"If any one can enjoy things as much as Milly Ridge, she ought to have them," to which the practical banker observed,--"She'll get them when she picks the man." So they made the wonderful journey and put up at the pleasant old Windsor on the avenue, for the era of vast caravansaries had not yet begun. Fifth Avenue in ninety was not the cosmopolitan thoroughfare it is to-day. Nevertheless, to Milly's inexperienced eyes, accustomed to the gloom of smoke, the ill-paved, dirty streets of mid-western cities, New York was even noble in its splendor. They went to the Metropolitan Museum, to the private galleries of the dealers, to Tiffany's, where the banker bought a trinket for his wife's young friend, and the women went to dressmakers who intimidated Milly with their airs and their prices. Of course they went to Daly's and to hear "Aida," and supped afterwards at the old Delmonico's. And a hundred other ravishing things were crowded into the breathless fortnight of their visit. When she was once more settled in her berth for the return journey, Milly sighed with regret and envisaged the dreary waste of West Laurence Avenue. "If we only lived in New York," she thought, and then she was wise enough to reflect that if the Ridges lived in New York, it would not be paradise, but another version of West Laurence Avenue. "Some day you will go to Paris, my dear," Mrs. Kemp said, "and then New York will seem like the West Side." "Never, that!" Milly exclaimed, shocked. The approach to Chicago under all circumstances is bleak and stern. But that early April day it seemed to Milly unduly depressing. The squalid little settlements on the outskirts of the great city were like eruptions in the low, flat landscape. Around the factories and mills the little houses were perched high on stilts to keep their feet out of the mud of the submerged prairie. All the way home Milly had been making virtuous resolutions not to be extravagant and tease her father, to be patient with her grandmother, etc.,--in short, to be content with that state of life unto which God had called her (for the present), as the catechism says. But she felt it to be very hard that Milly Ridge should be condemned to such a state of life as the West Side of Chicago afforded. After the cultivated, mildly luxurious atmosphere of the Kemps, she realized acutely the commonness of her home.... Her father was waiting for her in the train-shed, and she hugged him affectionately and went off on the little man's arm, quite gayly, waving a last farewell to Eleanor Kemp as the latter stepped into her waiting carriage. "Well, daughter, had a good time?" IX ACHIEVEMENTS "But, papa," Milly interrupted her chatter about her marvellous doings in the East, long enough to ask,--"where are you going?"