“But look here. I've been here ten weeks, and I've met your friends, and not one of them is a Jew. How's that?”
Fanny flushed a little. “Oh, it just worked out that way.”
Theodore looked at her hard. “You mean you worked it out that way?”
“Yes.”
“Fan, we're a couple of weaklings, both of us, to have sprung from a mother like ours. I don't know which is worse; my selfishness, or yours.” Then, at the hurt that showed in her face, he was all contrition. “Forgive me, Sis. You've been so wonderful to me, and to Mizzi, and to all of us. I'm a good-for-nothing fiddler, that's all. You're the strong one.”
Fenger had telephoned her on Saturday. He and his wife were at their place in the country. Fanny was to take the train out there Sunday morning. She looked forward to it with a certain relief. The weather had turned unseasonably warm, as Chicago Octobers sometimes do. Up to the last moment she had tried to shake Theodore's determination to take Mizzi and Otti with him. But he was stubborn.
“I've got to have her,” he said.
Michael Fenger's voice over the telephone had been as vibrant with suppressed excitement as Michael Fenger's dry, hard tones could be.
“Fanny, it's done—finished,” he said. “We had a meeting to-day. This is my last month with Haynes-Cooper.”
“But you can't mean it. Why, you ARE Haynes-Cooper. How can they let you go?”