* * * * *

"Milly is such a sweet creature," Mrs. Gilbert purred to her companion,

as she sank back into the silky softness of the brougham that Roy

Gilbert had provided for her. "I do hope she'll marry well!"

"Of course she must marry properly,--some man who will give her the

opportunity of exercising her remarkable social gift," Mrs. Bowman

pronounced sagely.

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

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

lady added.

And that was the universal verdict of all the experienced women who came

to bid their young hostess farewell and make their pretty speeches. One

and all they recognized a woman's triumph. In this first attempt she had

shown what she could do "with nothing, positively nothing--that house!"

Hers was a talent like any other, not to be denied. The woman's talent.

Obviously Horatio could not finance this career on coffee and tea. Some

stronger man, better equipped in fortune, must be found and pressed into

service. Who of all the young and middle-aged men that had come that

afternoon to take the girl's hand and say the proper things would

undertake this responsibility? From the way they hung about Milly, it

might be seen that she would not have to wait long for her "working

partner."

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

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

conjured.

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

if they can help it...."

Yes, it was an indubitable triumph! Even Horatio and Grandma Ridge

admitted it, as they sat down in the disorder of the cluttered

dining-room with the drooping flowers to munch sandwiches and drink cold

chocolate for supper. They were plainly excited and somewhat awed by the

vistas of the new social horizon that was opening through Milly's little

party.

* * * * *

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

her door.

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

to-day."

"Your father thought you would want to see the papers," her grandmother

said, holding out an armful of Sunday literature. "Shall I bring you up

a cup of tea?"

"Thanks, Granny." And Milly sank back into her pillows, while her hand

skilfully extracted the sheet that contained "Madame Alpha's" social

column. Ah, here it was!

"One of the most charming affairs of the post-lenten season.... A quiet

five o'clock.... Many of our notable fashionables, etc.... Radiant young

hostess, etc. The charm of the young hostess, etc."

Milly's thick braids circled her soft neck and fell on the large sheet

while she devoured the words, as a young actress might swallow her first

notices, or a young author scan his first reviews. The subtle

intoxication of a successful first appearance quickened her pulses.

"Quite the smartest bunch of snobs in the village," wrote "Suzette" in

the _Mirror_, with a too obvious sneer. (Suzette's pose was a breezy

disdain for the "highlights" of Society, an affectation of frontier

simplicity and democracy. But Milly, like every woman, knew well enough

that there is always a better and a worse socially, and the important

thing is to belong to the best wherever you are, democracy or no

democracy.)

At last Milly pushed from her the mass of newspapers and lay with

upturned face, hands crossed beneath her head, staring out of her blue

eyes at the dusty ceiling, dreaming of triumphs to be, social heights to

surmount, a flutter of engagement cards winging their way like a flight

of geese to the little Acacia Street house; dreaming of men and

women--and somewhere at the end of the long vista she saw a very

gorgeous procession, herself at the head, with a long veil and an

enormous bunch of white roses clasped to her breast, moving in stately

fashion up the church aisle. At the extreme end of the vista stood an

erect black figure beside a white-robed clergyman. (For Milly now went

to the Episcopal Church, finding the service more satisfying.) The face

of this erect figure was blurred in the dream. It was full of qualities,

but lacked defining shape: it was "manly," "generous," "high-spirited,"

"rich," "successful," etc., etc. But the nearer she approached in her

vision to the altar amid the crash of organ music, the more indefinite

became the face. She tried on the figure various faces she knew, but

none seemed to fit exactly. No one possessed all the qualities.

Grandma with a cup of lukewarm tea shattered the vision.

III

MILLY BECOMES ENGAGED

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

say to you."

It was a Sunday evening before the fire in the Gilberts' pleasant

drawing-room. The other supper guests had taken themselves off, and Roy

Gilbert had disappeared to his den, where he smoked many cigars and was

supposed to read serious books upon history and political economy.

Milly glanced apprehensively at the pretty, plump lady beside her. The

tone in which the words had been pronounced reminded her oddly of that

time so far away--so very far back--when Eleanor Kemp had talked to her

seriously about completing her education.

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

"Milly,"--Mrs. Gilbert leaned forward and frowned slightly. Milly

thought, "Nettie's getting fat, like her mother." The Gilberts had

awfully good food and a great deal of it, even if they did go in for

missions. "Milly, I have you on my mind a great deal these days."

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

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

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

marry, dear."

"Why?" Milly demanded with some asperity.

"Why, a girl in your position--"

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

She knew far better than Nettie Gilbert how necessary it was for her to

settle herself somehow. The bills had grown more rather than less the

last two years, and the tea and coffee importing business did not seem

to be doing what had been expected of it. There were signs of an

increasing financial stringency about Horatio. Then there were other

signs, more personal, that were not pleasant to recall. That social

career which had opened so brilliantly rather more than two years before

had been full of pleasures and excitements. For nearly a season Milly

Ridge had been the most talked of and invited girl in her special

circle. The next season she had still been "popular," but latterly at

the opening of the new season there had been a distinct falling off. The

fringe of cards about her long mirror, where she kept her invitations

tucked into the margins and pinned in pendants, had grown less

fresh--not to say stale--and less distinguished. Mrs. Bowman had

forgotten altogether to invite her to dinner this fall. There were other

stings and mortifications that need not be described.... Yes, Milly had

been pondering the matter more or less consciously for some months.

"Well," she said to Mrs. Gilbert, with a brave little smile, "what shall

I do about it?"

She recognized Nettie Gilbert's right to broach the subject. Nettie had

been her best friend, and thanks to her own experience had a

fellow-feeling for her and wished to see her launched upon a similar

successful career matrimonial.

"With all your charm, you could have married a dozen times," she said

with gentle reproach.

"But I haven't!" Milly retorted despairingly. She did not like to admit

that her opportunities had not been as numerous as it was popularly

supposed they had been. They never were, as Nettie must know from her

own experience. Yet she had had her "chances," and why hadn't she pulled

it off before this? Why had all the little flirtations with promising

young men come to nothing? Were they afraid of her lavish hand? Or had

she been waiting for something else,--"the real, right thing?" She did

not know.

Her grandmother said that a penniless girl had no right to be so

"particular"--which always maddened Milly.

"I'm afraid you're not serious enough, my dear," Mrs. Gilbert remarked

in gentle reproof. She had always felt that was a flaw in Milly's

character,--a lack of deep interest in the missionary side of life.

"But men don't like serious women," Milly said flippantly, dangling her

slipper on the end of her toes.

"I think the best ones do," Mrs. Gilbert retorted severely. "You were

making fun of Mr. Parker at supper to-night, and I'm afraid he

understood."

"I know," Milly admitted penitently. "But he has such a funny voice."

She imitated amusingly the shrill falsetto of the said Clarence Parker.

"And he's so solemn about everything he says."

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

herself.

"But, Milly, Clarence Parker's very nice. He's related to the best

people where he comes from, and he is doing remarkably well in his

business, Roy says."

"What is it?" Milly demanded more practically.

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

"Oh," said Milly, somewhat impressed.

"What is Clarence Parker's business, Roy?" Mrs. Gilbert appealed to her

husband, who at that moment happened to enter the room.

"He represents several large estates in the East--invests the money,"

Gilbert replied, and turning to Milly with a smile asked:--

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

"Lighthouse," Milly corrected sulkily.

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

"I haven't any to make!"

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

Nevertheless, when the two friends said their good-bys, kissing each

other affectionately on the cheek and saying, "Will you go with me to

the Drummonds Tuesday?" and "How about the meeting for the Old Man's

Mission?" Milly added, "Your financial rock asked if he might call. I

told him he could."

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

both laughed.

But Milly trotted home around the corner to the little house in Acacia

Street in anything but a gay mood. The angular, white face of Mr.

Clarence Albert Parker was far from fulfilling the idea she had visioned

to herself in her Sunday morning dream. She knew well enough why Nettie

Gilbert had arranged this particular Sunday supper with the intimacy of

only four guests--Milly was very much awake now socially--and she had

taken pains to examine the new young man with critical care. He was

little, scarcely taller than Horatio, and Milly disliked men whose heads

she could look across. But with a silk hat it might not be too bad. And

he was slightly bald, as well as pale,--on the whole not robust,--but he

had keen little gray eyes that seemed to watch one from the side and

take in a great deal. He was a precise, neat, colorless man, the sort

turned out by a conservative New England family that invests its savings

with scrupulous care at four and three-quarters per cent. No, he was not

inspiring, this grandson of the Plymouth Rock, with the thin voice. But

he seemed substantial. Mr. Gilbert said so, and Roy Gilbert knew.

There were other sombre reflections in Milly's revery that night. The

sense of family stringency was urging her to "make good" in some way.

She was aware that she was slipping back in the social sands, might

become commonplace and neglected, if she did not do something to revive

the waning interest in herself. She realized, as she had not definitely

realized before, that outside of the social game her life held little or

nothing. To be sure, she helped Mrs. Gilbert with her missionary

business and charities: she read to a few old men once a week, and she

carried flowers over to St. Joseph's Hospital. But she could not pretend

to herself that charities occupied her whole being.... No, the only way

out was Matrimony. A marriage, suitable and successful, would start her

career once more. With something like a desperate resolve Milly put her

latch-key into the hole, and let herself into the paternal home, where a

familiar family odor greeted her sensitive nostrils. With a grimace of

disgust she swept upstairs. Decidedly it was time for her to settle

herself, as Nettie phrased it.

* * * * *

This time Milly arrived, in spite of homely paw or lukewarm inclination

for the man. The young financier called at the Ridge home once, twice,

and there met Horatio and Grandma Ridge, who both thought very highly of

him. "A man with such principles, my dear," Grandma observed. The two

young people "attended divine service together," showed up afterwards on

the Drive, where Milly noted with satisfaction that Mr. Parker plus a

silk hat overtopped her gaze. She also noted that the friends she met

smiled and bowed with just an added touch of interest.... They

talked--chiefly Milly--on a variety of colorless topics. It appeared

that Mr. Parker had positive views only on financial matters. For all

the rest,--art, literature, religion, and life,--he began with a

cautious,--"Well, now, I don't know," and never got much farther.

However, Milly wisely reflected, one didn't marry for the sake of

exciting conversation.

The affair progressed quite smoothly; by the middle of winter Milly's

friends smiled when they spoke of "Milly's young man" and were ready

with their felicitations. On the whole they thought that Milly had "done

quite well...."

It happened naturally, in the course of an expedition which the two made

to the scene of the great new Exposition. They drove out in a smart

carriage with a pair of lively horses which Mr. Parker managed very

well, but which took all his attention. They first visited the

tumultuous fair grounds, where an army of workmen were making desperate

efforts to get the impromptu city in some shape for visitors. They

talked of the beauty of the buildings, the grandeur of the whole design,

the greatness of Chicago. Then they drove to a vast new hotel in which

Mr. Parker had taken a conservative interest, and they still talked of

the marvellous growth of the city, its Ultimate Destiny,--terms which

had a lugubrious sound in the New Englander's piping voice. As they

turned northwards around the great oval of Washington Park, the sun was

sinking into a golden haze of dust and smoke. The horses dropped to a

peaceful walk, and Milly knew that it was coming and braced herself for

it. It came, slowly.

