Always a babble of voices went on. At a corner saloon teamsters
stopped to have their drinking cans filled with beer and stood about
swearing and shouting. In the evening women and children went back and
forth from their houses carrying beer in pitchers from the same
saloon. Dogs howled and fought, drunken men reeled along the sidewalk
and the women of the town appeared in their cheap finery and paraded
before the idlers about the saloon door.
The woman who rented the room to McGregor boasted to him of Wycliff
blood. It was that she told him that had brought her to Chicago from
her home at Cairo, Illinois. "The place was left to me and not knowing
what else to do with it I came here to live," she said. She explained
to him that the Wycliffs had been people of note in the early history
of Chicago. The huge old house with the cracked stone steps and the
ROOMS TO RENT sign in the window had once been their family seat.
The history of this woman was characteristic of the miss-fire quality
of much of American life. She was at bottom a wholesome creature who
should have lived in a neat frame house in a village and tended a
garden. On Sunday she should have dressed herself with care and gone
off to sit in a country church with her hands crossed and her soul at
rest.
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