ardboard
against the impromptu rack. She brought her chair up close, fumbled in
her bag for the pens she had just purchased. Her eyes were on the blank
white surface of the paper. The table was the kind that has a sub-shelf.
It prevented Fanny from crossing her legs under it, and that bothered
her. While she fitted her pens, and blocked her paper, she kept on
barking her shins in unconscious protest against the uncomfortable
conditions under which she must work.

She sat staring at the paper now, after having marked it off into
blocks, with a pencil. She got up, and walked across the room,
aimlessly, and stood there a moment, and came back. She picked up a
thread on the floor. Sat down again. Picked up her pencil, rolled it a
moment in her palms, then, catching her toes behind either foreleg of
her chair, in an attitude that was as workmanlike as it was ungraceful,
she began to draw, nervously, tentatively at first, but gaining in
firmness and assurance as she went on.

If you had been standing behind her chair you would have seen, emerging
miraculously from the white surface under Fanny's pencil, a thin,
undersized little figure in sleazy black and white, whose face, under
the cheap hat, was upturned and rapturous. Her skirts were wind-blown,
and the wind tugged, too, at the banner whose pole she hugged so tightly
in her arms. Dimly you could see the crowds that lined the street on
either side. Vaguely, too, you saw the faces and stunted figures of the
little group of girls she led. But she, the central figure, stood out
among all the rest. Fanny Brandeis, the artist, and Fanny Brandeis, the
salesman, combined shrewdly to omit no telling detail. The wrong kind of
feet in the wrong kind of shoes; the absurd hat; the shabby skirt--every
bit of grotesquerie was there, serving to emphasize the glory of the
face. Fanny Brandeis' face, as the figure grew, line by line, was a
glorious thing, too.

She was working rapidly. She laid down her pencil, now, and leaned back,
squinting her eyes critically. She looked grimly pleased. Her hair was
rather rumpled, and her cheeks very pink. She took up her pen, now, and
began to ink her drawing with firm black strokes. As she worked a little
crow of delight escaped her--the same absurd crow of triumph that had
sounded that day in Winnebago, years and years before, when she,
a school girl in a red tam o' shanter, had caught the likeness of
Schabelitz, the peasant boy, under the exteri