First, by way of preliminary flourish, Mr. Parker declared all over

again his faith in the future of the city. He had come to stay, he

repeated with emphasis; had thrown in his fate with that of Chicago.

"I'm going to stay," he trilled, "and grow up with the city." (At this

point Milly almost upset the boat by laughing: the idea of the little

man's growing up with Chicago seemed funny.)

Having struck the personal note, the young man spoke of his own

"prospects," and outlined the dignified position he intended to occupy

in the forefront of the elect. This implied, of course, an establishment

and a suitable wife. Milly made the proper responses in the pauses. At

last the fateful words reached her ear, "Will you marry me, Miss Ridge?"

As Milly mimicked later his slow, solemn utterance, it sounded more

like, "Will you bury me, Miss Ridge?"

And Milly, with commendable directness, looked him straight in the eye

and said without a quiver,--"Yes, I will, Mr. Parker."

Afterwards, as if this effort had exhausted both, there was silence on

the way back. When they reached the house, he said impressively, "I will

call to-morrow and see your father."

"He'll be delighted to see you, I'm sure," Milly rejoined somewhat

flatly. Then she fled up the steps, as if she were afraid he might try

to kiss her or hold her hand. She escaped _that_, for the present....

So it was done at last.

IV

CONGRATULATIONS

If Milly had any misgivings or inner revolt that first night, it would

have been dispelled by the unfeigned joy of her father and her

grandmother the next morning when she told them the news. Little Horatio

said robustly as he kissed her:--

"Fine! Daughter! Fine!... He's a smart young man, I know that--the best

one of all your beaus.... And _he's_ lucky, too," he added

apologetically.

Grandma Ridge remarked with a certain malice, "You ought to be happy

with him, Milly; he will be able to give you all the things you want."

"I hope so," Milly responded briskly.

A few telephone messages to intimate friends and the news was spread

broadcast over the area of Milly's little world. For the rest of the day

and for several days afterwards she was kept busy receiving

congratulations by telephone and in person,--flowers, letters,

invitations,--all the little demonstrations of interest that give

importance and excitement to a woman's life.

She had "made good," at last--that was the pleasant sensation she was

bathed in from morning to night. She had done the right thing. The

congratulations sounded quite sincere. If not much was said of the young

man's personal charms, a great deal was made of his substantial

qualities, which were indubitable.

Nettie Gilbert was one of the first to arrive and took Milly to her arms

affectionately. "My dear," she murmured between kisses, "I'm _so_ glad

for you."

"You see I did it," Milly replied complacently, marvelling to herself

how easy it had been to do, once she had determined upon this way out.

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

ignoring delicate analysis.

That was the beginning of a joyous whirl of engagements,--luncheons,

dinners, suppers, and theatre parties. It seemed as if Milly's little

world had been waiting for this occasion to renew its enthusiasm. Milly

had the happy self-importance that an engaged girl should have, and to

cap her triumphs, Mrs. Bowman gave one of her tremendous dinners, with

twenty-four covers, her second-best gold service, and a dance afterward

in the picture gallery. All in honor of obscure little Milly Ridge! She

had arrived.

She might look down the long, heavily laden table with the men-servants

inserting the courses between the guests, and scan the faces of

prominent citizens and their wives together with a few minor

diplomats--for this was the great summer of '93--and feel a pardonable

elation in her position. On her right sat that Mr. George Danner, the

wealthy merchant whose equipage with two men on the box she had once

admired, and on her left was the kindly, homely face of old Christian

Becker, the owner of _The Daily Star_. (You may be sure that the _Star_

had a full account of this function. But Milly's name appeared so

frequently in Madame Alpha's social column that it had almost lost

interest for her.)... At the other end of the table next to the

hostess's expansive person sat the Instrument of Accomplishment, like a

very refined little white mouse, his keen eyes taking in every gold fork

on the table. His mouth was often open, and Milly imagined she could

hear the familiar, "Well now, I don't know about that." However, his

hostess seemed to treat him with consideration.

* * * * *

It should be said to Milly's credit that she took rather less

satisfaction in all this social flattery than in the happiness her

engagement brought into the little Acacia Street house. Horatio began to

chirp once more, after the interview with his prospective son-in-law.

The inspissated gloom of the days of stringency had passed. The golden

beams of prosperity seemed to radiate from the white-faced financier.

"I tell you Clarence is a smart one," Horatio announced after the first

interview. "He gave me some good pointers." For after the embarrassing

formalities of sentiment had been disposed of, the two men had naturally

dropped into business, and Parker had suggested a method of inserting

the tea and coffee business into the Exposition by getting concessions

for "Coffee Kiosks," which should advertise the Ridge brands of harmless

stimulants. The scheme had fired Horatio, who began once more to dream

dreams of wealth.

So when the ring came, which like everything else about Clarence Albert

was plain, costly, correct--and unlovely--Milly put the large diamond on

her stubby finger and reflected that even if its giver was not the Idol

of her Dreams, he was very good to her, and she ought to be happy. She

meant to make him a good wife as she understood that vague term, and

thus repay him for all his bounties. As a matter of fact the little

Parker man was getting repaid already in social matters for his generous

act in selecting a poor girl to share his affluence. The world knew him

to be sharp, and was glad to think him kind....

"It's a very handsome one, Clarence," Milly said of the ring, turning it

critically to the light. And she sweetly held up her face to be kissed.

That, to be frank, was the part she liked least of the whole affair,

"demonstrations," and she dealt out her favors to her lover sparingly.

However, her fiancé was not demonstrative by nature: if he had amorous

passions, he kept them carefully concealed, so that Milly could manage

that side quite easily. It usually came merely to a pressure of hands, a

cold kiss on the brow, or a flutter along the bronze tendrils about the

neck. Sometimes Milly speculated what it might be like later in the

obscure intimacy of marriage, but she dismissed the subject easily,

confident that she could "manage" as she did now. And she had the sweet

sense of self-sacrifice in doing something personally disagreeable. "If

it hadn't been for poor old Dad," she would say to herself and sigh.

Which was not wholly sincere. At this period of their lives few mortals

can be square with themselves.

All such refinements of thought and feeling were rare because there was

no time for revery. Milly was determined to get the most out of her

triumph, and drove the peaceable Clarence Albert rather hard. All women,

he had supposed in his ignorance, were more or less fragile. But it was

astonishing what an amount of nerve-racking gayety Milly could get

through in a day and come up smiling the next morning for another

sixteen-hour bout with pleasure. Sometimes Clarence protested that he

was a working man and must be at his office by nine. But Milly had

slight mercy; she let him see plainly the social duty of the American

husband. He too reflected, it might be, that things would be different

after the wedding and yawned away the hours as best he could at dance or

dinner or late supper in Old Vienna on the famous Midway.

It was Chicago's wonderful festal year, the summer of the great Fair.

Responsible men of large affairs, who knew what was going on financially

behind the scenes, might look grave and whisper their apprehensions

among themselves. But the people were resolved to be gay. They were mad

with doing, especially the women. All the world was entertained in the

lavish western spirit of hospitality. Thus in addition to her own

private excitement, Milly shared the general festival spirit, and thanks

to her social charm and her young man's reputation for solid achievement

the two were part of many an important festivity. They helped to

entertain the European notables, dined and did the shows from morning

until morning in the best of company. Milly wished it might go on like

this forever.

"Chicago will not be large enough for you after this experience," her

old friend, Eleanor Kemp, observed, crossing her path at the ball for

the French ambassador. "You will have to move on to New York."

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

with,--

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

She smiled graciously on her old friend, divining exactly that kind

lady's mixed feelings. "Come on, Clarence!" and she sailed off into the

press, bowing and smiling to her right and her left.

In the midst of all this feverish activity there was little time for

mutual examination and discovery for the engaged couple,--all the

better, Milly thought,--and yet she had already resolved upon certain

changes in her husband-to-be, like a competent wife. For one thing she

discovered quite early that Clarence Albert was inclined to be close in

money matters. He always counted his change carefully, like a good

puritan, and gave small tips. He ordered the less expensive dishes and

wines, and inquired whether a single portion might do for two when they

were lunching out together. He did not like to take cabs when the

street-cars were running. Milly had suffered all her life at the hands

of Grandma Ridge from such petty economies, and she did not intend that

it should continue. It was not so much any intentional meanness--if

Milly had but known--as the resultant habit of generations of enforced

thrift. Milly's fingers all turned outwards, and money ran through them

like sand. She was a born Spender and scattered Cash, her own or other

people's, with regal indifference. All her life she had suffered from

cramped means, and now that she was about to marry a rich man she meant

to get the good of it. What am I doing it for? she would ask herself in

her more cynical moments.... As soon as she was Mrs. Parker she would

come to an understanding with her husband on this cardinal point and

show him what was decent for a man in his position. Meanwhile she gave

him a few hints of what he might expect.

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

to spend money."

"Of course I do! What woman doesn't?" Milly retorted brightly, as she

chucked the bunch of violets she had been wearing out of the cab window

because they were somewhat wilted, and she added warningly, "I hate mean

people!"

He laughed good naturedly.

* * * * *

Their first misunderstanding came over the question where they were to

live after their return from the European trip. It seems that Parker had

already bought land far out on the north shore of the Lake in a new and

promising neighborhood and proposed building a house there. Milly was

ready enough to build: she had large plans for her new home. But she had

set her mind on a lot on the Drive, a block from the Bowman place and

two from the Gilberts--"the most desirable site in the city, every one

says," she explained, "and so near all our friends."

Parker tried to make her understand that fifty thousand dollars was

altogether too much money to put into an "unproductive investment" like

that.

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

He admitted it reluctantly.

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

Milly, who had secret plans of running the great Bowman a social race,

was thoroughly irritated at his obstinacy. They turned from the vacant

lot, which they had been examining for the second time, and walked down

the Drive at odds.

"My property at Lakehurst has twice the frontage and only cost me ten

thousand," the little man of means observed complacently.

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

suburbs."

"The city's growing that way fast."

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

"Before that I guess...."

She dashed upstairs to her room, leaving her lover to the attentions of

Mrs. Ridge. The old lady approved of Clarence Albert. They discussed

religion together. They had the same Victorian standards and principles

about life. This afternoon he confided to her the real estate trouble

Milly and he had had.

"I'm sure, Clarence, you are quite right, and Milly must learn to be

more reasonable. The air will be so much cleaner out there."

"And the cars come within a block now."

"I'll speak to Milly about it."

She did.

"If you aren't careful, Milly," she warned her granddaughter, "you'll

frighten him. You aren't married yet," she added meaningly.

"He oughtn't to buy land without consulting me," Milly flared,

forgetting that this transaction had taken place before her

determination to become Mrs. Clarence Parker.

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

pressed lips.

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

man in the world."

"Better take care before it's too late," the old lady repeated

warningly. "You don't treat Clarence as a girl should who is going to

marry. He's an admirable young man."

