Chapter 7

GETTING MARRIED

I

THE GREAT OUTSIDE

All this time, while Milly Ridge was busily spinning her little cocoon in the big city, other and more serious life had been going on there, it is needless to say. Out of the human stream Milly was gathering to her attractive individualities, and Horatio was faithfully performing his minor function in the dingy brick establishment of the Hoppers'. Many hundreds of thousands, men and women, were weaving similar webs. For there was hardly a more stirring corner of the earth's broad platter than this same sprawling prairie city at the end of the great lake. All this time it had been swelling, much to the gratification of its boastful citizens,--getting busier, getting richer, getting dirtier. There had been many a civic throb and groan,--rosy successes and dreary failures.

But of all this surrounding life Milly was not faintly conscious. She could tell you just when the custom of giving afternoon teas first reached Chicago, when "two men on the box" became the rule, when the first Charity Ball was held and who led the grand march and why, and when women wore those absurd puffed sleeves and when they first appeared with long tails to their coats. But of the daily doings of men folk when they disappeared of a morning into the smoky haze of the city, and of all the mighty human forces around her, she had not the slightest conception, as indeed few of her sisters had at that time. To all intents and purposes she might as well have lived in the eighteenth century or in the Colorado desert, as in Chicago in the eighties and early nineties of this marvellous nineteenth century.

Horatio often referred to Chicago as a "real live town," and congratulated himself for being part of it. It was the one place in all the world to do business in. It grew over night, so the papers said each morning, and was manifestly destined to be the metropolis of the western hemisphere, etc., etc. All that was in the opulent future, for which every one lived. Even Horatio, who spent all his waking hours among men, did not in the least comprehend what it might be to live in this centre of expanding race energy. Yet he would point out to Milly appreciatively on their Sunday walks the acres of new building growing mushroomlike from the sandy soil, with the miles of tangled railroad tracks, the forest of smoking chimneys, and the ever widening canopy of black smoke. It was all ugly and dirty, the girl thought. She preferred the drive along the lake shore, and the Bowman's new palace with its machicolated cornice.

It was all business, intensely business: business affected even social moments. Later, when Milly became sophisticated enough to generalize, she complained that the men were "all one kind"; they could "talk of nothing but business to a woman." Even their physique, heavy and flabby, showed the office habit, in contrast with the bony and ruddy Englishmen, who drifted through the city from time to time. That Chicago was a huge pool into which all races and peoples drained,--that was a fact of which Milly was only dimly conscious. "You see so many queer, foreign-looking people on the street," she might observe. "Polacks and Dagoes!... Ugh.... Wish they'd stay at home!" Horatio would growl in response. Milly supposed they came from the "Yards," where hordes of these savage-looking foreigners were employed in the disagreeable task of slaughtering cattle. Their activity was only too evident certain days when the wind veered to the southwest and filled the city with an awful stench.

Of what it all meant, this huddling together of strange peoples from the four quarters of the globe, Milly never took the time to think. She never had the least conception of what it was,--the many miles of bricks and mortar, the tangled railroads, the ceaseless roar of the great city like the din of a huge factory. Here was the mill and the market--here was LIFE in its raw material. When she crossed the murky, slimy river, as she had occasion to do almost daily, after the removal to the North Side, she thought merely how dingy and dirty the place was, and what a pity it was one had to go through such a mess to reach the best shops and the other quarters of the city where "nice" people lived. She saw neither the beauty nor the significance of those grimy warehouses thrusting up along the muddy river amid the steam and the smoke--caverns that concealed hardware, tools, groceries, lumber,--all the raw protoplasm of life. An artist remarked once to Milly, "It's like Hell--and like Paradise, all in one,--this river!" She thought him rather silly.

One evening, however, out of this roaring hive of men and women striving to feed and clothe and house themselves came a flash of vivid lightning in the murky sky,--the bomb of the anarchist. That was enough to startle even the Milly Ridges,--spitting forth its vicious message only a mile or two from where the very "nicest" people had their homes! The sodden consciousness of the city awoke in a hideous nightmare of fear. The newspapers were filled with the ravings of excited ignorance. Nobody talked of anything else. Horatio declaimed against the ungrateful dogs,--those "Polack beasts,"--who weren't fit to enjoy all that America gave them. At dinner parties grave and serious men debated in low tones the awful deed and its meaning. Even women spoke of the bomb instead of discussing whether "you could get this at Field's" or "should try Mandel's." A fearful vision of Anarchy stalked the commonplace streets and peered into comfortable houses. Milly imagined that somehow those evil-looking barbarians had got loose from the stockyards and might descend at any moment upon the defenceless city in a howling mob, as she had read of their doing in her history books. For the first few days it was an excitement to venture into the streets at night, even with a strong male escort. Horatio spoke solemnly, with an aroused consciousness of citizenship, of "teaching the mob lessons and a wholesome respect for the law." Then there were the rumors fresh every hour of plots against leading men and wholesale slaughter by these same bloodthirsty anarchists, and the theatrical discoveries of the police--it was a breathless time, when even Milly seized upon the newspaper of a morning. Then gradually, as the police gathered in the little band of scapegoats, the tension relaxed: people went to the celebrated Haymarket to gape at the spot where the crime against society had taken place....

The excitement flamed up once more when the anarchists were brought to trial. Women fought for the chance to sit in the noisome little court-room, to see the eight men caught like rats in the nets of Justice. When life emerges dramatically in the court-room, it interests the Milly Ridges.... One morning Sally Norton came flying into the Ridge house.

"Get your things on, Mil!" she rippled breathlessly. "We're going to the anarchist trial."

"But the papers say you can't get near the door."

"Father's given me a card to the judge--he knows him. Come on--Vivie's waiting at the corner."

In such heady excitement the three girls raced to the criminal court building and were smuggled by a fat bailiff through the judge's private chambers into the crowded scene. There was not six inches of standing room to be had in the place except beside the judge, and there the bailiff installed the young women in comfortable chairs, much to the envy of the perspiring throng beneath.

There, behold, beside the grave judge, facing the court-room, above the counsel, the reporters, the prisoners, sat Milly Ridge and Sally and Vivie Norton, in their best clothes, with the sweeping plumed hats that had just come into fashion then.... Milly beamed with pleasure and excitement, casting alluring glances from beneath her great hat at the severe judge. It was like a play, and she had a very good seat.

It was a play that went on day after day for weeks, sometimes dull with legal formalities, sometimes tense with "human" interest. And, day after day, the three girls occupied their favored seats beside the judge, listening to the evidence of the great conspiracy against Society, watching the prisoners--a sorry lot of men generally--and staring haughtily down at the jammed court-room. Their presence, of course, was noted by the reporters and mentioned as at a social event "among our society leaders in daily attendance at the trial." Their names and dresses were duly recorded, along with pen pictures of the anarchists. It quite fluttered Milly, this prominence,--"the Misses Norton and Miss Mildred Ridge, etc."

The three girls became deeply interested in the prisoners and picked their favorites among them. Sally was for a German because he looked to be "such an interesting devil," and Vivie was intrigued by the newspaper stories about another. Milly was drawn to the youngest of all,--a mere lad, blue-eyed and earnest, who had evidently "got into bad company" and been led astray. Vivie sent her man flowers,--a bunch of deep red roses,--and the next day he appeared wearing one conspicuously pinned to his coat. Sally coaxed the obliging bailiff to smuggle them all into the jail so that they might see the prisoners and talk to them through the bars. But the great event was when Spies made his celebrated speech of defiance, breathing scorn and hatred of his captors. Sally Norton rose in her seat and threw him kisses with both hands. A bailiff came, put his hand on her shoulder, and forced her to be quiet. It made something of a scene in court. The judge looked annoyed. Then Sally had a fit of the giggles and finally had to leave the room.

But when the turn of Milly's hero came to speak in his own defence, Milly had a choking sensation in her throat and felt the warm tears run over her cheeks. He, too, was brave. He talked of the wrongs of society, and Milly realized somehow that she was part of the society he was condemning,--one of the more privileged at the feast of life, who made it impossible for the many others to get what they wanted. Of course his views were wrong,--all the men she knew said so,--but the pity of it all in his case, so young and handsome and brave he appeared!

While counsel wrangled and pleaded, while this little group of men rounded up by the police to stand sponsors for Anarchy and expiate its horrid creed, so that good citizens might sleep peacefully nights, faced death, the three girls sat and stared at the spectacle. It passed slowly, and the prisoners were condemned by a jury of their peers quite promptly, and the grave judge sentenced them "to hang by their necks until dead." At the dreadful words Milly gasped, then sobbed outright.

No matter what they had done, at least what _he_ had done, how wrong _his_ ideas about society were, _he_ was too young and too handsome for such an awful fate. If he had only had about him from the beginning the right influences, if some woman had loved him and guided him aright,--Milly hoped that he might yet be spared, pardoned if possible. Mopping the tears from her eyes she left the court-room for the last time, with a vague sense of the wretchedness of life--sometimes.

* * * * *

That very night, however, she was as gay and bright as ever at the Kemps' dinner. A fascinating young lawyer was of the party, a newcomer to the city, who dared to raise his voice in that citadel of respectability, the Kemps' Gothic dining-room, and declare that the whole affair was a miserable travesty of justice,--a conspiracy framed up by the police. "They have the city scared," he said, "and nobody dares say what he thinks. The newspapers know the truth, but the big men make the papers keep quiet." It was all quite thrilling, Milly thought. Perhaps, after all, her young man was not a villain. The table of sober diners sat very still, but afterwards the banker pronounced what the young lawyer said to be "loose talk" and "wicked nonsense." And Milly knew one young man who would never be asked again to the Granger Avenue house.

After the verdict came all sorts of legal delays, and Milly largely lost interest in the anarchists. The drama had evaporated, and though she continued to read what the papers printed about the prisoners, more personal affairs crowded in to blot out from her mind that sense of a large, suffering humanity which she had had for a few moments. When the governor was finally induced to intervene and commute some of the sentences, she had a muddled notion that he had deprived Society of its just vengeance, that the well-to-do, well-meaning people had failed to get full punishment for the shocking deeds of the anarchists.

And that was all.

About a year later the young blue-eyed anarchist, in whom Milly had been interested, blew off the top of his head with a bomb. But Milly was very busy just at that time with other matters.

II

MILLY ENTERTAINS

Of much more importance to Milly than the fatal bomb was her first real party. She had long desired to entertain.

What magic the word has for women of Milly's disposition! It conjures the scene of their real triumphs, for woman displays herself when she "entertains" as man does when he fights. She patronizes her friends, worsts her enemies,--then, when she "entertains"....

Milly's party came off that first spring after the Ridges had moved into the Acacia Street house,--in 1890 to be exact. Milly had had it in mind, of course, even before the family moved. She had long been conscious of her social indebtedness, which of late years had accumulated rapidly. Her party should be also an announcement, as well as a review of progress. She had consulted with the Nortons and Eleanor Kemp, who advised giving a "tea,"--a cheap form of wholesale entertainment then in more repute than now. Milly would have preferred to "entertain at dinner," as the papers put it. But that was obviously out of the question. The Ridge household with its shabby appointments and one colored maid was not yet on a dinner-giving basis. Moreover, it would have cost far too much to feed suitably the host that Milly aspired to gather together. The moving and necessary replenishment of the household goods had quite exhausted Horatio's purse, and the increase in the monthly bills more than consumed all the present profits of the tea and coffee business. Grandma Ridge was more vinegary than ever these days over the household bills. Milly called her "mean," and meanness in her eyes was the most detestable of human vices.

The famous "tea" marked another advance in Milly's career. It proved beyond question her gift for the life she had elected. Simple as this affair was--"from four until seven"--it had to be created out of whole cloth and involved a marvellous display of energy and tact on Milly's part. First her father and grandmother had to be accustomed to the idea. "I ain't much on Sassiety myself," Horatio protested, when the subject was first broached. (He had an exasperating habit of becoming needlessly ungrammatical when he wished to "take Milly down.") Mrs. Ridge observed coldly,--"It would be a great extravagance."

That tiresome word, "Extravagance!" Milly came to loathe it most of all the words in the language.

"Oh, grandma!" she exclaimed. "Just tea and cakes!"

Her conception grew before the event. Just "tea and cakes" developed into ices and sherbets and bonbons. Horatio would not permit punch or any form of alcoholic refreshment. After a convivial youth he had become rigidly temperance. "Tea and coffee's enough," he said. "You might tell your friends where they come from--help on the business." (It was one of Horatio's rude jokes.)

Eleanor Kemp, from her conservatories at Como, supplied the flowers and plants that did much to disguise the shabbiness of the little house. The Norton girls collected the silver and china from a radius of eight blocks. There was a man at the door with white gloves, another at the curb for carriage company, and a strip of dusty red carpet across the walk. Milly financed all this extra expense, and that and her new gown made such a deep hole in her budget that she never again caught up with her bills, although Horatio was induced to increase her allowance the next Christmas.

Milly and all her friends worked for weeks in preparation. They wrote the cards, addressed the envelopes, arranged the furniture, and distributed the flowers. She felt "dead" the day before with fatigue and anxiety, and shed tears over one of Grandma Ridge's little speeches.

