nal home wedding,
with friends and a reception. But she readily acquiesced in Milly's
idea, and one bleak Saturday in January slipped off with the lovers to a
neighboring church, and after seeing them lawfully wedded by a parson
left them to their two days' holiday, which was all the honeymoon they
allowed themselves at this time....

Milly was a fresh and blooming bride in a becoming gray broadcloth suit,
and as she stood before the faded parson beside her chosen man to take
the eternal vows of fidelity, no woman ever gave herself more completely
to the one of her heart. The wonderful song of bliss that had been
singing inside her all these last weeks burst into a triumphal poem. She
felt curiously exalted, scarcely herself. Was she not giving everything
she had as a woman to her loved one, without one doubt? Had she not been
true to woman's highest instinct, to her heart? She had rejected all the
bribes of worldliness in order to obtain "the real, right thing," and
she felt purified, ennobled, having thus fulfilled the ideals of her
creed.... She turned to her husband a radiant face to be kissed,--a face
in which shone pride, confidence, happiness.

As the older woman, with tear-dimmed eyes, watched the two bind
themselves together for the long journey, she murmured to herself like a
prayer,--"She's such a woman! Such a dear woman! She MUST be
happy."

That was the secret of Milly's hold upon all her women friends: they
felt the woman in her, the pure character of their sex more highly
expressed in her than in any one else they knew. She was the unconscious
champion of their hearts.

Again the older woman murmured prayerfully,--"What will she do with
life? What _will_ she do?"

For like the wise woman she was she knew that in most cases it is the
woman who makes marriage sing like a perpetual song or become a sullen
silence. All the way to her home she kept repeating to herself,--

"What will she make of it? Milly!"

PART THREE

ASPIRATIONS

I

THE NEW HOME

They took a tiny, four-room apartment far, far out on the North Side. It
was close to the sandy shore of the Lake; from the rear porch, which was
perched on wooden stilts in the fashion of Chicago apartments, the gray
blue waters of the great lake could be seen. In the next block there
were a few scrubby oak trees, still adorned, even in January, with
rustling brown leaves, which gave something of a country air to the
landscape. By an