L

Wilson avenue, Chicago, is not merely an avenue but a district; not only
a district but a state of mind; not a state of mind alone but a
condition of morals. For that matter, it is none of these things so much
as a mode of existence. If you know your Chicago--which you probably
don't--(_sotto voce_ murmur, Heaven forbid!)--you are aware that, long
ago, Wilson Avenue proper crept slyly around the corner and achieved a
clandestine alliance with big glittering Sheridan Road; which escapade
changed the demure thoroughfare into Wilson Avenue improper.

When one says "A Wilson Avenue girl," the mind--that is, the Chicago
mind--pictures immediately a slim, daring, scented, exotic creature
dressed in next week's fashions; wise-eyed; doll-faced; rapacious. When
chiffon stockings are worn Wilson Avenue's hosiery is but a film over
the flesh. Aigrettes and mink coats are its winter uniform. A feverish
district this, all plate glass windows and delicatessen dinners and
one-room-and-kitchenette apartments, where light housekeepers take
their housekeeping too lightly.

At six o'clock you are likely to see Wilson Avenue scurrying about in
its mink coat and its French heels and its crepe frock, assembling its
haphazard dinner. Wilson Avenue food, as displayed in the ready-cooked
shops, resembles in a startling degree the Wilson Avenue ladies
themselves: highly coloured, artificial, chemically treated, tempting to
the eye, but unnutritious. In and out of the food emporia these dart,
buying dabs of this and bits of that. Chromatic viands. Vivid scarlet,
orange, yellow, green. A strip of pimento here. A mound of mayonnaise
there. A green pepper stuffed with such burden of deceit as no honest
green pepper ever was meant to hold. Two eggs. A quarter-pound of your
best creamery butter. An infinitesimal bottle of cream. "_And_ what
else?" says the plump woman in the white bib-apron, behind the counter.
"_And_ what else?" Nothing. I guess that'll be all. Mink coats prefer to
dine out.

As a cripple displays his wounds and sores, proudly, so Wilson Avenue
throws open its one-room front door with a grandiloquent gesture as it
boasts, "Two hundred and fifty a month!" Shylock, purchasing a
paper-thin slice of pinky ham in Wilson Avenue, would know his own early
Venetian transaction to have been pure philanthropy.

It took Raymond and Cora Atwater twelve years to reach this Wilson
Avenue, though they carried it with them all the way. They