* * * * *

But it was a triumph! Guests began coming shortly after four,--a few women from the West side,--and by five-thirty the little Acacia Street house was jammed to the bursting point, so that the young men who arrived towards six had to exercise their athletic skill in order to insert themselves into the crush. Afternoon teas still had some allurement, even for young men, in those primitive days, and Milly had an army of loyal friends, who would have come to anything out of devotion to her. And the affair had got abroad, as all Milly's affairs did, had become the talk of the quarter; a good many families were interested through personal contributions of tableware. There was a line of waiting cabs and carriages for three blocks in from the Lake. The stream of smartly dressed people flowed in and out of the house until after eight, when the last boisterous young men were literally shooed out of the front door by Milly and her aides,--the two Norton girls. It was, as the French put it, furiously successful.

Through the heat of the fray Mrs. Kemp and Mrs. Gilbert stood beside Milly under the grille that divided the hall from the drawing-room. Grandma Ridge in her best black gown, with her stereotyped cat-smile, sat near by in a corner. Milly had carefully planted the old lady where she would be conspicuous and harmless and had impressed upon her the danger of moving from her eminent position. For once the little old lady was stirred to genuine emotion as the babble of tongues surged over her. A becoming pink in her white cheeks betrayed the excitement within her withered breast over the girl's triumph. For even Grandma Ridge possessed traces of a feminine nature.... And Horatio! He came in late from his business, scorning to pay attention to the "women's doings," sneaked up the back stairs and donned his Sunday broadcloth coat, then wormed his way cautiously into the press to see the fun. One of the more exquisite moments of the day, preserved by Sally Norton and widely circulated among Milly's friends, was the picture of the little man facing the majestic Mrs. Bernhard Bowman--she of the palace on the shore--and teetering nervously on his heels, with hands thrust nonchalantly into his trousers' pockets, bragging to that distinguished person of "Daughter."

"She's a wonder--mighty smart girl," he said confidingly. "Done all this herself you know--her own idee. I'm not much myself for entertaining and all that society business. Give me a friend or two and a quiet game of cards, etc., etc."

The majestic "leader of our most exclusive circle," as the _Star_ had it the next Sunday morning, eyed the nervous little man over her broad bosom and across her plate of salad and pronounced gravely her judgment,--

"Your daughter, Mr. Ridge, must have a remarkable social talent."

"They all say it--must be so. Guess she got it from her mother's folks--not from _me_." He laughed confidentially. "Well, I tell her grandmother we must give her some rope--she'll marry one of these days."

"Of course."

"Young folks will be young."

(Afterwards Horatio puffed considerably when he told of his encounter with the great Mrs. Bowman. "I wasn't the least might 'fraid of her,--talked to her like anybody else. Who was she, anyway, when old Joe Bowman married her? Saleslady in a State Street store. I've seen her myself sliding the change across the counter and handing out socks." In this the little man must have exaggerated, for it was long before the Ridge advent in Chicago that the lady destined to become its social leader had withdrawn from the retail trade, if indeed there were any truth in the tale. "And she married a butcher," Horatio added. "Oh, papa!" from Milly. "Yes, he _was_ a butcher, too--wholesale, maybe, but he had the West Side Market out beyond Division Street--I've seen the sign." That might well have been. But long before this the honorable Joseph Bernhard Bowman had died,--God rest his soul in the granite mausoleum in Oakwoods,--and left a pleasant number of millions to finance his widow's aspirations. In Chicago, in those days, one never laid the start up against any assured achievement.)

At any rate Mrs. Bowman's presence at Milly's party was the last touch of success. Milly, though she had met the great lady, had not dared to send her a card. But Mrs. Gilbert, who realized what it would mean to Milly, had fetched her in her carriage, coaxingly,--"It will please the girl so, you know, to have you there for a few minutes!" And when the leader towered above Milly, whose flushed face was upturned with glistening, childlike eyes, and said in her ear, "My dear, it's all delightful, your party, and you are charming, really charming!" Milly felt that she had received the red ribbon.

"She has a very magnetic personality, your young friend," the great lady confided afterwards to Mrs. Gilbert, and repeated impressively several times, "A magnetic personality--it's all in that."

The phrase had not become meaningless then, and it aptly described Milly's peculiar power. Somehow she reached out unconsciously in every direction and drew to her all these perspiring, pushing, eating, talking people. She had drawn them all into her shabby little home. "Magnetic," as the great lady said. It is a power much desired in democratic societies where all must be done by the individual of his own initiative--a power independent of birth, education, money,--with a touch of the mystery of genius in it, of course.

Milly drew all kinds, indiscriminately,--even men, who didn't count for much in this woman's game of entertaining, except for the fact that they came. Yes, Mrs. Bernhard Bowman, who knew that people came to her chilly halls merely to have it known that they _could_ come, might well envy poor little Milly Ridge her one magnet gift.

"And so sweet," Mrs. Gilbert cooed fondly, watching her protégé.

At the moment Milly was listening to an elderly lady of the species frump, with two homely daughters of the species bore,--obviously West Side relics,--and she gave them the same whole-hearted interest she had given the majestic one herself. The two older, experienced women gazed at the scene half enviously. This was another magic quality that the girl possessed,--especially feminine, a tricksy gift of the Gods, quite outside the moral categories and therefore desired by all--charm. Charm made all that mob so happy to be there in the stuffy quarters, struggling to appease their thirst with the dregs of tepid sherbet; charm compelled the warm, enthusiastic speeches to the girl. As Eleanor Kemp whispered, pinching Milly's plump arm, "My dear, you are a wonder, just a perfect wonder,--I always said so.... I'll run in to-morrow to talk it over...."

All the women, richer, better placed in the game than Milly, easily detecting the shabbiness of her home beneath the attempts to furbish up, envied the girl these two gifts. Why? Because they most help a woman to be what civilization has forced her to be--a successful adventuress.

* * * * *

"Milly is such a sweet creature," Mrs. Gilbert purred to her companion, as she sank back into the silky softness of the brougham that Roy Gilbert had provided for her. "I do hope she'll marry well!"

"Of course she must marry properly,--some man who will give her the opportunity of exercising her remarkable social gift," Mrs. Bowman pronounced sagely.

Nettie Gilbert smiled. She felt that she had done a kind act that day.

"The girl has a career before her, if she makes no mistakes," the great lady added.

And that was the universal verdict of all the experienced women who came to bid their young hostess farewell and make their pretty speeches. One and all they recognized a woman's triumph. In this first attempt she had shown what she could do "with nothing, positively nothing--that house!" Hers was a talent like any other, not to be denied. The woman's talent. Obviously Horatio could not finance this career on coffee and tea. Some stronger man, better equipped in fortune, must be found and pressed into service. Who of all the young and middle-aged men that had come that afternoon to take the girl's hand and say the proper things would undertake this responsibility? From the way they hung about Milly, it might be seen that she would not have to wait long for her "working partner."

"Next, Milly's engagement!" Vivie Norton suggested daringly.

"And then!" Sally shouted, waving her arms in abandon at the vision she conjured.

"Did you ever see so many men?... And they never go to afternoon things if they can help it...."

Yes, it was an indubitable triumph! Even Horatio and Grandma Ridge admitted it, as they sat down in the disorder of the cluttered dining-room with the drooping flowers to munch sandwiches and drink cold chocolate for supper. They were plainly excited and somewhat awed by the vistas of the new social horizon that was opening through Milly's little party.

* * * * *

Milly was roused the next morning from a deep sleep to answer a knock at her door.

"What is it?" she said peevishly. "I think you might let me sleep to-day."

"Your father thought you would want to see the papers," her grandmother said, holding out an armful of Sunday literature. "Shall I bring you up a cup of tea?"

"Thanks, Granny." And Milly sank back into her pillows, while her hand skilfully extracted the sheet that contained "Madame Alpha's" social column. Ah, here it was!

"One of the most charming affairs of the post-lenten season.... A quiet five o'clock.... Many of our notable fashionables, etc.... Radiant young hostess, etc. The charm of the young hostess, etc."

Milly's thick braids circled her soft neck and fell on the large sheet while she devoured the words, as a young actress might swallow her first notices, or a young author scan his first reviews. The subtle intoxication of a successful first appearance quickened her pulses. "Quite the smartest bunch of snobs in the village," wrote "Suzette" in the _Mirror_, with a too obvious sneer. (Suzette's pose was a breezy disdain for the "highlights" of Society, an affectation of frontier simplicity and democracy. But Milly, like every woman, knew well enough that there is always a better and a worse socially, and the important thing is to belong to the best wherever you are, democracy or no democracy.)

At last Milly pushed from her the mass of newspapers and lay with upturned face, hands crossed beneath her head, staring out of her blue eyes at the dusty ceiling, dreaming of triumphs to be, social heights to surmount, a flutter of engagement cards winging their way like a flight of geese to the little Acacia Street house; dreaming of men and women--and somewhere at the end of the long vista she saw a very gorgeous procession, herself at the head, with a long veil and an enormous bunch of white roses clasped to her breast, moving in stately fashion up the church aisle. At the extreme end of the vista stood an erect black figure beside a white-robed clergyman. (For Milly now went to the Episcopal Church, finding the service more satisfying.) The face of this erect figure was blurred in the dream. It was full of qualities, but lacked defining shape: it was "manly," "generous," "high-spirited," "rich," "successful," etc., etc. But the nearer she approached in her vision to the altar amid the crash of organ music, the more indefinite became the face. She tried on the figure various faces she knew, but none seemed to fit exactly. No one possessed all the qualities.

Grandma with a cup of lukewarm tea shattered the vision.

III

MILLY BECOMES ENGAGED

"Milly," Nettie Gilbert said impressively, "I've something serious to say to you."

It was a Sunday evening before the fire in the Gilberts' pleasant drawing-room. The other supper guests had taken themselves off, and Roy Gilbert had disappeared to his den, where he smoked many cigars and was supposed to read serious books upon history and political economy.

Milly glanced apprehensively at the pretty, plump lady beside her. The tone in which the words had been pronounced reminded her oddly of that time so far away--so very far back--when Eleanor Kemp had talked to her seriously about completing her education.

"Yes, dear?" she answered, caressing a dimpled hand at her side.

"Milly,"--Mrs. Gilbert leaned forward and frowned slightly. Milly thought, "Nettie's getting fat, like her mother." The Gilberts had awfully good food and a great deal of it, even if they did go in for missions. "Milly, I have you on my mind a great deal these days."

"That's so good of you, dear."

Milly thought it must be religion once more, and prepared herself.

"You ought to settle yourself.... All your friends think you should marry, dear."

"Why?" Milly demanded with some asperity.

"Why, a girl in your position--"

"Yes, I know all that," Milly interrupted quickly.

She knew far better than Nettie Gilbert how necessary it was for her to settle herself somehow. The bills had grown more rather than less the last two years, and the tea and coffee importing business did not seem to be doing what had been expected of it. There were signs of an increasing financial stringency about Horatio. Then there were other signs, more personal, that were not pleasant to recall. That social career which had opened so brilliantly rather more than two years before had been full of pleasures and excitements. For nearly a season Milly Ridge had been the most talked of and invited girl in her special circle. The next season she had still been "popular," but latterly at the opening of the new season there had been a distinct falling off. The fringe of cards about her long mirror, where she kept her invitations tucked into the margins and pinned in pendants, had grown less fresh--not to say stale--and less distinguished. Mrs. Bowman had forgotten altogether to invite her to dinner this fall. There were other stings and mortifications that need not be described.... Yes, Milly had been pondering the matter more or less consciously for some months.

"Well," she said to Mrs. Gilbert, with a brave little smile, "what shall I do about it?"

She recognized Nettie Gilbert's right to broach the subject. Nettie had been her best friend, and thanks to her own experience had a fellow-feeling for her and wished to see her launched upon a similar successful career matrimonial.

"With all your charm, you could have married a dozen times," she said with gentle reproach.

"But I haven't!" Milly retorted despairingly. She did not like to admit that her opportunities had not been as numerous as it was popularly supposed they had been. They never were, as Nettie must know from her own experience. Yet she had had her "chances," and why hadn't she pulled it off before this? Why had all the little flirtations with promising young men come to nothing? Were they afraid of her lavish hand? Or had she been waiting for something else,--"the real, right thing?" She did not know.

Her grandmother said that a penniless girl had no right to be so "particular"--which always maddened Milly.

"I'm afraid you're not serious enough, my dear," Mrs. Gilbert remarked in gentle reproof. She had always felt that was a flaw in Milly's character,--a lack of deep interest in the missionary side of life.

"But men don't like serious women," Milly said flippantly, dangling her slipper on the end of her toes.

"I think the best ones do," Mrs. Gilbert retorted severely. "You were making fun of Mr. Parker at supper to-night, and I'm afraid he understood."

"I know," Milly admitted penitently. "But he has such a funny voice." She imitated amusingly the shrill falsetto of the said Clarence Parker. "And he's so solemn about everything he says."

Mrs. Gilbert laughed in spite of her stern mood, then controlled herself.

"But, Milly, Clarence Parker's very nice. He's related to the best people where he comes from, and he is doing remarkably well in his business, Roy says."

"What is it?" Milly demanded more practically.

"Stocks and bonds, I think,--banking, you know."

"Oh," said Milly, somewhat impressed.

