ear
viewpoint that the weary-wise old traveling man had spoken about. She
took their offer. She was to go to Chicago almost at once, to begin work
June first.

Two conversations that took place before she left are perhaps worth
recording. One was with Father Fitzpatrick of St. Ignatius Catholic
Church. The other with Rabbi Emil Thalmann of Temple Emanu-el.

An impulse brought her into Father Fitzpatrick's study. It was a week
before her departure. She was tired. There had been much last signing of
papers, nailing of boxes, strapping of trunks. When things began to come
too thick and fast for her she put on her hat and went for a walk at the
close of the May day. May, in Wisconsin, is a thing all fragrant, and
gold, and blue; and white with cherry blossoms; and pink with apple
blossoms; and tremulous with budding things.

Fanny struck out westward through the neat streets of the little town,
and found herself on the bridge over the ravine in which she had played
when a little girl--the ravine that her childish imagination had
peopled with such pageantry of redskin, and priests, and voyageurs,
and cavaliers. She leaned over the iron railing and looked down.
Where grass, and brook, and wild flower had been there now oozed great
eruptions of ash heaps, tin cans, broken bottles, mounds of dirt.
Winnebago's growing pains had begun. Fanny turned away with a little
sick feeling. She went on across the bridge past the Catholic church.
Just next the church was the parish house where Father Fitzpatrick
lived. It always looked as if it had been scrubbed, inside and out, with
a scouring brick. Its windows were a reproach and a challenge to every
housekeeper in Winnebago.

Fanny wanted to talk to somebody about that ravine. She was full of it.
Father Fitzpatrick's study over-looked it. Besides, she wanted to
see him before she left Winnebago. A picture came to her mind of his
handsome, ruddy face, twinkling with humor as she had last seen it when
he had dropped in at Brandeis' Bazaar for a chat with her mother. She
turned in at the gate and ran up the immaculate, gray-painted steps,
that always gleamed as though still wet with the paint brush.

"I shouldn't wonder if that housekeeper of his comes out with a pail
of paint and does 'em every morning before breakfast," Fanny said to
herself as she rang the bell.

Usually it was that sparse and spectacled person herself who opened the
parish house door, but to-day Fanny's ring was