# So Big/Chapter 14

XIV
Throughout Dirk’s Freshman year there were, for him, no heartening, informal, mellow talks before the wood-fire in the booklined study of some professor whose wisdom was such a mixture of classic lore and modernism as to be an inspiration to his listeners. Midwest professors delivered their lectures in the classroom as they had been delivering them in the past ten or twenty years and as they would deliver them until death or a trustees’ meeting should remove them. The younger professors and instructors in natty gray suits and bright-coloured ties made a point of being unpedantic in the classroom and rather overdid it. They posed as being one of the fellows; would dashingly use a bit of slang to create a laugh from the boys and an adoring titter from the girls. Dirk somehow preferred the pedants to these. When these had to give an informal talk to the men before some university event they would start by saying, “Now listen, fellahs——” At the dances they were not above “rushing” the pretty co-eds.
Two of Dirk’s classes were conducted by women professors. “They were well on toward middle age, or past it; desiccated women. Only their eyes were alive. Their clothes were of some indefinite dark ​stuff, brown or drab-gray; their hair lifeless; their hands long, bony, unvital. They had seen classes and classes and classes. A roomful of fresh young faces that appeared briefly only to be replaced by another roomful of fresh young faces like round white pencil marks manipulated momentarily on a slate, only to be sponged off to give way to other round white marks. Of the two women one—the elder—was occasionally likely to flare into sudden life; a flame in the ashes of a burned-out grate. She had humour and a certain caustic wit, qualities that had managed miraculously to survive even the deadly and numbing effects of thirty years in the classroom. A fine mind, and iconoclastic, hampered by the restrictions of a conventional community and the soul of a congenital spinster.
Under the guidance of these Dirk chafed and grew restless. Miss Euphemia Hollingswood had a way of emphasizing every third or fifth syllable, bringing her voice down hard on it, thus:
“In the consideration of all the facts in the case presented before us we must first review the history and attempt to analyze the outstanding——”
He found himself waiting for that emphasis and shrinking from it as from a sledge-hammer blow. It hurt his head.
Miss Lodge droned. She approached a word with a maddening uh-uh-uh-uh. In the uh-uh-uh face of the uh-uh-uh-uh geometrical situation of the uh-uh-uh uh——
​He shifted restlessly in his chair, found his hands clenched into fists, and took refuge in watching the shadow cast by an oak branch outside the window on a patch of sunlight against the blackboard behind her.
During the early spring Dirk and Selina talked things over again, seated before their own fireplace in the High Prairie farmhouse. Selina had had that fireplace built five years before and her love of it amounted to fire-worship. She had it lighted always on winter evenings and in the spring when the nights were sharp. In Dirk’s absence she would sit before it at night long after the rest of the weary household had gone to bed. Old Pom, the mongrel, lay stretched at her feet enjoying such luxury in old age as he had never dreamed of in his bastard youth. High Prairie, driving by from some rare social gathering or making a late trip to market as they sometimes were forced to do, saw the rosy flicker of Mrs. DeJong’s fire dancing on the wall and warmed themselves by it even while they resented it.
“A good heater in there and yet anyway she’s got to have a fire going in a grate. Always she does something funny like that. I should think she’d be lonesome sitting there like that with her dog only.”
They never knew how many guests Selina entertained there before her fire those winter evenings—old friends and new. Sobig was there, the plump earth-grimed baby who rolled and tumbled in the fields while his young mother wiped the sweat from her face to look at him with fond eyes. Dirk DeJong of ten ​years hence was there. Simeon Peake, dapper, soft-spoken, ironic, in his shiny boots and his hat always a little on one side. Pervus DeJong, a blue-shirted giant with strong tender hands and little fine golden hairs on the backs of them. Fanny Davenport, the actress-idol of her girlhood came back to her, smiling, bowing; and the gorgeous spangled creatures in the tights and bodices of the old Extravaganzas. In strange contrast to these was the patient, tireless figure of Maartje Pool standing in the doorway of Roelf’s little shed, her arms tucked in her apron for warmth. “You make fun, huh?” she said, wistfully, “you and Roelf. You make fun.” And Roelf, the dark vivid boy, misunderstood. Roelf, the genius. He was always one of the company.