"What is Clarence Parker's business, Roy?" Mrs. Gilbert appealed to her husband, who at that moment happened to enter the room.

"He represents several large estates in the East--invests the money," Gilbert replied, and turning to Milly with a smile asked:--

"Going out for him, Milly? He's all right, solid as a rock."

"Lighthouse," Milly corrected sulkily.

"And he's got plenty of his own money--has sense about investments."

"I haven't any to make!"

"Oh, come--you've got one...."

Nevertheless, when the two friends said their good-bys, kissing each other affectionately on the cheek and saying, "Will you go with me to the Drummonds Tuesday?" and "How about the meeting for the Old Man's Mission?" Milly added, "Your financial rock asked if he might call. I told him he could."

Milly squeaked the words in imitation of Mr. Parker's thin voice. They both laughed.

But Milly trotted home around the corner to the little house in Acacia Street in anything but a gay mood. The angular, white face of Mr. Clarence Albert Parker was far from fulfilling the idea she had visioned to herself in her Sunday morning dream. She knew well enough why Nettie Gilbert had arranged this particular Sunday supper with the intimacy of only four guests--Milly was very much awake now socially--and she had taken pains to examine the new young man with critical care. He was little, scarcely taller than Horatio, and Milly disliked men whose heads she could look across. But with a silk hat it might not be too bad. And he was slightly bald, as well as pale,--on the whole not robust,--but he had keen little gray eyes that seemed to watch one from the side and take in a great deal. He was a precise, neat, colorless man, the sort turned out by a conservative New England family that invests its savings with scrupulous care at four and three-quarters per cent. No, he was not inspiring, this grandson of the Plymouth Rock, with the thin voice. But he seemed substantial. Mr. Gilbert said so, and Roy Gilbert knew.

There were other sombre reflections in Milly's revery that night. The sense of family stringency was urging her to "make good" in some way. She was aware that she was slipping back in the social sands, might become commonplace and neglected, if she did not do something to revive the waning interest in herself. She realized, as she had not definitely realized before, that outside of the social game her life held little or nothing. To be sure, she helped Mrs. Gilbert with her missionary business and charities: she read to a few old men once a week, and she carried flowers over to St. Joseph's Hospital. But she could not pretend to herself that charities occupied her whole being.... No, the only way out was Matrimony. A marriage, suitable and successful, would start her career once more. With something like a desperate resolve Milly put her latch-key into the hole, and let herself into the paternal home, where a familiar family odor greeted her sensitive nostrils. With a grimace of disgust she swept upstairs. Decidedly it was time for her to settle herself, as Nettie phrased it.

* * * * *

This time Milly arrived, in spite of homely paw or lukewarm inclination for the man. The young financier called at the Ridge home once, twice, and there met Horatio and Grandma Ridge, who both thought very highly of him. "A man with such principles, my dear," Grandma observed. The two young people "attended divine service together," showed up afterwards on the Drive, where Milly noted with satisfaction that Mr. Parker plus a silk hat overtopped her gaze. She also noted that the friends she met smiled and bowed with just an added touch of interest.... They talked--chiefly Milly--on a variety of colorless topics. It appeared that Mr. Parker had positive views only on financial matters. For all the rest,--art, literature, religion, and life,--he began with a cautious,--"Well, now, I don't know," and never got much farther. However, Milly wisely reflected, one didn't marry for the sake of exciting conversation.

The affair progressed quite smoothly; by the middle of winter Milly's friends smiled when they spoke of "Milly's young man" and were ready with their felicitations. On the whole they thought that Milly had "done quite well...."

It happened naturally, in the course of an expedition which the two made to the scene of the great new Exposition. They drove out in a smart carriage with a pair of lively horses which Mr. Parker managed very well, but which took all his attention. They first visited the tumultuous fair grounds, where an army of workmen were making desperate efforts to get the impromptu city in some shape for visitors. They talked of the beauty of the buildings, the grandeur of the whole design, the greatness of Chicago. Then they drove to a vast new hotel in which Mr. Parker had taken a conservative interest, and they still talked of the marvellous growth of the city, its Ultimate Destiny,--terms which had a lugubrious sound in the New Englander's piping voice. As they turned northwards around the great oval of Washington Park, the sun was sinking into a golden haze of dust and smoke. The horses dropped to a peaceful walk, and Milly knew that it was coming and braced herself for it. It came, slowly.

First, by way of preliminary flourish, Mr. Parker declared all over again his faith in the future of the city. He had come to stay, he repeated with emphasis; had thrown in his fate with that of Chicago.

"I'm going to stay," he trilled, "and grow up with the city." (At this point Milly almost upset the boat by laughing: the idea of the little man's growing up with Chicago seemed funny.)

Having struck the personal note, the young man spoke of his own "prospects," and outlined the dignified position he intended to occupy in the forefront of the elect. This implied, of course, an establishment and a suitable wife. Milly made the proper responses in the pauses. At last the fateful words reached her ear, "Will you marry me, Miss Ridge?" As Milly mimicked later his slow, solemn utterance, it sounded more like, "Will you bury me, Miss Ridge?"

And Milly, with commendable directness, looked him straight in the eye and said without a quiver,--"Yes, I will, Mr. Parker."

Afterwards, as if this effort had exhausted both, there was silence on the way back. When they reached the house, he said impressively, "I will call to-morrow and see your father."

"He'll be delighted to see you, I'm sure," Milly rejoined somewhat flatly. Then she fled up the steps, as if she were afraid he might try to kiss her or hold her hand. She escaped _that_, for the present....

So it was done at last.

IV

CONGRATULATIONS

If Milly had any misgivings or inner revolt that first night, it would have been dispelled by the unfeigned joy of her father and her grandmother the next morning when she told them the news. Little Horatio said robustly as he kissed her:--

"Fine! Daughter! Fine!... He's a smart young man, I know that--the best one of all your beaus.... And _he's_ lucky, too," he added apologetically.

Grandma Ridge remarked with a certain malice, "You ought to be happy with him, Milly; he will be able to give you all the things you want."

"I hope so," Milly responded briskly.

A few telephone messages to intimate friends and the news was spread broadcast over the area of Milly's little world. For the rest of the day and for several days afterwards she was kept busy receiving congratulations by telephone and in person,--flowers, letters, invitations,--all the little demonstrations of interest that give importance and excitement to a woman's life.

She had "made good," at last--that was the pleasant sensation she was bathed in from morning to night. She had done the right thing. The congratulations sounded quite sincere. If not much was said of the young man's personal charms, a great deal was made of his substantial qualities, which were indubitable.

Nettie Gilbert was one of the first to arrive and took Milly to her arms affectionately. "My dear," she murmured between kisses, "I'm _so_ glad for you."

"You see I did it," Milly replied complacently, marvelling to herself how easy it had been to do, once she had determined upon this way out.

"You must let me give you a party.... Thursday?" Mrs. Gilbert purred, ignoring delicate analysis.

That was the beginning of a joyous whirl of engagements,--luncheons, dinners, suppers, and theatre parties. It seemed as if Milly's little world had been waiting for this occasion to renew its enthusiasm. Milly had the happy self-importance that an engaged girl should have, and to cap her triumphs, Mrs. Bowman gave one of her tremendous dinners, with twenty-four covers, her second-best gold service, and a dance afterward in the picture gallery. All in honor of obscure little Milly Ridge! She had arrived.

She might look down the long, heavily laden table with the men-servants inserting the courses between the guests, and scan the faces of prominent citizens and their wives together with a few minor diplomats--for this was the great summer of '93--and feel a pardonable elation in her position. On her right sat that Mr. George Danner, the wealthy merchant whose equipage with two men on the box she had once admired, and on her left was the kindly, homely face of old Christian Becker, the owner of _The Daily Star_. (You may be sure that the _Star_ had a full account of this function. But Milly's name appeared so frequently in Madame Alpha's social column that it had almost lost interest for her.)... At the other end of the table next to the hostess's expansive person sat the Instrument of Accomplishment, like a very refined little white mouse, his keen eyes taking in every gold fork on the table. His mouth was often open, and Milly imagined she could hear the familiar, "Well now, I don't know about that." However, his hostess seemed to treat him with consideration.

* * * * *

It should be said to Milly's credit that she took rather less satisfaction in all this social flattery than in the happiness her engagement brought into the little Acacia Street house. Horatio began to chirp once more, after the interview with his prospective son-in-law. The inspissated gloom of the days of stringency had passed. The golden beams of prosperity seemed to radiate from the white-faced financier.

"I tell you Clarence is a smart one," Horatio announced after the first interview. "He gave me some good pointers." For after the embarrassing formalities of sentiment had been disposed of, the two men had naturally dropped into business, and Parker had suggested a method of inserting the tea and coffee business into the Exposition by getting concessions for "Coffee Kiosks," which should advertise the Ridge brands of harmless stimulants. The scheme had fired Horatio, who began once more to dream dreams of wealth.

So when the ring came, which like everything else about Clarence Albert was plain, costly, correct--and unlovely--Milly put the large diamond on her stubby finger and reflected that even if its giver was not the Idol of her Dreams, he was very good to her, and she ought to be happy. She meant to make him a good wife as she understood that vague term, and thus repay him for all his bounties. As a matter of fact the little Parker man was getting repaid already in social matters for his generous act in selecting a poor girl to share his affluence. The world knew him to be sharp, and was glad to think him kind....

"It's a very handsome one, Clarence," Milly said of the ring, turning it critically to the light. And she sweetly held up her face to be kissed.

That, to be frank, was the part she liked least of the whole affair, "demonstrations," and she dealt out her favors to her lover sparingly. However, her fiancé was not demonstrative by nature: if he had amorous passions, he kept them carefully concealed, so that Milly could manage that side quite easily. It usually came merely to a pressure of hands, a cold kiss on the brow, or a flutter along the bronze tendrils about the neck. Sometimes Milly speculated what it might be like later in the obscure intimacy of marriage, but she dismissed the subject easily, confident that she could "manage" as she did now. And she had the sweet sense of self-sacrifice in doing something personally disagreeable. "If it hadn't been for poor old Dad," she would say to herself and sigh. Which was not wholly sincere. At this period of their lives few mortals can be square with themselves.

All such refinements of thought and feeling were rare because there was no time for revery. Milly was determined to get the most out of her triumph, and drove the peaceable Clarence Albert rather hard. All women, he had supposed in his ignorance, were more or less fragile. But it was astonishing what an amount of nerve-racking gayety Milly could get through in a day and come up smiling the next morning for another sixteen-hour bout with pleasure. Sometimes Clarence protested that he was a working man and must be at his office by nine. But Milly had slight mercy; she let him see plainly the social duty of the American husband. He too reflected, it might be, that things would be different after the wedding and yawned away the hours as best he could at dance or dinner or late supper in Old Vienna on the famous Midway.

It was Chicago's wonderful festal year, the summer of the great Fair. Responsible men of large affairs, who knew what was going on financially behind the scenes, might look grave and whisper their apprehensions among themselves. But the people were resolved to be gay. They were mad with doing, especially the women. All the world was entertained in the lavish western spirit of hospitality. Thus in addition to her own private excitement, Milly shared the general festival spirit, and thanks to her social charm and her young man's reputation for solid achievement the two were part of many an important festivity. They helped to entertain the European notables, dined and did the shows from morning until morning in the best of company. Milly wished it might go on like this forever.

"Chicago will not be large enough for you after this experience," her old friend, Eleanor Kemp, observed, crossing her path at the ball for the French ambassador. "You will have to move on to New York."

"Well, now, I don't know about that," Parker demurred, but Milly cut in with,--

"We're going abroad first, you know."

She smiled graciously on her old friend, divining exactly that kind lady's mixed feelings. "Come on, Clarence!" and she sailed off into the press, bowing and smiling to her right and her left.

In the midst of all this feverish activity there was little time for mutual examination and discovery for the engaged couple,--all the better, Milly thought,--and yet she had already resolved upon certain changes in her husband-to-be, like a competent wife. For one thing she discovered quite early that Clarence Albert was inclined to be close in money matters. He always counted his change carefully, like a good puritan, and gave small tips. He ordered the less expensive dishes and wines, and inquired whether a single portion might do for two when they were lunching out together. He did not like to take cabs when the street-cars were running. Milly had suffered all her life at the hands of Grandma Ridge from such petty economies, and she did not intend that it should continue. It was not so much any intentional meanness--if Milly had but known--as the resultant habit of generations of enforced thrift. Milly's fingers all turned outwards, and money ran through them like sand. She was a born Spender and scattered Cash, her own or other people's, with regal indifference. All her life she had suffered from cramped means, and now that she was about to marry a rich man she meant to get the good of it. What am I doing it for? she would ask herself in her more cynical moments.... As soon as she was Mrs. Parker she would come to an understanding with her husband on this cardinal point and show him what was decent for a man in his position. Meanwhile she gave him a few hints of what he might expect.

"I'm afraid," he remarked in his falsetto voice, not unkindly, "you like to spend money."

"Of course I do! What woman doesn't?" Milly retorted brightly, as she chucked the bunch of violets she had been wearing out of the cab window because they were somewhat wilted, and she added warningly, "I hate mean people!"

He laughed good naturedly.

