with him, correcting his false
impression, she was willing to procrastinate. She wanted him to love
her, to pay her all those innumerable little attentions which he
managed with such faultless delicacy. To say: "No, Mr. Corthell, I do
not love you, I will never be your wife," would--this time--be final.
He would go away, and she had no intention of allowing him to do that.

But abruptly her reflections were interrupted. While she thought it all
over she had been looking out of the carriage window through a little
space where she had rubbed the steam from the pane. Now, all at once,
the strange appearance of the neighbourhood as the carriage turned
north from out Jackson Street into La Salle, forced itself upon her
attention. She uttered an exclamation.

The office buildings on both sides of the street were lighted from
basement to roof. Through the windows she could get glimpses of clerks
and book-keepers in shirt-sleeves bending over desks. Every office was
open, and every one of them full of a feverish activity. The sidewalks
were almost as crowded as though at noontime. Messenger boys ran to and
fro, and groups of men stood on the corners in earnest conversation.
The whole neighbourhood was alive, and this, though it was close upon
one o'clock in the morning!

"Why, what is it all?" she murmured.

Corthell could not explain, but all at once Page cried:

"Oh, oh, I know. See this is Jackson and La Salle streets. Landry was
telling me. The 'commission district,' he called it. And these are the
brokers' offices working overtime--that Helmick deal, you know."

Laura looked, suddenly stupefied. Here it was, then, that other drama,
that other tragedy, working on there furiously, fiercely through the
night, while she and all those others had sat there in that atmosphere
of flowers and perfume, listening to music. Suddenly it loomed
portentous in the eye of her mind, terrible, tremendous. Ah, this drama
of the "Provision Pits," where the rush of millions of bushels of
grain, and the clatter of millions of dollars, and the tramping and the
wild shouting of thousands of men filled all the air with the noise of
battle! Yes, here was drama in deadly earnest--drama and tragedy and
death, and the jar of mortal fighting. And the echoes of it invaded the
very sanctuary of art, and cut athwart the music of Italy and the
cadence of polite conversation, and the shock of it endured when all
the world should have slept, and galvan