s" and finding the
nearest congregation of her old faith. But Milly promptly announced that
"everybody went to the Presbyterian church here." She was satisfied with
the air and the appearance of the congregation that first Sunday and
made her father promise to take seats for the family. The old lady,
content to have the wayward Horatio committed to any sort of
church-going, made slight objection. It mattered little to Horatio
himself. In religion he was catholic: he was ready to stand up in any
evangelical church, dressed in his best, and boom forth the hymns in his
bass voice. The choice of church was a matter to be left to the women,
like the color of the wallpaper, or the quality of crockery,--affairs of
delicate discrimination. Moreover, he was often out of the city over
Sunday on his business trips and did not have to go to church.

It was impossible that Milly, dressed very becomingly in her new gray
suit, should escape notice after the first Sunday. Her lovely bronze
hair escaped from her round hat engagingly. Her soft blue eyes looked up
at the minister appealingly. She had the attractive air of youth and
health and good looks. The second Sunday the minister's wife, prompted
by her husband, spoke to Mrs. Ridge and called soon after. She liked
Milly--minister's wives usually did--and she approved of the
grandmother, who had an aristocratic air, in her decent black, her thin,
gray face. "They seem really nice people," Mrs. Borland reported to her
husband, "but a very ordinary home. He travels for the Hoppers'. Her
mother was a southerner." (Milly had got that in somehow,--"My mother's
home was Kentucky, you know.")... So, thanks to the church, here was
Milly at last launched on the West Side and in a fair way of knowing
people.

She began going to vespers--it was a new custom then, during Lent--and
she was faithful at the Wednesday evening prayer meetings. The Borlands
had a daughter, of about Milly's age,--a thin, anaemic girl who took to
Milly's warmth and eagerness at once. As Milly succinctly summed up the
minister's family,--"They're from Worcester, Mass." To come from New
England seemed to Milly to give the proper stamp of respectability,
while Virginia gave aristocracy.

Mrs. Borland introduced Milly to Mrs. Walter Kemp after the service one
Sunday. Milly knew, as we have seen, that Mrs. Kemp had been a Claxton,
and that the general still lived in the ample mansion which he had built
in the early fifties