PART V

THE CAKE SHOP

I. "Number 236"

II. At Last, the Real Right Scheme

III. Chicago Again

IV. Going into Business

V. Milly's Second Triumph

VI. Coming Down

VII. Capitulations

VIII. The Sunshine Special

PART ONE

THE WEST SIDE

I

THE NEW HOME

"Is _that_ the house!" Milly Ridge exclaimed disapprovingly.

Her father, a little man, with one knee bent against the unyielding,

newly varnished front door, glanced up apprehensively at the figures

painted on the glass transom above. In that block of little houses, all

exactly alike, he might easily have made a mistake. Reassured he

murmured over his shoulder,--"Yes--212--that's right!" and he turned the

key again.

Milly frowning petulantly continued her examination of the dirty yellow

brick face of her new home. She could not yet acquiesce sufficiently in

the fact to mount the long flight of steps that led from the walk to the

front door. She looked on up the street, which ran straight as a

bowling-alley between two rows of shabby brick houses,--all low, small,

mean, unmistakably cheap,--thrown together for little people to live in.

West Laurence Avenue was drab and commonplace,--the heart, the crown,

the apex of the commonplace. And the girl knew it.... The April breeze,

fluttering carelessly through the tubelike street, caught her large hat

and tipped it awry. Milly clutched her hat savagely, and something like

tears started to her eyes.

"What did you expect, my dear?" Grandmother Ridge demanded with a subtle

undercut of reproof. The little old lady, all in black, with a neat

bonnet edged with white, stood on the steps midway between her son and

her granddaughter, and smiled icily at the girl. Milly recognized that

smile. It was more deadly to her than a curse--symbol of mocking age.

She tossed her head, the sole retort that youth was permitted to give

age.

Indeed, she could not have described her disappointment intelligibly.

All she knew was that ever since their hasty breakfast in the dirty

railroad station beside the great lake her spirits had begun to go down,

and had kept on dropping as the family progressed slowly in the stuffy

street-car, mile after mile, through this vast prairie wilderness of

brick buildings. She knew instinctively that they were getting farther

and farther from the region where "nice people" lived. She had never

before been in this great city, yet something told her that they were

journeying block by block towards the outskirts,--the _hinterland_ of

the sprawling city. (Only Milly didn't know the word _hinterland_.) She

had gradually ceased to reply to her father's cheerful comments on the

features of the West Side landscape. And now she was very near tears.

She was sixteen--it was the spring of '86. Ever since her mother's

death, two years before, the family had done "light housekeeping" in

three rooms in St. Louis. This 212 West Laurence Avenue, Chicago, was to

be her first home--this slab of a dirty yellow wall!

"There!" her father muttered with satisfaction, as, after a last twist

of key and thump of knee, he effected an entrance. Grandma Ridge moved

up the flight of steps, the girl following reluctantly.

"See, mother," little Horatio Ridge said, jingling his keys, "it's fresh

and clean!"

The new varnish smelt poignantly. The fresh paint clung insidiously to

the feet.

"And it's light too, mother, isn't it?" He turned quickly from the

cavernous gloom of the rear rooms and pointed to a side window in the

hall where one-sixteenth of the arc of the firmament was visible between

the brick walls of the adjoining houses.

"The dining-room's downstairs--that makes it roomier," he continued,

throwing open at random a door. "There's more room than you'd think from

the outside."

Milly and her grandmother peered downwards into the black hole from

which came a mouldy odor.

"Oh, father, why did you come 'way out here!" Milly wailed.

"Why not?" Horatio retorted defensively. "You didn't expect a house on

the lake front, did you?"

Just what she had expected from this new turn in the family destiny was

not clear to herself. But ever since it had been decided that they were

to have a house of their own in Chicago--her father having at last

secured a position that promised some permanence--the girl's buoyant

imagination had begun to soar, and out of all the fragments of her

experience derived by her transient residence in Indianapolis, Kansas

City, and Omaha--not to mention St. Louis--she had created a wonderful

composite--the ideal American home, architecturally ambitious, suburban

in tone. In some of the cities where she had lived the Ridges had

tarried as long as three years, and each time, since she was a very

little girl in short dresses and had left Indianapolis crying over the

doll in her arms, she had believed they were permanently settled: this

was to be their home for always.

Her mother had had the same forlorn, homesick hope, but each time it was

doomed to disappointment. Always they had had to move on,--to make a new

circle of temporary acquaintances, to learn the ropes of new streets and

shops and schools all over again. Always it was "business" that did the

mischief,--the failure of "business" here or the hope of better

"business" somewhere else that had routed them out of their temporary

shelter. Horatio Ridge was "travelling" for one firm or another in drugs

and chemicals: he was of an optimistic and sanguine temperament. Milly's

mother, less hopeful by nature, had gradually succumbed under the

perpetual tearing up of her thin roots, and finally faded away

altogether in the light housekeeping phase of their existence in St.

Louis.

Milly was sanguine like her father, and she had the other advantage of

youth over her mother. So she had hoped again--overwhelmingly--of

Chicago. But as she gazed at the row of pallid houses and counted three

"To rent" signs in the cobwebby front windows opposite, she knew in her

heart that this was not the end--not this, for her! It was another

shift, another compromise to be endured, another disappointment to be

overcome.

"Well, daughter, what d'ye think of your new home?" Little Horatio's

blustering tone betrayed his timidity before the passionate criticism of

youth. Milly turned on him with flashing blue eyes.

"I think, my dear," her grandmother announced primly, "that instead of

finding fault with your father's selection of a home, you had better

look at it first."

Grandma Ridge was a tiny lady, quite frail, with neat bands of iron-gray

hair curling over well-shaped ears. Her voice was soft and low,--the

kind of voice which her generation described as "ladylike." But Milly

knew what lay beneath its gentle surface. Milly did not love her

grandmother. Milly's mother had not loved the little old lady. It was

extremely doubtful if any one had ever loved her. Mrs. Ridge embodied

unpleasant duties; she was a vessel of unwelcome reproof that could be

counted upon to spill over at raw moments, like this one.

"You'll like it first rate, Milly," her father continued robustly, "once

you get settled in it. It's a great bargain, the real estate man said

so, almost new and freshly painted and papered. It's close to the cars

and Hoppers'"--Hoppers' was the Chicago firm that had offered Horatio

his latest opportunity. "And I don't care about travelling all over

Illinois to get to my work...."

Curiosity compelled Milly to follow the others up the narrow stairs that

reached from the hall to the floor above. Milly was a tall,

well-developed girl for sixteen, already quite as large as her father

and enough of a woman physically to bully the tiny grandmother when she

wished to. Her face was now prettily suffused with color due to her

resentment, and her blue eyes moist with unshed tears. She glanced into

the small front chamber which had been decorated with a pink paper and

robin's-egg blue paint.

"Pretty, ain't it?" Horatio observed, seeking his crumb of appreciation.

"It's a very nice home, Horatio--I'm sure you displayed excellent taste

in your choice," his mother replied.

"Pretty? ... It's just awful!" Milly burst forth, unable to control

herself longer. She felt that she should surely die if she were

condemned to sleep in that ugly chamber even for a few months. Yet the

house was on the whole a better one than any that the peripatetic Ridges

had thus far achieved. It was fully as good as most of those that her

acquaintances lived in. But it cruelly shamed Milly's expectations.

"It's perfectly horrid,--a nasty, cheap, ugly little box, and 'way out

here on the West Side." Somehow Milly had already divined the coming

degradation of the West Side. "I don't see how you can tell father such

stories, grandma.... He ought to have waited for us before he took a

house."

With that she turned her back on the whole affair and whisked down the

narrow stairs, leaving her elders to swallow their emotions while

inspecting the tin bath-tub in the closet bath-room.

"Milly has her mother's temper," Mrs. Ridge observed sourly.

"She'll come 'round all right," Horatio replied hopefully.

Milly squirmed, but on the whole she "took her medicine" as well as most

human beings....

Meantime she stood before the dusty window in the front room eyeing the

dirty street, dabbing the tears from her eyes with her handkerchief,

welling with resentment at her fate.

* * * * *

Years later she remembered the fierce emotions of that dreary April day

when she had first beheld the little block house on West Laurence

Avenue, recalling vividly her rage of rebellion at her father and her

fate, the hot disgust in her soul that she should be forced to endure

such mean surroundings. "And," she would say then to the friend to whom

she happened to be giving a vivacious account of the incident, "it was

just as mean and ugly and depressing as I thought it.... I can see the

place now--the horror of that basement dining-room and the smells! My

dear, it was just common West Side, you know."

But how did Milly Ridge at sixteen perceive all this? What gave her the

sense of social distinctions,--of place and condition,--at her age, with

her limited, even if much-travelled experience of American cities? To

read this mystery will be to understand Milly Ridge--and something of

America as well.

II

A VICTORY FOR MILLY

The lease for the house had been signed, however, and for a five years'

term. The glib agent had taken advantage of Horatio's new fervor for

being settled, as well as his ignorance of the city. The lease was a

fact that even Milly's impetuous will could not surmount--for the

present.

