s, hounding them from
place to place, herding them in dark and filthy streets, without leaving
some sort of brand on them--a mark that differentiates. Sometimes it
doesn't show outwardly. But it's there, inside. You know, Fanny, how
it's always been said that no artist can became a genius until he has
suffered. You've suffered, you Jews, for centuries and centuries, until
you're all artists--quick to see drama because you've lived in it,
emotional, oversensitive, cringing, or swaggering, high-strung,
demonstrative, affectionate, generous.

"Maybe they're right. Perhaps it isn't a race. But what do you call the
thing, then, that made you draw me as you did that morning when you came
to ten o'clock mass and did a caricature of me in the pulpit. You showed
up something that I've been trying to hide for twenty years, till I'd
fooled everybody, including myself. My church is always packed. Nobody
else there ever saw it. I'll tell you, Fanny, what I've always said: the
Irish would be the greatest people in the world--if it weren't for the
Jews."

They laughed together at that, and the tension was relieved.

"Well, anyway," said Fanny, and patted his great arm, "I'd rather talk
to you than to any man in the world."

"I hope you won't be able to say that a year from now, dear girl."

And so they parted. He took her to the door himself, and watched her
slim figure down the street and across the ravine bridge, and thought
she walked very much like her mother, shoulders squared, chin high, hips
firm. He went back into the house, after surveying the sunset largely,
and encountered the dour Casey in the hall.

"I'll type your sermon now, sir--if it's done."

"It isn't done, Casey. And you know it. Oh, Casey,"--(I wish your
imagination would supply that brogue, because it was such a deliciously
soft and racy thing)--"Oh, Casey, Casey! you're a better priest than I
am--but a poorer man."

Fanny was to leave Winnebago the following Saturday. She had sold the
last of the household furniture, and had taken a room at the Haley
House. She felt very old and experienced--and sad. That, she told
herself, was only natural. Leaving things to which one is accustomed is
always hard. Queerly enough, it was her good-by to Aloysius that most
unnerved her. Aloysius had been taken on at Gerretson's, and the dignity
of his new position sat heavily upon him. You should have seen his ties.
Fanny sought him out at Gerretson's.

"It's flure-mana