The things that excited her about Chicago did not seem to interest Dirk at all. Sometimes she took a vacant room for a day or two in Dirk’s boarding house. “What do you think!” she would say to him, breathlessly, when he returned from the office in the evening. “I’ve been way over on the northwest side. It’s another world. It’s—it’s Poland. Cathedrals and shops and men sitting in restaurants all day long reading papers and drinking coffee and playing dominoes or something like it. And what do you think I found out! Chicago’s got the second largest Polish population of any city in the world. In the _world_!” “Yeh?” Dirk would reply, absently. There was nothing absent-minded about his tone this afternoon as he talked to his mother on the telephone. “Sure you don’t mind? Then I’ll be out next Saturday. Or I may run out in the middle of the week to stay over night . . . Are you all right?” “I’m fine. Be sure and remember all about Paula’s new house so’s you can tell me about it. Julie says it’s like the kind you read of in the novels. She says old Aug saw it just once and now won’t go near it even to visit his grandchildren.” The day was marvellously mild for March in Chicago. Spring, usually so coy in this region, had flung herself at them head first. As the massive revolving door of Dirk’s office building fanned him into the street he saw Paula in her long low sporting roadster at the curb. She was dressed in black. All feminine fashionable and middle-class Chicago was dressed in black. All feminine fashionable and middle-class America was dressed in black. Two years of war had robbed Paris of its husbands, brothers, sons. All Paris walked in black. America, untouched, gayly borrowed the smart habiliments of mourning and now Michigan Boulevard and Fifth Avenue walked demurely in the gloom of crêpe and chiffon; black hats, black gloves, black slippers. Only black was “good” this year. Paula did not wear black well. She was a shade too sallow for these sombre swathings even though relieved by a pearl strand of exquisite colour, flawlessly matched; and a new sly face-powder. Paula smiled up at him, patted the leather seat beside her with one hand that was absurdly thick-fingered in its fur-lined glove. “It’s cold driving. Button up tight. Where’ll we stop for your bag? Are you still in Deming Place?” He was still in Deming Place. He climbed into the seat beside her—a feat for the young and nimble. Theodore Storm never tried to double his bulk into the jack-knife position necessary to riding in his wife’s roadster. The car was built for speed, not comfort. One sat flat with the length of one’s legs stretched out. Paula’s feet, pedalling brake and clutch so expertly, were inadequately clothed in sheer black silk stockings and slim buckled patent-leather slippers. “You’re not dressed warmly enough,” her husband would have said. “Those shoes are idiotic for driving.” And he would have been right. Dirk said nothing.