ake. Harley saw
that Chicago bulked much more largely in her imagination than in his,
and he began to fear that he had been neglectful; it was the most
concrete expression of the West, and, as the greatest achievement of a
new people in city building, it deserved attention for qualities
peculiarly its own, and there could be no doubt either of Miss Morgan's
admiration or pleasure. She was seeking neither for the old nor the
picturesque, which are not always synonymous, but was in full sympathy
with the fresh, active, and, on the whole, joyous life around her. It
was sufficient to her to be a part of the human tide, and to feel by
contact the keenness and zest of the human endeavor. She was not
troubled by the absence of ruins.

"But the city is flat and unpicturesque," once said Harley.

"All the better," she rejoined. "I have so much of silence and grandeur
in Idaho that I enjoy the sight of two million people at work on this
billiard-table that is Chicago. I like my own kind, I like to talk to it
and have it talk to me. I suppose that the mountains have a voice, but
the voice is too big for perpetual conversation with a poor little
mortal like myself. After a while I want to come down to my own level,
and I find it here."

Harley glanced at her. The flush was still on her face, and there was a
soft light in her eyes. He could not doubt that she was sincere, and she
started in his mind thoughts that were not altogether new to him; he
wondered if excessive reverence for the antique did not indicate a
detachment from the present, and therefore from life itself, and, as a
logical sequence, a lack of feeling for one's own kind. He had heard an
elderly man from Chicago, dragged about by his wife and daughters in
Rome, exclaim in disgust, "I would not give a single street corner in
Chicago for all Rome!" The elderly Chicagoan had been drowned in
derisive laughter, but Harley could understand his point of view, and
now, as he remembered him, he had for him a fellow-feeling.

Hobart took them through many streets, one much like another, and then
over a white asphalt drive beside the great lake. The shores were low,
but to Harley the lake had the calm restlessness and expanse of the sea,
and the wind had the same keen tang that comes over miles of salt. He
saw the girl's eyes linger upon the vast sheet of green, and the
incipient hostility that he felt towards her disappeared for a time.
Somewhere in her nature, strait thou