She brought her mind back to the point. They succeeded, small beings though they were, they faced the millions of the earth and became the masters, the kings and queens of art.
By what necromancy did they do this? If it was born in them, then there was hope for her; if they reached it by toil, then, surely, there was hope for her.
CHAPTER XVII
HER FIRST DINNER OUT
Rose went to see the parts of the city which no true Chicagoan ever visits. That is to say, she spent Sunday in the park, admiring with pathetic fortitude the sward, the curving drives, and the bridges and the statues, in company with the lowly and nameless multitude—she even crowded in to see the animals.
She had intended to get back to church, conformable to Mary's programme, which was to start in St. James, and go in rotation to all the great churches and hear the choirs; but it happened that on this first Sunday there was a fine west wind, and the three-masters were setting sail to the north close inshore, and when Rose found she could sit on the park benches and see those mighty birds sail by she was content to do that and nothing more.
She had no cheap, easy and damnable comparisons. The passage of each purple-sailed lumber freighter was a poem to her. They floated noiselessly, effortlessly, on a beautiful sea of color. They drove like butterflies in dreams, their motive power indiscernible.
She sat with her chin in her palm, her big eyes, like beautiful windows, letting in the sunshine and the grace of ships and clouds without effort, fixed in an ecstasy of reverie. Around her streamed floods of the city's newly acquired residents, clerks, bookkeepers, typewriters, shop-girls, butcher's boys, salesmen, all fresh from the small towns and from the farms of the West. As the ships passed, she gave her attention to these people—recognized in them many familiar types. There was the smart young man, son of the tavernkeeper in Cyene. There was the blundering big wag, Ed Smith of Molasses Gap (assistant shipping clerk in Smith & Rydal's hardware store now). There were types like Mary, hearty, loud-voiced, cheery, wholesome, whom the city could never rob of their native twang. There were Tom and Grace and Elsa and Bert and all the rest of the bright, restless spirits of the country towns and wide-awake school districts come to try their fortunes in the great city like herself.
They wore bargains in ready-made clothing pretty generally, but it was up-to-date and they were all clean as a new dime. They laughed, shouted jokes, scuffled and pushed the girls, quite in the good country way. They made quaint and sometimes insolent remarks about the park and its adornments, assuming blasé airs as old residents, and pointing out to the later arrivals the various attractions.