She read some books which her husband got for her,—those breakfast-food culture books provided for just such people, about cities and monuments and history. She was supposed to "read up" about Rome and Florence, where they hoped to go in the spring. But books tired Milly very soon: the unfamiliar names and places meant nothing at all to her. She decided that, as in most cases, one had to have money and plenty of it to enjoy Europe,—to travel and live at the gay hotels, to buy things and get experiences "first hand." Evidently it was not for her, at present.
What she liked best in her life this first winter were the Sunday excursions they made to Fontainebleau, St. Germain, Versailles, and St. Cloud, and other smaller places where the people went. She liked the mixed crowds of chattering French on the river boats and the third-class trains,—loved to talk with the women and children in her careless French, and watch their foreign domesticities.... Best of all, perhaps, were the walks in the Bois with her husband, where she could see the animation of the richer world. On their way back they would often stop at Gagé's for cakes and mild drinks. All the pastry-shops fascinated Milly, they were so bright and clean and chic. The efficiency of French civilization was summed up to her in the patisserie. She liked sweet things and almost made herself ill with the delectable concoctions at Gagé's. That more than anything else this first year came to typify to her Paris,—the people, men as well as women, who came in for their cakes or syrop, the eagle-eyed Madame perched high at the comptoir, holding the entire business in her competent hand, and all the deft girls in their black dresses, nimbly serving, "Oui, Madame! Voici, Monsieur! Que desirez-vous?" etc. She admired the neat glass trays of tempting sweets, the round jars of bonbons, the colored liqueurs, the neat little marble-topped tables. Apparently the patisserie was a popular institution, for people of all sorts and conditions flocked there like flies.
"If you ever die and I have to earn my living," she would say jokingly to her husband, "I know what I should do. I'd run a cake-shop!"
"You'd eat all the cakes yourself," Bragdon rejoined, tearing her away after the eighth or tenth.
She went there by herself sometimes, and became good friends with the reigning Madame, from whom she learned the routine of the manufacture and the sales, as well as the trials and tribulations with les desmoiselles that the manager of a popular pastry shop must have. This Madame liked the pretty, sociable Americaine, always smiled when she entered the shop with her husband, counselled her as to the choicest dainties of the day, asked her opinion deferentially as that of a connoisseur, and made her little gifts. Through the cake-shop Milly came to realize the French, as her husband never did.
So the winter wore away somehow,—the period that Milly remembered as, on the whole, the dullest part of her married life. Her first season in Paris! They might read a little in one of the culture books in their room after dinner, then would take refuge from the damp chill in bed. Jack was less gay here in Paris than he had ever been in Chicago, preoccupied with his work, frequently gloomy, as if he foresaw the failure of his ambitions. Milly felt that he was ungrateful for his fate. Hadn't he the dearest wish of his heart—and her, too?...
Something was wrong, she never knew quite what. The trouble was that she had no job whatever now, and no social distraction to take the place of work. She was the victim of ideas that were utterly beyond her knowledge, ideas that must impersonally carry the Milly Ridges along in their momentum, to their ultimate destruction.
"I ought to be very happy," she said to herself piously. "We both ought to be."
But they weren't.