eported
more hopefully to his wife of Milly's new undertaking.

"Anyway, she's got a good partner," he declared. "The Geyer woman is not
much on looks, but she's solid--and if I'm not mistaken, she knows her
business."

In this last the banker was mistaken. Ernestine was being carried along
passively in the whirl of Milly's enterprise and hardly knew what she
was about, it was all so unfamiliar; but she kept her mouth shut and her
eyes open and was learning all the time. She had already found out that
their cake shop was not to be a plebeian provision business, but an
affair of fashion and taste--or, as she called it,--for the "swells,"
and had her first instinctive misgivings on that score. And that ten
thousand dollars, which had seemed to her a substantial sum, she saw
would look very small indeed by the time the doors of their shop were
opened to "trade." But Milly's spirits were never higher: she sparkled
with confidence and ideas. On the signing of the lease, which Walter
Kemp guaranteed, they had a very jolly luncheon at the large hotel near
by.

As soon as the lease had been signed Milly telegraphed--she never wrote
letters any more, it was so much more businesslike to telegraph--to Sam
Reddon to come on at once and superintend the rehabilitation of the
premises. Ernestine would have intrusted this important detail to a
scrub woman, and the agent's Chicago decorator, but Milly said
promptly,--"That would spoil everything!"

Reddon responded to "Milly's Macedonian cry," as he described her
telegram, with an admirable promptness, arriving the next day "with one
clean shirt and no collars," he confessed. Milly took him at once to the
dingy shop.

"Now, Sam," she said to him in her persuasive way, "I want you to make
this into the nicest little _patisserie_ you ever saw in Paris. _Vrai
chic_, you know!"

"Some stunt," he replied, looking at the grimy squalor of the abandoned
shop, with its ugly plate-glass windows and forbidding walls. "Don't you
want me to get you a frieze for those bare walls--some Chicago nymphs
taking a bath in the Lake with a company of leading citizens observing
them from the steps of the Art Institute, in the manner of the sainted
Puvis?"

"Don't be silly, Sam!" Milly replied in reproof. "This is business."

And Sam put it through for her. They had a good time over the
transformation of the Chicago shop to something "elegant and
spirituelle," as Sam called it. He entered into the s