* * * * *

Their first misunderstanding came over the question where they were to live after their return from the European trip. It seems that Parker had already bought land far out on the north shore of the Lake in a new and promising neighborhood and proposed building a house there. Milly was ready enough to build: she had large plans for her new home. But she had set her mind on a lot on the Drive, a block from the Bowman place and two from the Gilberts--"the most desirable site in the city, every one says," she explained, "and so near all our friends."

Parker tried to make her understand that fifty thousand dollars was altogether too much money to put into an "unproductive investment" like that.

"You've got the money?" Milly demanded succinctly.

He admitted it reluctantly.

"Then I can't see why we shouldn't have the best."

Milly, who had secret plans of running the great Bowman a social race, was thoroughly irritated at his obstinacy. They turned from the vacant lot, which they had been examining for the second time, and walked down the Drive at odds.

"My property at Lakehurst has twice the frontage and only cost me ten thousand," the little man of means observed complacently.

"I don't care if it cost only ten dollars," Milly pouted. "It's in the suburbs."

"The city's growing that way fast."

"It'll reach us when I'm an old woman!"

"Before that I guess...."

She dashed upstairs to her room, leaving her lover to the attentions of Mrs. Ridge. The old lady approved of Clarence Albert. They discussed religion together. They had the same Victorian standards and principles about life. This afternoon he confided to her the real estate trouble Milly and he had had.

"I'm sure, Clarence, you are quite right, and Milly must learn to be more reasonable. The air will be so much cleaner out there."

"And the cars come within a block now."

"I'll speak to Milly about it."

She did.

"If you aren't careful, Milly," she warned her granddaughter, "you'll frighten him. You aren't married yet," she added meaningly.

"He oughtn't to buy land without consulting me," Milly flared, forgetting that this transaction had taken place before her determination to become Mrs. Clarence Parker.

"I think you are a very ungrateful girl," Mrs. Ridge observed, with pressed lips.

"Oh, you always take the men's side, grandma!... Clarence isn't the only man in the world."

"Better take care before it's too late," the old lady repeated warningly. "You don't treat Clarence as a girl should who is going to marry. He's an admirable young man."

Mrs. Ridge ever croaked thus, foretelling disaster.

"If you say anything more, I'll never marry him!" Milly flamed in final exasperation. "You don't understand. Women don't behave as they did when you were a girl. They don't lie down before their husbands and let them walk all over them."

"Perhaps not," grandma laughed icily in reply. "But I guess men aren't so different from what they were in my time."

Grandma had her own understanding of male character.

V

THE CRASH

As events soon proved, Mrs. Ridge's croaking was not without justification. The crash in Milly's affairs came, not until the autumn, a few weeks before the day set for the wedding, and it came on the line of cleavage already described, although quite unexpectedly and over a trivial matter, as such things usually happen.

After the closing of the fairy city gloom had settled down over Chicago. People were exhausted socially from their hectic summer and Panic stalked forth from behind the festival trappings where it had lain hidden. Times were frightfully bad, every one said,--never so bad before in the experience of the country. There were strikes, a hundred thousand idle men walking the cold streets, empty rows of buildings, shops and factories closed--and a hard winter coming on. All this did not mean much to Milly, busy with her own concerns and plans for the wedding, except for the fact that few people entertained and everybody seemed relaxed and depressed. Clarence Albert, like a prudent mariner of the puritan type, dwelt upon the signs of dire storm, and counselled their not building for the present, although he let her understand that his own ventures were well under cover. Milly was less disappointed over not building the house because she still had her mind on that vacant lot on the Drive. Perhaps in the depression Clarence would be able to get it at a bargain....

Then the quarrel came over nothing at all. They were to go to the theatre or opera--later she forgot which--by themselves one evening. Her fiancé came to dinner, and he and Horatio talked dolefully of the business outlook. When they started out, there was no cab before the door. Milly, regarding her light raiment, demurred and telephoned for one herself. When they reached the theatre and she proceeded to sail down the centre aisle, she found that their seats were in the balcony. Clarence, who never dealt with ticket brokers on principle, had not been able to get good floor seats and thought the first row of the balcony would answer, as the theatre was a small one. Where he had been brought up, the balcony seats were considered "just as good," and better if they could be had more cheaply. He did not understand the awfulness of metropolitan standards to which Chicago was aspiring.

Milly, a cloud upon her pretty face, drew her wrap close about her and sat dumb through the first act. Her mortification was increased by discovering Sally Norton in a box below with Ted Leffingwell and some gay folk. Sally's roaming eyes also discovered Milly and her young man before the act was finished; she signalled markedly and communicated the news to her party, who all looked at the glum pair, laughed and smiled among themselves.

Milly's burning ears could hear Sally's jeers. At the close of the act she got up and marched out without a word, followed by the bewildered Clarence.

"What's the matter Milly? Where are you going?"

"Home."

At the entrance there were no cabs in sight at this hour, and they walked to the end of the block where the cars passed. When a car came, Milly got as far as the platform, pronounced it a "filthy box," which it probably was, and made the conductor let her off. Then she marched haughtily northwards, trailed by Clarence Albert, in whose white face a dangerous pink was rising. Fortunately it was a still clear, night, and they covered the mile to Acacia Street without misadventure and without words. When they had reached the small front room and Milly had thrown off her wrap, her eyes still flashing angrily, Parker said in a carefully controlled voice:--

"I'm sorry, Milly, to have given you so much annoyance."

"As if a girl with a decent gown on could ride in a street-car!"

"I'm sorry--"

"If you can't afford--"

"I didn't know you were so dependent on carriages--"

It was a pardonable human revenge, but it was the straw. In a flash Milly stripped the big diamond from her finger and dramatically held it forth to him.

"Here's your ring," she said.

"Milly!..."

It isn't wise to follow such a scene any further. I do not know that Milly finally flung the ring at her lover, though she was capable of doing it like an angry child. At any rate the symbolic circle of harmonious union lay on the floor between them when Grandma Ridge arrived, stealthily coming from behind the portières, her little gray shawl hugged tight about her narrow shoulders.

"Why, Milly--what is this? Clarence!"

"It means that I'm not going to marry a man who cares more for his money than for me," Milly said bluntly, picking up her wraps and stalking out of the room. She paused in the hall, however, long enough to hear her former lover say dolefully,--

"She don't love me, Mrs. Ridge. That's the trouble--Milly don't really love me."

And she added from the hall:--

"Clarence is quite right, grandma. I don't love him--and what's more, I'm never going to marry a man I can't love for all the money in the world!"

With this defiant proclamation of principle Milly ascended to her room.

What passed between Mrs. Ridge and the discarded Clarence, it is needless to relate. Even Mrs. Ridge became convinced after a time that the rupture was both inevitable and irrevocable. Parker at last left the house, and it must be added took with him the ring which had been recovered from the floor.

After he had gone Mrs. Ridge knocked at Milly's door. But an obstinate silence prevailed, and so she went away. Milly was sitting on her bed, tears dropping from her eyes, tears of rage and mortification and disappointment. She realized that she had failed, after all, in doing what she had set out to do, and angry as she still was, disgusted with Clarence's thin and parsimonious nature, she was beginning, nevertheless, to be conscious of her own folly.

"I never liked him," she said to herself over and over, in justification for her rash act. "I couldn't bear him near me. I only did it for Dad's sake. And I could not, that's all there is to it--I just couldn't.... We should have fought all the time--cold, mean little thing."

After a time she undressed and went to bed, calmer and more at peace with herself than for some time. The inevitable does that for us. "I can't live with a man I don't love--it isn't right," she thought, and gradually a glow of self-appreciation for her courage in refusing, even at the ninth hour, to make the woman's terrible sacrifice of her sacred self came to her rescue. Her sentimental education, with its woman's creed of the omnipotence of love, had reasserted itself.

"I tried," she said in her heart, "but I couldn't--it wasn't the real, right thing."

Of course she had known this all along, but she treated it now as a new discovery. And she went to sleep, sooner than one might expect under the circumstances.

VI

THE DEPTHS

But the next day, as the French say, it was to pay. When Milly kissed her father at the breakfast table, his mournful eyes and drooping mouth showed plainly that he knew the disaster.

"I couldn't, father," she murmured weepily.

"It's all right, daughter," the little man responded bravely, fumbling with his fork and knife.

But her grandmother did not mince matters. It was all well enough for a girl to have her own way as Milly had had hers, but now she had made a nice mess of things,--put them all in a ridiculous position. Who was she to be so particular, to consider herself such a queen? etc., etc. Milly took it all in silence. She knew that she deserved it in part.

At last Horatio intervened. He didn't want his daughter to feel forced to marry a man she couldn't be happy with, not for all Danner's millions. Business was bad, to be sure, but he was a man yet and could find something to do to support his daughter.

"I hope it ends all this society business for good," Mrs. Ridge put in with a hard little laugh. "If you don't want to marry, you can go to work."

"I will," said Milly, humbly.

"Don't be hard on her, mother," Horatio whispered into the old lady's ear. "It don't do no good now."

But after he had left, Mrs. Ridge turned on Milly again.

"I don't suppose you know the trouble your father is in."

"We're always hard up.... Anything new?"

She had been so fully preoccupied with her own affairs these past months she had not realized that the tea and coffee business was getting into worse straits than ever. Everything, she had optimistically reckoned, would be smoothed out by her marriage.

"Bankruptcy--that's what's coming," her grandmother informed her, with an acid satisfaction in being able to record the fulfilment of her prophecies. "That comes of your father's trying a new business at his age--and Hoppers' was so sure. He'd have been a department head by now, if he had stayed."

"I thought the fair concession made a lot of money."

Mrs. Ridge gave her the facts. It seemed that Horatio, always optimistic and trusting, had put this new venture in the hands of a man who had talked well, but had cheated him outrageously, and finally absconded after the close of the Fair, leaving behind debts contracted in the firm's name. The losses had wiped out all the profits of the concession and more, and this, added to the general business depression, was bad enough. But there was worse. Snowden had suddenly demanded his money. Using the defalcation as an excuse he alleged Horatio's bad management, and wanted an immediate settlement of the firm's affairs. That meant the end--bankruptcy, as Mrs. Ridge said. Awful word!

"But it's outrageous of Mr. Snowden!" Milly cried.

"It seems he's that kind. He got ahead of your father in the partnership agreement, and now the lawyer says he can do anything he likes--sell out the business if he wants to.... And we've got this house on our hands for another year," she added sourly, bringing home to Milly her share in the general misfortune.

Then the little old lady gathered up the breakfast dishes, while Milly sat and looked at the dreary wall of the next house. It was pretty bad. Still she could not feel sorry for what she had done....

"I'll see Mr. Snowden myself," she announced at last.

Her grandmother looked at her curiously.

"What good will that do?"

Milly, recollecting the old offence, blushed. Latterly as the prospective wife of a rich man she had assumed certain airs of her putative social position, and thought she could "manage" easily a common sort of person like this Snowden man. Now she realized with a sudden sinking of spirits it was all different. She possessed no longer any authority other than that of an attractive, but poor, young woman with "a good manner."

During the next few days she was destined to feel this change in her position repeatedly. If the news of her engagement to an "eligible" man had spread rapidly, the announcement of the disaster to her engagement seemed miraculously immediate. She had just begun with her grandmother's help to prepare to return her engagement gifts, as her grandmother insisted was the proper thing to do, when in rushed the Norton girls, quite breathless. Sally greeted her with a jovial laugh.

"So you've dropped him! I told Ted, Milly would never stand for those balcony seats!" She rippled with laughter at the humor of the situation. Milly, revived by her attitude, related the cab and car incidents. "He was--horrid."

"They're all like that, those New Englanders--afraid to spend their money," Sally commented lightly.

Vivie took the sentimental view.

"Your heart was never in it, dear," she said consolingly.

"Of course it wasn't--I never pretended it was!"

"That sort of thing can't last."

Milly, now quite reassured, gave a drole imitation of Clarence Albert's last remarks,--"She doesn't love me, Mrs. Ridge--Milly doesn't really love me!"

She trilled the words mischievously. Sally roared with pleasure. Vivie said, "Of course you couldn't marry him--not that!"

And Milly felt that she was right. No, she could not do _that_: she had been true to herself, true to her feelings,--woman's first duty,--a little late, to be sure.

* * * * *

But a full realization of her situation did not come until she appeared in public. Then she began to understand what she had done in discarding her suitable fiancé. Nettie Gilbert hardly invited her to sit when she called. She said severely:--

"Yes, Clarence told me all about it. He feels very badly. It was very frivolous of you, Milly. I should not have _thought it possible_."

She treated Milly as the one soul saved who, after being redeemed, had fled the flock. Milly protested meekly, "But I didn't care for him, Nettie, not the least little bit."

Mrs. Gilbert, who remembered her Roy, replied severely, "At least you ought to have known your own mind before this."

"He _is_ mean," Milly flared.

"And you are rather extravagant, I'm afraid, my dear!"

That relation ended there, at least its pleasant intimacy. And so it went from house to house, especially among the settled married folk, who regarded Milly as inconceivably foolish and silly. Who was she to be so scrupulous about her precious heart? Even the younger, unmarried sort had a knowing and disapproving look on their faces when she met them. As for the stream of invitations, there was a sudden drought, as of a parched desert, and the muteness of the telephone after its months of perpetual twinkle was simply ghastly.

