der shawls pinned over
their waists, for warmth, and all four, including Aloysius, sniffled for
weeks afterward. That inventory developed a new, grim line around Mrs.
Brandeis' mouth, and carved another at the corner of each eye. After it
was over she washed her hair, steamed her face over a bowl of hot water,
packed two valises, left minute and masterful instructions with Mattie
as to the household, and with Sadie and Pearl as to the store, and was
off to Chicago on her first buying trip. She took Fanny with her, as
ballast. It was a trial at which many men would have quailed. On the
shrewdness and judgment of that buying trip depended the future of
Brandeis' Bazaar, and Mrs. Brandeis, and Fanny, and Theodore.

Mrs. Brandeis had accompanied her husband on many of his trips to
Chicago. She had even gone with him occasionally to the wholesale houses
around La Salle Street, and Madison, and Fifth Avenue, but she had
never bought a dollar's worth herself. She saw that he bought slowly,
cautiously, and without imagination. She made up her mind that she would
buy quickly, intuitively. She knew slightly some of the salesmen in
the wholesale houses. They had often made presents to her of a vase,
a pocketbook, a handkerchief, or some such trifle, which she accepted
reluctantly, when at all. She was thankful now for these visits. She
found herself remembering many details of them. She made up her mind,
with a canny knowingness, that there should be no presents this time, no
theater invitations, no lunches or dinners. This was business, she told
herself; more than business--it was grim war.

They still tell of that trip, sometimes, when buyers and jobbers and
wholesale men get together. Don't imagine that she came to be a woman
captain of finance. Don't think that we are to see her at the head of
a magnificent business establishment, with buyers and department heads
below her, and a private office done up in mahogany, and stenographers
and secretaries. No, she was Mrs. Brandeis, of Brandeis' Bazaar, to the
end. The bills she bought were ridiculously small, I suppose, and the
tricks she turned on that first trip were pitiful, perhaps. But they
were magnificent too, in their way. I am even bold enough to think that
she might have made business history, that plucky woman, if she had had
an earlier start, and if she had not, to the very end, had a pack of
unmanageable handicaps yelping at her heels, pulling at her skirts.

It was o