Business men began to compliment Milly upon her shrewdness and predicted a marvellous growth for the business. One broker seriously suggested incorporating the Cake Shop, as certain candy manufacturers had incorporated, and offered to boom the stock on the local exchange, Milly talked of opening a summer branch in Newport or Bar Harbor, she could not decide which. But she was a little timid about the east. She felt that she had been right in starting in Chicago. The west was less accustomed to Paris and had a lustier appetite for cake than New York, and the charm of their Gallic interior was more of a novelty beside Lake Michigan than it would be on Fifth Avenue. A branch in St. Louis or Omaha might pay: her mind was nimble with schemes.... She was also going out more or less all the time, to dinners and theatre parties, which with her long day's work took every ounce of her strength and more. Virginia had to get along these days the best she could. But was her mother not building up a fortune for her future?

* * * * *

Of course they had their troubles from the very start. M. Paul's Parisian morals, it was quickly found, could not be domesticated in a Chicago home, and quarters had to be found for him outside the house. Then the prettiest of the girls suddenly disappeared, much to Milly's grief and anxiety. The men had been specially attentive to Lulu, and it was found that she had taken a trip to the Pacific Coast with a young broker. Then in the midst of their harvest the receipts began to fall mysteriously, and Ernestine discovered an unauthorized trail from the cash drawer to the large pocket of their dame de comptoir. Ernestine resolutely handed her over to the police, which proved to be a very bad move indeed, for no good French substitute could be found immediately and her Nebraska successor spoke no French and twanged her English in the good Omaha way. She gave the Cake Shop the air of a Childs' Restaurant. Milly cabled her ally in Paris, Madame Catteau, for a new Queen of the Counter, but she did not arrive until their first season was drawing to a close.

There were other difficulties, new ones almost every day, but the two partners met them all pluckily,—Ernestine with a determined look and a heavy hand; Milly, with smiles and tactful suggestions. Ernestine admired the wonderful way in which Milly managed "the French help," talking to them in their own language, flattering them, finding companions and ways of forgetting their loneliness. And through their troubles both were buoyed up by the stimulating sense of success and prosperity. They were making money,—how much they did not know because the business was complex and they hadn't time to figure it all out,—but a good, deal they were sure. As the winter season came to a close there was a lull naturally because many of their patrons left the city for California and the south. It was a convenient breathing time in which they could straighten out their affairs and plan the future campaign. Trade revived at the end of May and held pretty well into July, then dropped as the country season got into swing. Ernestine was for turning the Cake Shop into a glorified ice-cream stand for the summer, but Milly would not hear of this desecration of her Vision; they were both tired and had earned a vacation. So while Ernestine took Virginia to one of the lake resorts, Milly rested in the big, cool, empty house and played around Chicago with her numerous friends.

She felt that she deserved a reward, and she took it.



VI

COMING DOWN

The Cake Shop started the autumn season rather dully. Some of its eclat had evaporated by the second year, and M. Paul was decidedly getting spoiled in the New World. His cakes were inferior in both quality and variety, and he demanded a sixty per cent rise in wages, which they felt obliged to give him. Another girl had drifted away during the summer, so that one lone Parisian maiden—and the homeliest of the trio—remained to "give an air" to the Cake Shop, and she, already corrupted by the free air of the west, gave it sullenly and with a Chicago heaviness. The shop itself was, of course, less fresh and dainty, having suffered from ten months of smoke, although they had spent a good deal in having it largely redecorated. Just as the cakes became heavier, tougher, more ordinary, as the months passed, so the whole enterprise suffered gradually from that coarsening and griming which seems an inevitable result of Chicago use. Much of the fine artistic flavor of Milly's conception had already been lost. It was becoming commercialized. Ernestine did not perceive these changes, to be sure, though Milly did in her less buoyant moments. What troubled Ernestine was the fact that the receipts were falling off, and the accounts were hard to collect.

