funeral wreath.  By daily toil and the amicable ignoring of casualness of manner or slights, they managed to cling to the edge of the precipice of social oblivion, into whose depths a lesser degree of assiduity, or a greater sensitiveness, would have plunged them.  Once—­early in Milly’s career, when her ever-ready chatter and her superficial brightness were a novelty, it had seemed for a short time that luck might be glancing towards her.  A young man of foreign title and of Bohemian tastes met her at a studio dance, and, misled by the smartness of her dress and her always carefully carried air of careless prosperity, began to pay a delusive court to her.  For a few weeks all her freshest frocks were worn assiduously and credit was strained to buy new ones.  The flat was adorned with fresh flowers and several new yellow and pale blue cushions appeared at the little teas, which began to assume a more festive air.  Desirable people, who went ordinarily to the teas at long intervals and through reluctant weakness, or sometimes rebellious amiability, were drummed up and brought firmly to the fore.  Milly herself began to look pink and fluffy through mere hopeful good spirits.  Her thin little laugh was heard incessantly, and people amusedly if they were good-tempered, derisively if they were spiteful, wondered if it really would come to something.  But it did not.  The young foreigner suddenly left New York, making his adieus with entire lightness.  There was the end of it.  He had heard something about lack of income and uncertainty of credit, which had suggested to him that discretion was the better part of valour.  He married later a young lady in the West, whose father was a solid person.

Less astute young women, under the circumstances, would have allowed themselves a week or so of headache or influenza, but Milly did not.  She made calls in the new frocks, and with such persistent spirit that she fished forth from the depths of indifferent hospitality two or three excellent invitations.  She wore her freshest pink frock, and an amazingly clever little Parisian diamond crescent in her hair, at the huge Monson ball at Delmonico’s, and it was recorded that it was on that glittering occasion that her “Uncle James” was first brought upon the scene.  He was only mentioned lightly at first.  It was to Milly’s credit that he was not made too much of.  He was casually touched upon as a very rich uncle, who lived in Dakota, and had actually lived there since his youth, letting his few relations know nothing of him.  He had been rather a black sheep as a boy, but Milly’s mother had liked him, and, when he had run away from New York, he had told her what he was going to do, and had kissed her when she cried, and had taken her daguerreotype with him.  Now he had written, and it turned out that he was enormously rich, and was interested in Milly.  From that time Uncle James formed an atmosphere.  He did not appear in New York, but Milly spent the next season in London, and