"He thinks you so unspoiled," her friend added. "I've asked him to stay another week." So the two boated and walked and sat out beside the lake until the stars grew dim--and nothing ever came of it! Milly had her little extravagant imaginings about this well-bred young man with his distinguished manner; she did her best to please--and nothing came of it. Why? she asked herself afterward. He had held her hand and talked about "the woman who gives purpose to a man's life" and all that. (Alas, that plebeian paw of Milly's!) Then he had left and sent her a five-pound box of candy from the metropolis, with a correct little note, assuring her that he could never forget those days he had spent with her by the lake of Como. Years afterward on an Atlantic steamer she met a sandy-haired, stoutish American, who introduced himself with the apology,-- "You're so like a girl I knew once out West--at some lake in Wisconsin--" "And you are Harrison Plummer," she said promptly. "I shouldn't have known _you_," she added maliciously, surveying the work of time. She felt that her plebeian hands were revenged: he was quite ordinary. His wife was with him and four uninteresting children, and he seemed bored.... That had been her Alpine height at eighteen. The heights seem lower at thirty-five. Even if this affair didn't prove to be "the real, right thing," Milly gained a good deal from her Como visit. Her social perspective was greatly enlarged by the acquaintances she made there. It was long before the day of the motor, the launch, the formal house party, but the families who sought rural relief from the city along the shores of the Wisconsin lake lived in a liberal, easy manner. They had horses and carriages a plenty and entertained hospitably. They did not use red cotton table-cloths (which Grandma Ridge insisted upon to save washing), and if there were few men-servants, there was an abundance of tidy maids. It gave Milly unconsciously a conception of how people lived in circles remote from West Laurence Avenue, and behind her pretty eyes there formed a blind purpose of pushing on into this unknown territory. "I had my own way to make socially," she said afterwards, half in apology, half in pride. "I had no mother to bring me out in society--I had to make my own friends!" It was easy, to be sure, in those days for a pretty, vivacious girl with pleasant manners to go where she would. Society was democratic, in a flux, without pretence. Like went with like as they always will, but the social game was very simple, not a definite career, even for a woman. Many of these good people said "folks" and "ain't" and "doos," and nobody thought the worse of them for that. And they were kind,--quick to help a young and attractive girl, who "would make a good wife for some man."