How could one make fine cakes without imagination? "They make better ones at the Auditorium Hotel even," Milly observed disgustedly. The Cake Shop had gone down another peg. Now it served afternoon tea with English wafers instead of the exotic "sirops" and "liqueurs," and advertised "Dainty Luncheons for Suburban Shoppers." (That was Ernestine's phrasing.) Milly almost never went near the place, and acted as if she wanted to forget it altogether.

In her efforts to revive her partner's waning interest Ernestine even suggested Milly's going again to Paris to engage a fresh crew, but Milly only shrugged her shoulders. "What's the use? You know we haven't the money."

"Borrow it!" Ernestine said desperately.

"When a thing is dead, it's dead," Milly p.r.o.nounced, and added oracularly, "Better to let the dead past bury its dead," and murmured the lines from a celebrated new play, "Smashed to h.e.l.l is smashed to h.e.l.l!" If she were willing to see her creation die, Ernestine ought to be. But that was not Ernestine's nature: she was not artistic nor temperamental, as Milly often proved to her. In her dumb, heavy fashion she still tried to prop up the ill-fated Cake Shop and make it pay expenses at least, in one way or another.

The time came, as it must come, when even this was more than Ernestine could compa.s.s. She had tried every device she could think of, but, as she reflected sadly, she had not been brought up to the "food business."

It was a peculiar business, like all businesses, especially the delicatessen end, and needed an expert to diagnose its cure. So the doors were closed, and a "To Rent" sign plastered on the front panes.

Ernestine acknowledged defeat.

Milly was outwardly unmoved. She had divined the outcome so much sooner than her partner that she had already pa.s.sed through the agonies of failure and come to that other side where one looks about for the next engagement with life. Possibly she had already in view what this was to be. She a.s.sented indifferently to Ernestine's proposal that they should meet Mr. Kemp and the agent at the Shop and decide what was to be done about the lease, which had more than a year to run.

"They'll be there shortly after noon," Ernestine reminded Milly, as the latter was about to leave the house that day.

"All right," she said evasively. "I'll try to be there, but it won't make any difference if I'm not--you know about everything."

She was not there. Ernestine knew well enough that Milly would not come to the funeral of their enterprise at the Cake Shop, and though she felt hurt she said nothing to the men and went through with the last formalities in the dusty, dismantled temple of cakes. At the end the banker asked Ernestine kindly what she meant to do. He knew that the Laundryman's capital had gone--all her savings--and that "the firm" was in debt to his bank for a loan of several hundred dollars, which he expected to pay himself and also to take care of the lease.

"I don't know yet," Ernestine replied. "I'll find some place.... And it won't be in any fancy kind of business like this, you can bet," and she cast a malevolent glance over the tarnished glories of the Cake Shop. "I got my experience and I paid for it--with every cent I had in the world.

I ain't goin' to buy any more of that!"

The banker laughed sympathetically.

"What's Mrs. Bragdon going to do?" he inquired.

"I don't know--she hasn't told me yet."

Her answer was evasive because Ernestine suspected very well what Milly was likely to do.... She turned the key in the lock, handed it over to the agent, and with a curt nod to the two men strode away from the Cake Shop for the last time. (That evening the banker, reporting the occurrence to his wife, said,--"I feel sorry for that woman! She's lost every cent she had--our Milly has milked her clean." "Walter, how can you say that?" his wife replied indignantly. "It wasn't Milly's fault if the business failed, any more than hers." "Well, I'd like to bet it's a good big part the fault of our pretty friend." "Miss Geyer ought not to have gone into something she knew nothing about." "Milly bewitched her, I expect. The best thing she can do is to shake her and go back to the laundry business.")

It was not Ernestine, however, who was to "shake" Milly. That lady herself was busily evading their partnership, as Ernestine suspected.

While the short obsequies were being transacted at the Cake Shop, Milly was lunching in the one good new hotel Chicago boasts with Edgar Duncan, who had returned from Washington sooner than expected and had asked Milly by telegraph to lunch with him. Seated in the s.p.a.cious, cool room overlooking the Boulevard and the Lake, at a little table cosily placed beside the open window, Milly might easily have looked through the fragrant plants in the flower-box and descried Ernestine doggedly tramping homeward from her final task at the Cake Shop. Milly preferred to study the menu through her little gold lorgnette, and when that important matter had been settled to her satisfaction, she sat back contentedly and smiled upon the man opposite her, who, after a successful hearing before the Commerce Commission, had more than ever the alert air of a man who knows his own business. Outside in the summer sunlight, above the blue water of the Lake and over the dingy sward of the Park, the airmen were man[oe]uvring their winged ships, casting great shadows as they dipped and soared above the admiring throngs.