Mrs. Ridge ever croaked thus, foretelling disaster.

"If you say anything more, I'll never marry him!" Milly flamed in final

exasperation. "You don't understand. Women don't behave as they did when

you were a girl. They don't lie down before their husbands and let them

walk all over them."

"Perhaps not," grandma laughed icily in reply. "But I guess men aren't

so different from what they were in my time."

Grandma had her own understanding of male character.

V

THE CRASH

As events soon proved, Mrs. Ridge's croaking was not without

justification. The crash in Milly's affairs came, not until the autumn,

a few weeks before the day set for the wedding, and it came on the line

of cleavage already described, although quite unexpectedly and over a

trivial matter, as such things usually happen.

After the closing of the fairy city gloom had settled down over Chicago.

People were exhausted socially from their hectic summer and Panic

stalked forth from behind the festival trappings where it had lain

hidden. Times were frightfully bad, every one said,--never so bad before

in the experience of the country. There were strikes, a hundred thousand

idle men walking the cold streets, empty rows of buildings, shops and

factories closed--and a hard winter coming on. All this did not mean

much to Milly, busy with her own concerns and plans for the wedding,

except for the fact that few people entertained and everybody seemed

relaxed and depressed. Clarence Albert, like a prudent mariner of the

puritan type, dwelt upon the signs of dire storm, and counselled their

not building for the present, although he let her understand that his

own ventures were well under cover. Milly was less disappointed over not

building the house because she still had her mind on that vacant lot on

the Drive. Perhaps in the depression Clarence would be able to get it at

a bargain....

Then the quarrel came over nothing at all. They were to go to the

theatre or opera--later she forgot which--by themselves one evening. Her

fiancé came to dinner, and he and Horatio talked dolefully of the

business outlook. When they started out, there was no cab before the

door. Milly, regarding her light raiment, demurred and telephoned for

one herself. When they reached the theatre and she proceeded to sail

down the centre aisle, she found that their seats were in the balcony.

Clarence, who never dealt with ticket brokers on principle, had not been

able to get good floor seats and thought the first row of the balcony

would answer, as the theatre was a small one. Where he had been brought

up, the balcony seats were considered "just as good," and better if they

could be had more cheaply. He did not understand the awfulness of

metropolitan standards to which Chicago was aspiring.

Milly, a cloud upon her pretty face, drew her wrap close about her and

sat dumb through the first act. Her mortification was increased by

discovering Sally Norton in a box below with Ted Leffingwell and some

gay folk. Sally's roaming eyes also discovered Milly and her young man

before the act was finished; she signalled markedly and communicated the

news to her party, who all looked at the glum pair, laughed and smiled

among themselves.

Milly's burning ears could hear Sally's jeers. At the close of the act

she got up and marched out without a word, followed by the bewildered

Clarence.

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

"Home."

At the entrance there were no cabs in sight at this hour, and they

walked to the end of the block where the cars passed. When a car came,

Milly got as far as the platform, pronounced it a "filthy box," which it

probably was, and made the conductor let her off. Then she marched

haughtily northwards, trailed by Clarence Albert, in whose white face a

dangerous pink was rising. Fortunately it was a still clear, night, and

they covered the mile to Acacia Street without misadventure and without

words. When they had reached the small front room and Milly had thrown

off her wrap, her eyes still flashing angrily, Parker said in a

carefully controlled voice:--

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

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

"I'm sorry--"

"If you can't afford--"

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

It was a pardonable human revenge, but it was the straw. In a flash

Milly stripped the big diamond from her finger and dramatically held it

forth to him.

"Here's your ring," she said.

"Milly!..."

It isn't wise to follow such a scene any further. I do not know that

Milly finally flung the ring at her lover, though she was capable of

doing it like an angry child. At any rate the symbolic circle of

harmonious union lay on the floor between them when Grandma Ridge

arrived, stealthily coming from behind the portières, her little gray

shawl hugged tight about her narrow shoulders.

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

"It means that I'm not going to marry a man who cares more for his money

than for me," Milly said bluntly, picking up her wraps and stalking out

of the room. She paused in the hall, however, long enough to hear her

former lover say dolefully,--

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

love me."

And she added from the hall:--

"Clarence is quite right, grandma. I don't love him--and what's more,

I'm never going to marry a man I can't love for all the money in the

world!"

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

What passed between Mrs. Ridge and the discarded Clarence, it is

needless to relate. Even Mrs. Ridge became convinced after a time that

the rupture was both inevitable and irrevocable. Parker at last left the

house, and it must be added took with him the ring which had been

recovered from the floor.

After he had gone Mrs. Ridge knocked at Milly's door. But an obstinate

silence prevailed, and so she went away. Milly was sitting on her bed,

tears dropping from her eyes, tears of rage and mortification and

disappointment. She realized that she had failed, after all, in doing

what she had set out to do, and angry as she still was, disgusted with

Clarence's thin and parsimonious nature, she was beginning,

nevertheless, to be conscious of her own folly.

"I never liked him," she said to herself over and over, in justification

for her rash act. "I couldn't bear him near me. I only did it for Dad's

sake. And I could not, that's all there is to it--I just couldn't.... We

should have fought all the time--cold, mean little thing."

After a time she undressed and went to bed, calmer and more at peace

with herself than for some time. The inevitable does that for us. "I

can't live with a man I don't love--it isn't right," she thought, and

gradually a glow of self-appreciation for her courage in refusing, even

at the ninth hour, to make the woman's terrible sacrifice of her sacred

self came to her rescue. Her sentimental education, with its woman's

creed of the omnipotence of love, had reasserted itself.

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

right thing."

Of course she had known this all along, but she treated it now as a new

discovery. And she went to sleep, sooner than one might expect under the

circumstances.

VI

THE DEPTHS

But the next day, as the French say, it was to pay. When Milly kissed

her father at the breakfast table, his mournful eyes and drooping mouth

showed plainly that he knew the disaster.

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

"It's all right, daughter," the little man responded bravely, fumbling

with his fork and knife.

But her grandmother did not mince matters. It was all well enough for a

girl to have her own way as Milly had had hers, but now she had made a

nice mess of things,--put them all in a ridiculous position. Who was she

to be so particular, to consider herself such a queen? etc., etc. Milly

took it all in silence. She knew that she deserved it in part.

At last Horatio intervened. He didn't want his daughter to feel forced

to marry a man she couldn't be happy with, not for all Danner's

millions. Business was bad, to be sure, but he was a man yet and could

find something to do to support his daughter.

"I hope it ends all this society business for good," Mrs. Ridge put in

with a hard little laugh. "If you don't want to marry, you can go to

work."

"I will," said Milly, humbly.

"Don't be hard on her, mother," Horatio whispered into the old lady's

ear. "It don't do no good now."

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

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

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

She had been so fully preoccupied with her own affairs these past months

she had not realized that the tea and coffee business was getting into

worse straits than ever. Everything, she had optimistically reckoned,

would be smoothed out by her marriage.

"Bankruptcy--that's what's coming," her grandmother informed her, with

an acid satisfaction in being able to record the fulfilment of her

prophecies. "That comes of your father's trying a new business at his

age--and Hoppers' was so sure. He'd have been a department head by now,

if he had stayed."

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

Mrs. Ridge gave her the facts. It seemed that Horatio, always optimistic

and trusting, had put this new venture in the hands of a man who had

talked well, but had cheated him outrageously, and finally absconded

after the close of the Fair, leaving behind debts contracted in the

firm's name. The losses had wiped out all the profits of the concession

and more, and this, added to the general business depression, was bad

enough. But there was worse. Snowden had suddenly demanded his money.

Using the defalcation as an excuse he alleged Horatio's bad management,

and wanted an immediate settlement of the firm's affairs. That meant the

end--bankruptcy, as Mrs. Ridge said. Awful word!

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

"It seems he's that kind. He got ahead of your father in the partnership

agreement, and now the lawyer says he can do anything he likes--sell out

the business if he wants to.... And we've got this house on our hands

for another year," she added sourly, bringing home to Milly her share in

the general misfortune.

Then the little old lady gathered up the breakfast dishes, while Milly

sat and looked at the dreary wall of the next house. It was pretty bad.

Still she could not feel sorry for what she had done....

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

Her grandmother looked at her curiously.

"What good will that do?"

Milly, recollecting the old offence, blushed. Latterly as the

prospective wife of a rich man she had assumed certain airs of her

putative social position, and thought she could "manage" easily a common

sort of person like this Snowden man. Now she realized with a sudden

sinking of spirits it was all different. She possessed no longer any

authority other than that of an attractive, but poor, young woman with

"a good manner."

During the next few days she was destined to feel this change in her

position repeatedly. If the news of her engagement to an "eligible" man

had spread rapidly, the announcement of the disaster to her engagement

seemed miraculously immediate. She had just begun with her grandmother's

help to prepare to return her engagement gifts, as her grandmother

insisted was the proper thing to do, when in rushed the Norton girls,

quite breathless. Sally greeted her with a jovial laugh.

"So you've dropped him! I told Ted, Milly would never stand for those

balcony seats!" She rippled with laughter at the humor of the situation.

Milly, revived by her attitude, related the cab and car incidents. "He

was--horrid."

"They're all like that, those New Englanders--afraid to spend their

money," Sally commented lightly.

Vivie took the sentimental view.

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

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

"That sort of thing can't last."

Milly, now quite reassured, gave a drole imitation of Clarence Albert's

last remarks,--"She doesn't love me, Mrs. Ridge--Milly doesn't really

love me!"

She trilled the words mischievously. Sally roared with pleasure. Vivie

said, "Of course you couldn't marry him--not that!"

And Milly felt that she was right. No, she could not do _that_: she had

been true to herself, true to her feelings,--woman's first duty,--a

little late, to be sure.

* * * * *

But a full realization of her situation did not come until she appeared

in public. Then she began to understand what she had done in discarding

her suitable fiancé. Nettie Gilbert hardly invited her to sit when she

called. She said severely:--

"Yes, Clarence told me all about it. He feels very badly. It was very

frivolous of you, Milly. I should not have _thought it possible_."

She treated Milly as the one soul saved who, after being redeemed, had

fled the flock. Milly protested meekly, "But I didn't care for him,

Nettie, not the least little bit."

Mrs. Gilbert, who remembered her Roy, replied severely, "At least you

ought to have known your own mind before this."

"He _is_ mean," Milly flared.

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

That relation ended there, at least its pleasant intimacy. And so it

went from house to house, especially among the settled married folk, who

regarded Milly as inconceivably foolish and silly. Who was she to be so

scrupulous about her precious heart? Even the younger, unmarried sort

had a knowing and disapproving look on their faces when she met them. As

for the stream of invitations, there was a sudden drought, as of a

parched desert, and the muteness of the telephone after its months of

perpetual twinkle was simply ghastly.