Oh, Selina DeJong never was lonely on these winter evenings before her fire.
She and Dirk sat there one fine sharp evening in early April. It was Saturday. Of late Dirk had not always come to the farm for the week-end. Eugene and Paula Arnold had been home for the Easter holidays. Julie Arnold had invited Dirk to the gay parties at the Prairie Avenue house. He had even spent two entire week-ends there. After the brocaded luxury of the Prairie Avenue house his farm bedroom seemed almost startlingly stark and bare. Selina frankly enjoyed Dirk’s somewhat fragmentary accounts of these visits; extracted from them as much vicarious pleasure as he had had in the reality—more, probably.
​“Now tell me what you had to eat,” she would say, sociably, like a child. “What did you have for dinner, for example? Was it grand? Julie tells me they have a butler now. Well! I can’t wait till I hear Aug Hempel on the subject.”
He would tell her of the grandeurs of the Arnold ménage. She would interrupt and exclaim: “Mayonnaise! On fruit! Oh, I don’t believe I'd like that. You did! Well, I'll have it for you next week when you come home. I'll get the recipe from Julie.”
He didn’t think he’d be home next week. One of the fellows he’d met at the Arnolds’ had invited him to their place out north, on the lake. He had a boat.
“That'll be lovely!” Selina exclaimed, after an almost unnoticeable moment: of silence—silence with panic in it. “I'll try not to fuss and be worried like an old hen every minute of the time I think you're on the water. . . Now do go on, Sobig. First fruit with mayonnaise, h’m? What kind of soup?”
He was not a naturally talkative person. There was nothing surly about his silence. It was a taciturn streak inherited from his Dutch ancestry. This time, though, he was more voluble than usual. “Paula. . .” came again and again into his conversation. “Paula . . . Paula. . .” and again “. . . Paula.” He did not seem conscious of the repetition, but Selina’s quick ear caught it.
“I haven’t seen her,” Selina said, “since she went away to school the first year. She must be—let’s see ​——she’s a year older than you are. She’s nineteen going on twenty. Last time I saw her I thought she was a dark scrawny little thing. Too bad she didn’t inherit Julie’s lovely gold colouring and good looks, instead of Eugene, who doesn’t need ’em.”
“She isn’t!” said Dirk, hotly. “She’s dark and slim and sort of—uh—sensuous”—Selina started visibly, and raised her hand quickly to her mouth to hide a smile—“like Cleopatra. Her eyes are big and kind of slanting—not squinty I don’t mean, but slanting up a little at the corners. Cut out, kind of, so that they look bigger than most people’s.”
“My eyes used to be considered rather fine,” said Selina, mischievously; but he did not hear.
“She makes all the other girls lock sort of blowzy.” He was silent a moment. Selina was silent, too, and it was not a happy silence. Dirk spoke again, suddenly, as though continuing aloud a train of thought, “—all but her hands.”
Selina made her voice sound natural, not sharply inquisitive. “What’s the matter with her hands, Dirk?”
He pondered a moment, his brows knitted. At last, slowly, “Well, I don’t know. They’re brown, and awfully thin and sort of—grabby. I mean it makes me nervous to watch them. And when the rest of her is cool they’re hot when you touch them.”
He looked at his mother’s hands that were busy with some sewing. “The stuff on which she was working was a bit of satin ribbon; part of a hood intended ​to grace the head of Geertje Pool Vander Sijde’s second baby. She had difficulty in keeping her rough fingers from catching on the soft surface of the satin. Manual work, water, sun, and wind had tanned those hands, hardened them, enlarged the knuckles, spread them, roughened them. Yet how sure they were, and strong, and cool and reliable—and tender. Suddenly, looking at them, Dirk said, “Now your hands. I love your hands, Mother.”
She put down her work hastily, yet quietly, so that the sudden rush of happy grateful tears in her eyes should not sully the pink satin ribbon. She was flushed, like a girl. “Do you, Sobig?” she said.
