Yet he could have forgiven his new wife many deficiencies, perhaps, if she had supplied that thing he had most expected: Sanctuary in her arms. Milly had supplied no sanctuary in her arms. If Milly had arms, they were far from the purpose of solacing distraught masculinity. Milly’s arms were very necessary connections between her paste-bedaubed hands and her ample shoulders. Nothing more. What else did he expect them to be? Nathan was shocked. She was a Woman, wasn’t she? He had made her his wife. She had said that she loved him and asked him if there were anything she could do to make him happy. What, then, was wrong? A small-town Pygmalion waited for the conjugal Galatea he had created to be struck with divine fire and return his embrace gloriously. But divine fires, alas, rarely impregnate dough pans. Nathan had made the sickening mistake that millions of poor youngsters make piteously every day,—that keeps divorce mills grinding to the horror of sanctimonious religionists: He had mistaken Sex for Ladyhood. Instead of Milly inviting Nathan into Carmel, it was the man who descended to the girl as though she were a coarse-grained child. Milly in propinquity with her suddenly acquired husband was the charwoman who had found a wounded demigod by the wayside and did not know what to do with him, nor exactly how to treat him, after his bruised hulk—Olympus ostracized—was hers for the taking. Nathan and Milly, however, were married. In _metempsychosis_ or no, the lad had assumed obligations he felt he could not retract. A home might solve the problem. So Nathan set about acquiring a home. With an eye to the limitations of thirty dollars, he rented the Mills cottage on Pine Street,—a six-room structure of poor sanitary equipment and no furnace. His first purchases were two stoves,—one set up in the kitchen, the other in the “sitting room.” Milly, her first shock of disillusion over, proceeded to make the best of a bad bargain. IV It quickly developed that she had a passion for soap clubs and a dangerous propensity toward buying from agents. The former was the more harmless for some deliberation was usually given to premiums. But those agents! Milly bought a twelve-volume set of encyclopedias “on time” before she and Nathan had found a bedroom carpet. She bought several “shrieking” rugs from Armenian peddlers and a banquet lamp in anticipation of domestic equipment to be requisite when the Forges had attained to banquets. She was imposed upon for patent mops and cheated on carpet beaters. She laid in enough stove polish to shine all the baseburners in Paris County. Nathan came home one night and found himself in debt for an upright piano, twenty dollars down and five dollars a month until death. Milly thought it was “just simply grand” and contracted to begin music lessons before she had sheets enough for her beds. But her wildest orgies were carried on in the depths of the local “five and ten.”