Chapter VII: Part THREE: Aspirations (1)

I

THE NEW HOME

They took a tiny, four-room apartment far, far out on the North Side. It was close to the sandy shore of the Lake; from the rear porch, which was perched on wooden stilts in the fashion of Chicago apartments, the gray blue waters of the great lake could be seen. In the next block there were a few scrubby oak trees, still adorned, even in January, with rustling brown leaves, which gave something of a country air to the landscape. By an ironical accident the new apartment they had chosen happened to be not far from the spot where Clarence Albert had wished to build his home. There was still much vacant property in this neighborhood, as well as the free lake beach, which attracted the lovers, and though it was a tiresome car-ride to the centre of the city Milly did not expect to make many journeys back and forth.

At first she had had some idea of resuming her newspaper work, but that had become almost negligible of late, since her preoccupation with love, and when she approached Mr. Becker, he showed slight interest. He felt kindly towards the two young adventurers, but he was not disposed to carry his sentiments into the newspaper business. They must "make good" by themselves, like any other Tom and Gill, and Milly married to an impecunious newspaper artist would not be a social asset for the _Star_. So Milly, happily, was relegated to domesticity, and the management of her one raw little maid. Anyway, as she told Eleanor Kemp, her husband did not care to have his wife working--didn't think much of women in the newspaper business. She was proud of his Pride....

The new home was a pretty little nest. Milly had rescued from the last débacle of the Ridge household those few good pieces of old mahogany that had been her mother's contribution to the conglomerate, and kind friends had added a few essential articles. Especially Eleanor Kemp, with a practical eye and generous hand, had taken delight in seeing that all details of the new home were complete, and that everything was in smiling order on their return from the brief wedding trip. She had even taken pains to have flowers and plants sent in from the Como greenhouses. (The plants speedily died, as Milly forgot to water them.)

So now they were embarked, cosily and cheerily, considering their circumstances. As a shrewd worldly philosopher once put it on a similar occasion: "Your John and my Amy got launched to-day on the long journey. Poor dears! They think it's to be one long picnic. But we know they are up against the Holy State of Matrimony--a very different proposition." By which he meant, no doubt, that the young couple were to discover that instead of passion and sentiment, verses and kisses, marriage was largely a matter of feeding John and keeping him smoothly running as an economic machine, and of clothing Milly and keeping her happily attuned to the social cosmos,--later on of feeding, clothing, educating, and properly launching the little Johns and Millys who might be expected to put in an appearance....

But our lovers had not struck the prosaic bottom yet, though they reached it sooner than either had expected. There were a good many kisses and verses the first months, passion and temperament. John discovered, of course, that Mrs. Bragdon was quite a different woman from Milly Ridge,--a still fascinating, though occasionally exasperating, creature, while Milly thought John was just what she had known he would be,--an altogether adorable lover and perfect man. What surprised her more as the early weeks of marriage slipped by was to find that she herself had remained, in spite of her great woman's experience, much the same person she had always been, with the same lively interests in people and things outside and the same dislike of the sordid side of existence. She had vaguely supposed that the state of love ecstasy which had been aroused in her would continue forever, excluding all other elements in her being, and thus transform her into something gloriously new. Not at all. She still felt aggrieved when the maid boiled her eggs more than two minutes or passed the vegetables on the wrong side.

When the two first seriously faced the budget question, they found that they had started their sentimental partnership with a combined deficit of over four hundred dollars. Luckily Mrs. Gilbert had sent to their new address a chilly note of good wishes and a crisp cheque for one hundred dollars. It was rather brutal of the good lady to put them so quickly on the missionary list, and Milly wanted to return the cheque; but John laughed and "entered it to the good," as he said. Then miraculously Grandma Ridge had put into Milly's hand just before the wedding ten fresh ten-dollar bills. Where had the old lady concealed such wealth all these barren years, Milly wondered!... And finally, among other traces of Eleanor Kemp's fairy hand, they found in a drawer of Milly's new desk a bank-book on Walter Kemp's bank with a bold entry of $250 on the first page. So, all told, they were able to start rather to the windward, as Bragdon put it. Much to Milly's surprise, the artist proved to have a sense of figures, light handed as he had shown himself before marriage. At least he knew the difference between the debit and the credit side of the ledger, and had grasped the fundamental principle of domestic finance, viz. one cannot spend more than one earns, long. He insisted upon paying up all the old bills and establishing a monthly budget. When, after the rent had been deducted from the sum he expected to earn, Milly proved to him that they could not live on what was left, he whistled and said he must "dig it up somehow," and he did. He became indefatigably industrious in picking up odd dollars, extending his funny column, doing posters, and making extra sketches for the sporting sheet. In spite of these added fives and tens, they usually exceeded the budget by a third, and when Jack looked grave, Milly of course explained just how exceptional the circumstances had been.

