The St. Francis at tea-time.—With her hotels San Francisco is New
York, but with her people she is San Francisco—which comes
near being the apotheosis of praise. Frontispiece | FACING
PAGE |
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I was moving about my room, my hands full of hairbrushes and toothbrushes
and clothesbrushes and shaving brushes; my head full of
railroad trains, and hills, and plains, and valleys | 5 |
| A dusky redcap took my baggage | 12 |
What scenes these black, pathetic people had passed through—were
passing through! Why did they not look up in wonderment?. | 17 |
We made believe we wanted to go out and smoke. And as we left
our seats she made believe she didn't know that we were going. | 23 |
The gentleman who favored linen mesh was a fat, prosperous-looking
person, whose gold-rimmed spectacles reflected flying lights
from out of doors | 26 |
In a few hours there was enough shame around us to have lasted all
the reformers and muckrakers I know a whole month | 32 |
My companion and I made excuses to go downstairs and wash our
hands in the public washroom, just for the pleasure of doing so
without fear of being attacked by a swarthy brigand with a brush | 35 |
I was prepared to take the field against all comers, not only in favor
of simplicity, but in favor of anything and everything which was
favored by my hostess | 38 |
Chamber of Commerce representatives were with us all the first day
and until we went to our rooms, late at night | 43 |
It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy timbered front, suggesting
some ancient, hospitable, London coffee house where wits of
old were used to meet | 46 |
In this charming, homelike old building, with its grandfather's clock,
its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a visitor finds it hard
to realize that he is in the "west" | 53 |
Down by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines, expressive of
Cleveland's lake commerce—machines for loading and unloading
ships in the space of a few hours | 60 |
In midstream passes a continual parade of freighters ... and in
their swell you may see, teetering, all kinds of craft, from proud
white yachts to canoes | 71 |
The automobile has not only changed Detroit from a quiet old town
into a rich, active city, but upon the drowsy romance of the old
days it has superimposed the romance of modern business | 74 |
Of course there was order in that place, of course there was system—relentless
system—terrible "efficiency"—but to my mind it expressed
but one thing, and that thing was delirium | 97 |
Never, since then, have I heard men jeering over women as they look
in dishabille, without wondering if those same men have ever seen
themselves clearly in the mirrored washroom of a sleeping car | 112 |
| "Can that stuff," admonished Miss Buck in her easy, offhand manner | 117 |
She was saying to herself (and, unconsciously, to us, through the
window): "If I had played that hand, I never should have done
it that way!" | 124 |
| Rodin's "Thinker" | 145 |
Chicago's skyline from the docks.... A city which rebuilt itself after
the fire; in the next decade doubled its size; and now has a population
of two million, plus a city of about the size of San Francisco | 160 |
Two rabbis, old bearded men, performed the rites with long, slim,
shiny blades | 177 |
As I stood there, studying the temperament of pigs, I saw the butcher
looking up at me.... I have never seen such eyes | 192 |
The bold front of Michigan Avenue along Grant Park ... great
buildings wreathed in whirling smoke and that allegory of infinity
which confronts one who looks eastward | 196 |
The dilapidation of the quarter has continued steadily from Dickens's
day to this, and the beauty now to be discovered there is that of
decay and ruin | 205 |
The three used bridges which cross the Mississippi River at St. Louis
are privately controlled toll bridges | 212 |
The skins are handled in the raw state ... with the result that the
floor of the exchange is made slippery by animal fats, and that the
olfactory organs encounter smells not to be matched in any zoo | 221 |
St. Louis needs to be taken by the hand and led around to some municipal-improvement
tailor, some civic haberdasher |
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