Somehow during the next weeks the Ridge furniture was assembled from the

various places where it had been cached since the last impermanent

experiment in housekeeping. It was a fantastic assortment, as Milly

realized afresh when it was unpacked. As a basis there were a few pieces

of old southern mahogany, much battered, but with a fine air about them

still. These were the contributions of Milly's mother, who had been of a

Kentucky family. To these had been added here and there pieces of many

different styles and shades of modern inelegance. One layer of the

conglomerate was specially distasteful to Milly. That was the

black-walnut "parlor set," covered with a faded green velvet, the

contribution of Grandma Ridge from her Pennsylvania home. It still

seemed to the little old lady of the first water as it had been when it

adorned Judge Ridge's brick house in Euston, Pa. Milly naturally had

other views of this treasure. Somewhere she had learned that the living

room of a modern household was no longer called the "parlor," by those

who knew, but the "drawing-room," and with the same unerring instinct

she had discovered the ignominy of this early Victorian heritage. She

did not loathe the shiny "quartered oak" dining-room pieces--her

father's venture in an opulent moment--nor the dingy pine bedroom sets,

nor even the worn "ingrain" carpets, as she did these precious relics of

her grandmother's home.

Over them she fought her first successful battle with the older

generation for her woman's rights--and won. She directed the colored men

who were hired to unpack the household goods to put the green velvet

horrors in the obscure rear parlor. In the front room she had placed the

battered mahogany, and had just rejected the figured parlor carpet when

her grandmother came upon her unawares. The old lady had slipped in

noiselessly through the area door.

"My dear!" she remarked softly, a deceitful smile on her thin lips.

"Why, my dear!" Milly hated this tender appellation, scenting the

hypocrisy in it. "Haven't you made a mistake? I _think_ this is the

parlor."

"Of course it is the parlor," Milly admitted briskly, wheeling to meet

the cold gray eyes that were fixed on her.

"Then why, may I ask, is the parlor furni--"

"Because I am doing this to suit myself," the girl promptly explained.

"In _this_ house, I mean to have things suit _me_, grandma," she added

firmly. It was just as well to settle the matter at once.

"But, my dear," the old lady stammered, helpless before the audacity of

the revolt. "I'm sure nobody wants to cross you--but--but--where's the

carpet?"

"I'm not going to have that ugly green rag staring at me any longer!"

"My dear--"

"Don't 'my dear' me any more, grandma, please!"

Mrs. Ridge gasped, closed her thin lips tightly, then emitted,--

"Mildred, I'm afraid you are not quite yourself to-day," and she

retreated to the rear room, where in the gloom were piled her rejected

idols.

After an interval she returned to the fight, gliding noiselessly forth

from the gloom. She was a very small and a very frail little body, and

as Milly put it she was "always sneaking about the house like a ghost."

"I see that the kitchen things have not been touched, and the

dining-room furniture--"

"And they won't be--until I have this room to suit me.... Sam, please

move that desk a little nearer the window.... There!"

It was characteristic of Milly to begin with the show part of the

premises first and then work backwards to the fundamentals, pushing

confusion slowly before her. The old lady watched the colored man move

the rickety mahogany back and forth under Milly's orders for a few more

minutes, then her thin lips tightened ominously.

"I think your father may have something to say about this, Mildred!"

"He'll be all right if you don't stir him up," the girl replied with

assurance. She walked across the room to her grandmother. "See here,

grandma, I'm 'most seventeen now and big for my age--"

"Please-say 'large,' Mildred."

"Large then--'most a woman. And this is my father's home--and

_mine_--until he gets married again, which of course he won't do as long

as I am here to look after him.... And, grandma, I mean to be the head

of this house."

The old lady drooped.

"Very well, my dear, I see only too plainly the results of your poor

mother's--"

"Grandma!" the girl flashed warningly.

"If I'm not wanted here--"

"You're not--now! The best thing for you to do is to go straight back to

the boarding-house and read your _Christian Vindicator_ until I'm ready

for you to move in."

"At the rate you are going it will be some days before your father can

have the use of his home."

"A week at least I should say."

"And he must pay board another week for all of us!"

"I suppose so--we must live somewhere, mustn't we?" Milly remarked

sweetly.

So with a final shrug of her tiny shoulders the little old lady let

herself out of the front door, stealthily betook herself down the long

flight of steps and, without a backward glance, headed for the

boarding-house. Milly watched her out of sight from the front window.

"Thank heaven, she's really gone!" she muttered. "Always snooping about

like a cat,--prying and fussing. She's such a nuisance, poor grandma."

It was neither said nor felt ill-naturedly. Milly was generous with all

the world, liked everybody, including her grandmother, who was a

perpetual thorn,--liked her least of anybody in the world because of her

stealthy ways and her petty bullying, also because of the close watch

she kept over the family purse when Milly wished to thrust her prodigal

hand therein. She made the excuse to herself when she was harsh with the

old lady,--"And she was so mean to poor mama,--" that gentle, soft, weak

southern mother, whom Milly had abused while living and now adored--as

is the habit of imperfect mortals....

So with a lighter heart, having routed the old lady, at least for this

afternoon, Milly continued to set up the broken and shabby household

goods to suit herself. She coaxed the colored boys into considerable

activity with her persuasive ways, having an inherited capacity for

getting work out of lazy and emotional help, who respond to the

personal touch. By dusk, when her father came, she had the two

front rooms arranged to her liking. Sam was hanging a bulky steel

engraving--"Windsor Castle with a View of Eton"--raising and lowering it

patiently at Milly's orders. It was the most ambitious work of art that

the family possessed, yet she felt it was not really suited, and

accepted it provisionally, consigning it mentally to the large

scrap-heap of Ridge belongings which she had already begun in the back

yard.

"Well, daughter," Mr. Ridge called out cheerily from the open door, "how

you're getting on?"

"Oh, papa!" (Somewhere in the course of her wanderings Milly had learned

not to say "paw.")

She flew to the little man and hugged him enthusiastically.

"I'm so dead tired--I've worked every minute, haven't I, Sam?"

"She sure has," the boy chuckled admiringly, "kep us all agoin' too!"

"How do you like it, papa?"

Milly led the little man into the front room and waited breathlessly for

his approbation. It was her first attempt in the delicate art of

household arrangement.

"It's fine--it's all right!" Horatio commented amiably, twisting an

unlighted cigar between his teeth and surveying the room dubiously. His

tone implied bewilderment. He was a creature of habits, even if they

were peripatetic habits: he missed the parlor furniture and the green

rug. They meant home to him. Looking into the rear cavern where Milly

had thrust all the furniture she had not the courage to scrap, he

observed slyly,--"What'll your grandmother say?"

"She's said it," Milly laughed.

Horatio chuckled. This was woman's business, and wise male that he was

he maintained an amused neutrality.

"Ain't you most unpacked, Milly? I'm getting dead tired of boarding."

"Oh, I've just begun, really! You don't know what time it takes to

settle a house properly."

"Didn't think we had so much stuff."

"We haven't _anything_ fit to use--that's the trouble. We must get some

new things right away. I want a rug for this room first."

"Isn't there a carpet?"

"A carpet! Papa, they don't use carpets any more. A nice, soft rug, with

a border 'round it...."

Horatio retreated towards the door. But before they had reached the

boarding-house, the first advance towards Milly's Ideal of the New Home

had been plotted. The rug was settled. Milly was to meet her father in

the city at noon on the morrow and select one. Arm in arm, father and

daughter came up the steps,--charming picture of family intimacy.

"So nice to see father and daughter such friends!" one of the

boarding-house ladies observed to Grandma Ridge.

"Oh, yes," the old lady admitted with a chilly smile. She knew what

these demonstrations cost in cash from her son's leaky pockets. If she

had lived later, doubtless she would have called Milly a cunning

grafter.

Milly smiled upon the interested stranger, good humoredly, as she always

smiled. She was feeling very tired after her day's exertions, but

happily content with her first efforts to realize her ambition,--to have

"some place for herself." What she meant by having a place for herself

in the world she did not yet understand of course. Nor what she could do

with it, having achieved it. It was an instinct, blind in the manner of

instincts, of her dependent womanhood. She was quite sure that something

must happen,--a something that would give her a horizon more spacious

than that of the West Side.

* * * * *

Meantime she ate the unappetizing food put before her with good grace,

and smiled and chatted with all the dreary spinsters of the

boarding-house table.

III

MILLY GOES TO CHURCH

The ugly little house was at last got to rights, at least as much so as

Milly's limited means permitted. Horatio's resources were squeezed to

the last dollar, and the piano came in on credit. Then the family moved

in, and soon the girl's restless gaze turned outwards.

She must have people for her little world,--people to visit with, to

talk to. From her doll years Milly had loved people indiscriminately.

She must have them about her, to play with, to interest, to arouse

interest in herself. Wherever she derived this social passion--obviously

not from Grandma Ridge--it had been and would always be the dominant

note of her life. Later, in her more sophisticated and more

introspective phase, she would proclaim it as a creed: "People are the

most interesting thing in life--just humans!" And she would count her

gregariousness as a virtue. But as yet it was unconscious, an animal

instinct for the herd. And she was lonely the first days at West

Laurence Avenue.

Everywhere the family had put foot to earth in its wanderings, Milly had

acquired friends easily,--at school, in church, among the

neighbors,--what chance afforded from the mass. She wept even on her

departure from St. Louis, which she had hated because of the light

housekeeping, at the thought of losing familiar faces. A number of her

casual friends came to the station to see her off, as they always did.

She kissed them all, and swore to each that she would write, which she

promptly forgot to do. But she loved them all, just the same. And now

that the Ridge destiny seemed to be settled with fair prospects of

permanency in this new, untried prairie city,--a huddle of a million or

more souls,--she cast her eager eyes about for the conquest that must be

made....

The social hegira from the West Side of the city had already begun: the

more prosperous with social aspirations were dropping away, moving to

the north or the south, along the Lake. Some of the older families still

lingered, rooted in associations, hesitant before new fashions, and

these, Milly at once divined, lived in the old-fashioned brick and stone

houses along the Boulevard that crossed West Laurence Avenue just below

the Ridge home. These seats of the mighty on Western Boulevard might not

be grand, but they alone of all the neighborhood had something of the

aristocratic air.

