sufficiently prosperous to maintain the sort of house that the architect had designed for a rising young western banker.
"Oh, dear," Milly sighed, "you will be moving soon—and there'll be nobody left around here for me to know."
Eleanor Kemp smiled.
"You know what I mean! … People like you and your mother."
"You may not live here always," her friend prophesied.
"I hope not. But papa seems perfectly content—he's taken a five years' lease of that horrid house. I just knew it wasn't the right place as soon as I saw it!"
The older woman laughed at Milly's despair.
"There's time yet for something to happen."
Milly blushed happily. There was only one sort of something to happen for her—the right sort of marriage. Milly, as Mrs. Kemp confided to her husband, was a girl with a "future," and that future could be only a matrimonial one. Her new friend good naturedly did what she could for Milly by putting her in the way of meeting people. At her own house and her mother's, across the street, Milly saw a number of people who came into her life helpfully later on. General Claxton was still at that time a considerable political figure in the middle west, had been congressman and was spoken of for Senator. Jolly, plump Mrs. Claxton maintained a large, informal hospitality of the Virginia sort, and to the big brick house came all kinds of people—southerners with quaint accents and formal manners, young Englishmen on their way to the wild northwest, down-state politicians, as well as the merchant aristocracy of the city. Thus Milly as a mere girl had her first opportunity of peeping at the larger world in the homely, high-studded rooms and on the generous porches of the Claxton house, and enjoyed it immensely.
The church had thus far done a good deal for Milly.
For some time it remained the staple of her social existence—that sallow, cream-colored pile, in which the congregation had already so shrunken by removals that the worshippers rattled around in the big building like dried peas in a pod. Milly became a member of the pastor's Bible class and an ardent worker in the Young Women's Guild. She was looked upon favorably as a right-minded and religious young woman. She had joined the church some years before, shortly after the death of her mother. Her first religious fervor lasted rather more than a year and was dying out when the family moved from St. Louis. Its revival at the Second Presbyterian was of a purely institutional character. Although even Grandma Ridge called her a "good girl," Milly was too healthy a young person to be really absorbed by questions of salvation. Her religion was a social habit, like the habit of wearing fresh underclothes and her best dress on the seventh day, having a late breakfast and responding to the din of the church bells with other ceremonially dressed folk. She believed what she heard in church as she believed everything that was spoken with authority. It would have seemed to her very dreadful to question the great dogmas of Heaven, Hell, the Atonement, the Resurrection, etc. But they meant absolutely nothing to her: they did not come into practical relation with her life as did the ugly little box of her home and the people she knew, and she had no taste for abstractions.
Milly was "good." She tried to have a helpful influence upon her companions, especially upon young men who seemed to need an influence more than others: she wanted to induce them not to swear, to smoke, to drink—or be "bad,"—a vague state of unrealized vice. She encouraged them to go to church by letting them escort her. It was the proper way of displaying right intentions to lead good lives. When one young man who had been a member of the Bible class was found to have taken money from Mr. Kemp's bank, where he was employed, and indulged in riotous living with it, Milly felt depressed for several days—accused herself of not having done her utmost to bring this lost soul to the Saviour.
Yet Milly was no prig—at least not much of a one. For almost all her waking hours her mind was occupied with totally mundane affairs, and she was never much concerned about her own salvation. It seemed so far off—in the hazy distances of stupid middle age or beyond. So, like thousands upon thousands of other young women of her day, she appeared at the Second Presbyterian every Sunday morning, looking her freshest and her best, and with engaging zest, if with a somewhat wandering mind, sang—
"How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord!"
It was a wholly meaningless social function, this, and useful to the girl. Later charity might take its place. Horatio Ridge, who had never qualified as a church member while his wife lived, knowing his own unregenerate habits and having a healthy-minded male's aversion to hypocrisy, now went to church with his daughter quite regularly. He felt that it was a good thing—the right thing for the girl, in some way insuring her woman's safety in this wicked world, if not her salvation in the next.
They made a pretty picture together, father and daughter—the girl with the wide blue eyes and open mouth, standing shoulder to shoulder with the little man, each with one gloved hand grasping an edge of the hymn-book and singing, Milly in a high soprano—
"Nearer, my God, to Thee!"
and Horatio, rumbling behind a little uncertainly—
"Nearer to Thee—to THEE!"
IV
MILLY COMPLETES HER EDUCATION
"Milly," Mrs. Kemp remarked thoughtfully, "aren't you going to complete your education?"
Milly translated this formidable phrase in a flash—
"You mean go to school any more? Why should I?"
It was a warm June day. Milly had been reading to Mrs. Kemp, who was sewing. The book was "Romola." Milly had found quite dull its solid pages of description of old Florence sparsely relieved by conversation, and after a futile attempt to discover more thrilling matter farther on had abandoned the book altogether in favor of talk, which always interested her more than anything else in the world.
"Why should I go to school?" she repeated.
"You are only sixteen."
"Seventeen—in September," Milly promptly corrected.
Mrs. Kemp laughed.
"I didn't finish school until I was eighteen."
"School is so stupid," Milly sighed, with a little grimace. "I hate getting things out of books."
She had never been distinguished in school—far from it. Only by real labor had she been able to keep up with her classes.
"I guess the schools I went to weren't much good," she added.
She saw herself behind a desk at the high school she had last attended in St. Louis. In front of her sat a dried, sallow, uncheerful woman of great age, ready to pounce upon her and expose her ignorance before the jeering class. The girls and the boys at the school were not "refined"—she knew that now. No, she did not want any more school of that sort. … Besides, what use could an education be, if she were not to teach? And Milly had not the faintest idea of becoming a teacher.
"Do
