When the two first seriously faced the budget question, they found that

they had started their sentimental partnership with a combined deficit

of over four hundred dollars. Luckily Mrs. Gilbert had sent to their new

address a chilly note of good wishes and a crisp cheque for one hundred

dollars. It was rather brutal of the good lady to put them so quickly on

the missionary list, and Milly wanted to return the cheque; but John

laughed and "entered it to the good," as he said. Then miraculously

Grandma Ridge had put into Milly's hand just before the wedding ten

fresh ten-dollar bills. Where had the old lady concealed such wealth all

these barren years, Milly wondered!... And finally, among other traces

of Eleanor Kemp's fairy hand, they found in a drawer of Milly's new desk

a bank-book on Walter Kemp's bank with a bold entry of $250 on the first

page. So, all told, they were able to start rather to the windward, as

Bragdon put it. Much to Milly's surprise, the artist proved to have a

sense of figures, light handed as he had shown himself before marriage.

At least he knew the difference between the debit and the credit side of

the ledger, and had grasped the fundamental principle of domestic

finance, viz. one cannot spend more than one earns, long. He insisted

upon paying up all the old bills and establishing a monthly budget.

When, after the rent had been deducted from the sum he expected to earn,

Milly proved to him that they could not live on what was left, he

whistled and said he must "dig it up somehow," and he did. He became

indefatigably industrious in picking up odd dollars, extending his funny

column, doing posters, and making extra sketches for the sporting sheet.

In spite of these added fives and tens, they usually exceeded the budget

by a third, and when Jack looked grave, Milly of course explained just

how exceptional the circumstances had been.

It is not worth while to go into the budgetary details of this

particular matrimonial venture. Other story-tellers have done that with

painful literalness, and nothing is drearier than the dead accounts of

the butcher and baker, necessary as they are. The essential truths of

domestic finance are very simple, and invariable: in the last analysis

they come to one horn of the eternal dilemma,--fewer wants or more

dollars. In America it is usually the second horn of the dilemma that

the husband valiantly embraces--it seems the easier one at the time, at

least the more comfortable horn upon which to be impaled. Milly was

convinced that the first horn was impossible, if they were to "live

decently." Bragdon began to think they might do better in New York,

where the market for incidental art was larger and the pay better. Milly

was eager for the venture. But both hesitated to cut themselves off from

a sure, if lean, subsistence. The _Star_ raised him during the

presidential campaign, when he was quite happy in caricaturing the

Democratic ass and the wide-mouthed Democratic candidate. (They always

had a tender feeling for the gentleman after that!) All in all, he made

nearly twenty-five hundred dollars the first year, and that was much

more than he had expected. But he found that even in those years of low

prices it was a small income for two--as Milly pointed out.

However, money was not their only concern. The young wife was properly

ambitious for her husband.

"It isn't so much the money," she told Eleanor Kemp. "I don't want Jack

to sink into mere newspaper work, though he's awfully clever at it. But

it leads nowhere, you know. I want him to be a real artist; he's got the

talent. And if he succeeds as a painter, it pays so much better. Just

think! That Varnot man charges fifteen hundred dollars for his portraits

and such daubs--don't you think so?"

(Emil Varnot was one of the tribe of foreign artists who periodically

descend upon American cities and reap in a few months a rich harvest of

portraits, if they are properly introduced--much to the disgust of local

talent.)

"Don't be impatient, Milly," Mrs. Kemp counselled. "It will come in

time, I've no doubt. You must save up to go abroad first."

But the dull way of thrift was not Milly's; it was not American.

Improvements there are financed by mortgage, not by savings. They must

borrow to make the next step.... Milly had lofty ideals of helping her

husband in his work. She was to be his inspiration in Art, of course:

that was to go on all the time. More practically she hoped to serve as

model from which his creations would issue to capture fame. She had

heard of artists who had painted themselves into fame through their

wives' figures, and she longed to emulate the wives. But this illusion

was shattered during the first year of their married life. When Bragdon

essayed a picture in the slack summer season, it was discovered that

Milly, for all her vivacious good looks, was not paintable in the full

figure. (They had tried her on the sands behind the flat, where they

rigged up an impromptu studio out of old sails.) Her legs were too short

between the thigh and the knee, and when the artist tried to correct

this defect of his model, the result was disastrous.... However, what

was of more practical purpose, her head answered very well, and Milly's

pretty face adorned the covers of various minor magazines, done in all

possible color schemes at twenty dollars per head. "I earn something,"

she said, by way of self-consolation.

She had another disappointment. She had imagined that her husband would

do most of his work at home, immediately under her fostering eye, and

that in this way she should have a finger, so to speak, in the creative

process; but for the present the sort of "art" they lived on was best

done in an office, with the thud of steam presses beneath and the eager

eye of the copy-reader at the door. So Milly was left to herself for

long hours in her new little home, and Milly was lonely. The trouble

obviously was that Milly had not enough to do to occupy her abundant

energy and interest in life. They were not to have children if possible:

in the modern way they had settled beforehand that _that_ was

impossible. And modern life had also so skilfully contrived the plebeian

machinery of living that there was little or nothing left for the woman

to do, if she were above the necessity of cooking and washing for her

man. Deliberately to set herself to find an interesting and inexpensive

occupation for her idle hours was not in Milly's nature,--few women of

her class did in those days. It was supposed to be enough for a married

woman to be "the head of her house"--even of a four-room modern

apartment--and to be a gracious and desirable companion to her lord in

his free hours of relaxation. Anything else was altogether "advanced"

and "queer."

So after the first egotistic weeks of young love, the social

instinct--Milly's dominant passion, in which her husband shared to some

extent--awoke with a renewed keenness, and she looked abroad for its

gratification. Their immediate neighbors, she quickly decided, were

"impossible" as intimates: they were honest young couples, clerks and

minor employees, who had come to the outskirts of the great city, like

themselves, for the sake of low rents and clean housing. There were no

signs of that "artistic and Bohemian" quality about them which she had

hoped to find in her new life. Her husband assured her that he had

failed to discover any such circle in Chicago, any at least whose

members she could endure. That was where America, except New York

possibly, differed from Europe. It had no class of cultivated poor.

Occasionally he brought a newspaper man from the city, and they had some

amusing talk over their dinner. A few of Milly's old friends

persistently followed her up, like the Norton girls, the kindly Mrs.

Lamereux, and the Kemps. But after accepting the hospitality of these

far-off friends, there was always the dreary long journey back to their

flat, with ample time for sleepy reflection on the futility of trying to

keep up with people who had ten times your means of existence. It was

not good for either of them, they knew, to taste surreptitiously the

_bourgeois_ social feast, when they were not able "to do their part."

Nevertheless, as the spring came on, Milly invited people more and more,

and in the long summer twilights they had some jolly "beach parties" on

the sandy lake shore, cooking messes over a driftwood fire, and also

moonlight swimming parties. By such means the dauntless Milly managed to

keep a sense of social movement about them.

* * * * *

She saw her father rarely. It was a day's journey, as she expressed it,

to the West Side, and her father was never free until after six, except

on Sundays, which Milly consecrated to husband, of course. Really,

father and daughter were not congenial, and they discovered it, now that

fate had separated them. At long intervals Horatio would come to them

for Sunday dinner, when Milly had not some other festivity on foot. On

these occasions the little man seemed subdued, as if he had turned down

the hill and drearily contemplated the end, at the bottom. He liked best

to sit on the rear porch, read the Sunday _Star_, and watch the gleaming

lake. Perhaps it reminded him of that vision he had indulged himself

with for a few short weeks of the broad Pacific beneath the Ventura

hills. Milly felt sorry for her father and did her best to cheer him by

giving him a bountiful dinner of the sort of food he liked. She had a

faint sense of guilt towards him, as if she might have done more to make

life toothsome for him in his old age. And yet how could she have been

false to her heart, which she felt had been amply vindicated by her

marriage? Pity that her heart could not have chimed to another note, but

that was the way of hearts. She was relieved when she had put her father

aboard the car on his return. As for Jack, he was always kind and

polite, but frankly bored; the two men had nothing in common--how could

they? It was the two generations over again--that was all.

Old Mrs. Ridge never made the journey to the Bragdon flat, and Milly saw

her only once or twice after her marriage. She was not sorry. Years of

living with "Grandma" had eaten into even Milly's amiable soul. The

little old lady grimly pursued her narrow path between the

boarding-house and the church, reading her _Christian Vindicator_ for

all mental relaxation, until one autumn morning she was found placidly

asleep in her bed, forever.

That was the next event of importance in Milly's life.

II

A FUNERAL AND A SURPRISE

When Horatio telephoned the news, Milly hurried over to the West Side,

and was taken to her grandmother's room. The little old lady seemed

extraordinarily lifelike in her death--perhaps because there had been so

little outward animation to her life. Her thin, veined hands were folded

neatly over her decent black dress, as she had sat so many hours,

perfectly still. The neat bands of white hair curved around the

well-shaped ears, and the same grim smile of petty irony that Milly knew

so well and hated was graven on the thin lips.... She was taken to that

cemetery on the Western Boulevard which Milly as a girl had prevented

her from visiting on her daily walk. There were several old ladies from

the boarding-house at the funeral, and one other thin-faced woman, whom

Milly vaguely remembered to have seen somewhere.

Milly returned from the funeral with her husband, and they were both

silent and thoughtful, occupied not so much with the dead as with the

future her going must disturb. They had not dared voice to each other

the idea that had been troubling them both since the first news of Mrs.

Ridge's death had reached them. At last, when they had left the car and

were approaching their own home, Bragdon said,--"I suppose, Milly, we

ought to have your father live with us."

"I suppose so," Milly sighed. "Poor papa--he feels it

dreadfully.... He's done so much for me always, Jack."

Her husband might rejoin that Horatio had done little for him, but he

said instead,--

"We shall have to find a larger apartment."

Milly sighed. It was difficult enough to get on in the little one.

"You'll go over to-morrow to see him about it?" Bragdon continued

courageously.

"Father can't come 'way out here to live--it's too far from his

business."

"We'll have to move nearer the business then."

"Not to the West Side!" Milly exclaimed in horror.

"What difference does it make?" her husband asked, as he wearily took up

his drawing-board.

"You don't know the West Side," Milly muttered.

"Well, we can't leave him alone in that boarding-house, can we?"

That was exactly what Milly would have liked to do, but she had not the

courage to say so in the face of her husband's ready acceptance of the

burden. The next day, as she revolved the unpleasant situation on her

way to see her father, she said to herself again and again,--"Not the

West Side. I won't have that--anything but that!" For to return to the

West Side seemed like beginning life all over again at the very bottom

of the hill.

* * * * *

When Milly announced her invitation to her father, Horatio exhibited a

strange diffidence.

"We'll find some nice little apartment nearer the city where you'll have

no trouble in getting to your business," Milly said in kindly fashion.

"I guess not," Horatio replied. "Not but that it's real kind of you and

John."

"Why not?"

"Well, you see, daughter, your husband ain't my kind," he stammered.

"He's all right--a good fellow, and he seems to make you happy--but I

don't much believe in mixing up families."

"What will you do?"

And after further embarrassment, Horatio confessed with a red face,--

"Perhaps I'll get married myself soon."

"Papa--you don't mean it!" Milly exclaimed, rather shocked, and inclined

to think it was one of Horatio's raw jokes.

"Why not?... I ain't as old as some, if I'm not as young as others."

"Who is the lady?"

"A fine young woman!... I've known her well for years, and I can tell

you she'll make the right sort of wife for any man."

"Who can it be?" demanded Milly, now quite excited, and running over in

her mind all of her father's female acquaintance, which was not

extensive.

"Miss Simpson," Horatio said. "Expect you don't remember Josephine

Simpson--she was the young woman who was in the office when I had the

coffee business."

"That woman!" Milly gasped, remembering vividly now the sour, keen

scrutiny the bookkeeper had given her the last time she had been in the

office of the tea and coffee business. It must have been Miss Simpson

who had stood a little to one side behind her father at the funeral. The

thin-faced woman had a familiar look, but in her best clothes Milly had

not recognized her.

Horatio resented the tone of his daughter's exclamation.

"Let me tell you, Milly," he asserted with dignity, "there are few

better women living on this earth than 'that woman.' She's looked after

a sick mother and a younger sister all her life, and now I mean she

shall have somebody look after her."

