Charlotte had been the first of these girls. Carrie, the second, came a tardy ten years later. It was a time and a city of strange contradictions and fluctuations. Fortunes were made in the boom of 1835 and lost in the panic of '37. Chicago was a broken-down speculative shanty village one day and an embryo metropolis the next. The Firemen's Ball was the event of the social season, with Engine No. 3, glittering gift of "Long John" Wentworth, set in the upper end of the dance-hall and festooned with flowers and ribbons. All the worth-while beaux of the town belonged to the volunteer fire brigade. The names of Chicago's firemen of 1838 or '40, if read aloud to-day, would sound like the annual list of box-holders at the opera. The streets of the town were frequently impassable; servants almost unknown; quiltings and church sociables noteworthy events. The open prairie, just beyond town, teemed with partridges, quail, prairie chicken. Fort Dearborn, deserted, was a playground for little children. Indians, dirty, blanketed, saturnine, slouched along the streets. "Long John" Wentworth was kinging it in Congress. Young ladies went to balls primly gowned in dark-colored merinos, long-sleeved, high-necked. Little girls went to school in bodices low-cut and nearly sleeveless; toe-slippers; and manifold skirts starched to stand out like a ballerina's.
These stiffly starched skirts, layer on layer, first brought romance into Charlotte Thrift's life. She was thirteen, a rather stocky little girl, not too obedient of the prim maternal voice that was forever bidding her point her toes out, hold her shoulders back and not talk at table. She must surely have talked at table this morning, or, perhaps, slouched her shoulders and perversely toed in once safely out of sight of the house, because she was late for school. The horrid realization of this came as Charlotte reached the Rush Street ferry—a crude ramshackle affair drawn from one side of the river to the other with ropes pulled by hand. Charlotte attended Miss Rapp's school on the North Side though the Thrifts lived South. This makeshift craft was about to leave the south shore as Charlotte, her tardiness heavy upon her, sighted the river. With a little cry and a rush she sped down the path, leaped, slipped, and landed just short of the ferry in the slimy waters of the Chicago River. Landed exactly expresses it. Though, on second thought, perhaps settled is better. Layer on layer of stiffly starched skirts sustained her. She had fallen feet downward. There she rested on the water, her skirts spread petal-like about her, her toes, in their cross-strapped slippers, no doubt pointing demurely downward. She looked like some weird white river-lily afloat on its pad in the turbid stream. Her eyes were round with fright beneath the strongly marked black brows. Then, suddenly and quite naturally, she screamed, kicked wildly, and began to sink. Sank, in fact. It had all happened with incredible swiftness. The ferry men had scarcely had time to open their mouths vacuously. Charlotte's calliope screams, so ominously muffled now, wakened them into action. But before their clumsy wits and hands had seized on ropes a slim black-and-white line cleft the water, disappeared, and reappeared with the choking struggling frantic Charlotte, very unstarched now and utterly unmindful of toes, shoulders, and vocal restraint.
The black-and-white line had been young Jesse Dick, of the "Hardscrabble" Dicks; the black had been his trousers, the white his shirt. He swam like a river rat—which he more or less was. Of all the Chicago male inhabitants to whom Mrs. Thrift would most have objected as the rescuer of her small daughter, this lounging, good-for-nothing young Jesse Dick would have been most prominently ineligible. Fortunately (or unfortunately) she did not even know his name until five years later. Charlotte herself did not know it. She had had one frantic glimpse of a wet, set face above hers, but it had been only a flash in a kaleidoscopic whole. Young Dick, having towed her ashore, had plumped her down, retrieved his coat, and lounged off unmissed and unrecognized in the ensuing hubbub. The rescue accomplished, his seventeen-year-old emotions found no romantic stirrings in the thought of this limp and dripping bundle of corded muslin, bedraggled pantalettes, and streaming, stringy hair.
Charlotte, put promptly to bed of course, with a pan at her feet and flannel on her chest and hot broth administered at intervals—though she was no whit the worse for her ducking—lay very flat and still under the gay calico comfortable, her hair in two damp braids, her eyes wide and thoughtful.
"But who was he?" insisted Mrs. Thrift, from the foot of the bed.
And "I don't know," replied Charlotte for the dozenth time.
"What did he look like?" demanded Isaac Thrift (hastily summoned from his place of business so near the scene of the mishap).
"I—don't know," replied Charlotte. And that, bafflingly enough, was the truth. Only sometimes in her dreams she saw his face again, white, set, and yet with something almost merry about it. From these dreams Charlotte would wake shivering deliciously. But she never told them. During the next five years she never went to a dance, a sleigh-ride, walked or rode, that she did not unconsciously scan the room or the street for his face.
Five years later Charlotte was shopping on Lake Street in her second-best merino, voluminously hooped. Fortunately (she thought later, devoutly) she had put on her best bonnet of sage green velvet with the frill of blond lace inside the face. A frill of blond lace is most flattering when set inside the bonnet. She had come out of her father's store and was bound for the shop of Mr. Potter Palmer where, the week before, she had flirted with a plum-colored pelisse and had known no happiness since then. She must feel it resting on her own sloping shoulders. Of course it was—but then, Mr. Palmer, when he waited on you himself, often came down in his price.
Chicago sidewalks were crazy wooden affairs raised high on rickety stilts, uneven, full of cracks for the unwary, now five steps up, now six steps down, with great nails raising their ugly heads to bite at unsuspecting draperies. Below this structure lay a morass of mud, and woe to him who stepped into it.