anny helplessly, and looked
at her mother. Mrs. Brandeis reached for the cream pitcher and poured
a little more cream over Theodore's baked apple. Even as she did it
her eyes met Fanny's, and in them was a certain sly amusement, a
little gleam of fun, a look that said, "Neither do I." Fanny sat back,
satisfied. Here, at least, was some one who understood.

At half past seven Theodore, looking very brushed and sleek, went off to
meet Emil Bauer. Mrs. Brandeis had looked him over, and had said, "Your
nails!" and sent him back to the bathroom, and she had resisted the
desire to kiss him because Theodore disliked demonstration. "He hated to
be pawed over," was the way he put it. After he had gone, Mrs. Brandeis
went into the dining-room where Fanny was sitting. Mattie had cleared
the table, and Fanny was busy over a book and a tablet, by the light
of the lamp that they always used for studying. It was one of the rare
occasions when she had brought home a school lesson. It was arithmetic,
and Fanny loathed arithmetic. She had no head for mathematics. The set
of problems were eighth-grade horrors, in which A is digging a well 20
feet deep and 9 feet wide; or in which A and B are papering two rooms,
or building two fences, or plastering a wall. If A does his room in 9
1/2 days, the room being 12 feet high, 20 feet long, and 15 1/2 feet
wide, how long will it take B to do a room 14 feet high, 11 3/4 feet,
etc.

Fanny hated the indefatigable A and B with a bitter personal hatred.
And as for that occasional person named C, who complicated matters still
more--!

Sometimes Mrs. Brandeis helped to disentangle Fanny from the mazes of
her wall paper problems, or dragged her up from the bottom of the well
when it seemed that she was down there for eternity unless a friendly
hand rescued her. As a rule she insisted that Fanny crack her own
mathematical nuts. She said it was good mental training, not to speak
of the moral side of it. But to-night she bent her quick mind upon the
problems that were puzzling her little daughter, and cleared them up in
no time.

When Fanny had folded her arithmetic papers neatly inside her book and
leaned back with a relieved sigh Molly Brandeis bent forward in the
lamplight and began to talk very soberly. Fanny, red-cheeked and
bright-eyed from her recent mental struggles, listened interestedly,
then intently, then absorbedly. She attempted to interrupt, sometimes,
with an occasional, "But, Mother, ho