This spacious boulevard was the place she chose for her daily stroll

with her grandmother, taking the old lady, who had betrayed an interest

in a cemetery, up and down Western Boulevard, past the large houses

where the long front windows were draped with spotless lace curtains.

She learned somehow that the old-fashioned brick house, with broad eaves

and wooden pillars, belonged to the Claxtons. The grounds about the

house ran even to the back yards of the West Laurence Avenue

block,--indeed had originally included all that land,--for the Claxtons

were an old family as age went in Chicago, and General Claxton was a

prominent man in the state. She also knew that the more modern stone

house on the farther corner was occupied by the Walter Kemps; that Mrs.

Kemp had been a Claxton; and that Mr. Kemp was a rising young banker in

the city. How Milly had found out all this in the few days she had lived

in the neighborhood would be hard to explain: such information she

acquired unconsciously, as one does the character of the weather....

On the next corner north of the Claxton place was a large church, with a

tall spire, and an adjoining parish house. They were built of the same

cream-colored stone, which had grown sallow under the smoke, with

chocolate-brown trimmings, like a deep edging to a mourning

handkerchief. Its appearance pleased Milly. She felt sure that the best

people of the neighborhood worshipped here, and so to this dignified

edifice she led her father and grandmother the first Sunday after they

were installed in their new home.

It proved to be the Second Presbyterian Church. The Ridges were

orthodox, _i.e._ Congregational: the judge had been deacon in Euston,

Pa., and Mrs. Ridge talked of "sending for her papers" and finding the

nearest congregation of her old faith. But Milly promptly announced that

"everybody went to the Presbyterian church here." She was satisfied with

the air and the appearance of the congregation that first Sunday and

made her father promise to take seats for the family. The old lady,

content to have the wayward Horatio committed to any sort of

church-going, made slight objection. It mattered little to Horatio

himself. In religion he was catholic: he was ready to stand up in any

evangelical church, dressed in his best, and boom forth the hymns in his

bass voice. The choice of church was a matter to be left to the women,

like the color of the wallpaper, or the quality of crockery,--affairs of

delicate discrimination. Moreover, he was often out of the city over

Sunday on his business trips and did not have to go to church.

It was impossible that Milly, dressed very becomingly in her new gray

suit, should escape notice after the first Sunday. Her lovely bronze

hair escaped from her round hat engagingly. Her soft blue eyes looked up

at the minister appealingly. She had the attractive air of youth and

health and good looks. The second Sunday the minister's wife, prompted

by her husband, spoke to Mrs. Ridge and called soon after. She liked

Milly--minister's wives usually did--and she approved of the

grandmother, who had an aristocratic air, in her decent black, her thin,

gray face. "They seem really nice people," Mrs. Borland reported to her

husband, "but a very ordinary home. He travels for the Hoppers'. Her

mother was a southerner." (Milly had got that in somehow,--"My mother's

home was Kentucky, you know.")... So, thanks to the church, here was

Milly at last launched on the West Side and in a fair way of knowing

people.

She began going to vespers--it was a new custom then, during Lent--and

she was faithful at the Wednesday evening prayer meetings. The Borlands

had a daughter, of about Milly's age,--a thin, anæmic girl who took to

Milly's warmth and eagerness at once. As Milly succinctly summed up the

minister's family,--"They're from Worcester, Mass." To come from New

England seemed to Milly to give the proper stamp of respectability,

while Virginia gave aristocracy.

Mrs. Borland introduced Milly to Mrs. Walter Kemp after the service one

Sunday. Milly knew, as we have seen, that Mrs. Kemp had been a Claxton,

and that the general still lived in the ample mansion which he had built

in the early fifties when he had transferred his fortunes from Virginia

to the prairie city. They were altogether the most considerable people

Milly had ever encountered. And so when Eleanor Kemp called at the

little West Laurence Avenue house, Milly was breathless. Not that Milly

was a snob. She was as kind to the colored choreman as to the minister's

wife, smiling and good-humored with every one. But she had a keen sense

of differences. Unerringly she reached out her hands to the "best" as

she understood the best,--the men and women who were "nice," who were

pleasant to know. And Mrs. Kemp, then a young married woman of

twenty-seven or eight, seemed to the enthusiastic girl quite adorable.

She was tall and slender, with fine oval features and clear brown skin

and dark hair. Her manner was rather distant at first and awed Milly.

"Oh, you're so beautiful,--you don't mind my saying it!" she exclaimed

the first time they were alone in the Kemp house.

"You funny child!" the older woman laughed, quite won. And that was the

phrase she used invariably of Milly Ridge,--"That funny child!" varied

occasionally by "That astonishing child!" even when the child had become

a woman of thirty. There would always be something of the breathless,

impulsive child in Milly Ridge.

After that first visit Milly went home to arrange a tea-table like

Eleanor Kemp's. She found among the discarded remnants of the family

furniture a small round table without a leg. She had it repaired and set

up her tea-table near the black marble fireplace. The next time the

banker's wife came to call she was able to offer her a cup of tea, with

sliced lemon, quite as a matter of course, after the manner that Mrs.

Kemp had handed it to her the week before. Milly was not crudely

imitative: she was selectively imitative, and for the present she had

chosen Mrs. Kemp for her model.

For the most part they met at the Kemp house. The young married woman

liked her new rôle of guide and experienced friend to Milly; she also

liked the admiration that Milly sincerely, copiously poured forth on all

occasions. When Milly praised the ugly house and its furniture, she

might smile in a superior way, for she was "travelled," had visited "the

chief capitals of Europe,"--as well as Washington and New York,--and

knew perfectly well that the solid decoration of her library and

drawing-room was far from good style. The Kemps had already secured

their lot on the south side of the city near the Lake. The plans for

their new house were being drawn by a well-known eastern architect, and

they were merely waiting before building until Mr. Kemp should find

himself sufficiently prosperous to maintain the sort of house that the

architect had designed for a rising young western banker.

"Oh, dear," Milly sighed, "you will be moving soon--and there'll be

nobody left around here for me to know."

Eleanor Kemp smiled.

"You know what I mean!... People like you and your mother."

"You may not live here always," her friend prophesied.

"I hope not. But papa seems perfectly content--he's taken a five years'

lease of that horrid house. I just knew it wasn't the right place as

soon as I saw it!"

The older woman laughed at Milly's despair.

"There's time yet for something to happen."

Milly blushed happily. There was only one sort of something to happen

for her,--the right sort of marriage. Milly, as Mrs. Kemp confided to

her husband, was a girl with a "future," and that future could be only a

matrimonial one. Her new friend good naturedly did what she could for

Milly by putting her in the way of meeting people. At her own house and

her mother's, across the street, Milly saw a number of people who came

into her life helpfully later on. General Claxton was still at that time

a considerable political figure in the middle west, had been congressman

and was spoken of for Senator. Jolly, plump Mrs. Claxton maintained a

large, informal hospitality of the Virginia sort, and to the big brick

house came all kinds of people,--southerners with quaint accents and

formal manners, young Englishmen on their way to the wild northwest,

down-state politicians, as well as the merchant aristocracy of the city.

Thus Milly as a mere girl had her first opportunity of peeping at the

larger world in the homely, high-studded rooms and on the generous

porches of the Claxton house, and enjoyed it immensely.

The church had thus far done a good deal for Milly.

For some time it remained the staple of her social existence,--that

sallow, cream-colored pile, in which the congregation had already so

shrunken by removals that the worshippers rattled around in the big

building like dried peas in a pod. Milly became a member of the pastor's

Bible class and an ardent worker in the Young Women's Guild. She was

looked upon favorably as a right-minded and religious young woman. She

had joined the church some years before, shortly after the death of her

mother. Her first religious fervor lasted rather more than a year and

was dying out when the family moved from St. Louis. Its revival at the

Second Presbyterian was of a purely institutional character. Although

even Grandma Ridge called her a "good girl," Milly was too healthy a

young person to be really absorbed by questions of salvation. Her

religion was a social habit, like the habit of wearing fresh

underclothes and her best dress on the seventh day, having a late

breakfast and responding to the din of the church bells with other

ceremonially dressed folk. She believed what she heard in church as she

believed everything that was spoken with authority. It would have seemed

to her very dreadful to question the great dogmas of Heaven, Hell, the

Atonement, the Resurrection, etc. But they meant absolutely nothing to

her: they did not come into practical relation with her life as did the

ugly little box of her home and the people she knew, and she had no

taste for abstractions.

Milly was "good." She tried to have a helpful influence upon her

companions, especially upon young men who seemed to need an influence

more than others: she wanted to induce them not to swear, to smoke, to

drink--or be "bad,"--a vague state of unrealized vice. She encouraged

them to go to church by letting them escort her. It was the proper way

of displaying right intentions to lead good lives. When one young man

who had been a member of the Bible class was found to have taken money

from Mr. Kemp's bank, where he was employed, and indulged in riotous

living with it, Milly felt depressed for several days,--accused herself

of not having done her utmost to bring this lost soul to the Saviour.

Yet Milly was no prig,--at least not much of a one. For almost all her

waking hours her mind was occupied with totally mundane affairs, and she

was never much concerned about her own salvation. It seemed so far

off--in the hazy distances of stupid middle age or beyond. So, like

thousands upon thousands of other young women of her day, she appeared

at the Second Presbyterian every Sunday morning, looking her freshest

and her best, and with engaging zest, if with a somewhat wandering mind,

sang,--

"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord!"