She suspected that Milly had lost something of her enthusiasm for the Cake Shop. Milly certainly devoted less ardor to the enterprise. She continued to go out a good deal, more than Ernestine felt was good for her health or good for the business, and she often required the use of the house and the servants for elaborate luncheons or dinner-parties. This invariably put the machine out of order, although Milly always feed the employees liberally for their extra service. Ernestine did not like to complain, because it seemed selfish to deprive Milly of the social relaxation she craved. So she took her supper with Virgie in the latter's nursery. When she did demur finally, Milly, without a word, transferred her party to an expensive new hotel, which was not good for Milly's all-too-open purse.

Business picked up at the holiday season, but fell off again thereafter. They were not making much money this second winter, and Ernestine was becoming anxious.

"You're always worrying about something," Milly said, when Ernestine pointed out this fact to her. "If the Cake Shop fails, I'll think up something else that will put us right," she added lightly, in the role of the fertile creator, and tripped off to the theatre.

But that wasn't Ernestine's idea of business. She got out the books and went through them again.

The play proved to be entertaining, and Milly returned home in good spirits. From the hall she heard the sounds of voices in altercation in the rear room where Ernestine had her desk. M. Paul's excited accent could be distinguished playing arpeggios all over Ernestine's grumbling bass. "Oh, dear!" thought Milly, "Paul's off the hooks again and I'll have to straighten him out...."

"See here, my man—" Ernestine growled, but what she was going to say was cut off by a flood of Gallic impertinence.

"Your man! Ah, non, non, non! Indeed not the man of such a woman as you! I call you 'my voman'? Not by—"

Here Milly intervened to prevent a more explicit illustration of M. Paul's contempt for Ernestine's femininity.

"She call me her 'man'!" the pastry-cook flamed, pointing disdainfully at Ernestine.

"The fellow's been thieving from us for months," Ernestine said angrily, and pointing to the door she said,—"Get out!"

"Oh, Ernestine!" Milly protested.

But M. Paul had "got out" with a few further remarks uncomplimentary to American women, and the damage was done. Ernestine could not be made to see that with the departure of the pastry-cook, the last substantial prop to Milly's fairy structure was gone.

"The beast has been selling our sugar and supplies," Ernestine explained.

"It makes no difference what he has done!" Milly replied with justifiable asperity.

The next morning she set forth to track the fugitive pastry-cook and wile him back to their service. She found him after a time at one of the new hotels, where he had already been engaged as pastry-cook. To Milly's plea that he return to his old allegiance, he orated dramatically upon Ernestine and la femme in general.

"You, Madame Brag-donne, are du vrai monde," he testified tearfully. "But that thing—bah! 'Her man'—canaille du peuple,"—etc.

Milly, touched by the compliment, tried to make him understand the meaning of her partner's remark. But he shook his head wrathfully, and she was forced to depart, defeated. It was some consolation to reflect that this time it had been Ernestine's fault. Milly thought there might be something in the Frenchman's criticism of Ernestine. Her good partner lacked tact, and she was indisputably "of the people." Milly philosophized,—"Servants always feel those things."

She walked across the city from the hotel in a depressed frame of mind,—not so much crushed by approaching disaster as numbed. She had something of the famous "artistic temperament," which is fervid and buoyant in creation, but apt to lose interest and become cold when the gauzy fabric of fancy's weaving fails to work out as it should. She passed the Cake Shop, where through the long front windows she could see the girls idling over the marble counter, and instead of turning in, as she had meant to do, she kept on towards the Avenue. The place gave her a chill these days. All the dazzling gilt was dropping from the creature of her imagination, and it was becoming smudged, like the sign, by reality. Ernestine had seriously suggested converting the Cake Shop into a lunch-counter for the employees of the neighboring office buildings! Milly saw a horrible vision of coarse sandwiches, machine-made pies, and Bismarcks (a succulent western variety of doughnut) on the marble tables instead of Paul's dainty confections; coffee and "soft drinks" in place of the rainbow-hued "sirops." Her soul shuddered. No, they would take down the pretty sign and close the doors of the Cake Shop before admitting such desecration into the temple of her dreams....

