During the next two weeks I saw much of both Miss W—— and Miss Ginity. By day I usually accompanied Miss W—— and her sister from place to place about the grounds and of an evening strolled with Miss Ginity, all the while wondering if Miss W—— really liked me, whether her present feeling was likely to turn to something deeper. I felt a very definite point of view in her, very different from mine. In her was none of the variability that troubled me: if ever a person was fixed in conventional views it was she. One life, one love would have answered for her exactly. She could have accepted any condition, however painful or even degrading, providing she was bolstered up by what she considered the moral law. “To have and to hold, in sickness and in health, in poverty and in riches, until death do us part.” I think the full force of these laws must have been imbibed with her mother’s milk.
As for Miss Ginity, although she was conventional enough, I did feel that she might be persuaded to relax the moral rule in favor of one at least, and so was congratulating myself upon having achieved an affectional triumph. She may not have been deeply impressed by my physical attraction but there was something about me nevertheless which seemed to hold her. After a few days she left the hotel to visit some friends or relatives, to whom she had to pay considerable attention, but in my box nights or mornings, if by any chance I had not seen her, I would find notes explaining where she could be found in the evening, usually at a drugstore near the park or her new apartment, and we would take a few minutes’ stroll in the park. Such a fever of emotion as she displayed at times! “Oh dear!” she would exclaim in an intense hungry way upon seeing me. “Oh, I could hardly wait!” And once in the park she would throw her strong young arms about me and kiss me in a fiery, hungry way. There was one last transport the night before she left for Michigan for a visit, when if I had been half the Don Juan I longed to be we might have passed the boundary line; but lack of courage on my part and inexperience on hers kept us apart.
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THUS these days sped swiftly and ecstatically by. For once in my life I seemed to be truly and consistently happy, and that in this very city where but a year or two before I had suffered such keen distress. Toward the middle of the second week Miss Ginity left for Michigan, and then I had Miss W—— all to myself. By now I had come to feel an intense interest in her, an elation over the mere thought of being with her. In addition to this joy my mind and body seemed to be responding in some ecstatic fashion to Chicago and the Fair as a whole, the romance and color of it all, the winelike quality of the air, the raw, fresh, young force of the city, so vividly manifested in its sounding streets, its towering new buildings, its far-flung lines of avenues and boulevards, and, by way of contrast, its vast regions of middle and lower class poor. When we lived here as a family I had always thought that poverty was no great hardship. The poor were poor enough, in all conscience, but oh, the singing hope of the city itself! Up, up, and to work! Here were tasks for a million hands. In spite of my attachment to the Fair and Miss Ginity and Miss W—— I was still lured cityward, to visit the streets in which we had once lived or where I had walked so much in the old days, mere journeys of remembrance.