But if Butte is the ugliest city in the United States, she knows

how to make amends. She is alive to her finger-tips. Her streets,

her fine shops, her hotels, her great office buildings, are always

swarming and animated. At no time, not even in the devitalised hours

that precede the dawn, does she sink into that peace which even a

metropolis welcomes. She has the jubilant expression of one who coins

the very air, the thin, sparkling, nervous air, into shining dollars,

and, confident in the inexhaustible riches beneath her feet, knows

that she shall go on coining them forever. Even the squads of miners,

always, owing to the three shifts, to be seen on the street corners,

look satisfied and are invariably well-dressed. Not only do these

mines with their high wages and reasonable hours draw the best class

of workingmen, but there are many college men in them, many more

graduates from the High Schools of Montana. The “Bohunks,” or “dark

men,” an inferior class of Southern Europeans, who live like pigs and

send their wages home, rarely if ever are seen in these groups.

And if Butte be ugly, hopelessly, uncompromisingly ugly, her

compensation is akin to that of many an heiress: she never forgets

that she is the richest hill in the world. Even the hard grip of the

most unassailable trust in America, which has absorbed almost as much

of Montana’s surface as of its hidden treasure, does not interfere

with her prosperity or supreme complacency. And although she has

her pestilential politicians, her grafters and crooks, and is so

tyrannically unionized that the workingman groans under the yoke of his

brother and forgets to curse the trust, yet ability and talent make

good as always; and in that electrified city of permanent prosperity

there is a peculiar condition that offsets its evils: it is a city of

sudden and frequent vacancies. New York, Europe, above all, California,

swarm with former Montanans, particularly of Butte, who have coppered

their nests, and transplanted them with a still higher sense of

achievement.

Ora was thinking of Butte and the world beyond Butte, as she splashed

along through the suddenly melted snow toward her home on the West

Side. The Chinook, loud herald from Japan, had swept down like an army

in the night and turned the crisp white streets to rivers of mud. But

Ora wore stout walking boots, and her short skirt, cut by a master

hand, was wide enough to permit the impatient stride she never had

been able to modify in spite of her philosophy and the altitude. She

walked several miles a day and in all weathers short of a blizzard; but

not until the past few weeks with the admission that her increasing

restlessness, her longing for Europe, was growing out of bonds. She

wondered today if it were Europe she wanted, or merely a change.

She had, of course, no money of her own, and never had ceased to be

grateful that her husband’s prompt and generous allowance made it

unnecessary to ask alms of him. Three times since her marriage he had

suddenly presented her with a check for several hundred dollars and

told her to “give her nerves a chance” either down “on the coast,”

or in New York. She had always fled to New York, remained a month

or six weeks, gone day and night to opera, theatre, concerts, art

exhibitions, not forgetting her tailor and dressmaker; returning to

Butte as refreshed as if she had taken her heart and nerves, overworked

by the altitude, down to the poppy fields of Southern California.

Her vacations and her husband’s never coincided. Mark always departed

at a moment’s notice for Chicago or New York, alleging pressing

business. He returned, after equally pressing delays, well, complacent,

slightly apologetic.

Ora knew that she had but to ask permission to spend the rest of

the winter in New York, for not only was Mark the most indulgent of

husbands, but he was proud of his wife’s connections in the American

Mecca, not unwilling to read references in the Butte newspapers to her

sojourn among them. The “best people” of these Western towns rarely

have either friends or relatives in the great cities of the East. The

hardy pioneer is not recruited from the aristocracies of the world, and

the dynamic men and women that have made the West what it is have the

blood of the old pioneers in them.

