ng in her brain, while the
fight went on within herself, thus:

"You'll never do it, Fanny. You're not built that way."

"Oh, won't I! Watch me! Give me time."

"You'll think of what your mother would have done under the same
conditions, and you'll do that thing."

"I won't. Not unless it's the long-headed thing to do. I'm through being
sentimental and unselfish. What did it bring her? Nothing!"

The weeks went by. Fanny worked hard in the store, and bought little.
February came, and with the spring her months of private thinking bore
fruit. There came to Fanny Brandeis a great resolve. She would put
herself in a high place. Every talent she possessed, every advantage,
every scrap of knowledge, every bit of experience, would be used toward
that end. She would make something of herself. It was a worldly, selfish
resolve, born of a bitter sorrow, and ambition, and resentment. She made
up her mind that she would admit no handicaps. Race, religion, training,
natural impulses--she would discard them all if they stood in her way.
She would leave Winnebago behind. At best, if she stayed there, she
could never accomplish more than to make her business a more than
ordinarily successful small-town store. And she would be--nobody. No,
she had had enough of that. She would crush and destroy the little girl
who had fasted on that Day of Atonement; the more mature girl who had
written the thesis about the paper mill rag-room; the young woman who
had drudged in the store on Elm Street. In her place she would mold a
hard, keen-eyed, resolute woman, whose godhead was to be success, and
to whom success would mean money and position. She had not a head for
mathematics, but out of the puzzling problems and syllogisms in geometry
she had retained in her memory this one immovable truth:

A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.

With her mental eye she marked her two points, and then, starting from
the first, made directly for the second. But she forgot to reckon with
the law of tangents. She forgot, too, how paradoxical a creature
was this Fanny Brandeis whose eyes filled with tears at sight of a
parade--just the sheer drama of it--were the marchers G. A. R. veterans,
school children in white, soldiers, Foresters, political marching clubs;
and whose eyes burned dry and bright as she stood over the white mound
in the cemetery on the state road. Generous, spontaneous, impulsive,
warm-hearted, she would be cold, calc