He met half-way the universal expectation that the spirit of the White City was but just transferred to the body of the great Black City close at hand, over which it was to hover as an enlightenment--through which it might permeate as an informing force. "Good!" he thought; "there's no place where it's needed more or where it might do more good." The great town, in fact, sprawled and coiled about him like a hideous monster--a piteous, floundering monster, too. It almost called for tears. Nowhere a more tireless activity, nowhere a more profuse expenditure, nowhere a more determined striving after the ornate, nowhere a more undaunted endeavor towards the monumental expression of success, yet nowhere a result so pitifully grotesque, grewsome, appalling. "So little taste," sighed Truesdale; "so little training, so little education, so total an absence of any collective sense of the fit and the proper! Who could believe, here, that there _are_ cities elsewhere which fashioned themselves rightly almost by intuition--which took shape and reached harmony by an unreasoned instinct, as you might say?" But let that pass; he must take the town as he found it. Between his own transplanted artistic interests on the one hand and his association with the great throng of artists that the _Aufklärung_ had doubtless brought and held, he should do well enough. He figured mornings given over to music and painting--his own; and afternoons of studio-rounds, when fellow-artists would turn him their unfinished canvasses to the light, or would pull away the clinging sheets from their shapes of dampened clay; and evenings when the room would thicken with smoke and tall glasses would make rings on the shining tops of tables, while a dozen agile wits had their own way with Monet and Bourget and Verlaine. For the rest, _concerts_, _spectacles_, _bals_; if need be, receptions; or, if pushed to it, five-o'clock tea--with the chance that one other man might be present. Thus the winter. As for the summer: "No canoeing, of course, on the Lahn and the Moselle; I must fall back upon the historic Illinois, with its immemorial towns and villages and crumbling cathedrals, and the long line of ancient and picturesque châteaux between Ottawa and Peoria. No more villeggiatura at Frascati or Fiesole; I shall have to flee from the summer heats to the wild ravines and gorges of DuPage County--and raise turnips and cabbages there with the rest of them."