d also so skilfully contrived the plebeian
machinery of living that there was little or nothing left for the woman
to do, if she were above the necessity of cooking and washing for her
man. Deliberately to set herself to find an interesting and inexpensive
occupation for her idle hours was not in Milly's nature,--few women of
her class did in those days. It was supposed to be enough for a married
woman to be "the head of her house"--even of a four-room modern
apartment--and to be a gracious and desirable companion to her lord in
his free hours of relaxation. Anything else was altogether "advanced"
and "queer."

So after the first egotistic weeks of young love, the social
instinct--Milly's dominant passion, in which her husband shared to some
extent--awoke with a renewed keenness, and she looked abroad for its
gratification. Their immediate neighbors, she quickly decided, were
"impossible" as intimates: they were honest young couples, clerks and
minor employees, who had come to the outskirts of the great city, like
themselves, for the sake of low rents and clean housing. There were no
signs of that "artistic and Bohemian" quality about them which she had
hoped to find in her new life. Her husband assured her that he had
failed to discover any such circle in Chicago, any at least whose
members she could endure. That was where America, except New York
possibly, differed from Europe. It had no class of cultivated poor.
Occasionally he brought a newspaper man from the city, and they had some
amusing talk over their dinner. A few of Milly's old friends
persistently followed her up, like the Norton girls, the kindly Mrs.
Lamereux, and the Kemps. But after accepting the hospitality of these
far-off friends, there was always the dreary long journey back to their
flat, with ample time for sleepy reflection on the futility of trying to
keep up with people who had ten times your means of existence. It was
not good for either of them, they knew, to taste surreptitiously the
_bourgeois_ social feast, when they were not able "to do their part."
Nevertheless, as the spring came on, Milly invited people more and more,
and in the long summer twilights they had some jolly "beach parties" on
the sandy lake shore, cooking messes over a driftwood fire, and also
moonlight swimming parties. By such means the dauntless Milly managed to
keep a sense of social movement about them.

* * * * *

She saw her father r