The little man rose an inch bodily with his intention.

"I think it's very nice of you, papa."

"Nice of me! An old hulks like me?... I guess it's nice of her to let

me.... We'll make out all right. Will you come to the wedding?" he

concluded with a laugh.

"Of course--and I'm so glad for you, really glad, papa. I hope

Josephine'll make you very happy."

And she kissed her father.

On her way back to the city Milly laughed aloud several times with

amusement mingled with relief. "Who would have thought it--and with such

a scarecrow!" She stopped at the _Star_ to tell Jack the news. They had

lunch together and laughed again and again at "love's young dream."

"He won't be lonely now!" Milly said.

"I suppose he had to have some woman attached to him," her husband

mused; "when a man has reached his age and has had 'em about always--"

"Well, I like that!" Milly pouted.

"Anyway, that let's us out," was the final comment of both upon the

approaching nuptials of Horatio.

It was not the only surprise that the little old lady's death provided

the young couple with. It was discovered that she had made a will, and,

what was still more wonderful, that she had really something to will!

Various savings-bank books were found neatly tied up with string in her

drawer below a pile of handkerchiefs. The will said, after duly

providing for the care of her grave, "To my beloved granddaughter, I

give and bequeath the residue of my estate," which upon examination of

the bank-books was found to be rather more than three thousand dollars

all told.

"To me!!" Milly almost shouted when her father read the slip of paper to

her. She was divided in her astonishment between surprise that there

should be any money left, and that the little old lady, who had fought

her all her life, should give it all to "her beloved granddaughter."

Bragdon could not appreciate the full irony of the situation.

"And why not to you?" he asked.

"You don't know grandma!" Milly replied oracularly, feeling that any

attempt to explain would be useless.--And, it may be added, Milly did

not know her grandmother, either. She could no more appreciate the

steady, stern self-denial that had gone to the gathering of that three

thousand dollars than she could the nature of a person who would nag for

twenty years the girl she meant to endow. That also belonged among the

puritan traits, as well as a sneaking admiration for the handsome,

self-willed, extravagant granddaughter.

"She ought to have left it to you," Milly said to her father.

"I guess she thought she had done enough for me already," Horatio said

lightly. "She knew about Josephine, too--expect she thought the green

parlor furniture would be the right thing for us. Josephine's likely to

appreciate that more'n you, Milly!"

Milly was amply content with this division.

* * * * *

Husband and wife lay awake for long hours that night, in a flutter of

excitement, discussing Milly's marvellous windfall.

"Just think," Milly cried, snuggling very close to her husband. "We'll

go abroad as soon as we can pack up, shan't we? And you will paint! And

all thanks to poor old grandma."

"It _is_ luck," the artist agreed thankfully.

"And I brought it to you--poor little me, without a _sou_!... Three

thousand ought to last a long time."

(Milly was invariably optimistic about the expansibility of money.)

"It'll be a good starter, anyway," her husband agreed, "and before it's

gone I ought to be making good."

So that night two very happy married people went to sleep in each

other's arms to dream of a wonderful future.

III

ON BOARD SHIP

At last Milly was tucked up in a steamer chair beside her artist

husband, on board the old _Augusta Victoria_, bound for Europe, that

exhaustless haven of romance where with or without an excuse all good

Americans betake themselves when they can....

The last few weeks had been exciting ones. It had begun with Horatio's

wedding to the homely bookkeeper, which Milly dutifully attended with

her husband. In spite of the very handsome rug that they had sent the

couple, Mrs. Horatio preserved a cold demeanor towards her husband's

daughter, as if she still suspected the young woman of designs upon

Horatio and had married him for the sole purpose of protecting him for

the future from this rapacious creature. Milly, quickly perceiving the

situation, mischievously redoubled her demonstration over poor Horatio,

who was visibly torn between his loyalties.

"Lord, what a sour face she has!" Milly commented to her husband, when

they had left the bride and groom. "Poor old Dad, I hope she'll let him

smoke!... Why do you suppose he married her?"

"To have some one to work for," Bragdon, who was not without a sense of

humor, suggested.

"He might at least have found somebody better looking."

"She looks capable, at any rate."

Milly made a face. She did not like this appreciation of another woman's

capability by her husband....

Then came the farewell visits of old friends, who all wished the two

venturers great good luck and sadly prophesied they would never return

to the city by the lake. Milly was tearful over their departure, but a

delirious week in New York that followed did much to efface this

sentimental grief. Jack kept finding old friends at every corner, who

welcomed him "back to civilization" uproariously, and Milly felt fairly

launched on her new career already. A very good-natured Big

Brother-in-law took them to Sherry's for dinner, and, charmed by his new

sister, spontaneously offered to increase their small hoard by another

thousand, with the promise of still more help, in case their "stake" ran

out before the two years of Europe they planned had brought results.

Finally an old college acquaintance of Jack's, who had made his début in

literature successfully and was engaged to provide a woman's magazine

with one of his tender stories with a pronounced "heart interest,"

promised to secure the illustrations for Bragdon. "If I can catch on,"

the artist told his wife, "it means--anything. Clive Reinhard turns out

one of his sloppy stories every six months, and they are all

illustrated."

Altogether when they set sail they calculated their resources, if

carefully managed, could be made to last three years. Three years of

Europe!... Milly had never looked so far ahead in all her life.

* * * * *

Milly, snugly tucked up on the leeward side of the deck, closed her eyes

as the boat rolled with heavy dignity, and thought. To be perfectly

frank her married life in the four-room flat on the outskirts of Chicago

had begun to pall on her. It seemed to lead nowhere. It had not been

very different from the lives of the little people about her, from what

she would have done and been if she had married Ted Donovan, say. Only,

of course, Jack was different from Ted, and with him it could not last

in the commonplace rut. They were merely little people, and very poor

little people, in the big whirl of the western city--with their hope.

Suddenly in the most romantic manner the Hope had taken shape--and

Milly, thanks to grandma's surprising gift, arrogated to herself the

whole credit of that. She did not pause to think what might have

happened to them if they had been obliged to continue in the rut. She

did not realize that already "love was not enough."

But now heigho for Venture and the New Life--the life of Art! Milly

still thought vaguely that according to Mrs. Lamereux it would mean

meeting a lot of interesting people, endless clever talk over delightful

meals in queer little French restaurants or in picturesque and

fascinating studios. "Art" was the next thing to money or fashion. If

one couldn't be awfully rich or a "social leader," the best thing was to

be artistic and distinguished, which brought you into contact with all

sorts of people, among them "the fashionables," of course. She meant

that her husband should be a successful painter, not a mere illustrator.

Of the real nature of Art and the artist's life Milly had no better

conception than when she first fell in love with Jack Bragdon. She knew

nothing of the artist's despairs and triumphs, his tireless labor to

grasp the unseen, his rare and exalted joys, his strange valuation of

life,--in short the blind, unconscious purpose of Art in the terrestrial

scheme of things. Nor perhaps did John Bragdon at twenty-eight. The

crust of _bourgeois_ standards is so thick in American life that it

takes a rare and powerful nature to break through, and Bragdon had not

yet begun to knock his way.... Milly's idea of Art, like most women's,

was Decoration and Excitement. When successful, it made money and noise

in the world, and brought social rewards, naturally. She hadn't married

Jack for that, or for any reason except because of his own adorable

personality, as she told him frequently. But now that she was married

she meant to make the most of the Gift. Jack was to be a Creator, and

she aspired to be embodied somehow in the creation and share its

profits.

At last they were launched: their marriage was really just

beginning.... She snuggled closer to her husband under the common

rug and murmured in his sleepy ear,--

"Isn't it great, Jack?"

"What?" (Drowsily.)

"Europe! Everything!... That we're really here on the steamer!"

"Um!"

"And you're going to be a great painter--"

"Perhaps." (Dubiously.)

"What shall you do first?"

"Don't know--find a cab."

"Silly!... Don't make fun of me.... Kiss me!... Do you mind, dear, going

down into the cabin and looking for my hot-water bottle," etc.

Bragdon recovered first from the Atlantic languor, and in the course of

his rambles about the ship discovered an acquaintance in the second

cabin,--a young instructor in architecture at a technical school, who

with his wife and small child were also on their way to Paris for the

winter. He brought Milly to see the Reddons where they were established

behind a ventilator on the rear deck. Milly thought they seemed forlorn

and pitied them. Mrs. Reddon was a little pale New Englander, apparently

as fragile as a china cup, and in her arms was a mussy and peevish

child. She confided to Milly that she expected another child, and Milly,

whose one ever present terror was the fear of becoming inconveniently a

mother, was quite horrified.

"How can they do it!" she exclaimed to Jack, when they had returned to

their more spacious quarters. "Go over second-class like that--it's so

dirty and smelly and such common people all around one."

"I suppose Reddon can't afford anything better."

"Then I should stay at home until I could. With a baby, too, and another

one coming: it's like the emigrants!"

"Reddon is a clever chap: he's been over before, a couple of years at

the Beaux Arts. I suppose he wants more work and didn't like to leave

her behind."

"She shouldn't have babies, then," Milly pronounced seriously, feeling

her superiority in not thus handicapping her husband in his career.

"It is tough," Bragdon admitted....

They saw a good deal of the Reddons during the voyage. They proved to be

not in the least down-hearted over their lot, and quite unaware of

Milly's commiseration. They were going to Paris for some desirable

professional work, as they might go to San Francisco or Hong Kong, had

the path pointed that way. They had babies because that was part of the

game when one married, and they brought them along because there was

nothing else to do with them. It was all very simple from the Reddon

point of view.

Milly considered Mrs. Reddon to be a "nice little thing," and they

became chummy. Marion Reddon was a college-trained woman, with much more

real culture than her husband or either of the Bragdons. She had read

her Greek and Latin and forgotten them, liked pictures and music and

books, but preferred babies when they came. Sam Reddon was a

high-spirited American boy. He had never meant to study architecture and

he hadn't intended to marry or to teach; but having done all these

things he still found the world a merry place enough. He played the

piano a little and sang Italian songs in an odd falsetto and roamed over

the ship in disreputable corduroys, which he had preserved from his

student days in Paris, making himself thoroughly at home in all three

cabins.

They talked Paris, of course, about which Reddon knew a great deal more

than any of the others.

"Where are you going to live? In the Quarter?"

Mrs. Kemp had given Milly the address of an excellent pension near the

Arc, at which Sam Reddon expressed a frank disgust.

"Americans and English--the rotten _bourgeoisie_--why don't you stay in

New York?" He figuratively spat upon the proprieties, and Milly was

bewildered. "An _apartement meublée au cinquième_, near the _Boul'

'Mich_ for us, eh, missus?"

Milly had heard that the "Latin Quarter" was dirty, and not "nice." None

of her Chicago friends ever stayed there.

"You'll come and call on us, won't you?" the young man said with

pleasant mockery. "Nobody will know, but we won't lay it up against you

if you don't."

Milly thought he was "fresh" and tried to snub him, but her manner only

provoked Reddon the more.

"What's your husband trying to paint for? There are two thousand nine

hundred and ninety-nine other chaps like him in Paris, and he'll just be

the three thousandth, who thinks he's going to make his fortune painting

rich people's portraits. I'd rather break stone than try to live by

paint."

"And how about building summer villas for a living?" Bragdon queried.

"Well," the young man replied with a grin. "You see I don't--I can't get

any to do!"

It was pleasant enough to joke about the arts, but Milly didn't expect

to see much of the Reddons once they were launched in the fascinating

life of Paris. She was becoming a little bored with them already, with

their sloppy unconventionality and with ship life in general. Most of

the first-cabin passengers, she discovered, were from Chilicothe, Ohio,

or similar metropoli of the middle west, and as ignorant as she of what

was before them.

But when they sighted the green shores of Normandy, her enthusiasm

revived at a bound. As they came into the harbor, the gray stone houses

with high-pitched red roofs, the fishing smacks with their dun-colored

sails, even the blue-coated men on the waiting tender had about them the

charm of another world. They were different and strange, exciting to the

thirsty soul of the American, so long sodden with the ugly monotony of a

pioneer civilization. From the moment that the fat little tender touched

the steamer, amid a babble of tongues, Milly was breathless with

excitement. She squeezed her husband's arm, like an ecstatic child who

had at last got what it wanted. "I'm _so_ happy," she chirped. "Isn't it

all wonderful,--that we are really here, you and I?"