It was a wholly meaningless social function, this, and useful to the

girl. Later charity might take its place. Horatio Ridge, who had never

qualified as a church member while his wife lived, knowing his own

unregenerate habits and having a healthy-minded male's aversion to

hypocrisy, now went to church with his daughter quite regularly. He felt

that it was a good thing,--the right thing for the girl, in some way

insuring her woman's safety in this wicked world, if not her salvation

in the next.

They made a pretty picture together, father and daughter,--the girl with

the wide blue eyes and open mouth, standing shoulder to shoulder with

the little man, each with one gloved hand grasping an edge of the

hymn-book and singing, Milly in a high soprano,--

"Nearer, my God, to Thee!"

and Horatio, rumbling behind a little uncertainly,--

"Nearer to Thee--to THEE!"

IV

MILLY COMPLETES HER EDUCATION

"Milly," Mrs. Kemp remarked thoughtfully, "aren't you going to complete

your education?"

Milly translated this formidable phrase in a flash,--

"You mean go to school any more? Why should I?"

It was a warm June day. Milly had been reading to Mrs. Kemp, who was

sewing. The book was "Romola." Milly had found quite dull its solid

pages of description of old Florence sparsely relieved by conversation,

and after a futile attempt to discover more thrilling matter farther on

had abandoned the book altogether in favor of talk, which always

interested her more than anything else in the world.

"Why should I go to school?" she repeated.

"You are only sixteen."

"Seventeen--in September," Milly promptly corrected.

Mrs. Kemp laughed.

"I didn't finish school until I was eighteen."

"School is so stupid," Milly sighed, with a little grimace. "I hate

getting things out of books."

She had never been distinguished in school,--far from it. Only by real

labor had she been able to keep up with her classes.

"I guess the schools I went to weren't much good," she added.

She saw herself behind a desk at the high school she had last attended

in St. Louis. In front of her sat a dried, sallow, uncheerful woman of

great age, ready to pounce upon her and expose her ignorance before the

jeering class. The girls and the boys at the school were not

"refined"--she knew that now. No, she did not want any more school of

that sort.... Besides, what use could an education be, if she were not

to teach? And Milly had not the faintest idea of becoming a teacher.

"Do you think a girl needs to know a lot of stuff--stupid things in

books?" she asked.

"Women must have a better education than they once did," Eleanor Kemp

replied with conviction. She refrained from explaining that a girl like

Milly, with no social background, might marry "to advantage" on her

looks, but she would need something more to maintain any desirable

position in the world. Such ideas were getting into the air these days.

"I'm going to take some music lessons," Milly yawned.

"You have a good mind," her friend persisted flatteringly. "Do you know

French."

"A little," Milly admitted dubiously.

"German?"

Milly shook her head positively.

"Latin?"

"Latin! What for?"

"I had two years of Latin. It's ... it's cultivating."

Milly glanced at the load of new books on the library table. She knew

that the Kemps read together a great deal. They aspired to "stand for

the best things" in the ambitious young city,--for art, music, and all

the rest. She was somewhat awed.

"But what's the use of a girl's knowing all that?" she demanded

practically.

If a woman knew how to "write a good letter," when she was married, and

could keep the house accounts when there were any, and was bright and

entertaining enough to amuse her wearied male, she had all the education

she needed. That was Milly's idea.

"French, now, is so useful when one travels," Mrs. Kemp explained.

"Oh, if one travels," Milly agreed vaguely.

Later Mrs. Kemp returned to the attack and extolled the advantages,

social and intellectual, that came with a Good Education. She described

the Ashland Institute, where she had completed her own education and of

which she was a recently elected trustee.

"Mrs. Mason, the principal, is a very cultivated lady--speaks all the

modern languages and has such a refining influence. I know you would

like her."

Milly had always attended public school. It had never occurred to her

father that while the state was willing to provide an education he

should go to the expense of buying one privately for his daughter. Of

course Milly knew that there were fashionable boarding-schools. She

wanted to attend a Sacred Heart convent school where one of her

intimates--a Louisville girl--had been sent, but the mere idea had

shocked Mrs. Ridge, senior, unutterably.

It seemed that the Ashland Institute, according to Mrs. Kemp, was an

altogether superior sort of place, and Milly was at last thoroughly

fired with the idea that she should "finish herself" there. Her

grandmother agreed that more schooling would not hurt Milly, but

demurred at the expense. Horatio was easily convinced that it was the

only proper school for his daughter. So the following September Milly

was once more a pupil, enrolled in classes of "literature" (with a

handbook), "art" (with a handbook), "science" (handbook), "mental and

moral philosophy" (lectures), and French (_La tulipe noire_). Milly

liked Mrs. Mason, a personable lady, who always addressed her pupils as

"young ladies." And Milly was quickly fascinated by the professor of

mental and moral philosophy, a delicate-looking young college graduate.

She worked very hard, studying her lessons far into the night,

memorizing long lists of names, dates, maxims, learning by rote whatever

was contained in those dreary handbooks.

Even in those days this was not all there was to education for girls

like Milly. There were a few young women, east and west, bold enough to

go to college. But as yet their example had no influence upon the

general education dealt out to girls. Most girls whose parents had any

sort of ambition went through the high school with their brothers, and

then went to work--if they had to--or got married. Even for the

privileged few who could afford "superior advantages" the ideas about

women's education were chaos. Mrs. Mason solved the problem at the

Ashland Institute as well as any, with a little of this and of that,

elegant information conveyed chiefly in handbooks about "literature" and

"art"; for women were assumed to be the "artistic" sex as they were the

ornamental. There were, besides, deportment, dancing, and music, also

ornamental. The only practical occupations were keeping house and

nursing, and if a girl was obliged to do such things, she did not seek

the aristocratic "finishing school." The "home" was the proper place for

all that. In Milly's case the "home" was adequately run by her

grandmother with the help of one colored servant. So Horatio, being just

able to afford the tuition, Milly was privileged to "finish herself."

Of course she forgot all the facts so laboriously acquired within a

short six months after she read her little essay on "Plato's Conception

of the Beautiful" at the graduation exercises. (That effort, by the way,

lay heavy on the neighborhood for weeks, but was pronounced a triumph.

It was certainly a masterpiece of fearless quotation.)... Learning

passed over Milly like a summer sea over a shining sandbar and left no

trace behind, none whatever. It was the same way with music. Milly could

sing church hymns in a pleasant voice and thumped a little heavily on

the piano after learning her piece.... She used to say, years

afterward,--"I have no gifts; I was never clever with books. I like

life, people!" and she would stretch out her hands gropingly to the

broad horizon.

This year at the Ashland Institute helped to enlarge that horizon

somewhat. And one other thing she got with the absurd meal of

schooling,--a vague but influential something,--an "ideal of American

womanhood." That was the way Mrs. Mason phrased it in her eloquent talks

to the girls.

The other teachers, especially the pale young professor of mental and

moral philosophy, referred to it indirectly as the moving force of the

new world. This was the "formative influence" of the school,--the

quality that the Institute prided itself on above all else.

It was of a poetic shade, composed in equal parts of art, literature,

and religion. Milly absorbed it at church, where the minister spoke

almost tearfully about "the mission of young womanhood to elevate the

ideals of the race," or more colloquially in Bible class as the duty of

"being a good influence" in life, especially men's lives. She got it

also in what books she read,--especially in Tennyson and in every novel,

as well as in the few plays she saw. There it was embodied as Woman of

Romance,--sublime, divine, mysterious, with a heavenly mission to

reform, ennoble, uplift--men, of course,--in a word to make over the

world. The idea of it had come down from the darkness of the middle

ages,--that smelly and benighted period,--had inflamed all romance, and

was now spreading its last miasmatic touch over the close of the

nineteenth century. All this, to be sure, Milly never knew.

She merely began to feel self-conscious, as a member of her sex,--a

being apart from men and somehow superior to them, without the same

appetites and low ideals, and with her own peculiar and sacred function

to perform for humanity. Ordinarily this heavy ideal of her sex did not

burden Milly. She obeyed her thoroughly healthy instincts, chief of

which was "to have a good time," to be loved and petted by people. But

occasionally in her more emotional moods, when she was singing hymns or

watching the sun depart in golden mists, she experienced exalted

sensations of the beauty and the glory of life--of _her_ life--and what

it all might mean to Some One (a man).

When she undressed before the tiny mirror, she considered her attractive

young body with a delicious sense of mystery that would some day be

revealed, then plunged into bed, and buried herself chastely beneath the

cover, her heart throbbing.

If Milly had had any real education, she might have recalled the

teaching of science in such moments and realized that her soft tissue

was composed of common elements, her special function was but a

universal means to a universal end; that even her long, thick hair with

its glint of gold, her soft eyes, her creamy skin and rounding breasts

and sloping thighs were all designed for the simple purpose of

continuing the species. (But in those days they did not talk of such

things even in the handbooks, and Milly would have called any one who

dared mention them in her presence a "materialist"--a word she had heard

in the philosophy class.) Having no one to mention to her such improper

truths, she remained in the pleasant illusion of literature and religion

that she was altogether a superior creation,--something mysterious to be

worshipped and preserved. Not colored Jenny in the kitchen, who had

three or four illegitimate children! Not even all the girls in her

Sunday-school class, some of whom worked in stores, but the cultivated,

refined women who made Homes for Heroes. This belief was like Poetry: it

satisfied and sustained--and it gave an unconscious impulse to her whole

life, that she was never able wholly to escape....

And this was what they called Education in those days.

V

MILLY EXPERIMENTS

Of course Milly had "beaux," as she called them then. There had never

been a time since she was trusted to navigate herself alone upon the

street when she had not attracted to herself other little

persons--chiefly girls, to be sure. For as Milly was wont to confess in

her palmiest days when men flocked around her, she was a "woman's woman"

(and hence inferentially a man's woman, too). Milly very sincerely

preferred her own sex as constant companions. They were more expressive,

communicative, rational. Men were useful: they brought candies, flowers,

theatre parties.

