ut into the yards, the little party broke up.
Horatio, who was choky, turned to his wife. Mrs. Horatio was already
studying through her spectacles a suburban time-card to ascertain the
next "local" for Elm Park. Ernestine and Walter Kemp slowly strolled up
the train-shed together. The banker was the first to break the
silence:--

"Guess they'll have a comfortable journey, not too dusty.... He seems to
be a good fellow, and he must have a fine place out there."

Ernestine said nothing.

"Well," the banker remarked, "Milly is settled now anyway--hope she'll
be happy! She wasn't much of a business woman, eh?" He looked at
Ernestine, who smiled grimly, but made no reply. "She's better off
married, I expect--most women are," he philosophized, "whether they like
it or not.... That's what a woman like Milly is meant for.... She's the
kind that men have run after from the beginning of the world, I
guess--the woman with beauty and charm, you know."

Ernestine nodded. She knew better than the banker.

"She'll never do much anywhere, but she'll always find some man crazy to
do for her," and he added something in German about the eternal
feminine, which Ernestine failed to get.

There was a steady drizzle from a lowering, greasy sky outside of the
train-shed, and the two paused at the door. With a long sigh Ernestine
emitted,--

"I only hope she'll be happy now!"

As if he had not heard this heartfelt prayer, the banker mused aloud,--

"She's Woman,--the old-fashioned kind,--just Woman!"

Ernestine looked steadily into the drizzle. Neither commented on what
both understood to be the banker's meaning,--that Milly was the type of
what men through the ages, in their paramount desire for exclusive sex
possession, had made of women, what civilization had made of her, and
society still encouraged her to become when she could,--an
adventuress,--in the banker's more sophisticated phrase,--a fortuitous,
somewhat parasitic creature. In Ernestine's more vulgar idiom, if she
had permitted herself to express her conviction, "Milly was a little
grafter." But Ernestine would not have let hot iron force the words
through her lips....

"And I suppose," the banker concluded, "that's the kind of women men
will always desire and want to work for."

"I guess so," Ernestine mumbled.

Had she not worked for Milly? She would have slaved for her cheerfully
all her life and felt it a privilege. Milly had stripped her to the
bone, and wounde