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.”