Not colored Jenny in the kitchen, who had
three or four illegitimate children! Not even all the girls in her
Sunday-school class, some of whom worked in stores, but the cultivated,
refined women who made Homes for Heroes. This belief was like Poetry: it
satisfied and sustained--and it gave an unconscious impulse to her whole
life, that she was never able wholly to escape....
And this was what they called Education in those days.
V
MILLY EXPERIMENTS
Of course Milly had "beaux," as she called them then. There had never
been a time since she was trusted to navigate herself alone upon the
street when she had not attracted to herself other little
persons--chiefly girls, to be sure. For as Milly was wont to confess in
her palmiest days when men flocked around her, she was a "woman's woman"
(and hence inferentially a man's woman, too). Milly very sincerely
preferred her own sex as constant companions. They were more expressive,
communicative, rational. Men were useful: they brought candies, flowers,
theatre parties.
But now the era of young men as distinguished from girls had arrived.
Boys in long trousers with dark upper lips hung about the West Laurence
Avenue house on warm evenings, composing Milly's celebrated "stoop
parties," or wandered with her arm in arm up the broad boulevard to the
Park. And at the Claxtons and the Kemps she met older men who paid
attention to the vivacious, well-developed school-girl.
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