Reading Lew by nightlight--"in an ignorance [not quite] as black as night" now

[Mark Kohut]

After Troth has suggested Lew find a place in town, hailed a hansom-cab
and climbed in without looking back............

p.38   Lew looked around? Was it still Chicago?  Streets not like P's [chicago's] reviled grid....'not a name he could recognize' [on street signs}...plazas with lanes radiating like starfish.........even.....

one of TRPs wonderful happy images: courtyard within a courtyard.....

All this on the way to enetering Hotel Esthonia.........

One way to read this, I say, is as a foreshadowing of TRPs vision of Olde
Country/Old Deep Europe, so to speak, after Cyprian arrives there with Danilo...

Lew B. is getting reborn symbolically here.............