He dives again into his cultish lunch and after a moment resumes:
"The big lady has lost her job and we've thrown the shield—motto and all—into the lake. We're trying to forget the motto and that's why we've got the cult habit. We're class and we're close on the heels of you New Yorkers—only last winter they began to pass the French pastry around on a tray at my club. We learn quickly and then go you one better. We've finally given Jane Addams the recognition and the support that she should have had a dozen years ago. We're strong and we're sincere for culture—the university to the south of us has had some funny cracks but that is all history. Together with the one to the north of us, they are finally institutions—and Chicago respects them as such.
"Take opera. We used to think it was a fad to hear good music, and only the society folks went to hear it—so that the opera fairly starved to death when it came out here. Now they are falling over one another to get into the Auditorium, and our opera company is not only an institution but you New Yorkers would give your very hearts to have it in your own big opera house."
"You'll build an opera house out here then," you venture, "the biggest—"
He interrupts.
"Not necessarily the biggest," he corrects, "but as fine as the very best."
The talk changes. You are frankly interested in the cults. You have heard of how one is working in the public schools, how the school children of Chicago work in classrooms with the windows wide open, and you ask him about it.
"It must be fine for the children?" you finally venture.
"It is," he says. "My daughter teaches in a school down Englewood way, and she says that it is fine for the children—but hell on the teachers. They weren't trained to it in the beginning."
You are beginning to understand Chicago. A half an hour ago you could not have understood how a man like this—head of a giant corporation employing half a hundred thousand workmen, a man with three or four big houses, a stable full of automobiles, a man of vast resources and influences—would have his daughter teaching in a public school. You are beginning to understand the man—the man who is typical of Chicago. You come to know him the more clearly as he tells you of the city that he really loves. He tells you how Sorolla "caught on" over at the Institute—although more recently the Cubists rather dimmed the brilliance of the Spaniard's reception—and how the people who go to the Chicago libraries are reading less fiction and more solid literature all the while. Then—of a sudden, for he realizes that he must be back again into the grind and the routine of his work—he turns to you and says: