Robertson did not herself know why she had been attracted by Jean Daquin. She knew that, in part, she had been drawn by his gentle manner, so different from the blustering, raw, at times tiresome aggressiveness of her own Chicago. Even to herself she sternly denied that this had caused her interest in Jean to grow. Her father had used his earnings as a physician to speculate in real estate. Through shrewd and clever means he had accumulated considerable wealth in Chicago’s fast-growing Negro settlement on the south side, and this wealth had given him great political power among his people.
Mary Robertson had no recollection of a time when she did not hear from morning to night endless discussions of money and of politics. If her father was not talking of the sums he had made or expected to make from this piece of property or through that election, he usually was conjecturing as to the wisdom or folly of associating with this man or that one, of joining one fraternal order or the other one, of doing this thing or the other, all these speculations revolving around the one desideratum—will it pay?