He smiled good naturedly, and Milly smiled, too. Then Becker added in a childlike burst of confidence:—
"Let me tell you, you did just right, my girl! Don't tie yourself up with any man you can't run with. It don't work. It saves tears and trouble to quit before you're hitched by the parson."
Milly flushed at the frank reference to her broken engagement, then laughed at the crude phrasing. But her heart warmed with the word of sympathy. Gradually she unburdened herself of all her troubles, and at the conclusion the kindly newspaper man said wisely:—
"Never you mind how folks behave, Miss Ridge. Keep a stiff upper lip—hold up your head—and you'll have all of 'em running after you like hens after corn 'fore you know it. That's what happened to me when I went broke that time."
"But I'm not fit to do anything," Milly confessed truthfully, "and I must support myself somehow."
"Why don't you try newspaper work? You are a clever girl and you know the world.... Come to my office to-morrow noon—no, I've got a Washington nob on my hands for lunch—" (Becker was vain of his political influence, which consisted for the most part of entertaining visiting politicians at luncheon.) "Come in 'bout four, and we'll see what we can do to help you out."
With a fatherly nod he hurried off down a side street, and Milly went home with a new fillip to her lively imagination.
As a matter of fact the proprietor of the Star was not entirely disinterested in his kindness. He had been looking for some woman to take "Madame Alpha's" place and furnish the paper with that column of intimate social tittle-tattle about people the readers knew only by name, which every enterprising American newspaper considers a necessary ingredient of the "news." The estimable lady, who signed herself "Madame Alpha," had grown stale in the business, as such social chroniclers usually do. The widow of an esteemed citizen, with wide connections in the older society of the city, she had done very well at first. But she had "fallen down" lamentably, to use Becker's phrase, during the recent period of Chicago's social expansion. She neither knew the new gods and goddesses, nor did she know how to invent stories about their doings.
Becker, who had seen Milly, not merely at the Bowmans, but at many of the more brilliant functions of the Fair season, regarded her as "up-to-date," and further, thought her a nice, lively young woman, who would know the difference between Mrs. Patziki's card party on Garfield Boulevard and a dinner to the French ambassador at the Danner's. It made little difference whether she could write or not, so long as she had the "entry" as he called it. At any rate he would try her.
So Milly began her new career as journalist with much enthusiasm and a sense of self-importance that had been grievously lacking in her enterprises for some time. She thought she had the ability to write—what attractive young American woman doesn't? Her friends thought her clever, and laughed at her little "stories" about people. She set herself industriously to the composition of elaborate articles on "Our Social Leaders," consisting largely of a retrospect and review, for "our social leaders" kept very still during those terrible months of want and panic that followed the gay doings of the great show, or were out of the city. These articles appeared in the Sunday edition, over the nom de plume of the "Débutante." Other women of the regular staff did the card-parties and club news and the West Side stuff.