s a
background. Amazingly enough, she succeeded in doing it. That was
because she tried for broad effects, and relied on one bit of detail for
her story. It was the face of a girl--a very tired and tawdry girl, of
sixteen, perhaps. On her face the look that the day's work had stamped
there was being wiped gently away by another look; a look that said
release, and a sweetheart, and an evening at the movies. Fanny, in some
miraculous way, got it.

She prowled in the Ghetto, and sketched those patient Jewish faces,
often grotesque, sometimes repulsive, always mobile. She wandered down
South Clark street, flaring with purple-white arc-lights, and looked in
at its windows that displayed a pawnbroker's glittering wares, or, just
next door, a flat-topped stove over which a white-capped magician whose
face smacked of the galley, performed deft tricks with a pancake turner.
"Southern chicken dinner," a lying sign read, "with waffles and real
maple syrup, 35 cents each." Past these windows promenaded the Clark
street women, hard-eyed, high-heeled, aigretted; on the street corners
loafed the Clark street men, blue-shaven, wearing checked suits, soiled
faun-topped shoes, and diamond scarf pins. And even as she watched them,
fascinated, they vanished. Clark street changed overnight, and became a
business thoroughfare, lined with stately office buildings, boasting
marble and gold-leaf banks, filled with hurrying clerks, stenographers,
and prosperous bond salesmen. It was like a sporting man who, thriving
in middle age, endeavors to live down his shady past.

Fanny discovered Cottage Grove avenue, and Halsted street, and
Jefferson, and South State, where she should never have walked. There
is an ugliness about Chicago's ugly streets that, for sheer, naked
brutality, is equaled nowhere in the world. London has its foul streets,
smoke-blackened, sinister. But they are ugly as crime is ugly--and as
fascinating. It is like the ugliness of an old hag who has lived a life,
and who could tell you strange tales, if she would. Walking through them
you think of Fagin, of Children of the Ghetto, of Tales of Mean Streets.
Naples is honeycombed with narrow, teeming alleys, grimed with the
sediment of centuries, colored like old Stilton, and smelling much
worse. But where is there another Cottage Grove avenue! Sylvan misnomer!
A hideous street, and sordid. A street of flat-wheeled cars, of
delicatessen shops and moving picture houses, of clanging