jars of bonbons, the colored _liqueurs_, the
neat little marble-topped tables. Apparently the _patisserie_ was a
popular institution, for people of all sorts and conditions flocked
there like flies.

"If you ever die and I have to earn my living," she would say jokingly
to her husband, "I know what I should do. I'd run a cake-shop!"

"You'd eat all the cakes yourself," Bragdon rejoined, tearing her away
after the eighth or tenth.

She went there by herself sometimes, and became good friends with the
reigning _Madame_, from whom she learned the routine of the manufacture
and the sales, as well as the trials and tribulations with _les
desmoiselles_ that the manager of a popular pastry shop must have. This
_Madame_ liked the pretty, sociable _Americaine_, always smiled when she
entered the shop with her husband, counselled her as to the choicest
dainties of the day, asked her opinion deferentially as that of a
connoisseur, and made her little gifts. Through the cake-shop Milly came
to realize the French, as her husband never did.

* * * * *

So the winter wore away somehow,--the period that Milly remembered as,
on the whole, the dullest part of her married life. Her first season in
Paris! They might read a little in one of the culture books in their
room after dinner, then would take refuge from the damp chill in bed.
Jack was less gay here in Paris than he had ever been in Chicago,
preoccupied with his work, frequently gloomy, as if he foresaw the
failure of his ambitions. Milly felt that he was ungrateful for his
fate. Hadn't he the dearest wish of his heart--and her, too?...

Something was wrong, she never knew quite what. The trouble was that she
had no job whatever now, and no social distraction to take the place of
work. She was the victim of ideas that were utterly beyond her
knowledge, ideas that must impersonally carry the Milly Ridges along in
their momentum, to their ultimate destruction.

"I ought to be very happy," she said to herself piously. "We both ought
to be."

But they weren't.

V

WOMEN'S TALK

One day something dreadful happened. Milly realized that she was to have
a child. A strange kind of terror seized her at the conviction. _This_,
she had felt ever since her marriage, was the one impossible thing to
happen: she had promised herself when she married her poor young artist
it should never be. One could be "Bohemian," "artistic"--light and
gay--wi