So Milly was learning that there is one worse experience in life than not "making good," and that is, giving the appearance of it and then collapsing. This was the collapse. Sympathy was all with Clarence Albert, except among a few frivolous or sentimental souls, like Sally and Vivie. Young women having the means, who found themselves in Milly's situation,--with a broken engagement on their hands at the beginning of the season,--would at once have gone abroad or to California or the South, to distract themselves, rest their wounded hearts, and allow the world to forget their affairs, as it promptly would. At least they would have tried settlement work. But Milly had no money for such gentle treatment. She had to run the risk of bruising her sensibilities whenever she set foot out of doors, and she was too healthy-minded to sit long at home and mope. And home was not a pleasant place these days.

Still, she said to herself defiantly, she was not sorry for what she had done. A woman's first duty was to her heart, etc.

* * * * *

Eleanor Kemp, who had been ill and away from the city, sent for Milly on her return. She proved to be the most sympathetic of all her friends, and Milly decided that Eleanor was her best, as she was her oldest, friend. At the conclusion of Milly's tale, rendered partly in the comic vein, Mrs. Kemp sighed, "It's too bad, Milly." The sigh implied that Milly had damaged herself for the provincial marriage market, perhaps irretrievably. She might marry, of course, probably would, being sobered by this fiasco, but after such a failure, nothing "brilliant" might be expected.

"I just couldn't sit opposite that cold, fishy creature all my life," Milly protested. "He got on my nerves--that was it."

"Yes, I understand--but--"

Milly suspected that banking and bankers might get on a woman's nerves, too, though Walter Kemp was a much more human man than Clarence Albert ever would be.

"And now what will you do?" her friend inquired. (Milly had confided to her Horatio's coming disaster.)

"I don't know--something quick!"

"You might help me with my mail and buying--I never seem to get through with everything--and this New Hospital committee."

"Could I, do you think?" Milly responded eagerly.

So it was arranged that Milly should become a sort of informal lady secretary and assistant to the banker's wife, with unstated hours, duties, and compensation,--one of those flexible, vague business and social arrangements that women were more likely to make with one another twenty years ago than now.

Milly's spirits revived quickly, and she left the Kemps buoyant. It seemed easier than she had expected to "get something to do." She kissed Eleanor Kemp with genuine gratitude.

"You've always been the kindest, dearest thing to me, Nelly."

"I'm very fond of you, dear, and always shall be."

"I know--and you were my first real friend."

Milly had a pleasant sense of returning to old ideals and ties in thus drawing near once more to the Kemps, whom latterly she had found a trifle dull.... Leaving the house, she bumped into old Mrs. Jonas Haggenash, one of the Kemps' neighbors. The Haggenashes had made their way in lumber and were among the most considered of the older, unfashionable people in the city. Mrs. H. had a reputation as a wit, of the kind that "has her say" under any and all circumstances. Latterly she had rather taken up Milly Ridge, who fished in many pools.

"So you and your young man had a falling out, Milly," Mrs. Haggenash rasped nasally.

"Our engagement has been broken," Milly acknowledged with dignity.

"That's a pity. It ain't every day a poor girl can marry a millionaire. They don't grow on every bush."

"When I marry, it will be some one I can respect and love too."

The old lady smiled dubiously at the pretty sentiment.

"Most women want to. But they've got to be fed and clothed first."

She looked at Milly's smart walking costume and smiled again. Milly always managed to have a becoming street dress and hat, even in her poorest days, and lately she had let herself out, as the pile of unopened bills on her dressing-table would show.

"I expect to eat and dress," Milly retorted, and trotted off with a curse near her lips for Mrs. Jonas Haggenash and all her tribe.

* * * * *

The way home took Milly near the office of the tea and coffee business, and she thought to surprise her father and give him the good news of Mrs. Kemp's offer. She would also get him to walk home with her. Horatio had been very doleful of late and she wished to cheer him up. She had not visited the office for many months, but its outward appearance was much the same as it had been that first time when she had visited it with her father. The sign had become dingy, was almost undecipherable, as if it had anticipated the end of its usefulness. The same dreary little cart for "city deliveries" stood before the door, but the thin horse drooped disconsolately between the shafts, as if he too knew that he was not there for long.

Horatio was not in the office. Snowden stood beside the bookkeeper, looking over a ledger. As Milly opened the door both he and the bookkeeper looked up. Milly recognized the hatchet-faced woman of uncertain age, with the forbidding stare through her large spectacles. This time when Milly came forward with a pleasant smile and "Miss Simpson, how are you?" the stony face did not relax a muscle. Miss Simpson looked her employer's daughter over as if she were about to accuse her of being the cause for the firm's disaster. "Mr. Snowden," Milly continued, ignoring the woman's hostility, "I came for my father.... How are you and Mrs. Snowden?"

"Your father's gone," the bookkeeper snapped with an unpleasant smile. She eyed Milly's fashionable attire unsympathetically. It was the second time that afternoon that Milly was made to feel apologetic for her good clothes.

"Oh," she said hesitantly.

"Anything I can do for you, Miss Ridge?" Snowden asked, glancing down at the ledger indifferently.

Milly had an inspiration.

"Why, yes, Mr. Snowden," she exclaimed pleasantly. "I should like to talk with you a few moments, if I am not interrupting your work," she added, for Snowden made no move.

"Well?" he said gruffly.

Milly turned towards the rear of the loft where there were a number of little tables dotted with unwashed china cups, and grains of tea and coffee. Snowden followed her slowly, and leaned against a table.

"What is it?"

"Mr. Snowden," Milly began gently, "you are my father's oldest friend in the city."

"Guess I know that."

"He's very unhappy."

"Has good reason to be."

She made the direct appeal.

"Why do you do this thing, Mr. Snowden? Why do you want to ruin my father--your old friend?"

"Guess you don't understand--he's pretty nearly ruined _me_!" Snowden emitted with a snort.

"Yes, I understand," Milly replied glibly. "Business had been very bad. My friends tell me all business has been dreadful since the Fair--everybody feels poor. But why make things worse? A little time, and it will be different."

She smiled at him persuasively.

"I want to save my own skin, what there is left to save," he grumbled. "Your father's made a pretty bad mess of things, Milly."

"We won't discuss what my father has done," Milly retorted with dignity. "He's been deceived--he's too trusting with men. He trusted you!"

At this thrust Snowden laughed loudly.

"And you want me to trust him with my money some more? No, thank you."

His tone changed insensibly. No one could be rough with Milly for long. Snowden volunteered some explanations of the tea and coffee business not related by Mrs. Ridge. It seemed that Horatio had made rather a mess of things all around.

"So you see I must try and save what I can before it's _all_ gone.... I've got a family of my own, you know."

Milly knew that, and wished she had been nicer to Mrs. Snowden and the uninteresting daughter when she had had the chance. She had never had them to the Acacia Street house in all these years.

"Can't you wait a few months?... Please!..."

Entreaty was all the argument life had given Milly. There was a leap of something in the man's flushed face that caused the girl to retreat a step or two. She had not meant to rouse his graceless passion, but that was what she had almost succeeded in doing by her coaxing. As she drew back Snowden laughed.

"You see, Milly, people _pay_ in this world for what they want--men and women too. They have to _pay_ somehow!"

And, this enigmatic taunt ringing in her ears, Milly departed with all the dignity that remained to her. She was conscious of the bookkeeping woman's hostile sneer upon her back as she disappeared. Her face burned with the man's coarse words: "In this world people have to _pay_ for what they want."

That was too true! She had not been willing to pay, except with smiles and pretty speeches, the small change, and it seemed that was not enough. She had not been willing to pay the price of a good position in her world which she wanted, nor Snowden's price for mercy to her father. Of course not that! But now she must pay somehow for what she got: for her food and her clothes and her shelter first of all. It had come to that. Thus Milly had her first lesson in the manifold realities of life.

Soberly but bravely she faced the winter wind and made her way home to her father's house.

VII

MILLY TRIES TO PAY

The next months were in some respects the dreariest that Milly was ever to know. It was not long before the illusion about her work for Eleanor Kemp wore thin. It was, in a word, one of those polite, parasitic occupations for women, provided by the rich for helpless friends, and it was satisfying to neither party. A good deal of time for both was wasted in "talking things over," with much discursive chatter on matters in general, and all sorts of consulting back and forth about the job to be done. There were letters to be carefully written, then rewritten after delicately guarded criticisms had been made; shopping to be done where it took hours to decide whether this "matched" or not and whether Danner's or Dround's was a better place for purchasing this or that. Milly still tried to keep up some social life, and so she usually came in at the Kemps rather late in the morning, and after lunching with her friend went back to the city on errands. She was a miracle of un-system, and frequently forgot. But she was so genuinely penitent and abased when her omissions were discovered that her friend had not the heart to be severe. Milly, on the other hand, began to think that the work took a great deal of time and that fifty dollars a month was small pay for her services, yet did not like even to hint that she wanted more.

Walter Kemp summed the matter up in the brutal fashion of man-financier, "Better give Milly her money and let me send you a trained woman from the bank to do your work, Nell."

But Eleanor Kemp was shocked at this evidence of male tactlessness.

"Milly would never take a gift like that!"

That was the trouble: Milly belonged to the class too proud to take charity and too incompetent to earn money. So Mrs. Kemp continued to do as much as she had done before and to pay Milly fifty dollars a month out of her private purse.

"Pity she didn't marry Parker," Kemp said brusquely. "He'll be a very rich man one of these days."

"You see she couldn't, Walter," his wife explained eagerly. "She didn't love him enough."

"Well," this raw male rejoined, "she'd better hurry up and find some one she does love who can support her."

"Yes," Mrs. Kemp admitted, "she _ought_ to marry."

For in those days there didn't seem to be any other way of providing for the Milly Ridges.

* * * * *

Milly realized her inadequacy, but naturally did not ascribe it wholly to incompetency. She wanted to give up her irregular job: it could not be concealed from her friends, and it marked her as a dependent. But the stern fact remained that she needed the money, even the paltry fifty dollars a month, as she had never needed anything in life. If she refrained from spending a dollar for several years, she could hardly clear herself of the accumulated bills from her halcyon days of hope.

And the household needed money, too. After that regrettable interview with Snowden, the catastrophe in the tea and coffee business came with the swiftness of long-delayed fate. One morning Horatio did not rise from the breakfast table, as had been his wont for so many years, and throwing out his chest with the sensual satisfaction of the well-fed male shout boisterously:--

"Good-by, folks, I must be off to the office!"

For there was no longer any office to go to.

Instead, Horatio sat glumly at the table reading the want columns of the morning paper, down and up, and then as the morning wore on he silently departed for the city--"to look for something." Hopeless task, when the streets were filled with men out of work, and businesses everywhere were closing down and turning off old employees. Milly, watching Horatio reach gropingly for his hat and coat, like a stricken animal, realized that her father was no longer young and brave. He had passed fifty,--the terrible deadline in modern industry. "Nobody wants an old dog, any way," he said to his mother forlornly.

Then Milly was almost sorry for what she had done. But it was not really her fault, she still thought.

It was a mournful experience, this, of having a grown man--the one male of the family--sitting listlessly about the house of a morning and going forth aimlessly at irregular times, only to return before he should be expected. The habit of her life, as it had been the habit of Horatio's, was to have the male sally forth early from the domestic hearth and leave it free to the women of the family for the entire day.... Usually optimistic to a fault, with a profound conviction that things must come right of themselves somehow, Milly began to doubt and see dark visions of the family future. What if her father should be unable to find another place--any sort of work--and should come to hang about the house always, getting seedier and sadder, to be supported by her feeble efforts? Milly refused to contemplate the picture.

One day her grandmother asked money from Milly. The old lady was a grim little nemesis for the girl these days,--a living embodiment of "See what you have done," though never for a moment would Milly admit that she was responsible for the accumulation of disaster. It should be said in behalf of Grandma Ridge that now the blow of fate had fallen, which she had so persistently predicted for four long years, she set her lips in grim puritan silence and did that which must be done without reproach.

Somehow she found the money for the rent from month to month and gave Horatio his carfare and lunch money each morning. But she came to Milly for money to buy food, and Milly gave it generously although she owed all she earned and much more. But food came before bills. If it hadn't been for Eleanor Kemp's luxurious luncheons, the girl would often have gone hungry.... And through it all she never took refuge in tears. "What's the use?" she said.

* * * * *

It was during the darkest of these days that a new turn in Milly's fate came unexpectedly. She had been to a Sunday luncheon at the Nortons, and was walking back along the Drive, thinking a little sadly that even her old pals had invited her only at the last moment, "to fill in." She was no more any sort of social "card." She was revolving this and other dreary thoughts in her worried mind when she heard her name,--"Miss Ridge--I say, Miss Ridge!"

She turned to meet the beaming face of old Christian Becker, the editor-proprietor of the _Morning Star_, who was hurrying towards her as fast as his short, fat person would permit him. As he came along he raised his shiny silk hat above his bald head, and his broad face broke into a larger smile than was its wont. Becker was an amusing character, tempting to set before the reader, but as he has to do only incidentally with Milly Ridge it cannot be. Enough to say that after forty years of hard struggle in the land of his adoption, he had preserved the virtues of a simple countryman and the heart of a good-natured boy. Every one in the city knew Christian Becker; every one laughed and growled at his newspaper,--the God of his heart.

