speeded up her heart, her lungs, sent
the blood dancing through her veins. Figuratively, she was on tip-toe.

They had warned her, at the Inn, to take it slowly for the first few
days. They had asked no questions. Fanny learned to heed their advice.
She learned many more things in the next few days. She learned how to
entice the chipmunks that crossed her path, streak o' sunshine, streak
o' shadow. She learned to broil bacon over a fire, with a forked stick.
She learned to ride trail ponies, and to bask in a sun-warmed spot on a
wind-swept hill, and to tell time by the sun, and to give thanks for the
beauty of the world about her, and to leave the wild flowers unpicked,
to put out her campfire with scrupulous care, and to destroy all rubbish
(your true woodsman and mountaineer is as painstakingly neat as a French
housewife).

She was out of doors all day. At night she read for a while before the
fire, but by nine her eyelids were heavy. She walked down to the Inn
sometimes, but not often. One memorable night she went, with half a
dozen others from the Inn, to the tiny one-room cabin of Oscar, the
handy man about the Inn, and there she listened to one of Oscar's
far-famed phonograph concerts. Oscar's phonograph had cost twenty-five
dollars in Denver. It stood in one corner of his cabin, and its base was
a tree stump just five hundred years old, as you could tell for yourself
by counting its rings. His cabin walls were gorgeous with pictures of
Maxine Elliott in her palmy days, and blonde and sophisticated little
girls on vinegar calendars, posing bare-legged and self-conscious in
blue calico and sunbonnets. You sat in the warm yellow glow of Oscar's
lamp and were regaled with everything from the Swedish National
Anthem to Mischa Elman's tenderest crooning. And Oscar sat rapt, his
weather-beaten face a rich deep mahogany, his eyes bluer than any eyes
could ever be except in contrast with that ruddy countenance, his teeth
so white that you found yourself watching for his smile that was so
gently sweet and childlike. Oh, when Oscar put on his black pants and
issued invitations for a musical evening one was sure to find his cabin
packed. Eight did it, with squeezing.

This, then, was the atmosphere in which Fanny Brandeis found herself.
As far from Haynes-Cooper as anything could be. At the end of the first
week she found herself able to think clearly and unemotionally about
Theodore, and about Fenger. She had even evolve