Suddenly Miss Parker whisked around the corner of a vacant lot into a cross street as desolate as it was lonely. The defective boarding of the rotting plank walk necessitated gingerly progress.
“This new cosmopolis has been in such a hurry that it has neglected to make its toilette,” Erard remarked.
“I wish that you hadn’t come to Chicago!” Miss Parker flamed out.
“Why! I am a most perfervid admirer of all I have seen except the lonely stretches in the streets and the holes in the sidewalks.”
“You are only amusing yourself and getting material for a bundle of epigrams. You haven’t any sympathy or understanding. I hate to see you using your eye-glass on the people who made all this and are making it!”
“Am I so lost?” Erard replied with an amused laugh.
“You people in art and lovers of new ideas really talk a lot of nonsense. I have heard enough of it to know. But here we are. Thank you for your escort, and good-night.”
Erard turned back to the boulevard. Plunging his hands into his pockets and tying the hood of his cape over his head, he prepared for a long tramp through the silent city. On, on he sauntered, at the loitering pace of a Parisian, past the huge isolated houses with tidy front walks of patented concrete, each block squared artificially to resemble stone, but carrying somewhere the tell-tale firm-mark in brass; past the narrow wedges of high apartment houses, faced with pretentious stone and finished in the frank homeliness of unburnt brick, with scaffolded ends looming barrack-like in the alleys; past the rows of low brick stores, built out like booths from the old line of retiring wood-cottages. This section of compromise between business and home was most disfiguring of all in its ragged expression. Erard felt relieved when the square fronts of the business blocks began to loom up in the fog and smoke of the lower city. Here an enormous windowless wall of an armoury; next door the thin sides of a carriage factory; further on the spidery lines of a hotel. Thus for two miles until the sky-scrapers towered in the chill fog.
“Superb, superb,” he murmured to himself. “I must have walked five miles, and not a building, not a dog-hutch, where there is an idea expressed beyond size, convenience, and either the possession of money or the desire for it. It is a new race, a new world.”
It had roused his curiosity, this Chicago, from the first peep he had had on the train of the roaring city. Miss Parker was quite wrong in imagining him hostile to the place or its people. He was wondering over them perpetually, as a man would wonder who is enabled by a powerful lens to take into his consciousness a new planet where he finds that his ideas of propriety have been entirely reversed. Such a novel discovery could cause in him neither pain nor pleasure. If some one should come along the shore of this new world and bellow at him that he was beholding the last utterance of creation, he would laugh good-humouredly at the newcomer’s provinciality.