After a moment she took up her sewing again. Her face looked young, eager, fresh, like the face of the girl who had found cabbages so beautiful that night when she bounced along the rutty Halsted road with Klaas Pool, many years ago. It came into her face, that look, when she was happy, exhilarated, excited. That was why those who loved her and brought that look into her face thought her beautiful, while those who did not love her never saw the look and consequently considered her a plain woman.
There was another silence between the two. Then: “Mother, what would you think of my going East next fall, to take a course in architecture?”
“Would you like that, Dirk?”
“Yes, I think so—yes.”
“Then I'd like it better than anything in the world. I—it makes me happy just to think of it.”
​“It would—cost an awful lot.”
“I'll manage. I'll manage. . . What made you decide on architecture?”
“I don’t know, exactly. The new buildings at the university—Gothic, you know—are such a contrast to the old. Then Paula and I were talking the other day. She hates their house on Prairie—terrible old lumpy gray stone pile, with the black of the I. C. trains all over it. She wants her father to build north—an Italian villa or French chateau. Something of that sort. So many of her friends are moving to the north shore, away from these hideous south-side and north-side Chicago houses with their stoops, and their bay windows, and their terrible turrets. Ugh!”
“Well, now, do you know,” Selina remonstrated mildly, “I like 'em. I suppose I’m wrong, but to me they seem sort of natural and solid and unpretentious, like the clothes that old August Hempel wears, so squarecut and baggy. Those houses look dignified to me, and fitting. They may be ugly—probably are—but anyway they’re not ridiculous. They have a certain rugged grandeur. They’re Chicago. Those French and Italian gimcracky things they—they’re incongruous. It’s as if Abraham Lincoln were to appear suddenly in pink satin knee breeches and buckled shoes, and lace ruffles at his wrists.”
Dirk could laugh at that picture. But he protested, too. “But there’s no native architecture, so what’s to be done! You wouldn’t call those smoke-blackened old stone and brick piles with their iron fences and ​their conservatories and cupolas and gingerbread exactly native, would you?”
“No,” Selina admitted, “but those Italian villas and French chateaux in north Chicago suburbs are a good deal like a lace evening gown in the Arizona desert. It wouldn’t keep you cool in the daytime, and it wouldn’t be warm enough at night. I suppose a native architecture is evolved from building for the local climate and the needs of the community, keeping beauty in mind as you go. We don’t need turrets and towers any more than we need draw-bridges and moats. It’s all right to keep them, I suppose, where they grew up, in a country where the feudal system meant that any day your next-door neighbour might take it into his head to call his gang around him and sneak up to steal your wife and tapestries and gold drinking cups.”
Dirk was interested and amused. Talks with his mother were likely to affect him thus. “What's your idea of a real Chicago house, Mother?”
Selina answered quickly, as if she had thought often about it; as if she would have liked just such a dwelling on the site of the old DeJong farmhouse in which they now were seated so comfortably. “Well, it would need big porches for the hot days and nights so’s to catch the prevailing southwest winds from the prairies in the summer—a porch that would be swung clear around to the east, too—or a terrace or another porch east so that if the precious old lake breeze should come up just when you think you're dying of the heat, as it sometimes does, you could catch that, too. It ​ought to be built—the house, I mean—rather squarish and tight and solid against our cold winters and north-easters. Then sleeping porches, of course. There’s a grand American institution for you! England may have its afternoon tea on the terrace, and Spain may have its patio, and France its courtyard, and Italy its pergola, vine-covered; but America’s got the sleeping porch—the screened-in open-air sleeping porch, and I shouldn’t wonder if the man who first thought of that would get precedence, on Judgment Day, over the men who invented the aeroplane, the talking machine, and the telephone. After all, he had nothing in mind but the health of the human race.” After which grand period Selina grinned at Dirk, and Dirk grinned at Selina and the two giggled together there by the fireplace, companionably.
“Mother, you’re simply wonderful!—only your native Chicago dwelling seems to be mostly porch.”
Selina waved such carping criticism away with a careless hand. “Oh, well, any house that has enough porches, and two or three bathrooms and at least eight closets can be lived in comfortably, no matter what else it has or hasn’t got.”
