Читать книгу A Book About Myself онлайн

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And now, spread before me for my survey and entertainment was the great city of St. Louis, and life itself as it was manifesting itself to me through this city. This was the most important and interesting thing to me, not my new position. Work? Well, that was important enough, considering the difficulty I had had in securing it. What was more, I was always driven by the haunting fear of losing this or any other position I had ever had, of not being able to find another (a left-over fear, perhaps, due to the impression that poverty had made on me in my extreme youth). Just the same, the city came first in my imagination and desires, and I now began to examine it with care, its principal streets, shops, hotels, its residence district. What a pleasure to walk about, to stare, to dream of better days and great things to come.

Just at this time St. Louis seemed to be upon the verge of change and improvement. An old section of mansions bordering on the business center was rapidly giving way to a rabble of small stores and cheap factories. Already several new buildings of the Chicago style of skyscraper were either contemplated or in process of construction. There was a new club, the Mercantile, the largest in the city, composed entirely of merchants in the downtown section, which had just been opened and about which the papers were making a great stir. There was a new depot contracted for, one of the finest in all the country, so I was told, which was to house all the roads entering the city. A new city hall was being talked of, an enormous thing-to-be. Out in the west end, where progress seemed the most vital, were new streets and truly magnificent residence “places,” parked and guarded areas these, in which were ranged many residences of the ultra-rich. The first time I saw one of these places I was staggered by its exclusive air and the beauty and even grandeur of some of the great houses in it—newly manufactured exclusiveness. Here were great gray or white or brownstone affairs, bright, almost gaudy, with great verandas, astonishing doorways, flights of stone steps, heavily and richly draped windows, immense carriage-houses, parked and flowered lawns.