It is not worth while to go into the budgetary details of this particular matrimonial venture. Other story-tellers have done that with painful literalness, and nothing is drearier than the dead accounts of the butcher and baker, necessary as they are. The essential truths of domestic finance are very simple, and invariable: in the last analysis they come to one horn of the eternal dilemma,--fewer wants or more dollars. In America it is usually the second horn of the dilemma that the husband valiantly embraces--it seems the easier one at the time, at least the more comfortable horn upon which to be impaled. Milly was convinced that the first horn was impossible, if they were to "live decently." Bragdon began to think they might do better in New York, where the market for incidental art was larger and the pay better. Milly was eager for the venture. But both hesitated to cut themselves off from a sure, if lean, subsistence. The _Star_ raised him during the presidential campaign, when he was quite happy in caricaturing the Democratic ass and the wide-mouthed Democratic candidate. (They always had a tender feeling for the gentleman after that!) All in all, he made nearly twenty-five hundred dollars the first year, and that was much more than he had expected. But he found that even in those years of low prices it was a small income for two--as Milly pointed out.

However, money was not their only concern. The young wife was properly ambitious for her husband.

"It isn't so much the money," she told Eleanor Kemp. "I don't want Jack to sink into mere newspaper work, though he's awfully clever at it. But it leads nowhere, you know. I want him to be a real artist; he's got the talent. And if he succeeds as a painter, it pays so much better. Just think! That Varnot man charges fifteen hundred dollars for his portraits and such daubs--don't you think so?"

(Emil Varnot was one of the tribe of foreign artists who periodically descend upon American cities and reap in a few months a rich harvest of portraits, if they are properly introduced--much to the disgust of local talent.)

"Don't be impatient, Milly," Mrs. Kemp counselled. "It will come in time, I've no doubt. You must save up to go abroad first."

But the dull way of thrift was not Milly's; it was not American. Improvements there are financed by mortgage, not by savings. They must borrow to make the next step.... Milly had lofty ideals of helping her husband in his work. She was to be his inspiration in Art, of course: that was to go on all the time. More practically she hoped to serve as model from which his creations would issue to capture fame. She had heard of artists who had painted themselves into fame through their wives' figures, and she longed to emulate the wives. But this illusion was shattered during the first year of their married life. When Bragdon essayed a picture in the slack summer season, it was discovered that Milly, for all her vivacious good looks, was not paintable in the full figure. (They had tried her on the sands behind the flat, where they rigged up an impromptu studio out of old sails.) Her legs were too short between the thigh and the knee, and when the artist tried to correct this defect of his model, the result was disastrous.... However, what was of more practical purpose, her head answered very well, and Milly's pretty face adorned the covers of various minor magazines, done in all possible color schemes at twenty dollars per head. "I earn something," she said, by way of self-consolation.

She had another disappointment. She had imagined that her husband would do most of his work at home, immediately under her fostering eye, and that in this way she should have a finger, so to speak, in the creative process; but for the present the sort of "art" they lived on was best done in an office, with the thud of steam presses beneath and the eager eye of the copy-reader at the door. So Milly was left to herself for long hours in her new little home, and Milly was lonely. The trouble obviously was that Milly had not enough to do to occupy her abundant energy and interest in life. They were not to have children if possible: in the modern way they had settled beforehand that _that_ was impossible. And modern life had also so skilfully contrived the plebeian machinery of living that there was little or nothing left for the woman to do, if she were above the necessity of cooking and washing for her man. Deliberately to set herself to find an interesting and inexpensive occupation for her idle hours was not in Milly's nature,--few women of her class did in those days. It was supposed to be enough for a married woman to be "the head of her house"--even of a four-room modern apartment--and to be a gracious and desirable companion to her lord in his free hours of relaxation. Anything else was altogether "advanced" and "queer."

So after the first egotistic weeks of young love, the social instinct--Milly's dominant passion, in which her husband shared to some extent--awoke with a renewed keenness, and she looked abroad for its gratification. Their immediate neighbors, she quickly decided, were "impossible" as intimates: they were honest young couples, clerks and minor employees, who had come to the outskirts of the great city, like themselves, for the sake of low rents and clean housing. There were no signs of that "artistic and Bohemian" quality about them which she had hoped to find in her new life. Her husband assured her that he had failed to discover any such circle in Chicago, any at least whose members she could endure. That was where America, except New York possibly, differed from Europe. It had no class of cultivated poor. Occasionally he brought a newspaper man from the city, and they had some amusing talk over their dinner. A few of Milly's old friends persistently followed her up, like the Norton girls, the kindly Mrs. Lamereux, and the Kemps. But after accepting the hospitality of these far-off friends, there was always the dreary long journey back to their flat, with ample time for sleepy reflection on the futility of trying to keep up with people who had ten times your means of existence. It was not good for either of them, they knew, to taste surreptitiously the _bourgeois_ social feast, when they were not able "to do their part." Nevertheless, as the spring came on, Milly invited people more and more, and in the long summer twilights they had some jolly "beach parties" on the sandy lake shore, cooking messes over a driftwood fire, and also moonlight swimming parties. By such means the dauntless Milly managed to keep a sense of social movement about them.

