ity compelled Milly to follow the others up the narrow stairs that
reached from the hall to the floor above. Milly was a tall,
well-developed girl for sixteen, already quite as large as her father
and enough of a woman physically to bully the tiny grandmother when she
wished to. Her face was now prettily suffused with color due to her
resentment, and her blue eyes moist with unshed tears. She glanced into
the small front chamber which had been decorated with a pink paper and
robin's-egg blue paint.

"Pretty, ain't it?" Horatio observed, seeking his crumb of appreciation.

"It's a very nice home, Horatio--I'm sure you displayed excellent taste
in your choice," his mother replied.

"Pretty? ... It's just awful!" Milly burst forth, unable to control
herself longer. She felt that she should surely die if she were
condemned to sleep in that ugly chamber even for a few months. Yet the
house was on the whole a better one than any that the peripatetic Ridges
had thus far achieved. It was fully as good as most of those that her
acquaintances lived in. But it cruelly shamed Milly's expectations.

"It's perfectly horrid,--a nasty, cheap, ugly little box, and 'way out
here on the West Side." Somehow Milly had already divined the coming
degradation of the West Side. "I don't see how you can tell father such
stories, grandma.... He ought to have waited for us before he took a
house."

With that she turned her back on the whole affair and whisked down the
narrow stairs, leaving her elders to swallow their emotions while
inspecting the tin bath-tub in the closet bath-room.

"Milly has her mother's temper," Mrs. Ridge observed sourly.

"She'll come 'round all right," Horatio replied hopefully.

Milly squirmed, but on the whole she "took her medicine" as well as most
human beings....

Meantime she stood before the dusty window in the front room eyeing the
dirty street, dabbing the tears from her eyes with her handkerchief,
welling with resentment at her fate.

* * * * *

Years later she remembered the fierce emotions of that dreary April day
when she had first beheld the little block house on West Laurence
Avenue, recalling vividly her rage of rebellion at her father and her
fate, the hot disgust in her soul that she should be forced to endure
such mean surroundings. "And," she would say then to the friend to whom
she happened to be giving a vivacious account of the incident, "it was
just as me