“No! Twenty-four last March. Five proposals in full form, three half proposals,—kind of suggestions,—four other things that might have come to something, but didn’t. There is hope still. I am looking hard for him, and when the right young man comes along, I won’t hesitate. Have you any likely young men in view?”
Mrs. Wilbur shook her head. “That is one thing Chicago hasn’t produced,—ideal young men with good fortunes suitable for ideal young women without fortunes. There’s Thornton Jennings, but he hasn’t any money. He is quite the nicest young man I know.”
“Then I must do something right off quick,” Molly Parker sighed, disliking doing anything definite as much as a discreet cat.
“What will you do?” Mrs. Wilbur asked thoughtfully.
“Teach kindergarten, I guess. I get on best with the kids. But tell me something about Chicago and the people. How did you come to know them?”
That was a long theme which occupied the two friends for the rest of the drive. Mrs. Wilbur explained how much her uncle Sebastian Anthon had helped them to get a start socially through some old friends, who were warmly devoted to him. And in Chicago one got to know enough people very soon. There was a certain social openness, and a willingness to take people for their personal value. Then John had proved unusually sympatico, had made friends easily.
She described the three sections of the city with their three distinct milieus. When the city was young, people settled away from the lake out of a superstition that the water was unhealthy,—“some miles in the interior where it is very hot, and where it is awful every way. Some day I will take you over there and show you the miles of shabby homes, that bear all over them the marks of not being in it.” Then she related “the pilgrimage of the successful.” These good people of the West Side, prospered in business, and desiring something more than narrow, high-stooped brick houses with black-walnut decorations, moved down to the lake; most, the very rich, to the south where land was to be had in plenty. Occasionally a family who had acute social aspirations moved again to the north into the little segment of lake shore. This northern settlement held itself as conservative and distinctly fashionable. “But the money is where we are, on the South Side—for the most part.”
Mrs. Wilbur recounted ironically, yet with genuine interest, their own experiences in Chicago. They aspired to “the society of progressive people of weight and wealth, who patronize art and music and education.” They were members of the Art Association, of the Society for the Support of Classical Music, and a dozen minor enterprises of a public-spirited nature. Then Mrs. Wilbur described the Woman’s Amalgamated Institute and the Monday Club, to which she had been recently elected.
“You see,” she concluded with a laugh, “the women foster the arts and sciences. We are making it all: we order a stock of ideas as you would get flowers from a florist. Next Monday I am to read my first paper,—on Modern French Art. You must come and hear me get off what Erard told us over there.”
“And Erard?” Molly Parker put in curiously.