Wilson avenue, Chicago, is not merely an avenue but a district; not only a district but a state of mind; not a state of mind alone but a condition of morals. For that matter, it is none of these things so much as a mode of existence. If you know your Chicago—which you probably don\'t—(sotto voce murmur, Heaven forbid!)—you are aware that, long ago, Wilson Avenue proper crept slyly around the corner and achieved a clandestine alliance with big glittering Sheridan Road; which escapade changed the demure thoroughfare into Wilson Avenue improper.

When one says "A Wilson Avenue girl," the mind—that is, the Chicago mind—pictures immediately a slim, daring, scented, exotic creature dressed in next week\'s fashions; wise-eyed; doll-faced; rapacious. When chiffon stockings are worn Wilson Avenue\'s hosiery is but a film over the flesh. Aigrettes and mink coats are its winter uniform. A feverish district this, all plate glass windows and delicatessen dinners and one-room-and-kitchenette[Pg 151] apartments, where light housekeepers take their housekeeping too lightly.

At six o\'clock you are likely to see Wilson Avenue scurrying about in its mink coat and its French heels and its crêpe frock, assembling its haphazard dinner. Wilson Avenue food, as displayed in the ready-cooked shops, resembles in a startling degree the Wilson Avenue ladies themselves: highly coloured, artificial, chemically treated, tempting to the eye, but unnutritious. In and out of the food emporia these dart, buying dabs of this and bits of that. Chromatic viands. Vivid scarlet, orange, yellow, green. A strip of pimento here. A mound of mayonnaise there. A green pepper stuffed with such burden of deceit as no honest green pepper ever was meant to hold. Two eggs. A quarter-pound of your best creamery butter. An infinitesimal bottle of cream. "And what else?" says the plump woman in the white bib-apron, behind the counter. "And what else?" Nothing. I guess that\'ll be all. Mink coats prefer to dine out.

As a cripple displays his wounds and sores, proudly, so Wilson Avenue throws open its one-room front door with a grandiloquent gesture as it boasts, "Two hundred and fifty a month!" Shylock, purchasing a paper-thin slice of pinky ham in Wilson Avenue, would know his own early Venetian transaction to have been pure philanthropy.[Pg 152]

It took Raymond and Cora Atwater twelve years to reach this Wilson Avenue, though they carried it with them all the way. They had begun their married life in this locality before it had become a definite district. Twelve years ago the neighbourhood had shown no signs of mushrooming into its present opulence. Twelve years ago Raymond, twenty-eight, and Cora, twenty-four, had taken a six-room flat at Racine and Sunnyside. Six rooms. Modern. Light. Rental, $28.50 per month.

"But I guess I can manage it, all right," Raymond had said. "That isn\'t so terrible—for six rooms."

Cora\'s full under lip had drawn itself into a surprisingly thin straight line. Later, Raymond came to recognize the meaning of that labial warning. "We don\'t need all those rooms. It\'s just that much more work."

"I don\'t want you doing your own work. Not unless you want to. At first, maybe, it\'d be sort of fun for you. But after a while you\'ll want a girl to help. That\'ll take the maid\'s room off the kitchen."

"Well, supposing? That leaves an extra room, anyway."

A look came into Raymond\'s face. "Maybe we\'ll need that, too—later. Later on." He actually could have been said to blush, then, like a boy.[Pg 153] There was much of the boy in Raymond at twenty-eight.

Cora did not blush.

Raymond had married Cora because he loved her; and because she was what is known as a "home girl." From the first, business girls—those alert, pert, confident little sparrows of office and shop and the street at lunch hour—rather terrified him. They gave you as good as you sent. They were always ready with their own nickel for carfare. You never knew whether they were laughing at you or not. There was a little girl named Calhoun in the binoculars (Raymond\'s first Chicago job was with the Erwin H. Nagel Optical Company on Wabash). The Calhoun girl was smart. She wore those plain white waists. Tailored, Raymond thought they called them. They made her skin look fresh and clear and sort of downy-blooming like the peaches that grew in his own Michigan state back home. Or perhaps only girls with clear fresh skins could wear those plain white waist things. Raymond had heard that girls thought and schemed about things that were becoming to them, and then stuck to those things. He wondered how the Calhoun girl might look in a fluffy waist. But she never wore one down to work. When business was dull in the motor and sun-glasses (which was where he held forth) Raymond would stroll over to Laura[Pg 154] Calhoun\'s counter and talk. He would talk about the Invention. He had no one else to talk to about it. No one he could trust, or who understood.

