Tired as they were, they stopped at one of those frank little restaurants that brighten Chicago's drab side streets. Its windows were full of pans that held baked beans, all crusty and brown, and falsely tempting, and of baked apples swimming in a pool of syrup. These flanked by ketchup bottles and geometrical pyramids of golden grape-fruit.
Coffee and hot roast beef sandwiches, of course, in a place like that. “And,” added Fanny, “one of those baked apples. Just to prove they can't be as good as they look.”
They weren't, but she was too hungry to care. Not too hungry, though, to note with quick eye all that the little restaurant held of interest, nor too sleepy to respond to the friendly waitress who, seeing their dusty boots, and the sprig of sumac stuck in Fanny's coat, said, “My, it must have been swell in the country today!” as her flapping napkin precipitated crumbs into their laps.
“It was,” said Fanny, and smiled up at the girl with her generous, flashing smile. “Here's a bit of it I brought back for you.” And she stuck the scarlet sumac sprig into the belt of the white apron.
They finished the day incongruously by taking a taxi home, Fanny yawning luxuriously all the way. “Do you know,” she said, as they parted, “we've talked about everything from souls to infants' wear. We're talked out. It's a mercy you're going to New York. There won't be a next time.”
“Young woman,” said Heyl, forcefully, “there will. That young devil in the red tam isn't dead. She's alive. And kicking. There's a kick in every one of those Chicago sketches in your portfolio upstairs. You said she wouldn't fight anybody's battles to-day. You little idiot, she's fighting one in each of those pictures, from the one showing that girl's face in the crowd, to the old chap with the fish-stall. She'll never die that one. Because she's the spirit. It's the other one who's dead—and she doesn't know it. But some day she'll find herself buried. And I want to be there to shovel on the dirt.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
From the first of December the floor of the Haynes-Cooper mail room looked like the New York Stock Exchange, after a panic. The aisles were drifts of paper against which a squad of boys struggled as vainly as a gang of snow-shovelers against a blizzard. The guide talked in terms of tons of mail, instead of thousands. And smacked his lips after it. The Ten Thousand were working at night now, stopping for a hasty bite of supper at six, then back to desk, or bin or shelf until nine, so that Oklahoma and Minnesota might have its Christmas box in time.
Fanny Brandeis, working under the light of her green-shaded desk lamp, wondered, a little bitterly, if Christmas would ever mean anything to her but pressure, weariness, work. She told herself that she would not think of that Christmas of one year ago. One year! As she glanced around the orderly little office, and out to the stock room beyond, then back to her desk again, she had an odd little feeling of unreality. Surely it had been not one year, but many years—a lifetime—since she had elbowed her way up and down those packed aisles of the busy little store in Winnebago—she and that brisk, alert, courageous woman.