"Thought it must be you," he gasped. "Never forget how a pretty woman walks!" (How _does_ she walk? Milly wondered.) "How are you, Miss Ridge? Haven't seen you for some time--not since that swell dinner at the Bowman place, d'ye remember?"

Milly remembered very well,--the apex moment of her career hitherto.

He smiled good naturedly, and Milly smiled, too. Then Becker added in a childlike burst of confidence:--

"Let me tell you, you did just right, my girl! Don't tie yourself up with any man you can't run with. It don't work. It saves tears and trouble to quit before you're hitched by the parson."

Milly flushed at the frank reference to her broken engagement, then laughed at the crude phrasing. But her heart warmed with the word of sympathy. Gradually she unburdened herself of all her troubles, and at the conclusion the kindly newspaper man said wisely:--

"Never you mind how folks behave, Miss Ridge. Keep a stiff upper lip--hold up your head--and you'll have all of 'em running after you like hens after corn 'fore you know it. That's what happened to me when I went broke that time."

"But I'm not fit to do anything," Milly confessed truthfully, "and I must support myself somehow."

"Why don't you try newspaper work? You are a clever girl and you know the world.... Come to my office to-morrow noon--no, I've got a Washington nob on my hands for lunch--" (Becker was vain of his political influence, which consisted for the most part of entertaining visiting politicians at luncheon.) "Come in 'bout four, and we'll see what we can do to help you out."

With a fatherly nod he hurried off down a side street, and Milly went home with a new fillip to her lively imagination.

As a matter of fact the proprietor of the _Star_ was not entirely disinterested in his kindness. He had been looking for some woman to take "Madame Alpha's" place and furnish the paper with that column of intimate social tittle-tattle about people the readers knew only by name, which every enterprising American newspaper considers a necessary ingredient of the "news." The estimable lady, who signed herself "Madame Alpha," had grown stale in the business, as such social chroniclers usually do. The widow of an esteemed citizen, with wide connections in the older society of the city, she had done very well at first. But she had "fallen down" lamentably, to use Becker's phrase, during the recent period of Chicago's social expansion. She neither knew the new gods and goddesses, nor did she know how to invent stories about their doings.

Becker, who had seen Milly, not merely at the Bowmans, but at many of the more brilliant functions of the Fair season, regarded her as "up-to-date," and further, thought her a nice, lively young woman, who would know the difference between Mrs. Patziki's card party on Garfield Boulevard and a dinner to the French ambassador at the Danner's. It made little difference whether she could write or not, so long as she had the "entry" as he called it. At any rate he would try her.

So Milly began her new career as journalist with much enthusiasm and a sense of self-importance that had been grievously lacking in her enterprises for some time. She thought she had the ability to write--what attractive young American woman doesn't? Her friends thought her clever, and laughed at her little "stories" about people. She set herself industriously to the composition of elaborate articles on "Our Social Leaders," consisting largely of a retrospect and review, for "our social leaders" kept very still during those terrible months of want and panic that followed the gay doings of the great show, or were out of the city. These articles appeared in the Sunday edition, over the _nom de plume_ of the "_Débutante_." Other women of the regular staff did the card-parties and club news and the West Side stuff.

There was a city editor, of course, and a ruthless blue pencil, but as Milly was recognized on the paper as "the old man's" present hobby, she was given a pretty free rein. She sailed into the dingy _Star_ offices dressed quite smartly, dropped her sprawling manuscript on the Sunday editor's table, and ambled into Mr. Becker's sanctum for a little social chat. In the office she was known as "the Real Thing," and liked as she was almost everywhere, though the youthful reporters laughed at her pompous diction.

The _Star_ paid her the handsome sum of fifteen dollars a week.

VIII

MILLY RENEWS HER PROSPECTS

It did not take Milly long to realize that the sort of newspaper writing she was doing was as parasitic in its nature as her first job, and even less permanent. Of course it quickly leaked out who the _Débutante_ was who wrote with such finality of "our social leaders," and though friends were kind and even helpful, assuring Milly "it made no difference," and they thought it "a good thing for her to do," she knew that in the end her work would kill whatever social position she had retained through her vicissitudes. The more "exclusive" women with social aspirations liked secretly to have their presences and their doings publicly chronicled, but they were fearful lest they should seem to encourage such publicity. Although they said, "We'd rather have one of us do it if it has to be done, you know," yet they preferred to have it thought that the information came from the butler and the housemaid. Milly soon perceived that a woman must cheapen herself at the job, and by cheapening herself lose her qualification. Nevertheless, she had to keep at it for the money.

That was the terrible fact about earning one's living, Milly learned: the jobs--at least those she was fitted for--were all parasitic and involved personal humiliations. From this arose Milly's growing conviction of the social injustice in the world to women, of which view later she became quite voluble....

Fortunately the summer came on, when "Society" moved away from the city altogether. Becker, who had been somewhat disappointed in Milly's indifferent success, now suggested that she do a series of articles on inland summer resorts. "Show 'em," said the newspaper man, "that we've got a society of our own out here in the middle west, as classy as any in America,--Newport, Bar Harbor, or Lenox." He advised Lake Como for a start, but Milly, for reasons of her own, preferred Mackinac, then a popular resort on the cold water of Lake Superior.

By mid-July she was established in the most fashionable of the barny, wooden hotels at the resort and prepared to put herself in touch with the summer society. One of the first persons she met was a Mrs. Thornton from St. Louis, a pleasant, ladylike young married woman, who had a cottage near by and took her meals at the hotel. She was a summer widow with three children,--a thoroughly well-bred woman of the sort Milly instinctively took to and attracted. They became friends rapidly through the children, whom Milly petted. She learned all about the Thorntons in a few days. They were very nice people. He was an architect, and she had been a Miss Duncan of Philadelphia,--also a very nice family of the Quaker order, Milly gathered. Mrs. Thornton talked a great deal of an older brother, who had gone to California for his health and had bought a fruit ranch there in the Ventura mountains somewhere south of Santa Barbara. This brother, Edgar Duncan, was expected to visit Mrs. Thornton during the summer, and in the course of time he arrived at Mackinac.

Milly found him on the piazza of the Thornton cottage playing with the children. As he got up awkwardly from the floor and raised his straw hat, Milly remarked that his sandy hair was thin. He was slight, about middle-aged, and seemed quite timid. Not at all the large westerner with bronzed face and flapping cowboy hat she had vaguely pictured to herself. Nevertheless, she smiled at him cordially,--

"You are the brother I've heard so much about?" she said, proffering a hand.

"And you must be that new Aunt Milly the children are full of," he replied, coloring bashfully.

So it began. For the next month, until Milly, having exhausted the social possibilities of Mackinac, had to move on to another "resort" in Wisconsin, she saw a great deal of Edgar Duncan. They walked through the fir woods by moonlight, boated on the lake under the stars, and read Milly's literary efforts on the piazza of the Thornton cottage. Duncan told her much about his ranch on the slope of the Ventura hills above the Pacific, of the indolent California life in the sunshine, with an occasional excursion to Los Angeles or San Francisco. He was not exciting in any sense, not very energetic, like the Chicago men she had known, perhaps not very much alive; but he was gentle, and kindly, and thoughtful for women, of a refined and high-minded race--the sort of man "any woman could be sure of."

Mrs. Thornton, with much sisterly affection and no vulgar ambition, encouraged unobtrusively the intimacy. "Edgar is so lonely out there on his ranch," she explained to Milly, "I want him to come back east. He might now, you know,--there's nothing really the matter with his health. But he's got used to the life and doesn't like our hurry and the scramble for money. Besides he's put all his money into those lemons and olives.... I think a woman might be very happy out of the world in a place like that, with a man who loved her a lot,--and children, of course, children,--don't you?"

Milly thought so, too. She was becoming very tired of newspaper work, and of her single woman's struggle to maintain herself in the roar of Chicago. The future looked rather gray even through her habitually rose-colored glasses. She was twenty-four. She knew the social game, and its risks, better than two years before.... So she was very kind to Duncan,--she really liked him extremely, rather for what he was without than for what he had,--and when she left it was understood between them that the Californian should return to his ranch by the way of Chicago and meet Milly there on a certain day,--Monday, the first of September. He was very particular, sentimentally so, about this date,--kept repeating it,--and they made little jokes of it until Milly even particularized the hour when she could be free to see him,--"Five o'clock, 31 East Acacia Street,--hadn't you better write it down?" But Duncan thought he could remember it very well. "We'll go somewhere for dinner," Milly promised.

That was all, but it was a good deal for the shy Edgar Duncan to have arrived at. Milly was content to leave it just that way,--vague and pleasant, with no explicit understanding of what was to come afterwards. She knew he would write--he was that kind; he would say more on paper than by word of mouth, much more. Then, when they met again, she would put her hand in his and without any talk it would have happened.... He came with the children to see her off at the station, and as the fir-covered northern landscape retreated from the moving train, Milly relaxed in her Pullman seat, holding his roses in her lap, and decided that Edgar Duncan was altogether the "best" man she had ever known well. She surrendered herself to a dream of a wonderful land where the yellow lemons gleamed among glossy green leaves, and the distant hills were powdered with the gray tint of olive trees, as Duncan had described the ranch, and also of a little low bungalow, a silent Jap in white clothes moving back and forth, and far below the distant murmur of the Pacific surges.... Her eyes became suffused: it wasn't the pinnacle of her girlish hope, but it was Peace. And just now Milly wanted peace more than anything else.

He wrote, as Milly knew he would, and though Milly found his letters lacking in that warmth and color and glow in which she had bathed the ranch, they were tender and true letters of a real lover, albeit a timid one. "All his life he had longed for a real companion, for a woman who could be a man's mate as his mother was to his father," and that sort of thing. He implied again and again that not until he had met Milly had he found such a creature, "but now," etc. Milly sighed. She was happy, but not thrilled. Perhaps, she thought, she was too old for thrills--twenty-four--and this was as near "the real right thing" as she was ever to come. At any rate she meant to take the chance.

Ocanseveroc did not prove attractive: it was a hot little hole by a steaming, smelly lake, like Como, only less select in its society and more populous. Milly quickly "did" the resort and fled back to Chicago for a breath of fresh air from the great cooling tub of Lake Michigan. That was the nineteenth of August. She had twelve days in which to get ready her articles before Duncan's arrival. On the hot train she planned a little article on the search for the ideal resort with the result of a hasty return to the city for comfort and coolness. She thought it might be made amusing and resolved to see the editor about it.

* * * * *

Matters at home had scarcely improved during the languid summer. Horatio sat on the stoop in his shirt-sleeves, unchided, or went for long hours to a beer-garden he had found near by. He made no pretence of looking for work. "What's the use--in the summer?" Milly stirred the stagnant domestic atmosphere with her recovered cheerfulness. She told them of her various adventures, especially of the Thorntons and of the new young man. Duncan had given her some kodaks of the fruit ranch in the Ventura mountains, which she displayed. _HE_ was coming to see her soon, and she laughed prettily. Grandma maintained her sour indifference to Milly's doings, but Horatio took a lively interest. He had always wanted to go "back to a farm" since he was a young man, he said. It was the only place for a poor man to live these days, and they said those California ranches were wonderful money-makers. A man at Hoppers' had gone out there, etc.

Father and daughter talked ranch far into the hot night.

The next afternoon Milly went to the newspaper office to report and to discuss with the editor her last inspiration for an article. It was the vacation season and a number of the desks in the editorial room were vacant. Mr. Becker's door was closed and shrouded with an "Out of Town" card. At the Sunday editor's table in the partitioned box reserved for this official was an unfamiliar figure. Milly stopped at the threshold and stared. A young man, fair-haired, in a fresh and fetching summer suit with a flowing gauzy tie, looked up from the table and smiled at Milly. He was distinctly not of the _Star_ type.

"Come right in," he called out genially. "Anything I can do for you? No, I'm not the new Sunday editor--he's away cooling himself somewheres.... I just came in here to finish this sketch."

Milly noticed the drawing-paper and the India-ink bottle on the table.

"You're not Kim?" Milly stammered.

"The same."

("Kim" was the name signed to some clever cartoons that had been appearing all that winter in a rival paper, about which there had been more or less talk in the circles where Milly moved.)

"So you've come over to the _Star_?" she said with immediate interest.

"The silver-tongued Becker got me--for a price--a small one," he added with a laugh, as if nothing about him was of sufficient consequence to hide.

"I'm _so_ glad. I like your pictures awfully well."

"Thanks!... And you, I take it, are _la belle Débutante_?"

"Yes!" Milly laughed. "How did you know?"

"Oh," he replied, and his tone said, "it's because you too are different from the rest here," which flattered Milly.

"Won't you come in and sit down?"

The young man emptied a chair by the simple process of tipping it and presented it to Milly with a gallant flourish. She sat on the edge and drew up her veil as far as the tip of her nose. The young man smiled. Milly smiled back. They understood each other at once, far better than either could ever understand the other members of the _Star_ staff. Their clothes, their accents, their manners announced that they came from the same world,--that small "larger world," where they all use the same idiom.

"Been doing Mackinac and Ocara-se-er-oc?" the young man drawled with delightful irony. "Ye gods! What names!"

