CHAPTER ONE

You could not have lived a week in Winnebago without being
aware of Mrs. Brandeis. In a town of ten thousand, where
every one was a personality, from Hen Cody, the drayman, in
blue overalls (magically transformed on Sunday mornings into
a suave black-broadcloth usher at the Congregational
Church), to A. J. Dawes, who owned the waterworks before the
city bought it. Mrs. Brandeis was a super-personality.
Winnebago did not know it. Winnebago, buying its dolls, and
china, and Battenberg braid and tinware and toys of Mrs.
Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar, realized vaguely that here
was some one different.

When you entered the long, cool, narrow store on Elm Street,
Mrs. Brandeis herself came forward to serve you, unless she
already was busy with two customers. There were two
clerks--three, if you count Aloysius, the boy--but to Mrs.
Brandeis belonged the privilege of docketing you first. If
you happened in during a moment of business lull, you were
likely to find her reading in the left-hand corner at the
front of the store, near the shelf where were ranged the
dolls' heads, the pens, the pencils, and school supplies.

You saw a sturdy, well-set-up, alert woman, of the kind that
looks taller than she really is; a woman with a long,
straight, clever nose that indexed her character, as did
everything about her, from her crisp, vigorous, abundant
hair to the way she came down hard on her heels in