The disappointing and unsatisfactory thing about a motor trip is that unless you have unlimited time, which few people ever seem to have, you stop too short a while in each place to know anything at all about it. You arrive at night and leave early in the morning and all you see is one street driving in, and another going out, and the lobby, dining-room and a bedroom or two at the hotel.
Happily for us, we have been staying several days in Chicago, and, while we can scarcely be said to know the city well, we have had at least a few glimpses of her life and have met quite a few of her people.
Last evening at a dinner given for us, our hostess explained that she had asked the most typical Chicagoans she could think of, and that one of the most representative of them was to take me in to dinner. “He is so enthusiastic, he is what some people would call a booster,” she whispered just before she introduced him.
In books and articles I had read of persons called “boosters,” and had thought of them as persons slangy as their sobriquet; blustering, noisy braggarts, disagreeable in every way. I think the one last night must have been a very superior quality. He was neither noisy nor disagreeable; on the contrary, he was most charming and seemed really trying not to be a booster at all if he could help it.
He began by asking me eagerly how we liked Chicago. Had we thought the Lake Shore Drive beautiful? Were we struck with Chicago’s smallness compared to New York? I told him we had, and we were not. He thereupon generously but reluctantly admitted—the list is his own—that probably New York had more tall buildings, more wholesale hat and ribbon houses, a bigger museum of art, a few more theaters, and yes, undoubtedly, more millionaires’ palaces, but—he suddenly straightened up—“Chicago has more real homes! And when it comes to beauty, has New York anything to compare with Chicago’s boulevard systems of parks edged by the lake and jeweled with lagoons? And yet she is the greatest railroad center in the whole world. And let me tell you this,” he paused. “New York can never equal Chicago commercially! How can she? Look on the map and see for yourself! From New York to San Francisco, north to the lakes and south to Mexico—that’s where Chicago’s trade reaches! What is there left for New York after that? She can, of course, trade north to Boston and south to Washington, but she can’t go west, because Chicago reaches all the way to New York herself, and there is nothing on the east except the Atlantic Ocean!”
After dinner we were taken to the small dancing club, a one-storied pavilion containing only a ballroom with a service pantry in the back, that a few fashionables of Chicago built in a moment of dancing enthusiasm. Although we met comparatively few people and had little opportunity to talk to anyone, I noticed everywhere the same attitude as that of my companion at dinner. The women had it as much as the men. As soon as they heard we were from New York they began to laud Chicago.
Mrs. X., one of their most prominent hostesses and one of the most beautiful and faultlessly turned out people I have ever seen, instead of talking impersonalities as would a New York woman of like position, plunged immediately into the comparison of New York’s shoreline of unsightly docks with the view across her own lawn to the Lake. Imagine a typical hostess of Fifth Avenue greeting a stranger with: “How do you do, Mrs. Pittsburgh; our city is twice as clean as yours!” However, I felt I had to say something in defense of mine, so I remarked that the houses on Riverside Drive faced the Hudson, and across a green terrace, too.
“Oh, but the Palisades opposite are so hideously disfigured with signs,” she objected, “and besides none of your really fashionable world lives on your upper West Side.”
Having staked out our fashionable boundaries for us, she switched the topic to country clubs. Had we been to any of them?