Next day they were more serious. The eastern college and the architectural career seemed to be settled things. Selina was content, happy. Dirk was troubled about the expense. He spoke of it at breakfast next morning (Dirk’s breakfast; his mother had had hers hours before and now as he drank his coffee, was sitting with him a moment and glancing at the paper ​that had come in the rural mail delivery). She had been out in the fields overseeing the transplanting of young tomato seedlings from hotbed to field. She wore an old gray sweater buttoned up tight, for the air was still sharp. On her head was a battered black felt soft hat (an old one of Dirk’s) much like the one she had worn to the Haymarket that day ten years ago. Selina’s cheeks were faintly pink from her walk across the fields in the brisk morning air.
She sniffed. “That coffee smells wonderful. I think I’ just——” She poured herself a half cup with the air of virtue worn by one who really longs for a whole cup and doesn’t take it.
“I’ve been thinking,” he began, “the expense——”
“Pigs,” said Selina, serenely.
“Pigs!” He looked around, bewildered; stared at his mother.
“Pigs’ll do it,” Selina explained, calmly. “I’ve been wanting to put them in for three or four years. It’s August Hempel’s idea. Hogs, I should have said.”
Again, as before, he echoed, “Hogs!” rather faintly.
“High-bred hogs. They’re worth their weight in silver this minute, and “will be for years to come. I won't go in for them extensively. Just enough to make an architect out of Mr. Dirk DeJong.” Then, at the expression in his face: “Don’t look so pained, son. There's nothing revolting about a hog—not my kind, brought up in a pen as sanitary as a tiled bathroom and fed on corn. He’s a handsome, impressive​looking animal, the hog, when he isn’t treated like one.”
He looked dejected. “I’d rather not go to school on—hogs.”
She took off the felt hat and tossed it over to the old couch by the window; smoothed her hair back with the flat of her palm. You saw that the soft dark hair was liberally sprinkled with gray now, but the eyes were bright and clear as ever.
“You know, Sobig, this is what they call a paying farm—as vegetable farms go. We're out of debt, the land’s in good shape, the crop promises well if we don’t have another rainy cold spring like last year’s. But no truck garden is going to make its owner rich these days, with labour so high and the market what it is, and the expense of hauling and all. Any truck farmer who comes out even thinks he’s come out ahead.”
“I know it.” Rather miserably.
“Well. I’m not complaining, son. I’m just telling you. I’m having a grand time. When I see the asparagus plantation actually yielding, that I planted ten years ago, I’m as happy as if I’d stumbled on a gold mine. I think, sometimes, of the way your father objected to my planting the first one. April, like this, in the country, with everything coming up green and new in the rich black loam—I can’t tell you. And when I know that it goes to market as food—the best kind of food, that keeps people’s bodies clean and clear and flexible and strong! I like to think of ​babies’ mothers saying: 'Now eat your spinach, every scrap, or you can’t have any dessert!. . . Carrots make your eyes bright. . . Finish your potato. Potatoes make you strong!'”
Selina laughed, flushed a little.
“Yes, but how about hogs? Do you feel that way about hogs?”
“Certainly!” said Selina, briskly. She pushed toward him a little blue-and-white platter that lay on the white cloth near her elbow. “Have a bit more bacon, Dirk. One of these nice curly slivers that are so crisp.”
“I've finished my breakfast, Mother.” He rose.
The following autumn saw him a student of architecture at Cornell. He worked hard, studied even during his vacations. He would come home to the heat and humidity of the Illinois summers and spend hours each day in his own room that he had fitted up with a long work table and a drawing board. His T-square was at hand; two triangles—a 45 and a 60; his compass; a pair of dividers. Selina sometimes stood behind him watching him as he carefully worked on the tracing paper. His contempt for the local architecture was now complete. Especially did he hold forth on the subject of the apartment-houses that were mushrooming on every street in Chicago from Hyde Park on the south to Evanston on the north. Chicago was very elegant in speaking of these; never called them “flats”; always apartments. In front of each of these (there were usually six go a building) ​was stuck a little glass-enclosed cubicle known as a sun-parlour. In these (sometimes you heard them spoken of, grandly, as solariums) Chicago dwellers took refuge from the leaden skies, the heavy lake atmosphere, the gray mist and fog and smoke that so frequently swathed the city in gloom. They were done in yellow or rose cretonnes. Silk lamp shades glowed therein, and flower-laden boxes. In these frank little boxes Chicago read its paper, sewed, played bridge, even ate its breakfast. It never pulled down the shades.