The Calhoun girl, polishing the great black eyes of a pair of field glasses, would look up brightly to say, "Well, how\'s the Invention coming on?" Then he would tell her.

The Invention had to do with spectacles. Not only that, if you are a wearer of spectacles of any kind, it has to do with you. For now, twelve years later, you could not well do without it. The little contraption that keeps the side-piece from biting into your ears—that\'s Raymond\'s.

Knowing, as we do, that Raymond\'s wife is named Cora we know that the Calhoun girl of the fresh clear skin, the tailored white shirtwaists, and the friendly interest in the Invention, lost out. The reason for that was Raymond\'s youth, and Raymond\'s vanity, and Raymond\'s unsophistication, together with Lucy Calhoun\'s own honesty and efficiency. These last qualities would handicap any girl in love, no matter how clear her skin or white her shirtwaist.

Of course, when Raymond talked to her about the Invention she should have looked adoringly into his eyes and said, "How perfectly wonderful! I don\'t see how you think of such things."

What she said, after studying its detail thought[Pg 155]fully for a moment, was: "Yeh, but look. If this little tiny wire had a spring underneath—just a little bit of spring—it\'d take all the pressure off when you wear a hat. Now women\'s hats are worn so much lower over their ears, d\'you see? That\'d keep it from pressing. Men\'s hats, too, for that matter."

She was right. Grudgingly, slowly, he admitted it. Not only that, he carried out her idea and perfected the spectacle contrivance as you know it to-day. Without her suggestion it would have had a serious flaw. He knew he ought to be grateful. He told himself that he was grateful. But in reality he was resentful. She was a smart girl, but—well—a fella didn\'t feel comfortable going with a girl that knew more than he did. He took her to the theatre—it was before the motion picture had attained its present-day virulence. She enjoyed it. So did he. Perhaps they might have repeated the little festivity and the white shirtwaist might have triumphed in the end. But that same week Raymond met Cora.

Though he had come to Chicago from Michigan almost a year before, he knew few people. The Erwin H. Nagel Company kept him busy by day. The Invention occupied him at night. He read, too, books on optometry. Don\'t think that he was a Rollo. He wasn\'t. But he was naturally some[Pg 156]what shy, and further handicapped by an unusually tall lean frame which he handled awkwardly. If you had a good look at his eyes you forgot his shyness, his leanness, his awkwardness, his height. They were the keynote of his gentle, studious, kindly, humorous nature. But Chicago, Illinois, is too busy looking to see anything. Eyes are something you see with, not into.

Two of the boys at Nagel\'s had an engagement for the evening with two girls who were friends. On the afternoon of that day one of the boys went home at four with a well-developed case of grippe. The other approached Raymond with his plea.

"Say, Atwater, help me out, will you? I can\'t reach my girl because she\'s downtown somewheres for the afternoon with Cora. That\'s her girl friend. And me and Harvey was to meet \'em for dinner, see? And a show. I\'m in a hole. Help me out, will you? Go along and fuss Cora. She\'s a nice girl. Pretty, too, Cora is. Will you, Ray? Huh?"

Ray went. By nine-thirty that evening he had told Cora about the Invention. And Cora had turned sidewise in her seat next to him at the theatre and had looked up at him adoringly, awe-struck. "Why, how perfectly wonderful! I don\'t see how you think of such things."

"Oh, that\'s nothing. I got a lot of ideas. Things I\'m going to work out. Say, I won\'t always be[Pg 157] plugging down at Nagel\'s, believe me. I got a lot of ideas."

"Really! Why, you\'re an inventor, aren\'t you! Like Edison and those. My, it must be wonderful to think of things out of your head. Things that nobody\'s ever thought of before."

Ray glowed. He felt comfortable, and soothed, and relaxed and stimulated. And too large for his clothes. "Oh, I don\'t know. I just think of things. That\'s all there is to it. That\'s nothing."

"Oh, isn\'t it! No, I guess not. I\'ve never been out with a real inventor before ... I bet you think I\'m a silly little thing."

He protested, stoutly. "I should say not." A thought struck him. "Do you do anything? Work downtown somewheres, or anything?"

