rm of
disguised charity,--had convinced her, and Eleanor Kemp was a lady and a
friend and a competent person, all of which Mrs. Howard Bunker was not.
"I'd scrub floors first," Milly said stoutly, and straightway despatched
a ladylike refusal of the proffered job.

("I thought you said she was in great need," Mrs. Bunker telephoned Mrs.
Billman in an injured tone of voice. "She is!" "Well, you wouldn't think
so," the Bunkeress flashed back. "It's so hard to help that sort. You
know, the kind that have been ladies!" "I know," the Editress rejoined,
without the glimmer of a smile.)

* * * * *

The only one of all Milly's friends beside the novelist who came
promptly to the rescue at this crisis was Marion Reddon,--the one Milly
had seen least of since she had been thoroughly launched in New York.
Marion with her puritan directness went to the point at once.

"What you want is a place to stay in while you look around. You and
Virginia come to us. The hang-out, as Sam calls it, isn't large, but
there's always room somehow."

Milly demurred at first, but later when Marion Reddon was obliged to
depart hurriedly for the south because one of the children was
threatened with tuberculosis, she gratefully accepted the offer of the
Reddons' apartment during their absence. She moved from the
boarding-house where she had been staying between visits to the top
floor of the flimsy building behind Grant's Tomb in which the Reddons
had perched themselves latterly. Virginia was obliged to leave her
school where "the very nicest children all went," which was a keen
regret to Milly, for she had already formed ambitions for her daughter.
The contrast of her own pretty apartment with the shabby, worn rooms of
the Reddon flat brought home to her, as nothing else had, her precarious
situation. And she set herself vigorously to meet it.

VIII

THE WOMAN'S WORLD

Milly's most intimate friend was Hazel Fredericks. That restless, keen
young woman, after experimenting variously in settlement work, hygiene
for the poor, and immigration, had concentrated her interests on the
woman movement then coming more and more into notice. The agitation for
the suffrage, it seemed to her, was the effective expression of all
advanced, radical ideas for which she had always worked. Her activity in
the movement had brought her into close relations with some of the local
leaders, among whom were a few women socially pr