leaner out there."

"And the cars come within a block now."

"I'll speak to Milly about it."

She did.

"If you aren't careful, Milly," she warned her granddaughter, "you'll
frighten him. You aren't married yet," she added meaningly.

"He oughtn't to buy land without consulting me," Milly flared,
forgetting that this transaction had taken place before her
determination to become Mrs. Clarence Parker.

"I think you are a very ungrateful girl," Mrs. Ridge observed, with
pressed lips.

"Oh, you always take the men's side, grandma!... Clarence isn't the only
man in the world."

"Better take care before it's too late," the old lady repeated
warningly. "You don't treat Clarence as a girl should who is going to
marry. He's an admirable young man."

Mrs. Ridge ever croaked thus, foretelling disaster.

"If you say anything more, I'll never marry him!" Milly flamed in final
exasperation. "You don't understand. Women don't behave as they did when
you were a girl. They don't lie down before their husbands and let them
walk all over them."

"Perhaps not," grandma laughed icily in reply. "But I guess men aren't
so different from what they were in my time."

Grandma had her own understanding of male character.

V

THE CRASH

As events soon proved, Mrs. Ridge's croaking was not without
justification. The crash in Milly's affairs came, not until the autumn,
a few weeks before the day set for the wedding, and it came on the line
of cleavage already described, although quite unexpectedly and over a
trivial matter, as such things usually happen.

After the closing of the fairy city gloom had settled down over Chicago.
People were exhausted socially from their hectic summer and Panic
stalked forth from behind the festival trappings where it had lain
hidden. Times were frightfully bad, every one said,--never so bad before
in the experience of the country. There were strikes, a hundred thousand
idle men walking the cold streets, empty rows of buildings, shops and
factories closed--and a hard winter coming on. All this did not mean
much to Milly, busy with her own concerns and plans for the wedding,
except for the fact that few people entertained and everybody seemed
relaxed and depressed. Clarence Albert, like a prudent mariner of the
puritan type, dwelt upon the signs of dire storm, and counselled their
not building for the present, although he let her understand that his
own ventures were well under cover. Mill