If the plan as it stands at present has been accomplished within a long lifetime, Chicago will have maintained her reputation for swift action. Two or three lifetimes would be time enough in any other city. However, Chicago desires the fulfillment of the prophecy she has on paper. Work is going on, and the extent to which it will go on in future depends entirely upon the ability of the city to finance Plan projects. And when a thing depends upon the ability of the city of Chicago, it depends upon a very solid and a very splendid thing. CHAPTER XVI LOOKING BACKWARD The Chicago Club is the rich, substantial club of the city, an organization which may perhaps be compared with the Union Club of New York, although the inner atmosphere of the Chicago Club seems somehow less formal than that of its New York prototype. However, that is true in general where Chicago clubs and New York clubs are compared. The University Club of Chicago has a very large and handsome building in the Gothic style, with a dining room said to be the handsomest club dining room in the world: a Gothic hall with fine stained-glass windows. Between this clubhouse and the great Gothic piles of the Chicago University there exists an agreeable, though perhaps quite accidental, architectural harmony. Excepting Washington University, in St. Louis, Chicago University is the one great American college I have seen which seems fully to have anticipated its own vastness, and prepared for it with comprehensive plans for the grouping of its buildings. Architecturally it is already exceedingly harmonious and effective, for its great halls, all of gray Bedford stone, are beginning to be toned by the Chicago smoke into what will some day be Oxonian mellowness. Even now, by virtue of its ancient architecture, its great size and massiveness, it is not without an effect of age--an effect which is, however, violently disputed by the young trees of the campus. Though these trees have grown as fast as they could, they have not been able to keep up with the growth of the great institution of learning, fertilized, as it has been, by Mr. Rockefeller's millions. Instead of shading the university, the campus trees are shaded by it. * * * * * The South Shore Country Club is an astonishing resort: a huge pavilion, by the lake, on the site of the old World's Fair grounds. It is a pleasant place to which to motor for meals, and is much used, especially for dining, in the summer time. The building of this club made me think of Atlantic City; I felt that I was not in a club at all, but in the rotunda of some vast hotel by the sea.