ages ranged from seven to seventy. Brocades and ginghams; tailor suits
and peignoirs; puffed sleeves and tight--dramatic history, all, they
spelled failure, success, hope, despair, vanity, pride, triumph, decay.
Tragic ghosts, over which Josie Fifer held grim sway!

Have I told you that Josie Fifer, moving nimbly about the great
storehouse, limped as she went? The left leg swung as a normal leg
should. The right followed haltingly, sagging at hip and knee. And that
brings us back to the reason for her being where she was. And what.

The story of how Josie Fifer came to be mistress of the cast-off robes
of the firm of Hahn & Lohman is one of those stage tragedies that never
have a public performance. Josie had been one of those little girls who
speak pieces at chicken-pie suppers held in the basement of the
Presbyterian church. Her mother had been a silly, idle woman addicted to
mother hubbards and paper-backed novels about the house. Her one passion
was the theatre, a passion that had very scant opportunity for feeding
in Wapello, Iowa. Josie's piece-speaking talent was evidently a direct
inheritance. Some might call it a taint.

Two days before one of Josie's public appearances her mother would twist
the child's hair into innumerable rag curlers that stood out in
grotesque, Topsy-like bumps all over her fair head. On the eventful
evening each rag chrysalis would burst into a full-blown butterfly curl.
In a pale-blue, lace-fretted dress over a pale-blue slip, made in what
her mother called "Empire style," Josie would deliver herself of
"Entertaining Big Sister's Beau" and other sophisticated classics with
an incredible ease and absence of embarrassment. It wasn't a definite
boldness in her. She merely liked standing there before all those
people, in her blue dress and her toe slippers, speaking her pieces with