People seemed to be hurrying towards the Avenue, their heads tilted upwards, and a crowd had gathered on the steps of the Art Institute. Milly, whose mind fortunately was easily distracted from her troubles, joined the pushing, good-natured throng of men and women, who were staring open-mouthed into the heavens. It was the opening day of Chicago's first "Air Meet," which Milly had forgotten in the anxiety caused by M. Paul. Far above the smoky haze of the city, in the dim, distant depths of the blue sky there was a tiny object floating, circling waywardly, as free apparently as a lark in the high heavens, on which the eyes of the multitude were fastened in fascination. Milly uttered a little, unconscious sigh of satisfaction. Ah, that would be to live,—to soar above the murk and the roar of the city, free as a bird in the vast, wind-swept spaces of the sky! It filled her, as it did the eager crowd, with delight and yearning aspiration. She sighed again....

"It's a pretty sight, isn't it?" a familiar voice observed close behind her. With a start Milly turned and perceived, on the step below,—Edgar Duncan. His long face had an eager, wistful expression, also, caused perhaps by the aerial phenomenon above, as much as by the sight of his lost love; but the expression took Milly back immediately to the little front room on Acacia Street, when Duncan had stood before her to receive his blow.

"There!" Duncan exclaimed quickly, before Milly could collect an appropriate remark. "He's coming down!" Speechless they both craned their heads backwards to follow the aeroplane. The airman, tired of his lofty wandering, or having done the day's stunt required of him, had begun to descend and shot rapidly towards the spectators out of the sky. As he came nearer the earth, he executed the reckless corkscrew man[oe]uvre: the great winged machine seemed to be rushing, tumbling in a perpendicular line just above the heads of the gazing crowd. There was an agonized murmur, a prolonged,—"Ah!" It gave Milly delicious thrills up and down her body. When the airman took another leap towards earth, her heart stopped beating altogether. With only a few hundred feet between him and the earth the airman turned his planes and began circling in slow curves over the adjacent strip of park, as if he were judiciously selecting the best spot for alighting.

"It doesn't take 'em long to come down!" Duncan remarked, and Milly, with a swift mental comparison of the aeroplane flight and her own little fate, replied,—

"It never takes long to come down, does it?"

She looked more closely now at her former lover. Apparently his blow had not seriously damaged him. His figure was fuller and his face tanned to a healthier color than she remembered. He seemed to be in good spirits, and not perceptibly older than he was ten years before. They descended the steps with the moving throng and strolled slowly up the crowded boulevard, watching the distant flights and talking.

Edgar Duncan, she learned, had not spent the ten years nursing a wounded heart. He had doubled the acreage of his ranch, he told her, and thanks to the fatherly government at Washington, which had trebled the duty on foreign lemons, he was doing very well indeed. The big yellow balls among the glossy leaves were fast becoming golden balls. He was now on his way east to see his people and also to look after the interests of a fruit-growers' association in the matter of a railroad rate on lemons. He seemed very much alive. The blow had probably done him good, Milly concluded,—had waked him up.

There were a few hours between his trains, he explained to Milly, and so he had wandered over to the park to watch the aeroplanes, which were the first of the bird machines he had ever seen. It was almost time now for him to leave. But he lost that Washington train. For he walked home with Milly to see her little girl, stayed to luncheon, and was still at the house telling Virginia about real oranges on real orange trees when Ernestine came in. She was hot and tired, evidently much disturbed, and more than usually short with Milly's guest. Duncan left soon afterwards, and then Milly asked,—

"What's the matter, Ernestine?"

"I'd think you'd know!... If we can't get a cook, we might as well shut up the shop to-morrow."

Milly had forgotten all about the loss of the pastry-cook and the business in her surprise at meeting Edgar Duncan again and all the memories he had revived.

"All right!" she said promptly. "Do it."

"Give up the business?" Ernestine asked in amazement. She could not believe Milly meant to take her testy remark seriously. What had come over Milly!

"We might try it in Pasadena," Milly remarked after a time. "There are a lot of rich people out there."

This went beyond the bounds of Ernestine's patience.

"Pasadena!... Last time it was Palm Beach, and before that it was Newport. What's the matter with staying right here and making good?"