Both laughed with a pleasant sense of superiority over a primitive civilization, though Milly at least had hardly known any other.

"And they're just like their names," Milly asserted, "awful places!"

"I've not yet had the privilege of seeing our best people in their summer quarters," the young man continued, with his agreeable air of genial mockery.

"You won't see them in those places."

"Or anywhere else at present," the artist sighed, glancing at his unfinished sketch.

Milly asked to see the drawing, and another inspiration occurred to her. She told the young artist of her idea for a comic article on the hunt through the lake resorts for an ideal place of peace and coolness. He thought it a good topic and suggested graciously that he could do a few small pen-and-ink illustrations to elucidate the text.

"Oh, would you!" Milly exclaimed eagerly. It was what she had hoped he would say, and it revived her waning interest in journalism immensely, the prospect of collaboration with this attractive young artist. (She had already forgotten that she was to abandon journalism after the first Monday in September.)

Later they went out to tea together to discuss the article.

* * * * *

Jack Bragdon, who signed his pen-and-ink sketches with the name of "Kim," was one of that considerable army of young adventurers in the arts who pushed westward from the Atlantic seaboard at the time of the World's Fair in Chicago; also one of the large number who had been left stranded when the tidal wave of artistic effort had receded, exposing the dead flats of hard times. After graduation from an eastern college of the second class, where he had distinguished himself by composing the comic opera libretto for his club and drawing for the college annual, he had chosen for himself the career of art. With a year in a New York art school and another spent knocking about various European capitals in a somewhat aimless fashion, an amiable but financially restricted family had declined to embarrass itself further for the present with his career. Or, as his Big Brother in Big Business had put it, "the kid had better show what he can do for himself before we go any deeper." Jack had consequently taken an opportunity to see the Fair and remained to earn his living as best he could by contributing cartoons to the newspapers, writing paragraphs in a funny column, and occasional verse of the humorous order. And he designed covers for ephemeral magazines,--in a word, nimbly snatched the scanty dollars of Art.

All this he sketched lightly and entertainingly for Milly's benefit that first time.

Already he had achieved something of a vogue socially in pleasant circles, thanks to his vivacity and good breeding. Milly had heard of his charms about the time of her Crash, but had never happened to meet him. He had heard of Milly, of course,--many things which might well stir a young man's curiosity. So they smiled at each other across a little table in a deserted restaurant, and sat on into the August twilight, sipping cooling drinks. He smoked many cigarettes which he rolled with fascinating dexterity between his long white fingers, and talked gayly, while Milly listened with ears and eyes wide open to the engrossing story of Himself.

Jack Bragdon was a much rarer type in Chicago of the early nineties--or in any American city--than he would be to-day. Milly's experience of the world had never brought her into close touch with Art. And Art has a fatal fascination for most women. They buzz around its white arc-light, or tallow dip, like heedless moths bent on their own destruction. Art in the person of a handsome, sophisticated youth like Jack Bragdon, who had seen a little of drawing-rooms as well as the pavements of strange cities, was irresistible. (Milly too felt that she had in her something of the artistic temperament, which had never been properly developed.)

Thus far, even by his own account, Bragdon was not much of an artist. He was clever with his fingers,--pen or pencil,--but at twenty-six he might very truthfully state,--"I've been a rotten loafer always, you know. But I'm reformed. Chicago's reformed me. That's what Brother meant.... Now watch and see. I'm not going to draw ridiculous pot-bellied politicians for a newspaper--not after I have saved the fare to Europe and a few dollars over to keep me from starving while I learn to really paint."

"Of course you won't stay here!" Milly chimed sympathetically, with an unconscious sigh....

It is marvellous what a vast amount of mutual biography two young persons of the opposite sexes can exchange in a brief tête-à-tête. By the time Milly and the young artist were strolling slowly northward in the sombre city twilight, they had become old friends, and Milly was hearing about the girl in Rome, the fascination of artist life in Munich, the stunning things in the last Salon, and all the rest of it. They parted at Milly's doorstep without speaking of another meeting, for it never occurred to either that they should not meet--the next day.

The gardens of that California Hesperides were already getting dim in Milly's memory, blotted out by a more intoxicating vision.

IX

MILLY IN LOVE

The next meeting was not farther off than the next noon. They lunched together, to talk further of their collaboration, and from luncheon went to the Art Institute to see the pictures, most of which Bragdon disposed off condescendingly as "old-style stuff." Milly, who had been taught to reverence this selection of masterpieces, which were the local admiration, learned that there were realms beyond her ken.

The next day saw another meeting and the next yet another. Then there was an intermission--Bragdon had to finish some work--and Milly felt restless. But there ensued ten delicious days of music and beer-gardens and walks in the parks, luncheons and suppers,--one starry Sunday spent scrambling among the ravines on the north shore and picnicking on the sandy beach, listening to the sadly soothing sweetness of Omar--(yes, they read Omar in those days, the young did!)--with little opalescent waves twinkling at their feet. Milly never paused to think one moment of all those ten precious days. She was blissfully content with the world as it was, except when she was at home, and then she was plotting skilfully "another occasion." If she had stopped to think, she would have murmured to herself, "At last! This must be the real, right thing!"

He was so handsome, so full of strong male youth and joy, of large hopes and careless intentions, and he was also exotic to Milly,--a bit of that older, more complex civilization she had always longed for in her prairie limitations. His horizon had been broader than hers, she felt, though he was a mere boy in worldly knowledge. He even dressed differently from the men she knew, with a dash of daring color in waistcoat and ties that proclaimed the budding artist. And above all he embodied the Romance of Art,--that fatal lure for aspiring womankind. The sphere of creation is hermaphroditic: he too was fine and feminine, unlike the coarser types of men. He craved Reputation and would have it, Milly assured him confidently. She was immediately convinced of his high talent. Alas! She sighed when she said it, for she knew that his gifts would quickly waft him beyond her reach on his upward way. Chicago could not hold one like him long: he was for other, beautifuller ports of destiny!

* * * * *

At four forty-five on the afternoon of September first,--a Monday,--a tall, somewhat nervous man rang the bell of 31 East Acacia Street and inquired for Miss Ridge. He came in and waited when he learned from the little old lady who opened the door that Milly was not at home. He waited in the small front room, sombrely darkened, where the tragedy of Milly's first engagement ring had taken place,--waited until six forty-five, then at the signs of preparation for the evening meal slipped out. But he was back at seven forty-five and again came in. This time Mrs. Ridge introduced herself and invited him politely to await her granddaughter's return. "She's very uncertain in her hours," the old lady explained with a deprecatory little laugh, "since she has undertaken this newspaper work. It seems to keep her at the office a great deal of late...." We may leave Edgar Duncan there in the little front room, being entertained by Mrs. Ridge in her most gracious manner, while we go in search of the truant Milly.

* * * * *

She might have been found at an unpretentious German beer-garden far out on the North Side. Bragdon and Milly had discovered this particular retreat, which was small and secluded and usually rather empty. It seemed to Milly quite "Bohemian" to drop into the garden late in the afternoon and rouse the sleepy proprietor to fetch them cool stone mugs of foaming beer, which the artist drank and which she sipped at.

On this Monday afternoon they had installed themselves in the little arbor at the remote end of the tiny garden, where they were shielded by the dusty vines from any observation, and thus the quarter hours and the halves slipped by unheeded. The artist told her again of his aspirations to paint,--"the real thing," to "go in for the big stunts." Milly listened sympathetically. That was what he should do, of course,--have a career, a man's career,--even if it parted him from her for always. All her life she had wished to be an "inspiration" in some man's life-work. What greater thing than to inspire an Artist to his glorious fulfilment?...

Imperceptibly their words became more personal and more tender. He wanted to paint _her_ some day, as she had lain on the beach, with her lovely bronze hair, her wide blue eyes, and the little waves curling up towards her feet.... Dusk fell, and they forgot to eat.... At the moment when Edgar Duncan was describing to Mrs. Ridge for the second time the exact location of Arivista Ranch on the slope of the Ventura hills, Milly's head was resting close to the artist's face and very real tears were in her eyes--tears of joy--as her heart beat wildly under her lover's kisses and her ears sang with his passionate words....

For the one thing that the young artist had sworn to himself should never happen to HIM,--at any rate not until he was old and successful,--the very thing that Milly had laughed at as preposterous--"me fall in love with a poor man!"--had come to pass. Both had done it.

"I shan't spoil all your future for you, shall I, dear?" she whispered, her mouth close to his. He gave her the only proper answer....

"It shan't make any difference," she said later, in a calmer moment. "You shall have your life, dear, and become a great painter."

"Of course!" Youth replied robustly. "And I'll do a great picture of you!"

How wonderful! How wonderful it all was, Milly thought, as they threaded their way homewards through the slovenly, garish Chicago streets, mindful of naught but themselves and their Secret. How could anything so poetically wonderful happen in workaday Chicago? And Milly thought to herself how could any woman consider for a moment sacrificing THIS--"the real, right thing"--for any bribe on earth?...

As they neared the little house, Milly perceived the light in the front room and with an intuition of something unpleasant to follow dismissed her lover peremptorily, with a last daring kiss beneath the street-light, and tripped into the house.

It all came over her as soon as the tall figure rose from the uncomfortable corner sofa: she knew what she had done and she was filled with real concern for the Other One.

"Edgar!" she cried. "Have you been waiting long?"

"Some time," Mrs. Ridge observed with reproof.

"Since four forty-five," Duncan admitted, and added with a touch of sentiment. "I came fifteen minutes before the time."

Milly cast a fleeting glance backward over what had happened to her since four forty-five!

"But it doesn't matter now," he said with intention, "all the waiting!"

Mrs. Ridge discreetly withdrew at this point.

"I'm so glad to see you," Milly began lamely. "Do sit down."

"I've been sitting a long time," Edgar Duncan remarked, patiently reseating himself on the stiff sofa.

"I'm so sorry!"

"Did you forget?"

"Yes, I forgot all about it," Milly admitted bluntly. "You see so much has happened since--"

"Then you didn't get my letters?" he pressed on eagerly, ignoring Milly's last words.

"Oh, yes, I got all your letters," she said hastily, remembering that she had not found time or heart to open the last bulky three, which lay upstairs on her dressing-table. "Beautiful letters they were," she added sentimentally and irrelevantly, thinking, "What letters Jack will write!"

It is useless to follow this painful scene in further detail. Timid as Edgar Duncan was by nature he was man enough to strike for what he wanted when he had his chance,--as he had struck manfully in those bulky letters. And he repeated their message now in simple words.

"Milly, will you go back with me?... I've waited for you all my life."

Touched by the pathos of this genuine feeling, Milly's eyes filled with tears and she stammered,--

"Oh, I can't--I really can't!"

"Why not?"

(She would have been quite willing to make the journey with him, if she might have flown straightway back to the arms of her artist lover!)

"You see--it's different--I can't--" Milly could not bring herself to deal the blow. It seemed too absurd to state baldly that in twelve days a man had come into her life, whom she had never set eyes on thirteen days before, but who nevertheless had made it impossible for her to do what before that time she had looked forward to with serene content. Such things happened in books, but were ridiculous to say!

"You care for some one else?"

Milly nodded, and her eyes dropped tears fast. It all seemed very sad, almost tragic. She was sorry for herself as well as for him....

If he felt it inexplicable that he had not been allowed to suspect this deep attachment before, he was too much of a man to mention it. He took his blow and did not argue about it.

"I'm so sorry!" Milly cried.

"It had to be," he said, hastily putting out a hand to her. "I shall love you always, Milly!" (It was the thing they said in books, but in this case it sounded forlornly true.) "I'm glad I've had the chance to love you," and he was gone.

Milly dropped tears all the way upstairs to her room, where she shut herself in and locked herself against family intrusion. In spite of her tears she was glad for what she had done. A woman's heart seemed to her ample justification for inconsistencies, even if it jammed other hearts on the way to its goal. It was fate, that was all,--fate that Jack Bragdon should have walked into her life just twelve days before it would have been too late. Fate is a wondrously consoling word, especially in the concerns of the heart. It absolves from personal responsibility.

So Milly went to sleep, with tears still on her eyelashes, but a smile on her lips, and dreamed of her own happy fate. At last "the real, right thing" was hers!

X

MILLY MARRIES

She awoke with a sensation of bliss--a never ending happiness to be hers. Yet there were some disagreeable episodes before this bliss could be perfected. For one thing Horatio took the announcement of the new engagement very hard,--unexpectedly so. Grandma Ridge received it in stony silence with a sarcastic curve to her wrinkled lips, as if to say,--"Hope you know your mind this time!" But Horatio spluttered:--

"What? You don't mean that la-di-da newspaper pup who parts his hair in the middle?"

(To part one's hair in the middle instead of upon the slope of the head was Horatio's aversion--it indicated to him a lack of serious, masculine purpose in a young man.)

"I thought you would do better than that, Milly.... What's he making with his newspaper pictures?"

"I don't know," Milly replied loftily.

She might guess that it was in the neighborhood of thirty dollars a week, sometimes increased by a few dollars through a magazine cover or commercial poster. But in her present exalted mood it was completely indifferent to Milly whether her lover was earning twenty dollars or two thousand a week. They would live somehow--of course: all young lovers did.... And was he not a genius? Milly had every confidence.

