She was half-sitting, half-kneeling on the window seat, her elbows on the sill, her cheeks in her hands, looking out into the dim urban night. Directly to the south, over the loop, where Chicago was wide awake and playing, the diffused electric radiance was brightest and highest--a man-made borealis.
She took pride in her big city. It was unafraid. It followed no rules but its own, and didn't always follow them. It owned the future in fee and pitied the past. It said, not "Ought I?" but "I will." It was modern, just as she was modern. She was more characteristically the offspring of her city than of her mother. For she was new, like Chicago; and her mother was old, like the Church.
So she pondered in the pleasant after-glow of decision, buttressing her resolve.
The bell rang from the vestibule below and she went to the speaking tube to find out what was wanted. "Yes?" she inquired, then without saying anything more she walked slowly to her room.
"Who was it!" asked Al, but she closed the door behind her without answering. Funny things, women. He went to the tube himself.
"Jim?--well, for the love of goodness godness Agnes--d'you want to come up?"
Al pressed the door-opener, but before climbing the stairs Jim shouted another question through the tube: "Wasn't that Georgia who spoke first?"
There was a great change in Jim. He must have taken off forty or fifty pounds. His eyes were clear, his skin healthily brown, and he had hardened up all over. He looked a good ten years younger than the last time Al saw him, except for one thing, that his hair had thinned out a great deal. He was almost bald on top.
They shook hands and Jim gave him a solid grip. "Cheese," said the younger fellow heartily, "you look good--primed for a battle, almost." He put his fingers on the other's biceps.
Jim drew up his clenched fist, showing a very respectable bunch of muscle. "More than there ever used to be, eh?" he asked, smiling broadly.
Al whistled, stepped back for a better look at the miracle, and whistled. "And yet they say they never come back. Hm-m-m--how'd you do it?"
"Working. Rousty on a dredge in Oklahoma."
"Toted coal to the firemen, later got to firing myself--on the night shift. We kept her going steady. Funny thing, irrigating way out there, t'hell an' gone, in the middle of the frogs barking and the cattle bawling feeding your old thirty-horse and watching the old scoop lifting out her yard of sludge every six minutes. You got so it seemed the most natural thing in the world, but it ain't, is it!"