Page:That Royle Girl (Balmer).pdf/12

 men emerged from, and others vanished into, suddenly discovered doorways. Dance music beat its moaning measure.

Joan Daisy went on, in her lively fashion, beside the boulevard which becomes, at this point, the highway for a neighborhood as remarkable as any in America; but she thought nothing whatever about its extraordinary attributes. She could not think of them as unusual; they composed the commonplaces of her life; and it never entered her head that any one would find them strange and astonishing. She lived here. She had not long lived here; no one had. Impermanency is in the air of the quarter.

The situation is upon the shore of Lake Michigan some five miles north of the aggregations of great gray buildings which a traveler customarily calls to mind when he thinks of the tremendous city in the center of America. In physical location, this new neighborhood is part of the city; but no locality could feel less affinity for the Chicago of the wheat elevators, of the cattle and hog and sheep markets, of the endless railroad yards, of the blast furnaces and factories spread over the enormous, smoky reaches of the west and south and southwest "sides" which were settled and built by the first two millions of people.

The city of the third million knows little of these; it keeps itself beyond hearing of the clangor; and the haze hangs far away. The merchants of the sunny, agreeable streets, feeling their distinction and seeking to denote it, have called the new city "the uptown"; its thieves, more poetic and far more sensitive to essentials, speak of it as "Little Paris."

Its citizens, who are young, breakfast in cafeterias, lunch at automats, dine in gardens or at cabarets and hotels where is dancing. Man meets girl on the boulevard