Milly did not reply. Ernestine's pent-up irritation overflowed still more.

"You ain't any business woman, Milly!"

"I never said I was."

"You always want to get in some society work—social pull! Rich folks!" Ernestine groaned with disgust. "That kind of furor don't last. They're too flighty in their notions."

"Like me," Milly interposed bitterly.

"Well, it ain't business to quit."

"Oh, business!" Milly exclaimed disgustedly. She felt like an artist whose great work has been scorned by the philistines.

"Yes, business!" Ernestine asserted hotly. "If you're going into business, you've got to play the game and play it hard all the time, too. Or you'd better marry and do the other thing."

"Perhaps I'll marry," Milly retorted with an enigmatical smile.

Ernestine stared at her agape. Was that what was the trouble with Milly? She had not meant to go so far.



VII

CAPITULATIONS

They found another pastry-cook,—a French-Canadian woman. But if her ancestors had ever seen the Isle de France, it must have been centuries ago, and the family had become fatally corrupted since by British gastronomic ideals. Her pastry was thicker and heavier than Paul's worst, and she had "no more imagination than a cow" according to Milly. How could one make fine cakes without imagination? "They make better ones at the Auditorium Hotel even," Milly observed disgustedly. The Cake Shop had gone down another peg. Now it served afternoon tea with English wafers instead of the exotic "sirops" and "liqueurs," and advertised "Dainty Luncheons for Suburban Shoppers." (That was Ernestine's phrasing.) Milly almost never went near the place, and acted as if she wanted to forget it altogether.

In her efforts to revive her partner's waning interest Ernestine even suggested Milly's going again to Paris to engage a fresh crew, but Milly only shrugged her shoulders. "What's the use? You know we haven't the money."

"Borrow it!" Ernestine said desperately.

"When a thing is dead, it's dead," Milly pronounced, and added oracularly, "Better to let the dead past bury its dead," and murmured the lines from a celebrated new play, "Smashed to hell is smashed to hell!" If she were willing to see her creation die, Ernestine ought to be. But that was not Ernestine's nature: she was not artistic nor temperamental, as Milly often proved to her. In her dumb, heavy fashion she still tried to prop up the ill-fated Cake Shop and make it pay expenses at least, in one way or another.

The time came, as it must come, when even this was more than Ernestine could compass. She had tried every device she could think of, but, as she reflected sadly, she had not been brought up to the "food business." It was a peculiar business, like all businesses, especially the delicatessen end, and needed an expert to diagnose its cure. So the doors were closed, and a "To Rent" sign plastered on the front panes. Ernestine acknowledged defeat.

Milly was outwardly unmoved. She had divined the outcome so much sooner than her partner that she had already passed through the agonies of failure and come to that other side where one looks about for the next engagement with life. Possibly she had already in view what this was to be. She assented indifferently to Ernestine's proposal that they should meet Mr. Kemp and the agent at the Shop and decide what was to be done about the lease, which had more than a year to run.

"They'll be there shortly after noon," Ernestine reminded Milly, as the latter was about to leave the house that day.

"All right," she said evasively. "I'll try to be there, but it won't make any difference if I'm not—you know about everything."

She was not there. Ernestine knew well enough that Milly would not come to the funeral of their enterprise at the Cake Shop, and though she felt hurt she said nothing to the men and went through with the last formalities in the dusty, dismantled temple of cakes. At the end the banker asked Ernestine kindly what she meant to do. He knew that the Laundryman's capital had gone—all her savings—and that "the firm" was in debt to his bank for a loan of several hundred dollars, which he expected to pay himself and also to take care of the lease.

"I don't know yet," Ernestine replied. "I'll find some place.... And it won't be in any fancy kind of business like this, you can bet," and she cast a malevolent glance over the tarnished glories of the Cake Shop. "I got my experience and I paid for it—with every cent I had in the world. I ain't goin' to buy any more of that!"

The banker laughed sympathetically.

"What's Mrs. Bragdon going to do?" he inquired.

"I don't know—she hasn't told me yet."

