One Woman's Life Part 16

Becker, who had seen Milly, not merely at the Bowmans, but at many of the more brilliant functions of the Fair season, regarded her as "up-to-date," and further, thought her a nice, lively young woman, who would know the difference between Mrs. Patziki's card party on Garfield Boulevard and a dinner to the French amba.s.sador at the Danner's. It made little difference whether she could write or not, so long as she had the "entry" as he called it. At any rate he would try her.

So Milly began her new career as journalist with much enthusiasm and a sense of self-importance that had been grievously lacking in her enterprises for some time. She thought she had the ability to write--what attractive young American woman doesn't? Her friends thought her clever, and laughed at her little "stories" about people. She set herself industriously to the composition of elaborate articles on "Our Social Leaders," consisting largely of a retrospect and review, for "our social leaders" kept very still during those terrible months of want and panic that followed the gay doings of the great show, or were out of the city. These articles appeared in the Sunday edition, over the _nom de plume_ of the "_Debutante_." Other women of the regular staff did the card-parties and club news and the West Side stuff.

There was a city editor, of course, and a ruthless blue pencil, but as Milly was recognized on the paper as "the old man's" present hobby, she was given a pretty free rein. She sailed into the dingy _Star_ offices dressed quite smartly, dropped her sprawling ma.n.u.script on the Sunday editor's table, and ambled into Mr. Becker's sanctum for a little social chat. In the office she was known as "the Real Thing," and liked as she was almost everywhere, though the youthful reporters laughed at her pompous diction.

The _Star_ paid her the handsome sum of fifteen dollars a week.

VIII

MILLY RENEWS HER PROSPECTS

It did not take Milly long to realize that the sort of newspaper writing she was doing was as parasitic in its nature as her first job, and even less permanent. Of course it quickly leaked out who the _Debutante_ was who wrote with such finality of "our social leaders," and though friends were kind and even helpful, a.s.suring Milly "it made no difference," and they thought it "a good thing for her to do," she knew that in the end her work would kill whatever social position she had retained through her vicissitudes. The more "exclusive" women with social aspirations liked secretly to have their presences and their doings publicly chronicled, but they were fearful lest they should seem to encourage such publicity. Although they said, "We'd rather have one of us do it if it has to be done, you know," yet they preferred to have it thought that the information came from the butler and the housemaid. Milly soon perceived that a woman must cheapen herself at the job, and by cheapening herself lose her qualification. Nevertheless, she had to keep at it for the money.

That was the terrible fact about earning one's living, Milly learned: the jobs--at least those she was fitted for--were all parasitic and involved personal humiliations. From this arose Milly's growing conviction of the social injustice in the world to women, of which view later she became quite voluble....

Fortunately the summer came on, when "Society" moved away from the city altogether. Becker, who had been somewhat disappointed in Milly's indifferent success, now suggested that she do a series of articles on inland summer resorts. "Show 'em," said the newspaper man, "that we've got a society of our own out here in the middle west, as cla.s.sy as any in America,--Newport, Bar Harbor, or Lenox." He advised Lake Como for a start, but Milly, for reasons of her own, preferred Mackinac, then a popular resort on the cold water of Lake Superior.

By mid-July she was established in the most fashionable of the barny, wooden hotels at the resort and prepared to put herself in touch with the summer society. One of the first persons she met was a Mrs. Thornton from St. Louis, a pleasant, ladylike young married woman, who had a cottage near by and took her meals at the hotel. She was a summer widow with three children,--a thoroughly well-bred woman of the sort Milly instinctively took to and attracted. They became friends rapidly through the children, whom Milly petted. She learned all about the Thorntons in a few days. They were very nice people. He was an architect, and she had been a Miss Duncan of Philadelphia,--also a very nice family of the Quaker order, Milly gathered. Mrs. Thornton talked a great deal of an older brother, who had gone to California for his health and had bought a fruit ranch there in the Ventura mountains somewhere south of Santa Barbara. This brother, Edgar Duncan, was expected to visit Mrs. Thornton during the summer, and in the course of time he arrived at Mackinac.

