exclaimed the outraged Mrs. G. Manville Smith. And took her plumes
and her patronage out of Brandeis' Bazaar forever.

That was as malicious as Molly Brandeis ever could be. And it was
forgivable malice.

Most families must be described against the background of their homes,
but the Brandeis family life was bounded and controlled by the store.
Their meals and sleeping hours and amusements were regulated by it.
It taught them much, and brought them much, and lost them much. Fanny
Brandeis always said she hated it, but it made her wise, and tolerant,
and, in the end, famous. I don't know what more one could ask of any
institution. It brought her in contact with men and women, taught her
how to deal with them. After school she used often to run down to the
store to see her mother, while Theodore went home to practice. Perched
on a high stool in some corner she heard, and saw, and absorbed. It
was a great school for the sensitive, highly-organized, dramatic little
Jewish girl, for, to paraphrase a well-known stage line, there are just
as many kinds of people in Winnebago as there are in Washington.

It was about this time that Fanny Brandeis began to realize, actively,
that she was different. Of course, other little Winnebago girls' mothers
did not work like a man, in a store. And she and Bella Weinberg were the
only two in her room at school who stayed out on the Day of Atonement,
and on New Year, and the lesser Jewish holidays. Also, she went to
temple on Friday night and Saturday morning, when the other girls she
knew went to church on Sunday. These things set her apart in the little
Middle Western town; but it was not these that constituted the real
difference. She played, and slept, and ate, and studied like the
other healthy little animals of her age. The real difference was
temperamental, or emotional, or dramatic, or historic, or all four. They
would be playing tag, perhaps, in one of the cool, green ravines that
were the beauty spots of the little Wisconsin town.

They nestled like exquisite emeralds in the embrace of the hills, those
ravines, and Winnebago's civic surge had not yet swept them away in a
deluge of old tin cans, ashes, dirt and refuse, to be sold later for
building lots. The Indians had camped and hunted in them. The one under
the Court Street bridge, near the Catholic church and monastery, was
the favorite for play. It lay, a lovely, gracious thing, below the
hot little town, all green, and lush,