Edna Ferber: Fanny Herself

13. CHAPTER THIRTEEN (continued)

A moment later Ella bounced in, fresh as to blouse, pink as to cheeks, her whole appearance a testimony to the revivifying effects of a warm bath, a brief nap, clean clothes.

"Dear child, you look tired. I'm not going to stay. You get dressed and I'll meet you for dinner. Or do you want yours up here?"

"Oh, no!"

"'Phone me when you're dressed. But tell me, isn't it a wonder, this town? I'll never forget my first trip here. I spent one whole evening standing in front of the mirror trying to make those little spit-curls the women were wearing then. I'd seen 'em on Fifth avenue, and it seemed I'd die if I couldn't have 'em, too. And I dabbed on rouge, and touched up my eyebrows. I don't know. It's a kind of a crazy feeling gets you. The minute I got on the train for Chicago I washed my face and took my hair down and did it plain again."

"Why, that's the way I felt!" laughed Fanny. "I didn't care anything about infants' wear, or Haynes-Cooper, or anything. I just wanted to be beautiful, as they all were."

"Sure! It gets us all!"

Fanny twisted her hair into the relentless knob women assume preparatory to bathing. "It seems to me you have to come from Winnebago, or thereabouts, to get New York--really get it, I mean."

"That's so," agreed Ella. "There's a man on the New York Star who writes a column every day that everybody reads. If he isn't a small-town man then we're both wrong."

Fanny, bathward bound, turned to stare at Ella. "A column about what?"

"Oh, everything. New York, mostly. Say, it's the humanest stuff. He says the kind of thing we'd all say, if we knew how. Reading him is like getting a letter from home. I'll bet he went to a country school and wore his mittens sewed to a piece of tape that ran through his coat sleeves."