Rose ate her breakfast and felt much better. Her trunk came and she got out her dresses and hung them up and made other preparations for staying, although it seemed impossible she should ever sleep another night in this terrible city.
She got out her portfolio and wrote a letter home and one also to Dr. Thatcher. Then she looked over the little bunch of letters of introduction she had. One was to Doctor Isabel Herrick, one to Professor H. Bevan Fowler at Evanston, and one was to Orrin Thatcher; that was the Doctor's cousin, a young lawyer in the Woman's building, whatever that was. With these and ten dollars a week she faced Chicago. The contest was unequal.
She felt this more keenly as she stood on the lake front a little later on in the day. She went there as the New Hampshire girl goes to the sea. This body of water, majestic in its immense shoreless spread, is wonderful to the young girl from Iowa or interior Wisconsin.
A fresh, keen east wind had arisen, pure and exhilarating, and the smooth expanse of glittering green-and-blue water stretched out under a vivid blue sky, in which great clouds floated like snow mountains, trailing great shadows like robes of state upon the lake.
The curving lake-wall was wet and glistening with the up-flung spray. The slender elms were fronded at the top like palms, and the vivid green grass set opposite the pink-gray wall, and the brilliant many-colored lake in magnificent, harmonious contrast. The girl felt her soul grow larger as she faced this scene, so strange, so oriental, and she looked and looked, until it became a part of her.
It was all so remote and so splendid. There the great violet-shadowed sails of ships stood, as she had seen them in pictures of the sea. There a gleaming steamer ran, trailing great banners of smoke. There glittered the white bodies and slant wings of gulls, dipping, upshooting and whirling. To her eyes this was infinity, and the purple mist in which the ships drave was ultimate mystery.
At last she turned to look behind her. There on the left stood rows of immense houses, barred and grated like jails or fortresses; palaces where lived the mighty ones of Chicago commerce. Before their doors carriages stood, with attendants in livery, such as she had read about and had never seen. Up and down the curving ribbon of lavender sand other carriages were driving, with jingle of silver chains and soft roll of wheels. The horses flung foam from their bits; they were magnificent horses (she knew horses as well as any coachman), and their brass-trimmed harnesses glittered in the sun like burnished gold.
There was no noise here beyond the tread of these stately horses, the babble of a few soft-voiced children on the grass and the crackling, infrequent splash of the leaping breakers. It was a wide contrast to the Chicago of her first glimpses the day before. That side of the city terrified her, this oppressed and awed her. The social splendor of this life appealed to her perception as it would not to any man. Her quick imagination peopled these mansions with beautiful women and lordly men, and she felt herself rightful claimant of a place among them.
She turned and faced them with set teeth and a singular look in her half-closed eyes, and in her heart she said: "Before I die I'll go where I please in this city. I'll be counted as good as any of you—poor as I am."
To the onlooker—to Mrs. Oliver Frost, she was a girl in a picturesque attitude; to the coachmen on the carriages she was a possible nurse-girl; to the policeman she was a speck on the lake-front lawn.