er. 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
unregener