"See," Milly pointed excitedly through the open window. "He's going up now!" And she twisted her neck to get the last glimpse of the mounting machine.

"Yes," Duncan remarked indifferently, "they're doing a lot of stunts."

But he hadn't come back from Washington by the first train that left after the hearing to talk aeroplanes. And Milly let him do the talking, as she always had, listening with a childlike interest to what he had to say.

By this time the reader must know Milly well enough to be able to divine for himself what was pa.s.sing in her mind as she daintily excavated the lobster sh.e.l.l on her plate and listened to the plea of her rejected lover. Probably this was no more able to stir her pulses to a mad rhythm to-day than it had been ten years before. Edgar Duncan was somewhat nearer being her Ideal,--not much. But Milly was ten years older and "had had her throbs," as she once expressed it. She knew their meaning now, their relative value, and she knew other values.

The value of a home and a stable position among her fellows, for instance, no matter how small, and so she listens demurely while the man talks hungrily of the Joy of Home and the Beauty of Woman in the Home, "where they belong, not in business." (How Ernestine would give it to him for that, and Hazel, too, Milly thought!)

"You are such a woman, Milly!" he exclaims.--"Just a woman!" and in his voice the expression has a tender, reverential sound that falls pleasantly on Milly's ears. But she says nothing: she does not mean to be "soft" this time. Yet in reply to another compliment, she admits, smiling delphically,--"Yes, I _am_ a woman!"

The man takes up another verse of his song, for he has planned this attack carefully while the swift wheels were turning off the miles between Washington and Chicago.

"You want your little girl to have a home, too, don't you? A real home, _your_ home, where she can get the right sort of start in life?"

"Yes," Milly a.s.sents quickly. "The proper kind of home means so much more to a girl than to a boy. If I myself had had--" But she stops before this baseness to poor old Horatio. "I want Virgie's life to be different from mine--so utterly different!"

A wave of self-pity for her loneliness after all her struggle sweeps over her and casts a cloud on her face.

"You can't be a business woman and make that kind of home for your daughter," Duncan persists, pushing forward his point.

Milly shakes her head.

"I'm afraid a woman can't!" she sighs.

(She doesn't feel it necessary to tell him that for almost one hour by the clock she has not been a "business woman," even in the legal sense of the term.)

"Oh," she murmurs, as if convinced by his logic, "I'm good for nothing--I can't even be a good mother!"

"You are good for everything--for me!"

But Milly is not ready yet. In this sort of transaction she has grown to be a more expert trader than she was once.

"It must be the right man," she observes impersonally.

And the Ranchman takes another start. He paints glowingly the freedom and the beauty of that outdoors life on the Pacific Coast,--the fragrant lemon orchard with its golden harvest of yellow b.a.l.l.s, the velvety heavens spangled with stars each night, the blooming roses, etc., etc.

But he cannot keep long off the personal note.

"I've sat there nights on my veranda, and thought and thought of you, Milly, until it seemed as though you were really there by my side and I could almost touch you."

"Really!" Milly is becoming moved in spite of herself. Somehow Duncan's words have a genuine ring to them. "I believe," she muses, "that you _are_ the sort of man who could care always for a woman."

"I always have cared for one woman!"

"You are good, Edgar."

"I don't know about that. Good hasn't much to do between men and women when they love.... It's always love that counts, isn't it?"

(Milly is not as sure of that doctrine as she was once, but she is content that the man should feel that way. She does not argue the point.)

"Can't you sit there with me, Milly, and watch the stars for the rest of our lives?"

Milly evades. She must have the terms set forth more explicitly.

"It wouldn't be right to keep Virgie out there away from people all the time, would it?"

He sees the point and yields.

"We'll come here every year for the fall and see your friends."

"That would be nice," she accepts graciously. But Chicago doesn't appeal to Milly as strongly as it had on her first return to its breezy, hearty life.

"I should like to have Virgie study music," she suggests, "and travel--have advantages."

"Of course!" he a.s.sents eagerly, and bids again, more daringly,--"We'll take her to Europe."