their conservatories and cupolas and gingerbread exactly native, would you?”
“No,” Selina admitted, “but those Italian villas and French chateaux in north Chicago suburbs are a good deal like a lace evening gown in the Arizona desert. It wouldn’t keep you cool in the daytime, and it wouldn’t be warm enough at night. I suppose a native architecture is evolved from building for the local climate and the needs of the community, keeping beauty in mind as you go. We don’t need turrets and towers any more than we need draw-bridges and moats. It’s all right to keep them, I suppose, where they grew up, in a country where the feudal system meant that any day your next-door neighbour might take it into his head to call his gang around him and sneak up to steal your wife and tapestries and gold drinking cups.”
Dirk was interested and amused. Talks with his mother were likely to affect him thus. “What's your idea of a real Chicago house, Mother?”
Selina answered quickly, as if she had thought often about it; as if she would have liked just such a dwelling on the site of the old DeJong farmhouse in which they now were seated so comfortably. “Well, it would need big porches for the hot days and nights so’s to catch the prevailing southwest winds from the prairies in the summer—a porch that would be swung clear around to the east, too—or a terrace or another porch east so that if the precious old lake breeze should come up just when you think you're dying of the heat, as it sometimes does, you could catch that, too. It
