"It _is_ good," he assented; "better than I
could have thought--better than anybody over there could be made to
believe. I might have tried to get home a fortnight sooner, perhaps."
He met half-way the universal expectation that the spirit of the White
City was but just transferred to the body of the great Black City close
at hand, over which it was to hover as an enlightenment--through which it
might permeate as an informing force.
"Good!" he thought; "there's no place where it's needed more or where it
might do more good." The great town, in fact, sprawled and coiled about
him like a hideous monster--a piteous, floundering monster, too. It
almost called for tears. Nowhere a more tireless activity, nowhere a more
profuse expenditure, nowhere a more determined striving after the ornate,
nowhere a more undaunted endeavor towards the monumental expression of
success, yet nowhere a result so pitifully grotesque, grewsome,
appalling. "So little taste," sighed Truesdale; "so little training, so
little education, so total an absence of any collective sense of the fit
and the proper! Who could believe, here, that there _are_ cities
elsewhere which fashioned themselves rightly almost by intuition--which
took shape and reached harmony by an unreasoned instinct, as you might
say?"
But let that pass; he must take the town as he found it. Between his own
transplanted artistic interests on the one hand and his association with
the great throng of artists that the _Aufklaerung_ had doubtless brought
and held, he should do well enough.
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