resent circumstances. Milly recognized this and did
not attempt the impossible. Even if she had had the money, Ernestine was
not one who could be made a social figure, nor could she be ignored in
her own house. The situation, as has been described, had a flavor of
social irregularity, like an unauthorized union, and the social penalty
must be paid. With Milly's lean purse there was not much shopping to be
done, beyond the daily marketing, and it was dreary to walk the New York
streets and gaze into tempting shop windows, though Milly did a good
deal of that in her idle hours. She had never cared to read, except as
an occasional diversion, or to "improve her mind," as Grandma Ridge
might have put it, by lectures such as Hazel Fredericks had once
patronized. Lectures bored her, she admitted frankly, unless she knew
the lecturer personally. Perhaps Hazel and her set were justified in
condemning Milly's general lack of purpose and aim in life. But it
should be remembered that the generation with which Milly began had
never recognized the desirability of such ideals for women, and Milly,
like many of her sisters in the middle walk of life, always resented the
assumption that every human being, including women, should have a plan
and a purpose in this life. She liked to think of herself as an
irresponsible, instinctive vessel of divine fire to bless and inspire.
But such vessels very often go on the reefs of passion, and if Milly had
not been so thoroughly normal in her instincts, she might have suffered
shipwreck before this. Otherwise, they float out at middle age more or
less derelict in the human sea, unless they have been captured and
converted willy-nilly to some other's purpose. Now Milly was drifting
towards that dead sea of purposeless middle age, and instinctively
feared her fate.

She felt that her present life with the Laundryman offered her no outlet
for her powers, and this was the period when she became fertile in
launching schemes for which she displayed a few weeks' intense
enthusiasm that gradually died out before Ernestine's chilly good sense.
One of the first of these enthusiasms was "Squabs." She tried to
interest Ernestine in the business of raising squabs for the market. She
had read in some country-life magazine of a woman who had made a very
good income by breeding this delicacy for the New York market. Ernestine
had talked of buying a farm somewhere near the city for the summers, and
Milly thought th