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One Woman's Life

by Robert Herrick · English · Gutenberg #19656 · 602,884 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: One Woman's Life

Author: Robert Herrick


        
Release date: October 29, 2006 [eBook #19656]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19656

Credits: Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Mary Meehan and
        the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
        http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE WOMAN'S LIFE ***




Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Mary Meehan and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net









                            ONE WOMAN'S LIFE

                            BY ROBERT HERRICK

                 AUTHOR OF "TOGETHER," "THE HEALER," ETC.




New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1913

Set up and electrotyped.  Published February, 1913.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.




CONTENTS


PART I

THE WEST SIDE

        I. The New Home

       II. A Victory for Milly

      III. Milly goes to Church

       IV. Milly completes her Education

        V. Milly Experiments

       VI. Milly Learns

      VII. Milly sees More of the World

     VIII. Milly's Campaign

       IX. Achievements


PART II

GETTING MARRIED

        I. The Great Outside

       II. Milly Entertains

      III. Milly becomes Engaged

       IV. Congratulations

        V. The Crash

       VI. The Depths

      VII. Milly tries to Pay

     VIII. Milly renews her Prospects

       IX. Milly in Love

        X. Milly Marries


PART III

ASPIRATIONS

        I. The New Home

       II. A Funeral and a Surprise

      III. On Board Ship

      IV. Being an Artist's Wife

       V. Women's Talk

      VI. The Child

     VII. Beside the Resounding Sea

    VIII. The Picture

      IX. The Pardon

       X. The Painted Face

      XI. Crisis

     XII. "Come Home"


PART IV

REALITIES

        I. Home once More

       II. "Bunker's"

      III. More of "Bunker's"

       IV. The Head of the House

        V. A Shock

       VI. The Secret

      VII. Being a Widow

     VIII. The Woman's World

       IX. The New Woman

        X. Milly's New Marriage


PART V

THE CAKE SHOP

        I. "Number 236"

       II. At Last, the Real Right Scheme

      III. Chicago Again

       IV. Going into Business

        V. Milly's Second Triumph

       VI. Coming Down

      VII. Capitulations

     VIII. The Sunshine Special




PART ONE

THE WEST SIDE




I

THE NEW HOME


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

Her father, a little man, with one knee bent against the unyielding,
newly varnished front door, glanced up apprehensively at the figures
painted on the glass transom above. In that block of little houses, all
exactly alike, he might easily have made a mistake. Reassured he
murmured over his shoulder,--"Yes--212--that's right!" and he turned the
key again.

Milly frowning petulantly continued her examination of the dirty yellow
brick face of her new home. She could not yet acquiesce sufficiently in
the fact to mount the long flight of steps that led from the walk to the
front door. She looked on up the street, which ran straight as a
bowling-alley between two rows of shabby brick houses,--all low, small,
mean, unmistakably cheap,--thrown together for little people to live in.
West Laurence Avenue was drab and commonplace,--the heart, the crown,
the apex of the commonplace. And the girl knew it.... The April breeze,
fluttering carelessly through the tubelike street, caught her large hat
and tipped it awry. Milly clutched her hat savagely, and something like
tears started to her eyes.

"What did you expect, my dear?" Grandmother Ridge demanded with a subtle
undercut of reproof. The little old lady, all in black, with a neat
bonnet edged with white, stood on the steps midway between her son and
her granddaughter, and smiled icily at the girl. Milly recognized that
smile. It was more deadly to her than a curse--symbol of mocking age.
She tossed her head, the sole retort that youth was permitted to give
age.

Indeed, she could not have described her disappointment intelligibly.
All she knew was that ever since their hasty breakfast in the dirty
railroad station beside the great lake her spirits had begun to go down,
and had kept on dropping as the family progressed slowly in the stuffy
street-car, mile after mile, through this vast prairie wilderness of
brick buildings. She knew instinctively that they were getting farther
and farther from the region where "nice people" lived. She had never
before been in this great city, yet something told her that they were
journeying block by block towards the outskirts,--the _hinterland_ of
the sprawling city. (Only Milly didn't know the word _hinterland_.) She
had gradually ceased to reply to her father's cheerful comments on the
features of the West Side landscape. And now she was very near tears.

She was sixteen--it was the spring of '86. Ever since her mother's
death, two years before, the family had done "light housekeeping" in
three rooms in St. Louis. This 212 West Laurence Avenue, Chicago, was to
be her first home--this slab of a dirty yellow wall!

"There!" her father muttered with satisfaction, as, after a last twist
of key and thump of knee, he effected an entrance. Grandma Ridge moved
up the flight of steps, the girl following reluctantly.

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

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

"And it's light too, mother, isn't it?" He turned quickly from the
cavernous gloom of the rear rooms and pointed to a side window in the
hall where one-sixteenth of the arc of the firmament was visible between
the brick walls of the adjoining houses.

"The dining-room's downstairs--that makes it roomier," he continued,
throwing open at random a door. "There's more room than you'd think from
the outside."

Milly and her grandmother peered downwards into the black hole from
which came a mouldy odor.

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

"Why not?" Horatio retorted defensively. "You didn't expect a house on
the lake front, did you?"

Just what she had expected from this new turn in the family destiny was
not clear to herself. But ever since it had been decided that they were
to have a house of their own in Chicago--her father having at last
secured a position that promised some permanence--the girl's buoyant
imagination had begun to soar, and out of all the fragments of her
experience derived by her transient residence in Indianapolis, Kansas
City, and Omaha--not to mention St. Louis--she had created a wonderful
composite--the ideal American home, architecturally ambitious, suburban
in tone. In some of the cities where she had lived the Ridges had
tarried as long as three years, and each time, since she was a very
little girl in short dresses and had left Indianapolis crying over the
doll in her arms, she had believed they were permanently settled: this
was to be their home for always.

Her mother had had the same forlorn, homesick hope, but each time it was
doomed to disappointment. Always they had had to move on,--to make a new
circle of temporary acquaintances, to learn the ropes of new streets and
shops and schools all over again. Always it was "business" that did the
mischief,--the failure of "business" here or the hope of better
"business" somewhere else that had routed them out of their temporary
shelter. Horatio Ridge was "travelling" for one firm or another in drugs
and chemicals: he was of an optimistic and sanguine temperament. Milly's
mother, less hopeful by nature, had gradually succumbed under the
perpetual tearing up of her thin roots, and finally faded away
altogether in the light housekeeping phase of their existence in St.
Louis.

Milly was sanguine like her father, and she had the other advantage of
youth over her mother. So she had hoped again--overwhelmingly--of
Chicago. But as she gazed at the row of pallid houses and counted three
"To rent" signs in the cobwebby front windows opposite, she knew in her
heart that this was not the end--not this, for her! It was another
shift, another compromise to be endured, another disappointment to be
overcome.

"Well, daughter, what d'ye think of your new home?" Little Horatio's
blustering tone betrayed his timidity before the passionate criticism of
youth. Milly turned on him with flashing blue eyes.

"I think, my dear," her grandmother announced primly, "that instead of
finding fault with your father's selection of a home, you had better
look at it first."

Grandma Ridge was a tiny lady, quite frail, with neat bands of iron-gray
hair curling over well-shaped ears. Her voice was soft and low,--the
kind of voice which her generation described as "ladylike." But Milly
knew what lay beneath its gentle surface. Milly did not love her
grandmother. Milly's mother had not loved the little old lady. It was
extremely doubtful if any one had ever loved her. Mrs. Ridge embodied
unpleasant duties; she was a vessel of unwelcome reproof that could be
counted upon to spill over at raw moments, like this one.

"You'll like it first rate, Milly," her father continued robustly, "once
you get settled in it. It's a great bargain, the real estate man said
so, almost new and freshly painted and papered. It's close to the cars
and Hoppers'"--Hoppers' was the Chicago firm that had offered Horatio
his latest opportunity. "And I don't care about travelling all over
Illinois to get to my work...."

Curiosity compelled Milly to follow the others up the narrow stairs that
reached from the hall to the floor above. Milly was a tall,
well-developed girl for sixteen, already quite as large as her father
and enough of a woman physically to bully the tiny grandmother when she
wished to. Her face was now prettily suffused with color due to her
resentment, and her blue eyes moist with unshed tears. She glanced into
the small front chamber which had been decorated with a pink paper and
robin's-egg blue paint.

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

"It's a very nice home, Horatio--I'm sure you displayed excellent taste
in your choice," his mother replied.

"Pretty? ... It's just awful!" Milly burst forth, unable to control
herself longer. She felt that she should surely die if she were
condemned to sleep in that ugly chamber even for a few months. Yet the
house was on the whole a better one than any that the peripatetic Ridges
had thus far achieved. It was fully as good as most of those that her
acquaintances lived in. But it cruelly shamed Milly's expectations.

"It's perfectly horrid,--a nasty, cheap, ugly little box, and 'way out
here on the West Side." Somehow Milly had already divined the coming
degradation of the West Side. "I don't see how you can tell father such
stories, grandma.... He ought to have waited for us before he took a
house."

With that she turned her back on the whole affair and whisked down the
narrow stairs, leaving her elders to swallow their emotions while
inspecting the tin bath-tub in the closet bath-room.

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

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

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

Meantime she stood before the dusty window in the front room eyeing the
dirty street, dabbing the tears from her eyes with her handkerchief,
welling with resentment at her fate.

       *       *       *       *       *

Years later she remembered the fierce emotions of that dreary April day
when she had first beheld the little block house on West Laurence
Avenue, recalling vividly her rage of rebellion at her father and her
fate, the hot disgust in her soul that she should be forced to endure
such mean surroundings. "And," she would say then to the friend to whom
she happened to be giving a vivacious account of the incident, "it was
just as mean and ugly and depressing as I thought it.... I can see the
place now--the horror of that basement dining-room and the smells! My
dear, it was just common West Side, you know."

