, face-steaming, and manicuring bee. she wrote her paper from notes she had taken, and turned it in at the office of the high school principal with the feeling that it was not at all what she had meant it to be. a week later professor henning called her into his office. the essay lay on his desk.
“i've read your thesis,” he began, and stopped, and cleared his throat. he was not an eloquent man. “where did you get your information, miss brandeis?”
“i got it at the mill.”
“from one of the employees?”
“oh, no. i worked there, in the rag-room.”
professor henning gave a little startled exclamation that he turned hastily into a cough. “i thought that perhaps the editor of the courier might like to see it—it being local. and interesting.”
he brought it down to the office of the little paper himself, and promised to call for it again in an hour or two, when lem davis should have read it. lem davis did read it, and snorted, and scuffled with his feet in the drift of papers under his desk, which was a way he had when enraged.
“read it!” he echoed, at professor henning's question. “read it! yes, i read it. and let me tell you it's socialism of the rankest kind, that's what! it's anarchism, that's what! who's this girl? mrs. brandeis's daughter—of the bazaar? let me tell you i'd go over there and tell her what i think of the way she's bringing up that girl—if she wasn't an advertiser. `a piece of paper'! hell!” and to show his contempt for what he had read he wadded together a great mass of exchanges that littered his desk and hurled them, a crumpled heap, to the floor, and then spat tobacco juice upon them.
“i'm sorry,” said professor henning, and rose; but at the door he turned and said something highly unprofessorial. “it's a darn fine piece of writing.” and slammed the door. at supper that night he told mrs. henning about it. mrs. henning was a practical woman, as the wife of a small-town high school principal must needs be. “but don't you know,” she said, “that roscoe moore, who is president of the outagamie pulp mill and the winnebago paper company, practically owns the courier?”
professor henning passed a hand over his hair, ruefully, like a school boy. “no, martha, i didn't know. if i knew those things, dear, i suppose we wouldn't be eating sausage for supper to-night.” there was a little silence between them. then he looked up. “some day i'm going to brag about having been that brandeis girl's teacher.”
fanny was in the store a great deal now. after she finished high school they sent mattie away and fanny took over the housekeeping duties, but it was not her milieu. not that she didn't do it well. she put a perfect fury of energy and care into the preparation of a pot roast. after she had iced a cake she enhanced it with cunning arabesques of jelly. the house shone as it never had, even under mattie's honest regime. but it was like hitching a high-power engine to a butter churn. there were periods of maddening restlessness. at such times she would set about cleaning the cellar, perhaps. it was a three-roomed cellar, brick-floored, cool, and having about it that indefinable cellar smell which is of mold, and coal, and potatoes, and onions, and kindling wood, and dill pickles and ashes.
other girls of fanny's age, at such times, cleaned out their bureau drawers and read forbidden novels. fanny armed herself with the third best broom, the dust-pan, and an old bushel basket. she swept up chips, scraped up ashes, scoured the preserve shelves, washed the windows, cleaned the vegetable bins, and got gritty, and scarlet-cheeked and streaked with soot. it was a wonderful safety valve, that cellar. a pity it was that the house had no attic.
then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. and dream. and watch the town go by to supper. i think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or villages. they have had time to dream in their adolescence. no cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city child. little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the fields or woods. with the cloth laid, and the bread cut and covered with a napkin, and the sauce in the glass bowl, and the cookies on a blue plate, and the potatoes doing very, very slowly, and the kettle steaming with a peerybingle cheerfulness, fanny would stroll out to the front porch again to watch for the familiar figure to appear around the corner of norris street. she would wear her blue-and-white checked gingham apron deftly twisted over one hip, and tucked in, in deference to the passers-by. and the town would go by—hen cody's drays, rattling and thundering; the high school boys thudding down the road, dog-tired and sweaty in their football suits, or their track pants and jersies, on their way from the athletic field to the school shower baths; mrs. mosher flying home, her skirts billowing behind her, after a protracted afternoon at whist; little ernie trost with a napkin-covered peach basket carefully balanced in his hand, waiting for the six-fifteen interurban to round the corner near the switch, so that he could hand up his father's supper; rudie mass, the butcher, with a moist little packet of meat in his hand, and lurching ever so slightly, and looking about defiantly. oh, fanny probably never realized how much she saw and absorbed, sitting there on brandeis' front porch, watching winnebago go by to supper.
