walking. She was what might be called a very definite
person. But first you remarked her eyes. Will you concede
that eyes can be piercing, yet velvety? Their piercingness
was a mental quality, I suppose, and the velvety softness a
physical one. One could only think, somehow, of wild
pansies--the brown kind. If Winnebago had taken the trouble
to glance at the title of the book she laid face down on the
pencil boxes as you entered, it would have learned that the
book was one of Balzac's, or, perhaps, Zangwill's, or
Zola's. She never could overcome that habit of snatching a
chapter here and there during dull moments. She was too
tired to read when night came.

There were many times when the little Wisconsin town lay
broiling in the August sun, or locked in the January drifts,
and the main business street was as silent as that of a
deserted village. But more often she came forward to you
from the rear of the store, with bits of excelsior clinging
to her black sateen apron. You knew that she had been
helping Aloysius as he unpacked a consignment of chamber
sets or a hogshead of china or glassware, chalking each
piece with the price mark as it was dug from its nest of
straw and paper.

"How do you do!" she would say. "What can I do for you?"
And in that moment she had you listed, indexed, and filed,
were you a farmer woman in a black shawl and rusty bonnet
with a faded rose bobbing grotesquely atop it, or one of the
patronizing East End set who came to Brandeis' Bazaar
because Mrs. Brandeis' party favors, for one thing, were of