"And it couldn't 'a' been me!"
"Little Jingle Bells?"
"Why, y-yes, I—I'm on."
At three o'clock on Wednesday afternoon, in a magistrate's office, beneath a framed engraving of a judicial court in wigged session, Herman Schulien Loeb and Sadie Helen Mosher became as one. A bar of scant metropolitan sunshine, miraculously let in by a cleft between two skyscrapers, lay at the feet of the bride.
Slightly arear of them: Mr. Louis Slupsky; Mr. Samuel Kahn, with a tinge the color of apoplexy in his face; and Miss Sylvette de Long, her face thrust forward as if she heard melody. The voice of the magistrate rose like a bird in slow flight, then settled to a brief drone.
* * * * *
East is East and West is West, and St. Louis is neither. It lies like a mediator, the westerly hand of the east end of the country stretching across the sullenest part of the Mississippi to clasp the easterly hand of the west end of the country.
Indians have at one time or another left their chirography upon the face of St. Louis. But all that is effaced now under the hot lava of Americanism that is covering the major cities in more or less even layers. Now it stands atop its Indian mounds, a metropolis of almost a million souls, a twenty-story office-building upon the site of an old trading-post, and a subway threatening the city's inners. There is a highly restricted residence district given over to homes of the most stucco period of the Italian Renaissance, and an art-museum, as high on the brow of a hill as the Athenians loved to build. St. Louis has not yet a Champs-Élysées or a Fifth Avenue. And of warm evenings it takes its walks without hats. Neither is the café or the cabaret its evening solace.
It dines, even in its renaissance section, placidly chez soi; the family activities of the day here thrown into a common pool of discussion.
On Washington Boulevard, probably sixty dollars a foot removed from the renaissance section, architecture suddenly turns an indifferent shoulder to period, Queen Anne rubbing sloping roof with neighbor's concrete sleeping-porch of the hygienic period. Only the building-line is maintained, the houses sitting comfortably back and a well-hosed strip of sidewalk, bordered in hardy maples, running clear and white out to De Balaviere Avenue, where the art-nouveau apartment-house begins to invade. In winter bare branches meet in deadlock over this walk. On the smooth macadamized road of Washington Boulevard automobiles try out their speed limit.