“I want a man who has won out in spite of everything!” she cried. “Never mind how Gordon wins out, he will not have won out over enough!”
She wondered while dressing for dinner that night if Nathaniel Forge had come through that jail scrape “with a clean bill of health.”
CHAPTER IV
POOR SOW’S EAR
I
We hear much comment about Genius in this clay-and-paint age. Mediocrity is amazed that there can be persons capable of doing many things and doing them exceptionally well. It fails to grasp that the same brain power and caliber which makes a success of a specialty can be turned with equal success into any line of endeavor and approximate the same general result.
Nathan had gone on the road for the Thorne Knitting Mills as a traveling salesman. He had business experience; he had brains whetted by dilemmas in the box-shop. But most of all he had imagination. And that same imagination, whether applied to poetry, paper boxes or the sale of union suits, brought the same satisfying result.
My friend started at “two thousand a year and commission.” His territory was eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and a portion of middle New York. At the end of his first year he had realized four thousand dollars and Milly wondered if her prospects were not looking up and she hadn’t been a bit wrong about that business of being buncoed? Four thousand a year is nearly eighty dollars a week. The Forges left the Pine Street cottage and took a better house on Preston Hill. And Nathan did a manly thing. He started the task of making the poor mill girl he had married into a lady. He began by taking Milly with him on some of his trips and letting her see life outside a drab Vermont country town.
New York was a revelation to Milly. She had always been a frump in her dress, but Fifth Avenue kindled a spark of incentive in her, and under Nat’s gentle encouragement, she honestly tried to make something of herself. She came back to Paris full of ideas and aspirations. And give her credit. The first thing she did was to junk all the jumble of assorted furniture, get rid of her Woolworth trimmings and try to Be Somebody.
Try to Be Somebody! Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to—try to be somebody!