It was all a little pantomime of domestic life,—a varied, yet orderly pantomime, and it had continued with suitable variations for more than seven years. Ernestine often thought about it, not so much during the day when her mind was occupied with business wherever her eyes might be, as at night when she returned to her forlorn boarding-house room. That commonplace domestic interior of number 232 had more to do with Ernestine Geyer's life than it would be easy to say. It was her dream, her ideal of life as it should be—and almost never was.

Unconsciously it moved this solitary woman to listen favorably to the advances of a man she met at her boarding place. He was not much of a man—she knew that! A feeble body of a man, indeed, with a drooping, sallow face, and as Ernestine shrewdly suspected, he was making less money at the dry-goods shop where he worked than she made at the laundry. But for a time they "went out together"—a better phrase than became "engaged." Then Ernestine, with an unexpected keenness of vision and readiness to recognize a fact, even if it hurt her pride, knew that the man was marrying her to be taken care of. She had seen enough of that sort of marriage and had no mind for it. If he had wanted her with genuine passion, she would have lived with him—and gladly. But the shame of it all was that he had no desire of any kind for her. And she was not bad looking in spite of her deformity and her glasses. Her large, regular face was full of intelligence, and her black hair was thick and slightly curling. But no man wanted her, just for herself. She looked the fact in the face—and moved to another boarding-house.

About that time another change took place in the laundry business. The old proprietor sold out to two young men who knew little about the business. They incorporated as the "Twentieth Century Domestic Laundry" and left the management in Ernestine's competent hands. The old location was bought for a loft building, and a new building to be wholly occupied by the laundry business was put up farther north. Ernestine disliked leaving her family, as she called "number 232," but she judged that even they would not remain long after all their light had been cut off by the loft building. Anyway she had no time for sentimental regrets, for the business, with fresh blood and new capital, was growing past all belief. "Everybody has to get washed some time," was one of Ernestine's sayings, and it seemed as if a great many had to be washed by the Twentieth Century Company. She was neck and neck with the expanding business, and her salary went up rapidly until by the time she came into Milly's life she was drawing five thousand dollars a year, and earning it all as the responsible head of a business that netted twenty per cent on its capital, with nearly a hundred operatives under her.

In trade circles Ernestine was known as the "Laundryman," a name in which respect was mixed with chaff. Ernestine did not care. She knew that she had "made good," and it was pleasant. She could afford now to have a home of her own, and so she had installed herself in this apartment, far out of the dirt and the noise in which she had lived her life. She filled it with a strange assortment of furniture and ornamental accessories that did not please her. Somehow after all her years of longing, and all her efforts to make a home like other people, she had failed lamentably, and she knew it.

"I guess it ain't in me!" she confessed to Milly.

Nevertheless, she kept the vision of it,—the vision she had had through the swaying muslin curtains of "number 232."

Thus far Ernestine had come when she happened into Milly's life. Only the merest outline of her strenuous, if monotonous, existence has been given, and though Ernestine deserves much more,—deserves to be known in her mind and her feelings, yes, and in her soul,—she must put up, as she did in life, with getting less than her deserts, and let her rough actions reveal her nature imperfectly.



X

MILLY'S NEW MARRIAGE

The next morning—it was Sunday—when Ernestine presented herself at the Reddon flat to inquire in her heavy, grumbling voice for "the little gurl," Milly had difficulty in recognizing the woman who had offered Virginia an asylum the night before. Ernestine was now clothed in a well-cut walking suit of dark blue broadcloth, which became her square figure much better than the soft folds of the rose-pink negligee. Yet Milly thought her "quite common," and had a momentary pang, realizing how she and her daughter had come down in the world when they were obliged to have such neighbors. But Ernestine Geyer was not "common," and Milly, with her quick instinct for personal values, realized it as soon as she could recover from the shock of the harsh voice and the ungrammatical idiom.

After the obvious remarks about the evening's episode and some conversation with Virginia, for whom the stranger's withered hand had a great fascination, there was a pause. It was time for Ernestine to depart, and she knew it; but either her awkwardness kept her fixed in her chair or she was too much fascinated by Milly to stir. This morning Milly had put on a loose silk blouse, open at the neck, in which she looked very pretty and girlish. Ernestine stared at her in frank admiration. Milly could not understand that she embodied to this "queer" woman all that her heart had secretly longed for,—all the feminism in which she knew herself to be utterly lacking. She tried to take Virginia in her lap to caress her, but that demure little lady, submitting politely for a few moments, slipped off at the first chance and took refuge in her mother's lap, where she snuggled with conscious pleasure. Ernestine did not know how to hold a child.

"That's a nice picter," Ernestine grumbled, covering mother and daughter with glowing eyes. "Wished I had one of 'em in my place!"

"Perhaps you will some day," Milly replied politely. But Ernestine shook her head.

"Not unless I took one out of an asylum. I've thought of that, but I guess it ain't the same thing."

"Are you all alone?" Virgie asked gravely.

Ernestine nodded and added in a burst of confidence to Milly,—

"And it is lonely, I can tell you, coming home every night from your work to find just a hired girl waitin' for you and your food on the table!"

To which Milly made some commonplace rejoinder, and as another pause threatened she remarked pleasantly,—

"Where do you suppose I was last night, when I should have been at home looking after my little girl? At a suffrage meeting. Wasn't that like the modern mother?"

"Were you at that swell Mrs. ——'s house with all those big-bugs?" Ernestine questioned excitedly.

"Yes.... There were speeches about the suffrage,—the reasons why woman should have the vote, you know."

"I read all about it in the paper this morning."

Milly recalled what the interesting stranger had said to her about the point of view of actual women workers, and inquired,—

"What do you think about suffrage, Miss Geyer?"

Ernestine gave a hoarse laugh.

"I don't think much," she said succinctly.

Milly made some remarks on the subject, quoting freely from Hazel Fredericks on the injustices to women in this man-made world. Ernestine listened with a smile of sceptical amusement on her homely face, and slowly shook her head.

"There ain't much in that," she pronounced dogmatically. "The trouble ain't there. Any working-woman will tell you she ain't bothered much by lack of political power. We've got all the political powers we can use.... What does it amount to, anyhow? Things aren't done in this world by voting about 'em."

She easily threw down the feeble structure of Milly's arguments, which were largely borrowed from the talk she had heard the night before. Ernestine spoke with the assurance of one who has had reason to know.

"What women want is money, ain't it? Same as the men?" she demanded flatly.

"That's so!" Milly assented heartily.

"And they'll get it when they know how to do something somebody wants done as well as a man can. They do get it now when they've got something to give—that's truth!"

She gave Milly a brief account of her own struggles in the labor market, which interested Milly deeply.

"Now how did I get where I am to-day?" she concluded dramatically, drawing up her right sleeve and pointing to the withered arm. "Because of that. It taught me a lesson when I was nothing but an empty-headed girl. That and the burn on my leg made a man of me, because it took most of the woman thing out of me. I learned to think like a man and to act like a man. I learned my job, same as a man. Yes! And beat my boss at it so he had to pay me a man's wages to keep me, and the company has to pay me big money now—or I'd go out and get it somewheres else."

Milly was impressed. She said doubtfully,—

"But you had great ability to do all that."

Ernestine shook her head,—

"Not so much more'n most."

"And good health."

"Yes. My health don't trouble me—and that's partly because I've had no chance to fool it away like most girls."

"So you think it all depends on the women," Milly said unconvinced.

"Women—oh, Lord!" Ernestine exclaimed irreverently, getting up and walking about the room. She examined the books and the few sketches of Jack's that Milly had kept and hung on the bare walls of the Reddons' living-room.

"My husband did those," Milly explained.

"Widow?"

Milly nodded.

Examining a drawing, with her back to Milly, Ernestine continued her remarks on the great question:—

"Women! I guess the trouble with 'em started 'way back—in the Garden of Eden. They didn't like being put out, and they've never got reconciled to it since. They're mostly looking for some soft snap,—working-women, that is," she said deferentially for Milly's sake. "The ones I know at any rate. When they're young they mostly expect to marry right off—catch some feller who'll be nice to 'em and let 'em live off him. But they'd oughter know there's nothin' in that sort of marriage. All they have to do is to look at all the women the men get tired of and desert. And the slaves the mothers are! I knew that!" she interpolated with a woman's pride to prove to this other pretty woman that even she was not single in the world because she had not had her chance. "I c'd have married once, and came near making one great fool of myself like the others. But I got wise in time. You see he weren't no good," she explained frankly. "I expect, though, he's eatin' off some other woman before this.... Girls always expect to draw the grand prize in the lottery, where there's mostly blanks, and get a man who'll love 'em more'n anythin' else in the world, and give 'em a good time all their lives. Ain't that so?"

Milly agreed with reservations. Ernestine's observations had been confined to a class of women with whom Milly was not familiar, but her conclusions applied fairly well to the class Milly knew best,—the so-called "educated" and well-to-do women.

"Well, that ain't life," Ernestine pronounced with clenching force.

"Women have hearts, you must remember," Milly sighed a little sentimentally. "They'll always be foolish."

"Not that way—when they learn!"

"I wonder."

