So Big Edna Ferber (most romantic novels txt) 📖

gloom. At the right the white tower of the Wrigley building rose wraithlike against a background of purple sky. Just this side of it a swarm of impish electric lights grinned their message in scarlet and white. In white:

Trade At

then blackness, while you waited against your will. In red:

The Fair

Blackness again. Then, in a burst of both colours, in bigger letters, and in a blaze that hurled itself at your eyeballs, momentarily shutting out tower, sky, and street:

Save Money

Straight ahead the hut of the Adams Street L station in midair was a Venetian bridge with the black canal of asphalt flowing sluggishly beneath. The reflection of cafeteria and cigar-shop windows on either side were slender shafts of light along the canal. An enchanting sight. Dirk thought suddenly that Dallas was a good deal like that⁠—like Chicago. A mixture of grandeur and cheapness; of tawdriness and magnificence; of splendour and ugliness.

“Nice,” said Dallas. A long breath. She was a part of all this.

“Yes.” He felt an outsider. “Want a sandwich? Are you hungry?”

“I’m starved.”

They had sandwiches and coffee at an all-night one-arm lunch room because Dallas said her face was too dirty for a restaurant and she didn’t want to bother to wash it. She was more than ordinarily companionable that night; a little tired; less buoyant and independent than usual. This gave her a little air of helplessness⁠—of fatigue⁠—that aroused all his tenderness. Her smile gave him a warm rush of pure happiness⁠—until he saw her smile in exactly the same way at the pimply young man who lorded it over the shining nickel coffee container, as she told him that his coffee was grand.

XIX

The things that had mattered so vitally didn’t seem to be important, somehow, now. The people who had seemed so desirable had become suddenly insignificant. The games he had played appeared silly games. He was seeing things through Dallas O’Mara’s wise, beauty-loving eyes. Strangely enough, he did not realize that this girl saw life from much the same angle as that at which his mother regarded it. In the last few years his mother had often offended him by her attitude toward these rich and powerful friends of his⁠—their ways, their games, their amusements, their manners. And her way of living in turn offended him. On his rare visits to the farm it seemed to him there was always some drab dejected female in the kitchen or living room or on the porch⁠—a woman with broken teeth and comic shoes and tragic eyes⁠—drinking great draughts of coffee and telling her woes to Selina⁠—Sairey Gampish ladies smelling unpleasantly of peppermint and perspiration and poverty. “And he ain’t had a lick of work since November⁠—”

“You don’t say! That’s terrible!”

He wished she wouldn’t.

Sometimes old Aug Hempel drove out there and Dirk would come upon the two snickering wickedly together about something that he knew concerned the North Shore crowd.

It had been years since Selina had said, sociably, “What did they have for dinner, Dirk? H’m?”

“Well⁠—soup⁠—”

“Nothing before the soup?”

“Oh, yeh. Some kind of a⁠—one of those canapé things, you know. Caviar.”

“My! Caviar!”

Sometimes Selina giggled like a naughty girl at things that Dirk had taken quite seriously. The fox hunts, for example. Lake Forest had taken to fox hunting, and the Tippecanoe crowd kept kennels. Dirk had learned to ride⁠—pretty well. An Englishman⁠—a certain Captain Stokes-Beatty⁠—had initiated the North Shore into the mysteries of fox hunting. Huntin’. The North Shore learned to say nec’s’ry and conservat’ry. Captain Stokes-Beatty was a tall, bowlegged, and somewhat horse-faced young man, remote in manner. The nice Farnham girl seemed fated to marry him. Paula had had a hunt breakfast at Stormwood and it had been very successful, though the American men had balked a little at the devilled kidneys. The food had been patterned as far as possible after the pale flabby viands served at English hunt breakfasts and ruined in an atmosphere of lukewarm steam. The women were slim and perfectly tailored but wore their hunting clothes a trifle uneasily and self-consciously like girls in their first low-cut party dresses. Most of the men had turned stubborn on the subject of pink coats, but Captain Stokes-Beatty wore his handsomely. The fox⁠—a worried and somewhat dejected-looking animal⁠—had been shipped in a crate from the south and on being released had a way of sitting sociably in an Illinois corn field instead of leaping fleetly to cover. At the finish you had a feeling of guilt, as though you had killed a cockroach.

Dirk had told Selina about it, feeling rather magnificent. A fox hunt.

“A fox hunt! What for?”

“For! Why, what’s any fox hunt for?”

“I can’t imagine. They used to be for the purpose of ridding a fox-infested country of a nuisance. Have the foxes been bothering ’em out in Lake Forest?”

“Now, Mother, don’t be funny.” He told her about the breakfast.

“Well, but it’s so silly, Dirk. It’s smart to copy from another country the things that that country does better than we do. England does gardens and wood-fires and dogs and tweeds and walking shoes and pipes and leisure better than we do. But those lukewarm steamy breakfasts of theirs! It’s because they haven’t gas, most of them. No Kansas or Nebraska farmer’s wife would stand for one of their kitchens⁠—not for a minute. And the hired man would balk at such bacon.” She giggled.

“Oh, well, if you’re going to talk like that.”

But Dallas O’Mara felt much the same about these things. Dallas, it appeared, had been something of a fad with the North Shore society crowd after she had painted Mrs. Robinson Gilman’s portrait. She had been invited to dinners and luncheons and dances, but their doings, she told Dirk, had bored her.

“They’re nice,” she said, “but they don’t have much fun. They’re all trying to be something they’re not. And that’s such hard work. The women were always explaining that they lived in Chicago because their husband’s business was here. They all do things pretty well⁠—dance