take it, are _la belle Debutante_?"
"Yes!" Milly laughed. "How did you know?"
"Oh," he replied, and his tone said, "it's because you too are different
from the rest here," which flattered Milly.
"Won't you come in and sit down?"
The young man emptied a chair by the simple process of tipping it and
presented it to Milly with a gallant flourish. She sat on the edge and
drew up her veil as far as the tip of her nose. The young man smiled.
Milly smiled back. They understood each other at once, far better than
either could ever understand the other members of the _Star_ staff.
Their clothes, their accents, their manners announced that they came
from the same world,--that small "larger world," where they all use the
same idiom.
"Been doing Mackinac and Ocara-se-er-oc?" the young man drawled with
delightful irony. "Ye gods! What names!"
Both laughed with a pleasant sense of superiority over a primitive
civilization, though Milly at least had hardly known any other.
"And they're just like their names," Milly asserted, "awful places!"
"I've not yet had the privilege of seeing our best people in their
summer quarters," the young man continued, with his agreeable air of
genial mockery.
"You won't see them in those places."
"Or anywhere else at present," the artist sighed, glancing at his
unfinished sketch.
Milly asked to see the drawing, and another inspiration occurred to her.
She told the young artist of her idea for a comic article on the hunt
through the lake resorts for an ideal place of peace and coolness. He
thought it a good topic and suggested graciously that he could do a few
small pen-and-ink illustrations to elucidate the text.
"Oh, would you!" Milly exclaimed eagerly. It was what she had hoped he
would say, and it revived her waning interest in journalism immensely,
the prospect of collaboration with this attractive young artist. (She
had already forgotten that she was to abandon journalism after the first
Monday in September.)
Later they went out to tea together to discuss the article.
* * * * *
Jack Bragdon, who signed his pen-and-ink sketches with the name of
"Kim," was one of that considerable army of young adventurers in the
arts who pushed westward from the Atlantic seaboard at the time of the
World's Fair in Chicago; also one of the large number who had been left
stranded when the tidal wave of artistic effort had receded, exposing
the dead flats
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