ead, rumpling his hair a little. "An expensive proposition, let me tell
you, three girls. But there's very little I don't know about babies, as
you may imagine."

But there settled over Fanny Brandeis' face the mask of hardness that
was so often to transform it.

The morning mail was in--the day's biggest grist, deluge of it, a flood.
Buyer and assistant buyer never saw the actual letters, or attended to
their enclosed orders. It was only the unusual letter, the complaint or
protest that reached their desk. Hundreds of hands downstairs sorted,
stamped, indexed, filed, after the letter-opening machines had slit the
envelopes. Those letter-openers! Fanny had hung over them, enthralled.
The unopened envelopes were fed into them. Flip! Zip! Flip! Out! Opened!
Faster than eye could follow. It was uncanny. It was, somehow, humorous,
like the clever antics of a trained dog. You could not believe that this
little machine actually performed what your eyes beheld. Two years later
they installed the sand-paper letter-opener, marvel of simplicity.
It made the old machine seem cumbersome and slow. Guided by Izzy, the
expert, its rough tongue was capable of licking open six hundred and
fifty letters a minute.

Ten minutes after the mail came in the orders were being filled; bins,
shelves, warehouses, were emptying their contents. Up and down the
aisles went the stock clerks; into the conveyors went the bundles, down
the great spiral bundle chute, into the shipping room, out by mail, by
express, by freight. This leghorn hat for a Nebraska country belle; a
tombstone for a rancher's wife; a plow, brave in its red paint; coffee,
tea, tinned fruit, bound for Alaska; lace, muslin, sheeting, toweling,
all intended for the coarse trousseau of a Georgia bride.

It was not remarkable that Fanny Brandeis fitted into this scheme of
things. For years she had ministered to the wants of just this type of
person. The letters she saw at Haynes-Cooper's read exactly as customers
had worded their wants at Brandeis' Bazaar. The magnitude of the thing
thrilled her, the endless possibilities of her own position.

During the first two months of her work there she was as unaggressive
as possible. She opened the very pores of her mind and absorbed every
detail of her department. But she said little, followed Slosson's
instructions in her position as assistant buyer, and suggested no
changes. Slosson's wrinkle of anxiety smoothed itself away, and his
man