"And that's the reason I've been givin' yer why girls don't take to any work seriously and make somethin' of it, same as a man has to. Oh, I've seen lots of 'em—just lots!"

She waved a hand disgustedly.

Milly was now thoroughly interested in her new acquaintance, and they went deeper into the complicated woman-question. Ernestine, she perceived, had learned her lessons in the hard school of the man's world of give and take, and learned them thoroughly. And she had the rare ability to learn by experience. This with her good health and an innate sense of orderliness and thrift, possibly due to the Teutonic strain in her blood, had sufficed to put her ahead in the race. For she was even less educated than Milly, and naturally less quick. But having touched realities all her life, she had achieved an abiding sense of fact that Milly was now totally incapable of acquiring. Her philosophy was simple, but it embraced the woman question, suffrage, and the man-made world. To live, she said, you must give something of yourself that is worth the while of Somebody Else to take and pay for—pay as high as he can be made to pay. To Milly it seemed a harsh philosophy. She wished to give when and what she liked to whom she pleased and take whatever she wanted. It was the failure of this system to work that had brought about the present crisis in her affairs.

* * * * *

One o'clock arrived, and Milly, who was genuinely aroused by the harsh-voiced working-woman, invited Ernestine to stay for the mid-day meal, which on account of the child was dinner rather than lunch. The light in Ernestine's black eyes and the pleased, humble tone in which she exclaimed,—"Oh, may I!" touched Milly.

So the three presently sat down around the small table, which Milly had served in the front room of the flat rather than in the dark pocket of a dining-room. That seemed to Ernestine a very brilliant idea, and she was also much impressed by the daintiness of the table and the little details of the meal. Milly had a faculty of getting some results even from such unpromising material as Marion Reddon's sullen Swede. She knew very well how food should be cooked and served, how gentlefolk were in the habit of taking their food as a delightful occasion as well as a chance to appease hunger, and she always insisted upon some sort of form. So the mid-day meal, which seemed to Milly poor and forlorn compared with what she had known in her life, was a revelation to Ernestine of social grace and daintiness. Her keen eyes followed Milly's every motion, and she noted how each dish, and spoon, and fork was placed. All this, she realized, was what she had been after and failed to get. Milly apologized for the simple meal,—"Hilda isn't much of a cook, and since we've been by ourselves, I have lost interest in doing things."

"It ain't the food," Ernestine replied oracularly.

(When Virgie went to take her nap, she inquired of her mother why the nice "queer" lady said "ain't" so often.)

* * * * *

It was raining in torrents, and the two women spent the long afternoon in a series of intimate confidences. Milly's greatest gift was the faculty of getting at all sorts of people. Now that she had become used to the voice and the grammar of the street which Ernestine employed, and also to the withered hand, she liked the working-woman more and more and respected her fine quality. And Ernestine's simple, obvious admiration for Milly and everything about her was flattering. In the plain woman's eyes was the light of adoration that a man has for the thing most opposite to his soul, most lacking in his experience.

In the course of this long talk Milly learned everything about Ernestine Geyer's life contained in the previous chapter of this book and much more that only a woman could confide in another woman,—intimate details of her honorable struggle. Ernestine bared her hungry heart, her loneliness in her new home, and her feeling of helplessness in not getting, after all, what she wanted and what she had earned the money to pay for.

"I guess I'm too much of a man," she said, after she had described her solitary life in the apartment below. "There ain't enough of a woman left in me to make a home!"

Milly tried to cheer her and encourage her, and promised to take dinner with her some day and give her any suggestions she could.

* * * * *

After that Sunday Milly saw Ernestine Geyer almost every day and often on Sundays for the whole day. Ernestine was fertile in clumsy ways of wooing the new-found friends. She brought Virgie fruit and candies and toys and insisted upon thrusting flowers and dainties on Milly. The latter heartily liked the "queer" lady, as Virginia still called Ernestine, and invited her cordially to come in whenever she would. In Milly's busier, more social days, Ernestine's devotion might have proved a bore. But this was a lonely winter. Very few friends came to see her, and Milly had many idle hours.

Hazel Fredericks had not been offended by Milly's neglect to take advantage of her opportunities the night of the suffrage meeting,—at least she showed no pique when Milly finally got around to telephoning her friend and congratulating her on her successful speech. But Hazel had become so involved in the movement by this time, especially so intimate with the fascinating young married agitator, that she had less time and less interest to spare for Milly's small affairs. She was planning with her new friend, so she told Milly when she did get out to the flat, a serious campaign that promised to be immensely exciting,—nothing less than a series of drawing-room meetings in some western cities, especially Chicago, where "Society" had shown a lamentable indifference hitherto to the Cause. Presently this mission took Hazel Fredericks altogether beyond Milly's narrow sphere for the remainder of the winter. From time to time Milly received newspaper clippings and an occasional hurried note from Hazel, recounting the social flutter that they had created by their meetings, and the progress the Cause was making in the most fashionable circles of the middle west. Milly envied Hazel this new and exciting experience, and wished she might be in Chicago to witness the triumphs of the two missionaries. But she realized, nevertheless, more than ever before, her unfitness for the work. She no longer had a very fervent faith in it....

So in her loneliness she came to accept Ernestine Geyer's companionship and devotion, at first passively, then gratefully. Together they took Virginia on holiday sprees to the theatre, and the three had many of their meals together, usually in Milly's apartment, as she had found Ernestine's home "impossible," a "barracks," and the food,—"just food." Virginia had gotten used to the withered hand and no longer found Ernestine so "queer." Like the little egotist she was, as most children, she valued this new friend for all the good things that came from her, and found she could "work" Ernestine much easier than her mother.

"We make a pretty cosey family," Ernestine said happily, summing it up one day at dinner.

"Mama, papa, daughter," Virgie added, pointing demurely to Ernestine as "Papa." After that the Laundryman was known as "Pa" by the trio.

Milly was occasionally embarrassed by Ernestine,—and she was ashamed of her feeling,—as when Clive Reinhard came in on them one evening without warning. Reinhard glanced at the squat figure of the Laundryman, and tried to make her talk. Fortunately for Milly's feelings, Ernestine sat bolt upright and tongue-tied in the novelist's presence and thus did not betray her ungrammatical self. But she stayed on relentlessly until the visitor went, and observed afterwards,—

"So that's the Johnnie that writes the books I see in the windows? And the girls are crazy about 'em—humph!" All of which would have amused the popular novelist.

It was inevitable, of course, that sooner or later Ernestine should meet all of Milly's friends who still sought her out. And she always sat through these occasions, quiet and sharp-eyed; when she trusted herself to speak, her harsh, positive voice had the effect of dropping a piece of china on the floor. Milly was often mortified at first, though by this time she cared for Ernestine so genuinely that she would not let her suspect or hurt her feelings. She convinced herself that Ernestine's grammar was an accident of the slightest importance, and that as a person she compared quite favorably with all the people she knew.

Ernestine's fondness for Milly's visitors was not due to any vulgar desire to push herself into superior circles, merely a human curiosity about these members of another world and a pathetic admiration for their refinement. With the same attitude she was painstakingly, if shyly, improving her table manners and her speech. To Virginia's relief she had largely suppressed "ain't" already, and occasionally bestowed a final syllable on the participles.

* * * * *

But Milly had many more real worries than these trifling social maladjustments between her old friends and her new one. Her small funds were dwindling rapidly, as usual, even with the practice of a greater economy than she had ever before attempted. All her feeble efforts to find employment and earn money had failed. She felt herself slipping down, and with all her courageous determination to save herself from social chaos she was like a bird fluttering at the brink of a chasm, unable to wing itself steadily out of danger. The Reddons, she knew, would soon need their apartment, for Marion was coming north in the first warm weather. Then there would be for herself and Virginia nothing but a boarding-house, from which she shrank. And after that, what? Mornings she woke to consciousness with a start of terror, realizing that the weeks were melting to days,—days of grace as for a criminal! What should she do? What could she do? She envied Ernestine as she had never envied any one in her life, when she saw her striding off in the morning, her head in the air, a serious scowl on her plain face, competent and equipped in the face of life....

Ernestine found her one evening at a low point in her depression over her fate. Milly had told far less of her circumstances to the working-woman than Ernestine had told of hers in their mutual confidences. Social pride—a sense of caste—had prevented Milly from confessing her miserable situation. But now she unfolded the whole story, with a few tears.

"If it wasn't for Virgie," she sobbed, "I'd walk into the river to-night—I'd do anything to end it. I'm no good."

"Don't you talk like that, dearie!" Ernestine said, getting up impulsively and with her heavy tread crossing the room. She took Milly in her strong arms and held her tight. "Don't ever say those things again!" she murmured in an uncertain voice, hugging the yielding figure to her. "Don't I know how you feel?... I guessed things weren't very rosy with you, but I didn't like to ask you until you were ready to say.... Now we'll straighten this thing out."

Her robust, confident manner cheered Milly as much as her embrace. She trusted Ernestine's strength as she had once that of her husband. Ernestine went at things like a man in more ways than one. Releasing Milly, she stood over her frowningly, her hands on her hips, and looked steadily, intently at the pitiful face of the other woman.

