Edna Ferber: Fanny Herself

6. CHAPTER SIX (continued)

"Why did you do it?" demanded Mrs. Brandeis.

"I had to, to get it right."

"Oh, don't be silly. You could have visited the mill a dozen times."

Fanny twisted the fingers of her left hand in the fingers of her right as was her way when she was terribly in earnest, and rather excited.

"But I don't want to write about the paper business as a process."

"Well, then, what do you want?"

"I want to write about the overalls on some railroad engineer, perhaps; or the blue calico wrapper that belonged, maybe, to a scrub woman. And how they came to be spotted, or faded, or torn, and finally all worn out. And how the rag man got them, and the mill, and how the girls sorted them. And the room in which they do it. And the bins. And the machinery. Oh, it's the most fascinating, and--and sort of relentless machinery. And the acid burns on the hands of the men at the vats. And their shoes. And then the paper, so white. And the way we tear it up, or crumple it, and throw it in the waste basket. Just a piece of paper, don't you see what I mean? Just a piece of paper, and yet all that--" she stopped and frowned a little, and grew inarticulate, and gave it up with a final, "Don't you see what I mean, Mother? Don't you see what I mean?"

Molly Brandeis looked at her daughter in a startled way, like one who, walking tranquilly along an accustomed path, finds himself confronting a new and hitherto unsuspected vista, formed by a peculiar arrangement of clouds, perhaps, or light, or foliage, or all three blended. "I see what you mean," she said. "But I wish you wouldn't do it. I--I wish you didn't feel that you wanted to do it."

"But how can I make it real if I don't?"