Indians have at one time or another left their chirography upon the face of St. Louis. But all that is effaced now under the hot lava of Americanism that is covering the major cities in more or less even layers. Now it stands atop its Indian mounds, a metropolis of almost a million souls, a twenty-story office-building upon the site of an old trading-post, and a subway threatening the city's inners. There is a highly restricted residence district given over to homes of the most stucco period of the Italian Renaissance, and an art-museum, as high on the brow of a hill as the Athenians loved to build. St. Louis has not yet a Champs-Elysees or a Fifth Avenue. And of warm evenings it takes its walks without hats. Neither is the cafe or the cabaret its evening solace. It dines, even in its renaissance section, placidly _chez soi;_ the family activities of the day here thrown into a common pool of discussion. On Washington Boulevard, probably sixty dollars a foot removed from the renaissance section, architecture suddenly turns an indifferent shoulder to period, Queen Anne rubbing sloping roof with neighbor's concrete sleeping-porch of the hygienic period. Only the building-line is maintained, the houses sitting comfortably back and a well-hosed strip of sidewalk, bordered in hardy maples, running clear and white out to De Balaviere Avenue, where the _art-nouveau_ apartment-house begins to invade. In winter bare branches meet in deadlock over this walk. On the smooth macadamized road of Washington Boulevard automobiles try out their speed limit. One such wintry day, with the early dusk already invading, Mrs. Herman Loeb, with red circles round her very black eyes, and her unrouged face rather blotched, sat in one of the second-floor-front rooms of a double buff-brick house on Washington Boulevard, hunched up in a red-velvet chair, chin cupped in palm, and gazing, through perfectly adjusted Honiton lace curtains, at the steady line of home-to-dinner motor-cars. Warmth lay in that room, and a conservative mahogany elegance--a great mahogany double bed, immaculately covered in white, with a large monogram heavily hand-embroidered in its center; a mahogany swell-front dresser, with a Honiton lace cover and a precise outlay of monogramed silver. Over it a gilt-framed French engraving with "Maternal Love" writ in elegant script beneath. A two-toned red rug ate in footsteps. Mrs. Loeb let her head fall back against the chair and closed her eyes. In her dark-stuff dress with its sheer-white collar, she was part of the note of the room, except that her small bosom rose and fell too rapidly. A pungent odor of cookery began to invade; the street lamps of Washington Boulevard to pop out. The door from the hallway opened, but at the entrance of her mother-in-law Mrs. Loeb did not rise, only folded one foot closer under her. "You, Sadie?" "Yes." "Herman home yet?" "No." "Smell? I fixed him red cabbage to-night." "Yes, I smell."