e in this centre
of expanding race energy. Yet he would point out to Milly appreciatively
on their Sunday walks the acres of new building growing mushroomlike
from the sandy soil, with the miles of tangled railroad tracks, the
forest of smoking chimneys, and the ever widening canopy of black smoke.
It was all ugly and dirty, the girl thought. She preferred the drive
along the lake shore, and the Bowman's new palace with its machicolated
cornice.

It was all business, intensely business: business affected even social
moments. Later, when Milly became sophisticated enough to generalize,
she complained that the men were "all one kind"; they could "talk of
nothing but business to a woman." Even their physique, heavy and flabby,
showed the office habit, in contrast with the bony and ruddy Englishmen,
who drifted through the city from time to time. That Chicago was a
huge pool into which all races and peoples drained,--that was a fact
of which Milly was only dimly conscious. "You see so many queer,
foreign-looking people on the street," she might observe. "Polacks and
Dagoes!... Ugh.... Wish they'd stay at home!" Horatio would growl in
response. Milly supposed they came from the "Yards," where hordes of
these savage-looking foreigners were employed in the disagreeable task
of slaughtering cattle. Their activity was only too evident certain days
when the wind veered to the southwest and filled the city with an awful
stench.

Of what it all meant, this huddling together of strange peoples from the
four quarters of the globe, Milly never took the time to think. She
never had the least conception of what it was,--the many miles of bricks
and mortar, the tangled railroads, the ceaseless roar of the great city
like the din of a huge factory. Here was the mill and the market--here
was LIFE in its raw material. When she crossed the murky, slimy river,
as she had occasion to do almost daily, after the removal to the North
Side, she thought merely how dingy and dirty the place was, and what a
pity it was one had to go through such a mess to reach the best shops
and the other quarters of the city where "nice" people lived. She saw
neither the beauty nor the significance of those grimy warehouses
thrusting up along the muddy river amid the steam and the smoke--caverns
that concealed hardware, tools, groceries, lumber,--all the raw
protoplasm of life. An artist remarked once to Milly, "It's like
Hell--and like Paradise, all in one,--thi