uble your fist this way, and tuck your
thumb alongside, like that, and aim for this spot right here, about two
inches this side of the chin, bringing your arm back, and up, quickly,
like a piston, the person you hit will go down, limp. There's a nerve
right here that communicates with the brain. That blow makes you
see stars, bright lights, and fancy colors. They use it in the comic
papers."

"You ARE crazy," said Fanny, as though at last assured of a
long-suspected truth. The train began to move, almost imperceptibly.
"Run!" she cried.

Heyl sped up the aisle. At the door he turned. "It's called an
uppercut," he shouted to the amazement of the other passengers. And
leaped from the train.

Fanny sank into her seat, weakly. Then she began to laugh, and there was
a dash of hysteria in it. He had left a paper on the car seat. It was
the Star. Fanny crumpled it, childishly, and kicked it under the seat.
She took off her hat, arranged her belongings, and sat back with eyes
closed. After a few moments she opened them, fished about under the seat
for the crumpled copy of the Star, and read it, turning at once to his
column. She thought it was a very unpretentious thing, that column, and
yet so full of insight, and sagacity, and whimsical humor. Not a guffaw
in it, but a smile in every fifth line. She wondered if those years
of illness, and loneliness, with weeks of reading, and tramping, and
climbing in the Colorado mountains had kept him strangely young, or made
him strangely old.

She welcomed the hours that lay between New York and Chicago. They would
give her an opportunity to digest the events of the past ten days.
In her systematic mind she began to range them in the order of their
importance. Horn & Udell came first, of course, and then the line of
maternity dresses she had selected to take the place of the hideous
models carried under Slosson's regime. And then the slip-over pinafores.
But somehow her thoughts became jumbled here, so that faces instead of
garments filled her mind's eye. Again and again there swam into her ken
the face of that woman of fifty, in decent widow's weeds, who had stood
there in the Night Court, charged with drunkenness on the streets. And
the man with the frost-bitten fingers in Madison Square. And the dog in
the sweater. And the feverish concentration of the piece-work sewers in
the window of the loft building.

She gave it up, selected a magazine, and decided to go in to lunch.

Th