ious sense of mystery that would some day be
revealed, then plunged into bed, and buried herself chastely beneath the
cover, her heart throbbing.

If Milly had had any real education, she might have recalled the
teaching of science in such moments and realized that her soft tissue
was composed of common elements, her special function was but a
universal means to a universal end; that even her long, thick hair with
its glint of gold, her soft eyes, her creamy skin and rounding breasts
and sloping thighs were all designed for the simple purpose of
continuing the species. (But in those days they did not talk of such
things even in the handbooks, and Milly would have called any one who
dared mention them in her presence a "materialist"--a word she had heard
in the philosophy class.) Having no one to mention to her such improper
truths, she remained in the pleasant illusion of literature and religion
that she was altogether a superior creation,--something mysterious to be
worshipped and preserved. Not colored Jenny in the kitchen, who had
three or four illegitimate children! Not even all the girls in her
Sunday-school class, some of whom worked in stores, but the cultivated,
refined women who made Homes for Heroes. This belief was like Poetry: it
satisfied and sustained--and it gave an unconscious impulse to her whole
life, that she was never able wholly to escape....

And this was what they called Education in those days.

V

MILLY EXPERIMENTS

Of course Milly had "beaux," as she called them then. There had never
been a time since she was trusted to navigate herself alone upon the
street when she had not attracted to herself other little
persons--chiefly girls, to be sure. For as Milly was wont to confess in
her palmiest days when men flocked around her, she was a "woman's woman"
(and hence inferentially a man's woman, too). Milly very sincerely
preferred her own sex as constant companions. They were more expressive,
communicative, rational. Men were useful: they brought candies, flowers,
theatre parties.

But now the era of young men as distinguished from girls had arrived.
Boys in long trousers with dark upper lips hung about the West Laurence
Avenue house on warm evenings, composing Milly's celebrated "stoop
parties," or wandered with her arm in arm up the broad boulevard to the
Park. And at the Claxtons and the Kemps she met older men who paid
attention to the vivacious, well-developed school-girl.

"Mi