"Couldn't I do something in the laundry?" Milly suggested timidly. "You employ so many women there," she faltered. It had taken a struggle with her pride to contemplate this work. "I'm pretty strong."

Ernestine smiled and shook her head very positively.

"No, that's one thing that wouldn't do. You'd be no good as a working-woman now, dearie!"

"But I must do something!" Milly wailed, "or starve and let Virgie go to her father's people. Isn't there anything I can do in the world?"

She had reached the ultimate bottom of life, she felt, and her demand had a tragic pathos in it. She waited for her answer.

"Yes!" Ernestine exclaimed, a smile of successful thinking on her broad face. "You can make a home for me—a real one—that's what you can do—fine! Now listen," she insisted, as she saw the look of disappointment on Milly's expectant face. "Listen to me—it ain't bad at all."

And she unfolded her plan, recounting again her longing for her own hearth, and proving to Milly that she could do a real, useful thing in the world, if she would make life pleasanter and happier for one who was able to earn money for three.

"Don't wait for your friends to come back," she urged. "Just pack right up as soon as you can and move downstairs. Do you suppose Virgie's asleep? We'll tell her to-morrer any way.... And you do with my shack what you want,—any old thing, so's you let me sleep there. It'll be fine, fine!"

And so it was agreed, although Milly was not greatly pleased with the prospect of becoming homemaker and companion to the Laundryman. It was not very different in essentials from her marriage with Jack, and she recognized now that she had not made a success of that on the economic side. In short, it was like so much else in her life, practically all her life, she felt bitterly,—it was a shift, a compromise, a pis-aller, and this time it was a social descent also. What would her friends say? But Milly courageously put that cheap thought out of her mind. If this was all that she could find to do to support herself and her child,—if it was all that she was good for in this world,—she would do it and swallow her pride with her tears.

And she was sincerely grateful to Ernestine for the warm-hearted way in which she had put her proposal, as if it were a real favor to her. She made this one mental reservation to herself,—it should last only until she found "something better" as a solution. When Milly told the little girl of the new move, Virgie was delighted. "It'll be like having a real man in the house again," she said. "We'll have to teach her how to speak like we do, shan't we, mama?"

* * * * *

Ernestine came bubbling in the next day with a new inspiration.

"Been thinking of our scheme all night," she announced breathlessly, "and couldn't attend to business I was so excited. Now this is the conclusion I got to. You can't make a home in one of these flat-boxes, can you?"

Milly agreed listlessly that they were a poor compromise for the real thing.

"Well, I said to myself,—'Why not a real house?' So this morning I quit work and took a taxi so's I could get over ground faster and went down—"

"I know," Milly interrupted with a laugh,—"to number 232!"

"Yes! And they're there still, and I've got number 236! What do you think of that? It don't take me long to do business when I got an idea.... Of course there is that loft building opposite, but it's thin and don't take much light.... So to-morrow, Mrs. Bragdon, you meet me at luncheon and we'll go down and look over our new home!"

How could any one be doleful under so much joy? Milly kissed Ernestine with genuine emotion.

"It will be splendid. Virgie will like a house so much more than this."

"Of course, of course—it's the only proper thing for a family.... You'll have to do the whole thing, Madam." (Ernestine had a curious shyness about using Milly's name.) "I'll give you 'Carter Blanch' as they say.... Only one thing!"

She shook her thick finger at Milly solemnly.

"What's that?"

"Muslin curtains at all the front windows, and a real fireplace in the livin'-room—"

"And window boxes at the windows and real oil lamps on the table, Mr. Geyer!" Milly completed, entering into Ernestine's spirit.

"We'll be comfy and homelike, don't you think so?" Ernestine shouted gleefully, putting an arm around Milly's soft figure. "Now I've got what I want," she said almost solemnly.

"Don't be too sure—I'm a pretty bad housekeeper."

"I know you're not."

"Careless and horribly extravagant—every one says so."

"I won't let you break me!... Say, you'd ought to be married to a real man—that's what you are made for."

"Thanks!" Milly said a little sadly. "I've had all of that I want.... This suits me far better."

"Well, it does me, anyway!"

* * * * *

Thus Milly's second marriage came off. In another month she and Virginia were living quite happily in Ernestine Geyer's establishment at "number 236," with muslin curtains behind the windows, and flower-boxes.



PART FIVE

THE CAKE SHOP



I

"NUMBER 236"

Milly was content. At least she felt that she ought to be, and she really was—for a time. Thanks to Ernestine's "Carter Blanch," she had made a comfortable, homelike interior out of the little old house, in which she installed her own furniture and almost nothing of Ernestine's. Sam Reddon helped her make the alterations and decorate afresh "number 236," as the new home came to be known among Milly's friends. Reddon was explosively enthusiastic over the Laundryman, whom he described as a "regular old sport," "one of the finest," "the right sort," and the climax of praise—"one first-class man." He took a mischievous delight in drawing her out, especially on the aesthetic side, where she was wildest, and he revelled in her idiom, which reminded him of the dear argot of his beloved city, and which he declared was "the language of the future." Clive Reinhard, also, who came to dinner at the new house very soon, approved warmly of Ernestine. In his more conventional vocabulary she was "a character," "a true type," and "a trump." He liked her all the better, perhaps, because he did not feel obliged to study her professionally, and relaxed in her company.

Indeed, all the men Milly knew liked Ernestine Geyer and quickly got the habit of dropping in at "number 236" at all hours,—it was so conveniently near their offices and clubs, they said. They came for breakfast and luncheon and tea, and even for whiskey and cigarettes after the theatre. With the blunted sense of fine proprieties characteristic of their sex, they approved unreservedly of Milly's new marriage. In Reddon's frank phrase it was "an extraordinary fit." "You two are complements—which is more than one can say of most regular marriages."

(It was more than Milly could say of her union with Jack, alas!)

"I wonder more women don't do the same thing," the architect continued in a vein of philosophical speculation; "get married to other women. Now Ernestine has every good quality of a man, and she can't deceive you with a chorus girl! It cuts out all the sex business, which is a horrid nuisance—see the newspapers."

"Sam!" Milly warned, and then ventured,—"How about the children—where would they come in?"

"That is a difficulty," Reddon admitted, stretching his feet to the fire.

"You see I had mine already,—bless her little heart!"

"One of 'em would have to do as you did," Sam mused, "get the children on the side."

At this point Milly with a "Sam, don't be horrid" shut off further social theorizing. Ernestine grinned and chuckled over Sam's sallies. As Reddon said,—"You can say anything to her! She has a man's sense of humor,—the only woman I ever saw except Marion who has."

* * * * *

With the exception of Marion, Milly's women friends were much more dubious than the men about the new household. Mrs. Bunker and Mrs. Billman, of course, had long since lost sight of Milly in the course of her migrations. Although Hazel Fredericks looked her up soon after her return from the suffrage tour and praised the little house and said of the domestic arrangement,—"How interesting!... Miss Geyer must be a woman of remarkable force of character.... It is a wise experiment," etc., yet Milly knew that to others Hazel would shrug expressive shoulders and drop eyelids over muddy eyes and in other feminine ways indicate her sense of Milly's social descent. And from this time the friendship between them declined swiftly. Hazel explained, "They were interested in different things," and "Milly doesn't care for ideas, you know." Mrs. Fredericks, who considered herself to be in the flood-tide of the modern intellectual movement, had few moments to spare for her insignificant friend. Milly realized this with a touch of bitterness. "I can't do anything for her in any way. I can't help on her game." She knew that these ambitious, modern, intellectual women, with whom she had been thrown, had no use for people "out of the game."

It was that really, more than the fact that she had lost caste by keeping house for a business woman, that cost her women's friendship. Milly no longer in the least "counted." She had done something rather "queer" from the feminine point of view, however sensible a solution of her own problem it might be. She had confessed herself without ambition and "aim," as Hazel would put it; had no social sense or wish "to be Somebody," as Mrs. Billman would put it. She had become just plain Mrs. Nobody. Of course she could not entertain in any but the most informal, simple fashion as she entertained the men who came to the house, and women find no distinction in that sort of hospitality and do not like to offer it. All this Milly realized more and more, as any woman would have, when the house had settled into its groove. She bravely put the thoughts aside, although they rankled and later manifested themselves, as such things must. For the first time her own sex dropped Milly, and it cut.

Meantime there was much that was pleasant and comforting in her new life in pretty little "number 236," and Milly got what joy there was out of Virginia's delight in having a real home and Ernestine's beaming happiness all the time she was in the house. The little girl could return now to that "very nice school" where other nice little girls went. She departed every morning beside the Laundryman, tugging at her arm, skipping and chattering like a blackbird in June. Ernestine saw her safely up the school steps and then took the car to her business. Milly, after the housekeeping and her morning duties, walked up town for her daughter and spent most of the afternoons with her, as she had not much else to do. She had suggested at the beginning helping Ernestine in some way in the business, but the Laundryman had not encouraged that. In fact, she showed a curious reluctance in even having Milly visit the office or call for her there.

"It ain't any place for you, dearie," she said. "You just stick to your end of the business, the house—and that's enough."