* * * * *

She saw her father rarely. It was a day's journey, as she expressed it, to the West Side, and her father was never free until after six, except on Sundays, which Milly consecrated to husband, of course. Really, father and daughter were not congenial, and they discovered it, now that fate had separated them. At long intervals Horatio would come to them for Sunday dinner, when Milly had not some other festivity on foot. On these occasions the little man seemed subdued, as if he had turned down the hill and drearily contemplated the end, at the bottom. He liked best to sit on the rear porch, read the Sunday _Star_, and watch the gleaming lake. Perhaps it reminded him of that vision he had indulged himself with for a few short weeks of the broad Pacific beneath the Ventura hills. Milly felt sorry for her father and did her best to cheer him by giving him a bountiful dinner of the sort of food he liked. She had a faint sense of guilt towards him, as if she might have done more to make life toothsome for him in his old age. And yet how could she have been false to her heart, which she felt had been amply vindicated by her marriage? Pity that her heart could not have chimed to another note, but that was the way of hearts. She was relieved when she had put her father aboard the car on his return. As for Jack, he was always kind and polite, but frankly bored; the two men had nothing in common--how could they? It was the two generations over again--that was all.

Old Mrs. Ridge never made the journey to the Bragdon flat, and Milly saw her only once or twice after her marriage. She was not sorry. Years of living with "Grandma" had eaten into even Milly's amiable soul. The little old lady grimly pursued her narrow path between the boarding-house and the church, reading her _Christian Vindicator_ for all mental relaxation, until one autumn morning she was found placidly asleep in her bed, forever.

That was the next event of importance in Milly's life.

II

A FUNERAL AND A SURPRISE

When Horatio telephoned the news, Milly hurried over to the West Side, and was taken to her grandmother's room. The little old lady seemed extraordinarily lifelike in her death--perhaps because there had been so little outward animation to her life. Her thin, veined hands were folded neatly over her decent black dress, as she had sat so many hours, perfectly still. The neat bands of white hair curved around the well-shaped ears, and the same grim smile of petty irony that Milly knew so well and hated was graven on the thin lips.... She was taken to that cemetery on the Western Boulevard which Milly as a girl had prevented her from visiting on her daily walk. There were several old ladies from the boarding-house at the funeral, and one other thin-faced woman, whom Milly vaguely remembered to have seen somewhere.

Milly returned from the funeral with her husband, and they were both silent and thoughtful, occupied not so much with the dead as with the future her going must disturb. They had not dared voice to each other the idea that had been troubling them both since the first news of Mrs. Ridge's death had reached them. At last, when they had left the car and were approaching their own home, Bragdon said,--"I suppose, Milly, we ought to have your father live with us."

"I suppose so," Milly sighed. "Poor papa--he feels it dreadfully.... He's done so much for me always, Jack."

Her husband might rejoin that Horatio had done little for him, but he said instead,--

"We shall have to find a larger apartment."

Milly sighed. It was difficult enough to get on in the little one.

"You'll go over to-morrow to see him about it?" Bragdon continued courageously.

"Father can't come 'way out here to live--it's too far from his business."

"We'll have to move nearer the business then."

"Not to the West Side!" Milly exclaimed in horror.

"What difference does it make?" her husband asked, as he wearily took up his drawing-board.

"You don't know the West Side," Milly muttered.

"Well, we can't leave him alone in that boarding-house, can we?"

That was exactly what Milly would have liked to do, but she had not the courage to say so in the face of her husband's ready acceptance of the burden. The next day, as she revolved the unpleasant situation on her way to see her father, she said to herself again and again,--"Not the West Side. I won't have that--anything but that!" For to return to the West Side seemed like beginning life all over again at the very bottom of the hill.

* * * * *

When Milly announced her invitation to her father, Horatio exhibited a strange diffidence.

"We'll find some nice little apartment nearer the city where you'll have no trouble in getting to your business," Milly said in kindly fashion.

"I guess not," Horatio replied. "Not but that it's real kind of you and John."

"Why not?"

"Well, you see, daughter, your husband ain't my kind," he stammered. "He's all right--a good fellow, and he seems to make you happy--but I don't much believe in mixing up families."

"What will you do?"

And after further embarrassment, Horatio confessed with a red face,--

"Perhaps I'll get married myself soon."

"Papa--you don't mean it!" Milly exclaimed, rather shocked, and inclined to think it was one of Horatio's raw jokes.

"Why not?... I ain't as old as some, if I'm not as young as others."

"Who is the lady?"

"A fine young woman!... I've known her well for years, and I can tell you she'll make the right sort of wife for any man."

"Who can it be?" demanded Milly, now quite excited, and running over in her mind all of her father's female acquaintance, which was not extensive.

"Miss Simpson," Horatio said. "Expect you don't remember Josephine Simpson--she was the young woman who was in the office when I had the coffee business."

"That woman!" Milly gasped, remembering vividly now the sour, keen scrutiny the bookkeeper had given her the last time she had been in the office of the tea and coffee business. It must have been Miss Simpson who had stood a little to one side behind her father at the funeral. The thin-faced woman had a familiar look, but in her best clothes Milly had not recognized her.

Horatio resented the tone of his daughter's exclamation.

"Let me tell you, Milly," he asserted with dignity, "there are few better women living on this earth than 'that woman.' She's looked after a sick mother and a younger sister all her life, and now I mean she shall have somebody look after her."

The little man rose an inch bodily with his intention.

"I think it's very nice of you, papa."

"Nice of me! An old hulks like me?... I guess it's nice of her to let me.... We'll make out all right. Will you come to the wedding?" he concluded with a laugh.

