The value of a home and a stable position among her fellows, for instance, no matter how small, and so she listens demurely while the man talks hungrily of the Joy of Home and the Beauty of Woman in the Home, "where they belong, not in business." (How Ernestine would give it to him for that, and Hazel, too, Milly thought!)
"You are such a woman, Milly!" he exclaims.—"Just a woman!" and in his voice the expression has a tender, reverential sound that falls pleasantly on Milly's ears. But she says nothing: she does not mean to be "soft" this time. Yet in reply to another compliment, she admits, smiling delphically,—"Yes, I am a woman!"
The man takes up another verse of his song, for he has planned this attack carefully while the swift wheels were turning off the miles between Washington and Chicago.
"You want your little girl to have a home, too, don't you? A real home, your home, where she can get the right sort of start in life?"
"Yes," Milly assents quickly. "The proper kind of home means so much more to a girl than to a boy. If I myself had had—" But she stops before this baseness to poor old Horatio. "I want Virgie's life to be different from mine—so utterly different!"
A wave of self-pity for her loneliness after all her struggle sweeps over her and casts a cloud on her face.
"You can't be a business woman and make that kind of home for your daughter," Duncan persists, pushing forward his point.
Milly shakes her head.
"I'm afraid a woman can't!" she sighs.
(She doesn't feel it necessary to tell him that for almost one hour by the clock she has not been a "business woman," even in the legal sense of the term.)