So Big Edna Ferber (most romantic novels txt) 📖

Women, feeling the ardour of that dark glance turned upon them, were likely to credit him with feelings toward themselves of which he was quite innocent. They did not know that the glance and its effect were mere matters of pigmentation and eye-conformation. Then, too, the gaze of a man who talks little is always more effective than that of one who is loquacious.

Selina, in her black silk dress, and her plain black hat, and her sensible shoes was rather a quaint little figure amongst all those vivacious, bevoiled, and beribboned mammas. But a distinctive little figure, too. Dirk need not be ashamed of her. She eyed the rather paunchy, prosperous, middle-aged fathers and thought, with a pang, how much handsomer Pervus would have been than any of these, if only he could have lived to see this day. Then, involuntarily, she wondered if this day would ever have occurred, had Pervus lived. Chided herself for thinking thus.

When he returned to Chicago, Dirk went into the office of Hollis & Sprague, Architects. He thought himself lucky to work with this firm, for it was doing much to guide Chicago’s taste in architecture away from the box car. Already Michigan Boulevard’s skyline soared somewhat above the grimly horizontal. But his work there was little more than that of draughtsman, and his weekly stipend could hardly be dignified by the term of salary. But he had large ideas about architecture and he found expression for his suppressed feelings on his weekends spent with Selina at the farm. “Baroque” was the word with which he dismissed the new Beachside Hotel, north. He said the new Lincoln Park bandstand looked like an igloo. He said that the city council ought to order the Potter Palmer mansion destroyed as a blot on the landscape, and waxed profane on the subject of the east face of the Public Library Building, down town.

“Never mind,” Selina assured him, happily. “It was all thrown up so hastily. Remember that just yesterday, or the day before, Chicago was an Indian fort, with tepees where towers are now, and mud wallows in place of asphalt. Beauty needs time to perfect it. Perhaps we’ve been waiting all these years for just such youngsters as you. And maybe some day I’ll be driving down Michigan Boulevard with a distinguished visitor⁠—Roelf Pool, perhaps. Why not? Let’s say Roelf Pool, the famous sculptor. And he’ll say, ‘Who designed that building⁠—the one that is so strong and yet so light? So gay and graceful, and yet so reticent!’ And I’ll say, ‘Oh, that! That’s one of the earlier efforts of my son, Dirk DeJong.’ ”

But Dirk pulled at his pipe moodily; shook his head. “Oh, you don’t know, Mother. It’s so damned slow. First thing you know I’ll be thirty. And what am I! An office boy⁠—or little more than that⁠—at Hollis’s.”

During his university years Dirk had seen much of the Arnolds, Eugene and Paula, but it sometimes seemed to Selina that he avoided these meetings⁠—these parties and weekends. She was content that this should be so, for she guessed that the matter of money held him back. She thought it was well that he should realize the difference now. Eugene had his own car⁠—one of five in the Arnold garage. Paula, too, had hers. She had been one of the first Chicago girls to drive a gas car; had breezed about Chicago’s boulevards in one when she had been little more than a child in short skirts. At the wheel she was dexterous, daredevil, incredibly relaxed. Her fascination for Dirk was strong. Selina knew that, too. In the last year or two he had talked very little of Paula and that, Selina knew, meant that he was hard hit.

Sometimes Paula and Eugene drove out to the farm, making the distance from their new north-shore house to the DeJong place far south in some breathtaking number of minutes. Eugene would appear in rakish cap, loose London coat, knickers, queer brogans with an English look about them, a carefully careless looseness about the hang and fit of his jacket. Paula did not affect sports clothes for herself. She was not the type, she said. Slim, dark, vivacious, she wore slinky clothes⁠—crêpes, chiffons. Her feet were slim in sheer silk stockings and slippers with buckles. Her eyes were languorous, lovely. She worshipped luxury and said so.

“I’ll have to marry money,” she declared. “Now that they’ve finished calling poor Grandpa a beef-baron and taken I don’t know how many millions away from him, we’re practically on the streets.”

“You look it!” from Dirk; and there was bitterness beneath his light tone.

“Well, it’s true. All this silly muckraking in the past ten years or more. Poor Father! Of course Granddad was pur-ty rough, let me tell you. I read some of the accounts of that last indictment⁠—the 1910 one⁠—and I must say I gathered that dear old Aug made Jesse James look like a philanthropist. I should think, at his age, he’d be a little scared. After all, when you’re over seventy you’re likely to have some doubts and fears about punishment in the next world. But not a grand old pirate like Grandfather. He’ll sack and burn and plunder until he goes down with the ship. And it looks to me as if the old boat had a pretty strong list to starboard right now. Father says himself that unless a war breaks, or something, which isn’t at all likely, the packing industry is going to spring a leak.”

“Elaborate figure of speech,” murmured Eugene. The four of them⁠—Paula, Dirk, Eugene, and Selina⁠—, were sitting on the wide screened porch that Selina had had built at the southwest corner of the house. Paula was, of course, in the couch-swing. Occasionally she touched one slim languid foot to the floor and gave indolent impetus to the couch.

“It is, rather, isn’t it? Might as well finish it, then. Darling Aug’s been the grand old captain right through the vi’age. Dad’s never been more than a