"Of course--and I'm so glad for you, really glad, papa. I hope Josephine'll make you very happy."

And she kissed her father.

On her way back to the city Milly laughed aloud several times with amusement mingled with relief. "Who would have thought it--and with such a scarecrow!" She stopped at the _Star_ to tell Jack the news. They had lunch together and laughed again and again at "love's young dream."

"He won't be lonely now!" Milly said.

"I suppose he had to have some woman attached to him," her husband mused; "when a man has reached his age and has had 'em about always--"

"Well, I like that!" Milly pouted.

"Anyway, that let's us out," was the final comment of both upon the approaching nuptials of Horatio.

It was not the only surprise that the little old lady's death provided the young couple with. It was discovered that she had made a will, and, what was still more wonderful, that she had really something to will! Various savings-bank books were found neatly tied up with string in her drawer below a pile of handkerchiefs. The will said, after duly providing for the care of her grave, "To my beloved granddaughter, I give and bequeath the residue of my estate," which upon examination of the bank-books was found to be rather more than three thousand dollars all told.

"To me!!" Milly almost shouted when her father read the slip of paper to her. She was divided in her astonishment between surprise that there should be any money left, and that the little old lady, who had fought her all her life, should give it all to "her beloved granddaughter."

Bragdon could not appreciate the full irony of the situation.

"And why not to you?" he asked.

"You don't know grandma!" Milly replied oracularly, feeling that any attempt to explain would be useless.--And, it may be added, Milly did not know her grandmother, either. She could no more appreciate the steady, stern self-denial that had gone to the gathering of that three thousand dollars than she could the nature of a person who would nag for twenty years the girl she meant to endow. That also belonged among the puritan traits, as well as a sneaking admiration for the handsome, self-willed, extravagant granddaughter.

"She ought to have left it to you," Milly said to her father.

"I guess she thought she had done enough for me already," Horatio said lightly. "She knew about Josephine, too--expect she thought the green parlor furniture would be the right thing for us. Josephine's likely to appreciate that more'n you, Milly!"

Milly was amply content with this division.

* * * * *

Husband and wife lay awake for long hours that night, in a flutter of excitement, discussing Milly's marvellous windfall.

"Just think," Milly cried, snuggling very close to her husband. "We'll go abroad as soon as we can pack up, shan't we? And you will paint! And all thanks to poor old grandma."

"It _is_ luck," the artist agreed thankfully.

"And I brought it to you--poor little me, without a _sou_!... Three thousand ought to last a long time."

(Milly was invariably optimistic about the expansibility of money.)

"It'll be a good starter, anyway," her husband agreed, "and before it's gone I ought to be making good."

So that night two very happy married people went to sleep in each other's arms to dream of a wonderful future.

III

ON BOARD SHIP

At last Milly was tucked up in a steamer chair beside her artist husband, on board the old _Augusta Victoria_, bound for Europe, that exhaustless haven of romance where with or without an excuse all good Americans betake themselves when they can....

The last few weeks had been exciting ones. It had begun with Horatio's wedding to the homely bookkeeper, which Milly dutifully attended with her husband. In spite of the very handsome rug that they had sent the couple, Mrs. Horatio preserved a cold demeanor towards her husband's daughter, as if she still suspected the young woman of designs upon Horatio and had married him for the sole purpose of protecting him for the future from this rapacious creature. Milly, quickly perceiving the situation, mischievously redoubled her demonstration over poor Horatio, who was visibly torn between his loyalties.

"Lord, what a sour face she has!" Milly commented to her husband, when they had left the bride and groom. "Poor old Dad, I hope she'll let him smoke!... Why do you suppose he married her?"

"To have some one to work for," Bragdon, who was not without a sense of humor, suggested.

"He might at least have found somebody better looking."

"She looks capable, at any rate."

Milly made a face. She did not like this appreciation of another woman's capability by her husband....

Then came the farewell visits of old friends, who all wished the two venturers great good luck and sadly prophesied they would never return to the city by the lake. Milly was tearful over their departure, but a delirious week in New York that followed did much to efface this sentimental grief. Jack kept finding old friends at every corner, who welcomed him "back to civilization" uproariously, and Milly felt fairly launched on her new career already. A very good-natured Big Brother-in-law took them to Sherry's for dinner, and, charmed by his new sister, spontaneously offered to increase their small hoard by another thousand, with the promise of still more help, in case their "stake" ran out before the two years of Europe they planned had brought results. Finally an old college acquaintance of Jack's, who had made his début in literature successfully and was engaged to provide a woman's magazine with one of his tender stories with a pronounced "heart interest," promised to secure the illustrations for Bragdon. "If I can catch on," the artist told his wife, "it means--anything. Clive Reinhard turns out one of his sloppy stories every six months, and they are all illustrated."

Altogether when they set sail they calculated their resources, if carefully managed, could be made to last three years. Three years of Europe!... Milly had never looked so far ahead in all her life.