He laughed in superior male fashion at her enthusiasm, and stroked his

small mustache, but in his own way he was excited at sight of the

promised land.

"Hang on tight," he said to her, as they began the ticklish descent to

the tender, "or it will be still more wonderful."

Milly tripped over the long, unsteady gangway towards the Future, the

great adventure of her life. There beyond, in the smiling green country

with the old gray houses, lay mysterious satisfactions that she had

hungered for all her life,--Experiences, Fame, and Fortune--in a word

her Happiness.

IV

BEING AN ARTIST'S WIFE

But it wasn't so different after all! As Sam Reddon had predicted, the

Bragdons went to live in the Étoile quarter,--in a very respectable

hotel-pension on the Rue Galilée. It was so much healthier in that

quarter, every one said, more comfortable for a wife, who must be left

to herself for long hours each day. They had lost sight of the Reddons

from the moment they entered the Paris train, for the Reddons, having

second-class tickets, were forced to wait for a slower train, which they

didn't seem to mind as it gave them a chance to see the little town and

lunch in a _cabaret_ instead of paying for an expensive meal on the

wagon-restaurant as the Bragdons did.

Bragdon enrolled himself among the seventy or eighty students at

Julian's and also shared a studio near the _Pont des Invalides_ with

another American, where he worked afternoons by himself. He plunged into

his painting very earnestly, realizing all that he had to accomplish.

But he lived the life of the alien in France, as so many of his

fellow-students did, preserving a stout Americanism in the midst of

Paris. Thanks to an education in an American college, after eight years'

study of foreign languages he could read easy French, but he could

scarcely order a meal in the language. And he did not try to learn

French, like most of the young Americans "studying" in Paris. What was

the use? he said. He did not intend to live his life there. In truth, he

disdained the French, like the others, and all things French, including

most of their art. His marriage had emphasized this Americanism. Like

most of his countrymen he regarded every Frenchman as a would-be seducer

of his neighbor's wife, and every Frenchwoman as a possible wanton; all

things French as either corrupt or frivolous or hopelessly behind the

times.

He inspired Milly to some extent with these ideas, though she was of a

more curious and trusting nature. He did not like to have her go out in

Paris even in the daytime unaccompanied, and as after the first weeks of

settlement in their new environment he was very busy all day, Milly

found herself more or less secluded and idle from nine in the morning

until five in the afternoon. It was worse than in the flat in Chicago!

For there she could go out when she pleased, and had some social

distraction. Here they knew almost nobody.

The hotel-pension on the Rue Galilée was frequented by the quieter sort

of middle-aged English, and a few American mothers with their children,

"doing Europe." Hardly a word of French was spoken within its doors, and

as far as possible the English habitués of the place had anglicized its

food. Milly found few congenial spirits there. She rather liked two

invalidish maiden ladies from Boston and went shopping with them

sometimes and to see the pictures in the Louvre. But the Misses Byron

were quite delicate and took their Paris in dainty sips.

Milly was far from sharing her husband's distrust of all things French,

but she supposed being a man and having been there before he must know

Paris. She would have liked to spend the lovely late autumn days on the

streets, drinking in the sights and sounds. Instead she went with Jack

to the picture galleries and did the other "monuments" starred in

Baedeker, conscientiously. But these did not stir her soul. The Louvre

was like some thronged wilderness and she had no clews. Life spoke to

her almost exclusively through her senses, not through her mind, which

was totally untrained. She was profoundly ignorant of all history, art,

and politics; so the "monuments" meant nothing but their

picturesqueness. She picked up the language with extraordinary avidity,

and soon became her husband's interpreter, when the necessity reached

beyond a commonplace phrase.

Occasionally as a spree they dined in the city at some recommended

restaurant and went to the theatre. But these were expensive

pleasures--indeed the scale of living was more costly than in Chicago,

if one wanted the same comforts; and by the end of the first winter

Bragdon became worried over the rapid inroads they were making on their

letter of credit. Every time he had to journey to the Rue Scribe he

shook his head and warned Milly they must be more careful if their funds

were to last them even two years. And he knew now that he needed every

day of training he could possibly get. He was behind many of these other

three thousand young Americans engaged in becoming great artists. Milly

thought their sprees were modest and far between, but as the dark,

chilly Paris winter drew on she was more and more confined to the stuffy

salon or their one cheerless room. She became depressed and bored. This

was not at all what she had expected of Europe. It seemed that Paris

could be as small a place as Chicago, or even less!

Sometimes, like a naughty child, Milly broke rules and sallied forth by

herself on bright days, wandering down the Champs Élysées, gazing at the

people, speculating upon the very pronounced ladies in the smart

victorias, even getting as far as the crowded boulevards and the

beguiling shops, which she did not dare to enter for fear she should

yield to temptation. Once she had a venture that was exciting. She was

followed all the way from the Rue Royale to the Rue Galilée by a man,

who tried to speak to her as she neared the pension, so that she fairly

ran to shelter. She decided not to tell Jack of her little adventure,

for he would be severe with her and have his prejudices confirmed. She

rather enjoyed the excitement of it all, and wouldn't have minded

repeating it, if she could be sure of escaping in the end without

trouble....

She read some books which her husband got for her,--those breakfast-food

culture books provided for just such people, about cities and monuments

and history. She was supposed to "read up" about Rome and Florence,

where they hoped to go in the spring. But books tired Milly very soon:

the unfamiliar names and places meant nothing at all to her. She decided

that, as in most cases, one had to have money and plenty of it to enjoy

Europe,--to travel and live at the gay hotels, to buy things and get

experiences "first hand." Evidently it was not for her, at present.

What she liked best in her life this first winter were the Sunday

excursions they made to Fontainebleau, St. Germain, Versailles, and St.

Cloud, and other smaller places where the people went. She liked the

mixed crowds of chattering French on the river boats and the third-class

trains,--loved to talk with the women and children in her careless

French, and watch their foreign domesticities.... Best of all, perhaps,

were the walks in the Bois with her husband, where she could see the

animation of the richer world. On their way back they would often stop

at Gagé's for cakes and mild drinks. All the pastry-shops fascinated

Milly, they were so bright and clean and _chic_. The efficiency of

French civilization was summed up to her in the _patisserie_. She liked

sweet things and almost made herself ill with the delectable concoctions

at Gagé's. That more than anything else this first year came to typify

to her Paris,--the people, men as well as women, who came in for their

cakes or syrop, the eagle-eyed _Madame_ perched high at the _comptoir_,

holding the entire business in her competent hand, and all the deft

girls in their black dresses, nimbly serving, _"Oui, Madame! Voici,

Monsieur! Que desirez-vous?"_ etc. She admired the neat glass trays of

tempting sweets, the round jars of bonbons, the colored _liqueurs_, the

neat little marble-topped tables. Apparently the _patisserie_ was a

popular institution, for people of all sorts and conditions flocked

there like flies.

"If you ever die and I have to earn my living," she would say jokingly

to her husband, "I know what I should do. I'd run a cake-shop!"

"You'd eat all the cakes yourself," Bragdon rejoined, tearing her away

after the eighth or tenth.

She went there by herself sometimes, and became good friends with the

reigning _Madame_, from whom she learned the routine of the manufacture

and the sales, as well as the trials and tribulations with _les

desmoiselles_ that the manager of a popular pastry shop must have. This

_Madame_ liked the pretty, sociable _Americaine_, always smiled when she

entered the shop with her husband, counselled her as to the choicest

dainties of the day, asked her opinion deferentially as that of a

connoisseur, and made her little gifts. Through the cake-shop Milly came

to realize the French, as her husband never did.

* * * * *

So the winter wore away somehow,--the period that Milly remembered as,

on the whole, the dullest part of her married life. Her first season in

Paris! They might read a little in one of the culture books in their

room after dinner, then would take refuge from the damp chill in bed.

Jack was less gay here in Paris than he had ever been in Chicago,

preoccupied with his work, frequently gloomy, as if he foresaw the

failure of his ambitions. Milly felt that he was ungrateful for his

fate. Hadn't he the dearest wish of his heart--and her, too?...

Something was wrong, she never knew quite what. The trouble was that she

had no job whatever now, and no social distraction to take the place of

work. She was the victim of ideas that were utterly beyond her

knowledge, ideas that must impersonally carry the Milly Ridges along in

their momentum, to their ultimate destruction.

"I ought to be very happy," she said to herself piously. "We both ought

to be."

But they weren't.

V

WOMEN'S TALK

One day something dreadful happened. Milly realized that she was to have

a child. A strange kind of terror seized her at the conviction. _This_,

she had felt ever since her marriage, was the one impossible thing to

happen: she had promised herself when she married her poor young artist

it should never be. One could be "Bohemian," "artistic"--light and

gay--without money, if there were no children. And now, somehow, the

impossible had happened, in this unfamiliar city, far away from friends

and female counsellors.

She wandered out into the street in a dull despair, and after a time got

on top of an omnibus with a vague idea of going off somewhere, never to

return, and sat there in the drizzle until she reached the end of the

route, which happened to be the Luxembourg. She recognized the place

because she had visited the gallery with her husband and also dined at

Foyot's and gone to the Odéon on one of their expansive occasions. She

walked about aimlessly for a while, feeling that she must get farther

away somehow, then wandered into the garden and sat down near one of the

fountains among the nurses. The sun had come out from the watery sky,

and it was amusing to watch the funny French children and the chattering

nurses in their absurd headdresses. The graceful lines of the old Palais

made an elegant frame for the garden, the fountains, and the trees.

Milly couldn't brood long, but after a time the awful fact would intrude

and pull her up with a start. What should she do? There was no room in

their life for a child, especially just now. She could never tell Jack.

What useless things women were anyway! She didn't wonder that men

treated them badly, as they did sometimes, she had heard.

A familiar small figure came towards her. It was Elsie Reddon, the

two-year-old girl she had played with on the steamer.

"Where's Mama, Elsie?" Milly asked. The child pointed off to a corner of

the garden near by, and Milly followed her small guide to the bench

where Marion Reddon was seated. The other child hadn't yet come, but

evidently was not far off. Milly felt strangely glad to see the little

woman again, and before long confided in her her own trouble.

"That's good!" Marion Reddon said quickly and with evident sincerity.

"You think so!" Milly cried pettishly. "Well, I don't."

"It simplifies everything so."

"Simplifies?"

"Of course. When you're having children, there are some things you can't

do--just a few you can--and so you do what you can and don't worry about

the rest."

"It spoils your freedom."

The pale-faced little woman laughed.

"Freedom? That's book-talk. Most people do so much more when they aren't

free than when they are. Sam says it's the same with his work. When he's

free, he does nothing at all because there's so much time and so many

things he'd like to try. But when he's tied down with a lot of work at

the school, then he uses every spare moment and gets something

done--'just to spite the devil.'"

She smiled drolly.

"You'll see when it comes."

Milly looked unconvinced and said something about "the unfair burden on

women," the sort of talk her more advanced women friends were beginning

to indulge in. Mrs. Reddon had other views.

"It's the natural thing," she persisted. "If I didn't want children for

myself, I'd have 'em anyway for Sam."

"Does he like babies?"

"Not especially. Few men do at first. But it trains him. And it makes a

hold in the world for him."

"What do you mean?"

"Children make a home--you have to have one. The man can't run away and

forget it."

She smiled with her droll expression of worldly wisdom.

"Sam would be in mischief half the time, if it weren't for us. He'd be

running here and there, sitting up all hours, wasting his energies

smoking and drinking with everybody he met--and now he can't--very

much."

"But--but--how about you?"

"Oh," the little woman continued calmly, "I don't flatter myself that I

could hold my husband long alone, without the children." She looked

Milly straight in the eyes and smiled. "Few women can, you know."

"I don't see why not."

"They get used to us--in every way--and want change, don't you see that?

They know every idea we have, every habit, every look good and

bad--clever men, especially."

"So we know them!"

"Of course! But women don't like change, variety--the best of us don't.

