beach, a swampy river edged with wild onion grass, and an Indian trail.
The spectacular presence of the immense modern city at times offended Calvin Clarke and antagonized him; it seemed to him that this city ought not to be. He would not have had the lake shore return to be a careening place for Algonquin canoes; he would not have had it return to the village of three quarters of a century ago. He could willingly allow a city to be here, but it ought to be a "western" city, raw, crude, naïve—the city of the fire or, at most, of the pompous, gaudy World's Fair which had brought Calvin's parents to Chicago for their single westward journey and to their enduring, quiet amusement. But here was a midland metropolis, far more vital to America to-day than Boston; the nation's physical center, indeed, the heart of its transportation, and of its commerce the core.
No one, a Clarke or otherwise, to-day could feel amusement at Chicago; and the offense, which Calvin felt, held a large share of fascination which kept him in the city, hate it as he might. For here he moved among people who, though he called them many-bloods and mongrels and despised them, created a current at this dynamo center of national life which made that of people of his own blood, in his own home, feel feeble in comparison.
Why, else, had he remained here? Why, else, had he not found, among girls of his own blood and breeding, a wife, as had his fathers who, generation after generation, had dwelt in the old home beside the Merrimac?
He did not think of himself as having come to Chicago to seek women of another sort; he realized, only, that if he had found a wife from among the cool, constrained, self-contained neighbors in Massachusetts, he would have
