. Here Milly came in.

The one distinct memory Milly kept of that first year in New York was of
hunting apartments and moving. It seemed to her that she must have
looked at a cityful of dark, noisy rooms ambitiously called apartments,
each more impossible than the others. (As long as they lived in New York
she never gave up the desire for light and quiet,--the two most
expensive luxuries in that luxurious metropolis.) They settled
temporarily in a small furnished "studio-apartment" near Washington
Square, where they were constantly in each other's way. Milly called it
a tenement. Although they had done very well in two rooms in Brittany,
it required much more space than the studio-apartment offered to house
two people with divided hearts. So in the spring they moved farther
up-town to a larger and more expensive apartment without a studio.
Bragdon preferred, anyway, to do his work outside and shared a studio
with a friend. Milly regarded this new abode as merely temporary--they
had taken it for only one year--and they talked intermittently of
moving.

Once or twice Jack suggested going to one of the innumerable suburbs or
abandoning the city altogether for some small country place, as other
artists had done. It would be cheaper, and they could have a house,
their own patch of earth, and some quiet. Milly received this suggestion
in silence. Indeed they both shrank from facing each other in suburban
solitude. They were both by nature and training cockneys. Milly
especially had rather perch among the chimney-pots and see the
procession go by from the roof than possess all that Nature had to
offer. And they were still young, she felt: much might happen in the
city, "if they didn't give up." But she said equivocally,--

"Your work keeps you so much in the city; you have to see people."

What he wanted to reply was that he should abandon all this job-hunting
and live lean until he could sell his real work, instead of striving to
maintain the semblance of an expensive comfort in the city by selling
himself to magazines and publishers. But Milly would not understand the
urgency of that--how could she? And what had he to offer her now for the
sacrifice he should be demanding? What would she do with the long,
silent days in the country, while he worked and destroyed what he did,
only to begin again on the morrow at the ceaseless task, with its
doubtful result? If there had been real companionship, or if the flame
of their pa