We aren't venturesome. Men are, you see, and that's the difference.... I

don't know that we mightn't become so if we had the chance, but we've

been deprived of it for so long that we have lost the courage, the

desire for change almost. What we know we cling to, isn't that so?"

She rose to capture the wandering Elsie.

"I must go back now to get Sam's _déjeuner_. Won't you come? He'd love

to see you--he often speaks about you and your husband."

Milly accepted readily enough. Although she did not agree with all that

Marion Reddon had said, she was soothed by the talk, and she had a

curiosity to see the Reddon _ménage_ in operation.

"So," she remarked, as they passed through the great gilt gate out to

the noisy street, "you think a woman should have children to keep a man

true to her."

"Tied to her," Marion Reddon emended, "and truer than he otherwise might

be. Then they are something in case the husband quits altogether--if he

turns out to be a bad lot. Most of them don't, of course; they are loyal

and faithful. But if they do, then a woman has the children, and that's

a world for any one."

"It makes it all the worse--if she has to support them without a man's

help."

"I wonder! It's the incentive that makes work effective, isn't it?"

They crossed the vivid stream of the boulevard, the child between them,

and mounted the hill towards the Panthéon.

"You know the time is coming when the woman will again be the

responsible head of the family in form as she is in fact to-day, and

then she will tolerate the man about her house just so long as she

thinks him a fit father, and take another if she prefers him as the

father of her children."

These anarchistic doctrines had a quaint absurdity on the lips of this

mild, little New England woman. Milly, not having lived in circles where

the fundamental relations of life were discussed with such philosophical

frankness, was puzzled. The Reddons must be "queer" people, she thought.

"So I tell Sam when he gets fussy that if he isn't careful, I'll

_flanquer la porte_ to him and run the shop myself."

"My!"

"I could, too, and he knows it--which is very salutary for him when he

gets uppish and dictatorial, as all men will at times."

"How could you?"

"You see I'm an expert taxidermist. I learned the thing vacations to

help an uncle out, who was a collector. I could always make a living at

it, and one for the kiddies too. That's the nub of the whole matter, as

we used to say in the country."

(Later, Milly remembered this talk in its every bearing, and had reason

to appreciate the profound truth of the last statement.)

"But you love your husband," Milly remarked as if to reassure herself.

"Of course I do, or I shouldn't be living with him and bearing his

children. But he needs me and the children rather more than I need

him--which is the better way."

* * * * *

The Reddons lived on the fourth floor back of an old lantern-jawed

building that tilted uphill behind Ste. Geneviève. Milly found the

stairs steep and dark and the odor of the old building anything but

pleasant. Marion assured her cheerfully that the smell was not

unhealthy, and as they kept their windows open most of the time they did

not mind it. The three little rooms of the _apartement meublée_ were

dingy, to say the least, but they looked out over the clock tower of

Ste. Geneviève into an old college garden.

"I make Sam get the coffee mornings, and I do the _déjeuner_; then an

old woman comes in to clean us up and cook dinner, if we don't go out.

Sam is rather given to the student cafes."

Mrs. Reddon moved dexterously within the confined limits of the closet

kitchen and continued to describe her household. "You see we pay only

thirty dollars a month for this place, and I cover the housekeeping

bills with another thirty or a little more."

"Heavens! How can you do it?" Milly gasped.

Their pension was over that amount apiece.

"It's cheaper than anything at home, and lots more fun!"

Presently Sam Reddon came whistling upstairs. He stopped in histrionic

surprise at sight of Milly.

"Not really, Milady! How did you find your way?"

"By accident."

"Ma," he sang out to his wife, "you aren't going to try one of your

historic stews on Mrs. Bragdon--our one fashionable visitor of the

season? Don't you think we had better make an occasion of this and

adjourn to Foyot's?"

"No," his wife replied firmly, "you've had too many 'occasions' this

month. One of my _déjeuners_ won't hurt Mrs. Bragdon or you either."

"Well," he submitted dolefully, "she can't drink that red ink you

mistakenly bought for wine, my dear.... I'll just fetch a bottle of

something drinkable."

"Hurry then! _Déjeuner_ is quite ready."

"You see," she observed placidly as Reddon departed, "he takes every

excuse to escape his work and make a holiday. It wasn't altogether

_you_, my dear!"

"It's so human!"

"It's so--Sam."

They had a very jolly luncheon, and afterwards, the old servant having

arrived to take charge of the apartment and Elsie, the two women

accompanied Reddon down the hill as far as the Sorbonne, where Marion

was attending a course of lectures. Milly gathered that the little

woman, in spite of her housekeeping, the one child on the spot, and

another coming, had many lively interests and saw far more of Paris,

which she loved, than Milly and her husband did. Both the Reddons lived

carelessly, but lived hard every minute, taking all their chances, good

and bad, of the minutes to come. It was a useful philosophy, but not one

that Milly wholly admired.

Late that afternoon Milly met her husband in a frame of mind much more

serene than it was before she saw the Reddons, and told him her

momentous news. He seemed more pleased and less disturbed by it than she

had supposed possible. A few days later he got the proof-sheets of

Reinhard's novel from the trunk, where they had been lying neglected,

and worked diligently on the foolish sketches required by the text to

illustrate the hero and heroine in their "tense" moments. He finished

the job before they left Paris in March, which was his male way of

acknowledging the new obligation that was on its way.

Milly thought there might be something in Marion Reddon's ideas about

men, after all.

VI

THE CHILD

After much debate Milly resolved to take a leaf from Marion Reddon's

philosophy and not let her "condition" make any difference in her

husband's plans; they should not give up the trip to Italy because of

possible dangers or discomforts to her. So they went to Florence and

afterwards to Rome, where the Reddons, having miraculously procured the

price of the railroad tickets at the last moment, joined them and gave

them lessons in how to see Europe as the Europeans see it. After a short

visit to Venice, the two families settled for the summer in a quiet

little village of the Austrian Tyrol, where the men tried to work, but

for the most part climbed mountains and drank beer instead. Then in

September they were back in Paris; the Reddons, who had exhausted all

their resources, went home to America for the year's grind in the

technical school; and the Bragdons settled in a small house in Neuilly.

And there early in October Milly's little girl came safely into the

world.

The small brick house with its scrap of garden and gravelled drive

proved to be the pleasantest of Milly's European experiences. It was the

most regularly domestic thing they did. The artist still went to the

school in the mornings, but worked at home in the afternoons. Milly

convalesced healthily and was properly absorbed in her baby and her

house, so that she did not feel lonely during her husband's absences in

Paris. Now that the child had got into the world, after all her fears

and forebodings, Milly was surprised at the naturalness of the event. As

Marion Reddon had said, it really simplified life. First consideration

must always be the Baby. Mdle. Virginia, as she was called after Milly's

mother, could do so little in this world at present that its parents'

ambitions were necessarily curbed. Milly was an admirably devoted

mother. She had always liked babies since she was a very little girl,

and she became wholly wrapped up in her own human venture. The summer

while the child was coming had drawn her very close to Marion Reddon,

with whom she had established a staunch bond of the woman's league,

offensive and defensive, against men. Marion, she felt, understood both

babies and men. Although she could not approve of all Marion's ideas

about the relations of the sexes, she admired the frank, brave, humorous

way in which she solved her own life.

Curiously enough, the child seemed to set Milly apart from her

husband--and from the world of men in general. Jack was no longer the

supreme emotional fact in her life. He was a good husband; she was more

conscious of that than ever before. He had been very tender and

considerate of her during her pregnancy, keeping up her spirits,

guarding her against folly, insisting on luxuries in their travels so

that she might be thoroughly comfortable. Thus he went to Gossensass,

not for his own profit and pleasure, but because the doctor they

consulted in Venice advised this secluded mountain resort. And when the

time of the birth came, he had been properly solicitous to see that she

was provided with the best attendance and care, and Milly knew vaguely

that he had spent lavishly of their hoard for this purpose. Milly was

sure he loved her, and what was also very important to her, she was sure

that he was "a good man,"--clean-minded and unselfish with a woman. Even

if he should come to love her less passionately than at the beginning,

he was the loyal sort of American, who would not let that fact furnish

him with excuse for errancy. And she loved him, of course--was "quite

crazy" about him, as she expressed it to Marion--and still believed in

his glorious future as a great painter.

Yet in some indefinable way he had sunk from first to second place in

her thoughts and might soon--who knows?--descend to third place in the

family triangle. As for all other men, like Sam Reddon and the artists

Jack brought to the house, they began to have for her the aspect of

coarse and rather silly beings, essentially selfish and sensual. "Oh,

he's just a man" became more and more in her mouth the mocking formula

to indicate male inferiority. Later it was, "They're all alike, men."

Thus the child brought out in Milly the consciousness of womanhood. She

was more the mother now than the wife, as was natural, but she had no

desire to become again the wife, paramount, to any man....

Meanwhile any one of those who came in upon them in the Neuilly house

and saw the father and mother grouped about the baby's bassinet would

say,--"An ideal young pair--has he much talent?"

This winter when she grew stronger Milly saw more of people than before.

She had two very capable servants and her little household ran smoothly,

though its cost made severe inroads on the "hoard." People she knew

drifted through Paris and were glad to lunch or dine in the little

Neuilly house. Sally Norton, who was now Mrs. Willie Ashforth, having

finally secured the elderly bachelor, was one of the first to come.

Sally laughed over the small house, over Milly's baby, over Milly as a

mother. She seemed determined to consider Milly as an irresponsible joke

in everything she did, but she was good-natured and lively as always,

and absorbed in her own plans. The Ashforths were building at Highland

Forest, a fashionable suburb outside of Chicago. Vivie had had a

"desperate affair" with a divorced man, etc., etc. Then the Gilberts

turned up unexpectedly one day, gracious and forgiving to Milly, and

apparently very much bored with themselves in Paris. Milly gave them a

nice little dinner, to which she had the smartest people she knew, which

was her way of "getting even" with Nettie for the snubs. Others came

more frequently as the spring influx of Americans arrived. Occasionally

Jack complained of the time these idle wanderers consumed, especially of

the precious afternoons lost when they came for luncheon and stayed

until tea. Milly thought it selfish of him to object to "her one

pleasure," now that "she was tied up in the house." Perhaps he felt so

too, for he said no more, and remained at the school to work when there

was likely to be company at the Neuilly house. On the whole he was

amiably indulgent with his wife, according to the best American

tradition.... So with friends, new and old, the second year of their

foreign life drew on towards summer. The baby flourished, and all was

well. They began to talk of summer plans.

A cheap place in the country was imperative, for by this time their

"hoard" had shrunk to a mite in three figures, and unless Big Brother,

who had been doing well in Big Business by all accounts, should remember

to send over additional funds as he had promised, they must return to

America in the autumn. Jack seemed loath to remind Big Brother of their

needs as Milly wanted him to do. Yet he must have more time: he was not

yet ready to get a living out of his pictures. He had not done enough

work, he said. Milly, who had expected that in a year or so he would

become an accomplished painter, was disturbed. She found the oils he was

doing,--the picture of her beside the baby's bassinet on the terrace,

for instance,--disappointing. It was distinctly less understandable and

amusing than his pen-and-ink work had been, and she felt a certain

relief when he did some comic sketches of the Brittany nurses to send to

a magazine. His hand had not lost the old cunning, if it had not gained

the new. Was it possible that her husband was not born to be a great

painter?... "I don't know about such things," she murmured into the

baby's ear. "Jack must decide for himself what's best."

She found it very convenient to have a husband to take upon himself

decision and responsibility, the two most annoying things in life.

VII

BESIDE THE RESOUNDING SEA

After much of the usual futile discussion they decided upon Klerac, a

little place on the coast of Brittany, which certain artists whom

Bragdon knew recommended. One American landscapist of established

reputation painted in that region, and around him had gathered a number

of his countrymen, in the hope of acquiring if not his skill at least

some of his commercial talent for self-exploitation.