So Milly was learning that there is one worse experience in life than

not "making good," and that is, giving the appearance of it and then

collapsing. This was the collapse. Sympathy was all with Clarence

Albert, except among a few frivolous or sentimental souls, like Sally

and Vivie. Young women having the means, who found themselves in Milly's

situation,--with a broken engagement on their hands at the beginning of

the season,--would at once have gone abroad or to California or the

South, to distract themselves, rest their wounded hearts, and allow the

world to forget their affairs, as it promptly would. At least they would

have tried settlement work. But Milly had no money for such gentle

treatment. She had to run the risk of bruising her sensibilities

whenever she set foot out of doors, and she was too healthy-minded to

sit long at home and mope. And home was not a pleasant place these days.

Still, she said to herself defiantly, she was not sorry for what she had

done. A woman's first duty was to her heart, etc.

* * * * *

Eleanor Kemp, who had been ill and away from the city, sent for Milly on

her return. She proved to be the most sympathetic of all her friends,

and Milly decided that Eleanor was her best, as she was her oldest,

friend. At the conclusion of Milly's tale, rendered partly in the comic

vein, Mrs. Kemp sighed, "It's too bad, Milly." The sigh implied that

Milly had damaged herself for the provincial marriage market, perhaps

irretrievably. She might marry, of course, probably would, being sobered

by this fiasco, but after such a failure, nothing "brilliant" might be

expected.

"I just couldn't sit opposite that cold, fishy creature all my life,"

Milly protested. "He got on my nerves--that was it."

"Yes, I understand--but--"

Milly suspected that banking and bankers might get on a woman's nerves,

too, though Walter Kemp was a much more human man than Clarence Albert

ever would be.

"And now what will you do?" her friend inquired. (Milly had confided to

her Horatio's coming disaster.)

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

"You might help me with my mail and buying--I never seem to get through

with everything--and this New Hospital committee."

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

So it was arranged that Milly should become a sort of informal lady

secretary and assistant to the banker's wife, with unstated hours,

duties, and compensation,--one of those flexible, vague business and

social arrangements that women were more likely to make with one another

twenty years ago than now.

Milly's spirits revived quickly, and she left the Kemps buoyant. It

seemed easier than she had expected to "get something to do." She kissed

Eleanor Kemp with genuine gratitude.

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

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

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

Milly had a pleasant sense of returning to old ideals and ties in thus

drawing near once more to the Kemps, whom latterly she had found a

trifle dull.... Leaving the house, she bumped into old Mrs. Jonas

Haggenash, one of the Kemps' neighbors. The Haggenashes had made their

way in lumber and were among the most considered of the older,

unfashionable people in the city. Mrs. H. had a reputation as a wit, of

the kind that "has her say" under any and all circumstances. Latterly

she had rather taken up Milly Ridge, who fished in many pools.

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

rasped nasally.

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

"That's a pity. It ain't every day a poor girl can marry a millionaire.

They don't grow on every bush."

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

The old lady smiled dubiously at the pretty sentiment.

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

She looked at Milly's smart walking costume and smiled again. Milly

always managed to have a becoming street dress and hat, even in her

poorest days, and lately she had let herself out, as the pile of

unopened bills on her dressing-table would show.

"I expect to eat and dress," Milly retorted, and trotted off with a

curse near her lips for Mrs. Jonas Haggenash and all her tribe.

* * * * *

The way home took Milly near the office of the tea and coffee business,

and she thought to surprise her father and give him the good news of

Mrs. Kemp's offer. She would also get him to walk home with her. Horatio

had been very doleful of late and she wished to cheer him up. She had

not visited the office for many months, but its outward appearance was

much the same as it had been that first time when she had visited it

with her father. The sign had become dingy, was almost undecipherable,

as if it had anticipated the end of its usefulness. The same dreary

little cart for "city deliveries" stood before the door, but the thin

horse drooped disconsolately between the shafts, as if he too knew that

he was not there for long.

Horatio was not in the office. Snowden stood beside the bookkeeper,

looking over a ledger. As Milly opened the door both he and the

bookkeeper looked up. Milly recognized the hatchet-faced woman of

uncertain age, with the forbidding stare through her large spectacles.

This time when Milly came forward with a pleasant smile and "Miss

Simpson, how are you?" the stony face did not relax a muscle. Miss

Simpson looked her employer's daughter over as if she were about to

accuse her of being the cause for the firm's disaster. "Mr. Snowden,"

Milly continued, ignoring the woman's hostility, "I came for my

father.... How are you and Mrs. Snowden?"

"Your father's gone," the bookkeeper snapped with an unpleasant smile.

She eyed Milly's fashionable attire unsympathetically. It was the second

time that afternoon that Milly was made to feel apologetic for her good

clothes.

"Oh," she said hesitantly.

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

the ledger indifferently.

Milly had an inspiration.

"Why, yes, Mr. Snowden," she exclaimed pleasantly. "I should like to

talk with you a few moments, if I am not interrupting your work," she

added, for Snowden made no move.

"Well?" he said gruffly.

Milly turned towards the rear of the loft where there were a number of

little tables dotted with unwashed china cups, and grains of tea and

coffee. Snowden followed her slowly, and leaned against a table.

"What is it?"

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

the city."

"Guess I know that."

"He's very unhappy."

"Has good reason to be."

She made the direct appeal.

"Why do you do this thing, Mr. Snowden? Why do you want to ruin my

father--your old friend?"

"Guess you don't understand--he's pretty nearly ruined _me_!" Snowden

emitted with a snort.

"Yes, I understand," Milly replied glibly. "Business had been very bad.

My friends tell me all business has been dreadful since the

Fair--everybody feels poor. But why make things worse? A little time,

and it will be different."

She smiled at him persuasively.

"I want to save my own skin, what there is left to save," he grumbled.

"Your father's made a pretty bad mess of things, Milly."

"We won't discuss what my father has done," Milly retorted with dignity.

"He's been deceived--he's too trusting with men. He trusted you!"

At this thrust Snowden laughed loudly.

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

His tone changed insensibly. No one could be rough with Milly for long.

Snowden volunteered some explanations of the tea and coffee business not

related by Mrs. Ridge. It seemed that Horatio had made rather a mess of

things all around.

"So you see I must try and save what I can before it's _all_

gone.... I've got a family of my own, you know."

Milly knew that, and wished she had been nicer to Mrs. Snowden and the

uninteresting daughter when she had had the chance. She had never had

them to the Acacia Street house in all these years.

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

Entreaty was all the argument life had given Milly. There was a leap of

something in the man's flushed face that caused the girl to retreat a

step or two. She had not meant to rouse his graceless passion, but that

was what she had almost succeeded in doing by her coaxing. As she drew

back Snowden laughed.

"You see, Milly, people _pay_ in this world for what they want--men and

women too. They have to _pay_ somehow!"

And, this enigmatic taunt ringing in her ears, Milly departed with all

the dignity that remained to her. She was conscious of the bookkeeping

woman's hostile sneer upon her back as she disappeared. Her face burned

with the man's coarse words: "In this world people have to _pay_ for

what they want."

That was too true! She had not been willing to pay, except with smiles

and pretty speeches, the small change, and it seemed that was not

enough. She had not been willing to pay the price of a good position in

her world which she wanted, nor Snowden's price for mercy to her father.

Of course not that! But now she must pay somehow for what she got: for

her food and her clothes and her shelter first of all. It had come to

that. Thus Milly had her first lesson in the manifold realities of life.

Soberly but bravely she faced the winter wind and made her way home to

her father's house.

VII

MILLY TRIES TO PAY

The next months were in some respects the dreariest that Milly was ever

to know. It was not long before the illusion about her work for Eleanor

Kemp wore thin. It was, in a word, one of those polite, parasitic

occupations for women, provided by the rich for helpless friends, and it

was satisfying to neither party. A good deal of time for both was wasted

in "talking things over," with much discursive chatter on matters in

general, and all sorts of consulting back and forth about the job to be

done. There were letters to be carefully written, then rewritten after

delicately guarded criticisms had been made; shopping to be done where

it took hours to decide whether this "matched" or not and whether

Danner's or Dround's was a better place for purchasing this or that.

Milly still tried to keep up some social life, and so she usually came

in at the Kemps rather late in the morning, and after lunching with her

friend went back to the city on errands. She was a miracle of un-system,

and frequently forgot. But she was so genuinely penitent and abased when

her omissions were discovered that her friend had not the heart to be

severe. Milly, on the other hand, began to think that the work took a

great deal of time and that fifty dollars a month was small pay for her

services, yet did not like even to hint that she wanted more.

Walter Kemp summed the matter up in the brutal fashion of man-financier,

"Better give Milly her money and let me send you a trained woman from

the bank to do your work, Nell."

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

"Milly would never take a gift like that!"

That was the trouble: Milly belonged to the class too proud to take

charity and too incompetent to earn money. So Mrs. Kemp continued to do

as much as she had done before and to pay Milly fifty dollars a month

out of her private purse.

"Pity she didn't marry Parker," Kemp said brusquely. "He'll be a very

rich man one of these days."

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

love him enough."

"Well," this raw male rejoined, "she'd better hurry up and find some one

she does love who can support her."

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

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

the Milly Ridges.

* * * * *

Milly realized her inadequacy, but naturally did not ascribe it wholly

to incompetency. She wanted to give up her irregular job: it could not

be concealed from her friends, and it marked her as a dependent. But the

stern fact remained that she needed the money, even the paltry fifty

dollars a month, as she had never needed anything in life. If she

refrained from spending a dollar for several years, she could hardly

clear herself of the accumulated bills from her halcyon days of hope.

And the household needed money, too. After that regrettable interview

with Snowden, the catastrophe in the tea and coffee business came with

the swiftness of long-delayed fate. One morning Horatio did not rise

from the breakfast table, as had been his wont for so many years, and

throwing out his chest with the sensual satisfaction of the well-fed

male shout boisterously:--

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

For there was no longer any office to go to.

Instead, Horatio sat glumly at the table reading the want columns of the

morning paper, down and up, and then as the morning wore on he silently

departed for the city--"to look for something." Hopeless task, when the

streets were filled with men out of work, and businesses everywhere were

closing down and turning off old employees. Milly, watching Horatio

reach gropingly for his hat and coat, like a stricken animal, realized

that her father was no longer young and brave. He had passed fifty,--the

terrible deadline in modern industry. "Nobody wants an old dog, any

way," he said to his mother forlornly.

Then Milly was almost sorry for what she had done. But it was not really

her fault, she still thought.

It was a mournful experience, this, of having a grown man--the one male

of the family--sitting listlessly about the house of a morning and going

forth aimlessly at irregular times, only to return before he should be

expected. The habit of her life, as it had been the habit of Horatio's,

was to have the male sally forth early from the domestic hearth and

leave it free to the women of the family for the entire day.... Usually

optimistic to a fault, with a profound conviction that things must come

right of themselves somehow, Milly began to doubt and see dark visions

of the family future. What if her father should be unable to find

another place--any sort of work--and should come to hang about the house

always, getting seedier and sadder, to be supported by her feeble

efforts? Milly refused to contemplate the picture.

