She put down her work hastily, yet quietly, so that the sudden rush of happy grateful tears in her eyes should not sully the pink satin ribbon. She was flushed, like a girl. “Do you, Sobig?” she said.
After a moment she took up her sewing again. Her face looked young, eager, fresh, like the face of the girl who had found cabbages so beautiful that night when she bounced along the rutty Halsted road with Klaas Pool, many years ago. It came into her face, that look, when she was happy, exhilarated, excited. That was why those who loved her and brought that look into her face thought her beautiful, while those who did not love her never saw the look and consequently considered her a plain woman.
There was another silence between the two. Then: “Mother, what would you think of my going East next fall, to take a course in architecture?”
“Would you like that, Dirk?”
“Yes, I think so—yes.”
“Then I’d like it better than anything in the world. I—it makes me happy just to think of it.”
“It would—cost an awful lot.”
“I’ll manage. I’ll manage. . . . What made you decide on architecture?”
“I don’t know, exactly. The new buildings at the university—Gothic, you know—are such a contrast to the old. Then Paula and I were talking the other day. She hates their house on Prairie—terrible old lumpy gray stone pile, with the black of the I. C. trains all over it. She wants her father to build north—an Italian villa or French château. Something of that sort. So many of her friends are moving to the north shore, away from these hideous south-side and north-side Chicago houses with their stoops, and their bay windows, and their terrible turrets. Ugh!”
“Well, now, do you know,” Selina remonstrated mildly, “I like ’em. I suppose I’m wrong, but to me they seem sort of natural and solid and unpretentious, like the clothes that old August Hempel wears, so squarecut and baggy. Those houses look dignified to me, and fitting. They may be ugly—probably are—but anyway they’re not ridiculous. They have a certain rugged grandeur. They’re Chicago. Those French and Italian gimcracky things they—they’re incongruous. It’s as if Abraham Lincoln were to appear suddenly in pink satin knee breeches and buckled shoes, and lace ruffles at his wrists.”