She did not mind the wet gray wind as she clanked along in the little box-like contrivance, up Prairie Avenue, over Thirty-first, past gray stone and brick mansions whose former glory of façade and stone-and-iron fence and steps showed the neglect and decay following upon negro occupancy. It was too bad, she thought. Chicago was like a colossal and slovenly young woman who, possessing great natural beauty, is still content to slouch about in greasy wrapper and slippers run down at heel. The Kemps lived in one of the oldest of Hyde Park's apartment houses and one as nearly aristocratic as a Chicago South Side apartment house can be. It was on Hyde Park Boulevard, near Jackson Park and the lake. When Belle had married she had protested at an apartment. She had never lived in one, she said. She didn't think she could. She would stifle. No privacy. Everything huddled together on one floor and everybody underfoot. People upstairs; people downstairs. But houses were scarce in Hyde Park and she and Henry had compromised on an apartment much too large for them and as choice as anything for miles around. There were nine rooms. The two front rooms were a parlour and sitting room but not many years had passed before Belle did away with this. Belle had caused all sorts of things to be done to the apartment--at Henry's expense, not the landlord's. Year after year partitions had been removed; old fixtures torn out and modern ones installed; dark woodwork had been cream enamelled; the old parlour and sitting room had been thrown into one enormous living room. They had even built a "sun-parlour" without which no Chicago apartment is considered complete. As it eats, sleeps, plays bridge, reads, sews, writes, and lounges in those little many-windowed peep-shows all Chicago's family life is an open book to its neighbour.