You are beginning to understand Chicago. A half an hour ago you could not have understood how a man like this--head of a giant corporation employing half a hundred thousand workmen, a man with three or four big houses, a stable full of automobiles, a man of vast resources and influences--would have his daughter teaching in a public school. You are beginning to understand the man--the man who is typical of Chicago. You come to know him the more clearly as he tells you of the city that he really loves. He tells you how Sorolla "caught on" over at the Institute--although more recently the Cubists rather dimmed the brilliance of the Spaniard's reception--and how the people who go to the Chicago libraries are reading less fiction and more solid literature all the while. Then--of a sudden, for he realizes that he must be back again into the grind and the routine of his work--he turns to you and says: "And yesterday we had the big girl and the motto. It was hardly more than yesterday that we thought that population counted, that acreage was a factor in the consummation of a great city." * * * * * [Illustration: Michigan Avenue and the wonderful lakefront--Chicago] So you see that Chicago is only America, not boastful, not arrogant, but strong in her convictions, strong in her sincerity, strong in her poise between right and power together, and not merely power without right. A city set in the heart of America must certainly take strong American tone, no matter how many foreigners New York's great gateway may pour into her ample lap in the course of a single twelvemonth. Chicago has taken that dominating tone upon herself. She is a great city. Her policemen wear star-shaped badges after the fashion of country constables in rural drama, and her citizens call the trolleys that run after midnight "owl cars," but she is a great city none the less for these things. Her small shops along Michigan avenue have the smartness of Paris or of Vienna, the greatest of her department stores is one of the greatest department stores in all the land, which means in the whole world. It is softly carpeted, floor upon floor, and the best of Chicago delights to lunch upon one of its upper floors. Chicago likes to go high for its meals or else, as we have already intimated, down into basements. The reason for this last may be that one of the world's greatest _restauranteurs_, who had his start in the city by Lake Michigan, has always had his place below sidewalk level on a busy corner of the city.