andeis had a way of playing solitaire after supper; one of the
simpler forms of the game. It seemed to help her to think out the day's
problems, and to soothe her at the same time. She would turn down the
front of the writing desk, and draw up the piano stool.

All through that winter Fanny seemed to remember reading to the
slap-slap of cards, and the whir of their shuffling. In after years she
was never able to pick up a volume of Dickens without having her mind
hark back to those long, quiet evenings. She read a great deal of
Dickens at that time. She had a fine contempt for his sentiment, and his
great ladies bored her. She did not know that this was because they were
badly drawn. The humor she loved, and she read and reread the passages
dealing with Samuel Weller, and Mr. Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, and Fanny
Squeers. It was rather trying to read Dickens before supper, she had
discovered. Pickwick Papers was fatal, she had found. It sent one to the
pantry in a sort of trance, to ransack for food--cookies, apples, cold
meat, anything. But whatever one found, it always fell short of the
succulent sounding beefsteak pies, and saddles of mutton, and hot
pineapple toddy of the printed page.

To-night Mrs. Brandeis, coming in from the kitchen after a conference
with Mattie, found her daughter in conversational mood, though book in
hand.

"Mother, did you ever read this?" She held up "The Ladies' Paradise."

"Yes; but child alive, what ever made you get it? That isn't the kind of
thing for you to read. Oh, I wish I had more time to give----"

Fanny leaned forward eagerly. "It made me think a lot of you. You
know--the way the big store was crushing the little one, and everything.
Like the thing you were talking to that man about the other day. You
said it was killing the small-town dealer, and he said some day it would
be illegal, and you said you'd never live to see it."

"Oh, that! We were talking about the mail-order business, and how hard
it was to compete with it, when the farmers bought everything from a
catalogue, and had whole boxes of household goods expressed to them. I
didn't know you were listening, Fanchen."

"I was. I almost always do when you and some traveling man or somebody
like that are talking. It--it's interesting."

Fanny went back to her book then. But Molly Brandeis sat a moment,
eyeing her queer little daughter thoughtfully. Then she sighed, and laid
out her cards for solitaire. By eight o'cl