arning twenty dollars or two
thousand a week. They would live somehow--of course: all young lovers
did.... And was he not a genius? Milly had every confidence.

"You might just as well have married Ted Donovan," Horatio groaned.
(Donovan was the young man at Hoppers' whom Milly had disdained early in
her West Side career.) "I saw him on the street the other day, and he's
doing finely--got a rise last January."

"He's not fashionable enough for Milly," Grandma commented.

"I must say you treated that Mr. Duncan pretty badly," Horatio continued
with unusual severity.

"I should say so!" Grandma interposed.

Milly might think so too, but she was serenely indifferent to all the
defeated prospects, the bleeding hearts over which she must pass to the
fulfilment of her being. It was useless to explain to her father and her
grandmother the imperious call of "the real, right thing," and how
immeasurably Jack differed from Ted Donovan, Clarence Albert, or even
Edgar Duncan, and how indifferent to a true woman must be all the pain
in the world, once she had found her Ideal.

Horatio and his mother might feel the waste of all their efforts in
behalf of Milly,--the costly removal from the West Side home, the
disastrous venture in the tea and coffee business, and all the rest,--to
result in _this_, her engagement to a "mere newspaper feller who parts
his hair in the middle." It was another example of the mournful
experience of age,--the pouring forth of heart's blood in useless
sacrifice to Youth. But Milly saw that her artist lover,--and the flame
in her heart, the song in her ears,--could not have been without all the
devious turnings of her small career. Each step had been needed to bring
her at last into Jack's arms, and therefore the toil of the road was
nothing--in her eyes. That was the way Milly looked at it.

Could one blame her, remembering her sentimental education, the
sentimental ideals that for centuries upon centuries men have imposed
upon the more imitative sex? She could not see the simple selfishness of
her life,--not then, perhaps later when she too became a mother.

* * * * *

The catastrophe of her first engagement had cut Milly off from her more
fashionable friends and the world outside, and this second emotional
crisis cut her off from the sympathy of her family. After that first
wail Horatio was glumly silent, as if his cup of sorrow was now filled,
and Grandma Ridge we