Chapter XII: Part FOUR: Realities (3)

Embarrassed by the gaze of the servant and by the waiting people behind, she got into the hansom. The man gave some sort of order to his driver and got in beside her. They trotted briskly around the corner on to the Avenue, and as it was misting heavily the driver let down the glass shield. It seemed cozy and pleasant to jog home from a party in a private cab, with an agreeable man by one's side. Quite like old times, Milly thought!

"You'd better let me take you all the way. Where shall I say?" and he raised the top with his stick. For a moment Milly was about to yield. She liked the sense of having a masterful man near her, overbearing her doubts, but she still protested,--

"No, no--it's too far. Just put me down at Columbus Circle."

The man hesitated, looked at Milly curiously, then gave the driver the direction. Milly wondered why he had not insisted as she had expected he would or did not again suggest driving her out, when they had reached the subway station. There was a time when men would not have taken no for an answer. But he didn't--nor even ask her name. Instead he courteously helped her to alight and raising his hat drove off.

* * * * *

She was depressed going up-town in the crowded, smelly, shrieking train. The meeting had not been as thrilling as she had anticipated. Hazel would probably scold her to-morrow for not coming forward and meeting the leaders. But she felt that the Woman Forward movement had little to offer her in her perplexities. Hers was part of that economic maladjustment that the good-looking stranger had talked about, and even with the suffrage it would take generations to do anything for women like her.

What really depressed her most was the fact that her unknown acquaintance had not considered it worth while to find out her name and pave the way for further relations. She realized cynically that for the present at any rate the woman question came down to just this: men could do many pleasant and useful things for women when they were so inclined. And a woman failed when she could not interest a man sufficiently to move him to make the advance. Of course Milly knew that the "modern woman" would fiercely desire to be independent of all such male patronage. But as Milly climbed wearily the long flight of stairs to her apartment, feeling tired and forlorn and very much alone in the world, she knew that in the bottom of her heart she had no wish to be "modern." And she was even sceptical as to how sincerely the other women, like Hazel Fredericks, desired that "complete independence of the male" they chattered so much about.

* * * * *

When Milly turned on the electric light in the little apartment, it was forebodingly still. She glanced at once into the room where Virginia slept and found it empty, with the bedclothes tumbled in a heap. She rushed to the maid's room. That too was empty and the rear door was locked on the outside. For a moment Milly's heart ceased beating, then with a shriek,--"Virgie, Virgie--where are you!" she ran into the front hall and plunged, still shrieking, down the stairs.

A door opened on the floor below, and the figure of a large woman in a rose-pink negligee confronted Milly.

"Lookin' for yer little girl?" the stranger asked in a loud, friendly voice. "Well, she's all right--just come in here!"

She held open the door and pointed to the front room, where under a crocheted shawl little Virginia was curled up asleep on the divan. Milly fell beside her with an hysterical sob. The child, partly awakened, put out her thin arms and murmured sleepily, "The strange lady's very nice, but she's queer. Take me home, mama, please."

The "strange lady," who was looking on interestedly, explained,--

"I heard the kid runnin' round up above and cryin'--oh, that was hours ago when I first com' home--and as she kep it up cryin' as if she were scared and callin', I went up there and brought her down to stay with me till you got back.... Guess she woke up and was lonesome all by herself."

"That brute Hilda," Milly gasped, "must have gone off and left her."

"They're all like that,--them Swedes," the woman of the rose-pink negligee agreed. "Got no more heart than a brick."

She spoke as from a vast experience with the race.

"The little girl has been as nice as pie," the woman replied to Milly's stammered thanks. "We've been real friendly. Good-by, girlie, I'll be up to-morrer some time and tell you the last of that story.... Good-night!"

Milly gathered her precious bundle in her arms and with renewed thanks staggered back to her own quarters.

"She's queer, mama, and something happened to her arm and leg, long ago, but she's very kind," the small Virginia explained sleepily as her mother dropped her on her own bed.

By "queer" Virginia merely meant that her good Samaritan was not of the class she had been accustomed to, and did not use language precisely as her mother and her mother's friends used it. To Virginia the janitor of the building was "queer," and almost all of the many thousands of her fellow-beings whom she saw daily on the streets of the great city.

So Milly thought no more about it.

IX

THE NEW WOMAN

But the "queer" woman in the rose-pink negligee who befriended Virginia on the night when her mother had gone to the meeting of the Woman Forward Movement in the very grand house and "the beast of a Swede" Hilda had slipped out to meet her lover beside Grant's Tomb, has more to do with Milly and the woman question itself than the suffrage meeting and all the talk there. Ernestine Geyer, for such was the woman's name, came into Milly's life rather late, but she will have much to do with it hereafter and deserves a chapter to herself to begin with.

Incredible as it would seem to Milly, Ernestine's origin was not widely separated from that of Milly Ridge. She might very well have been one of the many little schoolmates, not exactly "nice," who sat beside Milly on the benches of the St. Louis public school. Her ancestry, to be sure, was more mongrel than Milly's; it would defy any genealogist to trace it beyond father and mother or resolve it properly into its elements. The name itself indicated that there must have been some German or Dutch blood in the line. Neither would it be possible now to explain what exigencies of the labor market compelled Ernestine's family to migrate from St. Louis to New York.

All that Ernestine herself knew was that her father worked in breweries, and that she with her five brothers and sisters lived in one of those forbidding brick rookeries on the lower west side of New York. This was when she was ten. When she reached fourteen--the legal age--she escaped from the routine of school and joyfully went to work in a laundry. For children of her class it was like coming of age,--to become wage-earners with the accompanying independence and family respect.

