The North Side in the city of Chicago may put on airs as a residence district, and the South Side may put on airs as containing the heart of the vast business district of Chicago, but the West Side is as big as the two of them, and its population contains a large number of exceedingly rich men, who, like the rich men of the other sides, are as content with themselves for being "self-made," are just as grumpy, and with as many weaknesses. Some of these West Side rich men live on Ashland Avenue. There certainly lived and lives Mr. Jason B. Grampus, a great speculator, whose home has its palatial aspects.
West Side millionaires, like those on the other sides, are not infrequently the fathers of fair daughters. Sometimes they have only one daughter, and no sons at all, and in such cases the daughter becomes a very desirable acquisition for a young man of tact and enterprise. There is no law of nature which makes a millionaire's daughter less really lovable than other young women, and there is no law of nature which makes a young man who may fall in love with her, even though he be poor, a fortune-hunter and a blackguard. The young man who has a social position without money is in a perilous way. He may fall in love with a young woman with money, and then his motives will be impugned, especially by the parents. It depends altogether on the young man how he accepts the more or less anomalous position described. If he be strong, he adapts himself in one way; if he be weak, he does it in another.
Ned Simpson was not of the weaker sort, and he was desperately in love with the daughter of "old man Grampus." The fact that she would eventually be worth more than a million did not affect his love to its injury. He said frankly to himself that she was none the worse for that, but it must be asserted to his credit that he thought of her prospective money very little. He stood ready to take her penniless, on the instant. Unfortunately, he could not take her on any conditions. Mr. Grampus and Mrs. Grampus stood like mountains in his way.
Not that Simpson lacked social equality with the Grampus family. He was a young stockbroker, with expectations as yet unrealized, it is true, but with a good ancestry and with business popularity. By day he met old Grampus upon terms of equality. Old Grampus liked him, after a fashion. He had visited the Grampus house, had dined there often, had met the old lady with the purring ways, had met, also, the radiant daughter, Sylvia, and had fallen in love with the latter, deeply and irrevocably. He had made love cleverly and earnestly, as a fine man should, and had succeeded wonderfully.
Sylvia was as deeply in love with him as he was with her. They had solemnly and in all honesty entered into an agreement that they would remain true, each to the other, no matter what might come. Then he had approached the father, manfully explained the situation, and had encountered a reception which was a sight to see and an amazing thing to hear. The old man was striking when at his worst, and Simpson almost admired him for his command of explosive expletives. One likes to see almost anything done well. Simpson was ordered never to enter the house again. He contained himself pretty well; he made no promises, but he met that young woman almost every evening. Meanwhile, the young man and the old man met daily in a business way.
As a rule, the relations between a lover who has been figuratively kicked out of a house and the man who has figuratively kicked him out are somewhat strained. Still, young Simpson and old Grampus met down town in a business way, and it is only putting it fairly concerning Simpson to say that he showed a forgiving spirit—almost an impudently forgiving spirit, one might say. Light-hearted and careless as he seemed to be among his business associates, Simpson possessed a resolute character, and when he decided upon a course, adhered to it determinedly. He was not going to be desperate; he was not going overseas to "wed some savage woman, who should rear his dusky race"; but he was going to eventually have Miss Grampus, or know the reason why. He did not want to elope with the young woman; in fact, he felt that she wouldn't elope if he asked her, for she was fond of her father, and he knew that his end must be attained by vast diplomacy. Just how, he had not decided upon. But he felt his way vaguely.
"One thing is certain," he said to himself, "I must keep my temper and cultivate the old man."
He did cultivate Mr. Grampus, and did it so well that after a season the two would even lunch together. It was an anomalous happening, this lunching together, of a poor young man with a rich old one, who had refused a daughter's hand; but such things occur in the grotesque, huge Western money-mart. In Chicago there is a great gulf fixed between business and family relations. Grampus began to consider Simpson an excellent fellow—that is, as one to meet at luncheon, not as a son-in-law. A son-in-law should have money.
There was a skeleton in the Grampus closet, but it was not scandalous, and was never mentioned. Still, to old Mr. Grampus, the guilty one, the skeleton was real and terrible. He, the gruff, overbearing, successful man of business, the one beneath whose gaze clerks shuddered and stenographers turned pale, was afraid to go home at least four nights of the seven nights in the week. He was afraid to meet his wife.
A great club man was Mr. Grampus. He delighted in each evening spent with his old cronies, in the whist-playing, the reminiscences, the storytelling, the arguments, and the moderate smoking and drinking. Unfortunately, he could not endure well the taking into his system of anything alcoholic. He always became perfectly sober within three hours, but a punch or two would give a certain flaccidity to his legs, and when he reached his home the broad steps leading up to the vestibule seemed Alpine-like and perilous. He would almost say to himself, "Beware the pine-tree's withered branch, beware the awful avalanche." But after all it was not the danger of the ascent which really troubled him; it was what would assuredly happen after he had reached the summit. The disaster always came upon the plateau.