One Woman's Life

little persons-chiefly girls, to be sure. For as Milly was wont to confess in her palmiest days when men flocked around her, she was a "woman's woman" (and hence inferentially a man's woman,

aurence Avenue house on warm evenings, composing Milly's celebrated "stoop parties," or wandered with her arm in arm up the broad boul

daughter when the school question was up, and when the latter de

had a lot of beaux-and she got no ha

of men in the household was the limit of her sex knowledge. Beyond that it was not "nice" for a girl to delve, and Milly was very scrupulous about being "nice." Nice girls did not discuss such things. Once when she was fifteen a woman she knew had "gone to the bad" and Milly had been very curious abou

lling her little stories, while her father smoked his cigar in the rear room. She was conscious always of Grandma Ridge's keen ears p

tertainment was the theatre or lopping about the long steps, listening to her chatter. When they took her "buggy-riding," they mi

ayey bluff and sat there in a thicket, looking out over the dimpled water, hot, uncomfortable, self-conscious. His hand had strayed to hers, and she had let him hold it, caress the stubby fingers in his thin ones, aware that hers was quite a

ract his attention exclaimed,-"See! What's that?" They looked across the broad

ust the

ul it is," M

ly dismissed him-he was only a clerk at Hoppers'-without hesitation. "We are both too young, dear," she said. He had tried to kiss her hand, and somehow he managed so awkwardly that their heads bumped. Then he had gone away to Colorado to recover. For some months they exchanged boy and girl letters, which she kept for years tied up with ribbon.

no mother, and such an easy, unsuspecting father, I don't know. Think of it, my dear, out almost every ni

ever, of these earlier yea