So the end of June found them settled comfortably enough in the Hotel du

Passage just across the bay from Douarnenez, where the great one had his

studio. Milly, who usually had some difficulty in adjusting herself to a

new situation and missed the freedoms of her own house, took to Klerac

after the first few days of strangeness. The tiny village and the sleepy

country were utterly unlike anything she had ever seen or dreamed of

before. Green branches of broad chestnut trees overhung the dark water

of the little bay, and a sea of the deepest purple lay out beyond the

headland and boomed against the sand-dunes. The bay and the brilliant

sea were perpetually alive with the fishing craft, which were

picturesquely adorned with colored sails. And inland, only a few steps

from all this vivid coloring of the sea, green lanes meandered between

lofty hedges of thick blackberry vines. Always, even among the remoter

fields, there was the muffled murmur of the sea on the sand and the tang

of salt in the air. The queer, dark little people of the place still

wore about their daily tasks their picturesque costumes, and spoke

little French. One met them as in an opera, gathering kelp on the beach,

driving their little tip carts through the lanes, or singing beside

their thatched cottages.

From her first exploratory walks with her husband Milly returned quite

ravished by the quality of the place, its beauty of colored sea and

peaceful country, and the little gray houses sheltered by large trees.

Here she dreamed, in this fragrant salty air, they would have an

enchanting summer withdrawn from the world, and great deeds would be

done by her husband. "I could almost paint myself here," she said to

him, "it all looks so quaint and lovely." Jack liked the place, and

quickly set up his easel under the trees down by the stone pier where

the fishing-boats landed and where there was always a noisy, lively

scene. Milly idled near by in the sand with the baby. But the work did

not go fast. She thought that Jack must be fagged after the long winter

indoors, and urged him to rest for a while. They took to walking through

the lanes and along the beaches. They found little to say to each other;

sometimes she thought that she bored him and he would rather be alone.

They were suffering, naturally, from the too great intimacy of the past

two years. Neither had a spontaneous thought to offer the other,--no

reaction to arouse surprise and discussion. Milly could not comprehend

her husband's restless depression, his wish to be at something which he

could not formulate to himself clearly enough to do. She decided that he

was developing nerves and recommended bathing in the sea. When he took

to painting again, she would wander along the beach by herself and watch

the boys fishing for _écrevisses_ in the salt pools among the rocks, or

lay prone on the sand gazing at the colored sails on the dark sea. In

spite of all the peace and the beauty about her she was lonely, and

asked herself sometimes if this was what it meant to be an artist's

wife. Was this all? Was life to be like this for years and years?...

Their hotel was a rambling low building surrounded by high walls, with a

high terrace behind, from which there was a glimpse of the sea and which

was well shaded by branching plane trees. Here on calm summer nights the

dinner table was spread for the _pensionnaires_, who gradually arrived.

There were a few French, of a nondescript sort, a fat American from

Honolulu, who had been rolling about Europe since the Spanish War, in

which he had had some part. Then there was a Russian lady with two

children and a Finnish maid. She was already there when they arrived and

kept by herself, taking her meals at a little table with her oldest

child. This Russian, a Madame Saratoff, piqued Milly's curiosity, and

she soon became acquainted with her. One day when they happened to be

alone on the terrace, the Russian lady turned to her with a swift

smile,--

"You are American?" and when Milly admitted it, she added, "One can

always tell the American women from the English."

She spoke English easily, with the slightest sort of accent that merely

added distinction to whatever she said. Madame Saratoff was still young,

and though not a beautiful woman, had an air of privilege and breeding,

with something odd in the glitter of her eyes and the wolfish way in

which her curving upper lip revealed strong white teeth. She had a good

figure, as Milly had already recognized, and she dressed well, with

great simplicity. Milly felt interested in her, and the women talked for

an hour. Milly reported to her husband:--

"She's really a Baroness. Her husband is in the diplomatic service--off

in the east somewhere, and she's here alone with the children and her

maid. Don't you think she's interesting looking?"

The artist replied indifferently,--

"Not particularly--she has fine hands."

He seemed to have noticed that about her.

They quickly became better acquainted with Madame Saratoff, who, it

seemed, had been in Brittany before and knew the coast thoroughly. She

explained that the little hotel became unendurable later with the

_canaille des artistes_, and so she had rented an old _manoir_ in the

neighborhood, which was being put to rights for her. The next afternoon

the three walked to see the _manoir_ through a maze of little lanes. It

was a lovely old gray building with crumbling walls and had evidently

once been the seat of a considerable family. But only a half dozen rooms

were now habitable, and in the cracks of the great walls that surrounded

the garden thick roots of creepers twisted and curled upwards. From the

other end of the garden, through a break in the old hedge, there was a

glimpse of the sea, and in one corner was the ruin of a chapel

surmounted by an iron cross. Madame Saratoff showed them all the rooms,

into which men were putting some furniture she had bought in the

neighborhood--old _armoires_ and brass-bound chests of black oak as well

as some modern iron beds and dressing-tables. Milly admired the peaceful

gray _manoir_, and Bragdon observed as they retraced their way alone

through the lanes:--

"That woman has a lot of energy in her! It shows in her movements--she

has personality, character."

Milly had never heard him say as much as that about any other woman, and

she wondered how such large generalizations could be made from the fact

that a woman was fitting up an old house. She was vaguely jealous, as

any woman might be, that her husband should choose just those qualities

for commendation.

She went often thereafter to the _manoir_ while her husband was

painting, and marvelled at the ease and sureness with which the Russian

installed herself, her only helpers being the stupid peasants, who

seemed to understand no language but their own jargon.

"I'm used to driving cattle," the Russian explained to Milly with a

little laugh. "You see my father had estates in southern Russia, and I

lived there a good deal before I was married."

"They must be quite important," Milly reported to Jack. "They seem to

know people all over Europe."

"Oh, that's Russian," he explained.

"And Baron Saratoff is away on a most important mission."

"Absent husbands ought to be!"

"I don't believe she cares for him much."

"How can you tell that so soon?"

"Oh!" Milly replied vaguely, as if that were a point few women could

keep from other women.

As a matter of fact the Russian lady had given Milly some new and

startling lights upon marriage.

"I am," she told Milly in her precise speech, "what you call the 'show

wife.' I go to parties, to court--all rigged up,--you say rigged,

no?--dressed then very grand with my jewels. And I have children, see!"

She pointed to the healthy little Saratoffs playing in the garden. "My

husband goes away on his business--makes long journeys. He amuses

himself. When he comes back, I have a child,--_voilà_." She laughed and

showed her white teeth. "But I have my vacations sometimes, too, like

this."

Milly thought that the Russian type of marriage must be much inferior to

the American, at least the Chicago variety, where if there was any going

away from home, it was usually the wife who went, and she confided this

opinion to Jack, who said with a laugh:--

"Oh, you can never understand these foreigners. She's probably like

every one else.... But I'd like to paint her and get that smile of

hers."

"Why don't you ask her?"

"Perhaps I will one of these days."

* * * * *

The hotel gradually filled up. The great painter had come and with him

his satellites, chiefly young American women, who "painted all over the

place," as Bragdon put it. The long _table d'hôte_ under the plane trees

was a cheerful if somewhat noisy occasion these summer nights, with the

black, star-strewn canopy above. They all drank the bottled cider and

talked pictures and joked and sang when so moved. Even if the spirit was

somewhat cheaply effervescent, like the cider, there was plenty of talk,

clashing of eager ideas, and Milly liked it even more than Bragdon. He

seemed older than the other artists, perhaps because he was married and

less given to idle chatter. The great man singled him out for

companionship after the first week, and gave patronizing praise to his

work.

"You are still young," he said, with a sigh for his own sixty years.

"Wait another ten years and you may find something to say."

Jack, repeating these words to his wife, added,--"And where do you

suppose we'd be if I should wait another ten years? On the street."

Tell an American to wait ten years in order to have something to say!

"He's jealous," Milly pronounced. "You're going to do something stunning

this summer, I just know it."

"How do you know it?" he asked teasingly.

"Because we can't wait ten years!"

"Um," the artist sighed, "I should think not."

VIII

THE PICTURE

Just how it came about Milly never remembered, but in the weeks that

followed it was arranged that Jack should do the Russian lady's

portrait. Milly flattered herself at the time that she had produced this

result. Madame Saratoff came rarely to the hotel after she was installed

in her old _manoir_, but she often drove to the beach for her bath and

took Milly home with her for luncheon. And Jack would join them late in

the long afternoon for tea. On one of these occasions the affair was

settled.

Bragdon decided to do the figure out of doors in a corner of the ruined

garden wall with a clustering festoon of purple creeper above and a

narrow slit of sea in the distant background. Against the gray and green

and purple of the wall he placed Madame Saratoff, who was tall, with a

supple, bony figure. It was for him a daring and difficult composition.

The first afternoon, while the figure was being lined in with charcoal,

Milly was much excited. She tried to keep quite still, but Madame

Saratoff persisted in making little jokes and impertinent comments upon

the artist. She did not seem to feel the importance of the event. Milly

thought to herself, "How wonderful if he should do a really stunning

picture and have it in the Salon next season!" and she said to herself,

"Portrait of the Baroness Saratoff by John Archer Bragdon." That would

be a start towards fame!

But the start was scarcely perceptible those first days. Milly could

make nothing of the blurred canvas and was depressed. Jack seemed more

intent on watching the lithe figure, with the mottled flesh tones, the

steel-blue eyes, the mocking mouth than in putting brush to canvas. When

Milly complained of his dawdling, the Baroness remarked with a curl of

her lips,--

"How do you expect an artist to work with his wife hanging over his

brushes and counting every stroke?"

Milly pretended to be hurt and ran off to the other end of the garden.

She asked her husband on their way back if she were really in the way,

and though he laughed at her question and considered the Russian woman's

remark as merely one of her rather feline jokes, Milly did not come the

next day. She said the baby was sick, and needed her attention. It was

several days before she returned to the _manoir_, and then because Jack

made a point of it. She was astonished at the progress which he had

made. The picture had suddenly leaped into life.

"See!" the Russian remarked, indicating the canvas with a slow sweep of

her long, thin fingers. "The painter has done all that without his

wife's help."

Milly resented the joke. But it was true that in these few days the

picture had grown surprisingly: the pose of the tall figure, the

background was all firmly worked in, and he had begun to define the

features,--the perilous part. Already something of the subtle mockery of

the Russian woman's expression was there. Milly turned away. For the

first time she felt outside her husband's world and in the way.

Presently, in spite of the Baroness's protests, she took little Paul

Saratoff to the beach. When her husband came in at the hotel just in

time for dinner and expressed surprise that she had not returned to the

_manoir_ for him, she said coldly,--

"Oh, I didn't care to--I didn't want to interrupt."

"Anna expected you back to tea."

"I guess not."

Bragdon gave her a swift glance, but said nothing. This was a new aspect

of his wife, and it evidently puzzled him. He was too much absorbed by

his picture, however, to give much heed to anything.

* * * * *

Latterly another American had joined the circle around the dinner table

on the terrace,--a long, lanky young man who had been in the navy during

the late war and was now engaged in the production of literature. That

is, he contributed profusely to those American magazines with flaming

covers stories of love and adventure in strange seas,--the highly

seasoned bonbon entertainment for the young. He was southern by birth

with a pronounced manner towards women. And Milly found him attractive.

Roberts and the fat Hawaiian wit had many encounters that kept the table

stirred. To-night they were discussing the needs of the artist

nature,--and "temperament." That was a term not much in vogue in the

Chicago of Milly's time, but it seemed to occupy endlessly the talkers

about the table at the Hotel du Passage. Milly never understood exactly

what was meant by "having a temperament," or the "needs of the artistic

temperament" except vaguely that it was a license to do flighty things

that all reasonable Chicago folk would deplore.

To-night the Hawaiian was maintaining his favorite thesis,--that the

first duty of the artist was to himself, to preserve and make effective

his "temperament." Modern life, especially in America, he held, made

_bourgeois_ of us all. The inevitable ruin of the artist was to attempt

to live according to the _bourgeois_ ideal of morality. (That was

another term which puzzled Milly always,--_bourgeois_. These young

artists used it with infinite contempt, and yet she concluded shrewdly

that the people she had known best and respected all her life would have

to come under this anathema. To be healthy and normal, to pay one's

bills and be true to husband or wife, was to be just _bourgeois_.

According to that standard Jack was _bourgeois_, she supposed, and she

was glad of it, and yet a little afraid at the same time, because it

seemed to mark him out for artistic ineptitude.) But the fat man was

talking heatedly, and Milly was listening.