One day her grandmother asked money from Milly. The old lady was a grim

little nemesis for the girl these days,--a living embodiment of "See

what you have done," though never for a moment would Milly admit that

she was responsible for the accumulation of disaster. It should be said

in behalf of Grandma Ridge that now the blow of fate had fallen, which

she had so persistently predicted for four long years, she set her lips

in grim puritan silence and did that which must be done without

reproach.

Somehow she found the money for the rent from month to month and gave

Horatio his carfare and lunch money each morning. But she came to Milly

for money to buy food, and Milly gave it generously although she owed

all she earned and much more. But food came before bills. If it hadn't

been for Eleanor Kemp's luxurious luncheons, the girl would often have

gone hungry.... And through it all she never took refuge in tears.

"What's the use?" she said.

* * * * *

It was during the darkest of these days that a new turn in Milly's fate

came unexpectedly. She had been to a Sunday luncheon at the Nortons, and

was walking back along the Drive, thinking a little sadly that even her

old pals had invited her only at the last moment, "to fill in." She was

no more any sort of social "card." She was revolving this and other

dreary thoughts in her worried mind when she heard her name,--"Miss

Ridge--I say, Miss Ridge!"

She turned to meet the beaming face of old Christian Becker, the

editor-proprietor of the _Morning Star_, who was hurrying towards her as

fast as his short, fat person would permit him. As he came along he

raised his shiny silk hat above his bald head, and his broad face broke

into a larger smile than was its wont. Becker was an amusing character,

tempting to set before the reader, but as he has to do only incidentally

with Milly Ridge it cannot be. Enough to say that after forty years of

hard struggle in the land of his adoption, he had preserved the virtues

of a simple countryman and the heart of a good-natured boy. Every one in

the city knew Christian Becker; every one laughed and growled at his

newspaper,--the God of his heart.

"Thought it must be you," he gasped. "Never forget how a pretty woman

walks!" (How _does_ she walk? Milly wondered.) "How are you, Miss Ridge?

Haven't seen you for some time--not since that swell dinner at the

Bowman place, d'ye remember?"

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

He smiled good naturedly, and Milly smiled, too. Then Becker added in a

childlike burst of confidence:--

"Let me tell you, you did just right, my girl! Don't tie yourself up

with any man you can't run with. It don't work. It saves tears and

trouble to quit before you're hitched by the parson."

Milly flushed at the frank reference to her broken engagement, then

laughed at the crude phrasing. But her heart warmed with the word of

sympathy. Gradually she unburdened herself of all her troubles, and at

the conclusion the kindly newspaper man said wisely:--

"Never you mind how folks behave, Miss Ridge. Keep a stiff upper

lip--hold up your head--and you'll have all of 'em running after you

like hens after corn 'fore you know it. That's what happened to me when

I went broke that time."

"But I'm not fit to do anything," Milly confessed truthfully, "and I

must support myself somehow."

"Why don't you try newspaper work? You are a clever girl and you know

the world.... Come to my office to-morrow noon--no, I've got a

Washington nob on my hands for lunch--" (Becker was vain of his

political influence, which consisted for the most part of entertaining

visiting politicians at luncheon.) "Come in 'bout four, and we'll see

what we can do to help you out."

With a fatherly nod he hurried off down a side street, and Milly went

home with a new fillip to her lively imagination.

As a matter of fact the proprietor of the _Star_ was not entirely

disinterested in his kindness. He had been looking for some woman to

take "Madame Alpha's" place and furnish the paper with that column of

intimate social tittle-tattle about people the readers knew only by

name, which every enterprising American newspaper considers a necessary

ingredient of the "news." The estimable lady, who signed herself "Madame

Alpha," had grown stale in the business, as such social chroniclers

usually do. The widow of an esteemed citizen, with wide connections in

the older society of the city, she had done very well at first. But she

had "fallen down" lamentably, to use Becker's phrase, during the recent

period of Chicago's social expansion. She neither knew the new gods and

goddesses, nor did she know how to invent stories about their doings.

Becker, who had seen Milly, not merely at the Bowmans, but at many of

the more brilliant functions of the Fair season, regarded her as

"up-to-date," and further, thought her a nice, lively young woman, who

would know the difference between Mrs. Patziki's card party on Garfield

Boulevard and a dinner to the French ambassador at the Danner's. It made

little difference whether she could write or not, so long as she had the

"entry" as he called it. At any rate he would try her.

So Milly began her new career as journalist with much enthusiasm and a

sense of self-importance that had been grievously lacking in her

enterprises for some time. She thought she had the ability to

write--what attractive young American woman doesn't? Her friends thought

her clever, and laughed at her little "stories" about people. She set

herself industriously to the composition of elaborate articles on "Our

Social Leaders," consisting largely of a retrospect and review, for "our

social leaders" kept very still during those terrible months of want and

panic that followed the gay doings of the great show, or were out of the

city. These articles appeared in the Sunday edition, over the _nom de

plume_ of the "_Débutante_." Other women of the regular staff did the

card-parties and club news and the West Side stuff.

There was a city editor, of course, and a ruthless blue pencil, but as

Milly was recognized on the paper as "the old man's" present hobby, she

was given a pretty free rein. She sailed into the dingy _Star_ offices

dressed quite smartly, dropped her sprawling manuscript on the Sunday

editor's table, and ambled into Mr. Becker's sanctum for a little social

chat. In the office she was known as "the Real Thing," and liked as she

was almost everywhere, though the youthful reporters laughed at her

pompous diction.

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

VIII

MILLY RENEWS HER PROSPECTS

It did not take Milly long to realize that the sort of newspaper writing

she was doing was as parasitic in its nature as her first job, and even

less permanent. Of course it quickly leaked out who the _Débutante_ was

who wrote with such finality of "our social leaders," and though friends

were kind and even helpful, assuring Milly "it made no difference," and

they thought it "a good thing for her to do," she knew that in the end

her work would kill whatever social position she had retained through

her vicissitudes. The more "exclusive" women with social aspirations

liked secretly to have their presences and their doings publicly

chronicled, but they were fearful lest they should seem to encourage

such publicity. Although they said, "We'd rather have one of us do it if

it has to be done, you know," yet they preferred to have it thought that

the information came from the butler and the housemaid. Milly soon

perceived that a woman must cheapen herself at the job, and by

cheapening herself lose her qualification. Nevertheless, she had to keep

at it for the money.

That was the terrible fact about earning one's living, Milly learned:

the jobs--at least those she was fitted for--were all parasitic and

involved personal humiliations. From this arose Milly's growing

conviction of the social injustice in the world to women, of which view

later she became quite voluble....

Fortunately the summer came on, when "Society" moved away from the city

altogether. Becker, who had been somewhat disappointed in Milly's

indifferent success, now suggested that she do a series of articles on

inland summer resorts. "Show 'em," said the newspaper man, "that we've

got a society of our own out here in the middle west, as classy as any

in America,--Newport, Bar Harbor, or Lenox." He advised Lake Como for a

start, but Milly, for reasons of her own, preferred Mackinac, then a

popular resort on the cold water of Lake Superior.

By mid-July she was established in the most fashionable of the barny,

wooden hotels at the resort and prepared to put herself in touch with

the summer society. One of the first persons she met was a Mrs. Thornton

from St. Louis, a pleasant, ladylike young married woman, who had a

cottage near by and took her meals at the hotel. She was a summer widow

with three children,--a thoroughly well-bred woman of the sort Milly

instinctively took to and attracted. They became friends rapidly through

the children, whom Milly petted. She learned all about the Thorntons in

a few days. They were very nice people. He was an architect, and she had

been a Miss Duncan of Philadelphia,--also a very nice family of the

Quaker order, Milly gathered. Mrs. Thornton talked a great deal of an

older brother, who had gone to California for his health and had bought

a fruit ranch there in the Ventura mountains somewhere south of Santa

Barbara. This brother, Edgar Duncan, was expected to visit Mrs. Thornton

during the summer, and in the course of time he arrived at Mackinac.

Milly found him on the piazza of the Thornton cottage playing with the

children. As he got up awkwardly from the floor and raised his straw

hat, Milly remarked that his sandy hair was thin. He was slight, about

middle-aged, and seemed quite timid. Not at all the large westerner with

bronzed face and flapping cowboy hat she had vaguely pictured to

herself. Nevertheless, she smiled at him cordially,--

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

hand.

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

replied, coloring bashfully.

So it began. For the next month, until Milly, having exhausted the

social possibilities of Mackinac, had to move on to another "resort" in

Wisconsin, she saw a great deal of Edgar Duncan. They walked through the

fir woods by moonlight, boated on the lake under the stars, and read

Milly's literary efforts on the piazza of the Thornton cottage. Duncan

told her much about his ranch on the slope of the Ventura hills above

the Pacific, of the indolent California life in the sunshine, with an

occasional excursion to Los Angeles or San Francisco. He was not

exciting in any sense, not very energetic, like the Chicago men she had

known, perhaps not very much alive; but he was gentle, and kindly, and

thoughtful for women, of a refined and high-minded race--the sort of man

"any woman could be sure of."

Mrs. Thornton, with much sisterly affection and no vulgar ambition,

encouraged unobtrusively the intimacy. "Edgar is so lonely out there on

his ranch," she explained to Milly, "I want him to come back east. He

might now, you know,--there's nothing really the matter with his health.

But he's got used to the life and doesn't like our hurry and the

scramble for money. Besides he's put all his money into those lemons and

olives.... I think a woman might be very happy out of the world in a

place like that, with a man who loved her a lot,--and children, of

course, children,--don't you?"

Milly thought so, too. She was becoming very tired of newspaper work,

and of her single woman's struggle to maintain herself in the roar of

Chicago. The future looked rather gray even through her habitually

rose-colored glasses. She was twenty-four. She knew the social game, and

its risks, better than two years before.... So she was very kind to

Duncan,--she really liked him extremely, rather for what he was without

than for what he had,--and when she left it was understood between them

that the Californian should return to his ranch by the way of Chicago

and meet Milly there on a certain day,--Monday, the first of September.

He was very particular, sentimentally so, about this date,--kept

repeating it,--and they made little jokes of it until Milly even

particularized the hour when she could be free to see him,--"Five

o'clock, 31 East Acacia Street,--hadn't you better write it down?" But

Duncan thought he could remember it very well. "We'll go somewhere for

dinner," Milly promised.

That was all, but it was a good deal for the shy Edgar Duncan to have

arrived at. Milly was content to leave it just that way,--vague and

pleasant, with no explicit understanding of what was to come afterwards.

She knew he would write--he was that kind; he would say more on paper

than by word of mouth, much more. Then, when they met again, she would

put her hand in his and without any talk it would have happened.... He

came with the children to see her off at the station, and as the

fir-covered northern landscape retreated from the moving train, Milly

relaxed in her Pullman seat, holding his roses in her lap, and decided

that Edgar Duncan was altogether the "best" man she had ever known well.

She surrendered herself to a dream of a wonderful land where the yellow

lemons gleamed among glossy green leaves, and the distant hills were

powdered with the gray tint of olive trees, as Duncan had described the

ranch, and also of a little low bungalow, a silent Jap in white clothes

moving back and forth, and far below the distant murmur of the Pacific

surges.... Her eyes became suffused: it wasn't the pinnacle of her

girlish hope, but it was Peace. And just now Milly wanted peace more

than anything else.

