"I don't think it can be denied," pursued Fairchild, tranquilly, "that new-comers are pretty well received here, whether they come to stay or to pass on or to go back. All that a man has to do, in order to insure good treatment, is to put a certain valuation on himself. That done, the more he claims, the more he receives; we take him at his own figure. The more I think of it, the more I am astonished at so much humility among people who have accomplished such great results. Commercially, we feel our own footing; socially, we are rather abashed by the pretensions that any new arrival chooses to make. We are a little afraid of him, and, to tell the truth, we are a little afraid of each other."
"H'm," said Winthrop, rather grimly; "Boston goes farther than that. Some of our great lights are almost afraid of themselves."
"I've noticed," remarked Mrs. Floyd, "that there is a good deal of watching and waiting for cues—people of plain origin who are beginning to take upon themselves the forms of social organization." She spoke like a princess of the blood-royal.
"That is the point," said Fairchild. "Individually, we may be of a rather humble grade of atoms, but we are crystallizing into a compound that is going to exercise a tremendous force. To him that hath eyes this crystallization, this organization, is the great thing to note just now."
"I acknowledge to have seen the ferment of activity, as they call it," said Winthrop.
"You may have seen the boiling of the kettle," returned Fairchild, "but you have hardly seen the force that feeds the flame. The big buildings are all well enough, and the big crowds in the streets, and the reports of the banks and railways and the Board of Trade. But there is something, now, beyond and behind all that."
"Let me tell Winthrop," broke in Mrs. Floyd. "Since I can't take him to our club, I must bring the club to him. At our last meeting"—there was a sub-acid relish in all this—"it developed that the present intellectual situation in Chicago is precisely that of Florence in the days of the-the—"
"Medici," suggested Ogden.
"Yes, the Medici," said Ann Wilde, loudly. She looked at him with a sharp aversion; he seemed to be taking part in her sister's joke. "That's just exactly what my paper said; the Florence of the Medici after the dispersal of the Greek scholars from Constantinople by the Turks."
"Oh, murder!" said Walworth to himself; "what will Ann rig up next?"