Subdivisions sprang up overnight.  Two-story, two-doored flat-buildings, whole ranks and files of them, with square patches of front porch cut in two by dividing railings, marched westward and skirted the restricted districts with the formality of an army flanking.  Grand Avenue, once the city’s limit, now girded its middle like a loin-cloth.  The middle-aged inhabitant who could remember it when it was a corn-field now beheld full-blasted breweries, cinematograph theaters, ten-story office-buildings, old mansions converted into piano-salesrooms and millinery emporiums, business colleges, and more full-blasted breweries up and down its length.

At Cook Street, which runs into Grand Avenue like a small tributary, a pall of smoke descended thick as a veil; and every morning, from off her second-story window-sills, Mrs. Shongut swept tiny dancing balls of soot; and one day Miss Rena Shongut’s neat rim of tenderly tended geraniums died of suffocation.

Shortly after, the Adolph Shongut Produce Company signed a heavy note and bought out the Mound City Fancy Sausage and Poultry Company at a low figure.  The spring following, large “To Let” signs appeared in the second-story windows of the modest house on Cook Street.  And, hard pressed by the approaching first payment of the note and the great iron voice of the Middle West Shoe Company, which backed up against the woodshed; goaded by the no-less-insistent voice of Mrs. Shongut, whose soot balls increased, and by Rena, who developed large pores; shamed by the scorn of a son who had the finger-nails and trousers creases of a bank clerk—­Adolph Shongut joined the great pantechnicon procession Westward Ho! and moved to a flat out on Wasserman Avenue—­a six-room-and-bath, sleeping-porch, hot-and-cold-water, built-in-plate-rack, steam-heat, hardwood-floor, decorated-to-suit-tenant flat neatly mounted behind a conservative incline of a front terrace, with a square patch of rear lawn that backed imminently into the white-stone garages of Kingston Place.

Friedrichstrasse, Rue de la Paix, Fifth Avenue, Piccadilly, Princess Street and Via Nazionale are the highways of the world.  Trod in literature, asterisked in guide-books, and pictured on postal cards, their habits are celebrated.  Who does not know that Fifth Avenue is the most rococo boulevard in the world, and that it drinks its afternoon tea from etched, thin-stemmed glasses?  Who does not know that Rue de la Paix runs through more novels than any other paved thoroughfare, and that Piccadilly bobbies have wider chest expansion than the Swiss Guards?

Wasserman Avenue has no such renown; but it has its routine, like the history-hoary Via Nazionale, which daily closes its souvenir-shops to seek siesta from two until four, the hours when American tourists are rattling in sight-seeing automobiles along the Appian Way.

At half past seven, six mornings in the week, a well-breakfasted procession, morning papers protruding from sack-coat pockets and toothpicks assiduous, hastens down the well-scrubbed front steps of Wasserman Avenue and turns its face toward the sun and the two-blocks-distant street-car.  At half past seven, six days in the week, the wives of Wasserman Avenue hold their wrappers close up about their throats and poke uncoifed heads out of doors to Godspeed their well-breakfasted spouses.