I am growing to feel at home in this queer grimy city. Life is pretty laborious. We get to the studio at nine. I drape J’s model, an old German soldier posing for St. Peter. Then I go to my den and grind away till lunch. Last Saturday the studios were turned into fairy land. A dainty table was spread and fourteen leaders of Chicago’s “sassiety” were invited to meet me at luncheon. Mrs. Pretyman, who gave the party, proved a wonderful decorator. All the working details of the rooms were hidden under soft draperies brought out from dark chests and drawers. In J’s studio his portraits of Uncle Sam and Julia Richards were hung, also his new sea babies and the big ceiling panel of cupids with apple blossoms. After luncheon, excellent music and hosts of people. It was as well done as it could have been in London or Paris, a perfect fête d’atelier.
Chicago, May, 1888.
I like the place, I like the people, I love the civic spirit here, but I can never like the climate. Thermometer dropped forty degrees yesterday in eight hours. The lake has as many moods as I have, with the difference that all are beautiful,—storm, squall and sun. Lake Michigan is as handsome as the Mediterranean, but it lacks salt,—salt, the savor of life. This morning to hear David Swing preach. He poured out vials of bitterness against the narrow doctrines of the Puritans. I have sold my story “Phil Owens” to the American for one hundred dollars. Reginald De Koven is the editor. Anna De K. has been kinder than kind. I meet delightful people at her house. I am writing the Vampire story for Oscar Wilde’s magazine. All the women in the house are reading my “Mammon” in Lippincott’s.
[To Laura Richards.]
Chicago, May, 1889.
The last of my lectures to-night. Want to know the titles? P.G. signifies pretty good.
Literature of New England. P.G.
Our Southern Literature. P.G.
The West in Literature.
The Metropolitan School (New York). P.G.
Has America produced a Poet? P.G.
English Poets.
English Novelists. P.G.
France in Literature To-day.
Dawn of Russian Literature. P.G.
Contemporaneous Russian Writers. P.D.G.!
In all the winter’s cramming for these talks, the books I have enjoyed most are Gogol’s “Taras Bulba” and Walter Pater’s “Marius, the Epicurean.” It’s been a beast of a grind to prepare so many, but how I have enjoyed it! I am very happy and busy since I began my hard work. All the devil blues vanished. They came of the fiends ennui and idleness, bara boom, bara boom!
This, my first lecture course, was held at the house of our friends, Mr. and Mrs. George Armour. The talks were given two evenings a week during Lent. In the audience were some of the men who had created Chicago,—Marshall Field, John Crerar, Charles Farwell, Wirt Dexter, Franklin MacVeagh, Potter Palmer, and scions of the powerful Pullman, Deering, and McCormick clans. The generation to which these men belonged loved their city as other men love a favorite child, with a passionate devotion and a pride I have never known equaled. That is the secret of Chicago’s strength; it is founded upon love, the strongest thing in the world. With these merchant princes came their wives and daughters, hardly less active than they in shaping the city’s social and artistic life. What a clever, brilliant group of women they were! By common consent Mrs. Potter Palmer was the acclaimed leader among them. She was greatly beloved and treated like a little queen.
Bertha Honoré Palmer was handsome, elegant, and distinguished, but so were many other women of her set: what made her preëminent among them was a rare gift of leadership combined with great executive ability. After the terrible fire of 1871, her husband, like other prominent business men, found himself a heavy loser from the disaster. It was at this time that the property which later became the Lake Shore Drive came into the market. When a great slice of this land was offered to Mr. Palmer, it seemed a hopeless proposition and he decided to turn it down. His wife, however, persuaded him to make the investment; she had the vision to foresee that what was then mere waste land on the borders of Lake Michigan was destined to become the fashionable quarter of the city. Mr. Palmer, who was much older than his wife, made a will that for chivalry is unsurpassed. After leaving the larger part of his immense fortune to his wife, he added a clause setting aside a certain sum of money, the income from which should be paid to Mrs. Palmer’s husband, in case she should marry again.