But how did Milly Ridge at sixteen perceive all this? What gave her the
sense of social distinctions,--of place and condition,--at her age, with
her limited, even if much-travelled experience of American cities? To
read this mystery will be to understand Milly Ridge--and something of
America as well.




II

A VICTORY FOR MILLY


The lease for the house had been signed, however, and for a five years'
term. The glib agent had taken advantage of Horatio's new fervor for
being settled, as well as his ignorance of the city. The lease was a
fact that even Milly's impetuous will could not surmount--for the
present.

Somehow during the next weeks the Ridge furniture was assembled from the
various places where it had been cached since the last impermanent
experiment in housekeeping. It was a fantastic assortment, as Milly
realized afresh when it was unpacked. As a basis there were a few pieces
of old southern mahogany, much battered, but with a fine air about them
still. These were the contributions of Milly's mother, who had been of a
Kentucky family. To these had been added here and there pieces of many
different styles and shades of modern inelegance. One layer of the
conglomerate was specially distasteful to Milly. That was the
black-walnut "parlor set," covered with a faded green velvet, the
contribution of Grandma Ridge from her Pennsylvania home. It still
seemed to the little old lady of the first water as it had been when it
adorned Judge Ridge's brick house in Euston, Pa. Milly naturally had
other views of this treasure. Somewhere she had learned that the living
room of a modern household was no longer called the "parlor," by those
who knew, but the "drawing-room," and with the same unerring instinct
she had discovered the ignominy of this early Victorian heritage. She
did not loathe the shiny "quartered oak" dining-room pieces--her
father's venture in an opulent moment--nor the dingy pine bedroom sets,
nor even the worn "ingrain" carpets, as she did these precious relics of
her grandmother's home.

Over them she fought her first successful battle with the older
generation for her woman's rights--and won. She directed the colored men
who were hired to unpack the household goods to put the green velvet
horrors in the obscure rear parlor. In the front room she had placed the
battered mahogany, and had just rejected the figured parlor carpet when
her grandmother came upon her unawares. The old lady had slipped in
noiselessly through the area door.

"My dear!" she remarked softly, a deceitful smile on her thin lips.
"Why, my dear!" Milly hated this tender appellation, scenting the
hypocrisy in it. "Haven't you made a mistake? I _think_ this is the
parlor."

"Of course it is the parlor," Milly admitted briskly, wheeling to meet
the cold gray eyes that were fixed on her.

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

"Because I am doing this to suit myself," the girl promptly explained.
"In _this_ house, I mean to have things suit _me_, grandma," she added
firmly. It was just as well to settle the matter at once.

"But, my dear," the old lady stammered, helpless before the audacity of
the revolt. "I'm sure nobody wants to cross you--but--but--where's the
carpet?"

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

"My dear--"

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

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

"Mildred, I'm afraid you are not quite yourself to-day," and she
retreated to the rear room, where in the gloom were piled her rejected
idols.

After an interval she returned to the fight, gliding noiselessly forth
from the gloom. She was a very small and a very frail little body, and
as Milly put it she was "always sneaking about the house like a ghost."

"I see that the kitchen things have not been touched, and the
dining-room furniture--"

"And they won't be--until I have this room to suit me.... Sam, please
move that desk a little nearer the window.... There!"

It was characteristic of Milly to begin with the show part of the
premises first and then work backwards to the fundamentals, pushing
confusion slowly before her. The old lady watched the colored man move
the rickety mahogany back and forth under Milly's orders for a few more
minutes, then her thin lips tightened ominously.

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

"He'll be all right if you don't stir him up," the girl replied with
assurance. She walked across the room to her grandmother. "See here,
grandma, I'm 'most seventeen now and big for my age--"

"Please-say 'large,' Mildred."

"Large then--'most a woman. And this is my father's home--and
_mine_--until he gets married again, which of course he won't do as long
as I am here to look after him.... And, grandma, I mean to be the head
of this house."

The old lady drooped.

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

"Grandma!" the girl flashed warningly.

"If I'm not wanted here--"

"You're not--now! The best thing for you to do is to go straight back to
the boarding-house and read your _Christian Vindicator_ until I'm ready
for you to move in."

"At the rate you are going it will be some days before your father can
have the use of his home."

"A week at least I should say."

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

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

So with a final shrug of her tiny shoulders the little old lady let
herself out of the front door, stealthily betook herself down the long
flight of steps and, without a backward glance, headed for the
boarding-house. Milly watched her out of sight from the front window.

"Thank heaven, she's really gone!" she muttered. "Always snooping about
like a cat,--prying and fussing. She's such a nuisance, poor grandma."

It was neither said nor felt ill-naturedly. Milly was generous with all
the world, liked everybody, including her grandmother, who was a
perpetual thorn,--liked her least of anybody in the world because of her
stealthy ways and her petty bullying, also because of the close watch
she kept over the family purse when Milly wished to thrust her prodigal
hand therein. She made the excuse to herself when she was harsh with the
old lady,--"And she was so mean to poor mama,--" that gentle, soft, weak
southern mother, whom Milly had abused while living and now adored--as
is the habit of imperfect mortals....

So with a lighter heart, having routed the old lady, at least for this
afternoon, Milly continued to set up the broken and shabby household
goods to suit herself. She coaxed the colored boys into considerable
activity with her persuasive ways, having an inherited capacity for
getting work out of lazy and emotional help, who respond to the
personal touch. By dusk, when her father came, she had the two
front rooms arranged to her liking. Sam was hanging a bulky steel
engraving--"Windsor Castle with a View of Eton"--raising and lowering it
patiently at Milly's orders. It was the most ambitious work of art that
the family possessed, yet she felt it was not really suited, and
accepted it provisionally, consigning it mentally to the large
scrap-heap of Ridge belongings which she had already begun in the back
yard.

"Well, daughter," Mr. Ridge called out cheerily from the open door, "how
you're getting on?"

"Oh, papa!" (Somewhere in the course of her wanderings Milly had learned
not to say "paw.")

She flew to the little man and hugged him enthusiastically.

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

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

"How do you like it, papa?"

Milly led the little man into the front room and waited breathlessly for
his approbation. It was her first attempt in the delicate art of
household arrangement.

"It's fine--it's all right!" Horatio commented amiably, twisting an
unlighted cigar between his teeth and surveying the room dubiously. His
tone implied bewilderment. He was a creature of habits, even if they
were peripatetic habits: he missed the parlor furniture and the green
rug. They meant home to him. Looking into the rear cavern where Milly
had thrust all the furniture she had not the courage to scrap, he
observed slyly,--"What'll your grandmother say?"

"She's said it," Milly laughed.

Horatio chuckled. This was woman's business, and wise male that he was
he maintained an amused neutrality.

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

"Oh, I've just begun, really! You don't know what time it takes to
settle a house properly."

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

"We haven't _anything_ fit to use--that's the trouble. We must get some
new things right away. I want a rug for this room first."

"Isn't there a carpet?"

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

Horatio retreated towards the door. But before they had reached the
boarding-house, the first advance towards Milly's Ideal of the New Home
had been plotted. The rug was settled. Milly was to meet her father in
the city at noon on the morrow and select one. Arm in arm, father and
daughter came up the steps,--charming picture of family intimacy.

"So nice to see father and daughter such friends!" one of the
boarding-house ladies observed to Grandma Ridge.

"Oh, yes," the old lady admitted with a chilly smile. She knew what
these demonstrations cost in cash from her son's leaky pockets. If she
had lived later, doubtless she would have called Milly a cunning
grafter.

Milly smiled upon the interested stranger, good humoredly, as she always
smiled. She was feeling very tired after her day's exertions, but
happily content with her first efforts to realize her ambition,--to have
"some place for herself." What she meant by having a place for herself
in the world she did not yet understand of course. Nor what she could do
with it, having achieved it. It was an instinct, blind in the manner of
instincts, of her dependent womanhood. She was quite sure that something
must happen,--a something that would give her a horizon more spacious
than that of the West Side.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meantime she ate the unappetizing food put before her with good grace,
and smiled and chatted with all the dreary spinsters of the
boarding-house table.




III

MILLY GOES TO CHURCH


The ugly little house was at last got to rights, at least as much so as
Milly's limited means permitted. Horatio's resources were squeezed to
the last dollar, and the piano came in on credit. Then the family moved
in, and soon the girl's restless gaze turned outwards.

She must have people for her little world,--people to visit with, to
talk to. From her doll years Milly had loved people indiscriminately.
She must have them about her, to play with, to interest, to arouse
interest in herself. Wherever she derived this social passion--obviously
not from Grandma Ridge--it had been and would always be the dominant
note of her life. Later, in her more sophisticated and more
introspective phase, she would proclaim it as a creed: "People are the
most interesting thing in life--just humans!" And she would count her
gregariousness as a virtue. But as yet it was unconscious, an animal
instinct for the herd. And she was lonely the first days at West
Laurence Avenue.

Everywhere the family had put foot to earth in its wanderings, Milly had
acquired friends easily,--at school, in church, among the
neighbors,--what chance afforded from the mass. She wept even on her
departure from St. Louis, which she had hated because of the light
housekeeping, at the thought of losing familiar faces. A number of her
casual friends came to the station to see her off, as they always did.
She kissed them all, and swore to each that she would write, which she
promptly forgot to do. But she loved them all, just the same. And now
that the Ridge destiny seemed to be settled with fair prospects of
permanency in this new, untried prairie city,--a huddle of a million or
more souls,--she cast her eager eyes about for the conquest that must be
made....

The social hegira from the West Side of the city had already begun: the
more prosperous with social aspirations were dropping away, moving to
the north or the south, along the Lake. Some of the older families still
lingered, rooted in associations, hesitant before new fashions, and
these, Milly at once divined, lived in the old-fashioned brick and stone
houses along the Boulevard that crossed West Laurence Avenue just below
the Ridge home. These seats of the mighty on Western Boulevard might not
be grand, but they alone of all the neighborhood had something of the
aristocratic air.

