Edna Ferber: Fanny Herself

8. CHAPTER EIGHT (continued)

"Smells like something burning--cloth, or something," called Annie, from the kitchen.

"It's only an old apron that was cluttering up my--my bureau drawer."

Thus she successfully demonstrated the first lesson in the cruel and rigid course of mental training she had mapped out for herself.

Leaving Winnebago was not easy. There is something about a small town that holds you. Your life is so intimately interwoven with that of your neighbor. Existence is so safe, so sane, so sure. Fanny knew that when she turned the corner of Elm Street every third person she met would speak to her. Life was made up of minute details, too trivial for the notice of the hurrying city crowds. You knew when Milly Glaenzer changed the baby buggy for a go-cart. The youngest Hupp boy--Sammy--who was graduated from High School in June, is driving A. J. Dawes's automobile now. My goodness, how time flies! Doeppler's grocery has put in plate-glass windows, and they're getting out-of-season vegetables every day now from Milwaukee. As you pass you get the coral glow of tomatoes, and the tender green of lettuces. And that vivid green? Fresh young peas! And in February. Well! They've torn down the old yellow brick National Bank, and in its place a chaste Greek Temple of a building looks rather contemptuously down its classic columns upon the farmer's wagons drawn up along the curb. If Fanny Brandeis' sense of proportion had not been out of plumb she might have realized that, to Winnebago, the new First National Bank building was as significant and epochal as had been the Woolworth Building to New York.

The very intimacy of these details, Fanny argued, was another reason for leaving Winnebago. They were like detaining fingers that grasped at your skirts, impeding your progress.