"In our society artists have no chance to experiment in life, to perfect

their natures untrammelled by public opinion, as the artists of old

did." (And he cited a lot of names, beginning, of course, with Benvenuto

and including Goethe, but Milly was not interested in these historical

cases. It was the immediate application of the principle she was waiting

for.)

"In those days," some one said, "artists were content to live in their

own class like actors and had no social ambitions."

"And much better for them, too!" the Honolulu man put in.

"How about Leonardo and Petrarch?" the great artist queried from his end

of the table, and then for a few moments the conversation got off into

the question of the social position of artists in the renaissance and

their relation to their patrons, which bored Milly, but the Hawaiian

brought it back to his point.

"So that's why we have no real creators to-day in any of the arts," he

asserted. "They're merely a lot of little citizens who daub canvass to

support a wife and a respectable house or pay the butcher's bill with

fluffy stories about silly women and impossible heroes." (This, Milly

thought, was a raw stab at young Roberts. She wondered how men could say

such things to one another and still remain friends.) "They have

bank-accounts and go to dinner-parties."

To which the story-teller retorted when he got his chance:--

"What you fellows always mean by 'living' is messing around with some

woman who isn't your own wife. A good many of our modern citizens manage

to live their own lives that way, and what does it do for them?"

Milly approved.

"That's just the trouble: society damns them and finishes them if they

don't behave like proper _bourgeois_. Take the case of----" and he cited

an instance of a young artist who was having much newspaper notoriety

over his passional experiments. "Women kill art, anyway," he concluded

with a growl.

Thereat Roberts' southern blood was touched, and he launched into a

glowing sentimental eulogy of Woman as the Inspirer of Men towards the

Noblest Things, and incidentally of the peace and the purity of

marriage. Milly liked what he said, although it seemed to her rather

florid in phrasing, and she felt an instinctive hostility towards the

fat gentleman from Honolulu, whom she suspected of disgusting

immorality. (Later in New York she was astonished to learn that Roberts

had had a very scandalous divorce from a wife, while the Hawaiian lived

a laborious and apparently upright life, supporting a mother, as a

newspaper correspondent. She learned then that men's expressed views had

very little to do with their conduct, and that an ideal was often merely

the sentimental reaction from experience.)

Just as Milly, thinking she heard Virginia cry in the room above,

slipped away from the table some one said,--

"A man who has anything to do in the world will never let a woman stand

in his way. If he does, he is soft, and that's the end of him."

Milly felt moved to put a word in here in behalf of her sex, but the

child's cry came more loudly and as she left she heard her husband ask

mildly,--

"And how about the children?"

"Oh, the kids--that's woman's business," the fat man replied carelessly.

"Pass the cigarettes, will you," and the talk went off somewhere

else....

Children were not all "woman's business," Milly felt indignantly. She

had surprised her pretty little maid Yvonne in a lonely lane one

moonlight night, in company with a tall man, who did not look like a

Breton. She had reported the fact to her husband, with her suspicions as

to the tall man, observing,--"Men are so horrid!" to which Jack had

merely laughed easily. She had scolded him for his frivolity, also

scolded Yvonne, who cried, yet somehow seemed to smile through her

tears.

To-night when her husband came up for bed, she asked seriously,--

"You don't believe all that stuff Steve Belchers was saying, do you?"

"What stuff?"

"About artists and women."

Bragdon yawned and laughed. Milly came close to him and put her arm

about his neck.

"You don't feel that your temperament is ruined by marriage, do you?"

"Never knew I had one before," he replied jokingly.

"Because you know if you ever want your freedom, you can have it."

"Thanks."

"If you need that sort of experience, I shan't stand in your way," she

concluded in a heroic burst....

Nevertheless she was glad that her husband had shown no symptoms

hitherto of this dangerous "temperament" and was content to be as

_bourgeois_ as the best. All the time there was growing in her a sense

of sex distinction, and a dislike, or rather disapproval, of men as a

whole. God, she was convinced, as the Southerner had said, had meant the

perfect type to be Woman, rather than Man.

IX

THE PARDON

One day the noisy chatter at the mid-day meal was interrupted by the

terrific splutter and throbbing of a motor-car. Those were still the

days when touring cars with strangely clad occupants were less familiar,

even on French roads, than they have since become, and the machines

announced themselves from afar by their ponderous groans. Very few cars,

indeed, got down to this secluded Brittany village which was reached by

only one road of the third class that penetrated the little peninsula

from Morlaix, a number of miles away to the north.

So every one left the table and crowded to the terrace wall to observe

the arrivals. As a dusty, becapped and begoggled figure got down from

the seat beside the driver, Milly exclaimed excitedly, "Why, it's Roy

Gilbert!" and ran towards the courtyard. The car finally disgorged

Nettie Gilbert and her uninteresting fourteen-year-old daughter. They

came in for luncheon, and their story was soon told. Paris was hot, and

in despair of dispelling Roy's thickening ennui at his European exile,

which threatened to terminate their trip, Mrs. Gilbert had induced her

husband to charter the car for a tour of Normandy and Brittany. Having

done all the north-coast watering-places and remembering that the

Bragdons were staying at this little place "with a funny name," they had

decided to make them a call. Roy Gilbert ate copiously and denounced

hotels, food, and the people, while Milly and Nettie Gilbert talked

Chicago and Baby.

"We want to see a '_Pardon_,'" Mrs. Gilbert announced at last, "and

we've come to take you and your husband with us."

It was the season of that famous Brittany festival, so Baedeker said,

and they had seen some evidences of it in the little villages through

which they had passed. Did Milly know of a good one? The Gilberts were

as æsthetically lazy as they were weak in French, and of course quite

helpless in Brittany, whose peasants seemed to them dirty baboons with a

monkey language. Milly quickly recalled that some of the artists had

been talking of the famous _Pardon_ at Poldau, a little

fisher-settlement at the extreme tip of the western coast, where the

costumes were said to be peculiarly rich and quaint. She had wanted to

visit it with Jack, but he had become so much absorbed in his new

picture that they had given up the idea. And there was Baby--she did not

like to leave her.

"Yvonne will do all right," her husband urged. "Better take the

chance--I'll look after Virgie."

So after much encouragement, though with misgivings, Milly consented to

accompany the Gilberts in their car for a couple of days and show them

the glories of the Brittany countryside.

"I owe Nettie so much," she explained privately to her husband, by way

of apology. "I can't very well refuse--and they are so helpless, poor

dears!"

"You'll have a bully time," he replied encouragingly. "Don't worry about

anything. I'll watch Yvonne like a cat."

"And telegraph me instantly if anything goes wrong."

"Of course.... Don't hurry back if they should want you to go farther.

It'll be good for you."

"Oh, not more than two days--I couldn't."

She did not give a thought to the Russian woman, or to anything but the

baby. (Afterwards she became convinced that the whole plan had been

arranged with skilful prescience by the wicked Baroness in order that

she might have the artist to herself these few days....)

* * * * *

The departure in the freshness of the August morning was a great event.

Every one in the hotel, including the _patron_ in his cook's white

costume, the _patronne_, the grinning ape of a waiter, all the artists,

and half the village gathered to watch the motor get under way. The

lumbering ark of a car was laden with bags and trunks and bundles, for

the Americans meant to be comfortable. Then Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert, their

natural amplitude swollen by their dust-coats, goggles, and veils,

mounted with stately complacency to their respective seats, and Milly

tucked herself into a corner. Then the ratlike French chauffeur

attempted to crank the engine, and perspiring, red in the face,

spluttering with oaths, made many desperate efforts to arouse his

monster. There were sympathetic murmurs from the audience. "Now he's got

her--ah--oh--no! Hang to it Pierrot, etc." Finally Pierre exploded in a

tragic _tirade_ to his employer, who sat stolidly through all the

rumpus, merely asking at the end, "What's he saying, Milly?"

"He can do nothing with the curséd beast," Milly abridged.

"That's evident," Gilbert remarked with cynical satisfaction.

"He thinks it's the water; he warned you not to come down here."

It seemed as if Milly's little trip was not to come off, after all, when

Bragdon, who had picked up some knowledge of the new machines in his

earlier singlestate, tipped up the hood and dove for the carburetor.

After a time he signalled to the Hawaiian to work the crank, and then

with a whir, a rumble, at last a clear bellow, the monster responded,

trembled, turned its snout up the narrow road, and disappeared. Milly

threw a kiss to her husband, who waved his hat in answer. He had saved

the day, and she was proud of him.

* * * * *

They had a wonderful time, in spite of Pierre and his balky car, bowling

along the winding, leafy roads not far from the sea, through little gray

stone villages whose inhabitants turned out _en masse_, including

children and animals, to witness their stately progress of ten miles an

hour. They got stuck once in a ford and had to be fished out with three

yoke of cream-colored bulls and a long ship's rope. That was about noon,

and they decided to lunch at the next inn, though it did not look

inviting. However, Milly's French coaxed a tolerable meal from the fat

housewife whom they discovered cleaning fish in the kitchen, and even

the stodgy Roy mellowed under the influence of fresh fish and a

drinkable bottle of wine which he and Milly discovered somewhere.

That evening, without further mishap, they rumbled into the hamlet of

Poldau. For the last hour they had seen signs of the coming _fête_. All

the natives, arrayed in their best clothes, were drifting westward to

the rocky cape, where, perched on a lonely cliff, was the tiny chapel,

"Our Lady of the Guard," which was the scene of the _Pardon_ on the

morrow. Before they entered Poldau night had fallen, and the long yellow

beams from the powerful _Phare_ glanced out across the sullen waters and

the level land. It was beneath this lofty lighthouse they slept, in a

clean, bare little inn. Milly, lying in her cushiony bed, could hear the

waves grumbling around the rocks, and watch the sweep of that golden

beam of light,--speaking to the distant passers-by upon the Atlantic,

warning them of the dangers of this treacherous coast....

It was the first time she had been separated from her family, and she

lay awake long hours, restless and sleepless, wondering whether Yvonne

would remember to pull up the extra blanket over Virginia before the

early morning dampness. And she thought about her husband, fleetingly,

contrasting him with Roy Gilbert, who seemed to have grown heavier in

mind as well as in person these last years. Roy was surely what the

artists called _bourgeois_, but she liked him--he was so kind and good

to Nettie. She felt at home, getting back to the familiar _bourgeois_

atmosphere of the Gilberts, where life was made easy and comfortable,

and you knew every idea any one would advance before the words were half

spoken....

Milly was wakened before dawn by the sound of a drunken quarrel beneath

her window. Some Breton evidently had begun to celebrate the _Pardon_

too soon; a shrill woman's voice broke the silence with unintelligible

reproaches. There was the sound of blows, of crashing glass, a scuffle,

sobs,--then silence, broken now and again by fresh sobs. Ah, those

men,--men!... The lamp in the _Phare_ went out: it was dawn. Milly fell

into a broken sleep.

* * * * *

The _Pardon_ itself, they all agreed, was wonderfully impressive and

picturesque, as Baedeker had promised. The little chapel on the cliffs

was stuffed with kneeling women in their stiff, starched coifs and heavy

velvet-trimmed skirts. The men, slinking up sheepishly, as always to

religious ceremonies, fell on their knees on the rocky ground all about

the chapel when the priests advanced with the sacred emblems, and prayed

vigorously with tight-closed eyes. The strangers, under the guidance of

the chauffeur, who maintained a supercilious disdain for these "stupid

Brittany pigs," took their position at the apex of the cliff, where they

could see everything to advantage. The Gilbert girl kodaked the kneeling

throng, which distressed Milly; she thought the people might resent it,

but they paid no attention to the Americans.

Her own eyes were filled with unaccountable tears. The symbols of the

Catholic religion always affected her in this way; while Nettie Gilbert

stared rather disapprovingly at the superstitious ceremony. In spite of

its quaint mediævalism, it seemed to Milly quite human,--the gathering

together of suffering, sinning human beings around the gray chapel on

the storm-beaten coast--"Our Lady of the Guard"--their prayers, the

absolution granted by the robed priests, and the going forth to another

year of trials and temptations, efforts and sins.... Just below the

chapel, withdrawn only a few feet from the religious ceremony, was a

cluster of tents, sheltering hurdy-gurdys, merry-go-rounds, cook-shops,

and cider--plenty of cider. A few indifferent males, bedecked in their

short coats brightly trimmed with yellow braid, were already feasting,

even while the host was being elevated above the kneeling throng. But

most of the people, with reverently bent heads and murmuring lips,

received the sacrament, kneeling around the gray chapel. It was solemn

and moving, Milly thought, and she wished that Jack might have had the

experience....

