You it was, I am sure, who moved your family in that conventional
pilgrimage of ambitious Chicagoans--west, south, north. Neither your
father nor your mother would have stirred from sober little Grant Street
had you not felt the pressing necessity for a career. Rumor got hold of
you first on the South Side, and had it that you were experimenting with
some small contractor. The explosion which followed reached me even in
Vienna. Did you feel that you could go farther, or did you courageously
run the risk of wrecking him then instead of wrecking yourself and him
later? Oh well, he's comfortably married now, and all the pain you gave
him was probably educative. You may look at his flaunting granite house on
that broad boulevard, and think well of your courage.

Your father died. You moved northward to that modest house tucked in
lovingly under the ample shelter of the millionnaires on the Lake Shore
Drive. I fancy there has always been the gambler in your nerves; that you
have sacrificed your principle to getting a rapid return on your money.
And you have dominated your family: you sent your two brothers to Harvard,
and filled them with ambitions akin to yours. Now you are impatient
because the thin ice cracks a bit.

But I have great faith: you will mend matters by some shrewd deal with the
manipulators at Hoffmeyer's, or by marrying number nine. You will do it
honestly--I mean the marrying; for you will convince him that you love, so
far as love is in you, and you will convince yourself that marriage, the
end of it all, is unselfish, though prosaic. You will accept resignation
with an occasional sigh, feeling that you have gone far, perhaps as far as
you can go. I trust that solution will not come quickly, however, because
I cannot regard it as a brilliant ending to your evolution. For you have
kept yourself sweet and clean from fads, and mean pushing, and the vulgar
machinery of society. You never forced your way or intrigued. You have