were short this
morning," she said.

The room was warm, and quiet, and bright. In her bathroom, that
glistened with blue and white tiling, were those redundant towels. Fanny
stood in the doorway and counted them, whimsically. Four great fuzzy
bath towels. Eight glistening hand towels. A blue and white bath rug
hung at the side of the tub. Her telephone rang. It was Ella.

"Where in the world have you been, child? I was worried about you. I
thought you were lost in the streets of New York."

"I took a 'bus ride," Fanny explained.

"See anything of New York?"

"I saw all of it," replied Fanny. Ella laughed at that, but Fanny's face
was serious.

"How did you make out at Horn & Udell's? Never mind, I'm coming in for a
minute; can I?"

"Please do. I need you."

A moment later Ella bounced in, fresh as to blouse, pink as to cheeks,
her whole appearance a testimony to the revivifying effects of a warm
bath, a brief nap, clean clothes.

"Dear child, you look tired. I'm not going to stay. You get dressed and
I'll meet you for dinner. Or do you want yours up here?"

"Oh, no!"

"'Phone me when you're dressed. But tell me, isn't it a wonder, this
town? I'll never forget my first trip here. I spent one whole evening
standing in front of the mirror trying to make those little spit-curls
the women were wearing then. I'd seen 'em on Fifth avenue, and it seemed
I'd die if I couldn't have 'em, too. And I dabbed on rouge, and touched
up my eyebrows. I don't know. It's a kind of a crazy feeling gets you.
The minute I got on the train for Chicago I washed my face and took my
hair down and did it plain again."

"Why, that's the way I felt!" laughed Fanny. "I didn't care anything
about infants' wear, or Haynes-Cooper, or anything. I just wanted to be
beautiful, as they all were."

"Sure! It gets us all!"

Fanny twisted her hair into the relentless knob women assume preparatory
to bathing. "It seems to me you have to come from Winnebago, or
thereabouts, to get New York--really get it, I mean."

"That's so," agreed Ella. "There's a man on the New York Star who writes
a column every day that everybody reads. If he isn't a small-town man
then we're both wrong."

Fanny, bathward bound, turned to stare at Ella. "A column about what?"

"Oh, everything. New York, mostly. Say, it's the humanest stuff. He
says the kind of thing we'd all say, if we knew how. Reading him is like
getting a letter from home. I'll bet he went to a co