He wrote, as Milly knew he would, and though Milly found his letters

lacking in that warmth and color and glow in which she had bathed the

ranch, they were tender and true letters of a real lover, albeit a timid

one. "All his life he had longed for a real companion, for a woman who

could be a man's mate as his mother was to his father," and that sort of

thing. He implied again and again that not until he had met Milly had he

found such a creature, "but now," etc. Milly sighed. She was happy, but

not thrilled. Perhaps, she thought, she was too old for

thrills--twenty-four--and this was as near "the real right thing" as she

was ever to come. At any rate she meant to take the chance.

Ocanseveroc did not prove attractive: it was a hot little hole by a

steaming, smelly lake, like Como, only less select in its society and

more populous. Milly quickly "did" the resort and fled back to Chicago

for a breath of fresh air from the great cooling tub of Lake Michigan.

That was the nineteenth of August. She had twelve days in which to get

ready her articles before Duncan's arrival. On the hot train she planned

a little article on the search for the ideal resort with the result of a

hasty return to the city for comfort and coolness. She thought it might

be made amusing and resolved to see the editor about it.

* * * * *

Matters at home had scarcely improved during the languid summer. Horatio

sat on the stoop in his shirt-sleeves, unchided, or went for long hours

to a beer-garden he had found near by. He made no pretence of looking

for work. "What's the use--in the summer?" Milly stirred the stagnant

domestic atmosphere with her recovered cheerfulness. She told them of

her various adventures, especially of the Thorntons and of the new young

man. Duncan had given her some kodaks of the fruit ranch in the Ventura

mountains, which she displayed. _HE_ was coming to see her soon, and she

laughed prettily. Grandma maintained her sour indifference to Milly's

doings, but Horatio took a lively interest. He had always wanted to go

"back to a farm" since he was a young man, he said. It was the only

place for a poor man to live these days, and they said those California

ranches were wonderful money-makers. A man at Hoppers' had gone out

there, etc.

Father and daughter talked ranch far into the hot night.

The next afternoon Milly went to the newspaper office to report and to

discuss with the editor her last inspiration for an article. It was the

vacation season and a number of the desks in the editorial room were

vacant. Mr. Becker's door was closed and shrouded with an "Out of Town"

card. At the Sunday editor's table in the partitioned box reserved for

this official was an unfamiliar figure. Milly stopped at the threshold

and stared. A young man, fair-haired, in a fresh and fetching summer

suit with a flowing gauzy tie, looked up from the table and smiled at

Milly. He was distinctly not of the _Star_ type.

"Come right in," he called out genially. "Anything I can do for

you? No, I'm not the new Sunday editor--he's away cooling himself

somewheres.... I just came in here to finish this sketch."

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

"You're not Kim?" Milly stammered.

"The same."

("Kim" was the name signed to some clever cartoons that had been

appearing all that winter in a rival paper, about which there had been

more or less talk in the circles where Milly moved.)

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

"The silver-tongued Becker got me--for a price--a small one," he added

with a laugh, as if nothing about him was of sufficient consequence to

hide.

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

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

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

"Oh," he replied, and his tone said, "it's because you too are different

from the rest here," which flattered Milly.

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

The young man emptied a chair by the simple process of tipping it and

presented it to Milly with a gallant flourish. She sat on the edge and

drew up her veil as far as the tip of her nose. The young man smiled.

Milly smiled back. They understood each other at once, far better than

either could ever understand the other members of the _Star_ staff.

Their clothes, their accents, their manners announced that they came

from the same world,--that small "larger world," where they all use the

same idiom.

"Been doing Mackinac and Ocara-se-er-oc?" the young man drawled with

delightful irony. "Ye gods! What names!"

Both laughed with a pleasant sense of superiority over a primitive

civilization, though Milly at least had hardly known any other.

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

"I've not yet had the privilege of seeing our best people in their

summer quarters," the young man continued, with his agreeable air of

genial mockery.

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

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

unfinished sketch.

Milly asked to see the drawing, and another inspiration occurred to her.

She told the young artist of her idea for a comic article on the hunt

through the lake resorts for an ideal place of peace and coolness. He

thought it a good topic and suggested graciously that he could do a few

small pen-and-ink illustrations to elucidate the text.

"Oh, would you!" Milly exclaimed eagerly. It was what she had hoped he

would say, and it revived her waning interest in journalism immensely,

the prospect of collaboration with this attractive young artist. (She

had already forgotten that she was to abandon journalism after the first

Monday in September.)

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

* * * * *

Jack Bragdon, who signed his pen-and-ink sketches with the name of

"Kim," was one of that considerable army of young adventurers in the

arts who pushed westward from the Atlantic seaboard at the time of the

World's Fair in Chicago; also one of the large number who had been left

stranded when the tidal wave of artistic effort had receded, exposing

the dead flats of hard times. After graduation from an eastern college

of the second class, where he had distinguished himself by composing the

comic opera libretto for his club and drawing for the college annual, he

had chosen for himself the career of art. With a year in a New York art

school and another spent knocking about various European capitals in a

somewhat aimless fashion, an amiable but financially restricted family

had declined to embarrass itself further for the present with his

career. Or, as his Big Brother in Big Business had put it, "the kid had

better show what he can do for himself before we go any deeper." Jack

had consequently taken an opportunity to see the Fair and remained to

earn his living as best he could by contributing cartoons to the

newspapers, writing paragraphs in a funny column, and occasional verse

of the humorous order. And he designed covers for ephemeral

magazines,--in a word, nimbly snatched the scanty dollars of Art.

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

first time.

Already he had achieved something of a vogue socially in pleasant

circles, thanks to his vivacity and good breeding. Milly had heard of

his charms about the time of her Crash, but had never happened to meet

him. He had heard of Milly, of course,--many things which might well

stir a young man's curiosity. So they smiled at each other across a

little table in a deserted restaurant, and sat on into the August

twilight, sipping cooling drinks. He smoked many cigarettes which he

rolled with fascinating dexterity between his long white fingers, and

talked gayly, while Milly listened with ears and eyes wide open to the

engrossing story of Himself.

Jack Bragdon was a much rarer type in Chicago of the early nineties--or

in any American city--than he would be to-day. Milly's experience of the

world had never brought her into close touch with Art. And Art has a

fatal fascination for most women. They buzz around its white arc-light,

or tallow dip, like heedless moths bent on their own destruction. Art in

the person of a handsome, sophisticated youth like Jack Bragdon, who had

seen a little of drawing-rooms as well as the pavements of strange

cities, was irresistible. (Milly too felt that she had in her something

of the artistic temperament, which had never been properly developed.)

Thus far, even by his own account, Bragdon was not much of an artist. He

was clever with his fingers,--pen or pencil,--but at twenty-six he might

very truthfully state,--"I've been a rotten loafer always, you know. But

I'm reformed. Chicago's reformed me. That's what Brother meant.... Now

watch and see. I'm not going to draw ridiculous pot-bellied politicians

for a newspaper--not after I have saved the fare to Europe and a few

dollars over to keep me from starving while I learn to really paint."

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

unconscious sigh....

It is marvellous what a vast amount of mutual biography two young

persons of the opposite sexes can exchange in a brief tête-à-tête. By

the time Milly and the young artist were strolling slowly northward in

the sombre city twilight, they had become old friends, and Milly was

hearing about the girl in Rome, the fascination of artist life in

Munich, the stunning things in the last Salon, and all the rest of it.

They parted at Milly's doorstep without speaking of another meeting, for

it never occurred to either that they should not meet--the next day.

The gardens of that California Hesperides were already getting dim in

Milly's memory, blotted out by a more intoxicating vision.

IX

MILLY IN LOVE

The next meeting was not farther off than the next noon. They lunched

together, to talk further of their collaboration, and from luncheon went

to the Art Institute to see the pictures, most of which Bragdon disposed

off condescendingly as "old-style stuff." Milly, who had been taught to

reverence this selection of masterpieces, which were the local

admiration, learned that there were realms beyond her ken.

The next day saw another meeting and the next yet another. Then there

was an intermission--Bragdon had to finish some work--and Milly felt

restless. But there ensued ten delicious days of music and beer-gardens

and walks in the parks, luncheons and suppers,--one starry Sunday spent

scrambling among the ravines on the north shore and picnicking on the

sandy beach, listening to the sadly soothing sweetness of Omar--(yes,

they read Omar in those days, the young did!)--with little opalescent

waves twinkling at their feet. Milly never paused to think one moment of

all those ten precious days. She was blissfully content with the world

as it was, except when she was at home, and then she was plotting

skilfully "another occasion." If she had stopped to think, she would

have murmured to herself, "At last! This must be the real, right thing!"

He was so handsome, so full of strong male youth and joy, of large hopes

and careless intentions, and he was also exotic to Milly,--a bit of that

older, more complex civilization she had always longed for in her

prairie limitations. His horizon had been broader than hers, she felt,

though he was a mere boy in worldly knowledge. He even dressed

differently from the men she knew, with a dash of daring color in

waistcoat and ties that proclaimed the budding artist. And above all he

embodied the Romance of Art,--that fatal lure for aspiring womankind.

The sphere of creation is hermaphroditic: he too was fine and feminine,

unlike the coarser types of men. He craved Reputation and would have it,

Milly assured him confidently. She was immediately convinced of his high

talent. Alas! She sighed when she said it, for she knew that his gifts

would quickly waft him beyond her reach on his upward way. Chicago could

not hold one like him long: he was for other, beautifuller ports of

destiny!

* * * * *

At four forty-five on the afternoon of September first,--a Monday,--a

tall, somewhat nervous man rang the bell of 31 East Acacia Street and

inquired for Miss Ridge. He came in and waited when he learned from the

little old lady who opened the door that Milly was not at home. He

waited in the small front room, sombrely darkened, where the tragedy of

Milly's first engagement ring had taken place,--waited until six

forty-five, then at the signs of preparation for the evening meal

slipped out. But he was back at seven forty-five and again came in. This

time Mrs. Ridge introduced herself and invited him politely to await her

granddaughter's return. "She's very uncertain in her hours," the old

lady explained with a deprecatory little laugh, "since she has

undertaken this newspaper work. It seems to keep her at the office a

great deal of late...." We may leave Edgar Duncan there in the little

front room, being entertained by Mrs. Ridge in her most gracious manner,

while we go in search of the truant Milly.

* * * * *

She might have been found at an unpretentious German beer-garden far out

on the North Side. Bragdon and Milly had discovered this particular

retreat, which was small and secluded and usually rather empty. It

seemed to Milly quite "Bohemian" to drop into the garden late in the

afternoon and rouse the sleepy proprietor to fetch them cool stone mugs

of foaming beer, which the artist drank and which she sipped at.