“Terrible!” Dirk fumed. “Not only are they hideous in themselves, stuck on the front of those houses like three pairs of spectacles; but the lack of decent privacy! They do everything but bathe in ’em. Have they never heard the advice given people who live in glass houses!”
By his junior year he was talking in a large way about the Beaux Arts. But Selina did not laugh at this. “Perhaps,” she thought. “Who can tell! After a year or two in an office here, why not another year of study in Paris if he needs it.”
Though it was her busiest time on the farm Selina went to Ithaca for his graduation in 1913. He was twenty-two and, she was calmly sure, the best-looking man in his class. Undeniably he was a figure to please the eye; tall, well-built, as his father had been, and blond, too, like his father, except for his eyes. These were brown—not so dark as Selina’s, but with some of the soft liquid quality of her glance. They ​strengthened his face, somehow; gave him an ardent look of which he was not conscious. 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 week-ends 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 band-stand 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 week-ends. 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, dare-devil, 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 breath-taking 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 Grand-dad 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 pretty bum second mate. And as for you, Gene my love, cabin boy would be, y’understand me, ​big.” Eugene had gone into the business a year before.
“What can you expect,” retorted Eugene, “of a lad that hates salt pork? And every other kind of pig meat?" He despised the yards and all that went with it.
Selina now got up and walked to the end of the porch. She looked out across the fields, shading her eyes with her hand. “There’s Adam coming in with the last load for the day. He'll be driving into town now. Cornelius started an hour ago.” The DeJong farm sent two great loads to the city now. Selina was contemplating the purchase of one of the large automobile trucks that would do away with the plodding horses and save hours of time on the trip. She went down the steps now on her way to oversee the loading of Adam Bras’s wagon. At the bottom of the steps she turned. “Why can’t you two stay to supper? You can quarrel comfortably right through the meal and drive home in the cool of the evening.”
“I’ll stay,” said Paula, “thanks. If you'll have all kinds of vegetables, cooked and uncooked. The cooked ones smothered in cream and oozing butter. And let me go out into the fields and pick ’em myself like Maud Muller or Marie Antoinette or any of those make-believe rustic gals.”
In her French-heeled slippers and her filmy silk stockings she went out into the rich black furrows of the fields, Dirk carrying the basket.
​“Asparagus,” she ordered first. Then, “But where is it? Is that it!”
“You dig for it, idiot,” said Dirk, stooping, and taking from his basket the queerly curved sharp knife or spud used for cutting the asparagus shoots. “Cut the shoots three or four inches below the surface.”
“Oh, let me do it!” She was down on her silken knees in the dirt, ruined a goodly patch of the fine tender shoots, gave it up and sat watching Dirk’s expert manipulation of the knife. “Let’s have radishes, and corn, and tomatoes and lettuce and peas and artichokes and——”
“Artichokes grow in California, not Illinois.” He was more than usually uncommunicative, and noticeably moody.
Paula remarked it. “Why the Othello brow?”
“You didn’t mean that rot, did you? about marrying a rich man.”
“Of course I meant it. What other sort of man do you think I ought to marry?” He looked at her, silently. She smiled. “Yes, wouldn’t I make an ideal bride for a farmer!”
“I’m not a farmer.”
“Well, architect then. Your job as draughts-man at Hollis & Sprague’s must pay you all of twenty-five a week.”
“Thirty-five,” said Dirk, grimly. “What's that got to do with it!”
“Not a thing, darling.” She stuck out one foot. “These slippers cost thirty.”
​“I won’t be getting thirty-five a week all my life. You’ve got brains enough to know that. Eugene wouldn’t be getting that much if he weren’t the son of his father.”
“The grandson of his grandfather,” Paula corrected him. “And I’m not so sure he wouldn't. Gene’s a born mechanic if they’d just let him work at it. He's crazy about engines and all that junk. But no—‘Millionaire Packer’s Son Learns Business from Bottom Rung of Ladder.’ Picture of Gene in workman’s overalls and cap in the Sunday papers. He drives to the office on Michigan at ten and leaves at four and he doesn’t know a steer from a cow when he sees it.”
