“He is bringing out a book, I believe. He sent me the proof, but John had no interest in it, and I was too tired after the day’s hurly-burly to do more than glance over it. The picture, they say, was a great success in the Champ de Mars and at Berlin. It’s on its way over now.”
“I think,” Miss Parker remarked irrelevantly, “that when we are landed in one place, the rest of the world should sink out of sight,—so there need be no pillars of salt along the road.”
“Chicago is just the place for you then,” Mrs. Wilbur answered wistfully, looking down the miles of Michigan Avenue. “When you are in it, you are cut off by a vacuum, as it were, from the surrounding world. You can’t see outside, and you hear the voices of the others only faintly.”
“That sounds too much like a prison to be true.”
Mrs. Wilbur’s face looked as if she were convinced that it was a prison, in certain aspects at least.
CHAPTER II
Miss Parker decided soon that if Chicago were a prison, it was a very nice kind of prison to visit. Mrs. Wilbur’s friends did all manner of pleasant things to entertain her. Each one seemed to feel responsible for the good name of Chicago hospitality, and if the people were a little eager to hear nice things about their home, Miss Parker was amply able to satisfy them.
On the appointed Monday afternoon the two friends sallied forth for the meeting of the Monday Club. Molly Parker watched with amusement the flutter of excitement with which Mrs. Wilbur clutched her little package of manuscript, when, on entering the room, they met the subdued hum of feminine voices on earnest purposes bent. The first paper was on Flaubert, by an important “social light” (as Mrs. Wilbur whispered to her companion), and a great worker for the cause of woman as distinguished from women. Molly Parker knew nothing about Flaubert beyond the fact that he had written at least one naughty book. The paper was not written to inform, but to entertain and impress. There were mysterious sentences about psychology and social movements. Suddenly it was all over. Much talking among the rows of women ensued; the president—a little delicate-faced lady—called for criticism and remarks from the floor. A few ladies berated poor Flaubert roundly and took exception to some of the opinions in the paper, as “being dangerously subversive of the home.” There seemed to be a general delicacy about speaking improprieties even about an improper book. So the president called for Mrs. Wilbur’s paper—On Some Tendencies among the Impressionists.
Mrs. Wilbur’s paper was earnest, enthusiastic, a trifle schoolgirly in its sounding periods. It caused much more discussion than poor Flaubert. Many of the women had seen the impressionists in Europe, and some owned Pissarros and Monets, and had “views.” Molly Parker found herself in a stirring atmosphere of art criticism. Then tea followed; women came up to congratulate Mrs. Wilbur and to meet her friend. Molly was charmed by their cordiality, their unpretentious good sense and power.
“Why, it’s great!” she exclaimed later, as they drove back, “to find all these fashionable women in such stunning clothes taking up these serious interests.”