r union with Jack, alas!)

"I wonder more women don't do the same thing," the architect continued
in a vein of philosophical speculation; "get married to other women. Now
Ernestine has every good quality of a man, and she can't deceive you
with a chorus girl! It cuts out all the sex business, which is a horrid
nuisance--see the newspapers."

"Sam!" Milly warned, and then ventured,--"How about the children--where
would they come in?"

"That _is_ a difficulty," Reddon admitted, stretching his feet to the
fire.

"You see I had mine already,--bless her little heart!"

"One of 'em would have to do as you did," Sam mused, "get the children
on the side."

At this point Milly with a "Sam, don't be horrid" shut off further
social theorizing. Ernestine grinned and chuckled over Sam's sallies. As
Reddon said,--"You can say anything to her! She has a man's sense of
humor,--the only woman I ever saw except Marion who has."

* * * * *

With the exception of Marion, Milly's women friends were much more
dubious than the men about the new household. Mrs. Bunker and Mrs.
Billman, of course, had long since lost sight of Milly in the course of
her migrations. Although Hazel Fredericks looked her up soon after her
return from the suffrage tour and praised the little house and said of
the domestic arrangement,--"How interesting!... Miss Geyer must be a
woman of remarkable force of character.... It is a wise experiment,"
etc., yet Milly knew that to others Hazel would shrug expressive
shoulders and drop eyelids over muddy eyes and in other feminine ways
indicate her sense of Milly's social descent. And from this time the
friendship between them declined swiftly. Hazel explained, "They were
interested in different things," and "Milly doesn't care for ideas, you
know." Mrs. Fredericks, who considered herself to be in the flood-tide
of the modern intellectual movement, had few moments to spare for her
insignificant friend. Milly realized this with a touch of bitterness. "I
can't do anything for her in any way. I can't help on her game." She
knew that these ambitious, modern, intellectual women, with whom she had
been thrown, had no use for people "out of the game."

It was that really, more than the fact that she had lost caste by
keeping house for a business woman, that cost her women's friendship.
Milly no longer in the least "counted." She had done something rather
"queer" from the feminine point of v