This spacious boulevard was the place she chose for her daily stroll
with her grandmother, taking the old lady, who had betrayed an interest
in a cemetery, up and down Western Boulevard, past the large houses
where the long front windows were draped with spotless lace curtains.
She learned somehow that the old-fashioned brick house, with broad eaves
and wooden pillars, belonged to the Claxtons. The grounds about the
house ran even to the back yards of the West Laurence Avenue
block,--indeed had originally included all that land,--for the Claxtons
were an old family as age went in Chicago, and General Claxton was a
prominent man in the state. She also knew that the more modern stone
house on the farther corner was occupied by the Walter Kemps; that Mrs.
Kemp had been a Claxton; and that Mr. Kemp was a rising young banker in
the city. How Milly had found out all this in the few days she had lived
in the neighborhood would be hard to explain: such information she
acquired unconsciously, as one does the character of the weather....

On the next corner north of the Claxton place was a large church, with a
tall spire, and an adjoining parish house. They were built of the same
cream-colored stone, which had grown sallow under the smoke, with
chocolate-brown trimmings, like a deep edging to a mourning
handkerchief. Its appearance pleased Milly. She felt sure that the best
people of the neighborhood worshipped here, and so to this dignified
edifice she led her father and grandmother the first Sunday after they
were installed in their new home.

It proved to be the Second Presbyterian Church. The Ridges were
orthodox, _i.e._ Congregational: the judge had been deacon in Euston,
Pa., and Mrs. Ridge talked of "sending for her papers" and finding the
nearest congregation of her old faith. But Milly promptly announced that
"everybody went to the Presbyterian church here." She was satisfied with
the air and the appearance of the congregation that first Sunday and
made her father promise to take seats for the family. The old lady,
content to have the wayward Horatio committed to any sort of
church-going, made slight objection. It mattered little to Horatio
himself. In religion he was catholic: he was ready to stand up in any
evangelical church, dressed in his best, and boom forth the hymns in his
bass voice. The choice of church was a matter to be left to the women,
like the color of the wallpaper, or the quality of crockery,--affairs of
delicate discrimination. Moreover, he was often out of the city over
Sunday on his business trips and did not have to go to church.

It was impossible that Milly, dressed very becomingly in her new gray
suit, should escape notice after the first Sunday. Her lovely bronze
hair escaped from her round hat engagingly. Her soft blue eyes looked up
at the minister appealingly. She had the attractive air of youth and
health and good looks. The second Sunday the minister's wife, prompted
by her husband, spoke to Mrs. Ridge and called soon after. She liked
Milly--minister's wives usually did--and she approved of the
grandmother, who had an aristocratic air, in her decent black, her thin,
gray face. "They seem really nice people," Mrs. Borland reported to her
husband, "but a very ordinary home. He travels for the Hoppers'. Her
mother was a southerner." (Milly had got that in somehow,--"My mother's
home was Kentucky, you know.")... So, thanks to the church, here was
Milly at last launched on the West Side and in a fair way of knowing
people.

She began going to vespers--it was a new custom then, during Lent--and
she was faithful at the Wednesday evening prayer meetings. The Borlands
had a daughter, of about Milly's age,--a thin, anæmic girl who took to
Milly's warmth and eagerness at once. As Milly succinctly summed up the
minister's family,--"They're from Worcester, Mass." To come from New
England seemed to Milly to give the proper stamp of respectability,
while Virginia gave aristocracy.

Mrs. Borland introduced Milly to Mrs. Walter Kemp after the service one
Sunday. Milly knew, as we have seen, that Mrs. Kemp had been a Claxton,
and that the general still lived in the ample mansion which he had built
in the early fifties when he had transferred his fortunes from Virginia
to the prairie city. They were altogether the most considerable people
Milly had ever encountered. And so when Eleanor Kemp called at the
little West Laurence Avenue house, Milly was breathless. Not that Milly
was a snob. She was as kind to the colored choreman as to the minister's
wife, smiling and good-humored with every one. But she had a keen sense
of differences. Unerringly she reached out her hands to the "best" as
she understood the best,--the men and women who were "nice," who were
pleasant to know. And Mrs. Kemp, then a young married woman of
twenty-seven or eight, seemed to the enthusiastic girl quite adorable.
She was tall and slender, with fine oval features and clear brown skin
and dark hair. Her manner was rather distant at first and awed Milly.

"Oh, you're so beautiful,--you don't mind my saying it!" she exclaimed
the first time they were alone in the Kemp house.

"You funny child!" the older woman laughed, quite won. And that was the
phrase she used invariably of Milly Ridge,--"That funny child!" varied
occasionally by "That astonishing child!" even when the child had become
a woman of thirty. There would always be something of the breathless,
impulsive child in Milly Ridge.

After that first visit Milly went home to arrange a tea-table like
Eleanor Kemp's. She found among the discarded remnants of the family
furniture a small round table without a leg. She had it repaired and set
up her tea-table near the black marble fireplace. The next time the
banker's wife came to call she was able to offer her a cup of tea, with
sliced lemon, quite as a matter of course, after the manner that Mrs.
Kemp had handed it to her the week before. Milly was not crudely
imitative: she was selectively imitative, and for the present she had
chosen Mrs. Kemp for her model.

For the most part they met at the Kemp house. The young married woman
liked her new rôle of guide and experienced friend to Milly; she also
liked the admiration that Milly sincerely, copiously poured forth on all
occasions. When Milly praised the ugly house and its furniture, she
might smile in a superior way, for she was "travelled," had visited "the
chief capitals of Europe,"--as well as Washington and New York,--and
knew perfectly well that the solid decoration of her library and
drawing-room was far from good style. The Kemps had already secured
their lot on the south side of the city near the Lake. The plans for
their new house were being drawn by a well-known eastern architect, and
they were merely waiting before building until Mr. Kemp should find
himself sufficiently prosperous to maintain the sort of house that the
architect had designed for a rising young western banker.

"Oh, dear," Milly sighed, "you will be moving soon--and there'll be
nobody left around here for me to know."

Eleanor Kemp smiled.

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

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

"I hope not. But papa seems perfectly content--he's taken a five years'
lease of that horrid house. I just knew it wasn't the right place as
soon as I saw it!"

The older woman laughed at Milly's despair.

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

Milly blushed happily. There was only one sort of something to happen
for her,--the right sort of marriage. Milly, as Mrs. Kemp confided to
her husband, was a girl with a "future," and that future could be only a
matrimonial one. Her new friend good naturedly did what she could for
Milly by putting her in the way of meeting people. At her own house and
her mother's, across the street, Milly saw a number of people who came
into her life helpfully later on. General Claxton was still at that time
a considerable political figure in the middle west, had been congressman
and was spoken of for Senator. Jolly, plump Mrs. Claxton maintained a
large, informal hospitality of the Virginia sort, and to the big brick
house came all kinds of people,--southerners with quaint accents and
formal manners, young Englishmen on their way to the wild northwest,
down-state politicians, as well as the merchant aristocracy of the city.
Thus Milly as a mere girl had her first opportunity of peeping at the
larger world in the homely, high-studded rooms and on the generous
porches of the Claxton house, and enjoyed it immensely.

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

For some time it remained the staple of her social existence,--that
sallow, cream-colored pile, in which the congregation had already so
shrunken by removals that the worshippers rattled around in the big
building like dried peas in a pod. Milly became a member of the pastor's
Bible class and an ardent worker in the Young Women's Guild. She was
looked upon favorably as a right-minded and religious young woman. She
had joined the church some years before, shortly after the death of her
mother. Her first religious fervor lasted rather more than a year and
was dying out when the family moved from St. Louis. Its revival at the
Second Presbyterian was of a purely institutional character. Although
even Grandma Ridge called her a "good girl," Milly was too healthy a
young person to be really absorbed by questions of salvation. Her
religion was a social habit, like the habit of wearing fresh
underclothes and her best dress on the seventh day, having a late
breakfast and responding to the din of the church bells with other
ceremonially dressed folk. She believed what she heard in church as she
believed everything that was spoken with authority. It would have seemed
to her very dreadful to question the great dogmas of Heaven, Hell, the
Atonement, the Resurrection, etc. But they meant absolutely nothing to
her: they did not come into practical relation with her life as did the
ugly little box of her home and the people she knew, and she had no
taste for abstractions.

Milly was "good." She tried to have a helpful influence upon her
companions, especially upon young men who seemed to need an influence
more than others: she wanted to induce them not to swear, to smoke, to
drink--or be "bad,"--a vague state of unrealized vice. She encouraged
them to go to church by letting them escort her. It was the proper way
of displaying right intentions to lead good lives. When one young man
who had been a member of the Bible class was found to have taken money
from Mr. Kemp's bank, where he was employed, and indulged in riotous
living with it, Milly felt depressed for several days,--accused herself
of not having done her utmost to bring this lost soul to the Saviour.

Yet Milly was no prig,--at least not much of a one. For almost all her
waking hours her mind was occupied with totally mundane affairs, and she
was never much concerned about her own salvation. It seemed so far
off--in the hazy distances of stupid middle age or beyond. So, like
thousands upon thousands of other young women of her day, she appeared
at the Second Presbyterian every Sunday morning, looking her freshest
and her best, and with engaging zest, if with a somewhat wandering mind,
sang,--

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

It was a wholly meaningless social function, this, and useful to the
girl. Later charity might take its place. Horatio Ridge, who had never
qualified as a church member while his wife lived, knowing his own
unregenerate habits and having a healthy-minded male's aversion to
hypocrisy, now went to church with his daughter quite regularly. He felt
that it was a good thing,--the right thing for the girl, in some way
insuring her woman's safety in this wicked world, if not her salvation
in the next.

