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Bragdon's efforts were so supremely concentrated on rolling his own small cart in the push, that he had little spirit to bestow elsewhere, however well he might wish people like the Reddons and others not in his immediate game. "I thought you liked the Reddons," Milly said, half accusingly. "I do what makes you think I don't?" he asked, taking up a pipe preparatory to work.
At least Jack did not yet have that excuse with her. Milly did not think that a man might love even a faded flower like Marion Reddon, if she had kept the sweet savor of her spirit alive.... So the Reddons were in New York, living far out in the impossible hinterland of the Bronx.
So Hazel Fredericks took Virginia to the Reddons and left Milly for this night and day to collect herself from her blow and decide with her brother-in-law's help just what she should do. The large "studio" room of the apartment had an unfamiliar air of disorderliness about it. Bragdon's easel was there and his uncleaned palette. Also a number of canvases were scattered about.
So they went to Florence and afterwards to Rome, where the Reddons, having miraculously procured the price of the railroad tickets at the last moment, joined them and gave them lessons in how to see Europe as the Europeans see it.
"But you love your husband," Milly remarked as if to reassure herself. "Of course I do, or I shouldn't be living with him and bearing his children. But he needs me and the children rather more than I need him which is the better way." The Reddons lived on the fourth floor back of an old lantern-jawed building that tilted uphill behind Ste. Geneviève.
They had lost sight of the Reddons from the moment they entered the Paris train, for the Reddons, having second-class tickets, were forced to wait for a slower train, which they didn't seem to mind as it gave them a chance to see the little town and lunch in a cabaret instead of paying for an expensive meal on the wagon-restaurant as the Bragdons did.
All her feeble efforts to find employment and earn money had failed. She felt herself slipping down, and with all her courageous determination to save herself from social chaos she was like a bird fluttering at the brink of a chasm, unable to wing itself steadily out of danger. The Reddons, she knew, would soon need their apartment, for Marion was coming north in the first warm weather.
Milly gathered that the little woman, in spite of her housekeeping, the one child on the spot, and another coming, had many lively interests and saw far more of Paris, which she loved, than Milly and her husband did. Both the Reddons lived carelessly, but lived hard every minute, taking all their chances, good and bad, of the minutes to come.
The hang-out, as Sam calls it, isn't large, but there's always room somehow." Milly demurred at first, but later when Marion Reddon was obliged to depart hurriedly for the south because one of the children was threatened with tuberculosis, she gratefully accepted the offer of the Reddons' apartment during their absence.
It was a useful philosophy, but not one that Milly wholly admired. Late that afternoon Milly met her husband in a frame of mind much more serene than it was before she saw the Reddons, and told him her momentous news. He seemed more pleased and less disturbed by it than she had supposed possible.
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