Milly paid much more attention to the details of their simple housekeeping than she had ever cared to do for herself and Jack. It may have been from a sense of obligation in spending Ernestine's money, for after all the Laundryman was not her legal husband. Or it may have been due to the fact that Ernestine, being another woman, knew and could not be easily bluffed with, "Everybody does that," "You can't get along with less and live, anyhow," etc., as a mere man could. Nor did she like to wheedle a woman. Whatever the cause, Milly gave up her lazy habit of telephoning to the dearest stores for supplies or letting the servants do the ordering, and went forth herself each morning to market. She accepted Ernestine's suggestions about where things could be bought cheaply, and even condescended to enter the large department stores where groceries were sold for cash at wholesale rates. The Laundryman purchased all the supplies for her business, and she knew that buying was a science and a game combined,—a very ancient game which is the basis of "trade." She took it for granted that Milly would play the game to the best advantage for all of them, and after a few attempts at the old slovenly, wasteful method of providing, Milly accepted the situation and did the best she knew how to meet Ernestine's idea. "Number 236" was to be well stocked with an abundance of wholesome food, but there was to be no waste and no "flummery." In a word, "efficiency."

There was almost no friction between them. It would seem that the Laundryman knew how to be both gentle and firm,—the requisites, so the sages say, for successful domesticity. Jack had often been not gentle with Milly, and almost never firm. Milly did not take seriously his constant complaint over bills, and in some way sooner or later got what she wanted. With Ernestine it was quite different: she did not dare let the accounts run on or run over. After the first few equivocations she had her bills ready for examination by the first of the month, and they were reasonably near the figures agreed upon. So, as Ernestine put it, slapping her knee with the cheque-book, "it all goes as slick as paint."

* * * * *

And so, to sum it up in conventional terms, one might call Milly's new marriage a success and expect that the modest little household of "number 236" would go its peaceful way uneventfully to nature's fulfilment of a comfortable middle age—and thus interest us no more. For a time both Ernestine and Milly so believed it would be. But they were deceived. Human affairs, even of the humblest, rarely arrange themselves thus easily and logically.

Milly, in spite of her sincere resolve to be contented with what she had, was growing restless. Once this orderly domestic life of the three in the small house was running smoothly, she began to feel cramped, full of unexpended energies. She would have spent them naturally in entertaining and the usual social activity, to which she had become accustomed as the fit expression of woman's life, but that obviously could not be in the present circumstances. Milly recognized this and did not attempt the impossible. Even if she had had the money, Ernestine was not one who could be made a social figure, nor could she be ignored in her own house. The situation, as has been described, had a flavor of social irregularity, like an unauthorized union, and the social penalty must be paid. With Milly's lean purse there was not much shopping to be done, beyond the daily marketing, and it was dreary to walk the New York streets and gaze into tempting shop windows, though Milly did a good deal of that in her idle hours. She had never cared to read, except as an occasional diversion, or to "improve her mind," as Grandma Ridge might have put it, by lectures such as Hazel Fredericks had once patronized. Lectures bored her, she admitted frankly, unless she knew the lecturer personally. Perhaps Hazel and her set were justified in condemning Milly's general lack of purpose and aim in life. But it should be remembered that the generation with which Milly began had never recognized the desirability of such ideals for women, and Milly, like many of her sisters in the middle walk of life, always resented the assumption that every human being, including women, should have a plan and a purpose in this life. She liked to think of herself as an irresponsible, instinctive vessel of divine fire to bless and inspire. But such vessels very often go on the reefs of passion, and if Milly had not been so thoroughly normal in her instincts, she might have suffered shipwreck before this. Otherwise, they float out at middle age more or less derelict in the human sea, unless they have been captured and converted willy-nilly to some other's purpose. Now Milly was drifting towards that dead sea of purposeless middle age, and instinctively feared her fate.

She felt that her present life with the Laundryman offered her no outlet for her powers, and this was the period when she became fertile in launching schemes for which she displayed a few weeks' intense enthusiasm that gradually died out before Ernestine's chilly good sense. One of the first of these enthusiasms was "Squabs." She tried to interest Ernestine in the business of raising squabs for the market. She had read in some country-life magazine of a woman who had made a very good income by breeding this delicacy for the New York market. Ernestine had talked of buying a farm somewhere near the city for the summers, and Milly thought this could be made into a productive enterprise. "With a man and his wife to run it," they could raise squabs by the thousands. But Ernestine, who had all the business she could attend to with her laundry, was apathetic. She averred that any man and his wife who could make money in the poultry business would be exploiting it for themselves, not for "two green-horn women."

The next proposal was "Violets," and then "Mushrooms," to which Ernestine was equally indifferent. You had to get your market in every case, she suspected. "You don't know how to sell violets or mushrooms, dearie, any more than you know how to raise 'em."

"But I could learn!" Milly pouted. She thought Ernestine was unenterprising and also underrated her ability, just because she had not been a working-woman.

"'Twould cost too much for you to learn," Ernestine replied dryly.

Milly's little schemes were oddly always of the luxury order,—to cater to the luxury-class,—squabs, violets, mushrooms. Her ideas revolved about the parasitic occupations because they seemed to promise large, immediate returns. Rebuffed in these first attempts she brought forth no new scheme for a time, but she was seeking. She envied Ernestine her manlike independence, her Bank-Account aspect, and wanted to become a Business Woman.

One invariable objection that Ernestine had made to all Milly's proposals was:—

"I don't know anything about that business. I know the laundry business from the skin to the clothes-line and home again—and that's all! It's a good enough business for me. Everybody has to get washed sometimes!" She was for the fundamental, basic occupations that dealt in universal human necessities, and once said to Sam Reddon, who had banteringly offered her the job of running his new office, "No, thank you! If I ever make a change from the laundry, I'm going into the liquor business. Every man seems to need his drink the same as he has to be washed." (This retort had immensely pleased Reddon, and he was always asking Ernestine when she would be ready to start a saloon with him.)

At last Milly thought she had cornered Ernestine's favorite objection by a new scheme, which was nothing less than starting a model "Ideal Laundry" in some pretty country spot near the city, "where the water is clean and soft," and there were green lawns and hedges on which to spread the clothes, "as they do abroad." It was to be manned by a force of tidy, white-clothed laundresses, who might do their washing bare-legged in the running brook. (She described to Ernestine the picturesque, if primitive, laundry customs of the south of Europe.) "They do such nice work over there: their linen is as soft and white as snow," she said.

"And whose goin' to pay for all that gilt?" Ernestine demanded in conclusion. For Milly had expatiated on the fortune they might confidently expect from the new laundry. Milly was sure that all nice, well-to-do families would be only too thankful to pay large prices for their laundry work, if they could be assured that it would be done in such sanitary, picturesque fashion by expert laundresses. And she had thought of another plan which combined philanthropy with aestheticism and business. They might employ "fallen women" as laundresses and teach them also expert mending of linen. To all of which Ernestine smiled as one would at the fancies of an engaging child. She said at the end in her heavy-voiced way:—

"I don't know how it is in Europe, but in this country you don't make money that way. You've got to do things cheap and do 'em for a whole lot of people to get big money in anything. It's the little people with their nickels and tens and quarters as pile up the fortunes."

Milly felt that Ernestine betrayed in this the limitations of her plebeian origin.

"S'pose now you c'd get all the capital you need for your Ideal Laundry—who'd patronize it? The swells, the families with easy money to spend? There ain't so many of them, take the whole bunch, and I can tell you, so far as I know, the rich want to get somethin' for nothin' as bad as the little fellers—I don't know but worse! I guess that's why they get rich."

Thus Ernestine would have nothing of any business that catered solely to the rich and exclusive classes. A sure democratic and business instinct made her rely for steady profits upon the multitude, who "must all get washed sometime," in her favorite axiom, and as cheaply as possible.

"You never take any of my ideas seriously," Milly complained after this rebuff.

* * * * *

It happened to be a stormy winter's evening when the Ideal Laundry had been up for discussion. They could hear occasional spats of snow against the window-panes behind the long red curtains, which had been drawn. A wood fire was crumbling into glowing coals on the hearth. Virginia had long since gone to bed, and Sam Reddon, who had dropped in for dinner in the absence of his wife from the city, had left after an evening of banter and chit-chat.... At Milly's despairing exclamation, Ernestine squatted down on a footstool at her feet and looked up at her mate with the pained expression of a faithful dog, who wants to understand his Idol's desires, but can't.

"What's the matter with this, dearie?" she grumbled, taking one of Milly's hands in her powerful grip. "Can't you be satisfied just as it is? Seems to me—" and she broke off to look around the cheerful room with a glance of appreciation—"seems to me we're pretty comfortable, we three, just as we are, without worrying 'bout making a lot more money and trying things that would be a bother and might turn out badly in the end."

As Milly's face still gloomed, unresponsive, she added contritely,—

"I know it's small. It ain't what you—"

"Oh, it isn't that!" Milly interrupted hastily. "You don't understand, Ernestine; I want to do something for myself just to show I can. I'm so useless—always have been, I suppose.... Well." She rose from her chair, disengaging herself from the Laundryman's embrace, and stood musingly with one foot on the fender, the firelight playing softly over the silk of her gown. (The favorite attitude, by the way, of the heroine in Jack's illustrations of Clive Reinhard's stories.)

