Safe, desirable, suddenly dear. No work for a woman, this. Well, perhaps they were right.
Down Wabash Avenue, with the L trains thundering overhead and her horses, frightened and uneasy with the unaccustomed roar and clangour of traffic, stepping high and swerving stiffly, grotesque and angular in their movements. A dowdy farm woman and a sunburned boy in a rickety vegetable wagon absurdly out of place in this canyon of cobblestones, shops, street-cars, drays, carriages, bicycles, pedestrians. It was terribly hot.
The boy’s eyes popped with excitement and bewilderment.
“Pretty soon,” Selina said. The muscles showed white beneath the skin of her jaw. “Pretty soon. Prairie Avenue. Great big houses, and lawns, all quiet.” She even managed a smile.
“I like it better home.”
Prairie Avenue at last, turning in at Sixteenth Street. It was like calm after a storm. Selina felt battered, spent.
There were groceries near Eighteenth, and at the other cross-streets—Twenty-second, Twenty-sixth, Thirty-first, Thirty-fifth. They were passing the great stone houses of Prairie Avenue of the ’90s. Turrets and towers, cornices and cupolas, hump-backed conservatories, porte-cochères, bow windows—here lived Chicago’s rich that had made their riches in pork and wheat and dry goods; the selling of necessities to a city that clamoured for them.