On this Monday afternoon they had installed themselves in the little

arbor at the remote end of the tiny garden, where they were shielded by

the dusty vines from any observation, and thus the quarter hours and the

halves slipped by unheeded. The artist told her again of his aspirations

to paint,--"the real thing," to "go in for the big stunts." Milly

listened sympathetically. That was what he should do, of course,--have a

career, a man's career,--even if it parted him from her for always. All

her life she had wished to be an "inspiration" in some man's life-work.

What greater thing than to inspire an Artist to his glorious

fulfilment?...

Imperceptibly their words became more personal and more tender. He

wanted to paint _her_ some day, as she had lain on the beach, with her

lovely bronze hair, her wide blue eyes, and the little waves curling up

towards her feet.... Dusk fell, and they forgot to eat.... At the moment

when Edgar Duncan was describing to Mrs. Ridge for the second time the

exact location of Arivista Ranch on the slope of the Ventura hills,

Milly's head was resting close to the artist's face and very real tears

were in her eyes--tears of joy--as her heart beat wildly under her

lover's kisses and her ears sang with his passionate words....

For the one thing that the young artist had sworn to himself should

never happen to HIM,--at any rate not until he was old and

successful,--the very thing that Milly had laughed at as

preposterous--"me fall in love with a poor man!"--had come to pass. Both

had done it.

"I shan't spoil all your future for you, shall I, dear?" she whispered,

her mouth close to his. He gave her the only proper answer....

"It shan't make any difference," she said later, in a calmer moment.

"You shall have your life, dear, and become a great painter."

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

you!"

How wonderful! How wonderful it all was, Milly thought, as they threaded

their way homewards through the slovenly, garish Chicago streets,

mindful of naught but themselves and their Secret. How could anything so

poetically wonderful happen in workaday Chicago? And Milly thought to

herself how could any woman consider for a moment sacrificing

THIS--"the real, right thing"--for any bribe on earth?...

As they neared the little house, Milly perceived the light in the front

room and with an intuition of something unpleasant to follow dismissed

her lover peremptorily, with a last daring kiss beneath the

street-light, and tripped into the house.

It all came over her as soon as the tall figure rose from the

uncomfortable corner sofa: she knew what she had done and she was filled

with real concern for the Other One.

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

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

"Since four forty-five," Duncan admitted, and added with a touch of

sentiment. "I came fifteen minutes before the time."

Milly cast a fleeting glance backward over what had happened to her

since four forty-five!

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

Mrs. Ridge discreetly withdrew at this point.

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

"I've been sitting a long time," Edgar Duncan remarked, patiently

reseating himself on the stiff sofa.

"I'm so sorry!"

"Did you forget?"

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

has happened since--"

"Then you didn't get my letters?" he pressed on eagerly, ignoring

Milly's last words.

"Oh, yes, I got all your letters," she said hastily, remembering that

she had not found time or heart to open the last bulky three, which lay

upstairs on her dressing-table. "Beautiful letters they were," she added

sentimentally and irrelevantly, thinking, "What letters Jack will

write!"

It is useless to follow this painful scene in further detail. Timid as

Edgar Duncan was by nature he was man enough to strike for what he

wanted when he had his chance,--as he had struck manfully in those bulky

letters. And he repeated their message now in simple words.

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

Touched by the pathos of this genuine feeling, Milly's eyes filled with

tears and she stammered,--

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

"Why not?"

(She would have been quite willing to make the journey with him, if she

might have flown straightway back to the arms of her artist lover!)

"You see--it's different--I can't--" Milly could not bring herself to

deal the blow. It seemed too absurd to state baldly that in twelve days

a man had come into her life, whom she had never set eyes on thirteen

days before, but who nevertheless had made it impossible for her to do

what before that time she had looked forward to with serene content.

Such things happened in books, but were ridiculous to say!

"You care for some one else?"

Milly nodded, and her eyes dropped tears fast. It all seemed very sad,

almost tragic. She was sorry for herself as well as for him....

If he felt it inexplicable that he had not been allowed to suspect this

deep attachment before, he was too much of a man to mention it. He took

his blow and did not argue about it.

"I'm so sorry!" Milly cried.

"It had to be," he said, hastily putting out a hand to her. "I shall

love you always, Milly!" (It was the thing they said in books, but in

this case it sounded forlornly true.) "I'm glad I've had the chance to

love you," and he was gone.

Milly dropped tears all the way upstairs to her room, where she shut

herself in and locked herself against family intrusion. In spite of her

tears she was glad for what she had done. A woman's heart seemed to her

ample justification for inconsistencies, even if it jammed other hearts

on the way to its goal. It was fate, that was all,--fate that Jack

Bragdon should have walked into her life just twelve days before it

would have been too late. Fate is a wondrously consoling word,

especially in the concerns of the heart. It absolves from personal

responsibility.

So Milly went to sleep, with tears still on her eyelashes, but a smile

on her lips, and dreamed of her own happy fate. At last "the real, right

thing" was hers!

X

MILLY MARRIES

She awoke with a sensation of bliss--a never ending happiness to be

hers. Yet there were some disagreeable episodes before this bliss could

be perfected. For one thing Horatio took the announcement of the new

engagement very hard,--unexpectedly so. Grandma Ridge received it in

stony silence with a sarcastic curve to her wrinkled lips, as if to

say,--"Hope you know your mind this time!" But Horatio spluttered:--

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

the middle?"

(To part one's hair in the middle instead of upon the slope of the head

was Horatio's aversion--it indicated to him a lack of serious, masculine

purpose in a young man.)

"I thought you would do better than that, Milly.... What's he making

with his newspaper pictures?"

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

She might guess that it was in the neighborhood of thirty dollars a

week, sometimes increased by a few dollars through a magazine cover or

commercial poster. But in her present exalted mood it was completely

indifferent to Milly whether her lover was earning twenty dollars or two

thousand a week. They would live somehow--of course: all young lovers

did.... And was he not a genius? Milly had every confidence.

"You might just as well have married Ted Donovan," Horatio groaned.

(Donovan was the young man at Hoppers' whom Milly had disdained early in

her West Side career.) "I saw him on the street the other day, and he's

doing finely--got a rise last January."

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

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

with unusual severity.

"I should say so!" Grandma interposed.

Milly might think so too, but she was serenely indifferent to all the

defeated prospects, the bleeding hearts over which she must pass to the

fulfilment of her being. It was useless to explain to her father and her

grandmother the imperious call of "the real, right thing," and how

immeasurably Jack differed from Ted Donovan, Clarence Albert, or even

Edgar Duncan, and how indifferent to a true woman must be all the pain

in the world, once she had found her Ideal.

Horatio and his mother might feel the waste of all their efforts in

behalf of Milly,--the costly removal from the West Side home, the

disastrous venture in the tea and coffee business, and all the rest,--to

result in _this_, her engagement to a "mere newspaper feller who parts

his hair in the middle." It was another example of the mournful

experience of age,--the pouring forth of heart's blood in useless

sacrifice to Youth. But Milly saw that her artist lover,--and the flame

in her heart, the song in her ears,--could not have been without all the

devious turnings of her small career. Each step had been needed to bring

her at last into Jack's arms, and therefore the toil of the road was

nothing--in her eyes. That was the way Milly looked at it.

Could one blame her, remembering her sentimental education, the

sentimental ideals that for centuries upon centuries men have imposed

upon the more imitative sex? She could not see the simple selfishness of

her life,--not then, perhaps later when she too became a mother.

* * * * *

The catastrophe of her first engagement had cut Milly off from her more

fashionable friends and the world outside, and this second emotional

crisis cut her off from the sympathy of her family. After that first

wail Horatio was glumly silent, as if his cup of sorrow was now filled,

and Grandma Ridge went her way in stern oblivion of Milly. The girl was

so happy--and so much away from home--that she hardly felt the cold

domestic atmosphere.

A few short weeks afterwards, however, Mrs. Ridge announced to her that

a tenant having been found for the house they should move the first of

the month.

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

"Your father and I are going to board on the West Side," her grandmother

replied shortly, implying that Milly could do as she pleased, now that

she was her own mistress.

"Why over there?"

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

From the few further details offered by her grandmother Milly inferred

that it was a very humble place indeed, and that only dire necessity had

forced Horatio to accept it,--to sit at the gate in the great

establishment where once he had held some authority.

"Poor papa!" Milly sighed.

"It's rather late for you to be sorry, now," the old lady retorted

pitilessly. She was of the puritan temper that loves to scatter

irrefutable moral logic.

It was not until long afterward that Milly learned all the part the

indomitable old lady had played in this crisis of her son's affairs. She

had not only gone to see Mr. Baxter, one of the Hopper partners who

attended the Second Presbyterian Church, and begged him to give her son

employment once more, but she had humbled herself to appeal personally

to their enemy Henry Snowden and entreat him, for old friendship's sake,

to be magnanimous to a broken man. In these painful interviews she had

not spared Milly. She had succeeded.

* * * * *

Sometime during the last hurried weeks of their occupancy of the Acacia

Street house, Milly managed to have her lover come to Sunday supper and

make formal announcement of their intentions to the old people. For long

years afterwards she would remember the final scene of her emotional

career in the little front room when her father had to shake hands with

the young artist on the exact spot where Clarence's glittering diamond

had lain disdained, where the faithful ranchman had received his blow,

standing, full in the face.

Little Horatio looked gray and old; his lips trembled and his hand shook

as he greeted Bragdon.

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

"Yes, sir."

"Hope you'll make each other happy."

"We shall!" both chorused.

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

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

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

It was the only bitter thing the little man ever said to his daughter,

and it was the bitterness of disappointed hopes for her that forced the

words from him then. Perhaps, too, Horatio had permitted himself to

dream of Hesperidian apples of gold in eternal sunshine on the slopes of

the Ventura hills and a peaceful old age far from the roaring, dirty

city where he had failed. But when he spoke he was not thinking of

himself, only of the dangers for his one loved child.

The meeting was hardly a cheerful one. Milly, in the exuberance of her

new joy, could see no reason why everybody should not be as happy and

hopeful as she was. But the older people, although they were

scrupulously polite to the young artist, let their aloofness be felt in

a chilly manner. This was Milly's affair, they implied: she was running

her life to suit herself, as American children were wont to do, without

advice from her elders. The young man was obviously ill at ease.

Milly felt that he was too large for the picture. She had never been

ashamed of her humble home,--not with all her fashionable friends, not

with her rich lover. But now she was conscious of the poor impression it

must make upon the artist youth, who was so immeasurably superior to it

in culture. When the old people had withdrawn after supper, leaving the

lovers to themselves in the little front parlor, there were several

moments of awkward silence between them. Milly was distressed for him,

but she did not try to apologize. She said in her heart that she would

make it up to him,--all that she lacked in family background. A woman

could, she was convinced.

Possibly she did not fully realize how depressingly his situation had

been brought home to him by this first contact with the Ridge household.

He knew quite well how far thirty dollars a week went, with one man,

and, as has been said, the last intention of his soul was to induce any

woman to share it with him. Nor had he meant to seek out a rich wife,

although having brought good introductions he had made his way easily

into pleasant circles in his new home. Marriage had no part in his

scheme of things. But he had been snared by the same tricksy sprite of

blood and youth that had inflamed Milly. Now his was the main

responsibility, and he must envisage the future he had chosen soberly.