She shook her head. Her lips pouted. Her eyebrows made pained twin crescents. "No. I don\'t do anything. I was afraid you\'d ask that." She looked down at her hands—her white, soft hands with little dimples at the finger-bases. "I\'m just a home girl. That\'s all. A home girl. Now you will think I\'m a silly stupid thing." She flashed a glance at him, liquid-eyed, appealing.

He was surprised (she wasn\'t) to find his hand closed tight and hard over her soft dimpled one. He was terror-stricken (she wasn\'t) to hear his voice saying, "I think you\'re wonderful. I think you\'re[Pg 158] the most wonderful girl I ever saw, that\'s what." He crushed her hand and she winced a little. "Home girl."

Cora\'s name suited her to a marvel. Her hair was black and her colouring a natural pink and white, which she abetted expertly. Cora did not wear plain white tailored waists. She wore thin, fluffy, transparent things that drew your eyes and fired your imagination. Raymond began to call her Coral in his thoughts. Then, one evening, it slipped out. Coral. She liked it. He denied himself all luxuries and most necessities and bought her a strand of beads of that name, presenting them to her stammeringly, clumsily, tenderly. Tender pink and cream, they were, like her cheeks, he thought.

"Oh, Ray, for me! How darling! You naughty boy!... But I\'d rather have had those clear white ones, without any colouring. They\'re more stylish. Do you mind?"

When he told Laura Calhoun she said, "I hope you\'ll be very happy. She\'s a lucky girl. Tell me about her, will you?"

Would he! His home girl!

When he had finished she said, quietly, "Oh, yes."

And so Raymond and Cora were married and went to live in six-room elegance at Sunnyside and Racine. The flat was furnished sumptuously in Mission and those red and brown soft leather cush[Pg 159]ions with Indian heads stamped on them. There was a wooden rack on the wall with six monks\' heads in coloured plaster, very life-like, stuck on it. This was a pipe-rack, though Raymond did not smoke a pipe. He liked a mild cigar. Then there was a print of Gustave Richter\'s "Queen Louise" coming down that broad marble stair, one hand at her breast, her great girlish eyes looking out at you from the misty folds of her scarf. What a lot of the world she has seen from her stairway! The shelf that ran around the dining room wall on a level with your head was filled with steins in such shapes and colours as would have curdled their contents—if they had ever had any contents.

They planned to read a good deal, evenings. Improve their minds. It was Ray\'s idea, but Cora seconded it heartily. This was before their marriage.

"Now, take history alone," Ray argued: "American history. Why, you can read a year and hardly know the half of it. That\'s the trouble. People don\'t know the history of their own country. And it\'s interesting, too, let me tell you. Darned interesting. Better\'n novels, if folks only knew it."

"My, yes," Cora agreed. "And French. We could take up French, evenings. I\'ve always wanted to study French. They say if you know French you can travel anywhere. It\'s all in the accent;[Pg 160] and goodness knows I\'m quick at picking up things like that."

"Yeh," Ray had said, a little hollowly, "yeh, French. Sure."

But, somehow, these literary evenings never did materialize. It may have been a matter of getting the books. You could borrow them from the public library, but that made you feel so hurried. History was something you wanted to take your time over. Then, too, the books you wanted never were in. You could buy them. But buying books like that! Cora showed her first real display of temper. Why, they came in sets and cost as much as twelve or fifteen dollars. Just for books! The literary evenings degenerated into Ray\'s thorough scanning of the evening paper, followed by Cora\'s skimming of the crumpled sheets that carried the department store ads, the society column, and the theatrical news. Raymond began to use the sixth room—the unused bedroom—as a workshop. He had perfected the spectacle contrivance and had made the mistake of selling his rights to it. He got a good sum for it.

"But I\'ll never do that again," he said, grimly. "Somebody\'ll make a fortune on that thing." He had unwisely told Cora of this transaction. She never forgave him for it. On the day he received the money for it he had brought her home a fur set of baum marten. He thought the stripe in it beau[Pg 161]tiful. There was a neckpiece known as a stole, and a large muff.

"Oh, honey!" Cora had cried. "Aren\'t you fun-ny!" She often said that, always with the same accent. "Aren\'t you fun-ny!"

"What\'s the matter?"

"Why didn\'t you let me pick it out? They\'re wearing Persian lamb sets."