Her answer was evasive because Ernestine suspected very well what Milly was likely to do.... She turned the key in the lock, handed it over to the agent, and with a curt nod to the two men strode away from the Cake Shop for the last time. (That evening the banker, reporting the occurrence to his wife, said,—"I feel sorry for that woman! She's lost every cent she had—our Milly has milked her clean." "Walter, how can you say that?" his wife replied indignantly. "It wasn't Milly's fault if the business failed, any more than hers." "Well, I'd like to bet it's a good big part the fault of our pretty friend." "Miss Geyer ought not to have gone into something she knew nothing about." "Milly bewitched her, I expect. The best thing she can do is to shake her and go back to the laundry business.")

It was not Ernestine, however, who was to "shake" Milly. That lady herself was busily evading their partnership, as Ernestine suspected. While the short obsequies were being transacted at the Cake Shop, Milly was lunching in the one good new hotel Chicago boasts with Edgar Duncan, who had returned from Washington sooner than expected and had asked Milly by telegraph to lunch with him. Seated in the spacious, cool room overlooking the Boulevard and the Lake, at a little table cosily placed beside the open window, Milly might easily have looked through the fragrant plants in the flower-box and descried Ernestine doggedly tramping homeward from her final task at the Cake Shop. Milly preferred to study the menu through her little gold lorgnette, and when that important matter had been settled to her satisfaction, she sat back contentedly and smiled upon the man opposite her, who, after a successful hearing before the Commerce Commission, had more than ever the alert air of a man who knows his own business. Outside in the summer sunlight, above the blue water of the Lake and over the dingy sward of the Park, the airmen were man[oe]uvring their winged ships, casting great shadows as they dipped and soared above the admiring throngs.

"See," Milly pointed excitedly through the open window. "He's going up now!" And she twisted her neck to get the last glimpse of the mounting machine.

"Yes," Duncan remarked indifferently, "they're doing a lot of stunts." But he hadn't come back from Washington by the first train that left after the hearing to talk aeroplanes. And Milly let him do the talking, as she always had, listening with a childlike interest to what he had to say.

By this time the reader must know Milly well enough to be able to divine for himself what was passing in her mind as she daintily excavated the lobster shell on her plate and listened to the plea of her rejected lover. Probably this was no more able to stir her pulses to a mad rhythm to-day than it had been ten years before. Edgar Duncan was somewhat nearer being her Ideal,—not much. But Milly was ten years older and "had had her throbs," as she once expressed it. She knew their meaning now, their relative value, and she knew other values.

The value of a home and a stable position among her fellows, for instance, no matter how small, and so she listens demurely while the man talks hungrily of the Joy of Home and the Beauty of Woman in the Home, "where they belong, not in business." (How Ernestine would give it to him for that, and Hazel, too, Milly thought!)

"You are such a woman, Milly!" he exclaims.—"Just a woman!" and in his voice the expression has a tender, reverential sound that falls pleasantly on Milly's ears. But she says nothing: she does not mean to be "soft" this time. Yet in reply to another compliment, she admits, smiling delphically,—"Yes, I am a woman!"

The man takes up another verse of his song, for he has planned this attack carefully while the swift wheels were turning off the miles between Washington and Chicago.

"You want your little girl to have a home, too, don't you? A real home, your home, where she can get the right sort of start in life?"

"Yes," Milly assents quickly. "The proper kind of home means so much more to a girl than to a boy. If I myself had had—" But she stops before this baseness to poor old Horatio. "I want Virgie's life to be different from mine—so utterly different!"

A wave of self-pity for her loneliness after all her struggle sweeps over her and casts a cloud on her face.

"You can't be a business woman and make that kind of home for your daughter," Duncan persists, pushing forward his point.

Milly shakes her head.

"I'm afraid a woman can't!" she sighs.

(She doesn't feel it necessary to tell him that for almost one hour by the clock she has not been a "business woman," even in the legal sense of the term.)

"Oh," she murmurs, as if convinced by his logic, "I'm good for nothing—I can't even be a good mother!"

"You are good for everything—for me!"

But Milly is not ready yet. In this sort of transaction she has grown to be a more expert trader than she was once.

