et away with that vampire stuff.
Talons are things you have to be born with. You'll never learn to grab
with these." He reached over, and picked up her left hand lying inertly
in her lap, and brought it up to his lips, and kissed it, glove and all.
"They're built on the open-face pattern--for giving. You can't fool me.
I know."

A year and a half after her coming to Haynes-Cooper Fanny's department
was doing a business of a million a year. The need had been there. She
had merely given it the impetus. She was working more or less directly
with Fenger now, with an eye on every one of the departments that had
to do with women's clothing, from shoes to hats. Not that she did any
actual buying, or selling in these departments. She still confined
her actual selecting of goods to the infants' wear section, but she
occupied, unofficially, the position of assistant to the General
Merchandise Manager. They worked well together, she and Fenger, their
minds often marching along without the necessity of a single spoken
word. There was no doubt that Fenger's mind was a marvelous piece
of mechanism. Under it the Haynes-Cooper plant functioned with the
clockwork regularity of a gigantic automaton. System and Results--these
were his twin gods. With his mind intent on them he failed to see that
new gods, born of spiritual unrest, were being set up in the temples of
Big Business. Their coming had been rumored for many years. Words such
as Brotherhood, Labor, Rights, Humanity, Hours, once regarded as the
special property of the street corner ranter, were creeping into our
everyday vocabulary. And strangely enough, Nathan Haynes, the gentle,
the bewildered, the uninspired, heard them, and listened. Nathan Haynes
had begun to accustom himself to the roar of the flood that had formerly
deafened him. He was no longer stunned by the inrush of his millions.
The report sheet handed him daily had never ceased to be a wildly
unexpected thing, and he still shrank from it, sometimes. It was so
fantastic, so out of all reason. But he even dared, now and then, to put
out a tentative hand to guide the flood. He began to realize, vaguely,
that Italian Gardens, and marble pools, educational endowments and pet
charities were but poor, ineffectual barriers of mud and sticks, soon
swept away by the torrent. As he sat there in his great, luxurious
office, with the dim, rich old portraits gleaming down on him from the
walls, he began, gropingly, to evolve a ne