A Daughter of the Middle Border | Page 4

best to popularize a
knowledge of it, and I hope you will call upon me at my studio some
afternoon--any afternoon and discuss these isms with me."

Young Lorado Taft interested me, and I instantly accepted his
invitation to call, and in this way (notwithstanding a wide difference in
training and temperament), a friendship was established which has
never been strained even in the fiercest of our esthetic controversies.
Many others of the men and women I met that night became my
co-workers in the building of the "greater Chicago," which was even
then coming into being--the menace of the hyphenate American had no
place in our thoughts.
In less than a month I fell into a routine as regular, as peaceful, as that
in which I had moved in Boston. Each morning in my quiet sunny room
I wrote, with complete absorption, from seven o'clock until noon,
confidently composing poems, stories, essays, and dramas. I worked
like a painter with several themes in hand passing from one to the other
as I felt inclined. After luncheon I walked down town seeking exercise
and recreation. It soon became my habit to spend an hour or two in
Taft's studio (I fear to his serious detriment), and in this way I soon
came to know most of the "Bunnies" of "the Rabbit-Warren" as Henry
B. Fuller characterized this studio building--and it well deserved the
name! Art was young and timid in Cook County.
Among the women of this group Bessie Potter, who did lovely
statuettes of girls and children, was a notable figure. Edward Kemeys,
Oliver Dennett Grover, Charles Francis Browne, and Hermon MacNeill,
all young artists of high endowment, and marked personal charm
became my valued associates and friends. We were all equally poor and
equally confident of the future. Our doubts were few and transitory as
cloud shadows, our hopes had the wings of eagles.
As Chicago possessed few clubs of any kind and had no common place
of meeting for those who cultivated the fine arts, Taft's studio became,
naturally, our center of esthetic exchange. Painting and sculpture were
not greatly encouraged anywhere in the West, but Lorado and his brave
colleagues, hardy frontiersmen of art, laughed in the face of all
discouragement.
A group of us often lunched in what Taft called "the Beanery"--a noisy,
sloppy little restaurant on Van Buren Street, where our lofty

discussions of Grecian sculpture were punctuated by the crash of
waiter-proof crockery, or smothered with the howl of slid chairs.
However, no one greatly minded these barbarities. They were all a part
of the game. If any of us felt particularly flush we dined, at sixty cents
each, in the basement of a big department store a few doors further
west; and when now and then some good "lay brother" like Melville
Stone, or Franklin Head, invited us to a "royal gorge" at Kinsley's or to
a princely luncheon in the tower room of the Union League, we went
like minstrels to the baron's ball. None of us possessed evening suits
and some of us went so far as to denounce swallowtail coats as
"undemocratic." I was one of these.
This "artistic gang" also contained several writers who kept a little
apart from the journalistic circle of which Eugene Field and Opie Read
were the leaders, and though I passed freely from one of these groups
to the other I acknowledged myself more at ease with Henry Fuller and
Taft and Browne, and a little later I united with them in organizing a
society to fill our need of a common meeting place. This association we
called The Little Room, a name suggested by Madelaine Yale Wynne's
story of an intermittently vanishing chamber in an old New England
homestead.
For a year or two we met in Bessie Potter's studio, and on the theory
that our club, visible and hospitable on Friday afternoon, was
non-existent during all the other days of the week, we called it "the
Little Room." Later still we shifted to Ralph Clarkson's studio in the
Fine Arts Building--where it still flourishes.
The fact is, I was a poor club man. I did not smoke, and never used rum
except as a hair tonic--and beer and tobacco were rather distasteful to
me. I do not boast of this singularity, I merely state it. No doubt I was
considered a dull and profitless companion even in "the Little Room,"
but in most of my sobrieties Taft and Browne upheld me, though they
both possessed the redeeming virtue of being amusing, which I, most
certainly, never achieved.
Taft was especially witty in his sly, sidewise comment, and often when
several of us were in hot debate, his sententious or humorous retorts cut

or stung in defence of some esthetic principle much more effectively
than