e." At last Milly had won her point and translated herself from the
despised West Side to the heart of the "nicest" neighborhood in the
city. After the turmoil of moving she went to her bed in the third floor
front room, listening to the splash of the lake on the breakwater,
dreaming of new conquests.

What next?

PART TWO

GETTING MARRIED

I

THE GREAT OUTSIDE

All this time, while Milly Ridge was busily spinning her little cocoon
in the big city, other and more serious life had been going on there, it
is needless to say. Out of the human stream Milly was gathering to her
attractive individualities, and Horatio was faithfully performing his
minor function in the dingy brick establishment of the Hoppers'. Many
hundreds of thousands, men and women, were weaving similar webs. For
there was hardly a more stirring corner of the earth's broad platter
than this same sprawling prairie city at the end of the great lake. All
this time it had been swelling, much to the gratification of its
boastful citizens,--getting busier, getting richer, getting dirtier.
There had been many a civic throb and groan,--rosy successes and dreary
failures.

But of all this surrounding life Milly was not faintly conscious. She
could tell you just when the custom of giving afternoon teas first
reached Chicago, when "two men on the box" became the rule, when the
first Charity Ball was held and who led the grand march and why, and
when women wore those absurd puffed sleeves and when they first appeared
with long tails to their coats. But of the daily doings of men folk when
they disappeared of a morning into the smoky haze of the city, and of
all the mighty human forces around her, she had not the slightest
conception, as indeed few of her sisters had at that time. To all
intents and purposes she might as well have lived in the eighteenth
century or in the Colorado desert, as in Chicago in the eighties and
early nineties of this marvellous nineteenth century.

Horatio often referred to Chicago as a "real live town," and
congratulated himself for being part of it. It was the one place in all
the world to do business in. It grew over night, so the papers said each
morning, and was manifestly destined to be the metropolis of the western
hemisphere, etc., etc. All that was in the opulent future, for which
every one lived. Even Horatio, who spent all his waking hours among men,
did not in the least comprehend what it might be to liv