Paradise."

"Yes; but child alive, what ever made you get it? That
isn't the kind of thing for you to read. Oh, I wish I had
more time to give----"

Fanny leaned forward eagerly. "It made me think a lot of
you. You know--the way the big store was crushing the
little one, and everything. Like the thing you were talking
to that man about the other day. You said it was killing
the small-town dealer, and he said some day it would be
illegal, and you said you'd never live to see it."

"Oh, that! We were talking about the mail-order business,
and how hard it was to compete with it, when the farmers
bought everything from a catalogue, and had whole boxes of
household goods expressed to them. I didn't know you were
listening, Fanchen."

"I was. I almost always do when you and some traveling man
or somebody like that are talking. It--it's interesting."

Fanny went back to her book then. But Molly Brandeis sat a
moment, eyeing her queer little daughter thoughtfully. Then
she sighed, and laid out her cards for solitaire. By eight
o'clock she was usually so sleepy that she would fall, dead-
tired, asleep on the worn leather couch in the sitting-room.
She must have been fearfully exhausted, mind and body. The
house would be very quiet, except for Mattie, perhaps,
moving about in the kitchen or in her corner room upstairs.