"It must be the right man," she observes impersonally.

And the Ranchman takes another start. He paints glowingly the freedom and the beauty of that outdoors life on the Pacific Coast,—the fragrant lemon orchard with its golden harvest of yellow balls, the velvety heavens spangled with stars each night, the blooming roses, etc., etc. But he cannot keep long off the personal note.

"I've sat there nights on my veranda, and thought and thought of you, Milly, until it seemed as though you were really there by my side and I could almost touch you."

"Really!" Milly is becoming moved in spite of herself. Somehow Duncan's words have a genuine ring to them. "I believe," she muses, "that you are the sort of man who could care always for a woman."

"I always have cared for one woman!"

"You are good, Edgar."

"I don't know about that. Good hasn't much to do between men and women when they love.... It's always love that counts, isn't it?"

(Milly is not as sure of that doctrine as she was once, but she is content that the man should feel that way. She does not argue the point.)

"Can't you sit there with me, Milly, and watch the stars for the rest of our lives?"

Milly evades. She must have the terms set forth more explicitly.

"It wouldn't be right to keep Virgie out there away from people all the time, would it?"

He sees the point and yields.

"We'll come here every year for the fall and see your friends."

"That would be nice," she accepts graciously. But Chicago doesn't appeal to Milly as strongly as it had on her first return to its breezy, hearty life.

"I should like to have Virgie study music," she suggests, "and travel—have advantages."

"Of course!" he assents eagerly, and bids again, more daringly,—"We'll take her to Europe."

"That would be pleasant."

"In a year or two," he explains, "the ranch will almost run itself and be making big money—with the right rate on lemons and the tariff as it is. Then we can do almost anything we please—live any place you like."

A pause here. So far it is wholly satisfactory, Milly is thinking, and she wonders what more she wants. Then,—

"Milly?"

She looks at him with kind eyes.

"You won't make me wait—much longer?"

Milly slowly shakes her head, acceptingly.

"God, how I have longed for you!"

"Silly man!"

But she is pleased. She is thinking,—

"I'm doing it for Virginia. It's her only chance—I must do it."

Which was not altogether a falsehood, and she repeats this self-defence to herself again when later on Duncan kisses her for the first time,—"It's for her sake—I would do anything for her." And with a sigh of unconquerable sentimentalism she seals her bargain on the man's lips. She has found a new sentimental faith,—a mother's sacrifice for her child.... But she is really very glad, and quite tender with him.

* * * * *

In this mood she bade her lover good-by at the door and went back into the house to meet her partner. Ernestine, who was not too obtuse to recognize what had happened without the need of many words, listened to Milly's announcement dumbly. At the end she put her hand on Milly's shoulder and looked steadily at her for several moments. She was well enough aware how false Milly had been to her, how careless of her stupid heart, how she had betrayed her in the final hour of their tribulations. Nevertheless, she said quite honestly,—"I'm so glad, dearie, for you!" and kissed her.



VIII

THE SUNSHINE SPECIAL

A few weeks later a little party gathered in the murky railroad station from which the California trains depart from Chicago. As they approached the waiting train, which bore on its observation platform the brass sign, "Sunshine Special," the negro porters showed their gleaming teeth and the conductor muttered with an appropriate smile,—"Another of them bridal parties!" At the head of the little procession the Ranchman walked, conversing with Walter Kemp. Duncan had an air of apparent detachment, but one eye usually rested on Milly, who was walking with her father and was followed by a laughing group. Eleanor Kemp was not among them. Somehow since the last evolution of Milly's affairs there had been a coolness between these two old friends, and Mrs. Kemp had not taken the trouble to leave her summer home "to see Milly off" again. She had sent her instead a very pretty dressing-case with real gold-stoppered bottles, which the new husband now handed over to the porter.

Milly's arm was caressingly placed on her father's. Horatio was older, more wizened, than when we first met him, but he was genial and happy, with a boyish light in his eyes.

"You'll be sure to come, papa!" Milly said, squeezing his arm.

"I won't miss it this time, daughter," Horatio replied slyly,—"my long-delayed trip to California." He chuckled reminiscently.

