Chapter XIII: Part FIVE: The Cake Shop (1)

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 æsthetic 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 æstheticism 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 Gagé'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 Gagé'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 Gagé's with real cakes and a real _Madame_ in black at the desk!"

She gave Eleanor a vivid description of the charms of Gagé'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 Gagé'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 Gagé'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 Gagé'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 clientèle 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."