"You ain't one mite useless to me!" Ernestine protested. (In her emotional moments she lapsed into her native idiom in spite of herself.)

"You're kind, Ernestine," Milly replied almost coldly. "But I really am nearly useless. Can't you see why I want to do something for myself and my child, as you have done for yourself? And not be always a dependent!"

Ernestine threw herself on the lounge, looking quite miserable. The worm in her swelling bud of happiness had already appeared.

"I'm content," she sighed, "just as it is."

"I'm not!" Milly retorted, rather unfeelingly.

"It suits me to a T, if it could only last."

For a time neither added anything to the subject. Milly, who was never hard for more than a few moments, went over to the lounge and caressed the Laundryman's face.

"That was horrid of me," she said. "It's going to last—forever, I guess."

But in spite of herself she could not keep the droop from her voice at this statement of the irrevocable, and Ernestine shook her head sadly.

"No, it ain't. You'll marry again sometime."

"I'll never do that!" Milly exclaimed impatiently.

"I s'pose it would really be the best thing for you," Ernestine admitted, looking at Milly thoughtfully. Milly was now barely thirty-four and more seductive as a woman than ever before. Ernestine's jealous heart could understand why men would desire her mate. "And this time," she continued more cheerfully, "you'll know enough to pick a good provider."

"Don't talk such nonsense."

Nevertheless Milly was pleased at this proof that she was still desirable, merely as a woman. What woman wouldn't, be? Her early romantic notion that second marriages were impure had completely changed since the failure of her marriage with Jack. Now she had merely a feeling of disgust with the married state in general and with husbands as a class.

"They ain't all bad, I expect," Ernestine remarked in a spirit of fairness. "There must be exceptions among husbands the same as in everything else in life."

"I don't care to take the risk."

"But I expect if you'd happened to marry one of those others who wanted you to you'd felt different. You'd be on easy street to-day, anyhow!... The trouble was, my dear, you trusted to your feelin' too much, and not enough to your head."

She nodded her own large head sagely.

"Perhaps," Milly agreed vaguely.... "Well, will you shut the house up?"

Ernestine went downstairs to lock the doors and see that the lights were out in the servants' quarters.



II

AT LAST, THE REAL RIGHT SCHEME

Whenever Eleanor Kemp came to New York—which happened usually at least twice a year, on her way to and from Europe—she always endeavored to see her old friend, if for only a few minutes. So when she landed this spring, she went almost immediately from her hotel to number 236, and Milly found her waiting in the little reception room on her return from her marketing.

"You see I didn't forget the number, and just came over!" Mrs. Kemp said gayly. "We docked at ten, and Walter has already disappeared to see some pictures.... How are you, dear?"

The two friends had kissed, and then still holding each other by the arms drew off for the preliminary scrutiny. Eleanor Kemp's black hair showed gray about the temples, and there were lines around the trembling mouth. "She's getting old, really," Milly thought in a flash. "But it doesn't make so much difference to her, they are so rich!"

"Milly, you are prettier than ever—you always are when I see you—how do you keep so young?" the older woman exclaimed admiringly, and drew Milly's smiling face closer for another kiss. "And you have been through so much since I saw you last—so much sadness."

"Yes," Milly admitted flatly.

Somehow she did not want to talk of her marriage and Jack's death with Eleanor Kemp, who had been so near her during the ecstatic inception of that passion.

"How pretty your house is!" Eleanor said, divining Milly's reluctance to intimacy. "I've been peeking into the next room while I waited."

"Yes, it's pleasant," Milly replied unenthusiastically. "It's small and the street is rather noisy. But it does well enough. You know it isn't my house. It belongs to a friend,—Ernestine Geyer."

"Yes, you wrote me."

"She's in business, away all day, and I keep house for her," Milly explained, as if she were eager not to have her position misunderstood.

"It must be much pleasanter for you and Virginia than being alone."

"Yes," Milly agreed, in the same negative voice, and then showed her friend over the house, which Mrs. Kemp pronounced "sweet" and "cunning." As Milly's manner remained listless, Eleanor Kemp suggested their lunching at the hotel, and they walked over to the large hostelry on the Avenue, where the Kemps usually stayed in New York.

Walter Kemp not having returned from his picture quest, the women had luncheon by themselves at a little table near a window in the ornate dining-room of the hotel. Milly grew more cheerful away from her home. It always lightened her mind of its burdens to eat in a public place. She liked the movement about her, the strange faces, the unaccustomed food, and her opportunities of restaurant life had not been numerous of late. It was pleasant to be again with her old friend and revive their common memories of Chicago days. They discussed half the people they knew. Milly told Eleanor of Vivie Norton's engagement finally to the divorced man and the marriage, "a week after he got his decree." And Eleanor told Milly of the approaching marriage of Nettie Gilbert's daughter to a very attractive youth, etc.

"You must come to visit me this summer," she declared. "Your friends are all dying to see you."

"Do you think they remember me still?"

"Remember you! My dear, they still talk about your engagement to Clarence Parker."

Milly laughed gayly.

"That!"... She added quite unexpectedly, "I suppose I ought to have married him really."

"Milly!"

"Why not?" Milly persisted in a would-be indifferent tone. "Then I shouldn't be keeping house for somebody else for my living."

Mrs. Kemp gave her a quick look, and then turned it off with,—

"You should have stayed in Chicago, whatever you did. We all miss you so!..."

In her glances about the crowded room Milly's eyes had rested upon a little woman seated at a table not far away,—a blond, fluffy-haired, much-dressed and much-jewelled creature, who was scrutinizing the long menu with close attention.

"Do you know who she is, Nelly?" Milly asked, indicating the little blond person. "It seems to me she's some one I ought to know."

Mrs. Kemp glanced out of her lowered eyes; then as the other looked up both bowed. She said in a whisper to Milly,—

"You ought to know her, Milly! She was Annie Dove."

"Who is she now?"

Eleanor Kemp paused to laugh before replying and then whispered,—

"She's who you might have been—Mrs. Clarence Parker!"

"Oh!" Milly murmured and looked again with more curiosity at the fluffy-haired little woman. "She dresses a good deal," she observed. "I wonder how Clarence likes to pay the bills."

"We saw them at Wiesbaden this spring. They seemed quite happy. He was taking the cure."

"Did it do him any good?" Milly inquired amiably....

Presently a short, bald-headed man took the place opposite their neighbor, and Milly examined him with much care. Clarence Albert was balder and whiter than ever, and his cold gray eyes were now concealed by glasses which gave him the look of an eminent financier. His wife coached him evidently about the menu. Milly thought she could hear his squeaky voice saying, "Well, now, I don't know about that." A queer little smile came around her lips as she considered that she might have occupied the seat the richly dressed, bejewelled little lady had, and be listening at that moment to Clarence Albert's observations on the luncheon menu. Just then Parker looked over, recognized Mrs. Kemp, and hurried across with outstretched hand. He did not see Milly until he reached the table, and then he stopped as if he did not know what to do next. Milly smiled and extended a hand.

"How do you do, Mr. Parker!" she said gayly. "Eleanor has just pointed out your wife to me—such a pretty woman! How are you?"

"Very well now Miss—Mrs.—"

"Bragdon," Milly supplied.

"Very well indeed, Mrs. Bragdon, and I see you are the same."

He retreated at once, and Milly glancing roguishly at Eleanor Kemp murmured,—

"I take it back.... No, I couldn't! Not even with all the clothes and jewels."

"Of course you couldn't!"

"It's fate—it's all fate!" Milly sighed. That was her way of saying that everything in this world depended upon the individual soul, and she couldn't manage her soul differently. She felt relieved.

The dessert arriving just then, Milly's attention was distracted from the Clarence Alberts and from her soul. She took much time and care in selecting a piece of patisserie. French pastry, which had become a common article in New York hotels by that time, always interested Milly. She liked the sweet, seductive cakes, and they brought back to memory happy times in Paris and her visits to Gage's with Jack.

"I am afraid they aren't very good," her hostess remarked, observing that Milly after all her research into the dish merely tasted her cake and pushed it away. "They don't seem able to make the nice French ones over here—they're usually as heavy as lead."

"No, they're not a bit like those we used to get at Gage's. I wonder why they don't find somebody who can make real French pastry.... Now there's an idea!" she exclaimed with sudden illumination. "A cake shop like Gage's with real cakes and a real Madame in black at the desk!"

She gave Eleanor a vivid description of the charms of Gage's. Her friend laughed indulgently.

"You funny child, to remember that all this time!"

"But why not?" Milly persisted. "Everybody likes French pastry. I believe you could make heaps of money from a good cake shop in America."

"Well, when you are ready to open your cake shop, come to Chicago!... And anyway you are coming to visit me next month."

Milly readily promised to make the visit when Virginia's school closed, and shortly afterwards the friends parted.