"Baedeker says," Roy Gilbert pronounced in her ear, in the midst of the

ceremony, "that there must be Spanish blood among these people because

their costumes show Spanish designs.... They all look like Irish or

monkeys to me."

Milly smiled responsively to him.

"The costumes are lovely, aren't they?"

The crowd of women worshippers had burst forth from the chapel: there

was a swarm of white and black figures over the rocky headland. The

faces beneath the broad white caps did not seem to Milly monkeylike.

They were weather-beaten and bronzed like their coast, but eager and

smiling, and some of the younger ones quite bonny and sweet. And the

young men sidled up to the young women here as elsewhere in the world.

Milly was full of the spirit of forgiveness that the ceremony had

taught: men and women must mutually forgive and strive to do better. She

said this to Nettie Gilbert, who seemed only moderately impressed with

the semi-pagan scene.

They went down the hill to the booths, which were already thronged with

a noisy crowd of eating and drinking peasants, and straightway became

too evil-smelling for the Americans.

"If the ladies like this barbaric show," the chauffeur confided to

Gilbert, "there is an even larger one to be seen a day's run farther

north on the coast at the celebrated shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré."

So they went on that afternoon to "the other show," as Gilbert expressed

it. Milly's doubts were quickly overborne: they must have her longer now

that she was with them; she could return any time if necessary by rail;

they would telegraph that evening, etc. And they set forth hopefully

again in search of the picturesque. The larger _pardon_ proved

disappointing, less religious and characteristic, more like a country

fair. The next afternoon they meant to return to Klerac, in time for

dinner, but the car balked and finally gave out altogether. All Pierre's

ingenuity, as well as his heartfelt curses, availed nothing, and they

had to abandon it. They drove to the nearest railroad station, which

proved to be many kilometres distant, and waited there half a day for a

train.

Milly left the Gilberts at Morlaix. They were bound for Paris, and

judging from Roy Gilbert's remarks they would shortly be on their way

back to America and "some decent living." Four months of Europe and

strange beds was all he could endure at a stretch. Milly laughed at his

complaints. The way the rich spent their money had always seemed to her

a little stupid. If she and Jack had the Gilberts' money! She mused of

all the exciting freedom they could get out of it, while the little

one-horse trap she had hired at the station rattled her over the hard

road towards Klerac.

She had enjoyed her trip greatly, yet after the five days' absence she

was eager to get back and see her child. She even looked forward to the

noisy Hotel du Passage, with its cluttered table of talkative artists

and her own two small rooms. As she had said to Nettie Gilbert, "I'm

something of a cat and like my own garret best," even if it were a

traveller's garret. And though she had liked being with the Gilberts,

going over old Chicago times with Nettie, and had enjoyed the car and

the luxurious, easy way of travelling, she suspected that long contact

with these good people would be boresome. They were so persistently

occupied with how they should sleep and eat, with all their

multitudinous contrivances for comfort, with fear of the dust or of

getting tired, that they had little energy for other things. She decided

that the Gilbert sort made a fetich of comfort and missed most of the

landscape of life in their excessive attention to the roadbed. Perhaps

that was what clever folk meant by being _bourgeois_. If so, she hoped

that she should never be _bourgeois_ to the extent the Gilberts were.

Thus Milly, in a properly contented frame of mind, urged the peasant lad

to whip up his lazy pony and get her more quickly home to her family.

X

THE PAINTED FACE

There was a midsummer silence about the hotel in the early afternoon

when Milly arrived. Yvonne, so the _patronne_ informed her, had taken

the baby to the dunes, and thither Milly, without stopping to change her

dusty dress, set out to find her. She descried her little Brittany maid

on the sands safely above tide-water, and by her side a small white

bundle that made Milly's heart beat faster.

Virginia received her returned mother with disappointing indifference,

more concerned for the moment in the depth of the excavation into the

sand which her nurse was making for her benefit. Milly covered her with

kisses, nevertheless, while Yvonne explained that all had gone well,

"_très, très bien, Madame_." _Bébé_, it seemed, had slept and eaten

as a celestial _bébé_ should. They were looking for Madame yesterday,

but Monsieur had not been disturbed even before the _dépêche_

arrived.... And Monsieur was at his work as usual at the other madame's

_manoir_.

After a time Milly, wearied of bestowing unreciprocated caresses upon

her daughter, left her to the mystery of the hole in the sand and

sauntered up the beach. Dotted here and there in the sunlight at

favorable points along the dunes were the broad umbrellas of the

artists, who were doubtless all busily engaged in trying to transfer a

bit of the dazzling sunlight and dancing purple sea to their little

squares of canvases. To Milly this ceaseless effort to comment on nature

had something of the ridiculous,--perhaps supererogatory would be a

better word. It was so much pleasanter to look at the landscape, and

easier! Offshore the dun-colored sails of the fishing fleet dipped and

fluttered where the sturdy men of Douarnenez were engaged in their task

of getting the herring from the sea. That seemed to Milly more real and

important in a world of fact. Such a view betrayed the _bourgeois_ in

her, she suspected, but according to the Hawaiian all women were

_bourgeois_ at heart.

After a time her feet turned into one of the lanes, and she followed

unconsciously the well-known path until the gray wall of the ruined

_manoir_ came in sight. She paused for a moment--she had not meant to go

there--then impulsively went forward, crossed the empty courtyard, and

finding the garden door ajar pushed it open. The drowsy midsummer

silence seemed to possess both house and garden. The place was deserted.

In the corner stood the painter's large canvas on the easel, with the

brushes and palette on the bench by its side, as if just abandoned, and

one of Madame Saratoff's large hats of coarse straw.

Milly went over and examined the picture. It was almost finished, in

that last stage where the artist can play with his creation, fondly

touching and perfecting infinitesimal details, knowing that the thing

has really been "pulled off." And it was triumphantly done! Even to

Milly's untutored eyes, the triumph of it was indubitable. There the

Russian stood on her thin, lithe haunches, her head tipped a little back

disdainfully as in life, the open mouth about to emit some cold

brutality, the long curving lip daringly drawn up over the teeth,--the

look of "one who eats what she wants," as she herself had said one day.

Milly shuddered before the insolence of the painted face. She felt that

this was one of the few creatures on the earth whom she feared and

hated. Instinctively she made a gesture as if she would deface the

portrait. The face seemed to answer her with a sneer,--"Well, and if you

did, what good would that do? Would he love _you_ any more for that?" it

said, and she paused.

Even the background and all the details were admirably conceived and

rendered,--the crumbling, lichened wall, in cold gray, with the gnarled

root of the creeper and the wreath of purple blossoms, in sharp contrast

to the pallor of the face and the bold assurance of the figure. The

light fell across the canvas, leading down to a slab of vivid purple

water in the far distance. There was nothing pretty or affected or

conventional about the painting: it was life caught and rendered with

the true boldness of actuality. Milly, gazing in fascination at the

creation of line and color and light, realized that here was the work of

a new man, totally unknown to her. Its maker was no youthful pupil,

stumbling at his set task. No dabbler, this one, no trivial illustrator

or petty drawing-room amuser, but a man who had found within himself

something long sought for. She shuddered and turned away. So that was

what it was to be an Artist! She understood, and she hated it,--Art and

all the tribe of artists big and little. In this strange woman, whom

chance had put in his way, he had seen what she had not noticed, and he

had projected what he saw. He was able to divine the soul of things

beneath their superficial appearance, and he was able, exultantly, to

project in material form that hidden meaning for others to see and

understand, if they would. And that was what an artist, a real artist,

was for.

Naturally Milly did not analyze closely her own troubled mind. Here was

plain evidence of her husband's being in which she no longer had the

smallest share. She had been slightly jealous, more than she would

admit, that other time at the beginning of the portrait because of

Jack's absorption in his subject and his work. Her egotism had been

wounded. But that was trifling compared with the present feeling. In

this completed creation she no more existed than the fly which rested

for a moment upon the painted canvas. His creation had nothing

whatsoever to do with her. And something deeper than egotism, far deeper

than jealousy, rose from the depths of her nature in antagonism--a

sex-antagonism to the whole affair. Her husband had a new mistress--not

necessarily the Russian woman, for that idea had not yet come to

her--but his Art. And he might follow this mistress whither she

beckoned,--to poverty, defeat, or victory,--unmindful of her and her

child, forgetting them like idle memories in the pursuit of his blind

purpose. It was a force inimical to her and antagonistic to all orderly

living, as the Hawaiian had said,--a demonic force which rises in the

midst of society to give the lie to all the pretences men make to

themselves and call "civilization."

Milly hated it, instinctively. Jack must paint no more such pictures for

love or for money, if their life were not to end in disaster. Did he

know what he had done with this Russian woman?... Where were they,

anyway?

She looked up at the silent _manoir_. The green blinds were drawn to

shut out the western sun. Milly knew the long, high room with its

timbered ceiling which Madame Saratoff had restored and furnished in

English style, and where, for the most part, she lived. The two were

there together now--she was sure of it. A new and fiercer emotion swept

Milly towards the house: she would discover them in their shame, in

their cruel selfishness. But she stopped on the stairs, suffocated by

her passion. She felt their presence just above her with a physical

sense of pain, but she lacked the strength to go forward. A terrible

sense of weakness in face of her defeat made her tremble. Her heart was

broken, she said; what mattered it now what they did. She had no doubts:

all was revealed as if she saw them in each other's arms. No man could

have discovered the secret of a woman's inmost being, if she had not

voluntarily yielded to him the key....

After a time she left the place, slipped out through the garden-gate

into the green field behind the _manoir_ and wandered unseeingly along

the hedge, and at length flung herself down on the ground, sobbing. She

was alone, so utterly alone. The one in whose hands she had put her

whole life had betrayed her and deserted her. It was worse than death.

They were there in that dim, silent room, in the utmost intimacy, and

she lay here outside, robbed and abandoned.... She rose to get farther

away from the place, when she heard steps approaching on the other side

of the hedge. Kneeling close to the ground, she could see through the

thick roots of the hedge and watch the two as they came up the lane. It

was her husband and the Russian woman. They were not closeted in the

house. She had been wrong. They had been for a stroll after his work,

and were coming back now for their tea, silently and companionably, side

by side. For the merest moment Milly had a sense of relief: it might not

be true what her heart had said, after all. But almost at once she knew

that it made no difference just what their relations were or had been.

She could read their faces as they came slowly towards her,--the Russian

woman's slanting glance from covered eyes of hateful content as she

looked at the artist. The "one who eats what she wants!"... They walked

very slowly, as if full of thoughts and weary with the day. Bragdon's

head was high, his glance fell far off across the fields, his mind

intent on something within, his brow slightly contracted as in stern

resolve. He was pale, and he seemed to his wife older, much older than

she remembered. He was a man, not the careless boy she had married so

many, many years ago, and her heart tightened anew with intolerable

pain.... His glance fell to the expectant face of his companion, and

both smiled with profound intimacy as at a meeting where words are

needless.... Milly's hand grasped the prickly vines of the hedge, and

she held herself still until they had passed. No, it made no difference

to her now what they thought or did. She knew.

She fled. She heard her name faintly through the din of rushing blood in

her ears, but she stumbled across the field out into the lane, towards

the sea. There followed the most atrocious hour Milly was ever to know

in her life, while she wandered aimlessly to and fro on the lonely

beach. Her marriage was over--that thought returned like a mournful

chant in the storm of blind feeling. Latterly she had come to take her

husband as a matter of course, as a part of the married life of a woman.

Though she had said to Nettie Gilbert, "I'm as much in love with Jack as

when I married him," and believed it, she hadn't been. But now that

another had dared to take her husband from her, if only for a few days

or hours, she was outraged. She persistently focussed her whole anguish

upon this foreign creature with her vampire mouth, though she might know

in the depth of her heart that her quarrel was not with the Russian or

any woman, but with fate.... She kept repeating to herself,--"He doesn't

love me any longer. He loves her--_her_!... He will be hers now--for a

time. They are all like that,--artists. It's _bourgeois_ to love one

woman always." So Womanhood from the beginning of time seemed outraged

in her person.

