out the letter and stood turning
it over and over in her hands. She had no thought of reading it. It was
its destruction she was contemplating. Finally she tucked it away in her
handkerchief box. Perhaps, after the fifteenth of October. Everything
depended on that.

And the fifteenth of October came. It had dragged for weeks, and then,
at the end, it galloped. By that time Fanny had got used to seeing
Theodore's picture and name outside Orchestra Hall, and in the musical
columns of the papers. Brandeis. Theodore Brandeis, the violinist. The
name sang in her ears. When she walked on Michigan Avenue during that
last week she would force herself to march straight on past Orchestra
Hall, contenting herself with a furtive and oblique glance at the
announcement board. The advance programs hung, a little bundle of them,
suspended by a string from a nail on the wall near the box office, so
that ticket purchasers might rip one off and peruse the week's musical
menu. Fanny longed to hear the comment of the little groups that were
constantly forming and dispersing about the box office window. She never
dreamed of allowing herself to hover near it. She thought sometimes of
the woman in the businesslike gray skirt and the black sateen apron who
had drudged so cheerfully in the little shop so that Theodore Brandeis'
name might shine now from the very top of the program, in heavy black
letters:

Soloist: MR. THEODORE BRANDEIS, Violin

The injustice of it. Fanny had never ceased to rage at that.

In the years to come Theodore Brandeis was to have that adulation which
the American public, temperamentally so cold, gives its favorite, once
the ice of its reserve is thawed. He was to look down on that surging,
tempestuous crowd which sometimes packs itself about the foot of the
platform in Carnegie Hall, demanding more, more, more, after a generous
concert is concluded. He had to learn to protect himself from those
hysterical, enraptured, wholly feminine adorers who swarmed about him,
scaling the platform itself. But of all this there was nothing on that
Friday and Saturday in October. Orchestra Hall audiences are not, as
a rule, wildly demonstrative. They were no exception. They listened
attentively, appreciatively. They talked, critically and favorably, on
the way home. They applauded generously. They behaved as an Orchestra
Hall audience always behaves, and would behave, even if it were
confronted with a composite Elman-Kreisler-Ys