Milly smiled upon the interested stranger, good humoredly, as she always
smiled. She was feeling very tired after her day's exertions, but
happily content with her first efforts to realize her ambition,--to have
"some place for herself." What she meant by having a place for herself
in the world she did not yet understand of course. Nor what she could do
with it, having achieved it. It was an instinct, blind in the manner of
instincts, of her dependent womanhood. She was quite sure that something
must happen,--a something that would give her a horizon more spacious
than that of the West Side.

* * * * *

Meantime she ate the unappetizing food put before her with good grace,
and smiled and chatted with all the dreary spinsters of the
boarding-house table.

III

MILLY GOES TO CHURCH

The ugly little house was at last got to rights, at least as much so as
Milly's limited means permitted. Horatio's resources were squeezed to
the last dollar, and the piano came in on credit. Then the family moved
in, and soon the girl's restless gaze turned outwards.

She must have people for her little world,--people to visit with, to
talk to. From her doll years Milly had loved people indiscriminately.
She must have them about her, to play with, to interest, to arouse
interest in herself. Wherever she derived this social passion--obviously
not from Grandma Ridge--it had been and would always be the dominant
note of her life. Later, in her more sophisticated and more
introspective phase, she would proclaim it as a creed: "People are the
most interesting thing in life--just humans!" And she would count her
gregariousness as a virtue. But as yet it was unconscious, an animal
instinct for the herd. And she was lonely the first days at West
Laurence Avenue.

Everywhere the family had put foot to earth in its wanderings, Milly had
acquired friends easily,--at school, in church, among the
neighbors,--what chance afforded from the mass. She wept even on her
departure from St. Louis, which she had hated because of the light
housekeeping, at the thought of losing familiar faces. A number of her
casual friends came to the station to see her off, as they always did.
She kissed them all, and swore to each that she would write, which she
promptly forgot to do. But she loved them all, just the same. And now
that the Ridge destiny seemed to be settled with fair prospects of
permanency in this new, untried pr