They made a pretty picture together, father and daughter,--the girl with
the wide blue eyes and open mouth, standing shoulder to shoulder with
the little man, each with one gloved hand grasping an edge of the
hymn-book and singing, Milly in a high soprano,--

    "Nearer, my God, to Thee!"

and Horatio, rumbling behind a little uncertainly,--

    "Nearer to Thee--to THEE!"




IV

MILLY COMPLETES HER EDUCATION


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

Milly translated this formidable phrase in a flash,--

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

It was a warm June day. Milly had been reading to Mrs. Kemp, who was
sewing. The book was "Romola." Milly had found quite dull its solid
pages of description of old Florence sparsely relieved by conversation,
and after a futile attempt to discover more thrilling matter farther on
had abandoned the book altogether in favor of talk, which always
interested her more than anything else in the world.

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

"You are only sixteen."

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

Mrs. Kemp laughed.

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

"School is so stupid," Milly sighed, with a little grimace. "I hate
getting things out of books."

She had never been distinguished in school,--far from it. Only by real
labor had she been able to keep up with her classes.

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

She saw herself behind a desk at the high school she had last attended
in St. Louis. In front of her sat a dried, sallow, uncheerful woman of
great age, ready to pounce upon her and expose her ignorance before the
jeering class. The girls and the boys at the school were not
"refined"--she knew that now. No, she did not want any more school of
that sort.... Besides, what use could an education be, if she were not
to teach? And Milly had not the faintest idea of becoming a teacher.

"Do you think a girl needs to know a lot of stuff--stupid things in
books?" she asked.

"Women must have a better education than they once did," Eleanor Kemp
replied with conviction. She refrained from explaining that a girl like
Milly, with no social background, might marry "to advantage" on her
looks, but she would need something more to maintain any desirable
position in the world. Such ideas were getting into the air these days.

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

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

"A little," Milly admitted dubiously.

"German?"

Milly shook her head positively.

"Latin?"

"Latin! What for?"

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

Milly glanced at the load of new books on the library table. She knew
that the Kemps read together a great deal. They aspired to "stand for
the best things" in the ambitious young city,--for art, music, and all
the rest. She was somewhat awed.

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

If a woman knew how to "write a good letter," when she was married, and
could keep the house accounts when there were any, and was bright and
entertaining enough to amuse her wearied male, she had all the education
she needed. That was Milly's idea.

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

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

Later Mrs. Kemp returned to the attack and extolled the advantages,
social and intellectual, that came with a Good Education. She described
the Ashland Institute, where she had completed her own education and of
which she was a recently elected trustee.

"Mrs. Mason, the principal, is a very cultivated lady--speaks all the
modern languages and has such a refining influence. I know you would
like her."

Milly had always attended public school. It had never occurred to her
father that while the state was willing to provide an education he
should go to the expense of buying one privately for his daughter. Of
course Milly knew that there were fashionable boarding-schools. She
wanted to attend a Sacred Heart convent school where one of her
intimates--a Louisville girl--had been sent, but the mere idea had
shocked Mrs. Ridge, senior, unutterably.

It seemed that the Ashland Institute, according to Mrs. Kemp, was an
altogether superior sort of place, and Milly was at last thoroughly
fired with the idea that she should "finish herself" there. Her
grandmother agreed that more schooling would not hurt Milly, but
demurred at the expense. Horatio was easily convinced that it was the
only proper school for his daughter. So the following September Milly
was once more a pupil, enrolled in classes of "literature" (with a
handbook), "art" (with a handbook), "science" (handbook), "mental and
moral philosophy" (lectures), and French (_La tulipe noire_). Milly
liked Mrs. Mason, a personable lady, who always addressed her pupils as
"young ladies." And Milly was quickly fascinated by the professor of
mental and moral philosophy, a delicate-looking young college graduate.
She worked very hard, studying her lessons far into the night,
memorizing long lists of names, dates, maxims, learning by rote whatever
was contained in those dreary handbooks.

Even in those days this was not all there was to education for girls
like Milly. There were a few young women, east and west, bold enough to
go to college. But as yet their example had no influence upon the
general education dealt out to girls. Most girls whose parents had any
sort of ambition went through the high school with their brothers, and
then went to work--if they had to--or got married. Even for the
privileged few who could afford "superior advantages" the ideas about
women's education were chaos. Mrs. Mason solved the problem at the
Ashland Institute as well as any, with a little of this and of that,
elegant information conveyed chiefly in handbooks about "literature" and
"art"; for women were assumed to be the "artistic" sex as they were the
ornamental. There were, besides, deportment, dancing, and music, also
ornamental. The only practical occupations were keeping house and
nursing, and if a girl was obliged to do such things, she did not seek
the aristocratic "finishing school." The "home" was the proper place for
all that. In Milly's case the "home" was adequately run by her
grandmother with the help of one colored servant. So Horatio, being just
able to afford the tuition, Milly was privileged to "finish herself."

Of course she forgot all the facts so laboriously acquired within a
short six months after she read her little essay on "Plato's Conception
of the Beautiful" at the graduation exercises. (That effort, by the way,
lay heavy on the neighborhood for weeks, but was pronounced a triumph.
It was certainly a masterpiece of fearless quotation.)... Learning
passed over Milly like a summer sea over a shining sandbar and left no
trace behind, none whatever. It was the same way with music. Milly could
sing church hymns in a pleasant voice and thumped a little heavily on
the piano after learning her piece.... She used to say, years
afterward,--"I have no gifts; I was never clever with books. I like
life, people!" and she would stretch out her hands gropingly to the
broad horizon.

This year at the Ashland Institute helped to enlarge that horizon
somewhat. And one other thing she got with the absurd meal of
schooling,--a vague but influential something,--an "ideal of American
womanhood." That was the way Mrs. Mason phrased it in her eloquent talks
to the girls.

The other teachers, especially the pale young professor of mental and
moral philosophy, referred to it indirectly as the moving force of the
new world. This was the "formative influence" of the school,--the
quality that the Institute prided itself on above all else.

It was of a poetic shade, composed in equal parts of art, literature,
and religion. Milly absorbed it at church, where the minister spoke
almost tearfully about "the mission of young womanhood to elevate the
ideals of the race," or more colloquially in Bible class as the duty of
"being a good influence" in life, especially men's lives. She got it
also in what books she read,--especially in Tennyson and in every novel,
as well as in the few plays she saw. There it was embodied as Woman of
Romance,--sublime, divine, mysterious, with a heavenly mission to
reform, ennoble, uplift--men, of course,--in a word to make over the
world. The idea of it had come down from the darkness of the middle
ages,--that smelly and benighted period,--had inflamed all romance, and
was now spreading its last miasmatic touch over the close of the
nineteenth century. All this, to be sure, Milly never knew.

She merely began to feel self-conscious, as a member of her sex,--a
being apart from men and somehow superior to them, without the same
appetites and low ideals, and with her own peculiar and sacred function
to perform for humanity. Ordinarily this heavy ideal of her sex did not
burden Milly. She obeyed her thoroughly healthy instincts, chief of
which was "to have a good time," to be loved and petted by people. But
occasionally in her more emotional moods, when she was singing hymns or
watching the sun depart in golden mists, she experienced exalted
sensations of the beauty and the glory of life--of _her_ life--and what
it all might mean to Some One (a man).

When she undressed before the tiny mirror, she considered her attractive
young body with a delicious sense of mystery that would some day be
revealed, then plunged into bed, and buried herself chastely beneath the
cover, her heart throbbing.

If Milly had had any real education, she might have recalled the
teaching of science in such moments and realized that her soft tissue
was composed of common elements, her special function was but a
universal means to a universal end; that even her long, thick hair with
its glint of gold, her soft eyes, her creamy skin and rounding breasts
and sloping thighs were all designed for the simple purpose of
continuing the species. (But in those days they did not talk of such
things even in the handbooks, and Milly would have called any one who
dared mention them in her presence a "materialist"--a word she had heard
in the philosophy class.) Having no one to mention to her such improper
truths, she remained in the pleasant illusion of literature and religion
that she was altogether a superior creation,--something mysterious to be
worshipped and preserved. Not colored Jenny in the kitchen, who had
three or four illegitimate children! Not even all the girls in her
Sunday-school class, some of whom worked in stores, but the cultivated,
refined women who made Homes for Heroes. This belief was like Poetry: it
satisfied and sustained--and it gave an unconscious impulse to her whole
life, that she was never able wholly to escape....

And this was what they called Education in those days.




V

MILLY EXPERIMENTS


Of course Milly had "beaux," as she called them then. There had never
been a time since she was trusted to navigate herself alone upon the
street when she had not attracted to herself other little
persons--chiefly girls, to be sure. For as Milly was wont to confess in
her palmiest days when men flocked around her, she was a "woman's woman"
(and hence inferentially a man's woman, too). Milly very sincerely
preferred her own sex as constant companions. They were more expressive,
communicative, rational. Men were useful: they brought candies, flowers,
theatre parties.

But now the era of young men as distinguished from girls had arrived.
Boys in long trousers with dark upper lips hung about the West Laurence
Avenue house on warm evenings, composing Milly's celebrated "stoop
parties," or wandered with her arm in arm up the broad boulevard to the
Park. And at the Claxtons and the Kemps she met older men who paid
attention to the vivacious, well-developed school-girl.

"Milly will take care of herself," Mrs. Claxton remarked to her daughter
when the school question was up, and when the latter deplored the
unchaperoned condition of her young friend, she added,--

"That was the way in Virginia. A girl had a lot of beaux--and she got no
harm from it, if she were a good girl."

