One Woman's Life

" Milly Ridge excla

vely at the figures painted on the glass transom above. In that block of little houses, all exactly alike, he might ea

the street, which ran straight as a bowling-alley between two rows of shabby brick houses,-all low, small, mean, unmistakably cheap,-thrown together for little people to live in. West Laurence Avenue was drab and commonplace,-the heart, the cro

onnet edged with white, stood on the steps midway between her son and her granddaughter, and smiled icily at the girl. Milly recognized that s

fy street-car, mile after mile, through this vast prairie wilderness of brick buildings. She knew instinctively that they were getting farther and farther from the region where "nice people" lived. She had never before been in this great city, yet something told her that they we

ore, the family had done "light housekeeping" in three rooms in St. Louis. This 212 We

twist of key and thump of knee, he effected an entrance. Grandma

o Ridge said, jingling his k

nantly. The fresh paint cl

of the rear rooms and pointed to a side window in the hall where one-sixteenth of t

," he continued, throwing open at random a door. "T

d downwards into the black hole

d you come 'way out

nsively. "You didn't expect a ho

on had begun to soar, and out of all the fragments of her experience derived by her transient residence in Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Omaha-not to mention St. Louis-she had created a wonderful composite-the ideal American home, architecturally ambitious, suburban in tone. In some of

s it was "business" that did the mischief,-the failure of "business" here or the hope of better "business" somewhere else that had routed them out of their temporary shelter. Horatio Ridge was "travelling" for one firm or another in drugs and chemicals: he

o. But as she gazed at the row of pallid houses and counted three "To rent" signs in the cobwebby front windows opposite, she knew in her hea

io's blustering tone betrayed his timidity before the passionate

, "that instead of finding fault with your father's

ibed as "ladylike." But Milly knew what lay beneath its gentle surface. Milly did not love her grandmother. Milly's mother had not loved the little old lady. It was extremely doubtf

estate man said so, almost new and freshly painted and papered. It's close to the cars and Hoppers'"-Hoppers' was the Chicago f

eady quite as large as her father and enough of a woman physically to bully the tiny grandmother when she wished to. Her face was now prettily suffused with color due to

tio observed, seeking hi

sure you displayed excellent taste

mned to sleep in that ugly chamber even for a few months. Yet the house was on the whole a better one than any that the peripatetic Ridge

omehow Milly had already divined the coming degradation of the West Side. "I don't see how you

own the narrow stairs, leaving her elders to swallow their emot

r's temper," Mrs. Ri

all right," Horati

ole she "took her medicine" a

m eyeing the dirty street, dabbing the tears from her eyes

d her fate, the hot disgust in her soul that she should be forced to endure such mean surroundings. "And," she would say then to the friend to whom she happened to be giving a vivacious account of the i

s,-of place and condition,-at her age, with her limited, even if much-travelled experience of Ameri