airie city,--a huddle of a million or
more souls,--she cast her eager eyes about for the conquest that must be
made....

The social hegira from the West Side of the city had already begun: the
more prosperous with social aspirations were dropping away, moving to
the north or the south, along the Lake. Some of the older families still
lingered, rooted in associations, hesitant before new fashions, and
these, Milly at once divined, lived in the old-fashioned brick and stone
houses along the Boulevard that crossed West Laurence Avenue just below
the Ridge home. These seats of the mighty on Western Boulevard might not
be grand, but they alone of all the neighborhood had something of the
aristocratic air.

This spacious boulevard was the place she chose for her daily stroll
with her grandmother, taking the old lady, who had betrayed an interest
in a cemetery, up and down Western Boulevard, past the large houses
where the long front windows were draped with spotless lace curtains.
She learned somehow that the old-fashioned brick house, with broad eaves
and wooden pillars, belonged to the Claxtons. The grounds about the
house ran even to the back yards of the West Laurence Avenue
block,--indeed had originally included all that land,--for the Claxtons
were an old family as age went in Chicago, and General Claxton was a
prominent man in the state. She also knew that the more modern stone
house on the farther corner was occupied by the Walter Kemps; that Mrs.
Kemp had been a Claxton; and that Mr. Kemp was a rising young banker in
the city. How Milly had found out all this in the few days she had lived
in the neighborhood would be hard to explain: such information she
acquired unconsciously, as one does the character of the weather....

On the next corner north of the Claxton place was a large church, with a
tall spire, and an adjoining parish house. They were built of the same
cream-colored stone, which had grown sallow under the smoke, with
chocolate-brown trimmings, like a deep edging to a mourning
handkerchief. Its appearance pleased Milly. She felt sure that the best
people of the neighborhood worshipped here, and so to this dignified
edifice she led her father and grandmother the first Sunday after they
were installed in their new home.

It proved to be the Second Presbyterian Church. The Ridges were
orthodox, _i.e._ Congregational: the judge had been deacon in Euston,
Pa., and Mrs. Ridge talked of "sending for her paper