"Don't you talk like that, dearie!" Ernestine said, getting up impulsively and with her heavy tread crossing the room. She took Milly in her strong arms and held her tight. "Don't ever say those things again!" she murmured in an uncertain voice, hugging the yielding figure to her. "Don't I know how you feel?... I guessed things weren't very rosy with you, but I didn't like to ask you until you were ready to say.... Now we'll straighten this thing out." Her robust, confident manner cheered Milly as much as her embrace. She trusted Ernestine's strength as she had once that of her husband. Ernestine went at things like a man in more ways than one. Releasing Milly, she stood over her frowningly, her hands on her hips, and looked steadily, intently at the pitiful face of the other woman. "Couldn't I do something in the laundry?" Milly suggested timidly. "You employ so many women there," she faltered. It had taken a struggle with her pride to contemplate this work. "I'm pretty strong." Ernestine smiled and shook her head very positively. "No, that's one thing that _wouldn't_ do. You'd be no good as a working-woman now, dearie!" "But I _must_ do something!" Milly wailed, "or starve and let Virgie go to her father's people. Isn't there _anything_ I can do in the world?" She had reached the ultimate bottom of life, she felt, and her demand had a tragic pathos in it. She waited for her answer. "Yes!" Ernestine exclaimed, a smile of successful thinking on her broad face. "You can make a home for me--a real one--that's what you can do--fine! Now listen," she insisted, as she saw the look of disappointment on Milly's expectant face. "Listen to me--it ain't bad at all." And she unfolded her plan, recounting again her longing for her own hearth, and proving to Milly that she could do a real, useful thing in the world, if she would make life pleasanter and happier for one who was able to earn money for three. "Don't wait for your friends to come back," she urged. "Just pack right up as soon as you can and move downstairs. Do you suppose Virgie's asleep? We'll tell her to-morrer any way.... And you do with my shack what you want,--any old thing, so's you let me sleep there. It'll be fine, fine!" And so it was agreed, although Milly was not greatly pleased with the prospect of becoming homemaker and companion to the Laundryman. It was not very different in essentials from her marriage with Jack, and she recognized now that she had not made a success of that on the economic side. In short, it was like so much else in her life, practically all her life, she felt bitterly,--it was a shift, a compromise, a _pis-aller_, and this time it was a social descent also. What would her friends say? But Milly courageously put that cheap thought out of her mind. If this was all that she could find to do to support herself and her child,--if it was all that she was good for in this world,--she would do it and swallow her pride with her tears.