g dull moments. She was too
tired to read when night came.

There were many times when the little Wisconsin town lay broiling in
the August sun, or locked in the January drifts, and the main business
street was as silent as that of a deserted village. But more often she
came forward to you from the rear of the store, with bits of excelsior
clinging to her black sateen apron. You knew that she had been helping
Aloysius as he unpacked a consignment of chamber sets or a hogshead of
china or glassware, chalking each piece with the price mark as it was
dug from its nest of straw and paper.

"How do you do!" she would say. "What can I do for you?" And in that
moment she had you listed, indexed, and filed, were you a farmer woman
in a black shawl and rusty bonnet with a faded rose bobbing grotesquely
atop it, or one of the patronizing East End set who came to Brandeis'
Bazaar because Mrs. Brandeis' party favors, for one thing, were of a
variety that could be got nowhere else this side of Chicago. If, after
greeting you, Mrs. Brandeis called, "Sadie! Stockings!" (supposing
stockings were your quest), you might know that Mrs. Brandeis had
weighed you and found you wanting.

There had always been a store--at least, ever since Fanny could
remember. She often thought how queer it would seem to have to buy pins,
or needles, or dishes, or soap, or thread. The store held all these
things, and many more. Just to glance at the bewildering display outside
gave you promise of the variety within. Winnebago was rather ashamed of
that display. It was before the day of repression in decoration, and
the two benches in front of the windows overflowed with lamps, and
water sets, and brooms, and boilers and tinware and hampers. Once the
Winnebago Courier had had a sarcastic editorial about what they called
the Oriental bazaar (that was after the editor, Lem Davis, had bumped
his shin against a toy cart that protruded unduly), but Mrs. Brandeis
changed nothing. She knew that the farmer women who stood outside with
their husbands on busy Saturdays would not have understood repression
in display, but they did understand the tickets that marked the wares in
plain figures--this berry set, $1.59; that lamp, $1.23. They talked it
over, outside, and drifted away, and came back, and entered, and bought.

She knew when to be old-fashioned, did Mrs. Brandeis, and when to be
modern. She had worn the first short walking skirt in Winnebago. It
cleared the