Milly dropped tears all the way upstairs to her room, where she shut herself in and locked herself against family intrusion. In spite of her tears she was glad for what she had done. A woman's heart seemed to her ample justification for inconsistencies, even if it jammed other hearts on the way to its goal. It was fate, that was all,--fate that Jack Bragdon should have walked into her life just twelve days before it would have been too late. Fate is a wondrously consoling word, especially in the concerns of the heart. It absolves from personal responsibility. So Milly went to sleep, with tears still on her eyelashes, but a smile on her lips, and dreamed of her own happy fate. At last "the real, right thing" was hers! X MILLY MARRIES She awoke with a sensation of bliss--a never ending happiness to be hers. Yet there were some disagreeable episodes before this bliss could be perfected. For one thing Horatio took the announcement of the new engagement very hard,--unexpectedly so. Grandma Ridge received it in stony silence with a sarcastic curve to her wrinkled lips, as if to say,--"Hope you know your mind this time!" But Horatio spluttered:-- "What? You don't mean that la-di-da newspaper pup who parts his hair in the middle?" (To part one's hair in the middle instead of upon the slope of the head was Horatio's aversion--it indicated to him a lack of serious, masculine purpose in a young man.) "I thought you would do better than that, Milly.... What's he making with his newspaper pictures?" "I don't know," Milly replied loftily. She might guess that it was in the neighborhood of thirty dollars a week, sometimes increased by a few dollars through a magazine cover or commercial poster. But in her present exalted mood it was completely indifferent to Milly whether her lover was earning twenty dollars or two thousand a week. They would live somehow--of course: all young lovers did.... And was he not a genius? Milly had every confidence. "You might just as well have married Ted Donovan," Horatio groaned. (Donovan was the young man at Hoppers' whom Milly had disdained early in her West Side career.) "I saw him on the street the other day, and he's doing finely--got a rise last January." "He's not fashionable enough for Milly," Grandma commented. "I must say you treated that Mr. Duncan pretty badly," Horatio continued with unusual severity. "I should say so!" Grandma interposed. Milly might think so too, but she was serenely indifferent to all the defeated prospects, the bleeding hearts over which she must pass to the fulfilment of her being. It was useless to explain to her father and her grandmother the imperious call of "the real, right thing," and how immeasurably Jack differed from Ted Donovan, Clarence Albert, or even Edgar Duncan, and how indifferent to a true woman must be all the pain in the world, once she had found her Ideal.