Milly found him on the piazza of the Thornton cottage playing with the children. As he got up awkwardly from the floor and raised his straw hat, Milly remarked that his sandy hair was thin. He was slight, about middle-aged, and seemed quite timid. Not at all the large westerner with bronzed face and flapping cowboy hat she had vaguely pictured to herself. Nevertheless, she smiled at him cordially,--

"You are the brother I've heard so much about?" she said, proffering a hand.

"And you must be that new Aunt Milly the children are full of," he replied, coloring bashfully.

So it began. For the next month, until Milly, having exhausted the social possibilities of Mackinac, had to move on to another "resort" in Wisconsin, she saw a great deal of Edgar Duncan. They walked through the fir woods by moonlight, boated on the lake under the stars, and read Milly's literary efforts on the piazza of the Thornton cottage. Duncan told her much about his ranch on the slope of the Ventura hills above the Pacific, of the indolent California life in the sunshine, with an occasional excursion to Los Angeles or San Francisco. He was not exciting in any sense, not very energetic, like the Chicago men she had known, perhaps not very much alive; but he was gentle, and kindly, and thoughtful for women, of a refined and high-minded race--the sort of man "any woman could be sure of."

Mrs. Thornton, with much sisterly affection and no vulgar ambition, encouraged un.o.btrusively the intimacy. "Edgar is so lonely out there on his ranch," she explained to Milly, "I want him to come back east. He might now, you know,--there's nothing really the matter with his health.

But he's got used to the life and doesn't like our hurry and the scramble for money. Besides he's put all his money into those lemons and olives.... I think a woman might be very happy out of the world in a place like that, with a man who loved her a lot,--and children, of course, children,--don't you?"

Milly thought so, too. She was becoming very tired of newspaper work, and of her single woman's struggle to maintain herself in the roar of Chicago. The future looked rather gray even through her habitually rose-colored gla.s.ses. She was twenty-four. She knew the social game, and its risks, better than two years before.... So she was very kind to Duncan,--she really liked him extremely, rather for what he was without than for what he had,--and when she left it was understood between them that the Californian should return to his ranch by the way of Chicago and meet Milly there on a certain day,--Monday, the first of September.

He was very particular, sentimentally so, about this date,--kept repeating it,--and they made little jokes of it until Milly even particularized the hour when she could be free to see him,--"Five o'clock, 31 East Acacia Street,--hadn't you better write it down?" But Duncan thought he could remember it very well. "We'll go somewhere for dinner," Milly promised.

That was all, but it was a good deal for the shy Edgar Duncan to have arrived at. Milly was content to leave it just that way,--vague and pleasant, with no explicit understanding of what was to come afterwards.

She knew he would write--he was that kind; he would say more on paper than by word of mouth, much more. Then, when they met again, she would put her hand in his and without any talk it would have happened.... He came with the children to see her off at the station, and as the fir-covered northern landscape retreated from the moving train, Milly relaxed in her Pullman seat, holding his roses in her lap, and decided that Edgar Duncan was altogether the "best" man she had ever known well.

She surrendered herself to a dream of a wonderful land where the yellow lemons gleamed among glossy green leaves, and the distant hills were powdered with the gray tint of olive trees, as Duncan had described the ranch, and also of a little low bungalow, a silent j.a.p in white clothes moving back and forth, and far below the distant murmur of the Pacific surges.... Her eyes became suffused: it wasn't the pinnacle of her girlish hope, but it was Peace. And just now Milly wanted peace more than anything else.

He wrote, as Milly knew he would, and though Milly found his letters lacking in that warmth and color and glow in which she had bathed the ranch, they were tender and true letters of a real lover, albeit a timid one. "All his life he had longed for a real companion, for a woman who could be a man's mate as his mother was to his father," and that sort of thing. He implied again and again that not until he had met Milly had he found such a creature, "but now," etc. Milly sighed. She was happy, but not thrilled. Perhaps, she thought, she was too old for thrills--twenty-four--and this was as near "the real right thing" as she was ever to come. At any rate she meant to take the chance.

Ocanseveroc did not prove attractive: it was a hot little hole by a steaming, smelly lake, like Como, only less select in its society and more populous. Milly quickly "did" the resort and fled back to Chicago for a breath of fresh air from the great cooling tub of Lake Michigan.

