ahead, avoiding the sight of the comfortable, ugly houses, anxious to
escape them and their associations, pressing on for a beyond, for something
other than this vast, roaring, complacent city. The great park itself was
filled with people, carriages, bicycles. A stream of carts and horse-back
riders was headed for the Driving Club, where there was tennis and the new
game of golf. But Sommers turned his horse into the disfigured Midway,
where the Wreck of the Fair began. He came out, finally, on a broad stretch
of sandy field, south of the desolate ruins of the Fair itself. The horse
picked his way daintily among the debris of staff and wood that lay
scattered about for acres. A wagon road led across this waste land toward
the crumbling Spanish convent. In this place there was a fine sense of
repose, of vast quiet. Everything was dead; the soft spring air gave no
life. Even in the geniality of the April day, with the brilliant,
theatrical waters of the lake in the distance, the scene was gaunt, savage.
To the north, a broad dark shadow that stretched out into the lake defined
the city. Nearer, the ample wings of the white Art Building seemed to stand
guard against the improprieties of civilization. To the far south, a line
of thin trees marked the outer desert of the prairie. Behind, in the west,
were straggling flat-buildings, mammoth deserted hotels, one of which was
crowned with a spidery steel tower. Nearer, a frivolous Grecian temple had
been wheeled to the confines of the park, and dumped by the roadside to
serve as a saloon.

Sommers rose in his stirrups and gazed about him over the rotting buildings
of the play-city, the scrawny acres that ended in the hard black line of
the lake, the vast blocks of open land to the south, which would go to make
some new subdivision of the sprawling city. Absorbed, charmed, grimly
content with the abominable desolation of it all, he stood and gazed. No
evidence of any plan, of any continuity in building, appeared upon the
waste: mere sporadic eruptions of dwellings, mere heaps of brick and mortar