Milly was a good girl without any doubt, astonishing as it may seem.
Milly Ridge had passed through the seventeen years of her existence and
at least four different public schools without knowing anything about
"sex hygiene." That married women had babies and that somehow these were
due to the presence of men in the household was the limit of her sex
knowledge. Beyond that it was not "nice" for a girl to delve, and Milly
was very scrupulous about being "nice." Nice girls did not discuss such
things. Once when she was fifteen a woman she knew had "gone to the bad"
and Milly had been very curious about it, as she was later about the
existence of bad women generally. This state of virginal ignorance was
due more to her normal health than to any superior delicacy. As one man
meaningly insinuated, Milly was not yet "awake." He apparently desired
the privilege of awakening her, but she eluded him safely.

When these older men began to call, Milly entertained them quite
formally in the little front room, discussing books with them and
telling her little stories, while her father smoked his cigar in the
rear room. She was conscious always of Grandma Ridge's keen ears pricked
to attention behind the smooth curls of gray hair. It was astonishing
how much the old lady could overhear and misinterpret!...

Almost all these young men, clerks and drummers and ranchers, were
hopelessly, stupidly dull, and Milly knew it. Their idea of
entertainment was the theatre or lopping about the long steps, listening
to her chatter. When they took her "buggy-riding," they might try
clumsily to put their arms around her. She would pretend not to notice
and lean forward slightly to avoid the embrace....

Her first really sentimental encounter came at the end of a long day's
picnicking on the hot sands of the lake beach. Harold--ultimately she
forgot his last name--had taken her up the shore after supper. They had
scrambled to the top of the clayey bluff and sat there in a thicket,
looking out over the dimpled water, hot, uncomfortable, self-conscious.
His hand had strayed to hers, and she had let him hold it, caress the
stubby fingers in his thin ones, aware that hers was quite a homely
hand, her poorest "point." She knew somehow that he wanted to kiss her,
and she wondered what she should do if he tried,--whether she should be
offended or let him "just once." He was a handsome, bashful boy, and she
felt fond of him.

But when he had got his courage to the point, she drew off quickly, and
to distract his attention exclaimed,--"See! What's that?" They looked
across the broad surface of the lake and saw a tiny rim of pure gold
swell upwards from the waves.

"It's just the moon!"

"How beautiful it is," Milly sighed.

Again when his arm came stealing about her she moved away murmuring,
"No, no." And so they went back, awkwardly silent, to the others, who
were telling stories about a blazing camp-fire they had thought it
proper to build.... After that Harold came to see her quite regularly,
and at last declared his love in a stumbling, boyish fashion. But Milly
dismissed him--he was only a clerk at Hoppers'--without hesitation. "We
are both too young, dear," she said. He had tried to kiss her hand, and
somehow he managed so awkwardly that their heads bumped. Then he had
gone away to Colorado to recover. For some months they exchanged boy and
girl letters, which she kept for years tied up with ribbon. After a time
he ceased to write, and she thought nothing of it, as her busy little
world was peopled with new figures. Then there came wedding cards from
Denver and at first she could not remember who this Harold Stevens about
to marry Miss Glazier, could be. Her first affair, a pallid little
romance that had not given her any real excitement!

Afterwards in moods of retrospection Milly would say: "However I didn't
get into trouble as a girl, with no mother, and such an easy,
unsuspecting father, I don't know. Think of it, my dear, out almost
every night, dances, rides, picnics, theatres. Perhaps the men were
better those days or the girls more innocent."

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




VI

MILLY LEARNS


The friend who at the opportune moment had offered Horatio his point of
stability at Hoppers' was Henry Snowden,--a handsome, talkative man of
forty-five. He was manager of a department in the mail-order house, with
the ambition of becoming one of the numerous firm. It was he who had put
Horatio in the hands of the real estate firm that had resulted in the
West Laurence Avenue House. Snowden, with his wife and two grown
children, lived up the Boulevard, some distance from the Kemps. Mrs.
Snowden was a rather fat lady a few years older than her husband, with a
mid-western nasal voice. Milly thought her "common,"--a word she had
learned from Eleanor Kemp,--and the daughter, who was in one of the
lower classes of the Institute, was like her mother. During the first
months in Chicago the Snowdens were the people Milly saw most of.

Horatio liked to have the Snowdens in for what he called a "quiet rubber
of whist" with a pitcher of cider, a box of cheap cigars, and a plate of
apples on the table. Grandma Ridge sat in the dining-room, reading her
_Christian Vindicator_, while Milly entertained her friends on the steps
or visited at the Kemps. Occasionally she was induced to take a hand in
the game. She liked Mr. Snowden. He was more the gentleman than most of
her father's business friends. With his trim, grizzled mustache and his
eye-glass he looked almost professional, she thought. He treated Milly
gallantly, brought her flowers occasionally, and took her with his
daughter to the theatre. He seemed much younger than his wife, and Milly
rather pitied him for being married to her. She felt that it must have
been a mistake of his youth. Her father was proud of the friendship and
would repeat often,--"Snow's a smart man, I can tell you. There's a
great future for Snow at Hoppers'."

The Snowdens had an old-fashioned house with a stable, and kept a horse.
Mr. Snowden was fond of driving, and had always a fast horse. He would
come on a Saturday afternoon or Sunday and take Ridge for a drive. One
Saturday afternoon he drove up to the house, and seeing Milly in the
front window--it was a warm April day of their second year--motioned her
to come outside.

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

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

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

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

"You're all right--jump in--it's warm enough." And Milly without further
urging got into the buggy.

They went out through the boulevard to the new parkway, and when they
reached the broad open road in the park, Snowden let his horse out, and
they spun for a mile or more breathlessly. Milly's cheeks glowed, and
her eyes danced. She was afraid that he might turn back at the end of
the drive. But he kept on into a region that was almost country. Snowden
talked in nervous sentences about the horse, then about Horatio, who, he
said, was doing finely in the business. "He'll get on," he said, and
Milly felt that Mr. Snowden was the family's good genius.

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

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

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

"He won't lose me."

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

She shook her head.

"Not until I meet the right man," she said, and she explained volubly
her lofty ideals of matrimony.

Snowden agreed with her. He became personal, confiding, insinuated
even that his marriage had been a mistake--of ignorance and youth. Milly,
who was otherwise sympathetic, thought this was not nice of him,
even if Mrs. Snowden was pudgy and common and old. A woman gave so
much, she felt, in marriage that she should be insured against her
defects.... Snowden said that he was living for his children. Milly
thought that quite right and tried to turn the conversation.

The horse looked around as if to ask how much farther his master meant
to go over this rough country road. It was getting late and the sun was
sinking towards the flat prairie. Milly began to feel unaccountably
worried and suggested turning back. Instead the man cut the horse with
his whip so that he shot forward down the narrow road. The buggy rocked
and swayed, while Milly clung to the side. Snowden looked at her and
smiled triumphantly. His face came nearer hers. Milly thought it
handsome, but it was unpleasantly flushed, and Milly drew away.

Suddenly she found herself in the grasp of her companion's free arm. He
was whispering things into her ear.

"You make me mad--I--"

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

The horse stopped altogether and looked around at them.

"Let me go!" she cried. But now abandoning the lines he held her in both
his arms, his hot breath was close to her face, his lips seeking hers.
Then she bit him,--bit him so hard with her firm teeth that he drew away
with a cry, loosening his grip. She wriggled out of his embrace and
scrambled to the ground before he knew what she was doing and began to
run down the road. Snowden gathered up the lines and followed after her,
calling,--"Milly, Milly--Miss Ridge," in a penitent, frightened voice.
For some time she paid no attention until he shouted,--"You'll never get
anywhere that way!" The buggy was abreast of her now. "Do get in! I
won't--touch you."

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

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

"Yes, I know," he said, like a whipped dog. "But don't run off--I'll get
out and let you drive back alone."

There was a cart coming on slowly behind them. Milly marched past the
buggy haughtily and walked towards it. Snowden followed close behind,
pleading, apologizing. She knew that he was afraid she would speak to
the driver of the cart, and despised him.

"Milly, don't," he groaned.

She walked stiffly by the cart, whose driver eyed the scene with a slow
grin. She paid no attention, however, to Snowden's entreaties. She was
secretly proud of herself for her magnanimity in not appealing to the
stranger, for the manner in which she was conducting herself. But after
a mile or so, it became quite dark and she felt weary. She stumbled, sat
down beside the road. The buggy stopped automatically.

"If you'll only get in and drive home, Miss Ridge," Snowden said humbly,
and prepared to dismount. "It's a good eight miles to the boulevard and
your folks will be worried."

With a gesture that waved him back to his place Milly got into the buggy
and the horse started.

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

"Don't speak to me ever again, Mr. Snowden," Milly flamed. She sat bolt
upright in her corner of the seat, drawing her skirt under her as if
afraid it might touch him. Snowden drove rapidly, and thus without a
word exchanged they returned. As they came near the corner of West
Laurence Avenue, Snowden spoke again,--

"I know you can't forgive me--but I hope you won't let your father know.
It would hurt him and--"

It was a very mean thing to say, and she knew it. Afterwards she thought
of many spirited and apposite words she might have spoken, but at the
moment all she could do was to fling herself haughtily out of the buggy
as it drew up before the curb and without a word or glance march stiffly
up the steps, where her father sat smoking his after-dinner cigar.

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

She stalked past him into the house. She could hear her father ask
Snowden to stop and have some supper, and Snowden's refusal.

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

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

Then for the first time it came over her what it would mean if she
should follow her first impulse and tell her father what had happened.
Mr. Snowden was not merely his most intimate friend, but in a way his
superior. If she should make things unpleasant between them, it might be
serious. So when her grandmother came tiptoeing into Milly's room to see
why she did not come down for her supper, Milly merely said she was too
tired to eat.

"What's happened?"

"That nasty Snowden man," Milly spluttered, "tried to kiss me and I had
to--to fight him.... Don't tell father!"