"You must bring Josephine with you, of course," Milly added hastily.

Mrs. Horatio, still stern behind her spectacles, even in the midst of a merry bridal party, relented sufficiently to say,—

"I ain't much on travelling about in cars myself."

Milly, with the amiability of one who has at last "made good," remarked patronizingly,—

"You'll get used to the cars in three days, my dear."

Horatio meanwhile was playing with little Virginia, teasing her about her "new Papa." The little girl smiled rather dubiously. She had the animal-like loyalty of childhood, and glanced suspiciously at the "New Papa." However, she had already learned from the constant mutations of her brief life to accept the New and the Unexpected without complaint. At last perceiving Ernestine, who was hurrying breathlessly down the long platform in search of the party, a huge bunch of long-stemmed roses hugged close in her arms, Virginia ran to meet her old friend and clung tight to the Laundryman.

"Take 'em!" Ernestine said, breathing hard and thrusting the prickly flowers into Milly's arms. "My! I thought I'd miss the train."

"Oh, Ernestine! why did you do that, dear?" Milly exclaimed in a pleased voice.

"It's the last of the Cake Shop!" Ernestine replied with a grim smile. And the roses were almost literally the sole remains of that defunct enterprise, having taken the last of Ernestine's dollars.

"They're perfectly gorgeous—it was lovely of you to think of bringing them for me. I'll cut the stems and put them in water and they will keep all the way to the Coast—and remind me of you," Milly said, who had formed the habit of receiving floral offerings.

She handed the awkward bunch over to "Husband," who hastened dutifully to place them in their compartment.

"He's on his job," Ernestine grinned. The banker laughed.

"That's what we men are made for, isn't it, Milly?"

"Of course!"

She was in her right element once more, the centre of the picture,—becomingly dressed in a gray travelling suit, "younger than ever," about to start on a wonderful three days' journey to a strange new land, with her faithful and adoring knight. What more was there in life?

* * * * *

"All aboard!" the conductor droned.

Exclamations and final embraces. Milly came to Ernestine Geyer last.

"Good-by, dear! You've been awfully good to me—I can never forget it!"

"Yes, you will—that's all right," Ernestine replied gruffly, not knowing exactly what she was saying.

"I hope you'll make a fortune in your new business—"

"Him and me," Ernestine interrupted, nodding jocularly towards the banker, "are going into the laundry business together."

"You must write me all about it!"

"I will."

In a last confidential whisper Milly said,—"And some day marry a good man, dear!"

"Marry!!" Ernestine hooted, so that all could hear. "Me, marry! Not much—I'll leave the matrimony business to you."

Then they kissed.

There were tears in Ernestine's eyes as she stood waving a pocket-handkerchief after the receding train. Milly was at the rail of the observation platform, leaning on the brass sign and waving both hands to her old friends, Chicago, her past. Little Virginia at her side waved an inch or two of white also, while the smiling ranchman stood over them benignantly, protectingly, one hand on his wife's shoulder to keep her from falling over the rail.

* * * * *

When the train had swept out into the yards, the little party broke up. Horatio, who was choky, turned to his wife. Mrs. Horatio was already studying through her spectacles a suburban time-card to ascertain the next "local" for Elm Park. Ernestine and Walter Kemp slowly strolled up the train-shed together. The banker was the first to break the silence:—

"Guess they'll have a comfortable journey, not too dusty.... He seems to be a good fellow, and he must have a fine place out there."

Ernestine said nothing.

"Well," the banker remarked, "Milly is settled now anyway—hope she'll be happy! She wasn't much of a business woman, eh?" He looked at Ernestine, who smiled grimly, but made no reply. "She's better off married, I expect—most women are," he philosophized, "whether they like it or not.... That's what a woman like Milly is meant for.... She's the kind that men have run after from the beginning of the world, I guess—the woman with beauty and charm, you know."

Ernestine nodded. She knew better than the banker.

"She'll never do much anywhere, but she'll always find some man crazy to do for her," and he added something in German about the eternal feminine, which Ernestine failed to get.

