ized that his silence
was not due to the weight of his thoughts but to the fact that he
had nothing to say. In her last year at high school she found herself
singled out for the attentions of Harmon Kent, who was the Beau Nash
of the Winnebago high school. His clothes were made by Schwartze, the
tailor, when all the other boys of his age got theirs at the spring and
fall sales of the Golden Eagle Clothing Store. It was always nip and
tuck between his semester standings and his track team and football
possibilities. The faculty refused to allow flunkers to take part in
athletics.

He was one of those boys who have definite charm, and manner, and poise
at seventeen, and who crib their exams off their cuffs. He was always at
the head of any social plans in the school, and at the dances he rushed
about wearing in his coat lapel a ribbon marked Floor Committee. The
teachers all knew he was a bluff, but his engaging manner carried
him through. When he went away to the state university he made Fanny
solemnly promise to write; to come down to Madison for the football
games; to be sure to remember about the Junior prom. He wrote once--a
badly spelled scrawl--and she answered. But he was the sort of person
who must be present to be felt. He could not project his personality.
When he came home for the Christmas holidays Fanny was helping in the
store. He dropped in one afternoon when she was selling whisky glasses
to Mike Hearn of the Farmers' Rest Hotel.

They did not write at all during the following semester, and when he
came back for the long summer vacation they met on the street one day
and exchanged a few rather forced pleasantries. It suddenly dawned on
Fanny that he was patronizing her much as the scion of an aristocratic
line banters the housemaid whom he meets on the stairs. She bit an
imaginary apron corner, and bobbed a curtsy right there on Elm Street,
in front of the Courier office and walked off, leaving him staring.
It was shortly after this that she began a queer line of reading for
a girl--lives of Disraeli, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Mozart--distinguished
Jews who had found their religion a handicap.

The year of her graduation she did a thing for which Winnebago felt
itself justified in calling her different. Each member of the graduating
class was allowed to choose a theme for a thesis. Fanny Brandeis called
hers "A Piece of Paper." On Winnebago's Fox River were located a number
of the largest and most importan