* * * * *

Milly strolled home in a revery of Eleanor Kemp, who always brought back her past, of Clarence Albert and Clarence Albert's expensive wife. "If I had—" she mused. If somehow she had done differently and instead of being a penniless widow she were happily married with ample means; if the world was this or that or the other!... But back of all her thoughts, beneath all her revery, simmered the idea of the Cake Shop. In telling Ernestine of her day's adventure, however, she made no reference to the New Idea. This time she would not expose her conception to the chilling blast of the Laundryman's criticism until she had perfected it. She nursed it like an artist within her own breast.



III

CHICAGO AGAIN

A month later Milly and Virginia went to Chicago to visit the Kemps. Milly's heart leaped as the miles westward were covered by the rapid train. Old friends, she thought, are nearest, warmest, dearest to us, and again and again during the joyous weeks of her visit to the bustling city by the Lake, Milly felt the truth of this platitude. Everybody seemed delighted to see "Milly Ridge," as half the people she met still called her. She could not go a block without some more or less familiar figure stopping, and throwing up hands exclaiming, "Why, Milly! not you—I'm so glad." And they stopped to talk, obstructing traffic.

Milly was conscious of being at her very best. She had decided to discard her mourning altogether on going back to Chicago, and had some attractive new gowns to wear. Instead of a forlorn and weary widow, she presented herself to her Chicago public fresher and prettier than ever, beaming with delight over everything and very much alive. That is the way Chicago likes.

"Chicago is different," she repeated a dozen times a day, meaning by that vague comment that Chicago was more generous, kindly, hospitable, warmer and bigger-hearted than New York. Which was perfectly true, and which Chicago liked to hear as often as possible. The purely human virtues still nourished there, it seemed to Milly, in their primal bloom, while they had become somewhat faded in the more hectic air of the Atlantic seaboard. There was a feeling of frank good-fellowship and an optimistic belief in everybody and in the world as well as in yourself that was spoken of as the Spirit of the West. "In New York," Milly said to Eleanor Kemp, "unless you make a great noise all the time, nobody knows you are there. And when you fail, it's like a stone dropped into the ocean: nobody knows that you have gone under! I want to live the rest of my life in Chicago," she concluded positively.

"Yes," all her friends assented with one voice, "you must come back to us—you belong here!" (With the future, the setting sun, and all the rest of it.)

And they laid their little plans to entrap her and hold her in their midst for good,—obvious plans in which men, of course, were designedly included. They said a great many nice things about her behind her back as well as to her face.

"Milly has shown such pluck.... Her marriage was unfortunate—he left her without a cent.... And treated her quite badly, I hear," etc., etc.

Her two weeks' visit to the Kemps stretched to a month; there were many little parties and engagements made for her, and then she went to several suburban places to visit. Unlike other American cities summer is almost the liveliest season in and around Chicago, for having its own refrigerating plant at its door Chicago prefers to stay at home during the hot weather and take its vacation in the raw spring. So Milly found life very full and gay. And she perceived after a time a new spirit in her old home,—the metropolitan spirit, which was funnily self-conscious and proud of itself. "We too," every one seemed to be saying, "are natives of no mean city." Milly heartily approved of this spirit. She liked to think and to say that after all, in spite of her husband's errancy, Chicago was also her city.

So she had the best of times the ten weeks she spent in the strong young metropolis, and saw a great many people new and old, and was more popular than ever. She was well enough aware of those little plans kind friends were making for her, matrimonially, but her heart seemed dead to all men. She looked at them critically, and her heart gave no sign.

"I'm going to be a business woman," she announced to the Kemps one day.

"Milly in business! What do you think of that now?" the banker responded with a good-natured laugh that covered the jeer. "What next?"

But his wife, with jealous promptitude, added,—

"Milly, you are a wonder!"

"Yes," Milly affirmed stoutly. "Wait, and you will see."

For in spite of all the good times, the flattery, and the social pleasures, the great New Idea still simmered in her head. She would do something "unusual," and "in Chicago too," which was the place for originality and venture,—this big-hearted, hopeful city whose breath of life was business, always business, and where people believed in one another and looked favorably at "the new thing."

One day Milly stepped into the shop of the smart man-milliner, where in her opulent maiden days she had got her hats,—"just to see what Bamberg has this season." After chatting with the amiable proprietor, who, like every one who had dealings with Milly, was fond of her (even if she did not pay him promptly), Bamberg called to one of his young ladies to bring Mrs. Bragdon a certain hat he wished her to try on. "One of my last Paris things," he explained, "an absolutely new creation," and he whispered, "It was ordered for Mrs. Pelham—the young one, you know, but it didn't suit her." He whispered still more confidentially, "She was too old!"

After that how could Milly help "just trying it on"?

The girl who brought the hat exclaimed with a charming smile and a decided French accent, "It cannot be—but it is—it is Madame Brag-donne!"

"Jeanne—Jeanine!" and they almost embraced, to the scandal of Bamberg.

It was one of the girls Milly had known at Gage's, the chief demoiselle of the pastry shop. And how was Madame Catteau, the patronne, and when did Jeanne come to America? The hat was forgotten while the two chattered half in French and half in English about Gage's, Paris, and Chicago....

Of course Milly bought the hat in the end,—it was such a "jewel" and became her as if "it were made for Madame Brag-donne," who, Jeanne averred, was really more than half French. (Bamberg generously cut the price to "nothing,—$35," and Milly promised to "pay when I can, you know." Which perfectly contented the man-milliner. "We know you, Mrs. Bragdon," he said, conducting her himself to the Kemps' motor in which she had come.)

The negotiations over the hat, which had to be altered several times, gave Milly a chance to confide in her old friend Jeanne the New Idea. A Cake Shop—a real Paris patisserie, chic, and with French pastry, here in this Chicago! The idea thrilled the pretty French woman, and they discussed many of the details. "I must have a real French pastry cook, and girls, Paris girls like you," Milly said with sudden inspiration, "and a madame, of course, and the little marble-topped tables and all the rest" as nearly as possible like the adorable Gage's. Jeanne thought that it would be "furiously successful." There would be nothing like it in Chicago or anywhere else in the new world, where Madame Brag-donne would admit the eating was not all that it might be in quality. Oh, yes, it was a brilliant idea and Jean remembered a sister-in-law who would make a remarkable dame de comptoir. She was living in strict retirement at Grenoble, the fault of a wretched man she had been feeble enough to marry....

Thus by the time the hat was hers Milly's scheme had taken definite form, and it was also time for her to return to New York. "But I shall be back soon," she told all her friends confidently, with a mysterious nod of her pretty head.

* * * * *

She had seen Horatio, of course, had taken Virginia to spend a Sunday with her unknown grandfather in the little Elm Park cottage. Josephine received her husband's daughter and granddaughter with a carefully guarded cordiality, which expanded as soon as she saw that Milly had nothing to ask for. Horatio was very happy over the brief visit. He was an old man now, Milly realized, but a chirping and contented old man, who still went faithfully every working day in the year to his humble desk in Hoppers' great establishment, on Sundays to the Second Presbyterian, and in season watered the twenty-six square feet of turf before his front door. He talked a great deal about Hoppers', which had been growing with astounding rapidity, like everything in Chicago, and now covered three entire city blocks. That and the church and Josephine quite filled all the corners of Horatio's simple being. Milly promised her father another, longer visit, but with her many engagements could not "get it in." Horatio wrote her "a beautiful letter" and sent her on the eve of her departure a box of flowers from his own garden.

Milly carried the flowers back to New York with her. She had much to think over on that brief journey. Life seemed larger, much larger, than it had ten weeks before, and her appetite for it had grown wonderfully keener in the Chicago air. That was the virtue of the West, Milly decided. It put vigor and hope into one. She also felt more mature and independent. It had been a good thing for her to get away from New York, out from under Ernestine's protecting wings, which closed uncomfortably tight at times. She realized now that "she could do things for herself," and need not be so "dependent."

That, it must be observed, was the prevailing desire in Milly's new ambitions. Like all poor mortals who have not either triumphed indubitably in the world's eyes or sunk irretrievably into the mire, she hungered for some definite self-accomplishment, something that would give meaning and dignity to her own little life. All of her varied experience,—all the phases and "ideas" through which she had lived from her eager, unconscious girlhood to the present, were resolved and summed up in this at last,—the desire to have some meaning to her life, some dignity of purpose,—no longer to be the jetsam on the stream that so many women are, buffeted by storms beyond their ken, the sport of men and fate. She looked at her little daughter, who was absorbed in the pictures of a magazine, and said to herself that she was doing it all for her child, more than for herself. Virginia must have a very different kind of life from hers! Parentlike she yearned to graft upon the young tree the heavy branch of her own worldly experience. And perhaps Milly realized, also, that the world into which little Virginia was rapidly growing would be a very different sort of place—especially for women—from the one in which Milly Ridge had fluttered about with untutored instincts and a dominating determination "to have a good time...."

Tired at last with so much meditation, Milly bought a novel from the newsboy,—"Clive Reinhard's Latest and Best"—A Woman's Will, and buried herself in its pages.



IV

GOING INTO BUSINESS

"Ernestine," Milly announced gravely that first night after Virginia was tucked in bed, "I've something important to say to you."

"What is it, dearie?" Ernestine inquired apprehensively.

