By October, unbeknown to Milly, Nathan was mailing his mother a few dollars a week for her food and room rent. When he came in off the road he occasionally brought her new clothes. Mrs. Forge was grateful for the clothing but felt it would have been “nicer” in Nathan to give her the money and let her buy her clothes herself. But Nathan wanted the money to go for clothes. She talked quite a lot about it, and not within the immediate family circle, either. III In November, when the Forge house was furnished after some of the most gorgeous and least expensive plans in _House Beautiful_, Milly and Nathan sent my wife and self an invitation to “come up some night and have dinner.” Mary Ann had made a wry face. But for Nathan’s sake—with whose vicissitudes she had become more or less acquainted—she finally consented. Milly had acquired a certain middle-class pride in her establishment by this time. But it was the narrow, pathetic, provincial, poorly bred sort of pride which is ofttimes the worst vulgarity, since it admits a knowledge of the existence of etiquette but refuses to reason it out or work out the finesse of detail which makes living on a certain well-mannered, soft-toned, fine-grained plane an existence of beauty and a joy forever. Milly’s idea of serving a perfect meal was bulk—attuned to brilliance. But in the fine epicurean points of housewifery, she was as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal. She was careful to procure a three-dollar roast, cook it to the best of her ability (and Farmers Cook Book) bedeck it with pretty garnishes, and,—let it set around somewhere until it was clammy and greasy as cold-storage goose and about as delectable. She worked hard to get the appropriate flowers for a centerpiece and forgot the butter plates. She would spend half an afternoon preparing a lavish dessert, and by the time it came to the table the hour was so late and so much that was over-hearty had gone before, that her guests could only nibble at it. Then she accused them of not liking it or finding something the matter with it. She wept angrily when she was finally alone and declared “she wouldn’t get up another feed for nobody” if the whole world starved. Poor Milly! It was a hectic thing,—Trying to Be Somebody! Well, Mary Ann and I went up to Nathan’s. Little Mary, their child, was about six years of age at the time, a red-cheeked, obstreperous little bumpkin who meant well enough but never knew exactly what it was she was supposed to mean. Immediately we got into the house, Milly and her child viewed us as “company” and acquired that same old agonizing woodenness of the lowly-born known as “remembering their manners.”