She sent away the servant who came at her ring. She detained Frothingham, hoping against reason and instinct that he would tear off that tranquil mask of his, would forget his responsibilities as the bearer of a proud and ancient name, would say: “I care for only you. Come!” Even after he had left her she lingered, holding the door ajar, listening for returning footsteps. At last she shut the door, and went forlornly and wearily to her great, lonely, sombre dressing room. She stood before the mirror of her dressing table, studying her plain, wistful, woeful little face. “You aren’t pretty,” she said to it, with that candour which has its chance in those rare moments when vanity is quite downcast. “And one can’t expect much when men think of nothing but looks in a woman.” She could no longer see herself for tears. “And I believe he’d have been--at least kind to me.” She rang for her maid, and began listlessly and mechanically to dress for dinner. XVI At Chicago Barney came down the platform to meet Frothingham. “Here you are!” he exclaimed. “Six months in the country, but not a bit changed. And if an American goes over to your side and stays a week he has to learn the language all over again when he gets back.” It was still daylight, and Barney told his coachman to drive home by way of “the store”--the great “Barney and Company Emporium--seventy stores and a bank, three restaurants, a nursery, and an emergency hospital, all under one roof.” Frothingham watched the throngs pouring torrent-like through the cañons made by the towering buildings. “Don’t it remind you of New York?” asked Barney. “Yes--and no,” he replied. It seemed to him in the comparison that New York was a titanic triumph, Chicago a titanic struggle; New York a finished or at least definite creation, Chicago a chaos in convulsion. There was in the look and the noise of it an indefinable menace which oppressed him, filled him with vague uneasiness. When Barney told him the site of it was a swamp a few years before, he thought of a fairy story his nurse had told him--of a magic city that used to rise from an enchanted morass at dusk, live a single night, and vanish with the dawn. And as the daylight waned, he wondered whether this inchoate, volcanic unreality of a city would not soon be again engulfed in the bosom of its mother, the swamp. But he began to note here and there traces of form, civilised form, peering from the chaos to indicate the trend of the convulsion--that it was upward, not downward. “It is tremendous,” said Frothingham. “Is it bigger than New York?” “No,” Barney reluctantly answered. Then he added with curious, defiant energy: “But it _will_ be! And it’s American, which New York ain’t. It’s full of people that think for themselves, and do as they d----n please. We ain’t got many apes out here. We run more to humans.”