e wanted to touch
them. She wanted to talk with them. It was as though a lover of the
drama, eager to see his favorite actress in her greatest part, were to
find himself viewing her in a badly constructed film play.

So Fanny Brandeis took to prowling. There are people who have a penchant
for cities--more than that, a talent for them, a gift of sensing
them, of feeling their rhythm and pulse-beats, as others have a highly
developed music sense, or color reaction. It is a thing that cannot
be acquired. In Fanny Brandeis there was this abnormal response to the
color and tone of any city. And Chicago was a huge, polyglot orchestra,
made up of players in every possible sort of bizarre costume, performing
on every known instrument, leaderless, terrifyingly discordant, yet with
an occasional strain, exquisite and poignant, to be heard through the
clamor and din.

A walk along State street (the wrong side) or Michigan avenue at five,
or through one of the city's foreign quarters, or along the lake front
at dusk, stimulated her like strong wine. She was drunk with it. And all
the time she would say to herself, little blind fool that she was:

"Don't let it get you. Look at it, but don't think about it. Don't let
the human end of it touch you. There's nothing in it."

And meanwhile she was feasting on those faces in the crowds. Those faces
in the crowds! They seemed to leap out at her. They called to her. So
she sketched them, telling herself that she did it by way of relaxation,
and diversion. One afternoon she left her desk early, and perched
herself on one of the marble benches that lined the sunken garden just
across from the main group of Haynes-Cooper buildings. She wanted to see
what happened when those great buildings emptied. Even her imagination
did not meet the actuality. At 5:30 the streets about the plant were
empty, except for an occasional passerby. At 5:31 there trickled
down the broad steps of building after building thin dark streams of
humanity, like the first slow line of lava that crawls down the side of
an erupting volcano. The trickle broadened into a stream, spread into
a flood, became a torrent that inundated the streets, the sidewalks,
filling every nook and crevice, a moving mass. Ten thousand people! A
city! Fanny found herself shaking with excitement, and something like
terror at the immensity of it. She tried to get a picture of it, a
sketch, with the gleaming windows of the red brick buildings a