The laundry where she found her first job was a small affair, of the "domestic-hand laundry" type, situated in a low brick building that had once served as a gentleman's private stable on one of the cross streets near Gramercy Park. At that time Ernestine was a hearty, vigorous child, strong for her age, or she never could have endured the long hours of hard work on wet floors in a steaming room and with heavy bundles to lift and carry. As a grown woman her squat figure, large and slightly round-shouldered, betrayed these early years of stooping labor, and her colorless complexion, not a sickly pallor but a neutral white beneath the thick black hair, was the result of years spent in a dark, misty atmosphere, through which even the gas-lights burned dimly. In those early days when Ernestine scurried across the city in the procession of working-girls, mornings at seven forty-five and evenings at six, she was very much like all the others,--a not wholly unattractive young woman with quick eyes. Perhaps she was a trifle quieter, less emotional than her companions at the laundry--more reflective in disposition--but not noticeably more intelligent than the many thousands in her class.

And if it had not been for an accident, which at the time seemed frightful to her, Ernestine Geyer would probably have turned out, as most of her kind turn out, either have become the wife of a workingman with a brood of children to feed the labor hopper or gone to her end more rapidly on the streets. But one day, owing to a defect in the machinery that controlled the huge cauldron over which she was bending, the thing tipped and scalded her with a flood of boiling water on her right arm and leg. At the hospital it was thought she would have to lose the arm; but she was too robustly made for that. A frightful red scar from her hip to below the knee and a withered right hand and forearm were the results. They took her back at the laundry when she left the hospital out of pity and a sense of responsibility for her bad luck, and gave her some light work sorting out clothes and checking pieces, which she could do after a fashion with her left hand and the withered stump.

Ernestine quickly realized--and just here was the proof of her innate superiority to the majority--that her only chance for existence was to make herself so useful in the irregular labor she could perform that she would not be discharged at the first opportunity. And she worked as she had never before dreamed she could work! She counted, sorted, marked, checked the huge piles of restaurant and office linen that the laundry took. She had the sense to employ a younger brother to assist her with his whole hands. She became, in a word, the order, the system, the regulator of the small establishment, and hence indispensable to the overworked proprietor. Her accident by depriving her of the ordinary amusements of her fellows also made her more intelligent, because she had nothing but her work to occupy her mind. The laundry became the one thing she lived for: it had her every thought and emotion. She knew from the first that no man would ever think of marrying her--she saw it in the pitying glances that the girls gave her. No man would endure a woman with a withered stump of a right hand, not to mention the ugly scar that defaced her body. Thus the world of sex shut out with all its related disturbances, she became by the process of intense specialization a most efficient worker.

It is not necessary to recount all the steps of her progress upward. When the small proprietor of the "hand laundry" acquired another property farther up town she persuaded him to let her manage the old business under his direction. (He was a widower now and no longer young; he would have married her, perhaps. But she knew what that meant--a loss of salary and double work; and she would have none of him as husband.) She was twenty now, and earning more than she had ever expected to make,--eighteen dollars a week. After that the years passed quickly until she was twenty-five and getting thirty dollars a week. Her family having broken up, she was living in a boarding-house not far from the laundry....

Through the misty, dirty panes of the window in the rough office on the upper floor of the old stable where Ernestine now had her desk, she could look across the narrow street to the row of small brick houses opposite. These houses had suffered various vicissitudes since Ernestine had first come to work in the laundry. Then they had been shabby-genteel boarding-houses like the one a block or two away where she herself now lived. Gradually the character of the street had improved. Some young couples, hunting for a spot in all this crowded, expensive city where they might make their modest nests, had moved into the old-fashioned houses and renovated them according to modern ideas. Number 232, almost directly opposite Ernestine's loft, had been among the first thus to renew its youth. The old iron balconies had been restored and little green shutters with crescent-shaped peep-holes added, and also flower-filled window-boxes.

Ernestine had taken a special interest in this house and often speculated about the life going on within its sober brick walls, behind the fresh muslin curtains of the upper windows. At first there was just a man and his wife and a small child, whose young mother wheeled it out each morning in a basket carriage, for the one maid was busy all day long. Then another child had come and another. The first child went to school with a maid--there were three maids in the house now. Ernestine watched the orderly development of this family with all the interest of a nature lover observing a nest of robins. At first when the shutters were closed in the early hot days of June she was afraid lest other hands might open them in the autumn, but after a time she knew her family well enough to understand that they were not the kind that moves, except for death or other cogent cause. She inferred that they were becoming more prosperous, as was quite proper. There was an increasing amount of coming and going at the old-fashioned door, and she got to know the habitual visitors apart from the merely casual acquaintances. In time she built up from her myriad glances across the street a substantial family tree of uncles and aunts, cousins and brothers. What interested her most were the occasional glimpses of the front rooms she had when the maids opened wide the windows and pushed aside the curtains. She was enabled thus to observe three layers of an orderly, inviting domesticity: on the first floor she could see a large, soft rug, an oil painting, a lovely silk hanging that shut off the inner room, and a corner of a mahogany case with some foreign bric-a-brac. She liked best the floor above, where the family mostly lived when they were by themselves: here was one large recessed room where the crowded book-shelves went to the ceiling, a real fire burned in a fireplace, and real lamps lighted a large table, around which the members of the family read or worked or played. Here the lady of the house--a vigorous little body, with laughing eyes--sat and sewed, had tea with visitors, read to her children, and wrote letters. Here in the winter twilight before the day at the laundry was finished the man of the house entered with a jerky little masterful step, crossed to the chair where his wife sat reading, leaned over, kissed her, and having established himself with back to the fire delivered himself, so Ernestine judged, of his daily budget of news. How she would like to hear what he had to say!

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.