But now the era of young men as distinguished from girls had arrived.

Boys in long trousers with dark upper lips hung about the West Laurence

Avenue house on warm evenings, composing Milly's celebrated "stoop

parties," or wandered with her arm in arm up the broad boulevard to the

Park. And at the Claxtons and the Kemps she met older men who paid

attention to the vivacious, well-developed school-girl.

"Milly will take care of herself," Mrs. Claxton remarked to her daughter

when the school question was up, and when the latter deplored the

unchaperoned condition of her young friend, she added,--

"That was the way in Virginia. A girl had a lot of beaux--and she got no

harm from it, if she were a good girl."

Milly was a good girl without any doubt, astonishing as it may seem.

Milly Ridge had passed through the seventeen years of her existence and

at least four different public schools without knowing anything about

"sex hygiene." That married women had babies and that somehow these were

due to the presence of men in the household was the limit of her sex

knowledge. Beyond that it was not "nice" for a girl to delve, and Milly

was very scrupulous about being "nice." Nice girls did not discuss such

things. Once when she was fifteen a woman she knew had "gone to the bad"

and Milly had been very curious about it, as she was later about the

existence of bad women generally. This state of virginal ignorance was

due more to her normal health than to any superior delicacy. As one man

meaningly insinuated, Milly was not yet "awake." He apparently desired

the privilege of awakening her, but she eluded him safely.

When these older men began to call, Milly entertained them quite

formally in the little front room, discussing books with them and

telling her little stories, while her father smoked his cigar in the

rear room. She was conscious always of Grandma Ridge's keen ears pricked

to attention behind the smooth curls of gray hair. It was astonishing

how much the old lady could overhear and misinterpret!...

Almost all these young men, clerks and drummers and ranchers, were

hopelessly, stupidly dull, and Milly knew it. Their idea of

entertainment was the theatre or lopping about the long steps, listening

to her chatter. When they took her "buggy-riding," they might try

clumsily to put their arms around her. She would pretend not to notice

and lean forward slightly to avoid the embrace....

Her first really sentimental encounter came at the end of a long day's

picnicking on the hot sands of the lake beach. Harold--ultimately she

forgot his last name--had taken her up the shore after supper. They had

scrambled to the top of the clayey bluff and sat there in a thicket,

looking out over the dimpled water, hot, uncomfortable, self-conscious.

His hand had strayed to hers, and she had let him hold it, caress the

stubby fingers in his thin ones, aware that hers was quite a homely

hand, her poorest "point." She knew somehow that he wanted to kiss her,

and she wondered what she should do if he tried,--whether she should be

offended or let him "just once." He was a handsome, bashful boy, and she

felt fond of him.

But when he had got his courage to the point, she drew off quickly, and

to distract his attention exclaimed,--"See! What's that?" They looked

across the broad surface of the lake and saw a tiny rim of pure gold

swell upwards from the waves.

"It's just the moon!"

"How beautiful it is," Milly sighed.

Again when his arm came stealing about her she moved away murmuring,

"No, no." And so they went back, awkwardly silent, to the others, who

were telling stories about a blazing camp-fire they had thought it

proper to build.... After that Harold came to see her quite regularly,

and at last declared his love in a stumbling, boyish fashion. But Milly

dismissed him--he was only a clerk at Hoppers'--without hesitation. "We

are both too young, dear," she said. He had tried to kiss her hand, and

somehow he managed so awkwardly that their heads bumped. Then he had

gone away to Colorado to recover. For some months they exchanged boy and

girl letters, which she kept for years tied up with ribbon. After a time

he ceased to write, and she thought nothing of it, as her busy little

world was peopled with new figures. Then there came wedding cards from

Denver and at first she could not remember who this Harold Stevens about

to marry Miss Glazier, could be. Her first affair, a pallid little

romance that had not given her any real excitement!

Afterwards in moods of retrospection Milly would say: "However I didn't

get into trouble as a girl, with no mother, and such an easy,

unsuspecting father, I don't know. Think of it, my dear, out almost

every night, dances, rides, picnics, theatres. Perhaps the men were

better those days or the girls more innocent."

There was one episode, however, of these earlier years that left a

deeper mark.

VI

MILLY LEARNS

The friend who at the opportune moment had offered Horatio his point of

stability at Hoppers' was Henry Snowden,--a handsome, talkative man of

forty-five. He was manager of a department in the mail-order house, with

the ambition of becoming one of the numerous firm. It was he who had put

Horatio in the hands of the real estate firm that had resulted in the

West Laurence Avenue House. Snowden, with his wife and two grown

children, lived up the Boulevard, some distance from the Kemps. Mrs.

Snowden was a rather fat lady a few years older than her husband, with a

mid-western nasal voice. Milly thought her "common,"--a word she had

learned from Eleanor Kemp,--and the daughter, who was in one of the

lower classes of the Institute, was like her mother. During the first

months in Chicago the Snowdens were the people Milly saw most of.

Horatio liked to have the Snowdens in for what he called a "quiet rubber

of whist" with a pitcher of cider, a box of cheap cigars, and a plate of

apples on the table. Grandma Ridge sat in the dining-room, reading her

_Christian Vindicator_, while Milly entertained her friends on the steps

or visited at the Kemps. Occasionally she was induced to take a hand in

the game. She liked Mr. Snowden. He was more the gentleman than most of

her father's business friends. With his trim, grizzled mustache and his

eye-glass he looked almost professional, she thought. He treated Milly

gallantly, brought her flowers occasionally, and took her with his

daughter to the theatre. He seemed much younger than his wife, and Milly

rather pitied him for being married to her. She felt that it must have

been a mistake of his youth. Her father was proud of the friendship and

would repeat often,--"Snow's a smart man, I can tell you. There's a

great future for Snow at Hoppers'."

The Snowdens had an old-fashioned house with a stable, and kept a horse.

Mr. Snowden was fond of driving, and had always a fast horse. He would

come on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday and take Ridge for a drive. One

Saturday afternoon he drove up to the house, and seeing Milly in the

front window--it was a warm April day of their second year--motioned her

to come outside.

"Papa is not home yet," she said, patting the horse.

"I know he isn't," Snowden remarked jerkily. "Didn't come for him--came

for _you_--jump in!"

Milly looked at him joyously with her glowing, child's eyes.

"Really? You want me! But I'm not dressed."

"You're all right--jump in--it's warm enough." And Milly without further

urging got into the buggy.

They went out through the boulevard to the new parkway, and when they

reached the broad open road in the park, Snowden let his horse out, and

they spun for a mile or more breathlessly. Milly's cheeks glowed, and

her eyes danced. She was afraid that he might turn back at the end of

the drive. But he kept on into a region that was almost country. Snowden

talked in nervous sentences about the horse, then about Horatio, who, he

said, was doing finely in the business. "He'll get on," he said, and

Milly felt that Mr. Snowden was the family's good genius.

"He's a good fellow--I suppose he'll marry again, one of these days."

"No, he won't!" Milly replied promptly. "Not so long as he has me."

"What'll he do when he loses you?"

"He won't lose me."

"Oh, you'll be married, Milly, 'fore you know it."

She shook her head.

"Not until I meet the right man," she said, and she explained volubly

her lofty ideals of matrimony.

Snowden agreed with her. He became personal, confiding, insinuated

even that his marriage had been a mistake--of ignorance and youth. Milly,

who was otherwise sympathetic, thought this was not nice of him,

even if Mrs. Snowden was pudgy and common and old. A woman gave so

much, she felt, in marriage that she should be insured against her

defects.... Snowden said that he was living for his children. Milly

thought that quite right and tried to turn the conversation.

The horse looked around as if to ask how much farther his master meant

to go over this rough country road. It was getting late and the sun was

sinking towards the flat prairie. Milly began to feel unaccountably

worried and suggested turning back. Instead the man cut the horse with

his whip so that he shot forward down the narrow road. The buggy rocked

and swayed, while Milly clung to the side. Snowden looked at her and

smiled triumphantly. His face came nearer hers. Milly thought it

handsome, but it was unpleasantly flushed, and Milly drew away.

Suddenly she found herself in the grasp of her companion's free arm. He

was whispering things into her ear.

"You make me mad--I--"

"Don't, Mr. Snowden,--please, please don't!" Milly cried, struggling.

The horse stopped altogether and looked around at them.

"Let me go!" she cried. But now abandoning the lines he held her in both

his arms, his hot breath was close to her face, his lips seeking hers.

Then she bit him,--bit him so hard with her firm teeth that he drew away

with a cry, loosening his grip. She wriggled out of his embrace and

scrambled to the ground before he knew what she was doing and began to

run down the road. Snowden gathered up the lines and followed after her,

calling,--"Milly, Milly--Miss Ridge," in a penitent, frightened voice.

For some time she paid no attention until he shouted,--"You'll never get

anywhere that way!" The buggy was abreast of her now. "Do get in! I

won't--touch you."

She turned upon him with all the fire of her youth.

"You--a respectable man--with a wife--and my father's friend--you!"

"Yes, I know," he said, like a whipped dog. "But don't run off--I'll get

out and let you drive back alone."

There was a cart coming on slowly behind them. Milly marched past the

buggy haughtily and walked towards it. Snowden followed close behind,

pleading, apologizing. She knew that he was afraid she would speak to

the driver of the cart, and despised him.

"Milly, don't," he groaned.

