curls at eight in the morning. By the time school was out
at four they were as wildly unruly as if charged with electric
currents--which they really were, when you consider the little dynamo
that wore them.

Mrs. Brandeis took a scant half hour to walk the six blocks between
the store and the house, to snatch a hurried dinner, and traverse the
distance to the store again. It was a program that would have killed a
woman less magnificently healthy and determined. She seemed to thrive on
it, and she kept her figure and her wit when other women of her age grew
dull, and heavy, and ineffectual. On summer days the little town often
lay shimmering in the heat, the yellow road glaring in it, the red
bricks of the high school reflecting it in waves, the very pine knots
in the sidewalks gummy and resinous with heat, and sending up a pungent
smell that was of the woods, and yet stifling. She must have felt an
almost irresistible temptation to sit for a moment on the cool, shady
front porch, with its green-painted flower boxes, its hanging fern
baskets and the catalpa tree looking boskily down upon it.

But she never did. She had an almost savage energy and determination.
The unpaid debts were ever ahead of her; there were the children to be
dressed and sent to school; there was the household to be kept up; there
were Theodore's violin lessons that must not be neglected--not after
what Professor Bauer had said about him.

You may think that undue stress is being laid upon this driving force
in her, upon this business ability. But remember that this was fifteen
years or more ago, before women had invaded the world of business by the
thousands, to take their place, side by side, salary for salary, with
men. Oh, there were plenty of women wage earners in Winnebago, as
elsewhere; clerks, stenographers, school teachers, bookkeepers. The
paper mills were full of girls, and the canning factory too. But here
was a woman gently bred, untrained in business, left widowed with two
children at thirty-eight, and worse than penniless--in debt.

And that was not all. As Ferdinand Brandeis' wife she had occupied a
certain social position in the little Jewish community of Winnebago.
True, they had never been moneyed, while the others of her own faith
in the little town were wealthy, and somewhat purse-proud. They had
carriages, most of them, with two handsome horses, and their houses
were spacious and veranda-encircled, and set in shady lawns. Wh