They went to the same hotel, and took connecting rooms.
Each went her own way, not seeing the other from morning
until night, but they often found kimonoed comfort in each
other's presence.

Fanny had spent weeks outlining her plan of attack. She had
determined to retain the cheap grades, but to add a finer
line as well. She recalled those lace-bedecked bundles that
the farmer women and mill hands had born so tenderly in
their arms. Here was one direction in which they allowed
extravagance free rein. As a canny business woman, she
would trade on her knowledge of their weakness.

At Haynes-Cooper order is never a thing to be despised by a
wholesaler. Fanny, knowing this, had made up her mind to go
straight to Horn & Udell. Now, Horn & Udell are responsible
for the bloomers your small daughter wears under her play
frock, in place of the troublesome and extravagant petticoat
of the old days. It was they who introduced smocked
pinafores to you; and those modish patent-leather belts for
children at which your grandmothers would have raised
horrified hands. They taught you that an inch of hand
embroidery is worth a yard of cheap lace. And as for style,
cut, line--you can tell a Horn & Udell child from among a
flock of thirty.

Fanny, entering their office, felt much as Molly Brandeis
had felt that January many, many years before, when she had
made that first terrifying trip to the Chicago market. The