Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/289

 two dollars each and upwards, according to how often you winked; and their cars, with or without chauffeurs, crowded the parking stalls.

Of course Marjorie Hale, in her Evanston days, occasionally must have seen some of these people when boldly and with elaborate affront they invaded the hotels which the Sedgwicks, the Chadens, the Lovells, the Cleves, the Vanes and the Hales frequented but, when she noticed these intruders at all, it was rather with amusement or at least with condescension, and she imagined them lucky individuals from the new immigrants who, by extraordinary personal sacrifices or by isolated strokes of fortune, had got together a little money which they were half ridiculously, half pitifully parading. But she had completely cured herself of any comforting fancy of the fewness of these people and, as completely, she had lost any lingering feeling of condescension. As they became her friends, she still could not help being amused at things they did; but with her amusement and with her real liking for many of them there grew, in these days, respect and something beyond that which bordered on fear.

Fear of what? She wondered sometimes; not fear for herself, directly; rather, fear for hers. Her what? For Evanston, she said to herself; for Winnetka and Lake Forest and that north shore which was the stronghold of the life which had been hers; for the Lake Shore Drive and Astor Street and the avenues and places between them; for the Drake and the Blackstone and the clubs,—the pleasant, privileged places where her sort ruled. Sometimes she felt the presence of these new people as a pressure upon hers.

"They're taking over Chicago from you," Rinderfeld once commented calmly to her, "as we are taking