e
full size. Once or twice Doria, who sat on my left, lowered her eyes
disapprovingly. At her age, her mother would have been shocked; her
grandmother would have blushed from toes to forehead; her
great-grandmother might have fainted. But Doria, a Twentieth Century
product, on the Committee of a Maternity Home and a Rescue Laundry,
merely looked down her nose . . . I gathered that Liosha, for all her
yearning to shoot, flay alive, crucify and otherwise annoy her enemies,
did not greatly regret the loss of the distinguished young Albanian
cutthroat who was her affianced. Had he lived she would have spent the
rest of her days in saying, like Melisande, "I am not happy." She would
have been an instrument of pleasure, a producer of children, a slaving
drudge, while he went triumphantly about, a predatory ravisher, among
the scattered Bulgarian peasantry. In fact, she expressed a
whole-hearted detestation for her betrothed. I am pretty sure, too, that
the death of her father did not leave in her life the aching gap that it
might have done.

You see, it came to this. Her father, an American-Albanian, wanted to
run with the hare of barbarism and hunt with the hounds of civilisation.
His daughter (woman the world over) was all for hunting. He had spent
twenty years in America. By a law of gravitation, natural only in that
Melting Pot of Nations, Chicago, he had come across an Albanian
wife. . . .

Chicago is the Melting Pot of the nations of the world. Let me tell you
a true tale. It has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery Chayne or
Liosha--except perhaps to shew that there is no reason why a Tierra del
Fuegan foundling should not run across his long-lost brother on Michigan
Avenue, and still less reason why Albanian male should not meet Albanian
female in Armour's stockyards. And besides, considering that I was egged
on, as I said on the first page, to write these memoirs, I really don't
see why I should not put into them anything I choose.

An English novelist of my acquaintance visiting Chicago received a
representative of a great daily newspaper who desired to interview him.
The interviewer was a typical American reporter, blue-eyed, high
cheekboned, keen, nervous, finely strung, courteous, intensely alive,
desirous to get to the heart of my friend's mystery, and charmingly
responsive to his frank welcome. They talked. My friend, to give the
young man his story, discoursed on Chicago's amazingly solved problem of
the co