the building was "queer," and almost all of the many thousands of her
fellow-beings whom she saw daily on the streets of the great city.

So Milly thought no more about it.

IX

THE NEW WOMAN

But the "queer" woman in the rose-pink negligee who befriended Virginia
on the night when her mother had gone to the meeting of the Woman
Forward Movement in the very grand house and "the beast of a Swede"
Hilda had slipped out to meet her lover beside Grant's Tomb, has more to
do with Milly and the woman question itself than the suffrage meeting
and all the talk there. Ernestine Geyer, for such was the woman's name,
came into Milly's life rather late, but she will have much to do with it
hereafter and deserves a chapter to herself to begin with.

Incredible as it would seem to Milly, Ernestine's origin was not widely
separated from that of Milly Ridge. She might very well have been one of
the many little schoolmates, not exactly "nice," who sat beside Milly on
the benches of the St. Louis public school. Her ancestry, to be sure,
was more mongrel than Milly's; it would defy any genealogist to trace it
beyond father and mother or resolve it properly into its elements. The
name itself indicated that there must have been some German or Dutch
blood in the line. Neither would it be possible now to explain what
exigencies of the labor market compelled Ernestine's family to migrate
from St. Louis to New York.

All that Ernestine herself knew was that her father worked in breweries,
and that she with her five brothers and sisters lived in one of those
forbidding brick rookeries on the lower west side of New York. This was
when she was ten. When she reached fourteen--the legal age--she escaped
from the routine of school and joyfully went to work in a laundry. For
children of her class it was like coming of age,--to become wage-earners
with the accompanying independence and family respect.

The laundry where she found her first job was a small affair, of the
"domestic-hand laundry" type, situated in a low brick building that had
once served as a gentleman's private stable on one of the cross streets
near Gramercy Park. At that time Ernestine was a hearty, vigorous child,
strong for her age, or she never could have endured the long hours of
hard work on wet floors in a steaming room and with heavy bundles to
lift and carry. As a grown woman her squat figure, large and slightly
round-shouldered, betrayed these early years of s