thought he was "fresh" and tried to snub him, but her manner only
provoked Reddon the more.

"What's your husband trying to paint for? There are two thousand nine
hundred and ninety-nine other chaps like him in Paris, and he'll just be
the three thousandth, who thinks he's going to make his fortune painting
rich people's portraits. I'd rather break stone than try to live by
paint."

"And how about building summer villas for a living?" Bragdon queried.

"Well," the young man replied with a grin. "You see I don't--I can't get
any to do!"

It was pleasant enough to joke about the arts, but Milly didn't expect
to see much of the Reddons once they were launched in the fascinating
life of Paris. She was becoming a little bored with them already, with
their sloppy unconventionality and with ship life in general. Most of
the first-cabin passengers, she discovered, were from Chilicothe, Ohio,
or similar metropoli of the middle west, and as ignorant as she of what
was before them.

But when they sighted the green shores of Normandy, her enthusiasm
revived at a bound. As they came into the harbor, the gray stone houses
with high-pitched red roofs, the fishing smacks with their dun-colored
sails, even the blue-coated men on the waiting tender had about them the
charm of another world. They were different and strange, exciting to the
thirsty soul of the American, so long sodden with the ugly monotony of a
pioneer civilization. From the moment that the fat little tender touched
the steamer, amid a babble of tongues, Milly was breathless with
excitement. She squeezed her husband's arm, like an ecstatic child who
had at last got what it wanted. "I'm _so_ happy," she chirped. "Isn't it
all wonderful,--that we are really here, you and I?"

He laughed in superior male fashion at her enthusiasm, and stroked his
small mustache, but in his own way he was excited at sight of the
promised land.

"Hang on tight," he said to her, as they began the ticklish descent to
the tender, "or it will be still more wonderful."

Milly tripped over the long, unsteady gangway towards the Future, the
great adventure of her life. There beyond, in the smiling green country
with the old gray houses, lay mysterious satisfactions that she had
hungered for all her life,--Experiences, Fame, and Fortune--in a word
her Happiness.

IV

BEING AN ARTIST'S WIFE

But it wasn't so different after all! As Sam Reddon had predicted, the
Bragdons went to l