"Oh. Well, maybe the feller\'ll change it. It\'s all paid for, but maybe he\'ll change it."

"Do you mind? It may cost a little bit more. You don\'t mind my changing it though, do you?"

"No. No-o-o-o! Not a bit."

They had never furnished the unused bedroom as a bedroom. When they moved out of the flat at Racine and Sunnyside into one of those new four-room apartments on Glengyle the movers found only a long rough work-table and a green-shaded lamp in that sixth room. Ray\'s delicate tools and implements were hard put to it to find a resting place in the new four-room apartment. Sometimes Ray worked in the bathroom. He grew rather to like the white-tiled place, with its look of a laboratory. But then, he didn\'t have as much time to work at home as he formerly had had. They went out more evenings.

The new four-room flat rented at sixty dollars.[Pg 162] "Seems the less room you have the more you pay," Ray observed.

"There\'s no comparison. Look at the neighbourhood! And the living room\'s twice as big."

It didn\'t seem to be. Perhaps this was due to its furnishings. The Mission pieces had gone to the second-hand dealer. Ray was assistant manager of the optical department at Nagel\'s now and he was getting royalties on a new smoked glass device. There were large over-stuffed chairs in the new living room, and a seven-foot davenport, and oriental rugs, and lamps and lamps and lamps. The silk lampshade conflagration had just begun to smoulder in the American household. The dining room had one of those built-in Chicago buffets. It sparkled with cut glass. There was a large punch bowl in the centre, in which Cora usually kept receipts, old bills, moth balls, buttons, and the tarnished silver top to a syrup jug that she always meant to have repaired. Queen Louise was banished to the bedroom where she surveyed a world of cretonne.

Cora was a splendid cook. She had almost a genius for flavouring. Roast or cheese soufflé or green apple pie—your sense of taste never experienced that disappointment which comes of too little salt, too much sugar, a lack of shortening. Expert as she was at it, Cora didn\'t like to cook. That is, she didn\'t like to cook day after day. She rather[Pg 163] liked doing an occasional meal and producing it in a sort of red-cheeked triumph. When she did this it was an epicurean thing, savoury, hot, satisfying. But as a day-after-day programme Cora would not hear of it. She had banished the maid. Four rooms could not accommodate her. A woman came in twice a week to wash and iron and clean. Often Cora did not get up for breakfast and Ray got his at one of the little lunch rooms that were springing up all over that section of the North Side. Eleven o\'clock usually found Cora at the manicure\'s, or the dressmaker\'s, or shopping, or telephoning luncheon arrangements with one of the Crowd. Ray and Cora were going out a good deal with the Crowd. Young married people like themselves, living royally just a little beyond their income. The women were well-dressed, vivacious, somewhat shrill. They liked stories that were a little off-colour. "Blue," one of the men called these stories. He was in the theatrical business. The men were, for the most part, a rather drab-looking lot. Colourless, good-natured, open-handed. Almost imperceptibly the Crowd began to use Ray as a target for a certain raillery. It wasn\'t particularly ill-natured, and Ray did not resent it.

"Oh, come on, Ray! Don\'t be a wet blanket.... Lookit him! I bet he\'s thinking about those smoked glasses again. Eh, Atwater? He\'s in[Pg 164] a daze about that new rim that won\'t show on the glasses. Come out of it! First thing you know you\'ll lose your little Cora."

There was little danger of that. Though Cora flirted mildly with the husbands of the other girls in the Crowd (they all did) she was true to Ray.

Ray was always talking of building a little place of their own. People were beginning to move farther and farther north, into the suburbs.

"Little place of your own," Ray would say, "that\'s the only way to live. Then you\'re not paying it all out in rent to the other feller. Little place of your own. That\'s the right idear."

But as the years went by, and Ray earned more and more money, he and Cora seemed to be getting farther and farther away from the right idear. In the $28.50 apartment Cora\'s morning marketing had been an orderly daily proceeding. Meat, vegetables, fruit, dry groceries. But now the maidless four-room apartment took on, in spite of its cumbersome furnishings, a certain air of impermanence.

"Ray, honey, I haven\'t a scrap in the house. I didn\'t get home until almost six. Those darned old street cars. I hate \'em. Do you mind going over Jo Bauer\'s to eat? I won\'t go, because Myrtle served a regular spread at four. I couldn\'t eat a thing. D\'you mind?"