The little old lady was very much disturbed, but she did not tell her
son. Her policy was one of discreet silence about "unpleasant things" if
they could be covered up. And this was the kind of event that women were
capable of managing themselves, as Milly had managed....

Milly lay awake long hours that night, her heart beating loudly, her
busy mind reviewing the experience, and though her resentment did not
lessen as the hours wore on and she murmured to herself,--"Horrid, nasty
beast!" yet she became aware of another sensation. If--if things had
been different--she--well--it--might, and then she buried her head in
the pillow more ashamed than ever.

At last she had learned something of the real nature of men, and never
again in her long experience with the other sex was she unaware of "what
things meant." Whenever a man was concerned, one must always expect this
possibility. And she began to despise the weaker sex.

For some days the Snowdens did not come for cards. Horatio seemed
depressed. He would sit reading his paper through to the small
advertisements, or wander out by himself to a beer garden near by. When
the social circle is as small as the Ridges', such a state of affairs
means real deprivation, and Milly, who did not approve of the beer
garden any more than did her grandmother, wondered how she could restore
the old harmony between the two families.

But before anything came of her good-natured intention fate arranged
pleasantly to relieve her of the responsibility.




VII

MILLY SEES MORE OF THE WORLD


The Kemps had a cottage at one of the Wisconsin lakes, and Eleanor Kemp
invited Milly to make them a month's visit. The girl's imagination was
aflame with excitement: it was to her Newport or Bar Harbor or Aix.
There was first the question of clothes. Although Mrs. Kemp assured her
that they lived very quietly at Como, Milly knew that the Casses, the
Gilberts, the Shards had summer homes there, and the place was as gay as
anything in this part of the country. Mrs. Kemp might say, "Milly,
you're pretty enough for any place just as you are!" But Milly was woman
enough to know what _that_ meant between women.

Her allowance was spent, four months in advance as usual, but Horatio
was easily brought to see the exceptionality of this event, and even old
Mrs. Ridge was moved to give from her hoard. It was felt to be something
in the nature of an investment for the girl's future. So Milly departed
with a new trunk and a number of fresh summer gowns.

"Have a good time, daughter!" Horatio Ridge shouted as the car moved
off, and he thought he had done his best for his child, even if he had
had to borrow a hundred dollars from his friend Snowden.

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

Afterwards she might laugh over the excitement that first country-house
visit had caused, and recall the ugly little brown gabled cottage on the
shore of the hot lake, that did not even faintly resemble its Italian
namesake, with the simple diversions of driving about the dusty, flat
country, varied by "veranda parties" and moonlight rows with the rare
young men who dared to stay away from business through the week. All of
life, the sages tell us, is largely a matter of proportion. Como,
Wisconsin, was breathless excitement to Milly Ridge at eighteen, as she
testified to her hostess in a thousand joyous little ways.

And there was the inevitable man,--a cousin of the Claxton tribe, who
was a young lawyer in Baltimore. He spent a week at the lake, almost
every minute with Milly.

"You've simply fascinated him, my dear," Eleanor Kemp reported,
delightedly. "And they're very good people, I assure you--he's a Harvard
man."

It was the first time Milly had met on intimate terms a graduate of a
large university. In those days "Harvard" and "Yale" were titles of
aristocratic magic, as good as Rome or Oxford.

"He thinks you so unspoiled," her friend added. "I've asked him to stay
another week."

So the two boated and walked and sat out beside the lake until the stars
grew dim--and nothing ever came of it! Milly had her little extravagant
imaginings about this well-bred young man with his distinguished manner;
she did her best to please--and nothing came of it. Why? she asked
herself afterward. He had held her hand and talked about "the woman who
gives purpose to a man's life" and all that. (Alas, that plebeian paw of
Milly's!)

Then he had left and sent her a five-pound box of candy from the
metropolis, with a correct little note, assuring her that he could never
forget those days he had spent with her by the lake of Como. Years
afterward on an Atlantic steamer she met a sandy-haired, stoutish
American, who introduced himself with the apology,--

"You're so like a girl I knew once out West--at some lake in
Wisconsin--"

"And you are Harrison Plummer," she said promptly. "I shouldn't have
known _you_," she added maliciously, surveying the work of time. She
felt that her plebeian hands were revenged: he was quite ordinary. His
wife was with him and four uninteresting children, and he seemed
bored.... That had been her Alpine height at eighteen. The heights seem
lower at thirty-five.

Even if this affair didn't prove to be "the real, right thing," Milly
gained a good deal from her Como visit. Her social perspective was
greatly enlarged by the acquaintances she made there. It was long before
the day of the motor, the launch, the formal house party, but the
families who sought rural relief from the city along the shores of the
Wisconsin lake lived in a liberal, easy manner. They had horses and
carriages a plenty and entertained hospitably. They did not use red
cotton table-cloths (which Grandma Ridge insisted upon to save washing),
and if there were few men-servants, there was an abundance of tidy
maids. It gave Milly unconsciously a conception of how people lived in
circles remote from West Laurence Avenue, and behind her pretty eyes
there formed a blind purpose of pushing on into this unknown territory.
"I had my own way to make socially," she said afterwards, half in
apology, half in pride. "I had no mother to bring me out in society--I
had to make my own friends!"

It was easy, to be sure, in those days for a pretty, vivacious girl with
pleasant manners to go where she would. Society was democratic, in a
flux, without pretence. Like went with like as they always will, but the
social game was very simple, not a definite career, even for a woman.
Many of these good people said "folks" and "ain't" and "doos," and
nobody thought the worse of them for that. And they were kind,--quick to
help a young and attractive girl, who "would make a good wife for some
man."

So after her month with Mrs. Kemp, Milly was urged to spend a week at
the Gilberts, which easily stretched to two. The Gilberts were young
"North Side" people, and much richer than the Kemps. Roy Gilbert had the
rare distinction in those days of describing himself merely as
"capitalist," thanks to his father's exertions and denials. He was lazy
and good-natured and much in love with his young wife, who was unduly
religious and hoped to "steady" Milly. Apart from this obsession she was
an affectionate and pretty woman, rather given to rich food and
sentimental novels. She had been a poor girl herself, of a good New York
family, and life had not been easy until one fine day Roy Gilbert had
sailed into Watch Hill on his yacht and fallen in love with her. Some
such destiny, she hoped, would come to Milly Ridge....

When at last, one drearily hot September day, Milly got back to the
little box of a house on West Laurence Avenue, home seemed unendurably
sordid and mean, stifling. Her father was sitting on the stoop in his
shirt-sleeves, and had eased his feet by pushing off his shoes.
Discipline had grown lax in Milly's absence. Her first sensation of
revolt came at that moment.

"Oh, father--you oughtn't to look like that!" she said, kissing him.

"What's the harm? Nobody's home 'round here. All your swell friends are
at the seashore."

"But, father!"

"Well, Milly, so you decided to come home at last?"

Grandma Ridge had crept out from the house and was smiling icily.
Secretly both the older people were pleased with Milly's social success,
but they tempered their feelings in good puritan fashion with a note of
reproof.

That evening the Snowdens came in for the game of cards. Snowden was
plainly embarrassed at meeting Milly. "Good evening, Mr. Snowden, how
are you? and Mrs. Snowden?" she asked graciously, with her new air of
aloofness, as if he were an utter stranger. "You've come to play cards.
I'm so glad--papa enjoys having you so much!"

She felt that she was handling the situation like a perfect lady, and
she no longer had any real resentment. She even consented to take a hand
in the game. They were much excited about an atrocious murder that had
happened only a few doors away. Old Leonard Sweet, who had grown rich in
the contracting business, had been found dead in his kitchen. His
son-in-law--a dissipated young man whom Milly knew slightly--was
suspected of the crime. It was thought that the two had had a quarrel
about money, and the young man had shot his father-in-law. Milly
remembered old Sweet quite vividly. He used to sit on his stoop in his
stocking feet, even on Sundays when all the neighborhood was going by to
church,--very shocking to Milly's sense of propriety. And the boy had
hung around saloons. Now where was he?

"Well, daughter, can't you tell us what you did at Co-mo?" Horatio
urged....

No, decidedly, this sort of thing would not do for Milly!




VIII

MILLY'S CAMPAIGN


Almost at once Milly began the first important campaign of her life--to
move the household to a more advantageous neighborhood. One morning she
said casually at breakfast,--

"The Kemps are going to their new house when they come in from the
Lake.... Why can't we live some place where there are nice people?"

"What's the matter with this?" Horatio asked, crowding flannel cakes
into his mouth.

"Oh!" Milly exclaimed witheringly. "My friends are all moving away."

"You forget that your father has two years more of his lease of this
house," her grandmother remarked severely.

And the campaign was on, not to be relaxed until the family abandoned
the West Side a year later. It was a campaign fought in many subtle
feminine ways, chiefly between Milly and her grandmother. Needless to
say, the family atmosphere was not always comfortable for the mild
Horatio.

"It all comes of your ambition to go with rich people," Mrs. Ridge
declared. "Since your visit at the Lake, you have been discontented."

"I was never contented with _this_!" Milly retorted quite truthfully.
What the old lady regarded as a fault, Milly considered a virtue.

"And you are neglecting your church work to go to parties."

"Oh, grandma!" the girl exclaimed wearily. "Chicago isn't Euston, Pa.,
grandma!"

As if the young people's clubs of the Second Presbyterian Church could
satisfy the social aspirations of a Milly Ridge! She was fast becoming
conscious of the prize that had been given her--her charm and her
beauty--and an indefinable force was driving her on to obtain the
necessary means of self-exploitation.

It was true, as her grandmother said, that more and more this autumn
Milly was away from her home. Mrs. Gilbert had not forgotten her, nor
the other people she had met at the Lake. More and more she was being
asked to dinners and dances, and spent many nights with good-natured
friends.

"She might as well board over there," Horatio remarked forlornly, "for
all I see of the girl."

