braid and the smallest buttons. Stick it in the window and
they'll tear their hair to get patterns."

She did it, taking turns with Pearl and Sadie at weaving the
great, lacy square during dull moments. When it was
finished they placed it in the window, where it lay like
frosted lace, exquisitely graceful and delicate, with its
tracery of curling petals and feathery fern sprays.
Winnebago gazed and was bitten by the Battenberg bug. It
wound itself up in a network of Battenberg braid, in all
the numbers. It bought buttons of every size; it stitched
away at Battenberg covers, doilies, bedspreads, blouses,
curtains. Battenberg tumbled, foamed, cascaded over
Winnebago's front porches all that summer. Listening to Sam
Kiser had done it.

She listened to the farmer women too, and to the mill girls,
and to the scant and precious pearls that dropped from the
lips of the East End society section. There was something
about her brown eyes and her straight, sensible nose that
reassured them so that few suspected the mischievous in her.
For she was mischievous. If she had not been I think she
could not have stood the drudgery, and the heartbreaks, and
the struggle, and the terrific manual labor.

She used to guy people, gently, and they never guessed it.
Mrs. G. Manville Smith, for example, never dreamed of the
joy that her patronage brought Molly Brandeis, who waited on
her so demurely. Mrs. G. Manville Smith (nee Finnegan)
scorned the Winnebago shops, and was said to send to Chicago