different. Let's see, what was I
saying?"

"Specialize."

"Oh, yes. And that reminds me. Bunch of fellows in the smoker last night
talking about Haynes-Cooper. Your mother hated 'em like poison, the
way every small-town merchant hates the mail-order houses. But I hear
they've got an infants' wear department that's just going to grass for
lack of a proper head. You're only a kid. And they have done you dirt
all these years, of course. But if you could sort of horn in there--why,
say, there's no limit to the distance you could go. No limit! With your
brains and experience."

That had been the beginning. From then on the thing had moved forward
with a certain inevitableness. There was something about the vastness of
the thing that appealed to Fanny. Here was an organization whose great
arms embraced the world. Haynes-Cooper, giant among mail-order houses,
was said to eat a small-town merchant every morning for breakfast.

"There's a Haynes-Cooper catalogue in every farmer's kitchen," Molly
Brandeis used to say. "The Bible's in the parlor, but they keep the H.
C. book in the room where they live."

That she was about to affiliate herself with this house appealed to
Fanny Brandeis's sense of comedy. She had heard her mother presenting
her arguments to the stubborn farmer folk who insisted on ordering their
stove, or dinner set, or plow, or kitchen goods from the fascinating
catalogue. "I honestly think it's just the craving for excitement that
makes them do it," she often said. "They want the thrill they get
when they receive a box from Chicago, and open it, and take off the
wrappings, and dig out the thing they ordered from a picture, not
knowing whether it will be right or wrong."

Her arguments usually left the farmer unmoved. He would drive into town,
mail his painfully written letter and order at the post-office, dispose
of his load of apples, or butter, or cheese, or vegetables, and drive
cheerfully back again, his empty wagon bumping and rattling down the old
corduroy road. Express, breakage, risk, loyalty to his own region--an
these arguments left him cold.

In May, after much manipulation, correspondence, two interviews, came a
definite offer from the Haynes-Cooper Company. It was much less than the
State Street store had offered, and there was something tentative about
the whole agreement. Haynes-Cooper proffered little and demanded much,
as is the way of the rich and mighty. But Fanny remembered the ten-y