"You might just as well have married Ted Donovan," Horatio groaned. (Donovan was the young man at Hoppers' whom Milly had disdained early in her West Side career.) "I saw him on the street the other day, and he's doing finely--got a rise last January."

"He's not fashionable enough for Milly," Grandma commented.

"I must say you treated that Mr. Duncan pretty badly," Horatio continued with unusual severity.

"I should say so!" Grandma interposed.

Milly might think so too, but she was serenely indifferent to all the defeated prospects, the bleeding hearts over which she must pass to the fulfilment of her being. It was useless to explain to her father and her grandmother the imperious call of "the real, right thing," and how immeasurably Jack differed from Ted Donovan, Clarence Albert, or even Edgar Duncan, and how indifferent to a true woman must be all the pain in the world, once she had found her Ideal.

Horatio and his mother might feel the waste of all their efforts in behalf of Milly,--the costly removal from the West Side home, the disastrous venture in the tea and coffee business, and all the rest,--to result in _this_, her engagement to a "mere newspaper feller who parts his hair in the middle." It was another example of the mournful experience of age,--the pouring forth of heart's blood in useless sacrifice to Youth. But Milly saw that her artist lover,--and the flame in her heart, the song in her ears,--could not have been without all the devious turnings of her small career. Each step had been needed to bring her at last into Jack's arms, and therefore the toil of the road was nothing--in her eyes. That was the way Milly looked at it.

Could one blame her, remembering her sentimental education, the sentimental ideals that for centuries upon centuries men have imposed upon the more imitative sex? She could not see the simple selfishness of her life,--not then, perhaps later when she too became a mother.

* * * * *

The catastrophe of her first engagement had cut Milly off from her more fashionable friends and the world outside, and this second emotional crisis cut her off from the sympathy of her family. After that first wail Horatio was glumly silent, as if his cup of sorrow was now filled, and Grandma Ridge went her way in stern oblivion of Milly. The girl was so happy--and so much away from home--that she hardly felt the cold domestic atmosphere.

A few short weeks afterwards, however, Mrs. Ridge announced to her that a tenant having been found for the house they should move the first of the month.

"Where are you going?" Milly asked, a trifle bewildered.

"Your father and I are going to board on the West Side," her grandmother replied shortly, implying that Milly could do as she pleased, now that she was her own mistress.

"Why over there?"

"Your father has secured a place in his old business."

From the few further details offered by her grandmother Milly inferred that it was a very humble place indeed, and that only dire necessity had forced Horatio to accept it,--to sit at the gate in the great establishment where once he had held some authority.

"Poor papa!" Milly sighed.

"It's rather late for you to be sorry, now," the old lady retorted pitilessly. She was of the puritan temper that loves to scatter irrefutable moral logic.

It was not until long afterward that Milly learned all the part the indomitable old lady had played in this crisis of her son's affairs. She had not only gone to see Mr. Baxter, one of the Hopper partners who attended the Second Presbyterian Church, and begged him to give her son employment once more, but she had humbled herself to appeal personally to their enemy Henry Snowden and entreat him, for old friendship's sake, to be magnanimous to a broken man. In these painful interviews she had not spared Milly. She had succeeded.

* * * * *

Sometime during the last hurried weeks of their occupancy of the Acacia Street house, Milly managed to have her lover come to Sunday supper and make formal announcement of their intentions to the old people. For long years afterwards she would remember the final scene of her emotional career in the little front room when her father had to shake hands with the young artist on the exact spot where Clarence's glittering diamond had lain disdained, where the faithful ranchman had received his blow, standing, full in the face.

Little Horatio looked gray and old; his lips trembled and his hand shook as he greeted Bragdon.

"Well, sir, so you and Milly have made up your minds to get married?"

"Yes, sir."

"Hope you'll make each other happy."

"We shall!" both chorused.

"And I hope you'll be able to support her."

"We'll live on nothing," Milly bubbled gayly.

"First time then I've known you to," Horatio retorted sourly.

It was the only bitter thing the little man ever said to his daughter, and it was the bitterness of disappointed hopes for her that forced the words from him then. Perhaps, too, Horatio had permitted himself to dream of Hesperidian apples of gold in eternal sunshine on the slopes of the Ventura hills and a peaceful old age far from the roaring, dirty city where he had failed. But when he spoke he was not thinking of himself, only of the dangers for his one loved child.

The meeting was hardly a cheerful one. Milly, in the exuberance of her new joy, could see no reason why everybody should not be as happy and hopeful as she was. But the older people, although they were scrupulously polite to the young artist, let their aloofness be felt in a chilly manner. This was Milly's affair, they implied: she was running her life to suit herself, as American children were wont to do, without advice from her elders. The young man was obviously ill at ease.

Milly felt that he was too large for the picture. She had never been ashamed of her humble home,--not with all her fashionable friends, not with her rich lover. But now she was conscious of the poor impression it must make upon the artist youth, who was so immeasurably superior to it in culture. When the old people had withdrawn after supper, leaving the lovers to themselves in the little front parlor, there were several moments of awkward silence between them. Milly was distressed for him, but she did not try to apologize. She said in her heart that she would make it up to him,--all that she lacked in family background. A woman could, she was convinced.

Possibly she did not fully realize how depressingly his situation had been brought home to him by this first contact with the Ridge household. He knew quite well how far thirty dollars a week went, with one man, and, as has been said, the last intention of his soul was to induce any woman to share it with him. Nor had he meant to seek out a rich wife, although having brought good introductions he had made his way easily into pleasant circles in his new home. Marriage had no part in his scheme of things. But he had been snared by the same tricksy sprite of blood and youth that had inflamed Milly. Now his was the main responsibility, and he must envisage the future he had chosen soberly. No more pleasant dallying in rich drawing-rooms, no more daydreaming over the varied paths of an entertaining career. It was Matrimony! No wonder--and no discredit to him--that the young man was somewhat overwhelmed when he contemplated what that meant in material terms. Never for the fraction of a moment, it should be said, did he think of evading the responsibility. His American chivalry would have made that impossible, even if he had desired it. And Milly had his heart and his senses completely enthralled.

"Dearest," she said to him that evening, divining the sombre course of his thoughts, "it will be so different with us when we are married. We'll have everything pretty, even if it's only two rooms, won't we?" And her yielding lips sealed his bondage firmer than ever, though he might know that beauty, even in two rooms, costs money. He shut his eyes and hoped--which is the only way in such cases.

Milly did not tell him that within a fortnight she should be without even this home.

* * * * *

"There's going to be no engagement this time," Milly reported briskly to Sally Norton, when she announced her news, "for I had enough of that before, with all the fuss. Jack and I are both perfectly free. We're just going to be married some day--that's all."

"Milly! Well I never!" Sally gasped, amid shrieks of laughter. "Not really? You don't mean that kid?"

(Sally was conducting a serious affair herself, with a wary old bachelor, whom ultimately she led in triumph to the altar. Ever after she referred to Mr. John Bragdon as Milly's "kid lover").

"I think it splendid!" Vivie pronounced in a burst of appreciation. "It's the real thing, dear. You are both young and brave. You are willing to make sacrifices for your hearts."

Milly was not yet conscious of making any tremendous sacrifice. Nevertheless, she adopted easily this sentimentalized view of her marriage. And Vivie Norton went about among their friends proclaiming Milly's heroism. Some people were amused; some were sceptical; a few pitied the young man. "Milly, a poor man's wife--never! For he _is_ poor, isn't he, a newspaper artist?"

"He has a great deal of talent," Vivie Norton asserted with assurance. Milly had so informed her.

"But an artist!" and Chicago shrugged its shoulders dubiously. An artist, at least a resident specimen of the craft, might be a drawing-room lap-dog, unmarried, but married he soon became a seedy member of society, somewhere between a clerk and a college professor in social standing. One of the smarter women Milly knew, Mrs. James Lamereux, exclaimed when she heard the news,--"It's beautiful,--these days when the women as well as the men are so keen for the main chance in everything." It was rumored there had been a sentimental episode in this lady's past, the fragrance of which still lay in her heart. Meeting Milly on the street she congratulated the girl heartily,--"And, my dear, you'll have such an interesting life--you'll know lots of clever people and do unconventional things,--be free, you know, as WE are not".... But Mrs. Jonas Haggenash remarked when some one told her the news,--"The little fool! Now she's gone and done it."

In general the verdict of friends seemed to be suspended: they would wait and see, preserving meantime an attitude of amiable neutrality and good-will towards this outbreak of idealism. But Milly was not troubling herself about what people thought or said. This time she had the full courage of her convictions. The only one of her old friends she cared to confide in deeply was Eleanor Kemp. That lady listened with troubled, yet sympathetic eyes. "Oh, my dear," she murmured, kissing Milly many times. "My dear! My dear!" she repeated as if she did not trust herself to say more. "I so hope you'll be happy--that it will be right this time."

"Of course it _is_," Milly retorted, hurt by the shadow of doubt implied.

"You know it takes so much for two people to live together always, even when they have plenty of money."

"But when they love," Milly rejoined, according to her creed.

"Even when they love," the older woman affirmed gravely.

She could see beyond the immediate glamor those monotonous years of commonplace living,--struggle and effort. She knew from experience how much of life has nothing to do with the emotions and the soul, but merely with the stomach and other vulgar functions of the body.

"I haven't a doubt,--not one!" Milly affirmed.

"That's right--and I oughtn't to suggest any.... You must bring Mr. Bragdon to dinner Sunday. Walter and I want to see him.... When are you to be married?"

"Soon," Milly replied vaguely.

"That's best, too."

Then Milly confessed to her old friend the dark condition of the Ridge fortunes, with the uncomfortable fact that very shortly she herself would be without a home.

"I must find some place to stay--but it won't be for long."

"You must come here and stay with us as long as you will," Mrs. Kemp promptly said with true kindliness. "I insist! Walter would want it, if I didn't--he's very fond of you, too."

Thus fortune smiled again upon Milly, and the two friends plunged into feminine details of dress and domestic contrivance. Eleanor Kemp, who had a gift lying unused of being a capable manager, a poor man's helpmate, tried her best to interest Milly in the little methods of economizing and doing by which dollars are pushed to their utmost usefulness. Milly listened politely, but she felt sure that "all that would work out right in time." She could not believe that Jack would be poor always.... The older woman smiled at her confidence, and after she had gone shook her head.

* * * * *

The young artist had his due share of pride. When he realized that the woman he loved and meant to marry was staying with the Kemps because she had no other refuge, he urged their immediate marriage, though he also had a fair-sized package of bills in his desk drawer and needed a few months in which to straighten out his affairs. Milly was eager to be married,--"When all would come right somehow." So she opposed no objection.

Indeed as she let her lover understand, she was indifferent about the mere ceremony. She would go and live with him any time, anywhere, if it weren't for the talk it would make and hurting her father's feelings. Milly was, of course, an essentially monogamic creature, like any normal, healthy woman. She meant simply that, once united with the man she really loved, the thing was eternal. If he should cease to love her, it would be the end of everything for her, no matter whether she had the legal bond or not. However flattered her lover may have been by this exhibition of trust, Bragdon was too American in instinct to entertain the proposal seriously. "What's the use of that, anyway?" he said. "We mean to stick--we might as well get the certificate."

So, as Milly confided to Eleanor Kemp, they determined "just to go somewhere and have it done as quickly as possible, without fuss and feathers."

And Mrs. Kemp, realizing what a sacrifice this sort of marriage must mean to any girl,--without the pomp and ceremony,--felt that it was a good sign for the couple's future, showing a real desire to seek the essentials and dispense with the frills. She and her husband had planned to give the young adventurers a quiet but conventional home wedding, with friends and a reception. But she readily acquiesced in Milly's idea, and one bleak Saturday in January slipped off with the lovers to a neighboring church, and after seeing them lawfully wedded by a parson left them to their two days' holiday, which was all the honeymoon they allowed themselves at this time....

Milly was a fresh and blooming bride in a becoming gray broadcloth suit, and as she stood before the faded parson beside her chosen man to take the eternal vows of fidelity, no woman ever gave herself more completely to the one of her heart. The wonderful song of bliss that had been singing inside her all these last weeks burst into a triumphal poem. She felt curiously exalted, scarcely herself. Was she not giving everything she had as a woman to her loved one, without one doubt? Had she not been true to woman's highest instinct, to her heart? She had rejected all the bribes of worldliness in order to obtain "the real, right thing," and she felt purified, ennobled, having thus fulfilled the ideals of her creed.... She turned to her husband a radiant face to be kissed,--a face in which shone pride, confidence, happiness.

As the older woman, with tear-dimmed eyes, watched the two bind themselves together for the long journey, she murmured to herself like a prayer,--"She's such a woman! Such a dear woman! She MUST be happy."

That was the secret of Milly's hold upon all her women friends: they felt the woman in her, the pure character of their sex more highly expressed in her than in any one else they knew. She was the unconscious champion of their hearts.

Again the older woman murmured prayerfully,--"What will she do with life? What _will_ she do?"

For like the wise woman she was she knew that in most cases it is the woman who makes marriage sing like a perpetual song or become a sullen silence. All the way to her home she kept repeating to herself,--

"What will she make of it? Milly!"