Edna Ferber: Fanny Herself

8. CHAPTER EIGHT (continued)

And so they parted. He took her to the door himself, and watched her slim figure down the street and across the ravine bridge, and thought she walked very much like her mother, shoulders squared, chin high, hips firm. He went back into the house, after surveying the sunset largely, and encountered the dour Casey in the hall.

"I'll type your sermon now, sir--if it's done."

"It isn't done, Casey. And you know it. Oh, Casey,"--(I wish your imagination would supply that brogue, because it was such a deliciously soft and racy thing)--"Oh, Casey, Casey! you're a better priest than I am--but a poorer man."

Fanny was to leave Winnebago the following Saturday. She had sold the last of the household furniture, and had taken a room at the Haley House. She felt very old and experienced--and sad. That, she told herself, was only natural. Leaving things to which one is accustomed is always hard. Queerly enough, it was her good-by to Aloysius that most unnerved her. Aloysius had been taken on at Gerretson's, and the dignity of his new position sat heavily upon him. You should have seen his ties. Fanny sought him out at Gerretson's.

"It's flure-manager of the basement I am," he said, and struck an elegant attitude against the case of misses'-ready-to-wear coats. "And when you come back to Winnebago, Miss Fanny,--and the saints send it be soon--I'll bet ye'll see me on th' first flure, keepin' a stern but kindly eye on the swellest trade in town. Ev'ry last thing I know I learned off yur poor ma."

"I hope it will serve you here, Aloysius."

"Sarve me!" He bent closer. "Meanin' no offense, Miss Fanny; but say, listen: Oncet ye get a Yiddish business education into an Irish head, and there's no limit to the length ye can go. If I ain't a dry-goods king be th' time I'm thirty I hope a packin' case'll fall on me."