child was coming had drawn her very close to Marion Reddon,
with whom she had established a staunch bond of the woman's league,
offensive and defensive, against men. Marion, she felt, understood both
babies and men. Although she could not approve of all Marion's ideas
about the relations of the sexes, she admired the frank, brave, humorous
way in which she solved her own life.

Curiously enough, the child seemed to set Milly apart from her
husband--and from the world of men in general. Jack was no longer the
supreme emotional fact in her life. He was a good husband; she was more
conscious of that than ever before. He had been very tender and
considerate of her during her pregnancy, keeping up her spirits,
guarding her against folly, insisting on luxuries in their travels so
that she might be thoroughly comfortable. Thus he went to Gossensass,
not for his own profit and pleasure, but because the doctor they
consulted in Venice advised this secluded mountain resort. And when the
time of the birth came, he had been properly solicitous to see that she
was provided with the best attendance and care, and Milly knew vaguely
that he had spent lavishly of their hoard for this purpose. Milly was
sure he loved her, and what was also very important to her, she was sure
that he was "a good man,"--clean-minded and unselfish with a woman. Even
if he should come to love her less passionately than at the beginning,
he was the loyal sort of American, who would not let that fact furnish
him with excuse for errancy. And she loved him, of course--was "quite
crazy" about him, as she expressed it to Marion--and still believed in
his glorious future as a great painter.

Yet in some indefinable way he had sunk from first to second place in
her thoughts and might soon--who knows?--descend to third place in the
family triangle. As for all other men, like Sam Reddon and the artists
Jack brought to the house, they began to have for her the aspect of
coarse and rather silly beings, essentially selfish and sensual. "Oh,
he's just a man" became more and more in her mouth the mocking formula
to indicate male inferiority. Later it was, "They're all alike, men."
Thus the child brought out in Milly the consciousness of womanhood. She
was more the mother now than the wife, as was natural, but she had no
desire to become again the wife, paramount, to any man....

Meanwhile any one of those who came in upon them in the Neuilly house
and saw the father and