as he was the breadwinner.

With an impatient gesture, Bragdon drew the agreements towards him and
signed them.

"There!" he said, with a somewhat bitter laugh, "nothing in life is
worth so much talk."

Afterwards Milly reminded him that he had made this choice himself of
his own free will: he could not reproach her for their having bought a
slice in the East River Terrace Building.

III

MORE OF "BUNKER'S"

One of the notable incidents of this period was the visit they made to
the Bunker's place on Long Island. It was in the autumn after Bragdon
had been on the magazine staff for some months. Milly went out in the
train with Hazel Fredericks, who took this occasion to air her views of
the Bunkers and the Billmans more fully than she had before. She
described the magazine proprietor and his wife in a succinct sentence,--

"They're second-class New York: everything the others have but the right
crowd--you'll see."

Howard Bunker, she admitted, was likable,--a jolly, unpretentious,
shrewd business man, with a hearty American appetite for the bustle of
existence. As for the handsome Mrs. Bunker,--"She was from Waterbury,
Connecticut, you know," she said, assuming that Milly, who had heard of
the Connecticut town solely as a place where a popular cheap watch was
manufactured, would understand the depth of social inferiority Mrs.
Howard Bunker's origin implied. "She's too lazy to be really ambitious.
They have a box at the Opera, but that means nothing these days. She's
kind, if you don't put her to any trouble, and they have awfully good
food.... It's a bore coming out to their place, but you have to, once in
so often, you understand. You sit around and eat and look over the
stables and the garden and all that sort of thing."

She further explained that probably Grace Billman was motoring out with
their host. "She always manages that: she regards him as her property,
you know." It would be a "shop party," she expected. "That's all the
social imagination these people have: they get us together by
groups--we're the magazine group. Possibly she'll have Clive Reinhard.
He's different, though, because he's made a name for himself, so that
all sorts of people run after him."

Mrs. Bunker met the young women at the station, driving her own ponies.
Milly recognized the type at a glance, as much from her Chicago
experience as from Mrs. Fredericks' description. Mrs. Bunker was a
largish, violent blonde, with a p