the
banker bought a trinket for his wife's young friend, and the women went
to dressmakers who intimidated Milly with their airs and their prices.

Of course they went to Daly's and to hear "Aida," and supped afterwards
at the old Delmonico's. And a hundred other ravishing things were
crowded into the breathless fortnight of their visit. When she was once
more settled in her berth for the return journey, Milly sighed with
regret and envisaged the dreary waste of West Laurence Avenue.

"If we only lived in New York," she thought, and then she was wise
enough to reflect that if the Ridges lived in New York, it would not be
paradise, but another version of West Laurence Avenue.

"Some day you will go to Paris, my dear," Mrs. Kemp said, "and then New
York will seem like the West Side."

"Never, that!" Milly exclaimed, shocked.

The approach to Chicago under all circumstances is bleak and stern. But
that early April day it seemed to Milly unduly depressing. The squalid
little settlements on the outskirts of the great city were like
eruptions in the low, flat landscape. Around the factories and mills the
little houses were perched high on stilts to keep their feet out of the
mud of the submerged prairie. All the way home Milly had been making
virtuous resolutions not to be extravagant and tease her father, to be
patient with her grandmother, etc.,--in short, to be content with that
state of life unto which God had called her (for the present), as the
catechism says. But she felt it to be very hard that Milly Ridge should
be condemned to such a state of life as the West Side of Chicago
afforded. After the cultivated, mildly luxurious atmosphere of the
Kemps, she realized acutely the commonness of her home....

Her father was waiting for her in the train-shed, and she hugged him
affectionately and went off on the little man's arm, quite gayly, waving
a last farewell to Eleanor Kemp as the latter stepped into her waiting
carriage.

"Well, daughter, had a good time?"

IX

ACHIEVEMENTS

"But, papa," Milly interrupted her chatter about her marvellous doings
in the East, long enough to ask,--"where are you going?"

Instead of taking the familiar street-car that would plunge them into a
noisome tunnel and then rumble on for uncounted miles through the drab
West Side, Horatio had turned towards the river, and they were in the
wholesale district, where from the grimy stores came fragrant odors of
comestibles, ming