* * * * *

Milly, snugly tucked up on the leeward side of the deck, closed her eyes as the boat rolled with heavy dignity, and thought. To be perfectly frank her married life in the four-room flat on the outskirts of Chicago had begun to pall on her. It seemed to lead nowhere. It had not been very different from the lives of the little people about her, from what she would have done and been if she had married Ted Donovan, say. Only, of course, Jack was different from Ted, and with him it could not last in the commonplace rut. They were merely little people, and very poor little people, in the big whirl of the western city--with their hope. Suddenly in the most romantic manner the Hope had taken shape--and Milly, thanks to grandma's surprising gift, arrogated to herself the whole credit of that. She did not pause to think what might have happened to them if they had been obliged to continue in the rut. She did not realize that already "love was not enough."

But now heigho for Venture and the New Life--the life of Art! Milly still thought vaguely that according to Mrs. Lamereux it would mean meeting a lot of interesting people, endless clever talk over delightful meals in queer little French restaurants or in picturesque and fascinating studios. "Art" was the next thing to money or fashion. If one couldn't be awfully rich or a "social leader," the best thing was to be artistic and distinguished, which brought you into contact with all sorts of people, among them "the fashionables," of course. She meant that her husband should be a successful painter, not a mere illustrator.

Of the real nature of Art and the artist's life Milly had no better conception than when she first fell in love with Jack Bragdon. She knew nothing of the artist's despairs and triumphs, his tireless labor to grasp the unseen, his rare and exalted joys, his strange valuation of life,--in short the blind, unconscious purpose of Art in the terrestrial scheme of things. Nor perhaps did John Bragdon at twenty-eight. The crust of _bourgeois_ standards is so thick in American life that it takes a rare and powerful nature to break through, and Bragdon had not yet begun to knock his way.... Milly's idea of Art, like most women's, was Decoration and Excitement. When successful, it made money and noise in the world, and brought social rewards, naturally. She hadn't married Jack for that, or for any reason except because of his own adorable personality, as she told him frequently. But now that she was married she meant to make the most of the Gift. Jack was to be a Creator, and she aspired to be embodied somehow in the creation and share its profits.

At last they were launched: their marriage was really just beginning.... She snuggled closer to her husband under the common rug and murmured in his sleepy ear,--

"Isn't it great, Jack?"

"What?" (Drowsily.)

"Europe! Everything!... That we're really here on the steamer!"

"Um!"

"And you're going to be a great painter--"

"Perhaps." (Dubiously.)

"What shall you do first?"

"Don't know--find a cab."

"Silly!... Don't make fun of me.... Kiss me!... Do you mind, dear, going down into the cabin and looking for my hot-water bottle," etc.

Bragdon recovered first from the Atlantic languor, and in the course of his rambles about the ship discovered an acquaintance in the second cabin,--a young instructor in architecture at a technical school, who with his wife and small child were also on their way to Paris for the winter. He brought Milly to see the Reddons where they were established behind a ventilator on the rear deck. Milly thought they seemed forlorn and pitied them. Mrs. Reddon was a little pale New Englander, apparently as fragile as a china cup, and in her arms was a mussy and peevish child. She confided to Milly that she expected another child, and Milly, whose one ever present terror was the fear of becoming inconveniently a mother, was quite horrified.

"How can they do it!" she exclaimed to Jack, when they had returned to their more spacious quarters. "Go over second-class like that--it's so dirty and smelly and such common people all around one."

"I suppose Reddon can't afford anything better."

"Then I should stay at home until I could. With a baby, too, and another one coming: it's like the emigrants!"

"Reddon is a clever chap: he's been over before, a couple of years at the Beaux Arts. I suppose he wants more work and didn't like to leave her behind."

"She shouldn't have babies, then," Milly pronounced seriously, feeling her superiority in not thus handicapping her husband in his career.

"It is tough," Bragdon admitted....

They saw a good deal of the Reddons during the voyage. They proved to be not in the least down-hearted over their lot, and quite unaware of Milly's commiseration. They were going to Paris for some desirable professional work, as they might go to San Francisco or Hong Kong, had the path pointed that way. They had babies because that was part of the game when one married, and they brought them along because there was nothing else to do with them. It was all very simple from the Reddon point of view.

Milly considered Mrs. Reddon to be a "nice little thing," and they became chummy. Marion Reddon was a college-trained woman, with much more real culture than her husband or either of the Bragdons. She had read her Greek and Latin and forgotten them, liked pictures and music and books, but preferred babies when they came. Sam Reddon was a high-spirited American boy. He had never meant to study architecture and he hadn't intended to marry or to teach; but having done all these things he still found the world a merry place enough. He played the piano a little and sang Italian songs in an odd falsetto and roamed over the ship in disreputable corduroys, which he had preserved from his student days in Paris, making himself thoroughly at home in all three cabins.

They talked Paris, of course, about which Reddon knew a great deal more than any of the others.

"Where are you going to live? In the Quarter?"

Mrs. Kemp had given Milly the address of an excellent pension near the Arc, at which Sam Reddon expressed a frank disgust.

"Americans and English--the rotten _bourgeoisie_--why don't you stay in New York?" He figuratively spat upon the proprieties, and Milly was bewildered. "An _apartement meublée au cinquième_, near the _Boul' 'Mich_ for us, eh, missus?"

Milly had heard that the "Latin Quarter" was dirty, and not "nice." None of her Chicago friends ever stayed there.

