never think of her as existing outside of Cypher's. There nature
had placed her, and she had taken root and grown mightily. She seemed
happy, and took her few poor dollars on Saturday nights with the flushed
pleasure of a child that receives an unexpected donation.

It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must have held
latently. It came up apropos, of course, of certain questions of art at
which we were hammering. One of us compared the harmony existing between
a Haydn symphony and pistache ice cream to the exquisite congruity
between Milly and Cypher's.

"There is a certain fate hanging over Milly," said Kraft, "and if it
overtakes her she is lost to Cypher's and to us."

"She will grow fat?" asked Judkins, fearsomely.

"She will go to night school and become refined?" I ventured anxiously.

"It is this," said Kraft, punctuating in a puddle of spilled coffee with
a stiff forefinger. "Caesar had his Brutus--the cotton has its bollworm,
the chorus girl has her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has his poison
ivy, the hero has his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan, the rose has
its--"

"Speak," I interrupted, much perturbed. "You do not think that Milly
will begin to lace?"

"One day," concluded Kraft, solemnly, "there will come to Cypher's for a
plate of beans a millionaire lumberman from Wisconsin, and he will marry
Milly."

"Never!" exclaimed Judkins and I, in horror.

"A lumberman," repeated Kraft, hoarsely.

"And a millionaire lumberman!" I sighed, despairingly.

"From Wisconsin!" groaned Judkins.

We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her. Few things were less
improbable. Milly, like some vast virgin stretch of pine woods, was
made to catch the lumberman's eye. And well we knew the habits of the
Badgers, once fortune smiled upon them. Straight to New York they hie,
and lay their goods at the feet of the girl who serves them beans in a
beanery. Why, the alphabet itself connives. The Sunday newspaper's
headliner's work is cut for him.

"Winsome Waitress Wins Wealthy Wisconsin Woodsman."

For a while we felt that Milly was on the verge of being lost to us.

It was our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature that
inspired us. We could not give her over to a lumberman, doubly accursed
by wealth and provincialism. We shuddered to think of Milly, with her
voice modulated and her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble teepee
of a tree murderer. No! In Cypher's she bel