swept on it gathered rocks, trees,
stones, houses, everything that lay in its way. It was beyond the power
of human hand to stop this tumbling, roaring slide. In the midst of it
sat Nathan Haynes, deafened, stunned, terrified at the immensity of what
he had done.

He began giving away huge sums, incredible sums. It piled up faster than
he could give it away. And so he sat there in the office hung with the
dim old masterpieces, and tried to keep simple, tried to keep sane, with
that austerity that only mad wealth can afford--or bitter poverty. He
caused the land about the plant to be laid out in sunken gardens and
baseball fields and tennis courts, so that one approached this monster
of commerce through enchanted grounds, glowing with tulips and heady
hyacinths in spring, with roses in June, blazing with salvia and
golden-glow and asters in autumn. There was something apologetic about
these grounds.

This, then, was the environment that Fanny Brandeis had chosen. On the
face of things you would have said she had chosen well. The inspiration
of the roller skates had not been merely a lucky flash. That idea had
been part of the consistent whole. Her mind was her mother's mind raised
to the nth power, and enhanced by the genius she was trying to crush.
Refusing to die, it found expression in a hundred brilliant plans, of
which the roller skate idea was only one.

Fanny had reached Chicago on Sunday. She had entered the city as a
queen enters her domain, authoritatively, with no fear upon her, no
trepidation, no doubts. She had gone at once to the Mendota Hotel,
on Michigan Avenue, up-town, away from the roar of the loop. It was a
residential hotel, very quiet, decidedly luxurious. She had no idea of
making it her home. But she would stay there until she could find an
apartment that was small, bright, near the lake, and yet within fairly
reasonable transportation facilities for her work. Her room was on the
ninth floor, not on the Michigan Avenue side, but east, overlooking the
lake. She spent hours at the windows, fascinated by the stone and steel
city that lay just below with the incredible blue of the sail-dotted
lake beyond, and at night, with the lights spangling the velvety
blackness, the flaring blaze of Thirty-first Street's chop-suey
restaurants and moving picture houses at the right; and far, far away,
the red and white eye of the lighthouse winking, blinking, winking,
blinking, the rumble and clank of a flat-w