Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/211

 from her point of view, which she also made Marjorie's, the old section of suburban homes north and south of Wilson Avenue was being "ruined."

The trouble was that the immigrants crowding Chicago—the Italians, Bohemians, Swedes and Danes, Germans, Ruthenians, Croatians, Poles, Magyar, Irish, French, Jews—the vigorous, vital, enterprising peoples who a generation ago supplied you with servants, laborers, bootblacks and tradesmen and who kept themselves conveniently and picturesquely in foreign colonies, "slums" and ghettos, were forgetting their proper "place." For their children were growing up; and these new Americans felt small need for the old-world associations to which their fathers, feeling themselves at a disadvantage in a strange land, had clung, comforted by the sound of their native speech and encouraged by papers printed in the old language. These were the children who had learned American in the public schools and, for the most part, refused to speak their fathers' tongue; eagerly they fitted themselves for and boldly entered trades, businesses and professions never aspired to by their fathers; they succeeded, mixed again and met and married outside their own race and struck out for the American community which lay along the lake north of the city.

To accommodate them, an elevated railroad, with electric trains running at intervals of minutes, paralleled the rusty rails of the old suburban spur and, instead of slighting Wilson Avenue, it made a terminal in a meadow there; and upon the old American families, each in its separate home at intervals along the oak-wooded shore, the Chicago melting-pot began to pour. To the end of those elevated rails also traveled boys and girls and husbands and wives come to Chicago