Had she not joyfully "given up everything for him," as all women did for

the men they loved? (Even her worldly prospects when she married the

penniless artist began to seem to her brighter than they really had

been.) Had she not, at any rate, given _herself_ to him, first, and

always, and only? And borne him a child in pain and danger? What more

could woman do? He was her debtor for eternity, as every man was to the

woman who gave herself to him. And four years had barely passed before

another one plucked him easily from her side!... Women were cheated

always in the game of life because of their hearts, fated unfairly in

the primal scheme of things. Marion Reddon knew--she probably had had

_her_ experiences. But at least she had the child.

On that note her heart became centred, and she hurried back to the hotel

and began aimlessly to gather her clothes together and throw them into

the trunks. She must take her child and leave at once. She did not want

to see him again.... But where should she go--how? Jack always arranged

everything for her: she couldn't even make out a time-table or buy a

railroad ticket. Marriage had made her dependent--she would have to

learn.

At this moment Bragdon entered the room. His face still wore the stern

expression she had noted, which gave him the look of age.

"What are you doing?" he demanded abruptly.

"Don't you see--packing!"

"What for?... I've cabled home for more money--I'm going to stay here

and paint."

She thought swiftly to herself that the Other had persuaded him to do

what he had refused to do for her. She made no reply, but continued to

put things blindly into the trunk.

XI

CRISIS

When two human beings--above all when man and wife--meet at such tense

moments, one of Virgil's beneficent clouds should descend upon them,

hiding all, and they should be wafted apart to remote places, there to

abide until once more a sense of the proportion and the harmony in this

mundane system has taken possession of them, and they have become, if

not gods and goddesses, at least reasonable human beings. The least the

historian can do under the circumstances is to imitate Virgil and draw a

merciful veil between the cruel battle-field and all profane eyes. The

more so as few of the hot words then uttered, the sharp agony displayed,

the giving and the baring of wounds have any real effect upon the

result. What is done counts, and that is about all, always.

It might be that afterwards Milly derived some deeper understanding of

herself, of her husband, and of the married way of life from the agony

she then experienced. It might be that the young artist, headstrong in

his first triumphant mastery, the first achievement of his whole being,

entertained, for some moments at least, the idea of cutting the knot

then and there and taking his freedom which he had surrendered at the

altar, choosing what might seem to him then spiritual life instead of

prolonged death. The blood was in his head, the scent of delirious deeds

which he knew now that he could do. But he was an honest and loyal young

American, no matter what he had done: he could not hesitate long. One

glance at the sleeping form of his small child, dependent upon him for

the best in life, probably settled the matter.

In the calm of the still night it _was_ settled--and by him.

* * * * *

The little colony of the Hotel du Passage were genuinely concerned over

the hurried departure of the Bragdons, who were much liked. All--but

one--were at the pier that September morning to wish them farewell and

good luck and much happiness. It was understood that family matters had

recalled them unexpectedly to the States. Too bad! Bragdon was a

promising chap, the great painter pronounced at _déjeuner_,--willing to

work, intelligent, with his own ideas. Had any one seen Madame

Saratoff's portrait? He had kept very quiet about that--perhaps it had

not come off. Well, he needed years of hard work, which he wouldn't get

in America, worse luck. With a sigh he went to his day's task of

completing the thirty-seventh edition of the well-known

landscape,--"Beside the Bay at Klerac," with a fresh variation of four

colored sails on the horizon instead of three....

And meanwhile the slow train to Paris was carrying a man, who having

climbed his hill and looked upon the promised land from afar, must turn

his back for the present upon all its glories and await Opportunity.

XII

"COME HOME"

It is a long and tiresome journey in a second-class compartment from the

farther end of Brittany to Paris, even under the best of circumstances.

To Jack Bragdon and Milly, with the vivid memory of their personal wreck

on that rocky coast, it was monotonously painful. They dared not ask

each other,--"What next?" At first Milly thought there could be no next,

though she was really glad not to be making this journey alone with her

child, as she had expected to do. To the man who sat in the opposite

corner with closed eyes and set lips, it seemed to matter little for the

present what the next step was to be.

Happily an impersonal fate settled this for them. Bragdon found at the

bankers in Paris an answer to his appeal for funds. The curt cable read,

without the aid of code,--"Come Home." Probably that would have been the

wisest thing to do in any case. But it would have meant a hard struggle

with himself to turn his back so quickly upon the promised land of

accomplishment. Now it was beyond his power to do otherwise, unless he

were willing to force Milly and the child to starve on what he could

make. If that had ever been possible, it surely was not any longer.

So with the last of the hoard he bought their tickets, and all three

sailed for New York on the next steamer.

PART FOUR

REALITIES

I

HOME ONCE MORE

There was no one at the dock to greet them.

"Your friends come down to see you off," Milly reflected sadly, while

Bragdon was struggling with the inspectors, "but they let you find your

way back by yourself!"

It was hot and very noisy,--the New World,--and no one seemed to care

about anything. As they made their way up town through the crowded

streets, Milly felt it must be impossible for human beings to do more

than keep alive in this maelstrom. The aspect of an American city with

its savage roar, especially of New York in the full cry of the day's

work, was simply terrifying after two years of Europe. There was

something so sordidly repellent in the flimsily furnished rooms of the

hotel where they went first, that she shed a few tears of pure

homesickness. She longed to take the first train west; for the sights

and the sounds of Chicago, if no gentler, were at least more familiar.

She did not know what they would do; husband and wife had not discussed

plans on the homeward voyage or referred in any way to the future, both

shrinking from the quaking bog that lay between them. Now their course

must speedily be settled. When Bragdon went out after establishing them

in their hotel, Milly felt curiously like a passenger on a ship whose

ticket had been taken for her and all arrangements made by another. All

she could do, for the present at least, was to wait and see what would

happen....

Towards evening Big Brother came in with Jack and welcomed her back

nonchalantly. He had the New York air of unconcern over departures and

arrivals, living as he had all his life in a place where coming and

going was the daily order of life. He declared that Milly had grown

prettier than ever and accepted his niece with condescending

irony,--"Hello, missy, so you came along, too? Made in France, eh!" and

chuckled over the worn joke.

It seemed that no business disaster had caused him to send his cable

recalling them. Business, he declared, was "fine, fine, better all the

time," in the American manner. It was merely on general principles that

he had cabled,--"Come home." Two years was enough for any American to

spend out of his own country, even for an artist. Eying his younger

brother humorously, he remarked,--"I thought you'd better get a taste of

real life, and earn a few dollars. You can go back later on for another

vacation.... I saw Clive Reinhard on the Avenue the other day. He wanted

to know how you were getting on. Think he has another of his books on

the way. You'd better see him, Jack. He's a money-maker!"

The artist meantime sat cross-legged on his chair and stroked his

mustache meditatively, saying nothing. Milly glanced at him timidly, but

she could not divine what he was thinking of all this. As he was

American-trained he was probably realizing the force of Big Brother's

wholesome doctrine. He could not live on other people's bounty and

prosecute the artist's vague chimeras. Having taken to himself a wife

and added thereto a child, he must earn their living and his own, like

other men, by offering the world something it cared to pay for.

Nevertheless, there smouldered in his eyes the hint of another

thought,--a suggestion of the artist's fierce egotism, the desire to

fulfil his purpose no matter at whose cost,--the willingness to commit

crime rather than surrender his life purpose. It was the complement of

the Russian's "will to eat," only deeper, more impersonal, and more

tragic. But nowadays men like Jack Bragdon neither steal nor murder--nor

commit lesser crimes--for the sake of Art.

Instead he inquired casually,--"Where is Reinhard staying? The same

place?" and when his brother replied,--"He's got an apartment somewhere

up town. They'll know at the club--he's been very successful,"--Bragdon

merely nodded. And the next morning after breakfast he sallied from the

hotel, leaving Milly to dispose of herself and the child as she would.

For several days she hardly saw him. He had caught the key of the New

World symphony at once, and had set forth on the warpath without losing

time to get the Job. He succeeded without much difficulty in securing

the illustration of Reinhard's new piece of popular sentimentality and

also put himself in touch with the editors of a new magazine. Then to

work, not his own work, but the world's work,--what it apparently

wanted, at least would pay well for. And the first step was to find some

sort of abiding-place where his family could live less expensively than

at the hotel. Here Milly came in.

The one distinct memory Milly kept of that first year in New York was of

hunting apartments and moving. It seemed to her that she must have

looked at a cityful of dark, noisy rooms ambitiously called apartments,

each more impossible than the others. (As long as they lived in New York

she never gave up the desire for light and quiet,--the two most

expensive luxuries in that luxurious metropolis.) They settled

temporarily in a small furnished "studio-apartment" near Washington

Square, where they were constantly in each other's way. Milly called it

a tenement. Although they had done very well in two rooms in Brittany,

it required much more space than the studio-apartment offered to house

two people with divided hearts. So in the spring they moved farther

up-town to a larger and more expensive apartment without a studio.

Bragdon preferred, anyway, to do his work outside and shared a studio

with a friend. Milly regarded this new abode as merely temporary--they

had taken it for only one year--and they talked intermittently of

moving.

Once or twice Jack suggested going to one of the innumerable suburbs or

abandoning the city altogether for some small country place, as other

artists had done. It would be cheaper, and they could have a house,

their own patch of earth, and some quiet. Milly received this suggestion

in silence. Indeed they both shrank from facing each other in suburban

solitude. They were both by nature and training cockneys. Milly

especially had rather perch among the chimney-pots and see the

procession go by from the roof than possess all that Nature had to

offer. And they were still young, she felt: much might happen in the

city, "if they didn't give up." But she said equivocally,--

"Your work keeps you so much in the city; you have to see people."

What he wanted to reply was that he should abandon all this job-hunting

and live lean until he could sell his real work, instead of striving to

maintain the semblance of an expensive comfort in the city by selling

himself to magazines and publishers. But Milly would not understand the

urgency of that--how could she? And what had he to offer her now for the

sacrifice he should be demanding? What would she do with the long,

silent days in the country, while he worked and destroyed what he did,

only to begin again on the morrow at the ceaseless task, with its

doubtful result? If there had been real companionship, or if the flame

of their passion had still burned, then it might not have proved an

intolerable exile for the woman....

They did as others would do under the circumstances--hung on in the

great city as best they could, in the hope of a better fortune soon,

living expectantly from day to day. Each month the city life seemed to

demand more money, and each month Bragdon sank deeper into the mire of

journalistic art. Worst of all they got into the habit of regarding

their life as a temporary makeshift, which they expected to change when

they could, tolerating it for the present as best they could,--like most

of the workers of the world. Bragdon, at least, knew what he hoped for,

impossible as it might be,--a total escape from the debauching work he

was doing. Milly hoped vaguely for a pleasanter apartment and an easier

way of living,--more friends and more good times with them.

One of the first familiar faces Milly met in the bewildering new city

was Marion Reddon's. She came across the little New Englander standing

at the curb of a crowded street, a child by either hand, waiting until

the flow of traffic should halt long enough to permit crossing.

"Marion!" Milly cried, her eyes dancing with delight on recognizing her.

A smile came to the white, tired face of the other woman,--the smile

that gave something of beauty to the plain face. "Are you living here,

too--in New York?"

"Yes, since the autumn."

"Has Sam given up his teaching?"

"I made him resign."

They drew to one side where they could hear each other's voices. The

sight of Marion Reddon brought back happy days,--at least they seemed to

be happy now, by comparison. Marion continued:--

"The teaching was too easy for him--besides he didn't like it. And if a

man doesn't like that work, he's no business doing it. He had much

better get out into the fight with other men and make his way against

them."

"But you loved the college town: you must have hated to leave it."

"It was what I had known all my life, and it was a good sort of place to

bring the children up in--pleasant and easy. But New York is the big

game for men, of course. I wanted Sam to go up against it."

She smiled, but Milly might divine something of the courage it had taken

for Marion to launch her small craft in the seething city. They talked a

little longer, then parted, having exchanged addresses.

"Take the subway," Marion called out as she plunged into the street,

"get out when it stops, then walk! Don't forget!" and with a last smile

she was gone.