There was a steady drizzle from a lowering, greasy sky outside of the train-shed, and the two paused at the door. With a long sigh Ernestine emitted,—

"I only hope she'll be happy now!"

As if he had not heard this heartfelt prayer, the banker mused aloud,—

"She's Woman,—the old-fashioned kind,—just Woman!"

Ernestine looked steadily into the drizzle. Neither commented on what both understood to be the banker's meaning,—that Milly was the type of what men through the ages, in their paramount desire for exclusive sex possession, had made of women, what civilization had made of her, and society still encouraged her to become when she could,—an adventuress,—in the banker's more sophisticated phrase,—a fortuitous, somewhat parasitic creature. In Ernestine's more vulgar idiom, if she had permitted herself to express her conviction, "Milly was a little grafter." But Ernestine would not have let hot iron force the words through her lips....

"And I suppose," the banker concluded, "that's the kind of women men will always desire and want to work for."

"I guess so," Ernestine mumbled.

Had she not worked for Milly? She would have slaved for her cheerfully all her life and felt it a privilege. Milly had stripped her to the bone, and wounded her heart in addition,—but Ernestine loved her still.

* * * * *

"Can I put you down anywhere?" Kemp asked, as his car came up to the curb.

"No, thanks—I'll walk."

"Remember when you want some money for your new business to come and see me!"

"I owe you too much now."

"Oh," he said good-naturedly, "that account is wiped off. The partnership's been dissolved."

"That ain't the way I do business."

"I wish more of my men customers felt like you," the banker laughed as the car drove away.

Ernestine plunged into the drizzle, and while the Sunshine Special was hurrying the old-fashioned woman westward to the golden slopes of California, with her pretty

"face that burned the topless towers of Ilium,"

the new woman plodded sturdily through the mucky Chicago streets on her way to the eternal Job.

Milly was settled at last, and, let us assume, "lived happily ever after."



BY THE SAME AUTHOR



THE HEALER

"Distinctly unusual—and distinctly interesting."—Chicago Inter-Ocean.

"Mr. Herrick's finest."—Omaha Herald.

"Had Ibsen been a novelist, and had he chosen Mr. Herrick's theme in 'The Healer,' he might have written much the same sort of a novel."—The Dial.

"Of extraordinary vividness—a book of power."—Chicago Tribune.

"Mr. Herrick has written a novel in which every page has sustained interest, though we think he does not intend the reader to grasp the full moral purport of his story until he reveals it himself in the last paragraph. We credit the writer not only with possessing a high ideal, but also with having carried out his object with great artistic success—two things which are unhappily not often found between the same covers."—London Athenaeum.

"...exceedingly well done."—Bookman.

"...bears directly upon great evils in society to-day."—N.Y. Times.

TOGETHER

"Scarce a page but is tense and strong."—Record-Herald.

"A masterpiece of keen vision and vivid depiction."—Mail.

"An absorbing story ... likely to make a sensation."—New York Evening Post.

"A book of the first magnitude, that handles a momentous theme boldly, wisely, sympathetically, and with insight."—The Forum.

A LIFE FOR A LIFE

"A serious attempt to treat a big living question in a new way."—Record-Herald.

THE GOSPEL OF FREEDOM

"A novel that may be truly called the greatest study of social life that has ever been contributed to American fiction."—Chicago Inter-Ocean.

THE WEB OF LIFE

"It is strong in that it faithfully depicts many phases of American life, and uses them to strengthen a web of fiction, which is most artistically wrought out."—Buffalo Express.

THE COMMON LOT

Is a strong, virile picture of modern business life, with all its temptations to "graft" and its fight for privilege.

"A novel which it would be difficult to overpraise."—Philadelphia Ledger.

"It is by long odds the greatest novel of the autumn."—The New York American.

THE REAL WORLD

"Unusually satisfying.... The hero steadily approaches the dividing line between safety and ruin and you are kept in agitated suspense until the dramatic climax. A number of powerful scenes add color and forcefulness to a story in the main eminently satisfactory."—Record-Herald, Chicago.

THE END