I just wanted to be beautiful, as they all were."

"Sure! It gets us all!"

Fanny twisted her hair into the relentless knob women assume
preparatory to bathing. "It seems to me you have to come
from Winnebago, or thereabouts, to get New York--really get
it, I mean."

"That's so," agreed Ella. "There's a man on the New York
Star who writes a column every day that everybody reads.
If he isn't a small-town man then we're both wrong."

Fanny, bathward bound, turned to stare at Ella. "A column
about what?"

"Oh, everything. New York, mostly. Say, it's the humanest
stuff. He says the kind of thing we'd all say, if we knew
how. Reading him is like getting a letter from home. I'll
bet he went to a country school and wore his mittens sewed
to a piece of tape that ran through his coat sleeves."

"You're right," said Fanny; "he did. That man's from
Winnebago, Wisconsin."

"No!"

"Yes."

"Do you mean you know him? Honestly? What's he like?"