Ora was one of the few exceptions. Her father had been the last of a

distinguished line of jurists unbroken since Jonathan Stratton went

down with Alexander Hamilton in the death struggle between the Federal

and the new Republican party. Ora’s mother, one of New York’s imported

beauties for a season, who had languished theretofore on the remnants

of a Louisiana plantation, impecunious and ambitious, but inexperienced

and superficially imaginative, married the handsome and brilliant

lawyer for love, conceiving that it would be romantic to spend a few

years in a mining camp, where she, indubitably, would be its dominant

lady. Butte did not come up to her ideas of romance. Nor had she found

it possible to dislodge the passively determined women with the pioneer

blood in their veins. The fumes afflicted her delicate lungs, the

altitude her far more delicate nerves. Judge Stratton deposited her in

the drawing-room of an eastern bound train with increasing relish. Had

it not been for his little girl he would have bade her upon the second

or third of these migrations to establish herself in Paris and return

no more.

During these long pilgrimages Ora, even while attending school in New

York, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vevey, had seen something of society, for

Mrs. Stratton was ever surrounded by it, and did not approve of the

effect of boarding school diet on the complexion. But the ardours of

her mind, encouraged always by her father, who never was too busy to

write to her, had made her indifferent to the advantages prized by Mrs.

Stratton.

Today she was conscious of a keen rebellious desire for something more

frivolous, light, exciting, than had entered her life for many a year.

There can be little variety and no surprises in the social life of a

small community--for even scandal and divorce grow monotonous--and

although she could always enjoy an hour’s intellectual companionship

with the professors of the School of Mines, whenever it pleased her

to summon them, Ora, for the first time in her twenty-six years, had

drifted into a condition of mind where intellectual revels made no

appeal to her whatever.

She had wondered before this if her life would have been purely mental

had her obligations been different, but had dismissed the thought as

not only dangerous but ungrateful. She had reason to go on her knees

to her intellect, its ambitions and its furniture, for without it life

would have been insupportable. She ordered her quickening ego back

to the rear, or the depths, or wherever it bided its time, none too

amenable; she was only beginning to guess the proportions it might

assume if encouraged; the vague phantoms floating across her mind,

will-o’-the-wisps in a fog bank, frightened her. Several months since

she had set her lips, and her mind the task of acquiring the Russian

language. It had always been her experience that nothing compared with

a new language as a mental usurper.

She had entered into a deliberate partnership with a man who protected

and supported her, and she would keep the letter, far as its spirit

might be beyond the reach of her will. Even were she to become

financially independent, it was doubtful if she would leave him for

a long period; and for New York and its social diversions she cared

not at all. What she wanted was adventure--she stumbled on the word,

and stopped with a gasp. Adventure. For the first time she wished she

were a man. She would pack two mules with a prospector’s outfit and

disappear into the mountains.

She swung her mind to the Russian grammar, enough to impale it in

the death agony; but when she had entered her home, and, after a

visit to her leisurely cook, who was a unionized socialist, ascended

to her bedroom and stood before her mirror, she decided that it was

her singular interview with the wife of Gregory Compton that had

thrown her mind off its delicate balance. She recalled that Mrs.

Compton--certainly an interesting creature in spite of her appalling

commonness--had told her flagrantly that she was young, pretty, and

attractive to men, even as are young and pretty women without too much

brains. The compliment--or was it the suggestion?--had thrilled her,

and it thrilled her again. Men sometimes had tried to make love to

her, but she had ascribed such charm as she appeared to possess to the

automatically vibrating magnet of youth; and although she had never

been above a passing flirtation, either in her mother’s salon or in

Butte, she merely had been bored if the party of the other part had

taken his courage in his hands on the morrow. Scruples did not trouble

her. The American woman, she would have reasoned, is traditionally

“cold.” American men, brought up on her code of ethics, are able to

take care of themselves.

Had she been superficial in her conclusions? Could she attract men

more potently than by a merely girlish charm and a vivacious mind? Her

memory ran rapidly over the functions of the winter, particularly the

dinners and dances. She could not recall a passing conquest. She was

angry to feel herself shiver, but she jerked off her hat, and the pins

out of her fine abundant hair. She was twenty-six. Had she gone off?

