Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/30

 Lot," where children had done those redoubtable things told in the ballad which Gregg used to beg to be read to him over and over when he was a little boy. Now in their neighborhood and northward had crowded in an amazing conglomeration of "new people," eager to live in new, compact ways; and thousands of pretentious apartments—three, six or sixty to a building—were sprung up to shelter them; cafeterias and confectioneries to feed them; movies and dance halls and "gardens" to amuse them. Respectable people, most of them, if extremely dressed in the most modern fashion and if, by older standards of the vicinity, overfond of their new, conspicuous surroundings or loud or gauche in manner. For most of these people were on their way up from obscure localities; some from the blistered, grimy tenements of such dreary, west side streets as Elston and Halsted and West Division, where in the Italian or Polish or Scandinavian settlements their immigrant parents had begun to prosper; some from similar sections of Milwaukee or Toledo and such cities; but the most of them were from towns and little cities of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Billy Whittaker's practical mind largely ignored this neighborhood which held small interest in itself for him, as it represented no strata through which he had to pass, since he had started in Chicago several layers above this. But Gregg failed to think practically of people by strata and it appeared to him that those about here were working out for themselves a new way of ordering their lives. He did not go far enough in his thinking to decide that the attractiveness of such localities as this was what chiefly was draining the towns and the country and so enormously swelling the city and therefore that, of all parts of the city, this