kirts,--the _hinterland_ of
the sprawling city. (Only Milly didn't know the word _hinterland_.) She
had gradually ceased to reply to her father's cheerful comments on the
features of the West Side landscape. And now she was very near tears.

She was sixteen--it was the spring of '86. Ever since her mother's
death, two years before, the family had done "light housekeeping" in
three rooms in St. Louis. This 212 West Laurence Avenue, Chicago, was to
be her first home--this slab of a dirty yellow wall!

"There!" her father muttered with satisfaction, as, after a last twist
of key and thump of knee, he effected an entrance. Grandma Ridge moved
up the flight of steps, the girl following reluctantly.

"See, mother," little Horatio Ridge said, jingling his keys, "it's fresh
and clean!"

The new varnish smelt poignantly. The fresh paint clung insidiously to
the feet.

"And it's light too, mother, isn't it?" He turned quickly from the
cavernous gloom of the rear rooms and pointed to a side window in the
hall where one-sixteenth of the arc of the firmament was visible between
the brick walls of the adjoining houses.

"The dining-room's downstairs--that makes it roomier," he continued,
throwing open at random a door. "There's more room than you'd think from
the outside."

Milly and her grandmother peered downwards into the black hole from
which came a mouldy odor.

"Oh, father, why did you come 'way out here!" Milly wailed.

"Why not?" Horatio retorted defensively. "You didn't expect a house on
the lake front, did you?"

Just what she had expected from this new turn in the family destiny was
not clear to herself. But ever since it had been decided that they were
to have a house of their own in Chicago--her father having at last
secured a position that promised some permanence--the girl's buoyant
imagination had begun to soar, and out of all the fragments of her
experience derived by her transient residence in Indianapolis, Kansas
City, and Omaha--not to mention St. Louis--she had created a wonderful
composite--the ideal American home, architecturally ambitious, suburban
in tone. In some of the cities where she had lived the Ridges had
tarried as long as three years, and each time, since she was a very
little girl in short dresses and had left Indianapolis crying over the
doll in her arms, she had believed they were permanently settled: this
was to be their home for always.

Her mother had had the same forlorn, homesic