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Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber
page 203 of 415 (48%)
Those faces in the crowds! They seemed to leap out at her.
They called to her. So she sketched them, telling herself
that she did it by way of relaxation, and diversion. One
afternoon she left her desk early, and perched herself on
one of the marble benches that lined the sunken garden just
across from the main group of Haynes-Cooper buildings.
She wanted to see what happened when those great buildings
emptied. Even her imagination did not meet the actuality.
At 5:30 the streets about the plant were empty, except for
an occasional passerby. At 5:31 there trickled down the
broad steps of building after building thin dark streams of
humanity, like the first slow line of lava that crawls down
the side of an erupting volcano. The trickle broadened into
a stream, spread into a flood, became a torrent that
inundated the streets, the sidewalks, filling every nook and
crevice, a moving mass. Ten thousand people! A city!
Fanny found herself shaking with excitement, and something
like terror at the immensity of it. She tried to get a
picture of it, a sketch, with the gleaming windows of the
red brick buildings as a background. Amazingly enough, she
succeeded in doing it. That was because she tried for broad
effects, and relied on one bit of detail for her story. It
was the face of a girl--a very tired and tawdry girl, of
sixteen, perhaps. On her face the look that the day's work
had stamped there was being wiped gently away by another
look; a look that said release, and a sweetheart, and an
evening at the movies. Fanny, in some miraculous way, got
it.

She prowled in the Ghetto, and sketched those patient Jewish
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