"Reddon is a clever chap: he's been over before, a couple of years at the Beaux Arts. I suppose he wants more work and didn't like to leave her behind."
"She shouldn't have babies, then," Milly pronounced seriously, feeling her superiority in not thus handicapping her husband in his career.
"It is tough," Bragdon admitted....
They saw a good deal of the Reddons during the voyage. They proved to be not in the least down-hearted over their lot, and quite unaware of Milly's commiseration. They were going to Paris for some desirable professional work, as they might go to San Francisco or Hong Kong, had the path pointed that way. They had babies because that was part of the game when one married, and they brought them along because there was nothing else to do with them. It was all very simple from the Reddon point of view.
Milly considered Mrs. Reddon to be a "nice little thing," and they became chummy. Marion Reddon was a college-trained woman, with much more real culture than her husband or either of the Bragdons. She had read her Greek and Latin and forgotten them, liked pictures and music and books, but preferred babies when they came. Sam Reddon was a high-spirited American boy. He had never meant to study architecture and he hadn't intended to marry or to teach; but having done all these things he still found the world a merry place enough. He played the piano a little and sang Italian songs in an odd falsetto and roamed over the ship in disreputable corduroys, which he had preserved from his student days in Paris, making himself thoroughly at home in all three cabins.
They talked Paris, of course, about which Reddon knew a great deal more than any of the others.
"Where are you going to live? In the Quarter?"
Mrs. Kemp had given Milly the address of an excellent pension near the Arc, at which Sam Reddon expressed a frank disgust.
"Americans and English—the rotten bourgeoisie—why don't you stay in New York?" He figuratively spat upon the proprieties, and Milly was bewildered. "An apartement meublée au cinquième, near the Boul' 'Mich for us, eh, missus?"
Milly had heard that the "Latin Quarter" was dirty, and not "nice." None of her Chicago friends ever stayed there.