No more pleasant dallying in rich drawing-rooms, no more daydreaming

over the varied paths of an entertaining career. It was Matrimony! No

wonder--and no discredit to him--that the young man was somewhat

overwhelmed when he contemplated what that meant in material terms.

Never for the fraction of a moment, it should be said, did he think of

evading the responsibility. His American chivalry would have made that

impossible, even if he had desired it. And Milly had his heart and his

senses completely enthralled.

"Dearest," she said to him that evening, divining the sombre course of

his thoughts, "it will be so different with us when we are married.

We'll have everything pretty, even if it's only two rooms, won't we?"

And her yielding lips sealed his bondage firmer than ever, though he

might know that beauty, even in two rooms, costs money. He shut his eyes

and hoped--which is the only way in such cases.

Milly did not tell him that within a fortnight she should be without

even this home.

* * * * *

"There's going to be no engagement this time," Milly reported briskly to

Sally Norton, when she announced her news, "for I had enough of that

before, with all the fuss. Jack and I are both perfectly free. We're

just going to be married some day--that's all."

"Milly! Well I never!" Sally gasped, amid shrieks of laughter. "Not

really? You don't mean that kid?"

(Sally was conducting a serious affair herself, with a wary old

bachelor, whom ultimately she led in triumph to the altar. Ever after

she referred to Mr. John Bragdon as Milly's "kid lover").

"I think it splendid!" Vivie pronounced in a burst of appreciation.

"It's the real thing, dear. You are both young and brave. You are

willing to make sacrifices for your hearts."

Milly was not yet conscious of making any tremendous sacrifice.

Nevertheless, she adopted easily this sentimentalized view of her

marriage. And Vivie Norton went about among their friends proclaiming

Milly's heroism. Some people were amused; some were sceptical; a few

pitied the young man. "Milly, a poor man's wife--never! For he _is_

poor, isn't he, a newspaper artist?"

"He has a great deal of talent," Vivie Norton asserted with assurance.

Milly had so informed her.

"But an artist!" and Chicago shrugged its shoulders dubiously. An

artist, at least a resident specimen of the craft, might be a

drawing-room lap-dog, unmarried, but married he soon became a seedy

member of society, somewhere between a clerk and a college professor in

social standing. One of the smarter women Milly knew, Mrs. James

Lamereux, exclaimed when she heard the news,--"It's beautiful,--these

days when the women as well as the men are so keen for the main chance

in everything." It was rumored there had been a sentimental episode in

this lady's past, the fragrance of which still lay in her heart. Meeting

Milly on the street she congratulated the girl heartily,--"And, my dear,

you'll have such an interesting life--you'll know lots of clever people

and do unconventional things,--be free, you know, as WE are

not".... But Mrs. Jonas Haggenash remarked when some one told her the

news,--"The little fool! Now she's gone and done it."

In general the verdict of friends seemed to be suspended: they would

wait and see, preserving meantime an attitude of amiable neutrality and

good-will towards this outbreak of idealism. But Milly was not troubling

herself about what people thought or said. This time she had the full

courage of her convictions. The only one of her old friends she cared to

confide in deeply was Eleanor Kemp. That lady listened with troubled,

yet sympathetic eyes. "Oh, my dear," she murmured, kissing Milly many

times. "My dear! My dear!" she repeated as if she did not trust herself

to say more. "I so hope you'll be happy--that it will be right this

time."

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

implied.

"You know it takes so much for two people to live together always, even

when they have plenty of money."

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

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

She could see beyond the immediate glamor those monotonous years of

commonplace living,--struggle and effort. She knew from experience how

much of life has nothing to do with the emotions and the soul, but

merely with the stomach and other vulgar functions of the body.

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

"That's right--and I oughtn't to suggest any.... You must bring Mr.

Bragdon to dinner Sunday. Walter and I want to see him.... When are you

to be married?"

"Soon," Milly replied vaguely.

"That's best, too."

Then Milly confessed to her old friend the dark condition of the Ridge

fortunes, with the uncomfortable fact that very shortly she herself

would be without a home.

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

"You must come here and stay with us as long as you will," Mrs. Kemp

promptly said with true kindliness. "I insist! Walter would want it, if

I didn't--he's very fond of you, too."

Thus fortune smiled again upon Milly, and the two friends plunged into

feminine details of dress and domestic contrivance. Eleanor Kemp, who

had a gift lying unused of being a capable manager, a poor man's

helpmate, tried her best to interest Milly in the little methods of

economizing and doing by which dollars are pushed to their utmost

usefulness. Milly listened politely, but she felt sure that "all that

would work out right in time." She could not believe that Jack would be

poor always.... The older woman smiled at her confidence, and after she

had gone shook her head.

* * * * *

The young artist had his due share of pride. When he realized that the

woman he loved and meant to marry was staying with the Kemps because she

had no other refuge, he urged their immediate marriage, though he also

had a fair-sized package of bills in his desk drawer and needed a few

months in which to straighten out his affairs. Milly was eager to be

married,--"When all would come right somehow." So she opposed no

objection.

Indeed as she let her lover understand, she was indifferent about the

mere ceremony. She would go and live with him any time, anywhere, if it

weren't for the talk it would make and hurting her father's feelings.

Milly was, of course, an essentially monogamic creature, like any

normal, healthy woman. She meant simply that, once united with the man

she really loved, the thing was eternal. If he should cease to love her,

it would be the end of everything for her, no matter whether she had the

legal bond or not. However flattered her lover may have been by this

exhibition of trust, Bragdon was too American in instinct to entertain

the proposal seriously. "What's the use of that, anyway?" he said. "We

mean to stick--we might as well get the certificate."

So, as Milly confided to Eleanor Kemp, they determined "just to go

somewhere and have it done as quickly as possible, without fuss and

feathers."

And Mrs. Kemp, realizing what a sacrifice this sort of marriage must

mean to any girl,--without the pomp and ceremony,--felt that it was a

good sign for the couple's future, showing a real desire to seek the

essentials and dispense with the frills. She and her husband had planned

to give the young adventurers a quiet but conventional home wedding,

with friends and a reception. But she readily acquiesced in Milly's

idea, and one bleak Saturday in January slipped off with the lovers to a

neighboring church, and after seeing them lawfully wedded by a parson

left them to their two days' holiday, which was all the honeymoon they

allowed themselves at this time....

Milly was a fresh and blooming bride in a becoming gray broadcloth suit,

and as she stood before the faded parson beside her chosen man to take

the eternal vows of fidelity, no woman ever gave herself more completely

to the one of her heart. The wonderful song of bliss that had been

singing inside her all these last weeks burst into a triumphal poem. She

felt curiously exalted, scarcely herself. Was she not giving everything

she had as a woman to her loved one, without one doubt? Had she not been

true to woman's highest instinct, to her heart? She had rejected all the

bribes of worldliness in order to obtain "the real, right thing," and

she felt purified, ennobled, having thus fulfilled the ideals of her

creed.... She turned to her husband a radiant face to be kissed,--a face

in which shone pride, confidence, happiness.

As the older woman, with tear-dimmed eyes, watched the two bind

themselves together for the long journey, she murmured to herself like a

prayer,--"She's such a woman! Such a dear woman! She MUST be

happy."

That was the secret of Milly's hold upon all her women friends: they

felt the woman in her, the pure character of their sex more highly

expressed in her than in any one else they knew. She was the unconscious

champion of their hearts.

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

life? What _will_ she do?"

For like the wise woman she was she knew that in most cases it is the

woman who makes marriage sing like a perpetual song or become a sullen

silence. All the way to her home she kept repeating to herself,--

"What will she make of it? Milly!"

PART THREE

ASPIRATIONS

I

THE NEW HOME

They took a tiny, four-room apartment far, far out on the North Side. It

was close to the sandy shore of the Lake; from the rear porch, which was

perched on wooden stilts in the fashion of Chicago apartments, the gray

blue waters of the great lake could be seen. In the next block there

were a few scrubby oak trees, still adorned, even in January, with

rustling brown leaves, which gave something of a country air to the

landscape. By an ironical accident the new apartment they had chosen

happened to be not far from the spot where Clarence Albert had wished to

build his home. There was still much vacant property in this

neighborhood, as well as the free lake beach, which attracted the

lovers, and though it was a tiresome car-ride to the centre of the city

Milly did not expect to make many journeys back and forth.

At first she had had some idea of resuming her newspaper work, but that

had become almost negligible of late, since her preoccupation with love,

and when she approached Mr. Becker, he showed slight interest. He felt

kindly towards the two young adventurers, but he was not disposed to

carry his sentiments into the newspaper business. They must "make good"

by themselves, like any other Tom and Gill, and Milly married to an

impecunious newspaper artist would not be a social asset for the _Star_.

So Milly, happily, was relegated to domesticity, and the management of

her one raw little maid. Anyway, as she told Eleanor Kemp, her husband

did not care to have his wife working--didn't think much of women in the

newspaper business. She was proud of his Pride....

The new home was a pretty little nest. Milly had rescued from the last

débacle of the Ridge household those few good pieces of old mahogany

that had been her mother's contribution to the conglomerate, and kind

friends had added a few essential articles. Especially Eleanor Kemp,

with a practical eye and generous hand, had taken delight in seeing that

all details of the new home were complete, and that everything was in

smiling order on their return from the brief wedding trip. She had even

taken pains to have flowers and plants sent in from the Como

greenhouses. (The plants speedily died, as Milly forgot to water them.)

So now they were embarked, cosily and cheerily, considering their

circumstances. As a shrewd worldly philosopher once put it on a similar

occasion: "Your John and my Amy got launched to-day on the long journey.

Poor dears! They think it's to be one long picnic. But we know they are

up against the Holy State of Matrimony--a very different proposition."

By which he meant, no doubt, that the young couple were to discover that

instead of passion and sentiment, verses and kisses, marriage was

largely a matter of feeding John and keeping him smoothly running as an

economic machine, and of clothing Milly and keeping her happily attuned

to the social cosmos,--later on of feeding, clothing, educating, and

properly launching the little Johns and Millys who might be expected to

put in an appearance....

But our lovers had not struck the prosaic bottom yet, though they

reached it sooner than either had expected. There were a good many

kisses and verses the first months, passion and temperament. John

discovered, of course, that Mrs. Bragdon was quite a different woman

from Milly Ridge,--a still fascinating, though occasionally

exasperating, creature, while Milly thought John was just what she had

known he would be,--an altogether adorable lover and perfect man. What

surprised her more as the early weeks of marriage slipped by was to find

that she herself had remained, in spite of her great woman's experience,

much the same person she had always been, with the same lively interests

in people and things outside and the same dislike of the sordid side of

existence. She had vaguely supposed that the state of love ecstasy which

had been aroused in her would continue forever, excluding all other

elements in her being, and thus transform her into something gloriously

new. Not at all. She still felt aggrieved when the maid boiled her eggs

more than two minutes or passed the vegetables on the wrong side.