That was the nineteenth of August. She had twelve days in which to get ready her articles before Duncan's arrival. On the hot train she planned a little article on the search for the ideal resort with the result of a hasty return to the city for comfort and coolness. She thought it might be made amusing and resolved to see the editor about it.

Matters at home had scarcely improved during the languid summer. Horatio sat on the stoop in his shirt-sleeves, unchided, or went for long hours to a beer-garden he had found near by. He made no pretence of looking for work. "What's the use--in the summer?" Milly stirred the stagnant domestic atmosphere with her recovered cheerfulness. She told them of her various adventures, especially of the Thorntons and of the new young man. Duncan had given her some kodaks of the fruit ranch in the Ventura mountains, which she displayed. _HE_ was coming to see her soon, and she laughed prettily. Grandma maintained her sour indifference to Milly's doings, but Horatio took a lively interest. He had always wanted to go "back to a farm" since he was a young man, he said. It was the only place for a poor man to live these days, and they said those California ranches were wonderful money-makers. A man at Hoppers' had gone out there, etc.

Father and daughter talked ranch far into the hot night.

The next afternoon Milly went to the newspaper office to report and to discuss with the editor her last inspiration for an article. It was the vacation season and a number of the desks in the editorial room were vacant. Mr. Becker's door was closed and shrouded with an "Out of Town"

card. At the Sunday editor's table in the part.i.tioned box reserved for this official was an unfamiliar figure. Milly stopped at the threshold and stared. A young man, fair-haired, in a fresh and fetching summer suit with a flowing gauzy tie, looked up from the table and smiled at Milly. He was distinctly not of the _Star_ type.

"Come right in," he called out genially. "Anything I can do for you? No, I'm not the new Sunday editor--he's away cooling himself somewheres.... I just came in here to finish this sketch."

Milly noticed the drawing-paper and the India-ink bottle on the table.

"You're not Kim?" Milly stammered.

"The same."

("Kim" was the name signed to some clever cartoons that had been appearing all that winter in a rival paper, about which there had been more or less talk in the circles where Milly moved.)

"So you've come over to the _Star_?" she said with immediate interest.

"The silver-tongued Becker got me--for a price--a small one," he added with a laugh, as if nothing about him was of sufficient consequence to hide.

"I'm _so_ glad. I like your pictures awfully well."

"Thanks!... And you, I take it, are _la belle Debutante_?"

"Yes!" Milly laughed. "How did you know?"

"Oh," he replied, and his tone said, "it's because you too are different from the rest here," which flattered Milly.

"Won't you come in and sit down?"

The young man emptied a chair by the simple process of tipping it and presented it to Milly with a gallant flourish. She sat on the edge and drew up her veil as far as the tip of her nose. The young man smiled.

Milly smiled back. They understood each other at once, far better than either could ever understand the other members of the _Star_ staff.

Their clothes, their accents, their manners announced that they came from the same world,--that small "larger world," where they all use the same idiom.

"Been doing Mackinac and Ocara-se-er-oc?" the young man drawled with delightful irony. "Ye G.o.ds! What names!"

Both laughed with a pleasant sense of superiority over a primitive civilization, though Milly at least had hardly known any other.

"And they're just like their names," Milly a.s.serted, "awful places!"

"I've not yet had the privilege of seeing our best people in their summer quarters," the young man continued, with his agreeable air of genial mockery.

"You won't see them in those places."

"Or anywhere else at present," the artist sighed, glancing at his unfinished sketch.

Milly asked to see the drawing, and another inspiration occurred to her.

She told the young artist of her idea for a comic article on the hunt through the lake resorts for an ideal place of peace and coolness. He thought it a good topic and suggested graciously that he could do a few small pen-and-ink ill.u.s.trations to elucidate the text.

"Oh, would you!" Milly exclaimed eagerly. It was what she had hoped he would say, and it revived her waning interest in journalism immensely, the prospect of collaboration with this attractive young artist. (She had already forgotten that she was to abandon journalism after the first Monday in September.)