at christmas time she helped in the store, afternoons and evenings. then, one christmas, mrs. brandeis was ill for three weeks with grippe. they had to have a helper in the house. when mrs. brandeis was able to come back to the store sadie left to marry, not one of her traveling-men victims, but a steady person, in the paper-hanging way, whose suit had long been considered hopeless. after that fanny took her place. she developed a surprising knack at selling. yet it was not so surprising, perhaps, when one considered her teacher. she learned as only a woman can learn who is brought into daily contact with the outside world. it was not only contact: it was the relation of buyer and seller. she learned to judge people because she had to. how else could one gauge their tastes, temperaments, and pocketbooks? they passed in and out of brandeis' bazaar, day after day, in an endless and varied procession—traveling men, school children, housewives, farmers, worried hostesses, newly married couples bent on house furnishing, business men.
she learned that it was the girls from the paper mills who bought the expensive plates—the ones with the red roses and green leaves hand-painted in great smears and costing two dollars and a half, while the golf club crowd selected for a gift or prize one of the little white plates with the faded-looking blue sprig pattern, costing thirty-nine cents. one day, after she had spent endless time and patience over the sale of a nondescript little plate to one of winnebago's socially elect, she stared wrathfully after the retreating back of the trying customer.
“did you see that? i spent an hour with her. one hour! i showed her everything from the imported limoges bowls to the sevres cups and saucers, and all she bought was that miserable little bonbon dish with the cornflower pattern. cat!”
mrs. brandeis spoke from the depths of her wisdom.
“fanny, i didn't miss much that went on during that hour, and i was dying to come over and take her away from you, but i didn't because i knew you needed the lesson, and i knew that that mcnulty woman never spends more than twenty-five cents, anyway. but i want to tell you now that it isn't only a matter of plates. it's a matter of understanding folks. when you've learned whom to show the expensive hand-painted things to, and when to suggest quietly the little, vague things, with what you call the faded look, why, you've learned just about all there is to know of human nature. don't expect it, at your age.”
molly brandeis had never lost her trick of chatting with customers, or listening to them, whenever she had a moment's time. people used to drop in, and perch themselves on one of the stools near the big glowing base burner and talk to mrs. brandeis. it was incredible, the secrets they revealed of business, and love and disgrace; of hopes and aspirations, and troubles, and happiness. the farmer women used to fascinate fanny by their very drabness. mrs. brandeis had a long and loyal following of these women. it was before the day when every farmhouse boasted an automobile, a telephone, and a phonograph.
a worn and dreary lot, these farmer women, living a skimmed milk existence, putting their youth, and health, and looks into the soil. they used often to sit back near the stove in winter, or in a cool corner near the front of the store in summer, and reveal, bit by bit, the sordid, tragic details of their starved existence. fanny was often shocked when they told their age—twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty, but old and withered from drudgery, and child-bearing, and coarse, unwholesome food. ignorant women, and terribly lonely, with the dumb, lack-luster eyes that bespeak monotony. when they smiled they showed blue-white, glassily perfect false teeth that flashed incongruously in the ruin of their wrinkled, sallow, weather-beaten faces. mrs. brandeis would question them gently.
children? ten. living? four. doctor? never had one in the house. why? he didn't believe in them. no proper kitchen utensils, none of the devices that lighten the deadeningly monotonous drudgery of housework. everything went to make his work easier—new harrows, plows, tractors, wind mills, reapers, barns, silos. the story would come out, bit by bit, as the woman sat there, a worn, unlovely figure, her hands—toil-blackened, seamed, calloused, unlovelier than any woman's hands were ever meant to be—lying in unaccustomed idleness in her lap.
fanny learned, too, that the woman with the shawl, and with her money tied in a corner of her handkerchief, was more likely to buy the six-dollar doll, with the blue satin dress, and the real hair and eye-lashes, while the winnebago east end society woman haggled over the forty-nine cent kind, which she dressed herself.
i think their loyalty to mrs. brandeis might be explained by her honesty and her sympathy. she was so square with them. when minnie mahler, out centerville way, got married, she knew there would be no redundancy of water sets, hanging lamps, or pickle dishes.
