of talkative artists
and her own two small rooms. As she had said to Nettie Gilbert, "I'm
something of a cat and like my own garret best," even if it were a
traveller's garret. And though she had liked being with the Gilberts,
going over old Chicago times with Nettie, and had enjoyed the car and
the luxurious, easy way of travelling, she suspected that long contact
with these good people would be boresome. They were so persistently
occupied with how they should sleep and eat, with all their
multitudinous contrivances for comfort, with fear of the dust or of
getting tired, that they had little energy for other things. She decided
that the Gilbert sort made a fetich of comfort and missed most of the
landscape of life in their excessive attention to the roadbed. Perhaps
that was what clever folk meant by being _bourgeois_. If so, she hoped
that she should never be _bourgeois_ to the extent the Gilberts were.

Thus Milly, in a properly contented frame of mind, urged the peasant lad
to whip up his lazy pony and get her more quickly home to her family.

X

THE PAINTED FACE

There was a midsummer silence about the hotel in the early afternoon
when Milly arrived. Yvonne, so the _patronne_ informed her, had taken
the baby to the dunes, and thither Milly, without stopping to change her
dusty dress, set out to find her. She descried her little Brittany maid
on the sands safely above tide-water, and by her side a small white
bundle that made Milly's heart beat faster.

Virginia received her returned mother with disappointing indifference,
more concerned for the moment in the depth of the excavation into the
sand which her nurse was making for her benefit. Milly covered her with
kisses, nevertheless, while Yvonne explained that all had gone well,
"_tres, tres bien, Madame_." _Bebe_, it seemed, had slept and eaten
as a celestial _bebe_ should. They were looking for Madame yesterday,
but Monsieur had not been disturbed even before the _depeche_
arrived.... And Monsieur was at his work as usual at the other madame's
_manoir_.

After a time Milly, wearied of bestowing unreciprocated caresses upon
her daughter, left her to the mystery of the hole in the sand and
sauntered up the beach. Dotted here and there in the sunlight at
favorable points along the dunes were the broad umbrellas of the
artists, who were doubtless all busily engaged in trying to transfer a
bit of the dazzling sunlight and dancing purple sea to their li