Faded? She never had been called a beauty, never had had the vanity

to think herself a beauty, but she remembered that sometimes in an

animated company she had glanced into the passing mirror and thought

herself quite pretty, with her pink cheeks and sparkling eyes. But

normally she was too washed-out for beauty, however good her features

might be, and of course she had no figure at all. She dressed well from

force of habit, and she had the carriage at least to set off smartly

cut garments, but as much might be said of a dressmaker’s “form.”

And her skin was sallow and sunburned and weather-beaten and dry, as

any neglected skin in a high altitude is sure to be. Once it had been

as white as her native snows. Her hair, also the victim of the high

dry air, and exposed to the elements for hours together, was more

colourless than Nature had made it--dull--dead. She held out a strand

in dismay, remembering how her _cendré_ hair had been admired in Paris;

then with a sudden sense of relief (it escaped from the cellar where

her ego was immured on bread and water) she informed herself that it

was her duty to invoke the services of Miss Ruby Miller. No woman with

proper pride--or self-respect--would let her skin go to pot, no, not

at any age; certainly not at twenty-six. She recalled an impulsive

remark of Miss Miller’s a few months since when arranging her hair for

a fancy-dress ball, and gave another sigh--of hope.

So does Nature avenge herself.

X

She heard her husband’s voice as he entered the house, and hastily

changed her walking suit for one of the soft tea gowns she wore when

they were alone. This was a simple thing of a Copenhagen-blue silk,

with a guimpe of fine white net, and trimmed about the neck and half

sleeves with the newest and softest of the year’s laces. She noticed

with some satisfaction that her neck, below the collar line, was very

white; and she suddenly covered the rest of it with powder, then rubbed

the puff over her face. It was ordinary “baby powder” for the bath,

for she never had indulged in toilet accessories, but it answered

its purpose, if only to demonstrate what she might have been had she

safeguarded the gifts of nature. And the dull blue gown was suddenly

becoming.

Her husband, who had spent the intervening time in the library, ran

upstairs whistling in spite of his girth--he was the lightest dancer in

Butte--and knocked on her door before going to his own room.

“Say,” he said, as he chucked her under the chin, and kissed her

maritally, “but you look all right. Run down stairs and hold your

breath until I’ve made myself beautiful. I’ve got big news for you.”

She rustled softly down the stair, wondering what the news might be,

but not unduly interested. Mark was always excited over his new cases.

Perhaps he had been retained by Amalgamated. She hoped so. He deserved

it, for he worked harder than anyone knew. And she liked him sincerely,

quite without mitigation now that the years had taught him the folly of

being in love with her.

And he certainly had given her a pretty home. The house was not large

enough to be pointed out by the conductor of the “Seeing Butte Car,”

but it had been designed by a first rate architect, and had a certain

air of spaciousness within. Mrs. Stratton had furnished a flat in

Paris two years before her husband’s death, her excuse being that the

interior of the Butte house got on her nerves, and there was no other

way to take in household goods free of duty. Ora had shipped them when

the news of her father’s death and their own poverty came, knowing that

she would get a better price for the furniture in Butte, where someone

always was building, than in Paris.

Before it arrived she had made up her mind to marry Mark Blake, and

although it was several years before they had a house she kept it in

storage. In consequence her little drawing-room with its gay light

formal French furniture was unique in Butte, city of substantial and

tasteful (sometimes) but quite unindividual homes. Mark was thankful

that he was light of foot, less the bull in the china shop than he

looked, and would have preferred red walls, an oriental divan and

Persian rugs. He felt more at home in the library, a really large room

lined from floor to ceiling not only with Ora’s but Judge Stratton’s

books, which Mark had bought for a song at the auction; and further

embellished with deep leather chairs and several superb pieces of

carved Italian furniture. Ora spent the greater part of her allowance

on books, and many hours of her day in this room. But tonight she

deliberately went into the frivolous French parlour, turned on all the

lights, and sat down to await her husband’s reappearance.

Mark, who had taken kindly to the idea of dressing for dinner, came

running downstairs in a few moments.