“i thought like i'd get her a chamber set,” minnie's aunt would confide to mrs. brandeis.
“is this for minnie mahler, of centerville?”
“yes; she gets married sunday.”
“i sold a chamber set for that wedding yesterday. and a set of dishes. but i don't think she's got a parlor lamp. at least i haven't sold one. why don't you get her that? if she doesn't like it she can change it. now there's that blue one with the pink roses.”
and minnie's aunt would end by buying the lamp.
fanny learned that the mill girls liked the bright-colored and expensive wares, and why; she learned that the woman with the “fascinator” (tragic misnomer!) over her head wanted the finest sled for her boy. she learned to keep her temper. she learned to suggest without seeming to suggest. she learned to do surprisingly well all those things that her mother did so surprisingly well—surprisingly because both the women secretly hated the business of buying and selling. once, on the fourth of july, when there was a stand outside the store laden with all sorts of fireworks, fanny came down to find aloysius and the boy eddie absent on other work, and mrs. brandeis momentarily in charge. the sight sickened her, then infuriated her.
“come in,” she said, between her teeth. “that isn't your work.”
“somebody had to be there. pearl's at dinner. and aloysius and eddie were—”
“then leave it alone. we're not starving—yet. i won't have you selling fireworks like that—on the street. i won't have it! i won't have it!”
the store was paying, now. not magnificently, but well enough. most of the money went to theodore, in dresden. he was progressing, though not so meteorically as bauer and schabelitz had predicted. but that sort of thing took time, mrs. brandeis argued. fanny often found her mother looking at her these days with a questioning sadness in her eyes. once she suggested that fanny join the class in drawing at the winnebago university—a small fresh-water college. fanny did try it for a few months, but the work was not what she wanted; they did fruit pictures and vases, with a book, on a table; or a clump of very pink and very white flowers. fanny quit in disgust and boredom. besides, they were busy at the store, and needed her.
there came often to winnebago a woman whom fanny brandeis admired intensely. she was a traveling saleswoman, successful, magnetic, and very much alive. her name was mrs. emma mcchesney, and between her and mrs. brandeis there existed a warm friendship. she always took dinner with mrs. brandeis and fanny, and they made a special effort to give her all those delectable home-cooked dishes denied her in her endless round of hotels.
“noodle soup!” she used to say, almost lyrically.
“with real hand-made, egg noodles! you don't know what it means. you haven't been eating vermicelli soup all through illinois and wisconsin.”
“we've made a dessert, though, that—”
“molly brandeis, don't you dare to tell me what you've got for dessert. i couldn't stand it. but, oh, suppose, suppose it's homemade strawberry shortcake!”
which it more than likely was.
fanny brandeis used to think that she would dress exactly as mrs. mcchesney dressed, if she too were a successful business woman earning a man-size salary. mrs. mcchesney was a blue serge sort of woman—and her blue serge never was shiny in the back. her collar, or jabot, or tie, or cuffs, or whatever relieving bit of white she wore, was always of the freshest and crispest. her hats were apt to be small and full of what is known as “line.” she usually would try to arrange her schedule so as to spend a sunday in winnebago, and the three alert, humor-loving women, grown wise and tolerant from much contact with human beings, would have a delightful day together.