The Laundryman had taken a half holiday to welcome her family home after their prolonged vacation. She and the old colored cook—a great admirer of Milly's—had decorated the dining-room with wild flowers and contrived a birthday cake with eight candles for Virginia, who had celebrated her nativity a few days previously. Ernestine had also indulged in a quart of champagne, a wine of which Milly was very fond. But like poor Ernestine, in whom thrift usually fought a losing battle with generosity, she had compromised upon a native brand that the dealer had said was "just as good as the imported kind," but which Milly had tasted and left undrunk.... She had also put on her best dress, a much grander affair of black silk than the rose-pink negligee, which Milly had compelled her to bestow upon Amelia. And she had lighted the fire in the living-room and all the wax candles, though it was still warm outdoors and they had to open the street windows and endure the thunder of the traffic.

Milly, although she had received all Ernestine's efforts graciously, had been wearied by the noise,—the fierce song of New York,—and had been serious and non-communicative since her arrival. Virginia, however, had been eloquently happy to return to her own home, her own things, her own bed, and her own Amelia and Ernestine, which had somewhat made up to the Laundryman for Milly's indifference.

Now Milly stood in the middle of the room, looking straight before her, but seeing nothing. Ernestine, with hands clasped around her knees, sat in a low chair and anxiously watched her friend,—

"Well, what is it?" she demanded, as Milly's silence continued after her first announcement. Milly turned and looked at Ernestine, then said slowly,—

"I'm going into business—in Chicago."

Ernestine gave a little gasp, of relief.

"What is it this time?" she asked.

Then Milly explained her project at great length, growing more eloquent as she got deeper into the details of her conception, painting glowingly the opportunities of providing hungry Chicagoans with toothsome delicacies, and exhibiting a much more practical notion of the scheme than she had had of her other ideas.

"Chicago is the place," she asserted with conviction. "I'm known there, for one thing," she added with a touch of pride. "And it is the natural home of enterprise. They do things out there, instead of talking about them. You ought to know Chicago, Ernestine—I'm sure you'd like it."

The Laundryman asked in a dull tone:—

"Where'll you get the money to start your cake shop? For it will take money, a sight of money, to do all those things you talk about."

Milly hesitated a moment before this question.

"I don't know yet," she said thoughtfully, "but I think I shan't have much trouble in getting what capital I need. I have friends in Chicago, who promised to help me."

(It was perfectly true that Walter Kemp had said half jestingly to Milly when he last saw her,—"When you get ready to go into business, Milly, you must let me be your banker!")

"But," Milly continued meaningly, "I wanted to talk it over with you first. That's why I came back now."

Ernestine went over and closed the windows. It was a crisis. She recognized it, indeed she had felt it coming for a long time. She would have to choose some day between Milly and her own life—the laundry business—and the day had come.

"Will you go in with me, Ernestine?" Milly asked directly...

They talked far into the night until the traffic had died to a distant rumble. Probably in any case Ernestine would have yielded to Milly's desires. Her heart was too deeply involved with Milly and Virginia—"her family"—for her to allow them to take themselves out of her life, as she saw that this time Milly would do should she refuse to share in the new move. And as it happened the choice came when a crisis in her own business was on the way. The two young men who owned all but a few shares of the Twentieth Century Laundry stock had been bitten by the trustifying germ and had agreed to go into a "laundry combine" with several other large laundries. It was one thing, Ernestine realized, to be the practical boss of a small business, and quite another to be a subordinate in a large stock-gambling venture with an unknown crew of masters.

This complication had come up in definite form since Milly's departure, and Ernestine, after much consideration, had already resolved to sell to the new company the few shares she owned in the Twentieth Century Laundry, and look about for another opening in the business she knew. But she hesitated with a woman's timidity before embarking alone in a small independent business. She did not want the responsibility of being the head of a business, especially in these days when, as she was well aware, the little pots usually get smashed by the big kettles in the stream.

So Milly's scheme happened to come at the right moment. As far as the move to Chicago was concerned, Ernestine rather welcomed the change: hers had been a monotonous treadmill in one environment. She was ready for a venture in a new city, and curious about Chicago, of which Milly had talked a great deal. But above all, the conclusive reason for her consent was Milly—her affections. She could not lose her family, cost what it might to keep them. She had no clear idea of Milly's soaring ambition to transplant a French patisserie to the alien soil of Chicago. A cake shop, Ernestine supposed, was some sort of retail food business like a bakeshop or delicatessen stand, and cake seemed to her almost as elementally necessary to mankind as washing or liquor. But even if the venture failed and took with it all her savings from industrious years of toil, she would do it "like a sport," as Sam Reddon had called her, and when the time came, face life anew....

"I'll go, Milly!" she said at the end, with a thump of her fist on her knee. "And I'll put my own money into the thing. With what my stock will bring and the cash in the bank, I'll have pretty nearly ten thousand dollars. That ought to be enough to start a cake shop, I should think. You won't have to go to any of your rich friends for help."

Milly thought so, too, and was surprised at the amount of Ernestine's savings. She felt relieved not to have to go to the Kemps for money and genuinely delighted to have Ernestine a partner in her venture.

"Now we must start at once!" she said gayly. "Mustn't lose a day, so that we can open before the fall season is over."

She went to bed very happy and very confident. Ernestine, if less confident, had sufficient self-reliance not to worry about the future. Thanks to her eighteen years of successful self-support, she knew that she could meet life anywhere any time, and get the best of it.

From the very next day there began for Milly the most active and the happiest period of her existence. They packed hurriedly, and moved to Chicago, Milly going on ahead to engage a house where they could live and also have their cakes baked. With Eleanor's Kemp's advice Milly wisely selected a large, old-fashioned brick house on the south side, not far from the business district. Once the handsome residence of a prosperous merchant, it had been abandoned in the movement outward from the crowded city and was surrounded by lofty office buildings and automobile shops. Its large rooms were cool and comfortable, and the heavy cornices and woodwork gave an air of stately substantiality to the old house that pleased Milly.

When Ernestine arrived the two partners went hunting for a suitable shop. Milly wanted a location in the very centre of the fashionable retail district on the avenue, somewhere between the Institute and the Auditorium, the two most stable landmarks in the city. But the rents, even at that time, were prohibitive, and they found they must content themselves with one of the cross streets. There at last they found a grimy little old building tucked in, as if forgotten, between two more modern structures, which could be had entire for a rental that they might (with a burst of courage) contemplate. It was only a few steps from the great north and south thoroughfare and within the woman's zone. Ernestine, indeed, was for going farther away after something more modest in rental, so that they should not have to sink so much of their capital at the start. But Milly argued cogently that for the special clientele which they wished to attract they must be in the quarter such people frequented, near the haberdashers and milliners and beauty parlors, and Ernestine yielded the point because she did not know about cake shops. When they came to the business of the lease, the good services of Walter Kemp were enlisted. After he had met Ernestine in the course of the negotiations with the agent of the property, he reported more hopefully to his wife of Milly's new undertaking.

"Anyway, she's got a good partner," he declared. "The Geyer woman is not much on looks, but she's solid—and if I'm not mistaken, she knows her business."

In this last the banker was mistaken. Ernestine was being carried along passively in the whirl of Milly's enterprise and hardly knew what she was about, it was all so unfamiliar; but she kept her mouth shut and her eyes open and was learning all the time. She had already found out that their cake shop was not to be a plebeian provision business, but an affair of fashion and taste—or, as she called it,—for the "swells," and had her first instinctive misgivings on that score. And that ten thousand dollars, which had seemed to her a substantial sum, she saw would look very small indeed by the time the doors of their shop were opened to "trade." But Milly's spirits were never higher: she sparkled with confidence and ideas. On the signing of the lease, which Walter Kemp guaranteed, they had a very jolly luncheon at the large hotel near by.

As soon as the lease had been signed Milly telegraphed—she never wrote letters any more, it was so much more businesslike to telegraph—to Sam Reddon to come on at once and superintend the rehabilitation of the premises. Ernestine would have intrusted this important detail to a scrub woman, and the agent's Chicago decorator, but Milly said promptly,—"That would spoil everything!"

Reddon responded to "Milly's Macedonian cry," as he described her telegram, with an admirable promptness, arriving the next day "with one clean shirt and no collars," he confessed. Milly took him at once to the dingy shop.

"Now, Sam," she said to him in her persuasive way, "I want you to make this into the nicest little patisserie you ever saw in Paris. Vrai chic, you know!"

"Some stunt," he replied, looking at the grimy squalor of the abandoned shop, with its ugly plate-glass windows and forbidding walls. "Don't you want me to get you a frieze for those bare walls—some Chicago nymphs taking a bath in the Lake with a company of leading citizens observing them from the steps of the Art Institute, in the manner of the sainted Puvis?"

"Don't be silly, Sam!" Milly replied in reproof. "This is business."

And Sam put it through for her. They had a good time over the transformation of the Chicago shop to something "elegant and spirituelle," as Sam called it. He entered into the spirit of the thing, as Milly knew he would, and turned out a creditable imitation of a Paris shop, with stucco marbles, black woodwork, and glass everywhere, even to red plush sofas along the walls and a row of little tables and chairs in front. It had a very gay appearance—"distinguished" in its sombre setting. "No one could help walking in to buy a cake, could they?" Sam appealed to Ernestine.