"Milly is a selfish girl," her grandmother commented severely.

"She's young, and she wants her fling. Guess we'd better see if we can't
give it to her, mother."

Horatio was no fighter, especially of his own womenkind. Even the old
lady's judgment was disturbed by the dazzle of Milly's social conquests.

"She'll be married before long," they said.

Meanwhile Milly was learning the fine social distinctions between the
south and the north sides of the city. The Kemps' new house on Granger
Avenue was very rich and handsome like its many substantial neighbors,
but Milly already knew enough to prefer the Gilberts' on the North
Drive, which, if smaller, had more style. And in spite of all the miles
of solid prosperity and comfort in the great south side of the city,
Milly quickly perceived that the really nicest people had tucked
themselves in along the north shore.

Somewhere about this time Milly acquired two lively young friends, Sally
and Vivie Norton, daughters of a railroad man who had recently been
moved to Chicago from the East. Sally Norton was small and blonde and
gay. She laughed overmuch. Vivie was tall and sentimental,--a brunette.
They came once to the West Laurence Avenue house for Sunday supper.
Horatio did not like the sisters; he called them in his simple way
"Giggle" and "Simper." The Nortons lived not far from the Lake on East
Acacia Street, and that became for Milly the symbol of the
all-desirable. She spoke firmly of the advantages of East Acacia Street
as a residence--she had even picked out the house, the last but one in
the same row of stone-front boxes where the Nortons lived.

It made Horatio restless. Like a good father he wished to indulge his
only child in every way--to do his best for her. But with his salary of
three thousand dollars he could barely give Milly the generous allowance
she needed and always spent in advance. Rise at Hoppers' was slow,
although sure, and the only way for him to enlarge Milly's horizon was
by going into business for himself. He began to talk of schemes, said he
was tired of "working for others all his life." Milly's ambitions were
contagious.

After one of the family conflicts, Grandma invaded Milly's bedroom,
which was quite irritating to the young woman.

"Mildred," she began ominously. "Do you realize what you are doing to
your father?"

"The rent is only thirty dollars a month more, grandma," Milly replied,
reverting to the last topic under discussion. "Papa can take it out of
my allowance." (Milly was magnificently optimistic about the
expansiveness of her allowance.) "Anyhow, I don't see why I can't live
near my friends and have a decent--"

The old lady's lips tightened.

"In my days young girls did not pretend to decide where their parents
should live."

"These aren't your days, grandma, thank heaven!... If a girl is going to
get anything out of life--"

"You've had a great deal--"

"Thanks to the friends I've made for myself."

"It might be better if you cared less to go with folks above you--"

"Above me!" the exasperated girl flashed. "Who's above me? Nelly Kemp?
Sally Norton?--Above me!"

That was the flaming note of Milly's intense Americanism. As a social,
human being she recognized no superiors. There were richer, cleverer,
better educated women, no doubt, but in this year of salvation and hope,
1890, there were none "above her." Never!...

Mrs. Ridge discreetly shifted the point of attack.

"It might be disastrous for your father if you were to break up his
home."

"You talk so tragically, grandma! Who's thinking of breaking up homes?
Just moving a couple of miles across the city to another house in
another street. What difference does it make to a man what old house he
comes home to after his work is done?"

"You forget his church relations, Milly."

"You seem to think there are no churches on the North Side."

"But he's made his place here--and Dr. Barlow has a good influence upon
him."

Milly knew quite well the significance of these words. There had been a
time when Horatio did not come home every night sober, and did not go to
church on Sundays. When the little old lady wished to check the soaring
ambition of her granddaughter, she had but to refer to this dark period
in the Ridge history. Milly did not like to think of those dreary days,
and was inclined to put the responsibility for them upon her dead
mother. "If she'd only known how to manage him--" For with all men Milly
thought it was simply a question of management.

"Well," she announced at last. "I'm tired and want to go to bed. Come,
Cheriki, darling!" Cheriki was a fuzzy toy spaniel, the gift of an
admirer. Milly poked the animal from her bed, and the old lady, who
loathed dogs, scuttled out of the room. She had been routed again.
Knowing Milly's obstinate nature, she felt that she must battle daily
for the right.

But Milly did not return to the attack for some time. She stayed at home
for several evenings and was very sweet with her father. She
ostentatiously refused some alluring invitations and was quite cheerful
about it. "She must give up these parties--she could not always be
accepting the Nortons' hospitality, etc." But Milly was not a nagger, at
least not with men. Hers was a pleasant, cheerful nature, and she bathed
the West Laurence Avenue house in several beams of sunshine.

"She's a good girl, mother," Horatio said proudly. "And she's all we've
got. It would be a pity not to give her what she wants."

A complete expression of the submissive attitude of the new parent!

"It may not be good for her," Grandma Ridge objected, after her
generation.

"Well, if she only marries right."

More and more it was in their minds that Milly was destined to make "a
great match." Purely as a business matter that must be taken into
account. So Horatio thought harder about getting into business for
himself, and his little corner of the world revolved more and more about
the desires of a woman.

       *       *       *       *       *

Fortunately for the peace of the Ridge household, the Kemps invited
Milly to go to New York with them in the spring. They were still
furnishing the new house and had in mind some pictures. Mr. Kemp had
rather "gone in for art" of late, and the banking business had been
good.... To Milly, who had never been on a sleeping-car in her life (the
Ridge migrations hitherto having been accomplished in day coaches
because of economy and because Grandma Ridge dreaded night travel), it
was a thrilling prospect. Her feeling for Eleanor Kemp had been dimmed
somewhat by the acquisition of newer and gayer friends, but it revived
into a brilliant glow.

"You dear thing!... You're sure I won't be in the way?... It will be too
heavenly for words!"

To her husband Mrs. Kemp reported Milly's ecstasy laughingly, saying,--

"If any one can enjoy things as much as Milly Ridge, she ought to have
them," to which the practical banker observed,--"She'll get them when
she picks the man."

So they made the wonderful journey and put up at the pleasant old
Windsor on the avenue, for the era of vast caravansaries had not yet
begun. Fifth Avenue in ninety was not the cosmopolitan thoroughfare it
is to-day. Nevertheless, to Milly's inexperienced eyes, accustomed to
the gloom of smoke, the ill-paved, dirty streets of mid-western cities,
New York was even noble in its splendor. They went to the Metropolitan
Museum, to the private galleries of the dealers, to Tiffany's, where the
banker bought a trinket for his wife's young friend, and the women went
to dressmakers who intimidated Milly with their airs and their prices.

Of course they went to Daly's and to hear "Aida," and supped afterwards
at the old Delmonico's. And a hundred other ravishing things were
crowded into the breathless fortnight of their visit. When she was once
more settled in her berth for the return journey, Milly sighed with
regret and envisaged the dreary waste of West Laurence Avenue.

"If we only lived in New York," she thought, and then she was wise
enough to reflect that if the Ridges lived in New York, it would not be
paradise, but another version of West Laurence Avenue.

"Some day you will go to Paris, my dear," Mrs. Kemp said, "and then New
York will seem like the West Side."

"Never, that!" Milly exclaimed, shocked.

The approach to Chicago under all circumstances is bleak and stern. But
that early April day it seemed to Milly unduly depressing. The squalid
little settlements on the outskirts of the great city were like
eruptions in the low, flat landscape. Around the factories and mills the
little houses were perched high on stilts to keep their feet out of the
mud of the submerged prairie. All the way home Milly had been making
virtuous resolutions not to be extravagant and tease her father, to be
patient with her grandmother, etc.,--in short, to be content with that
state of life unto which God had called her (for the present), as the
catechism says. But she felt it to be very hard that Milly Ridge should
be condemned to such a state of life as the West Side of Chicago
afforded. After the cultivated, mildly luxurious atmosphere of the
Kemps, she realized acutely the commonness of her home....

Her father was waiting for her in the train-shed, and she hugged him
affectionately and went off on the little man's arm, quite gayly, waving
a last farewell to Eleanor Kemp as the latter stepped into her waiting
carriage.

"Well, daughter, had a good time?"




IX

ACHIEVEMENTS


"But, papa," Milly interrupted her chatter about her marvellous doings
in the East, long enough to ask,--"where are you going?"

Instead of taking the familiar street-car that would plunge them into a
noisome tunnel and then rumble on for uncounted miles through the drab
West Side, Horatio had turned towards the river, and they were in the
wholesale district, where from the grimy stores came fragrant odors of
comestibles, mingled in one strong fusion of raw food product. Horatio
smiled at the question and hurried at a faster pace, while Milly,
raising her skirts, had to scuttle over the "skids" that lay across the
sidewalk like traps for the unwary.

"I've an errand down here," he said slyly. "Guess it won't hurt you to
take a little walk."

His air was provocative, and Milly followed him breathlessly, her blue
eyes wide with wonder. He stopped opposite a low brick building at the
end of Market Street, and pointed dramatically across. At first Milly
saw nothing to demand attention, then her quick eyes detected the blazon
of a new gilt sign above the second-story windows, which read:--

    H. RIDGE & CO., IMPORTERS
    TEAS AND COFFEES

Horatio broke into an excited grin, as Milly grasped his arm.

"Oh, papa--is it _you_?"

"It's _me_ all right!" And he flung out a leg with a strut of
proprietorship. "Opened last week. Want to see the inside?"

"And Hoppers'?" Milly inquired as they crossed the muddy street, dodging
the procession of drays.

"Hoppers'--I just chucked it," Horatio swaggered. "Guess I'm old enough
to work for myself if I'm ever going to--no money in working for the
other feller."

When they had climbed the narrow, dark stairway to the second floor,
Horatio flung open the door to the low, unpartitioned room that ran
clear to the rear of the building. A man rose from behind the solitary
desk near the front window.