"You'll come and call on us, won't you?" the young man said with pleasant mockery. "Nobody will know, but we won't lay it up against you if you don't."

Milly thought he was "fresh" and tried to snub him, but her manner only provoked Reddon the more.

"What's your husband trying to paint for? There are two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine other chaps like him in Paris, and he'll just be the three thousandth, who thinks he's going to make his fortune painting rich people's portraits. I'd rather break stone than try to live by paint."

"And how about building summer villas for a living?" Bragdon queried.

"Well," the young man replied with a grin. "You see I don't--I can't get any to do!"

It was pleasant enough to joke about the arts, but Milly didn't expect to see much of the Reddons once they were launched in the fascinating life of Paris. She was becoming a little bored with them already, with their sloppy unconventionality and with ship life in general. Most of the first-cabin passengers, she discovered, were from Chilicothe, Ohio, or similar metropoli of the middle west, and as ignorant as she of what was before them.

But when they sighted the green shores of Normandy, her enthusiasm revived at a bound. As they came into the harbor, the gray stone houses with high-pitched red roofs, the fishing smacks with their dun-colored sails, even the blue-coated men on the waiting tender had about them the charm of another world. They were different and strange, exciting to the thirsty soul of the American, so long sodden with the ugly monotony of a pioneer civilization. From the moment that the fat little tender touched the steamer, amid a babble of tongues, Milly was breathless with excitement. She squeezed her husband's arm, like an ecstatic child who had at last got what it wanted. "I'm _so_ happy," she chirped. "Isn't it all wonderful,--that we are really here, you and I?"

He laughed in superior male fashion at her enthusiasm, and stroked his small mustache, but in his own way he was excited at sight of the promised land.

"Hang on tight," he said to her, as they began the ticklish descent to the tender, "or it will be still more wonderful."

Milly tripped over the long, unsteady gangway towards the Future, the great adventure of her life. There beyond, in the smiling green country with the old gray houses, lay mysterious satisfactions that she had hungered for all her life,--Experiences, Fame, and Fortune--in a word her Happiness.

IV

BEING AN ARTIST'S WIFE

But it wasn't so different after all! As Sam Reddon had predicted, the Bragdons went to live in the Étoile quarter,--in a very respectable hotel-pension on the Rue Galilée. It was so much healthier in that quarter, every one said, more comfortable for a wife, who must be left to herself for long hours each day. They had lost sight of the Reddons from the moment they entered the Paris train, for the Reddons, having second-class tickets, were forced to wait for a slower train, which they didn't seem to mind as it gave them a chance to see the little town and lunch in a _cabaret_ instead of paying for an expensive meal on the wagon-restaurant as the Bragdons did.

Bragdon enrolled himself among the seventy or eighty students at Julian's and also shared a studio near the _Pont des Invalides_ with another American, where he worked afternoons by himself. He plunged into his painting very earnestly, realizing all that he had to accomplish. But he lived the life of the alien in France, as so many of his fellow-students did, preserving a stout Americanism in the midst of Paris. Thanks to an education in an American college, after eight years' study of foreign languages he could read easy French, but he could scarcely order a meal in the language. And he did not try to learn French, like most of the young Americans "studying" in Paris. What was the use? he said. He did not intend to live his life there. In truth, he disdained the French, like the others, and all things French, including most of their art. His marriage had emphasized this Americanism. Like most of his countrymen he regarded every Frenchman as a would-be seducer of his neighbor's wife, and every Frenchwoman as a possible wanton; all things French as either corrupt or frivolous or hopelessly behind the times.

He inspired Milly to some extent with these ideas, though she was of a more curious and trusting nature. He did not like to have her go out in Paris even in the daytime unaccompanied, and as after the first weeks of settlement in their new environment he was very busy all day, Milly found herself more or less secluded and idle from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon. It was worse than in the flat in Chicago! For there she could go out when she pleased, and had some social distraction. Here they knew almost nobody.

The hotel-pension on the Rue Galilée was frequented by the quieter sort of middle-aged English, and a few American mothers with their children, "doing Europe." Hardly a word of French was spoken within its doors, and as far as possible the English habitués of the place had anglicized its food. Milly found few congenial spirits there. She rather liked two invalidish maiden ladies from Boston and went shopping with them sometimes and to see the pictures in the Louvre. But the Misses Byron were quite delicate and took their Paris in dainty sips.

Milly was far from sharing her husband's distrust of all things French, but she supposed being a man and having been there before he must know Paris. She would have liked to spend the lovely late autumn days on the streets, drinking in the sights and sounds. Instead she went with Jack to the picture galleries and did the other "monuments" starred in Baedeker, conscientiously. But these did not stir her soul. The Louvre was like some thronged wilderness and she had no clews. Life spoke to her almost exclusively through her senses, not through her mind, which was totally untrained. She was profoundly ignorant of all history, art, and politics; so the "monuments" meant nothing but their picturesqueness. She picked up the language with extraordinary avidity, and soon became her husband's interpreter, when the necessity reached beyond a commonplace phrase.

