nly a six-hour trip to Chicago. Fanny Brandeis' eyes, big enough
at any time, were surely twice their size during the entire journey of
two hundred miles or more. They were to have lunch on the train! They
were to stop at an hotel! They were to go to the theater! She would have
lain back against the red plush seat of the car, in a swoon of joy, if
there had not been so much to see in the car itself, and through the car
window.

"We'll have something for lunch," said Mrs. Brandeis when they were
seated in the dining car, "that we never have at home, shall we?"

"Oh, yes!" replied Fanny in a whisper of excitement.
"Something--something queer, and different, and not so very healthy!"

They had oysters (a New Yorker would have sniffed at them), and chicken
potpie, and asparagus, and ice cream. If that doesn't prove Mrs.
Brandeis was game, I should like to know what could! They stopped at
the Windsor-Clifton, because it was quieter and less expensive than the
Palmer House, though quite as full of red plush and walnut. Besides,
she had stopped at the Palmer House with her husband, and she knew how
buyers were likely to be besieged by eager salesmen with cards, and with
tempting lines of goods spread knowingly in the various sample-rooms.

Fanny Brandeis was thirteen, and emotional, and incredibly receptive
and alive. It is impossible to tell what she learned during that Chicago
trip, it was so crowded, so wonderful. She went with her mother to the
wholesale houses and heard and saw and, unconsciously, remembered. When
she became fatigued with the close air of the dim showrooms, with their
endless aisles piled with every sort of ware, she would sit on a
chair in some obscure corner, watching those sleek, over-lunched,
genial-looking salesmen who were chewing their cigars somewhat wildly
when Mrs. Brandeis finished with them. Sometimes she did not accompany
her mother, but lay in bed, deliciously, until the middle of the
morning, then dressed, and chatted with the obliging Irish chamber maid,
and read until her mother came for her at noon.

Everything she did was a delightful adventure; everything she saw had
the tang of novelty. Fanny Brandeis was to see much that was beautiful
and rare in her full lifetime, but she never again, perhaps, got
quite the thrill that those ugly, dim, red-carpeted, gas-lighted hotel
corridors gave her, or the grim bedroom, with its walnut furniture and
its Nottingham curtains. As for the Chicag