The Borlands
had a daughter, of about Milly's age,--a thin, anaemic girl who took to
Milly's warmth and eagerness at once. As Milly succinctly summed up the
minister's family,--"They're from Worcester, Mass." To come from New
England seemed to Milly to give the proper stamp of respectability,
while Virginia gave aristocracy.
Mrs. Borland introduced Milly to Mrs. Walter Kemp after the service one
Sunday. Milly knew, as we have seen, that Mrs. Kemp had been a Claxton,
and that the general still lived in the ample mansion which he had built
in the early fifties when he had transferred his fortunes from Virginia
to the prairie city. They were altogether the most considerable people
Milly had ever encountered. And so when Eleanor Kemp called at the
little West Laurence Avenue house, Milly was breathless. Not that Milly
was a snob. She was as kind to the colored choreman as to the minister's
wife, smiling and good-humored with every one. But she had a keen sense
of differences. Unerringly she reached out her hands to the "best" as
she understood the best,--the men and women who were "nice," who were
pleasant to know. And Mrs. Kemp, then a young married woman of
twenty-seven or eight, seemed to the enthusiastic girl quite adorable.
She was tall and slender, with fine oval features and clear brown skin
and dark hair. Her manner was rather distant at first and awed Milly.
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