“In the doll’s house?” he called out, as he saw the illumination in the

drawing-room. “Oh, come on into a real room and mix me a cocktail.”

“It isn’t good for you to drink cocktails so long before eating;

Huldah, who receives ‘The People’s War Cry’ on Monday, informed me that

dinner would be half an hour late.”

“I wish you’d chuck that wooden-faced leaden-footed apology for a

servant. This is the third time----”

“And get a worse? Butte rains efficient servants! Please sit down.

I--_feel_ like this room tonight. You may smoke.”

“Thanks. I believe this is the first time you have given me permission.

But I’m bound to say the room suits you.”

Ora sat in a _chaise-longue_ of the XV^{me} Siècle, a piece of

furniture whose awkward grace gives a woman’s arts full scope. Much

exercise had preserved the natural suppleness of Ora’s body and she had

ancestral memories of all arts and wiles. Mark seated himself on the

edge of a stiff little sofa covered with faded Aubusson tapestry, and

hunched his shoulders.

“If the French women furnish their rooms like this I don’t believe

all that’s said about them,” he commented wisely. “Men like to be

comfortable even when they’re looking at a pretty woman.”

“Mama let me choose the furniture for this room, and I wasn’t thinking

much about your sex at the time. I--I think it expressed a side of me

that I wasn’t conscious of then.”

“It’s a pretty room all right.” Mark lit the consolatory cigarette.

“But not to sit in. What struck you tonight?”

“Oh, I’d been thinking of Paris.”

Mark’s face was large and round and bland; it was only when he drew his

brows together that one saw how small and sharp his eyes were.

“H’m. I’ve wondered sometimes if you weren’t hankering after Europe. I

suppose it gets into the blood.”

“Oh, yes, it gets into the blood!” Ora spoke lightly, but she was

astonished at his insight.

“I’ve never been able to send you--not as you were used to going--I

don’t see you doing anything on the cheap----”

“Oh, my dear Mark, you are goodness itself. I’ve thought very little

about it, really.”

“Suppose you found yourself suddenly rich, would you light out and

leave me?”

“We’d go together. It would be great fun being your cicerone.”

“No chance! I’m going to be a rich man inside the next ten years, and

here I stick. And I don’t see myself travelling on a woman’s money,

either. But I suppose you’d be like all the rest if you could afford

it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Of course I look forward to spending a year in

Europe once more--I’d hardly be human if I didn’t. But I can wait for

you.”

“I’ve always admired your philosophy,” he said grimly. “And now I’ve

got a chance to put it to a real test. I believe you are in a way, if

not to be rich, at least to make a pretty good haul.”

“What do you mean?” Ora sat up straight.

“Your father made a good many wild-cat investments when he first came

out here, and the one he apparently thought the worst, for I found no

mention of it among his papers, was the Oro Fino Primo mine, which he

bought from a couple of sharks in the year you were born--that’s where

you got your name, I guess. One of the men was a well known prospector

and the Judge thought he was safe. The ore assayed about eighty dollars

a ton, so he took over the claim, paid the Lord knows how much to the

prospector, who promptly lit out, had it patented, and set a small crew

to work under a manager. They found nothing but low grade ore, which

in those days roused about as much enthusiasm as country rock. The

mine had been salted, of course. It was some time before your father

would give up, and he spent more than the necessary amount of money

to perfect the patent; always hoping. When he was finally convinced

there was nothing in it he quit. And it was characteristic of your

father that when he quit he quit for good. He simply dismissed the

thing from his mind. Well, times have changed since then. New processes

and more railroads have caused fortunes to be made out of low grade

ore when there is enough of it. Some people would rather have a big

lode of low grade ore than a pockety vein of rich quartz. As you know,

abandoned mines are being leased all over the state, and abandoned

prospect holes investigated. Well, there you are. This morning two

mining engineers from New York came into my office with a tale of woe.

