friendship quite independent of anything her family might feel for him. She
let him see that she made her own world, and that she would welcome him as
a member of it. Accustomed as he had been only to the primitive daughters
of the local society in Marion and Exonia, or the chance intercourse with
unassorted women in Philadelphia, where he had taken his medical course,
and in European pensions, Louise Hitchcock presented a very definite and
delightful picture. That it was but one generation from Hill's Crossing,
Maine, to this self-possessed, carefully finished young woman, was
unbelievable. Tall and finished in detail, from the delicate hands and fine
ears to the sharply moulded chin, she presented a puzzling contrast to the
short, thick, sturdy figure of her mother. And her quick appropriation of
the blessings of wealth, her immediate enjoyment of the aristocratic
assurances that the Hitchcock position had given her in Chicago, showed
markedly in contrast with the tentativeness of Mrs. Hitchcock. Louise
Hitchcock handled her world with perfect self-command; Mrs. Hitchcock was
rather breathless over every manifestation of social change.

Parker Hitchcock, the son, Sommers had not seen until his coming to
Chicago. At a first glance, then, he could feel that in the son the family
had taken a further leap from the simplicity of the older generation.
Incidentally the young man's cool scrutiny had instructed him that the
family had not committed Parker Hitchcock to _him_. Young Hitchcock
had returned recently to the family lumber yards on the West Side and the
family residence on Michigan Avenue, with about equal disgust, so Sommers
judged, for both _milieux_. Even more than his sister, Parker was
conscious of the difference between the old state of things and the new.
Society in Chicago was becoming highly organized, a legitimate business of
the second generation of wealth. The family had the money to spend, and at
Yale in winter, at Newport and Beverly and Bar Harbor in summer, he had
learned how to spend it, had watched admiringly how others spent their