Occasionally as a spree they dined in the city at some recommended restaurant and went to the theatre. But these were expensive pleasures--indeed the scale of living was more costly than in Chicago, if one wanted the same comforts; and by the end of the first winter Bragdon became worried over the rapid inroads they were making on their letter of credit. Every time he had to journey to the Rue Scribe he shook his head and warned Milly they must be more careful if their funds were to last them even two years. And he knew now that he needed every day of training he could possibly get. He was behind many of these other three thousand young Americans engaged in becoming great artists. Milly thought their sprees were modest and far between, but as the dark, chilly Paris winter drew on she was more and more confined to the stuffy salon or their one cheerless room. She became depressed and bored. This was not at all what she had expected of Europe. It seemed that Paris could be as small a place as Chicago, or even less!

Sometimes, like a naughty child, Milly broke rules and sallied forth by herself on bright days, wandering down the Champs Élysées, gazing at the people, speculating upon the very pronounced ladies in the smart victorias, even getting as far as the crowded boulevards and the beguiling shops, which she did not dare to enter for fear she should yield to temptation. Once she had a venture that was exciting. She was followed all the way from the Rue Royale to the Rue Galilée by a man, who tried to speak to her as she neared the pension, so that she fairly ran to shelter. She decided not to tell Jack of her little adventure, for he would be severe with her and have his prejudices confirmed. She rather enjoyed the excitement of it all, and wouldn't have minded repeating it, if she could be sure of escaping in the end without trouble....

She read some books which her husband got for her,--those breakfast-food culture books provided for just such people, about cities and monuments and history. She was supposed to "read up" about Rome and Florence, where they hoped to go in the spring. But books tired Milly very soon: the unfamiliar names and places meant nothing at all to her. She decided that, as in most cases, one had to have money and plenty of it to enjoy Europe,--to travel and live at the gay hotels, to buy things and get experiences "first hand." Evidently it was not for her, at present.

What she liked best in her life this first winter were the Sunday excursions they made to Fontainebleau, St. Germain, Versailles, and St. Cloud, and other smaller places where the people went. She liked the mixed crowds of chattering French on the river boats and the third-class trains,--loved to talk with the women and children in her careless French, and watch their foreign domesticities.... Best of all, perhaps, were the walks in the Bois with her husband, where she could see the animation of the richer world. On their way back they would often stop at Gagé's for cakes and mild drinks. All the pastry-shops fascinated Milly, they were so bright and clean and _chic_. The efficiency of French civilization was summed up to her in the _patisserie_. She liked sweet things and almost made herself ill with the delectable concoctions at Gagé's. That more than anything else this first year came to typify to her Paris,--the people, men as well as women, who came in for their cakes or syrop, the eagle-eyed _Madame_ perched high at the _comptoir_, holding the entire business in her competent hand, and all the deft girls in their black dresses, nimbly serving, _"Oui, Madame! Voici, Monsieur! Que desirez-vous?"_ etc. She admired the neat glass trays of tempting sweets, the round jars of bonbons, the colored _liqueurs_, the neat little marble-topped tables. Apparently the _patisserie_ was a popular institution, for people of all sorts and conditions flocked there like flies.

"If you ever die and I have to earn my living," she would say jokingly to her husband, "I know what I should do. I'd run a cake-shop!"

"You'd eat all the cakes yourself," Bragdon rejoined, tearing her away after the eighth or tenth.

She went there by herself sometimes, and became good friends with the reigning _Madame_, from whom she learned the routine of the manufacture and the sales, as well as the trials and tribulations with _les desmoiselles_ that the manager of a popular pastry shop must have. This _Madame_ liked the pretty, sociable _Americaine_, always smiled when she entered the shop with her husband, counselled her as to the choicest dainties of the day, asked her opinion deferentially as that of a connoisseur, and made her little gifts. Through the cake-shop Milly came to realize the French, as her husband never did.

* * * * *

So the winter wore away somehow,--the period that Milly remembered as, on the whole, the dullest part of her married life. Her first season in Paris! They might read a little in one of the culture books in their room after dinner, then would take refuge from the damp chill in bed. Jack was less gay here in Paris than he had ever been in Chicago, preoccupied with his work, frequently gloomy, as if he foresaw the failure of his ambitions. Milly felt that he was ungrateful for his fate. Hadn't he the dearest wish of his heart--and her, too?...

Something was wrong, she never knew quite what. The trouble was that she had no job whatever now, and no social distraction to take the place of work. She was the victim of ideas that were utterly beyond her knowledge, ideas that must impersonally carry the Milly Ridges along in their momentum, to their ultimate destruction.

"I ought to be very happy," she said to herself piously. "We both ought to be."

But they weren't.

V

WOMEN'S TALK

One day something dreadful happened. Milly realized that she was to have a child. A strange kind of terror seized her at the conviction. _This_, she had felt ever since her marriage, was the one impossible thing to happen: she had promised herself when she married her poor young artist it should never be. One could be "Bohemian," "artistic"--light and gay--without money, if there were no children. And now, somehow, the impossible had happened, in this unfamiliar city, far away from friends and female counsellors.

