She had read the papers and she said she felt rested already.

The turkey came out a delicate golden-brown, and deliciously crackly.
Fanny, looking up over a drumstick, noticed, with a shock, that her
mother's eyes looked strangely sunken, and her skin, around the jaws and
just under the chin, where her loose wrapper revealed her throat, was
queerly yellow and shriveled. She had eaten almost nothing.

"Mother, you're not eating a thing! You really must eat a little."

Mrs. Brandeis began a pretense of using knife and fork, but gave it up
finally and sat back, smiling rather wanly. "I guess I'm tireder than
I thought I was, dear. I think I've got a cold coming on, too. I'll
lie down again after dinner, and by to-morrow I'll be as chipper as a
sparrow. The turkey's wonderful, isn't it? I'll have some, cold, for
supper."

After dinner the house felt very warm and stuffy. It was crisply cold
and sunny outdoors. The snow was piled high except on the sidewalks,
where it had been neatly shoveled away by the mufflered Winnebago sons
and fathers. There was no man in the Brandeis household, and Aloysius
had been too busy to perform the chores usually considered his work
about the house. The snow lay in drifts upon the sidewalk in front of
the Brandeis house, except where passing feet had trampled it a bit.

"I'm going to shovel the walk," Fanny announced suddenly. "Way around
to the woodshed. Where are those old mittens of mine? Annie, where's the
snow shovel? Sure I am. Why not?"

She shoveled and scraped and pounded, bending rhythmically to the work,
lifting each heaping shovelful with her strong young arms, tossing it to
the side, digging in again, and under. An occasional neighbor passed
by, or a friend, and she waved at them, gayly, and tossed back their
badinage. "Merry Christmas!" she called, again and again, in reply to a
passing acquaintance. "Same to you!"

At two o'clock Bella Weinberg telephoned to say that a little party of
them were going to the river to skate. The ice was wonderful. Oh, come
on! Fanny skated very well. But she hesitated. Mrs. Brandeis, dozing on
the couch, sensed what was going on in her daughter's mind, and roused
herself with something of her old asperity.

"Don't be foolish, child. Run along! You don't intend to sit here and
gaze upon your sleeping beauty of a mother all afternoon, do you? Well,
then!"

So Fanny changed her clothes, got her skates, and ran out into the snap
and sparkl