h the drunken artist father and her mother, the French
opera girl.

With which modest preamble you are asked to be patient with Miss Fanny
Brandeis, aged thirteen. Not only must you suffer Fanny, but Fanny's
mother as well, without whom there could be no understanding Fanny. For
that matter, we shouldn't wonder if Mrs. Brandeis were to turn out the
heroine in the end. She is that kind of person.

FANNY HERSELF

CHAPTER ONE

You could not have lived a week in Winnebago without being aware of Mrs.
Brandeis. In a town of ten thousand, where every one was a personality,
from Hen Cody, the drayman, in blue overalls (magically transformed
on Sunday mornings into a suave black-broadcloth usher at the
Congregational Church), to A. J. Dawes, who owned the waterworks before
the city bought it. Mrs. Brandeis was a super-personality. Winnebago
did not know it. Winnebago, buying its dolls, and china, and Battenberg
braid and tinware and toys of Mrs. Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar,
realized vaguely that here was some one different.

When you entered the long, cool, narrow store on Elm Street, Mrs.
Brandeis herself came forward to serve you, unless she already was busy
with two customers. There were two clerks--three, if you count Aloysius,
the boy--but to Mrs. Brandeis belonged the privilege of docketing you
first. If you happened in during a moment of business lull, you were
likely to find her reading in the left-hand corner at the front of the
store, near the shelf where were ranged the dolls' heads, the pens, the
pencils, and school supplies.

You saw a sturdy, well-set-up, alert woman, of the kind that looks
taller than she really is; a woman with a long, straight, clever nose
that indexed her character, as did everything about her, from her crisp,
vigorous, abundant hair to the way she came down hard on her heels in
walking. She was what might be called a very definite person. But first
you remarked her eyes. Will you concede that eyes can be piercing, yet
velvety? Their piercingness was a mental quality, I suppose, and the
velvety softness a physical one. One could only think, somehow, of wild
pansies--the brown kind. If Winnebago had taken the trouble to glance
at the title of the book she laid face down on the pencil boxes as you
entered, it would have learned that the book was one of Balzac's, or,
perhaps, Zangwill's, or Zola's. She never could overcome that habit
of snatching a chapter here and there durin