"It ain't any place for you, dearie," she said. "You just stick to your end of the business, the house—and that's enough."
Milly paid much more attention to the details of their simple housekeeping than she had ever cared to do for herself and Jack. It may have been from a sense of obligation in spending Ernestine's money, for after all the Laundryman was not her legal husband. Or it may have been due to the fact that Ernestine, being another woman, knew and could not be easily bluffed with, "Everybody does that," "You can't get along with less and live, anyhow," etc., as a mere man could. Nor did she like to wheedle a woman. Whatever the cause, Milly gave up her lazy habit of telephoning to the dearest stores for supplies or letting the servants do the ordering, and went forth herself each morning to market. She accepted Ernestine's suggestions about where things could be bought cheaply, and even condescended to enter the large department stores where groceries were sold for cash at wholesale rates. The Laundryman purchased all the supplies for her business, and she knew that buying was a science and a game combined,—a very ancient game which is the basis of "trade." She took it for granted that Milly would play the game to the best advantage for all of them, and after a few attempts at the old slovenly, wasteful method of providing, Milly accepted the situation and did the best she knew how to meet Ernestine's idea. "Number 236" was to be well stocked with an abundance of wholesome food, but there was to be no waste and no "flummery." In a word, "efficiency."
There was almost no friction between them. It would seem that the Laundryman knew how to be both gentle and firm,—the requisites, so the sages say, for successful domesticity. Jack had often been not gentle with Milly, and almost never firm. Milly did not take seriously his constant complaint over bills, and in some way sooner or later got what she wanted. With Ernestine it was quite different: she did not dare let the accounts run on or run over. After the first few equivocations she had her bills ready for examination by the first of the month, and they were reasonably near the figures agreed upon. So, as Ernestine put it, slapping her knee with the cheque-book, "it all goes as slick as paint."
And so, to sum it up in conventional terms, one might call Milly's new marriage a success and expect that the modest little household of "number 236" would go its peaceful way uneventfully to nature's fulfilment of a comfortable middle age—and thus interest us no more. For a time both Ernestine and Milly so believed it would be. But they were deceived. Human affairs, even of the humblest, rarely arrange themselves thus easily and logically.
Milly, in spite of her sincere resolve to be contented with what she had, was growing restless. Once this orderly domestic life of the three in the small house was running smoothly, she began to feel cramped, full of unexpended energies. She would have spent them naturally in entertaining and the usual social activity, to which she had become accustomed as the fit expression of woman's life, but that obviously could not be in the present circumstances. Milly recognized this and did not attempt the impossible. Even if she had had the money, Ernestine was not one who could be made a social figure, nor could she be ignored in her own house. The situation, as has been described, had a flavor of social irregularity, like an unauthorized union, and the social penalty must be paid. With Milly's lean purse there was not much shopping to be done, beyond the daily marketing, and it was dreary to walk the New York streets and gaze into tempting shop windows, though Milly did a good deal of that in her idle hours. She had never cared to read, except as an occasional diversion, or to "improve her mind," as Grandma Ridge might have put it, by lectures such as Hazel Fredericks had once patronized. Lectures bored her, she admitted frankly, unless she knew the lecturer personally. Perhaps Hazel and her set were justified in condemning Milly's general lack of purpose and aim in life. But it should be remembered that the generation with which Milly began had never recognized the desirability of such ideals for women, and Milly, like many of her sisters in the middle walk of life, always resented the assumption that every human being, including women, should have a plan and a purpose in this life. She liked to think of herself as an irresponsible, instinctive vessel of divine fire to bless and inspire. But such vessels very often go on the reefs of passion, and if Milly had not been so thoroughly normal in her instincts, she might have suffered shipwreck before this. Otherwise, they float out at middle age more or less derelict in the human sea, unless they have been captured and converted willy-nilly to some other's purpose. Now Milly was drifting towards that dead sea of purposeless middle age, and instinctively feared her fate.
She felt that her present life with the Laundryman offered her no outlet for her powers, and this was the period when she became fertile in launching schemes for which she displayed a few weeks' intense enthusiasm that gradually died out before Ernestine's chilly good sense. One of the first of these enthusiasms was "Squabs." She tried to interest Ernestine in the business of raising squabs for the market. She had read in some country-life magazine of a woman who had made a very good income by breeding this delicacy for the New York market. Ernestine had talked of buying a farm somewhere near the city for the summers, and Milly thought this could be made into a productive enterprise. "With a man and his wife to run it," they could raise squabs by the thousands. But Ernestine, who had all the business she could attend to with her laundry, was apathetic. She averred that any man and his wife who could make money in the poultry business would be exploiting it for themselves, not for "two green-horn women."
The next proposal was "Violets," and then "Mushrooms," to which Ernestine was equally indifferent. You had to get your market in every case, she suspected. "You don't know how to sell violets or mushrooms, dearie, any more than you know how to raise 'em."
"But I could learn!" Milly pouted. She thought Ernestine was unenterprising and also underrated her ability, just because she had not been a working-woman.
"'Twould cost too much for you to learn," Ernestine replied dryly.