She wandered out into the street in a dull despair, and after a time got on top of an omnibus with a vague idea of going off somewhere, never to return, and sat there in the drizzle until she reached the end of the route, which happened to be the Luxembourg. She recognized the place because she had visited the gallery with her husband and also dined at Foyot's and gone to the Odéon on one of their expansive occasions. She walked about aimlessly for a while, feeling that she must get farther away somehow, then wandered into the garden and sat down near one of the fountains among the nurses. The sun had come out from the watery sky, and it was amusing to watch the funny French children and the chattering nurses in their absurd headdresses. The graceful lines of the old Palais made an elegant frame for the garden, the fountains, and the trees. Milly couldn't brood long, but after a time the awful fact would intrude and pull her up with a start. What should she do? There was no room in their life for a child, especially just now. She could never tell Jack. What useless things women were anyway! She didn't wonder that men treated them badly, as they did sometimes, she had heard.

A familiar small figure came towards her. It was Elsie Reddon, the two-year-old girl she had played with on the steamer.

"Where's Mama, Elsie?" Milly asked. The child pointed off to a corner of the garden near by, and Milly followed her small guide to the bench where Marion Reddon was seated. The other child hadn't yet come, but evidently was not far off. Milly felt strangely glad to see the little woman again, and before long confided in her her own trouble.

"That's good!" Marion Reddon said quickly and with evident sincerity.

"You think so!" Milly cried pettishly. "Well, I don't."

"It simplifies everything so."

"Simplifies?"

"Of course. When you're having children, there are some things you can't do--just a few you can--and so you do what you can and don't worry about the rest."

"It spoils your freedom."

The pale-faced little woman laughed.

"Freedom? That's book-talk. Most people do so much more when they aren't free than when they are. Sam says it's the same with his work. When he's free, he does nothing at all because there's so much time and so many things he'd like to try. But when he's tied down with a lot of work at the school, then he uses every spare moment and gets something done--'just to spite the devil.'"

She smiled drolly.

"You'll see when it comes."

Milly looked unconvinced and said something about "the unfair burden on women," the sort of talk her more advanced women friends were beginning to indulge in. Mrs. Reddon had other views.

"It's the natural thing," she persisted. "If I didn't want children for myself, I'd have 'em anyway for Sam."

"Does he like babies?"

"Not especially. Few men do at first. But it trains him. And it makes a hold in the world for him."

"What do you mean?"

"Children make a home--you have to have one. The man can't run away and forget it."

She smiled with her droll expression of worldly wisdom.

"Sam would be in mischief half the time, if it weren't for us. He'd be running here and there, sitting up all hours, wasting his energies smoking and drinking with everybody he met--and now he can't--very much."

"But--but--how about you?"

"Oh," the little woman continued calmly, "I don't flatter myself that I could hold my husband long alone, without the children." She looked Milly straight in the eyes and smiled. "Few women can, you know."

"I don't see why not."

"They get used to us--in every way--and want change, don't you see that? They know every idea we have, every habit, every look good and bad--clever men, especially."

"So we know them!"

"Of course! But women don't like change, variety--the best of us don't. We aren't venturesome. Men are, you see, and that's the difference.... I don't know that we mightn't become so if we had the chance, but we've been deprived of it for so long that we have lost the courage, the desire for change almost. What we know we cling to, isn't that so?"

She rose to capture the wandering Elsie.

"I must go back now to get Sam's _déjeuner_. Won't you come? He'd love to see you--he often speaks about you and your husband."

Milly accepted readily enough. Although she did not agree with all that Marion Reddon had said, she was soothed by the talk, and she had a curiosity to see the Reddon _ménage_ in operation.

"So," she remarked, as they passed through the great gilt gate out to the noisy street, "you think a woman should have children to keep a man true to her."

"Tied to her," Marion Reddon emended, "and truer than he otherwise might be. Then they are something in case the husband quits altogether--if he turns out to be a bad lot. Most of them don't, of course; they are loyal and faithful. But if they do, then a woman has the children, and that's a world for any one."

"It makes it all the worse--if she has to support them without a man's help."

"I wonder! It's the incentive that makes work effective, isn't it?"

They crossed the vivid stream of the boulevard, the child between them, and mounted the hill towards the Panthéon.

"You know the time is coming when the woman will again be the responsible head of the family in form as she is in fact to-day, and then she will tolerate the man about her house just so long as she thinks him a fit father, and take another if she prefers him as the father of her children."

These anarchistic doctrines had a quaint absurdity on the lips of this mild, little New England woman. Milly, not having lived in circles where the fundamental relations of life were discussed with such philosophical frankness, was puzzled. The Reddons must be "queer" people, she thought.

"So I tell Sam when he gets fussy that if he isn't careful, I'll _flanquer la porte_ to him and run the shop myself."

"My!"

"I could, too, and he knows it--which is very salutary for him when he gets uppish and dictatorial, as all men will at times."

"How could you?"

"You see I'm an expert taxidermist. I learned the thing vacations to help an uncle out, who was a collector. I could always make a living at it, and one for the kiddies too. That's the nub of the whole matter, as we used to say in the country."

(Later, Milly remembered this talk in its every bearing, and had reason to appreciate the profound truth of the last statement.)

"But you love your husband," Milly remarked as if to reassure herself.

"Of course I do, or I shouldn't be living with him and bearing his children. But he needs me and the children rather more than I need him--which is the better way."

* * * * *