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."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Theodore had been gone six years. His letters, all too brief, were
events in the lives of the two women. They read and reread them. Fanny
unconsciously embellished them with fascinating details made up out of
her own imagination.

"They're really triumphs of stupidity and dullness," she said one day
in disgust, after one of Theodore's long-awaited letters had proved
particularly dry and sparse. "Just think of it! Dresden, Munich,
Leipsic, Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt! And from his letters you would never
know he had left Winnebago. I don't believe he actually sees anything
of these cities--their people, and the queer ho