She walked stiffly by the cart, whose driver eyed the scene with a slow

grin. She paid no attention, however, to Snowden's entreaties. She was

secretly proud of herself for her magnanimity in not appealing to the

stranger, for the manner in which she was conducting herself. But after

a mile or so, it became quite dark and she felt weary. She stumbled, sat

down beside the road. The buggy stopped automatically.

"If you'll only get in and drive home, Miss Ridge," Snowden said humbly,

and prepared to dismount. "It's a good eight miles to the boulevard and

your folks will be worried."

With a gesture that waved him back to his place Milly got into the buggy

and the horse started.

"I didn't mean--I am sorry--"

"Don't speak to me ever again, Mr. Snowden," Milly flamed. She sat bolt

upright in her corner of the seat, drawing her skirt under her as if

afraid it might touch him. Snowden drove rapidly, and thus without a

word exchanged they returned. As they came near the corner of West

Laurence Avenue, Snowden spoke again,--

"I know you can't forgive me--but I hope you won't let your father know.

It would hurt him and--"

It was a very mean thing to say, and she knew it. Afterwards she thought

of many spirited and apposite words she might have spoken, but at the

moment all she could do was to fling herself haughtily out of the buggy

as it drew up before the curb and without a word or glance march stiffly

up the steps, where her father sat smoking his after-dinner cigar.

"Why, Milly," he exclaimed, "where've you been?"

She stalked past him into the house. She could hear her father ask

Snowden to stop and have some supper, and Snowden's refusal.

"You'll be over for a game later, Snow?"

"Guess not, Horace," and the buggy drove off.

Then for the first time it came over her what it would mean if she

should follow her first impulse and tell her father what had happened.

Mr. Snowden was not merely his most intimate friend, but in a way his

superior. If she should make things unpleasant between them, it might be

serious. So when her grandmother came tiptoeing into Milly's room to see

why she did not come down for her supper, Milly merely said she was too

tired to eat.

"What's happened?"

"That nasty Snowden man," Milly spluttered, "tried to kiss me and I had

to--to fight him.... Don't tell father!"

The little old lady was very much disturbed, but she did not tell her

son. Her policy was one of discreet silence about "unpleasant things" if

they could be covered up. And this was the kind of event that women were

capable of managing themselves, as Milly had managed....

Milly lay awake long hours that night, her heart beating loudly, her

busy mind reviewing the experience, and though her resentment did not

lessen as the hours wore on and she murmured to herself,--"Horrid, nasty

beast!" yet she became aware of another sensation. If--if things had

been different--she--well--it--might, and then she buried her head in

the pillow more ashamed than ever.

At last she had learned something of the real nature of men, and never

again in her long experience with the other sex was she unaware of "what

things meant." Whenever a man was concerned, one must always expect this

possibility. And she began to despise the weaker sex.

For some days the Snowdens did not come for cards. Horatio seemed

depressed. He would sit reading his paper through to the small

advertisements, or wander out by himself to a beer garden near by. When

the social circle is as small as the Ridges', such a state of affairs

means real deprivation, and Milly, who did not approve of the beer

garden any more than did her grandmother, wondered how she could restore

the old harmony between the two families.

But before anything came of her good-natured intention fate arranged

pleasantly to relieve her of the responsibility.

VII

MILLY SEES MORE OF THE WORLD

The Kemps had a cottage at one of the Wisconsin lakes, and Eleanor Kemp

invited Milly to make them a month's visit. The girl's imagination was

aflame with excitement: it was to her Newport or Bar Harbor or Aix.

There was first the question of clothes. Although Mrs. Kemp assured her

that they lived very quietly at Como, Milly knew that the Casses, the

Gilberts, the Shards had summer homes there, and the place was as gay as

anything in this part of the country. Mrs. Kemp might say, "Milly,

you're pretty enough for any place just as you are!" But Milly was woman

enough to know what _that_ meant between women.

Her allowance was spent, four months in advance as usual, but Horatio

was easily brought to see the exceptionality of this event, and even old

Mrs. Ridge was moved to give from her hoard. It was felt to be something

in the nature of an investment for the girl's future. So Milly departed

with a new trunk and a number of fresh summer gowns.

"Have a good time, daughter!" Horatio Ridge shouted as the car moved

off, and he thought he had done his best for his child, even if he had

had to borrow a hundred dollars from his friend Snowden.

Milly was sure she was about to have the most wonderful experience of

her life.

Afterwards she might laugh over the excitement that first country-house

visit had caused, and recall the ugly little brown gabled cottage on the

shore of the hot lake, that did not even faintly resemble its Italian

namesake, with the simple diversions of driving about the dusty, flat

country, varied by "veranda parties" and moonlight rows with the rare

young men who dared to stay away from business through the week. All of

life, the sages tell us, is largely a matter of proportion. Como,

Wisconsin, was breathless excitement to Milly Ridge at eighteen, as she

testified to her hostess in a thousand joyous little ways.

And there was the inevitable man,--a cousin of the Claxton tribe, who

was a young lawyer in Baltimore. He spent a week at the lake, almost

every minute with Milly.

"You've simply fascinated him, my dear," Eleanor Kemp reported,

delightedly. "And they're very good people, I assure you--he's a Harvard

man."

It was the first time Milly had met on intimate terms a graduate of a

large university. In those days "Harvard" and "Yale" were titles of

aristocratic magic, as good as Rome or Oxford.

"He thinks you so unspoiled," her friend added. "I've asked him to stay

another week."

So the two boated and walked and sat out beside the lake until the stars

grew dim--and nothing ever came of it! Milly had her little extravagant

imaginings about this well-bred young man with his distinguished manner;

she did her best to please--and nothing came of it. Why? she asked

herself afterward. He had held her hand and talked about "the woman who

gives purpose to a man's life" and all that. (Alas, that plebeian paw of

Milly's!)

Then he had left and sent her a five-pound box of candy from the

metropolis, with a correct little note, assuring her that he could never

forget those days he had spent with her by the lake of Como. Years

afterward on an Atlantic steamer she met a sandy-haired, stoutish

American, who introduced himself with the apology,--

"You're so like a girl I knew once out West--at some lake in

Wisconsin--"

"And you are Harrison Plummer," she said promptly. "I shouldn't have

known _you_," she added maliciously, surveying the work of time. She

felt that her plebeian hands were revenged: he was quite ordinary. His

wife was with him and four uninteresting children, and he seemed

bored.... That had been her Alpine height at eighteen. The heights seem

lower at thirty-five.

Even if this affair didn't prove to be "the real, right thing," Milly

gained a good deal from her Como visit. Her social perspective was

greatly enlarged by the acquaintances she made there. It was long before

the day of the motor, the launch, the formal house party, but the

families who sought rural relief from the city along the shores of the

Wisconsin lake lived in a liberal, easy manner. They had horses and

carriages a plenty and entertained hospitably. They did not use red

cotton table-cloths (which Grandma Ridge insisted upon to save washing),

and if there were few men-servants, there was an abundance of tidy

maids. It gave Milly unconsciously a conception of how people lived in

circles remote from West Laurence Avenue, and behind her pretty eyes

there formed a blind purpose of pushing on into this unknown territory.

"I had my own way to make socially," she said afterwards, half in

apology, half in pride. "I had no mother to bring me out in society--I

had to make my own friends!"

It was easy, to be sure, in those days for a pretty, vivacious girl with

pleasant manners to go where she would. Society was democratic, in a

flux, without pretence. Like went with like as they always will, but the

social game was very simple, not a definite career, even for a woman.

Many of these good people said "folks" and "ain't" and "doos," and

nobody thought the worse of them for that. And they were kind,--quick to

help a young and attractive girl, who "would make a good wife for some

man."

So after her month with Mrs. Kemp, Milly was urged to spend a week at

the Gilberts, which easily stretched to two. The Gilberts were young

"North Side" people, and much richer than the Kemps. Roy Gilbert had the

rare distinction in those days of describing himself merely as

"capitalist," thanks to his father's exertions and denials. He was lazy

and good-natured and much in love with his young wife, who was unduly

religious and hoped to "steady" Milly. Apart from this obsession she was

an affectionate and pretty woman, rather given to rich food and

sentimental novels. She had been a poor girl herself, of a good New York

family, and life had not been easy until one fine day Roy Gilbert had

sailed into Watch Hill on his yacht and fallen in love with her. Some

such destiny, she hoped, would come to Milly Ridge....

When at last, one drearily hot September day, Milly got back to the

little box of a house on West Laurence Avenue, home seemed unendurably

sordid and mean, stifling. Her father was sitting on the stoop in his

shirt-sleeves, and had eased his feet by pushing off his shoes.

Discipline had grown lax in Milly's absence. Her first sensation of

revolt came at that moment.

"Oh, father--you oughtn't to look like that!" she said, kissing him.

"What's the harm? Nobody's home 'round here. All your swell friends are

at the seashore."

"But, father!"

"Well, Milly, so you decided to come home at last?"

Grandma Ridge had crept out from the house and was smiling icily.

Secretly both the older people were pleased with Milly's social success,

but they tempered their feelings in good puritan fashion with a note of

reproof.

That evening the Snowdens came in for the game of cards. Snowden was

plainly embarrassed at meeting Milly. "Good evening, Mr. Snowden, how

are you? and Mrs. Snowden?" she asked graciously, with her new air of

aloofness, as if he were an utter stranger. "You've come to play cards.

I'm so glad--papa enjoys having you so much!"

