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?”............