trains made her house as untidy as a switch-yard; and there was her
husband's unconquerable propensity for smoking--a pleasure which she
compelled him to take outside on the foot pavement. Here, on pleasant
evenings, he would walk up and down alone, in a slow, meditative
fashion--having little to say and nobody to say it to--until bedtime
came.

This came early--from a habit early formed. The Chicago of his young
married life had given him little reason for being abroad after half-past
nine at night, and he appeared to find little more reason now than then.
It would not, indeed, have been impossible to make him see that, in the
interval, balls, concerts, spectacles, and such-like urban doings had
come on with increasing number and brilliancy, and that there were now
more interests to justify a man in remaining up until half-past ten, or
even until eleven. But you could not have convinced him that all these
opportunities were his.

Yet the consciousness of festivities sometimes obtruded upon his
indifference. Now and then on summer evenings, when the wind was from the
west, certain brazen discords originating a street or two behind the
house would come to advise him that the Circassian girl was on view, or
that a convention of lady snake-charmers was in session. Then there would
be weeks of winter nights when the frozen macadam in front of the house
would ring with a thousand prancing hoofs and rumble for an hour with a
steady flow of carriages, and the walls of the great temple of music a
few hundred yards to the north would throw back all this clamor, with the
added notes of slamming doors and shouted numbers and epic struggles
between angry drivers and determined policemen; sometimes he would extend
his smoking stroll far enough to skirt the edge of all this Babel. Then,
towards midnight, long after all staid and sensible people were abed, the