The Web of Life | Page 7

themselves home in high carts, and
through the windows of the broughams shone the luxuries of evening
attire. Dresser's glance shifted from face to face, from one trap to
another, sucking in the glitter of the showy scene. The flashing
procession on the boulevard pricked his hungry senses, goaded his
ambitions. The men and women in the carriages were the bait; the men
and women on the street sniffed it, cravingly, enviously.
"There's plenty of swag in the place," Dresser remarked.

CHAPTER III
The Hitchcocks and the Sommerses came from the same little village in
Maine; they had moved west, about the same time, a few years before
the Civil War: Alexander Hitchcock to Chicago; the senior Dr.
Sommers to Marion, Ohio. Alexander Hitchcock had been colonel of
the regiment in which Isaac Sommers served as surgeon. Although the
families had seen little of one another since the war, yet Alexander
Hitchcock's greeting to the young doctor when he met the latter in Paris
had been more than cordial. Something in the generous, lingering

hand-shake of the Chicago merchant had made the younger man feel
the strength of old ties.
"I knew your mother," Colonel Hitchcock had said, smiling gently into
the young student's face. "I knew her very well, and your father,
too,--he was a brave man, a remarkable man."
He had sympathetically rolled the hand he still retained in his broad
palm.
"If Marion had only been Chicago! You say he died two years ago?
And your mother long ago? Where will you settle?"
With this abrupt question, Dr. Sommers was taken at once into a kindly
intimacy with the Hitchcocks. Not long after this chance meeting there
came to the young surgeon an offer of a post at St. Isidore's. In the
vacillating period of choice, the successful merchant's counsel had had
a good deal of influence with Sommers. And his persistent kindliness
since the choice had been made had done much to render the first year
in Chicago agreeable. 'We must start you right,' he had seemed to say.
'We mustn't lose you.'
Those pleasant days in Paris had been rendered more memorable to the
young doctor by the friendship that came about between him and Miss
Hitchcock--a friendship quite independent of anything her family might
feel for him. She let him see that she made her own world, and that she
would welcome him as a member of it. Accustomed as he had been
only to the primitive daughters of the local society in Marion and
Exonia, or the chance intercourse with unassorted women in
Philadelphia, where he had taken his medical course, and in European
pensions, Louise Hitchcock presented a very definite and delightful
picture. That it was but one generation from Hill's Crossing, Maine, to
this self-possessed, carefully finished young woman, was unbelievable.
Tall and finished in detail, from the delicate hands and fine ears to the
sharply moulded chin, she presented a puzzling contrast to the short,
thick, sturdy figure of her mother. And her quick appropriation of the
blessings of wealth, her immediate enjoyment of the aristocratic
assurances that the Hitchcock position had given her in Chicago,

showed markedly in contrast with the tentativeness of Mrs. Hitchcock.
Louise Hitchcock handled her world with perfect self-command; Mrs.
Hitchcock was rather breathless over every manifestation of social
change.
Parker Hitchcock, the son, Sommers had not seen until his coming to
Chicago. At a first glance, then, he could feel that in the son the family
had taken a further leap from the simplicity of the older generation.
Incidentally the young man's cool scrutiny had instructed him that the
family had not committed Parker Hitchcock to him. Young Hitchcock
had returned recently to the family lumber yards on the West Side and
the family residence on Michigan Avenue, with about equal disgust, so
Sommers judged, for both milieux. Even more than his sister, Parker
was conscious of the difference between the old state of things and the
new. Society in Chicago was becoming highly organized, a legitimate
business of the second generation of wealth. The family had the money
to spend, and at Yale in winter, at Newport and Beverly and Bar Harbor
in summer, he had learned how to spend it, had watched admiringly
how others spent their wealth. He had begun to educate his family in
spending,--in using to brilliant advantage the fruits of thirty years' hard
work and frugality. With his cousin Caspar Porter he maintained a
small polo stable at Lake Hurst, the new country club. On fair days he
left the lumber yards at noon, while Alexander Hitchcock was still shut
in behind the dusty glass doors of his office. His name was much
oftener in the paragraphs of the city press than his parents': he was
leading the family