No, Milly didn’t like society. One agonizing evening was enough. She would be a nervous wreck in two months if she had to endure it night after night as a program. This thing she decided emphatically off in a corner by herself. Nathan was not going to take any job where a steady menu of this sort of thing might be necessary. Not if she could help it,—and she flattered herself that she could and she would. Milly was almost in tears when she finally culled out her husband. “I wanner go home!” she almost cried. “And if you won’t come with me, I’ll go alone!” That a lady and gentleman were talking with Nathan made no difference to Milly. She had enough. She wanted to go home. She meant what she said. Nathan excused himself as adroitly as he could. And Milly “sashayed” from the drawing-room, straight to the dressing-room door. “We must say good night to Mrs. Mosely,” said Nathan, before he started for his own wraps. “Oh, you can do it for me! I don’t ever want to speak to her again! I think she’s horrid! She asked me that joke about the pants and then made me feel like thirty cents when I told it.” “But, Milly, it’ll be almost insult to walk out this way; ordinary courtesy demands you come with me and bid her good night. Don’t you want to be courteous?” “Not to such as her! No! She’s too much of a high-brow! She makes me sick! You can tell her I said so!” Milly got her street clothes and put them on in the hallway,—as she might have “gone off mad” at a surprise party up home when some one present had “slapped her face.” Nathan went to Mrs. Mosely and apologized for his wife’s indisposition. “She’s taken suddenly ill,” he explained, “and I must hurry to the hotel with her at once.” Milly was anything but ill when they went down the steps at last and headed west in the invigorating night air toward the Avenue. Milly continued her comment anent Mrs. Mosely and all Mrs. Mosely’s guests, comparing them to sundry “honest-to-God” folks up in Paris. Nathan was at last stung to remark: “That was a rotten break you made! I should think your own intuitive good taste would have told you that those people think along a little higher plane than a stage hand changing his pants. That might be excellent humor for your father up in Gridley’s tannery. But in a New York drawing-room——” “Well, Gridley’s tannery and Paris and my father are good enough for me! And you needn’t think you’re so all-fired high-brow, either. It wasn’t only a few years ago you was helpin’ skin cows right alongside my father.” “I didn’t do it from choice. I was made to do it.” “I suppose you’ll be telling me next that a continual bill of fare of the ‘class’ we had to-night is what you’d ‘like from choice’?” “Certainly it is! You bet it is! And I intend to have it—if it’s possible to get.” “Well, I’ll tell you one thing, Nathan Forge, you’ll have it without me! If that’s ‘high-brow’, then gimme the ‘flats,’ where people live natural and enjoy themselves!”