"Let me introduce you to the Company," Horatio announced with gravity.
"Mr. Snowden, my daughter!"

They laughed, and Milly detected an air of embarrassment as the man came
forward. In the clear light of the window his hair and mustache seemed
blacker than she remembered; she suspected that they had been dyed. As
Milly shook hands with the "Company," she had her first moment of doubt
about the enterprise.

"My daughter, Miss Simpson," and Milly was shaking hands with a quiet,
homely little woman in spectacles, who might have been twenty-five or
fifty, and who gave Milly a keen, suspicious, commercial look. She was
evidently all that was left of the "company,"--bookkeeper, stenographer,
clerk.

Beside the desk there was a large round table with some unwashed cups
and saucers, a coffee boiler, and in the rear sample cases and
bundles,--presumably the results of importations. Milly admired
everything generously. She was bothered by discovering Snowden as "the
company" and considered whether she ought to confide to her father what
she knew of the man. "He's no gentleman," she thought. "But that would
not be any reason for his being a bad business man," she reflected
shrewdly. And in spite of her woman's misgivings of any person who was
errant "that way," she decided to be silent. "He may have regretted
it,--poor old thing."

Snowden left the place with them. Drawn up in front of the building was
a small delivery wagon, with a spindly horse and a boy. Freshly painted
on the dull black cover was the legend: "H. Ridge & Co. TEAS AND
COFFEES."

"City deliveries," Horatio explained. Snowden smiled wanly. Somehow the
spindly horse did not inspire Milly with confidence, nor the small boy.
But the outfit might answer very well for "city deliveries." Milly was
determined to see nothing but a rosy future for the venture. She
listened smilingly to Horatio, who bobbed along by her side, talking all
the time.

Evidently things had been moving with the Ridges since her departure.
Milly's insistent ambitions had borne fruit. She had roused the
quiescent Horatio. Hoppers' mail-order house offered a secure berth for
a middle-aged man, who had rattled half over the American continent in
search of stability. But, he told himself, the fire was not all out of
his veins yet, and Milly supplied the incentive this time "to better
himself." After some persuasion he had hired his friend Snowden, who had
not yet been invited to become a partner at Hoppers', and who agreed to
put ten thousand dollars into the new business, which Horatio was to
manage. And Grandma Ridge had been persuaded to invest five thousand
dollars, half of what the judge had left her, in her son's new venture.
Then a chance of buying out the China American Tea Company had come.
Horatio, of course, knew nothing about tea, and less about coffee; his
experience had been wholly in drugs. But he argued optimistically that
tea and coffee in a way were drugs, and if a man could sell one sort of
drugs why not another? He saw himself in his own office, signing the
firm's name,--his own name!

"Father!" Milly exclaimed that evening, throwing her arms boisterously
about the little man, in the hoydenish manner so much deplored by her
grandmother,--"Isn't it great! Your own business--and you'll make lots
of money, lots--I'm perfectly sure."

Her ambitions began to flower. There was a delicious sense of venture to
the whole thing: it offered that expansible horizon so necessary to the
happiness of youth, though it might be hard to see just why Horatio
Ridge's entering upon the wholesale tea and coffee business at the
mature age of fifty should light the path to a gorgeous future.

Mrs. Ridge was a rather wet blanket, to be sure, but Grandma was a timid
old lady who did not like travelling in the dark.

"I hope it will come out right--I hope so," she repeated lugubriously.

For a few fleeting moments Milly recalled the spindly horse and the
scrubby boy of the delivery wagon, but for only a few moments. Then her
natural buoyancy overcame any doubts.

"I'm sure father will make a great success of the business!" and she
gave him another hug. Was he not doing this for her? Horatio, twisting
his cigar rapidly between his teeth, strode back and forth in the little
room and nodded optimistically. He was a merchant....

       *       *       *       *       *

One pleasant Sunday in May, father and daughter took the street-car to
the city and strolled north towards the river past "the store." Horatio
glanced proudly at the sign, which was already properly tarnished by the
smoke. Milly turned to gaze at a smart new brougham that was climbing
the ascent to the bridge. There were two men on the box.

"That's the Danners' carriage," she said knowingly to her father, "and
Mrs. George Danner."

There were few carriages with two men on the box in the city those days,
and they were well worth a young woman's attention. The Danners had come
to Chicago hardly a generation before, "as poor as poverty," as Milly
knew. Now their mammoth dry goods establishment occupied almost a city
block, and young Mrs. Danner had two men on the box--all out of dry
goods. Why should not coffee and tea produce the same results? Father
and daughter crossed the bridge, musingly, arm in arm.

From the grimy fringe of commerce about the river they penetrated the
residence quarter beside the Lake. Milly made her father observe the
freshness of the air coming from the water, and how clean and quiet the
streets were. Indeed this quarter of the noisy new city had something of
the settled air of older communities "back east" that Horatio remembered
happily. Milly led him easily around the corner of Acacia Street to the
block where the Nortons lived.

"Aren't they homey looking, father? And just right for us.... Now that
one at the end of the block--it's empty.... You can see the lake from
the front windows. Just think, to be able to _see_ something!"

They went up the steps of the vacant house, and to be sure a little
slice of blue water closed the vista at the end of the street. Horatio
swung his cane hopefully. The pleasant day, the sense of "being his own
man" exhilarated him: he dealt lightly with the "future."

"It's a tony neighborhood, all right," he agreed. "What did you say
these houses rent for?"

"Eighty dollars a month--that's what the Nortons pay."

"Eighty a month--that's not bad, considering what you get!" Horatio
observed largely.

It was a bargain, of course, as father and daughter tried to convince
Mrs. Ridge. But the old lady, accustomed to Euston, Pa., rents, thought
that the forty dollars a month they had to pay for the West Laurence box
was regal, and when it was a question of subletting it at a sacrifice
and taking another for twice the sum she quaked--visibly.

"Don't you think, Horatio, you'd better wait and see how the new
business goes?"

But the voice of prudence was not to the taste of the younger
generations.

"It'll be so near the store," Milly suggested. "Papa can come home for
his lunch."

"You've got to live up to your prospects, mother," Horatio pronounced
robustly.

The old lady saw that she was beaten and said no more. With compressed
lips she contemplated the future. Father and daughter had no doubts:
they both possessed the gambling American spirit that reckons the
harvest ere the seed is put in the ground.

That evening after Milly had departed Horatio explained himself
further,--

"You see, mother, we must start Milly the best we can. She's made a lot
of real good friends for herself, and she'll marry one of these days.
It's our duty to give her every chance."

It never occurred to Horatio that a healthy young woman of twenty with
no prospect of inheritance might find something better worth doing in
life than amusing herself while waiting for a husband. Such strenuous
ideas were not in the air then.

"She'll always have a home so long as I'm alive and can make one for
her," he said sentimentally. "But she'll get one for herself, you see!"

He was vastly proud of "his girl,"--of her good looks, her social power,
her clever talk. And the old lady was forced to agree--they must give
Milly her chance.

       *       *       *       *       *

So that autumn the Ridges trekked again from West Laurence Avenue to the
snug little house on Acacia Street, "just around the corner from the
Drive." At last Milly had won her point and translated herself from the
despised West Side to the heart of the "nicest" neighborhood in the
city. After the turmoil of moving she went to her bed in the third floor
front room, listening to the splash of the lake on the breakwater,
dreaming of new conquests.

What next?




PART TWO

GETTING MARRIED




I

THE GREAT OUTSIDE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

And that was all.

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




II

MILLY ENTERTAINS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Of course."

"Young folks will be young."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grandma with a cup of lukewarm tea shattered the vision.




III

MILLY BECOMES ENGAGED


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why?" Milly demanded with some asperity.

"Why, a girl in your position--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is it?" Milly demanded more practically.

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

"Oh," said Milly, somewhat impressed.

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

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

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

"Lighthouse," Milly corrected sulkily.

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

"I haven't any to make!"

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it was done at last.




IV

CONGRATULATIONS


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

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

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

"I hope so," Milly responded briskly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He laughed good naturedly.

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

He admitted it reluctantly.

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

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

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

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

"The city's growing that way fast."

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

"Before that I guess...."

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

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

"And the cars come within a block now."

"I'll speak to Milly about it."

She did.

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Ridge ever croaked thus, foretelling disaster.

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

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

Grandma had her own understanding of male character.




V

THE CRASH


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

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

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

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

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

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

"Home."

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

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

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

"I'm sorry--"

"If you can't afford--"

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

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

"Here's your ring," she said.

"Milly!..."

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

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

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

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

And she added from the hall:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




VI

THE DEPTHS


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

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

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

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

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

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

"I will," said Milly, humbly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her grandmother looked at her curiously.

"What good will that do?"

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

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

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

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

Vivie took the sentimental view.

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

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

"That sort of thing can't last."

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

"He _is_ mean," Milly flared.

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

"Yes, I understand--but--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old lady smiled dubiously at the pretty sentiment.

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

"Oh," she said hesitantly.

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

Milly had an inspiration.

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

"Well?" he said gruffly.

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

"What is it?"

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

"Guess I know that."

"He's very unhappy."

"Has good reason to be."

She made the direct appeal.

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

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

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

She smiled at him persuasively.

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

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

At this thrust Snowden laughed loudly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




VII

MILLY TRIES TO PAY


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

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

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

"Milly would never take a gift like that!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

For there was no longer any office to go to.

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




VIII

MILLY RENEWS HER PROSPECTS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

Father and daughter talked ranch far into the hot night.

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

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

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

"You're not Kim?" Milly stammered.

"The same."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




IX

MILLY IN LOVE


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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

At four forty-five on the afternoon of September first,--a Monday,--a
tall, somewhat nervous man rang the bell of 31 East Acacia Street and
inquired for Miss Ridge. He came in and waited when he learned from the
little old lady who opened the door that Milly was not at home. He
waited in the small fro

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