ad perfected it.
She nursed it like an artist within her own breast.

III

CHICAGO AGAIN

A month later Milly and Virginia went to Chicago to visit the Kemps.
Milly's heart leaped as the miles westward were covered by the rapid
train. Old friends, she thought, are nearest, warmest, dearest to us,
and again and again during the joyous weeks of her visit to the bustling
city by the Lake, Milly felt the truth of this platitude. Everybody
seemed delighted to see "Milly Ridge," as half the people she met still
called her. She could not go a block without some more or less familiar
figure stopping, and throwing up hands exclaiming, "Why, Milly! not
_you_--I'm _so_ glad." And they stopped to talk, obstructing traffic.

Milly was conscious of being at her very best. She had decided to
discard her mourning altogether on going back to Chicago, and had some
attractive new gowns to wear. Instead of a forlorn and weary widow, she
presented herself to her Chicago public fresher and prettier than ever,
beaming with delight over everything and very much alive. That is the
way Chicago likes.

"Chicago _is_ different," she repeated a dozen times a day, meaning by
that vague comment that Chicago was more generous, kindly, hospitable,
warmer and bigger-hearted than New York. Which was perfectly true, and
which Chicago liked to hear as often as possible. The purely human
virtues still nourished there, it seemed to Milly, in their primal
bloom, while they had become somewhat faded in the more hectic air of
the Atlantic seaboard. There was a feeling of frank good-fellowship and
an optimistic belief in everybody and in the world as well as in
yourself that was spoken of as the Spirit of the West. "In New York,"
Milly said to Eleanor Kemp, "unless you make a great noise all the time,
nobody knows you are there. And when you fail, it's like a stone dropped
into the ocean: nobody knows that you have gone under! I want to live
the rest of my life in Chicago," she concluded positively.

"Yes," all her friends assented with one voice, "you must come back to
us--you belong here!" (With the future, the setting sun, and all the
rest of it.)

And they laid their little plans to entrap her and hold her in their
midst for good,--obvious plans in which men, of course, were designedly
included. They said a great many nice things about her behind her back
as well as to her face.

"Milly has shown such pluck.... Her marriage was unfortunate-