“molly,” mrs. mcchesney would say, when they were comfortably settled in the living-room, or on the front porch, “with your shrewdness, and experience, and brains, you ought to be one of those five or ten thousand a year buyers. you know how to sell goods and handle people. and you know values. that's all there is to the whole game of business. i don't advise you to go on the road. heaven knows i wouldn't advise my dearest enemy to do that, much less a friend. but you could do bigger things, and get bigger results. you know most of the big wholesalers, and retailers too. why don't you speak to them about a department position? or let me nose around a bit for you.”
molly brandeis shook her head, though her expressive eyes were eager and interested. “don't you think i've thought of that, emma? a thousand times? but i'm—i'm afraid. there's too much at stake. suppose i couldn't succeed? there's theodore. his whole future is dependent on me for the next few years. and there's fanny here. no, i guess i'm too old. and i'm sure of the business here, small as it is.”
emma mcchesney glanced at the girl. “i'm thinking that fanny has the making of a pretty capable business woman herself.”
fanny drew in her breath sharply, and her face sparkled into sudden life, as always when she was tremendously interested.
“do you know what i'd do if i were in mother's place? i'd take a great, big running jump for it and land! i'd take a chance. what is there for her in this town? nothing! she's been giving things up all her life, and what has it brought her?”
“it has brought me a comfortable living, and the love of my two children, and the respect of my townspeople.”
“respect? why shouldn't they respect you? you're the smartest woman in winnebago, and the hardest working.”
emma mcchesney frowned a little, in thought. “what do you two girls do for recreation?”
“i'm afraid we have too little of that, emma. i know fanny has. i'm so dog-tired at the end of the day. all i want is to take my hairpins out and go to bed.”
“and fanny?”
“oh, i read. i'm free to pick my book friends, at least.”
“now, just what do you mean by that, child? it sounds a little bitter.”
“i was thinking of what chesterfield said in one of his letters to his son. `choose always to be in the society of those above you,' he wrote. i guess he lived in winnebago, wisconsin. i'm a working woman, and a jew, and we haven't any money or social position. and unless she's a becky sharp any small town girl with all those handicaps might as well choose a certain constellation of stars in the sky to wear as a breastpin, as try to choose the friends she really wants.”
from molly brandeis to emma mcchesney there flashed a look that said, “you see?” and from emma mcchesney to molly brandeis another that said, “yes; and it's your fault.”
“look here, fanny, don't you see any boys—men?”
“no. there aren't any. those who have any sense and initiative leave to go to milwaukee, or chicago, or new york. those that stay marry the banker's lovely daughter.”
emma mcchesney laughed at that, and molly brandeis too, and fanny joined them a bit ruefully. then quite suddenly, there came into her face a melting, softening look that made it almost lovely. she crossed swiftly over to where her mother sat, and put a hand on either cheek (grown thinner of late) and kissed the tip of her nose. “we don't care—really. do we mother? we're poor wurkin' girruls. but gosh! ain't we proud? mother, your mistake was in not doing as ruth did.”
“ruth?”
“in the bible. remember when what's-his-name, her husband, died? did she go back to her home town? no, she didn't. she'd lived there all her life, and she knew better. she said to naomi, her mother-in-law, `whither thou goest i will go.' and she went. and when they got to bethlehem, ruth looked around, knowingly, until she saw boaz, the catch of the town. so she went to work in his fields, gleaning, and she gleaned away, trying to look just as girlish, and dreamy, and unconscious, but watching him out of the corner of her eye all the time. presently boaz came along, looking over the crops, and he saw her. `who's the new damsel?' he asked. `the peach?'”
“fanny brandeis, aren't you ashamed?”
“but, mother, that's what it says in the bible, actually. `whose damsel is this?' they told him it was ruth, the dashing widow. after that it was all off with the bethlehem girls. boaz paid no more attention to them than if they had never existed. he married ruth, and she led society. just a little careful scheming, that's all.”
“i should say you have been reading, fanny brandeis,” said emma mcchesney. she was smiling, but her eyes were serious. “now listen to me, child. the very next time a traveling man in a brown suit and a red necktie asks you to take dinner with him at the haley house—even one of those roast pork, queen-fritter-with-rum-sauce, roman punch sunday dinners—i want you to accept.”
“even if he wears an elks' pin, and a masonic charm, and a diamond ring and a brown derby?” “even if he shows you the letters from his girl in manistee,” said mrs. mcchesney solemnly. “you've been seeing too much of fanny brandeis.”
