One Woman's Life

Milly was gathering to her attractive individualities, and Horatio was faithfully performing his minor function in the dingy brick establishment of the Hoppers'. Many hundreds of thousan

stful citizens,-getting busier, getting richer, getting dirtier. There h

and when women wore those absurd puffed sleeves and when they first appeared with long tails to their coats. But of the daily doings of men folk when they disappeared of a morning into the smoky haze of the city, and of all the mighty human forces around her, she had not

at was in the opulent future, for which every one lived. Even Horatio, who spent all his waking hours among men, did not in the least comprehend what it might be to live in this centre of expanding race energy. Yet he would point out to Milly appreciatively on their Sunday walks the acres of new building gr

bony and ruddy Englishmen, who drifted through the city from time to time. That Chicago was a huge pool into which all races and peoples drained,-that was a fact of which Milly was only dimly conscious. "You see so many queer, foreign-looking people on the street," she might observe. "Polacks and Dagoes!... Ugh.... Wish they'd

here was LIFE in its raw material. When she crossed the murky, slimy river, as she had occasion to do almost daily, after the removal to the North Side, she thought merely how dingy and dirty the place was, and what a pity it was one had to go through such a mess to reach the best shops and the other quarters of the city where "nice" people lived.

ca gave them. At dinner parties grave and serious men debated in low tones the awful deed and its meaning. Even women spoke of the bomb instead of discussing whether "you could get this at Field's" or "should try Mandel's." A fearful vision of Anarchy stalked the commonplace streets and peered into comfortable houses. Milly imagined that somehow those evil-looking barbarians had got loose from the stockyards and might descend at any moment upon the defenceless city in a howling mob, as she had read of their doing in her history books. For the first few days it was an excitement to venture into the streets at night, even w

he noisome little court-room, to see the eight men caught like rats in the nets of Justice. When life emerges dramati

rippled breathlessly. "We're

say you can't ge

he judge-he knows him. Come on

ge's private chambers into the crowded scene. There was not six inches of standing room to be had in the place except beside the

nd Vivie Norton, in their best clothes, with the sweeping plumed hats that had just come into fashion then.... Milly beamed with pleasure

of the great conspiracy against Society, watching the prisoners-a sorry lot of men generally-and staring haughtily down at the jammed court-room. Their presence, of course, was noted by the reporters and mentioned as at a social event "a

mpany" and been led astray. Vivie sent her man flowers,-a bunch of deep red roses,-and the next day he appeared wearing one conspicuously pinned to his coat. Sally coaxed the obliging bailiff to smuggle them all into the jail so that they might see the prisoners and talk to them through the bars. But the great event was when Spies made his cele

ked of the wrongs of society, and Milly realized somehow that she was part of the society he was condemning,-one of the more privileged at the feast of life, who made it impossible fo

od citizens might sleep peacefully nights, faced death, the three girls sat and stared at the spectacle. It passed slowly, and the prisoners were condemned by a j

he had only had about him from the beginning the right influences, if some woman had loved him and guided him aright,-Milly hoped that he might yet be spare

was a miserable travesty of justice,-a conspiracy framed up by the police. "They have the city scared," he said, "and nobody dares say what he thinks. The newspapers know the truth, but the big men make the papers keep quiet." It was all quite thrilling, Milly thought. Perhaps,

re personal affairs crowded in to blot out from her mind that sense of a large, suffering humanity which she had had for a few moments. When the governor was finally induced to intervene and commute some of

hat w

y had been interested, blew off the top of his head with a bom