When she came out the fog was beginning to lift over the lake and there was even an impression of watery lemon-coloured sunshine behind the bank of gray. Lottie's spirits soared. As she stepped into the swaying old electric there came over her a little swooping sensation of freedom. It was good to be going about one's business thus, alone. No one to say, "Slower! Not so fast!" No one to choose the maelstrom of State and Madison streets as the spot in which to ask her opinion as to whether this sample of silk matched this bit of cloth. A licorice lane of smooth black roadway ahead. Down Hyde Park Boulevard and across to Drexel. Down the long empty stretch of that fine avenue at a spanking speed--spanking, that is, for the ancient electric whose inside protested at every revolution of the wheels. She negotiated the narrows of lower Michigan Avenue and emerged into the gracious sweep of that street as it widened at Twelfth. She always caught her breath a little at the spaciousness and magnificence of those blocks between Twelfth and Randolph. The new Field Columbian museum, a white wraith, rose out of the lake mist at her right. Already it was smudged with the smoke of the I. C. engines. A pity, Lottie thought. She always felt civic when driving down Michigan. On one side Grant Park and the lake beyond; on the other the smart shops. You had to keep eyes ahead, but now and then, out of the corner of them, you caught tantalising glimpses of a scarlet velvet evening wrap in the window of the Blackstone shop; a chic and trickily simple poiret twill in Vogue; the glint of silver as you flashed past a jeweller's; the sooted façade of the Art Institute. She loved it. It exhilarated her. She felt young, and free, and rather important. The sombre old house on Prairie ceased to dominate her for the time. What fun it would be to stay down for lunch with Emma Barton--wise, humourous, understanding Emma Barton. Maybe they could get hold of Winnie Steppler, too. Then, later, she might prowl around looking at the new cloth dresses for spring. Well, she couldn't. That was all there was to it.