“I don’t care a damn about Gene. I’m talking about you. You were joking, weren’t you?”
“I wasn't. I'd hate being poor, or even just moderately rich. I’m used to money—loads of it. I’m twenty-four. And I’m looking around.”
He kicked an innocent beet-top with his boot. “You like me better than any man you know.”
“Of course I do. Just my luck.”
“Well, then!”
“Well, then, let’s take these weggibles in and have ’em cooked in cream, as ordered.”
She made a pretense of lifting the heavy basket. Dirk snatched it roughly out of her hand so that she gave a little cry and looked ruefully down at the red mark on her palm. He caught her by the shoulder—even shook her a little. “Look here, Paula. Do ​you mean to tell me you’d marry a man simply because he happened to have a lot of money!”
“Perhaps not simply because he had a lot of money. But it certainly would be a factor, among other things. Certainly he would be preferable to a man who knocked me about the fields as if I were a bag of potatoes.”
“Oh, forgive me. But—listen, Paula—you know I'm—gosh!—— And there I am stuck in an architect’s office and it'll be years before I——”
“Yes, but it'll probably be years before I meet the millions I require, too. So why bother? And even if I do, you and I can be just as good friends.”
“Oh, shut up. Don’t pull that ingénue stuff on me, please. Remember I’ve known you since you were ten years old.”
“And you know just how black my heart is, don’t you, what? You want, really, some nice hearty lass who can tell asparagus from peas when she sees ’em, and who'll offer to race you from here to the kitchen.”
“God forbid!”
Six months later Paula Arnold was married to Theodore A. Storm, a man of fifty, a friend of her father’s, head of so many companies, stockholder in so many banks, director of so many corporations that even old Aug Hempel seemed a recluse from business in comparison. She never called him Teddy. No one ever did. Theodore Storm was a large man—not exactly stout, perhaps, but flabby. His inches saved him from grossness. He had a large white serious ​face, fine thick dark hair, graying at the temples, and he dressed very well except for a leaning toward rather effeminate ties. He built for Paula a town house on the Lake Shore drive in the region known as the Gold Coast. The house looked like a restrained public library. There was a country place beyond Lake Forest far out on the north shore, sloping down to the lake and surrounded by acres and acres of fine woodland, expertly parked. There were drives, ravines, brooks, bridges, hothouses, stables, a race-track, gardens, dairies, fountains, bosky paths, keeper’s cottage (twice the size of Selina’s farmhouse). Within three years Paula had two children, a boy and a girl. “There! That’s done,” she said. Her marriage was a great mistake and she knew it. For the war, coming in 1914, a few months after her wedding, sent the Hempel-Arnold interests sky-rocketing. Millions of pounds of American beef and pork were shipped to Europe. In two years the Hempel fortune was greater than it ever had been. Paula was up to her eyes in relief work for Bleeding Belgium. All the Gold Coast was. The Beautiful Mrs. Theodore A. Storm in her Gift Shop Conducted for the Relief of Bleeding Belgium.
Dirk had not seen her in months. She telephoned him unexpectedly one Friday afternoon in his office at Hollis & Sprague’s.
“Come out and spend Saturday and Sunday with us, won't you? We’re running away to the country this afternoon. I’m so sick of Bleeding Belgium, you ​can’t imagine. I’m sending the children out this morning. I can’t get away so early. I'll call for you in the roadster this afternoon at four and drive you out myself.”
“I am going to spend the week-end with Mother. She’s expecting me.”
“Bring her along.”
“She wouldn’t come. You know she doesn’t enjoy all that velvet-footed servitor stuff.”
“Oh, but we live quite simply out there, really. Just sort of rough it. Do come, Dirk. I’ve got some plans to talk over with you . . . How’s the job?”
“Oh, good enough. There’s very little building going on, you know.”
“Will you come?”
“I don’t think ——”
“I'll call for you at four. I'll be at the curb. Don’t keep me waiting, will you? The cops fuss so if you park in the Loop after four.”