The day was marvellously mild for March in Chicago. Spring, usually so coy in this region, had flung herself at them head first. As the massive revolving door of Dirk’s office building fanned him into the street he saw Paula in her long low sporting roadster at the curb. She was dressed in black. All feminine fashionable and middle-class Chicago was dressed in black. All feminine fashionable and middle-class America was dressed in black. Two years of war had robbed Paris of its husbands, brothers, sons. All Paris walked in black. America, untouched, gayly borrowed the smart habiliments of mourning and now Michigan Boulevard and Fifth Avenue walked demurely in the gloom of crêpe and chiffon; black hats, black gloves, black slippers. Only black was “good” this year.
Paula did not wear black well. She was a shade too sallow for these sombre swathings even though relieved by a pearl strand of exquisite colour, flawlessly matched; and a new sly face-powder. Paula smiled up at him, patted the leather seat beside her with one hand that was absurdly thick-fingered in its fur-lined glove.
“It’s cold driving. Button up tight. Where’ll we stop for your bag? Are you still in Deming Place?”
He was still in Deming Place. He climbed into the seat beside her—a feat for the young and nimble. Theodore Storm never tried to double his bulk into the jackknife position necessary to riding in his wife’s roadster. The car was built for speed, not comfort. One sat flat with the length of one’s legs stretched out. Paula’s feet, pedalling brake and clutch so expertly, were inadequately clothed in sheer black silk stockings and slim buckled patent-leather slippers.
“You’re not dressed warmly enough,” her husband would have said. “Those shoes are idiotic for driving.” And he would have been right.
Dirk said nothing.
Her manipulation of the wheel was witchcraft. The roadster slid in and out of traffic like a fluid thing, an enamel stream, silent as a swift current in a river. “Can’t let her out here,” said Paula. “Wait till we get past Lincoln Park. Do you suppose they’ll ever really get rid of this terrible Rush Street bridge?” When his house was reached, “I’m coming up,” she said. “I suppose you haven’t any tea?”
“Gosh, no! What do you think I am! A young man in an English novel!”
“Now, don’t be provincial and Chicago-ish, Dirk.” They climbed the three flights of stairs. She looked about. Her glance was not disapproving. “This isn’t so bad. Who did it? She did! Very nice. But of course you ought to have your own smart little apartment, with a Jap to do you up. To do that for you, for example.”
“Yes,” grimly. He was packing his bag—not throwing clothes into it, but folding them deftly, neatly, as the son of a wise mother packs. “My salary’d just about keep him in white linen housecoats.”
She was walking about the living room, picking up a book, putting it down, fingering an ash tray, gazing out of the window, examining a photograph, smoking a cigarette from the box on his table. Restless, nervously alive, catlike. “I’m going to send you some things for your room, Dirk.”
“For God’s sake don’t!”
“Why not?”
“Two kinds of women in the world. I learned that at college. Those who send men things for their rooms and those that don’t.”
“You’re very rude.”
“You asked me. There! I’m all set.” He snapped the lock of his bag. “I’m sorry I can’t give you anything. I haven’t a thing. Not even a glass of wine and a—what is it they say in books?—oh, yeh—a biscuit.”
In the roadster again they slid smoothly out along the drive, along Sheridan Road, swung sharply around the cemetery curve into Evanston, past the smug middle-class suburban neatness of Wilmette and Winnetka. She negotiated expertly the nerve-racking curves of the Hubbard Woods hills, then maintained a fierce and steady speed for the remainder of the drive.
“We call the place Stormwood,” Paula told him. “And nobody outside the dear family knows how fitting that is. Don’t scowl. I’m not going to tell you my marital woes. And don’t you say I asked for it. … How’s the job?”
“Rotten.”
“You don’t like it? The work?”
“I like it well enough, only—well, you see we leave the university architectural course thinking we’re all going to be Stanford Whites or Cass Gilberts, tossing off a Woolworth building and making ourselves famous overnight. I’ve spent all yesterday and today planning how to work in space for toilets on every floor of the new office building, six stories high and shaped like a drygoods box, that’s going up on the corner of Milwaukee Avenue and Ashland, west.”
“And ten years from now?”
“Ten years from now maybe they’ll let me do the plans for the drygoods box all alone.”
“Why don’t you drop it?”
He was startled. “Drop it! How do you mean?”
“Chuck it. Do something that will bring you quick results. This isn’t an age of waiting. Suppose, twenty years from now, you do plan a grand Gothic office building to grace this new and glorified Michigan Boulevard they’re always shouting about! You’ll be a middle-aged man living in a middle-class house in a middle-class suburb with a middle-class wife.”
“Maybe”—slightly nettled. “And maybe I’ll be the Sir Christopher Wren of Chicago.”
“Who’s he?”
“Good G⸺, how often have you been in London?”
“Three times.”
“Next time you find yourself there you might cast your eye over a very nice little structure called St. Paul’s Cathedral. I’ve never seen it but it has been very well spoken of.”
They turned in at the gates of Stormwood. Though the trees and bushes were gaunt and bare the grass already showed stretches of vivid green. In the fading light one caught glimpses through the shrubbery of the lake beyond. It was a dazzling sapphire blue in the sunset. A final turn of the drive. An avenue of trees. A house, massive, pillared, porticoed. The door opened as they drew up at the