She felt that she was handling the situation like a perfect lady, and

she no longer had any real resentment. She even consented to take a hand

in the game. They were much excited about an atrocious murder that had

happened only a few doors away. Old Leonard Sweet, who had grown rich in

the contracting business, had been found dead in his kitchen. His

son-in-law--a dissipated young man whom Milly knew slightly--was

suspected of the crime. It was thought that the two had had a quarrel

about money, and the young man had shot his father-in-law. Milly

remembered old Sweet quite vividly. He used to sit on his stoop in his

stocking feet, even on Sundays when all the neighborhood was going by to

church,--very shocking to Milly's sense of propriety. And the boy had

hung around saloons. Now where was he?

"Well, daughter, can't you tell us what you did at Co-mo?" Horatio

urged....

No, decidedly, this sort of thing would not do for Milly!

VIII

MILLY'S CAMPAIGN

Almost at once Milly began the first important campaign of her life--to

move the household to a more advantageous neighborhood. One morning she

said casually at breakfast,--

"The Kemps are going to their new house when they come in from the

Lake.... Why can't we live some place where there are nice people?"

"What's the matter with this?" Horatio asked, crowding flannel cakes

into his mouth.

"Oh!" Milly exclaimed witheringly. "My friends are all moving away."

"You forget that your father has two years more of his lease of this

house," her grandmother remarked severely.

And the campaign was on, not to be relaxed until the family abandoned

the West Side a year later. It was a campaign fought in many subtle

feminine ways, chiefly between Milly and her grandmother. Needless to

say, the family atmosphere was not always comfortable for the mild

Horatio.

"It all comes of your ambition to go with rich people," Mrs. Ridge

declared. "Since your visit at the Lake, you have been discontented."

"I was never contented with _this_!" Milly retorted quite truthfully.

What the old lady regarded as a fault, Milly considered a virtue.

"And you are neglecting your church work to go to parties."

"Oh, grandma!" the girl exclaimed wearily. "Chicago isn't Euston, Pa.,

grandma!"

As if the young people's clubs of the Second Presbyterian Church could

satisfy the social aspirations of a Milly Ridge! She was fast becoming

conscious of the prize that had been given her--her charm and her

beauty--and an indefinable force was driving her on to obtain the

necessary means of self-exploitation.

It was true, as her grandmother said, that more and more this autumn

Milly was away from her home. Mrs. Gilbert had not forgotten her, nor

the other people she had met at the Lake. More and more she was being

asked to dinners and dances, and spent many nights with good-natured

friends.

"She might as well board over there," Horatio remarked forlornly, "for

all I see of the girl."

"Milly is a selfish girl," her grandmother commented severely.

"She's young, and she wants her fling. Guess we'd better see if we can't

give it to her, mother."

Horatio was no fighter, especially of his own womenkind. Even the old

lady's judgment was disturbed by the dazzle of Milly's social conquests.

"She'll be married before long," they said.

Meanwhile Milly was learning the fine social distinctions between the

south and the north sides of the city. The Kemps' new house on Granger

Avenue was very rich and handsome like its many substantial neighbors,

but Milly already knew enough to prefer the Gilberts' on the North

Drive, which, if smaller, had more style. And in spite of all the miles

of solid prosperity and comfort in the great south side of the city,

Milly quickly perceived that the really nicest people had tucked

themselves in along the north shore.

Somewhere about this time Milly acquired two lively young friends, Sally

and Vivie Norton, daughters of a railroad man who had recently been

moved to Chicago from the East. Sally Norton was small and blonde and

gay. She laughed overmuch. Vivie was tall and sentimental,--a brunette.

They came once to the West Laurence Avenue house for Sunday supper.

Horatio did not like the sisters; he called them in his simple way

"Giggle" and "Simper." The Nortons lived not far from the Lake on East

Acacia Street, and that became for Milly the symbol of the

all-desirable. She spoke firmly of the advantages of East Acacia Street

as a residence--she had even picked out the house, the last but one in

the same row of stone-front boxes where the Nortons lived.

It made Horatio restless. Like a good father he wished to indulge his

only child in every way--to do his best for her. But with his salary of

three thousand dollars he could barely give Milly the generous allowance

she needed and always spent in advance. Rise at Hoppers' was slow,

although sure, and the only way for him to enlarge Milly's horizon was

by going into business for himself. He began to talk of schemes, said he

was tired of "working for others all his life." Milly's ambitions were

contagious.

After one of the family conflicts, Grandma invaded Milly's bedroom,

which was quite irritating to the young woman.

"Mildred," she began ominously. "Do you realize what you are doing to

your father?"

"The rent is only thirty dollars a month more, grandma," Milly replied,

reverting to the last topic under discussion. "Papa can take it out of

my allowance." (Milly was magnificently optimistic about the

expansiveness of her allowance.) "Anyhow, I don't see why I can't live

near my friends and have a decent--"

The old lady's lips tightened.

"In my days young girls did not pretend to decide where their parents

should live."

"These aren't your days, grandma, thank heaven!... If a girl is going to

get anything out of life--"

"You've had a great deal--"

"Thanks to the friends I've made for myself."

"It might be better if you cared less to go with folks above you--"

"Above me!" the exasperated girl flashed. "Who's above me? Nelly Kemp?

Sally Norton?--Above me!"

That was the flaming note of Milly's intense Americanism. As a social,

human being she recognized no superiors. There were richer, cleverer,

better educated women, no doubt, but in this year of salvation and hope,

1890, there were none "above her." Never!...

Mrs. Ridge discreetly shifted the point of attack.

"It might be disastrous for your father if you were to break up his

home."

"You talk so tragically, grandma! Who's thinking of breaking up homes?

Just moving a couple of miles across the city to another house in

another street. What difference does it make to a man what old house he

comes home to after his work is done?"

"You forget his church relations, Milly."

"You seem to think there are no churches on the North Side."

"But he's made his place here--and Dr. Barlow has a good influence upon

him."

Milly knew quite well the significance of these words. There had been a

time when Horatio did not come home every night sober, and did not go to

church on Sundays. When the little old lady wished to check the soaring

ambition of her granddaughter, she had but to refer to this dark period

in the Ridge history. Milly did not like to think of those dreary days,

and was inclined to put the responsibility for them upon her dead

mother. "If she'd only known how to manage him--" For with all men Milly

thought it was simply a question of management.

"Well," she announced at last. "I'm tired and want to go to bed. Come,

Cheriki, darling!" Cheriki was a fuzzy toy spaniel, the gift of an

admirer. Milly poked the animal from her bed, and the old lady, who

loathed dogs, scuttled out of the room. She had been routed again.

Knowing Milly's obstinate nature, she felt that she must battle daily

for the right.

But Milly did not return to the attack for some time. She stayed at home

for several evenings and was very sweet with her father. She

ostentatiously refused some alluring invitations and was quite cheerful

about it. "She must give up these parties--she could not always be

accepting the Nortons' hospitality, etc." But Milly was not a nagger, at

least not with men. Hers was a pleasant, cheerful nature, and she bathed

the West Laurence Avenue house in several beams of sunshine.

"She's a good girl, mother," Horatio said proudly. "And she's all we've

got. It would be a pity not to give her what she wants."

A complete expression of the submissive attitude of the new parent!

"It may not be good for her," Grandma Ridge objected, after her

generation.

"Well, if she only marries right."

More and more it was in their minds that Milly was destined to make "a

great match." Purely as a business matter that must be taken into

account. So Horatio thought harder about getting into business for

himself, and his little corner of the world revolved more and more about

the desires of a woman.

* * * * *

Fortunately for the peace of the Ridge household, the Kemps invited

Milly to go to New York with them in the spring. They were still

furnishing the new house and had in mind some pictures. Mr. Kemp had

rather "gone in for art" of late, and the banking business had been

good.... To Milly, who had never been on a sleeping-car in her life (the

Ridge migrations hitherto having been accomplished in day coaches

because of economy and because Grandma Ridge dreaded night travel), it

was a thrilling prospect. Her feeling for Eleanor Kemp had been dimmed

somewhat by the acquisition of newer and gayer friends, but it revived

into a brilliant glow.

"You dear thing!... You're sure I won't be in the way?... It will be too

heavenly for words!"

To her husband Mrs. Kemp reported Milly's ecstasy laughingly, saying,--

"If any one can enjoy things as much as Milly Ridge, she ought to have

them," to which the practical banker observed,--"She'll get them when

she picks the man."

So they made the wonderful journey and put up at the pleasant old

Windsor on the avenue, for the era of vast caravansaries had not yet

begun. Fifth Avenue in ninety was not the cosmopolitan thoroughfare it

is to-day. Nevertheless, to Milly's inexperienced eyes, accustomed to

the gloom of smoke, the ill-paved, dirty streets of mid-western cities,

New York was even noble in its splendor. They went to the Metropolitan

Museum, to the private galleries of the dealers, to Tiffany's, where the

banker bought a trinket for his wife's young friend, and the women went

to dressmakers who intimidated Milly with their airs and their prices.

Of course they went to Daly's and to hear "Aida," and supped afterwards

at the old Delmonico's. And a hundred other ravishing things were

crowded into the breathless fortnight of their visit. When she was once

more settled in her berth for the return journey, Milly sighed with

regret and envisaged the dreary waste of West Laurence Avenue.

"If we only lived in New York," she thought, and then she was wise

enough to reflect that if the Ridges lived in New York, it would not be

paradise, but another version of West Laurence Avenue.

"Some day you will go to Paris, my dear," Mrs. Kemp said, "and then New

York will seem like the West Side."

"Never, that!" Milly exclaimed, shocked.

The approach to Chicago under all circumstances is bleak and stern. But

that early April day it seemed to Milly unduly depressing. The squalid

little settlements on the outskirts of the great city were like

eruptions in the low, flat landscape. Around the factories and mills the

little houses were perched high on stilts to keep their feet out of the

mud of the submerged prairie. All the way home Milly had been making

virtuous resolutions not to be extravagant and tease her father, to be

patient with her grandmother, etc.,--in short, to be content with that

state of life unto which God had called her (for the present), as the

catechism says. But she felt it to be very hard that Milly Ridge should

be condemned to such a state of life as the West Side of Chicago

afforded. After the cultivated, mildly luxurious atmosphere of the

Kemps, she realized acutely the commonness of her home....

