lly will take care of herself," Mrs. Claxton remarked to her daughter
when the school question was up, and when the latter deplored the
unchaperoned condition of her young friend, she added,--

"That was the way in Virginia. A girl had a lot of beaux--and she got no
harm from it, if she were a good girl."

Milly was a good girl without any doubt, astonishing as it may seem.
Milly Ridge had passed through the seventeen years of her existence and
at least four different public schools without knowing anything about
"sex hygiene." That married women had babies and that somehow these were
due to the presence of men in the household was the limit of her sex
knowledge. Beyond that it was not "nice" for a girl to delve, and Milly
was very scrupulous about being "nice." Nice girls did not discuss such
things. Once when she was fifteen a woman she knew had "gone to the bad"
and Milly had been very curious about it, as she was later about the
existence of bad women generally. This state of virginal ignorance was
due more to her normal health than to any superior delicacy. As one man
meaningly insinuated, Milly was not yet "awake." He apparently desired
the privilege of awakening her, but she eluded him safely.

When these older men began to call, Milly entertained them quite
formally in the little front room, discussing books with them and
telling her little stories, while her father smoked his cigar in the
rear room. She was conscious always of Grandma Ridge's keen ears pricked
to attention behind the smooth curls of gray hair. It was astonishing
how much the old lady could overhear and misinterpret!...

Almost all these young men, clerks and drummers and ranchers, were
hopelessly, stupidly dull, and Milly knew it. Their idea of
entertainment was the theatre or lopping about the long steps, listening
to her chatter. When they took her "buggy-riding," they might try
clumsily to put their arms around her. She would pretend not to notice
and lean forward slightly to avoid the embrace....

Her first really sentimental encounter came at the end of a long day's
picnicking on the hot sands of the lake beach. Harold--ultimately she
forgot his last name--had taken her up the shore after supper. They had
scrambled to the top of the clayey bluff and sat there in a thicket,
looking out over the dimpled water, hot, uncomfortable, self-conscious.
His hand had strayed to hers, and she had let him hold it, caress the
stubby fingers in his t