"Hope they'll have the price for more than one," the former Laundryman observed.

"Oh, you'll do a big business," Sam rejoined encouragingly. "Mostly on tick, if Milly runs the cash drawer."

"She won't!" Ernestine retorted.

The last touch was the sign,—a long, thin black board on which was traced in a delicate gilt script,—The Cake Shop—Madame Millernine. The firm name was Sam's personal contribution to the business. "You must have a suitable name, and who ever heard of a Bragdon or a Geyer keeping a cake shop? There are proprieties in all these things."

But long before the sign was in place, Milly had sailed away from New York for Paris. It had been discovered that a good French pastry cook was not to be found in Chicago. A few were said to exist in America, chiefly in New York hotels, but their handiwork was not up to Milly's standard and their demands for wages were exorbitant. Also real chic French dames des comptoirs were exceedingly rare. Jeanne's Grenoble sister-in-law proved to be, in Reddon's words,—"so infernally homely that she would scare the customers from the door." So it was agreed that while Ernestine attended to the numerous details of the preparations in Chicago, Milly should make a hurried trip abroad consult with her friend, Madame Catteau, and secure among other things a competent pastry-cook and a few good-looking girls for waitresses.

Milly enjoyed her trip immensely. She had an air of importance about her that Sam Reddon described as "diplomatic." She was a woman of affairs now—large affairs and getting larger all the time. She spent two rapturous weeks, so breathlessly absorbed in consulting with Madame Catteau (who was ravished by Milly's scheme and deplored almost tearfully her fate in having a husband and two children to keep her from returning with Madame Brag-donne) and in interviewing men cooks and young Frenchwomen, that she had no time for memories or sentimental griefs of any sort. Once, flitting through the rue Gallilee in a cab, she saw the hotel-pension where she and Jack had spent their first winter, and she conjured up a vivid picture of the chilly salon, the table of elderly English women, and the long, dull hours in her close, back room. How long ago all that was, and how young and stupid she had been then! She felt very much more alive now, an altogether new person, with her business on her hands,—but not old, oh, not that!...

An ideal man pastry-cook was finally engaged, one highly recommended by Madame Catteau as vrai Parisien, skilful in every sort of pastry, and also three young women were induced, for love of Madame Brag-donne, to try their fortune in the great city of Chicago. Also, Milly bought quantities of bonbons, liquors, sirops, and other specialities of the business, which she knew could not be had "really, truly French" in America. With a feeling of having accomplished much, Milly gathered her flock and set sail from Havre on the French steamer. M. Paul—the pastry-cook—insisted on having a first-class passage, and would converse with Milly whenever he found her on deck. The girls were sick in the second cabin. Milly was indulgent with them all by sympathy as well as by policy, but she was glad to see Sandy Hook. She decided that the French temperament needed occupation, and she hustled her conscripts across the city and into the Chicago train without an hour's delay.

Ernestine, Virginia, and Sam Reddon met the party at the Chicago station and escorted the exclamatory laborers to their new home on the upper floor of the old mansion. Then Milly and Sam went to see the Cake Shop, which was now ready for its sweet merchandise. Milly, though she was fresh from Paris, was much pleased with Sam's results, and praised him warmly.

"It's cost an awful sight of money," Ernestine observed lugubriously.

Milly waved one hand negligently. Ernestine was almost as bad as Grandma had been. Would she never rise to the conception of modern business? It was not the outgo that counted, but the receipts. Milly knew that already.

"I'll do you a better one next time," Sam promised, "when you open your first succursale, Milly."

"That will be next autumn—in New York," Milly announced.

"My stars!" said Ernestine.



V

MILLY'S SECOND TRIUMPH

They opened the Cake Shop just before the holidays, with a great party. Milly was positive that was the right procedure, though Ernestine could see no point to giving away so much "trade." Nearly a thousand finely engraved cards were sent out to Milly's friends, the friends of Milly's friends, and their friends and acquaintances, to meet "Mrs. John Bragdon and Miss Ernestine Geyer at the Cake Shop on Saturday, December the fifteenth, from two until eight o'clock." (Ernestine, to be sure, could not be "met," because she was in the cellar most of the time attending to many essential details of the occasion. But Milly was there in the shop above, prettily gowned in a costume she had managed to capture, incidentally, on her flying visit to the French capital.)

* * * * *

It was a tremendous, resounding, thrilling success! Nearly everybody out of the thousand must have come, they reckoned afterwards, and several more besides who knew they had not been intentionally omitted from the list of the invited. The guests began coming shortly after the doors were thrown open (by a small colored boy, habited in Turkish costume), and no sooner did any tear themselves away from the shop than twice as many squeezed their way in somehow. At first the pretty French girls in silk aprons and coquettish caps tried to execute the orders, but soon their trays were seized by enthusiastic young men and the waitresses took refuge behind the marble table beside the Madame and helped to hand out the tempting cakes and bonbons and sorbets and sirops and liqueurs. Even Milly pulled off her long white gloves, got in line with her employees, and tried to appease her hungry guests. As a final touch a dainty, gold-printed souvenir menu, with the list of delicacies to be had at the Cake Shop, was handed to every comer, as long as they lasted.

There was one long glad chorus of praise for the Cake Shop and everything it contained, from the mirrors, the fetching decoration, the tables, the cakes (such as never had been dreamed of) to the pretty girls, who were surrounded always by a cluster of men, trying with their Chicago French to get attention.... And Milly, of course, was the heroine of the occasion. Her health was drunk, and she had to get on a chair to make a little speech of thanks and invitation to the Cake Shop as a new Chicago Institution.

Many of the women who came knew their Paris better than New York, and "adored" "this chic little place." It recalled to them all most delightful moments. And even in Paris they had never eaten anything so delicious as M. Paul's cakes. Henceforth they should buy all their desserts of "Madame Millernine," and there was a spatter of French phrases all over the place.

"It was a wonder!" they declared, "this idea of creating a little of Paris here in old Chicago. A touch of genius really—just like that astonishing Milly Ridge to have thought of the one thing—and the cakes were so good," etc., etc.

Milly's ears burned with the winged words, and she smiled all the time. If Ernestine only could hear this, it would cure her of doubting. She should hear! Milly felt that at last she had demonstrated herself. It was like that other occasion so many, many years ago, when she had surmounted all the difficulties and entertained her friends at "tea." Then her triumph had been indubitable. But this time it was more significant, for the affair was less childish: it meant money, Milly was sure,—much money. So every one said.

At eight Milly was rescued by a party of friends and borne to a hotel in triumph for a dinner which lasted long after midnight. Her health was drunk again in real champagne; speeches were made to impromptu toasts of "The New Woman in Business—God Bless Her." "The Poetry of the Palate," "The Creative Cake," etc.... At ten Ernestine and her aides, having succeeded in gathering the debris and straightening out the place for the public opening the next morning, went wearily home to bed. She was told that it had been a great success; she hoped that the enthusiasm would last; but all these people had eaten "a mighty sight of expensive stuff" without paying for it, which seemed to the prosaic Ernestine "bad business."

* * * * *

But Milly knew. She was right. Those cakes cast upon the waters of fashionable Chicago brought in a hundredfold return. The indulgent newspapers, always patriotically loud over local enterprise, noted the opening of the Cake Shop as a minor social event and so in the succeeding days all those who hadn't been invited and couldn't talk French with the waitresses crowded into the store. It was a Novelty,—the New Thing,—and became overnight a popular fad. M. Paul was hard pressed to turn off enough of his delectable tid-bits—they had to employ assistants for him almost at once, and one may suspect that the fairylike melt-in-the-mouth quality of his best work began to deteriorate from the second day. He had never baked cakes on this wholesale scale. Did these gluttonous barbarians devour them by the platterful?... Telephone orders were numerous, and Ernestine must organize an efficient delivery system, in which she was at home. Milly spent her days at the shop, where it became the fashion for men as well as women to drop in late in the afternoon, to eat a cake or six and chat with one's friends, to sip an anisette or grenadine, and maybe carry away a bagful of cakes for the little ones at home or to eke out Mary's thick-crusted New England pie.

So it was a Success! Milly and Ernestine worked like willing galley-slaves, getting things to run smoothly, fitting into all the corners that their excitable French assistants created daily. Milly was one broad beam these days, and went happily to bed so tired that she was asleep before she touched her pillow. Even Ernestine's heavy brows relaxed their tension, for the "queer" business seemed to be making good beyond her expectations. Milly had been right. They charged outrageous prices for their delicacies, which scandalized Ernestine, who could not believe that people would be foolish enough to pay twice and three times what things were worth. But Milly insisted. "The people we are after," she said, "like it all the better the more they have to pay." And to Ernestine's astonishment she seemed to be right again, for the present. That, Ernestine concluded, must be another freak of this "rich trade"; the "swells" expected to be done and would be disdainful if they weren't. Ernestine had a good deal of contempt for their patrons. But the glowing proof of their business success lay in the cash drawer, which literally overflowed with money, and they had accounts with half the families in Chicago who pretended to be "in society."