"Why, no." He would get into his coat again[Pg 165] and go out into the bleak November wind-swept street to Bauer\'s restaurant.

Cora was always home when Raymond got there at six. She prided herself on this. She would say, primly, to her friends, "I make a point of being there when Ray gets home. Even if I have to cut a round of bridge. If a woman can\'t be there when a man gets home from work I\'d like to know what she\'s good for, anyway."

The girls in the Crowd said she was spoiling Raymond. She told Ray this. "They think I\'m old-fashioned. Well, maybe I am. But I guess I never pretended to be anything but a home girl."

"That\'s right," Ray would answer. "Say, that\'s the way you caught me. With that home-girl stuff."

"Caught you!" The thin straight line of the mouth. "If you think for one minute——"

"Oh, now, dear. You know what I mean, sweetheart. Why, say, I never could see any girl until I met you. You know that."

He was as honestly in love with her as he had been nine years before. Perhaps he did not feel now, as then, that she had conferred a favour upon him in marrying him. Or if he did he must have known that he had made fair return for such favour.

Cora had a Hudson seal coat now, with a great kolinsky collar. Her vivid face bloomed rosily in this soft frame. Cora was getting a little heavier.[Pg 166] Not stout, but heavier, somehow. She tried, futilely, to reduce. She would starve herself at home for days, only to gain back the vanished pounds at one afternoon\'s orgy of whipped-cream salad, and coffee, and sweets at the apartment of some girl in the Crowd. Dancing had come in and the Crowd had taken it up vociferously. Raymond was not very good at it. He had not filled out with the years. He still was lean and tall and awkward. The girls in the crowd tried to avoid dancing with him. That often left Cora partnerless unless she wanted to dance again and again with Raymond.

"How can you expect the boys to ask me to dance when you don\'t dance with their wives! Good heavens, if they can learn, you can. And for pity\'s sake don\'t count! You\'re so fun-ny!"

He tried painstakingly to heed her advice, but his long legs made a sorry business of it. He heard one of the girls refer to him as "that giraffe." He had put his foot through an absurd wisp of tulle that she insisted on calling a train.

They were spending a good deal of money now, but Ray jousted the landlord, the victualler, the furrier, the milliner, the hosiery maker, valiantly and still came off the victor. He did not have as much time as he would have liked to work on the new invention. The invisible rim. It was calculated so to blend with the glass of the lens as to be, in ap[Pg 167]pearance, one with it, while it still protected the eyeglass from breakage. "Fortune in it, girlie," he would say, happily, to Cora. "Million dollars, that\'s all."

He had been working on the invisible rim for five years. Familiarity with it had bred contempt in Cora. Once, in a temper, "Invisible is right," she had said, slangily.

They had occupied the four-room apartment for five years. Cora declared it was getting beyond her. "You can\'t get any decent help. The washwoman acts as if she was doing me a favour coming from eight to four, for four dollars and eighty-five cents. And yesterday she said she couldn\'t come to clean any more on Saturdays. I\'m sick and tired of it."

Raymond shook a sympathetic head. "Same way down at the store. Seems everything\'s that way now. You can\'t get help and you can\'t get goods. You ought to hear our customers. Yesterday I thought I\'d go clear out of my nut, trying to pacify them."

Cora inserted the entering wedge, deftly. "Goodness knows I love my home. But the way things are now ..."

"Yeh," Ray said, absently. When he spoke like that Cora knew that the invisible rim was revolving in his mind. In another moment he would be off to[Pg 168] the little cabinet in the bathroom where he kept his tools and instruments.

She widened the opening. "I noticed as I passed to-day that those new one-room kitchenette apartments on Sheridan will be ready for occupancy October first." He was going toward the door. "They say they\'re wonderful."

"Who wants to live in one room, anyway?"

"It\'s really two rooms—and the kitchenette. There\'s the living room—perfectly darling—and a sort of combination breakfast room and kitchen. The breakfast room is partitioned off with sort of cupboards so that it\'s really another room. And so handy!"

"How\'d you know?"

"I went in—just to look at them—with one of the girls."

Until then he had been unconscious of her guile. But now, suddenly, struck by a hideous suspicion—"Say, looka here. If you think——"

"Well, it doesn\'t hurt to ............