rrived at. Milly was content to leave it just that way,--vague and
pleasant, with no explicit understanding of what was to come afterwards.
She knew he would write--he was that kind; he would say more on paper
than by word of mouth, much more. Then, when they met again, she would
put her hand in his and without any talk it would have happened.... He
came with the children to see her off at the station, and as the
fir-covered northern landscape retreated from the moving train, Milly
relaxed in her Pullman seat, holding his roses in her lap, and decided
that Edgar Duncan was altogether the "best" man she had ever known well.
She surrendered herself to a dream of a wonderful land where the yellow
lemons gleamed among glossy green leaves, and the distant hills were
powdered with the gray tint of olive trees, as Duncan had described the
ranch, and also of a little low bungalow, a silent Jap in white clothes
moving back and forth, and far below the distant murmur of the Pacific
surges.... Her eyes became suffused: it wasn't the pinnacle of her
girlish hope, but it was Peace. And just now Milly wanted peace more
than anything else.

He wrote, as Milly knew he would, and though Milly found his letters
lacking in that warmth and color and glow in which she had bathed the
ranch, they were tender and true letters of a real lover, albeit a timid
one. "All his life he had longed for a real companion, for a woman who
could be a man's mate as his mother was to his father," and that sort of
thing. He implied again and again that not until he had met Milly had he
found such a creature, "but now," etc. Milly sighed. She was happy, but
not thrilled. Perhaps, she thought, she was too old for
thrills--twenty-four--and this was as near "the real right thing" as she
was ever to come. At any rate she meant to take the chance.

Ocanseveroc did not prove attractive: it was a hot little hole by a
steaming, smelly lake, like Como, only less select in its society and
more populous. Milly quickly "did" the resort and fled back to Chicago
for a breath of fresh air from the great cooling tub of Lake Michigan.
That was the nineteenth of August. She had twelve days in which to get
ready her articles before Duncan's arrival. On the hot train she planned
a little article on the search for the ideal resort with the result of a
hasty return to the city for comfort and coolness. She thought it might
be made amusing and resolved to see the editor about it.