course, after the manner that Mrs. Kemp had handed it to her the week before. Milly was not crudely imitative: she was selectively imitative, and for the present she had chosen Mrs. Kemp for her model.

For the most part they met at the Kemp house. The young married woman liked her new rôle of guide and experienced friend to Milly; she also liked the admiration that Milly sincerely, copiously poured forth on all occasions. When Milly praised the ugly house and its furniture, she might smile in a superior way, for she was "travelled," had visited "the chief capitals of Europe,"—as well as Washington and New York,—and knew perfectly well that the solid decoration of her library and drawing-room was far from good style. The Kemps had already secured their lot on the south side of the city near the Lake. The plans for their new house were being drawn by a well-known eastern architect, and they were merely waiting before building until Mr. Kemp should find himself 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,—