Her father was waiting for her in the train-shed, and she hugged him

affectionately and went off on the little man's arm, quite gayly, waving

a last farewell to Eleanor Kemp as the latter stepped into her waiting

carriage.

"Well, daughter, had a good time?"

IX

ACHIEVEMENTS

"But, papa," Milly interrupted her chatter about her marvellous doings

in the East, long enough to ask,--"where are you going?"

Instead of taking the familiar street-car that would plunge them into a

noisome tunnel and then rumble on for uncounted miles through the drab

West Side, Horatio had turned towards the river, and they were in the

wholesale district, where from the grimy stores came fragrant odors of

comestibles, mingled in one strong fusion of raw food product. Horatio

smiled at the question and hurried at a faster pace, while Milly,

raising her skirts, had to scuttle over the "skids" that lay across the

sidewalk like traps for the unwary.

"I've an errand down here," he said slyly. "Guess it won't hurt you to

take a little walk."

His air was provocative, and Milly followed him breathlessly, her blue

eyes wide with wonder. He stopped opposite a low brick building at the

end of Market Street, and pointed dramatically across. At first Milly

saw nothing to demand attention, then her quick eyes detected the blazon

of a new gilt sign above the second-story windows, which read:--

H. RIDGE & CO., IMPORTERS

TEAS AND COFFEES

Horatio broke into an excited grin, as Milly grasped his arm.

"Oh, papa--is it _you_?"

"It's _me_ all right!" And he flung out a leg with a strut of

proprietorship. "Opened last week. Want to see the inside?"

"And Hoppers'?" Milly inquired as they crossed the muddy street, dodging

the procession of drays.

"Hoppers'--I just chucked it," Horatio swaggered. "Guess I'm old enough

to work for myself if I'm ever going to--no money in working for the

other feller."

When they had climbed the narrow, dark stairway to the second floor,

Horatio flung open the door to the low, unpartitioned room that ran

clear to the rear of the building. A man rose from behind the solitary

desk near the front window.

"Let me introduce you to the Company," Horatio announced with gravity.

"Mr. Snowden, my daughter!"

They laughed, and Milly detected an air of embarrassment as the man came

forward. In the clear light of the window his hair and mustache seemed

blacker than she remembered; she suspected that they had been dyed. As

Milly shook hands with the "Company," she had her first moment of doubt

about the enterprise.

"My daughter, Miss Simpson," and Milly was shaking hands with a quiet,

homely little woman in spectacles, who might have been twenty-five or

fifty, and who gave Milly a keen, suspicious, commercial look. She was

evidently all that was left of the "company,"--bookkeeper, stenographer,

clerk.

Beside the desk there was a large round table with some unwashed cups

and saucers, a coffee boiler, and in the rear sample cases and

bundles,--presumably the results of importations. Milly admired

everything generously. She was bothered by discovering Snowden as "the

company" and considered whether she ought to confide to her father what

she knew of the man. "He's no gentleman," she thought. "But that would

not be any reason for his being a bad business man," she reflected

shrewdly. And in spite of her woman's misgivings of any person who was

errant "that way," she decided to be silent. "He may have regretted

it,--poor old thing."

Snowden left the place with them. Drawn up in front of the building was

a small delivery wagon, with a spindly horse and a boy. Freshly painted

on the dull black cover was the legend: "H. Ridge & Co. TEAS AND

COFFEES."

"City deliveries," Horatio explained. Snowden smiled wanly. Somehow the

spindly horse did not inspire Milly with confidence, nor the small boy.

But the outfit might answer very well for "city deliveries." Milly was

determined to see nothing but a rosy future for the venture. She

listened smilingly to Horatio, who bobbed along by her side, talking all

the time.

Evidently things had been moving with the Ridges since her departure.

Milly's insistent ambitions had borne fruit. She had roused the

quiescent Horatio. Hoppers' mail-order house offered a secure berth for

a middle-aged man, who had rattled half over the American continent in

search of stability. But, he told himself, the fire was not all out of

his veins yet, and Milly supplied the incentive this time "to better

himself." After some persuasion he had hired his friend Snowden, who had

not yet been invited to become a partner at Hoppers', and who agreed to

put ten thousand dollars into the new business, which Horatio was to

manage. And Grandma Ridge had been persuaded to invest five thousand

dollars, half of what the judge had left her, in her son's new venture.

Then a chance of buying out the China American Tea Company had come.

Horatio, of course, knew nothing about tea, and less about coffee; his

experience had been wholly in drugs. But he argued optimistically that

tea and coffee in a way were drugs, and if a man could sell one sort of

drugs why not another? He saw himself in his own office, signing the

firm's name,--his own name!

"Father!" Milly exclaimed that evening, throwing her arms boisterously

about the little man, in the hoydenish manner so much deplored by her

grandmother,--"Isn't it great! Your own business--and you'll make lots

of money, lots--I'm perfectly sure."

Her ambitions began to flower. There was a delicious sense of venture to

the whole thing: it offered that expansible horizon so necessary to the

happiness of youth, though it might be hard to see just why Horatio

Ridge's entering upon the wholesale tea and coffee business at the

mature age of fifty should light the path to a gorgeous future.

Mrs. Ridge was a rather wet blanket, to be sure, but Grandma was a timid

old lady who did not like travelling in the dark.

"I hope it will come out right--I hope so," she repeated lugubriously.

For a few fleeting moments Milly recalled the spindly horse and the

scrubby boy of the delivery wagon, but for only a few moments. Then her

natural buoyancy overcame any doubts.

"I'm sure father will make a great success of the business!" and she

gave him another hug. Was he not doing this for her? Horatio, twisting

his cigar rapidly between his teeth, strode back and forth in the little

room and nodded optimistically. He was a merchant....

* * * * *

One pleasant Sunday in May, father and daughter took the street-car to

the city and strolled north towards the river past "the store." Horatio

glanced proudly at the sign, which was already properly tarnished by the

smoke. Milly turned to gaze at a smart new brougham that was climbing

the ascent to the bridge. There were two men on the box.

"That's the Danners' carriage," she said knowingly to her father, "and

Mrs. George Danner."

There were few carriages with two men on the box in the city those days,

and they were well worth a young woman's attention. The Danners had come

to Chicago hardly a generation before, "as poor as poverty," as Milly

knew. Now their mammoth dry goods establishment occupied almost a city

block, and young Mrs. Danner had two men on the box--all out of dry

goods. Why should not coffee and tea produce the same results? Father

and daughter crossed the bridge, musingly, arm in arm.

From the grimy fringe of commerce about the river they penetrated the

residence quarter beside the Lake. Milly made her father observe the

freshness of the air coming from the water, and how clean and quiet the

streets were. Indeed this quarter of the noisy new city had something of

the settled air of older communities "back east" that Horatio remembered

happily. Milly led him easily around the corner of Acacia Street to the

block where the Nortons lived.

"Aren't they homey looking, father? And just right for us.... Now that

one at the end of the block--it's empty.... You can see the lake from

the front windows. Just think, to be able to _see_ something!"

They went up the steps of the vacant house, and to be sure a little

slice of blue water closed the vista at the end of the street. Horatio

swung his cane hopefully. The pleasant day, the sense of "being his own

man" exhilarated him: he dealt lightly with the "future."

"It's a tony neighborhood, all right," he agreed. "What did you say

these houses rent for?"

"Eighty dollars a month--that's what the Nortons pay."

"Eighty a month--that's not bad, considering what you get!" Horatio

observed largely.

It was a bargain, of course, as father and daughter tried to convince

Mrs. Ridge. But the old lady, accustomed to Euston, Pa., rents, thought

that the forty dollars a month they had to pay for the West Laurence box

was regal, and when it was a question of subletting it at a sacrifice

and taking another for twice the sum she quaked--visibly.

"Don't you think, Horatio, you'd better wait and see how the new

business goes?"

But the voice of prudence was not to the taste of the younger

generations.

"It'll be so near the store," Milly suggested. "Papa can come home for

his lunch."

"You've got to live up to your prospects, mother," Horatio pronounced

robustly.

The old lady saw that she was beaten and said no more. With compressed

lips she contemplated the future. Father and daughter had no doubts:

they both possessed the gambling American spirit that reckons the

harvest ere the seed is put in the ground.

That evening after Milly had departed Horatio explained himself

further,--

"You see, mother, we must start Milly the best we can. She's made a lot

of real good friends for herself, and she'll marry one of these days.

It's our duty to give her every chance."

It never occurred to Horatio that a healthy young woman of twenty with

no prospect of inheritance might find something better worth doing in

life than amusing herself while waiting for a husband. Such strenuous

ideas were not in the air then.

"She'll always have a home so long as I'm alive and can make one for

her," he said sentimentally. "But she'll get one for herself, you see!"

He was vastly proud of "his girl,"--of her good looks, her social power,

her clever talk. And the old lady was forced to agree--they must give

Milly her chance.

* * * * *

So that autumn the Ridges trekked again from West Laurence Avenue to the

snug little house on Acacia Street, "just around the corner from the

Drive." At last Milly had won her point and translated herself from the

despised West Side to the heart of the "nicest" neighborhood in the

city. After the turmoil of moving she went to her bed in the third floor

front room, listening to the splash of the lake on the breakwater,

dreaming of new conquests.

What next?

PART TWO

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.