Thus these days sped swiftly and ecstatically by. For once in my life I seemed to be truly and consistently happy, and that in this very city where but a year or two before I had suffered such keen . Toward the middle of the second week Miss Ginity left for Michigan, and then I had Miss W—— all to myself. By now I had come to feel an intense interest in her, an over the thought of being with her. In addition to this joy my mind and body seemed to be responding in some ecstatic fashion to Chicago and the Fair as a whole, the romance and color of it all, the winelike quality of the air, the raw, fresh, young force of the city, so manifested in its sounding streets, its towering new buildings, its far-flung lines of avenues and boulevards, and, by way of contrast, its vast regions of middle and lower class poor. When we lived here as a family I had always thought that poverty was no great hardship. The poor were poor enough, in all conscience, but oh, the singing hope of the city itself! Up, up, and to work! Here were tasks for a million hands. In spite of my to the Fair and Miss Ginity and Miss W—— I was still cityward, to visit the streets in which we had once lived or where I had walked so much in the old days, mere journeys of remembrance.  
But as I wandered about I realized that the city was not my city any more, that life was a baseless, shifting thing, its seeming ties uncertain and and that that which one day we held dear was tomorrow gone, to come no more. How plain it was, I thought and with some surprise, so ignorant is youth, that even seemingly brisk organizations such as the Globe here in Chicago and some others with which I had been connected could or disappear completely, one’s commercial as well as one’s family life be to the four Winds. Sensing this, I now felt an intense sense of loneliness and homesickness, for what I could scarcely say: for each and every one of past pleasant moments, I presume, our abandoned home in Flournoy Street, now rented to another; my old desk at the Globe, now occupied by another; Alice’s former home on this south side; N——’s in Indiana Street. I was gloomy over having no , no intimates the name here who could and comfort me in such an hour as this. enough, at such moments I felt an intense leaning toward Miss W——, who seemed to answer with something stable and . I am at a loss even now to describe it but so it was, and it was more than anything else a sense of peace and support which I found in her presence, a something that suggested and warmth—possibly the Whole closely-knit family atmosphere which was behind her and upon which she relied. She would listen, with interest, to all my youthful and no doubt accounts of my former newspaper experiences here as well as in St. Louis, which I painted in high colors with myself as a newspaper man deep in the councils of my paper. Walking about the Fair grounds one night I wished to take her hand but so overawed was I by her personality that I could scarcely up the courage to do it. When I at last did she shyly withdrew her hand, pretending not to notice.
 
The same thing happened an evening or two later when I persuaded her and her sister to accompany me and a fellow-reporter whom I met in Chicago, to Lincoln Park, where was a band concert and the playing of a colored fountain given by the late C. T. Yerkes, then looked upon as one of the sights of the city. I recall how warm and clear was the evening, our trip on the newly-built “Alley L,” so-called because no public thoroughfare could be secured for it, how when we got off at Congress Street, where the enormous store of Siegel, Cooper & Company had only recently been opened, we there took a surface cable to Lincoln Park. It was barely dusk when we reached the park, and the fountain did not play until nine; but

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