"The dining-room's downstairs--that makes it roomier," he continued, throwing open at random a door. "There's more room than you'd think from the outside." Milly and her grandmother peered downwards into the black hole from which came a mouldy odor. "Oh, father, why did you come 'way out here!" Milly wailed. "Why not?" Horatio retorted defensively. "You didn't expect a house on the lake front, did you?" Just what she had expected from this new turn in the family destiny was not clear to herself. But ever since it had been decided that they were to have a house of their own in Chicago--her father having at last secured a position that promised some permanence--the girl's buoyant imagination had begun to soar, and out of all the fragments of her experience derived by her transient residence in Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Omaha--not to mention St. Louis--she had created a wonderful composite--the ideal American home, architecturally ambitious, suburban in tone. In some of the cities where she had lived the Ridges had tarried as long as three years, and each time, since she was a very little girl in short dresses and had left Indianapolis crying over the doll in her arms, she had believed they were permanently settled: this was to be their home for always. Her mother had had the same forlorn, homesick hope, but each time it was doomed to disappointment. Always they had had to move on,--to make a new circle of temporary acquaintances, to learn the ropes of new streets and shops and schools all over again. Always it was "business" that did the mischief,--the failure of "business" here or the hope of better "business" somewhere else that had routed them out of their temporary shelter. Horatio Ridge was "travelling" for one firm or another in drugs and chemicals: he was of an optimistic and sanguine temperament. Milly's mother, less hopeful by nature, had gradually succumbed under the perpetual tearing up of her thin roots, and finally faded away altogether in the light housekeeping phase of their existence in St. Louis. Milly was sanguine like her father, and she had the other advantage of youth over her mother. So she had hoped again--overwhelmingly--of Chicago. But as she gazed at the row of pallid houses and counted three "To rent" signs in the cobwebby front windows opposite, she knew in her heart that this was not the end--not this, for her! It was another shift, another compromise to be endured, another disappointment to be overcome. "Well, daughter, what d'ye think of your new home?" Little Horatio's blustering tone betrayed his timidity before the passionate criticism of youth. Milly turned on him with flashing blue eyes. "I think, my dear," her grandmother announced primly, "that instead of finding fault with your father's selection of a home, you had better look at it first."