Fifty-five years had yellowed the photograph of the wasp-waisted girl in the billowing riding skirt when her grand-niece, Charley Kemp, appeared before her in twentieth century riding clothes: sleeveless jacket ending a little below the hips; breeches baggy in the seat but gripping the knees. Great-aunt Charlotte had said, "So that's what it's come to." You could almost hear her agile old mind clicking back to that other young thing of the plume, and the rose and the little booted foot peeping so demurely from beneath the folds of the sweeping skirt.
"Don't you like it?" Charley had looked down at her slim self and had flicked her glittering tan boots with her riding whip because that seemed the thing to do. Charley went to matinees.
Great-aunt Charlotte had pursed her crumpled old lips, whether in amusement or disapproval—those withered lips whose muscles had long ago lost their elasticity. "Well, it's kind of comical, really. And ugly. But you don't look ugly in it, Charley, or comical either. You look like a right pretty young boy."
Her eyes had a tenderly amused glint. Those eyes saw less now than they used to: an encroaching cataract. But they had a bright and piercing appearance owing to the heavy brows which, by some prank of nature, had defied the aging process that had laid its blight upon hair, cheek, lips, skin, and frame. The brows had remained jetty black; twin cornices of defiance in the ivory ruin of her face. They gave her a misleadingly sinister and cynical look. Piratical, almost.
Perhaps those eyebrows indicated in Charlotte Thrift something of the iron that had sustained her father, Isaac Thrift, the young Easterner, throughout his first years of Middle-Western hardship. Chicago to-day is full of resentful grandsons and -daughters who will tell you that if their grandsire had bought the southwest corner of State and Madison Streets for $2,050 in cash, as he could have, they would be worth their millions to-day. And they are right. Still, if all those who tell you this were granted their wish Chicago now would be populated almost wholly by millionaire real estate holders; and the southwest corner of State and Madison would have had to be as the loaves and the fishes.
Isaac Thrift had been one of these inconsiderate forebears. He had bought real estate, it is true, but in the mistaken belief that the city's growth and future lay along the south shore instead of the north. Chicago's South Side in that day was a prairie waste where wolves howled on winter nights and where, in the summer, flowers grew so riotously as to make a trackless sea of bloom. Isaac Thrift had thought himself very canny and far-sighted to vision that which his contemporaries could not see. They had bought North Side property. They had built their houses there. Isaac Thrift built his on Wabash, near Madison, and announced daringly that some day he would have a real country place, far south, near Eighteenth Street. For that matter, he said, the time would come when they would hear of houses thick in a street that would be known as Thirtieth, or even Fortieth. How they laughed at that! Besides, it was pretty well acknowledged by the wiseacres that St. Charles, a far older town, would soon surpass Chicago and become the metropolis of the West.
In books on early Chicago and its settlers you can see Isaac Thrift pictured as one of the stern and flinty city fathers, all boots and stock and massive watch-chain and side-whiskers. It was neither a time nor a place for weaklings. The young man who had come hopefully out of New York state to find his fortune in the welter of mud, swamp, Indians, frame shanties and two-wheeled carts that constituted Chicago, had needed all his indomitability.
It is characteristic of him that until his marriage he lived at the New Temperance Hotel (board and lodging $2.00 a week; clothes washed extra), instead of at the popular Saugenash Hotel on Market and Lake, where the innkeeper, that gay and genial Frenchman and pioneer, Mark Beaubien, would sometimes take down his fiddle and set feet to twinkling and stepping in the square-dance. None of this for Isaac Thrift. He literally had rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Little enough use he made of the fine bottle-green broadcloth coat with the gilt buttons, the high stock, and the pale gray pantaloons brought from the East. But in two years he had opened a sort of general store and real estate office on Lake Street, had bought a piece of ground for a house on Wabash (which piece he later foolishly sold) and had sent back East for his bride. That lady left her comfortable roof-tree to make the long and arduous trip that duplicated the one made earlier by her husband-to-be. It is to her credit that she braved it; but she had a hard time trying to adjust her New England viewpoint to the crude rough setting in which she now found herself. Her letters back East are so typical and revealing that extracts, at least, are imperative.
"... The times are exceedingly dull in this city of Chicago; there is little business, no balls, no parties, some shooting, some riding, and plenty of loafers, and to-day, after the rain, a plenty of mud which completes the picture.... The water here is first-rate bad and the only way we get along is by drinking a great deal of tea and coffee—two coffees to one tea.... The weather has been very mild. There has not been snow enough to stop the burning of the prairies.... If the waters of Lake Michigan continue to rise for a year or two more Chicago and all the surrounding country will be covered with one vast sheet of water, and the inhabitants of this place must find a home elsewhere—and I, for one, will find said home farther East.... Everyone admires my pretty things from New York; my cherry-colored scarf; my gingham dress with the silk stripe in it, my Thibet cloth cloak of dark mulberry color; and my fine velvet bonnet which cost only $3.50 in New York. It is prettier than any I have seen here. A milliner here said that it would have cost $8.00 in Chicago but I think that is exaggerated. The ladies here wear only one flounce to their skirts. Even my third best—the brown-and-white plaid merino—has three.... The mud here is so bad that the men wear hip boots and we women must go about in two-wheeled carts that sink to the hubs in many places. There are signs stuck up in the mud with the warning, 'No bottom here'.... Our new furniture has come. A beautiful flowered red and green carpet in the chamber and parlor. When the folding doors are open the stove will heat both rooms.... They have most excellent markets in this place. We can get meat of every description for four cents a pound, such as sausages, venison, beef, pork—everything except fowls. Of fruit there is little. I saw some grapes yesterday in the market, all powdered over with sawdust. They had come from Spain. They made my mouth water.... Every day great prairie schooners, as they call them, go by the house. They have come all the way from the East.... I am terrified of the Indians though I have said little to Isaac. They are very dirty and not at all noble as our history and geography books state...."
She bore Isaac Thrift two children, accomplishing the feat as circumspectly and with as much reticence as is possible in the achievement of so physical a rite. Girls, both. I think she would have considered a man-child indelicate.