in New York was
horribly expensive, as every one was saying, and it was worse the more
they got to know people and had their own little place to keep in the
world. It seemed to Milly hard that such perfectly nice people as they
were should be so cramped for the means to enjoy the opportunities that
came to them. The first year they spent only five thousand dollars and
paid something towards the huge loan on their apartment. The second year
it was seven thousand and they paid nothing, and the third year they
started at a rate of ten thousand dollars. The figures were really small
when one considered what the other people they knew were spending.
Bragdon began to suspect that here was the trouble--they didn't know any
poor people! Milly said they "barely lived," as it was. Of course there
were good people who got along on three or four thousand dollars a year
and even indulged occasionally in a child or two--professors and young
painters and that sort. Milly could not see how it was done,--probably
in ghastly apartments out in the _hinterland_, like the Reddons. The
newspapers advertised astonishing bargains in houses, but they were
always in fantastically named suburban places, "within commuting
distance." One had to live where one's friends could get to you, or go
without people, Milly observed.

Husband and wife discussed all this, as every one did. The cost of
living, the best way of meeting the problem, whether by city or suburb
or country, was the most frequent topic of conversation in all circles,
altogether crowding out the weather and scandal. At first Jack was
severe about the leaping scale of expenditure and inclined to hold his
wife accountable for it as "extravagance." He would even talk of giving
up their pretty home and going to some impossible suburb,--"and all that
nonsense," as Milly put it to her closest friend, Hazel Fredericks. But
Milly always proved to him that they could not do better and "get
anything out of life." So in the position of one who is sliding down
hill in a sandy soil, he saw that it was useless to stick his feet in
and hold on--he must instead learn to plunge and leap and thus make
progress. And he did what every one was doing,--tried to make more
money. It was easy, seemingly, in this tumultuous New York to make money
"on the side." There were many chances of what he cynically called
"artistic graft,"--editing, articles, and illustration. One had merely
to put out a hand and strip