They reached Chicago the next morning, and at noon Hobart knocked at the door of Harley's room at the hotel.
"There is some idle time this afternoon," said Hobart, "and Tremaine and I have asked Miss Morgan to go driving. She has accepted, but it takes four to make a party, and you are the lucky fourth."
He allowed no protestations, and, after all, Harley, who had been under much strain for some time, was not averse to an hour or two in the fresh air.
"Miss Morgan has never been in Chicago before," said Hobart, "and it is our duty to show it to her."
Hobart, who drove, put Miss Morgan upon the seat beside him, and Tremaine and Harley, who sat behind, occupied what was to some extent the post of disadvantage; but Tremaine, safe in his years, would not permit the rear seat to be neglected. He talked constantly, and her face, of necessity, was often turned to them, giving Harley opportunity to see that it had a most becoming flush.
She had an eager interest in everything—the tall buildings, the wind-swept streets, and the glimpses of the wide, green lake. Harley saw that Chicago bulked much more largely in her imagination than in his, and he began to fear that he had been neglectful; it was the most concrete expression of the West, and, as the greatest achievement of a new people in city building, it deserved attention for qualities peculiarly its own, and there could be no doubt either of Miss Morgan's admiration or pleasure. She was seeking neither for the old nor the picturesque, which are not always synonymous, but was in full sympathy with the fresh, active, and, on the whole, joyous life around her. It was sufficient to her to be a part of the human tide, and to feel by contact the keenness and zest of the human endeavor. She was not troubled by the absence of ruins.
"But the city is flat and unpicturesque," once said Harley.
"All the better," she rejoined. "I have so much of silence and grandeur in Idaho that I enjoy the sight of two million people at work on this billiard-table that is Chicago. I like my own kind, I like to talk to it and have it talk to me. I suppose that the mountains have a voice, but the voice is too big for perpetual conversation with a poor little mortal like myself. After a while I want to come down to my own level, and I find it here."
Harley glanced at her. The flush was still on her face, and there was a soft light in her eyes. He could not doubt that she was sincere, and she started in his mind thoughts that were not altogether new to him; he wondered if excessive reverence for the antique did not indicate a detachment from the present, and therefore from life itself, and, as a logical sequence, a lack of feeling for one's own kind. He had heard an elderly man from Chicago, dragged about by his wife and daughters in Rome, exclaim in disgust, "I would not give a single street corner in Chicago for all Rome!" The elderly Chicagoan had been drowned in derisive laughter, but Harley could understand his point of view, and now, as he remembered him, he had for him a fellow-feeling.
Hobart took them through many streets, one much like another, and then over a white asphalt drive beside the great lake. The shores were low, but to Harley the lake had the calm restlessness and expanse of the sea, and the wind had the same keen tang that comes over miles of salt. He saw the girl's eyes linger upon the vast sheet of green, and the incipient hostility that he felt towards her disappeared for a time. Somewhere in her nature, strait though the place might be, there was a feeling for fine things, and he felt a kindred glow.