They came out here to look about, and after considerable travel within

a reasonable distance of railroads found an old prospect hole with a

shaft sunk about fifty feet. It looked abandoned all right, but as

the dump was still there and they liked the looks of it they went to

the De Smet ranch house--the hole is just over the border of Greg’s

ranch--and made inquiries. Oakley, who is a monomaniac on the subject

of intensive farming and doesn’t know a mine from a gopher hole, told

them that the adjacent land belonged to no one but the government.

So they staked their claim, recorded it in Virginia City, retimbered

the shaft and sank it twenty feet deeper. They began to take out ore

that looked good for fifteen dollars a ton. Then along comes an old

prospector and tells them the story of the mine. They leave their two

miners on the job and post up to Helena to have the records examined

in the Land Office. There, sure enough, they find that the mine was

duly patented by Judge Stratton, and all of the government requirements

complied with. So they come to me. They want a bond and lease for

three years--which means they may have the privilege of buying at the

end of the lease--and offer you ten per cent. on the net proceeds. I

haven’t given them my answer yet, for I’m going to take Greg out there

next Sunday and have a look at it. There was a sort of suppressed

get-rich-quickishness in their manner, and their offer was not what

you would call munificent. Greg is a born geologist, to say nothing

of his training. I don’t mean so much in the School of Mines, but he

was always gophering about with old prospectors, and ran away into the

mountains several times when his father was alive. Never showed up all

summer. He’s at ore now every spare moment he gets, and is as good an

assayer as there is in the state. If there’s mineral on his own ranch

he’ll find it, and if there isn’t he’ll find it elsewhere. So, I do

nothing till he’s looked the property over. But in any case I think I

can promise you a good lump of money.”

Ora’s breath was short. Her face had been scarlet for a few moments

but now showed quite pale under the tan and powder. When her husband

finished, however, and she replied, “How jolly,” her voice was quite

steady.

“And shall you fly off and leave me if it pans out?”

“Of course not. What do you take me for?”

“To tell you the truth it will mean a good deal to me if you stay until

the fall. I’ve a client coming out here from New York whom I am trying

to persuade to buy the old Iron Hat mine. There’s a fortune in it for

anyone with money enough to spend rebuilding the old works and putting

in new machinery and timbers; and a big rake-off for me, if I put the

deal through. Well, this client figures to bring his wife and daughter,

and you could help me a lot--persuade them they’d have the time of

their lives if they spent several months of every year out here for

a while--he’s a domestic sort of man. After that take a flyer if you

like. You deserve it.”

“How nice of you! Here is dinner at last.” Ora felt almost physically

sick, so dazzling had been the sudden prospect of deliverance,

followed by the certainty, even before her husband asked for the

diplomatic assistance she so often had given him, that she could not

take advantage of it. Noblesse oblige! For the moment she hated her

watchword.

She mixed a cocktail with steady hand. “I’ll indulge in a perfect orgie

of clothes!” she said gaily. “And import a chef. By the way,” she

added, as she seated herself at the table and straightened the knives

and forks beside her plate, “what do you think I let myself in for

today?”

“Not been speculating? There’s a quart of Worcestershire in this soup.”

“I’ll certainly treat you to a chef. No, not speculating--I wonder if

it mightn’t be that? I called on your friend’s wife----”

“Good girl! She’s not your sort, but she’s Greg’s wife----”

“I thought she was quite terrible at first, but I soon became

interested. She’s clever in her way, ignorant as she is, and has

individuality. Before I knew it I had offered to take a hand in her

education----”

“Good lord! What sort of a hand?”

“Oh, just showing her my portfolios, giving her some idea of art. It

sounds very elemental, but one must begin somewhere. She knows so

little that it will be like teaching a child a b c.”

“I’m afraid it will bore you.”

“No, I like the idea. It is something new, and change is good for the

soul. I have an idea that I shall continue to find her as interesting

as I intend she shall find the ‘lessons’.”

“She’ll get more than lessons on art. She’ll get a good tone down, and

she needs that all right. Poor old Greg! He deserved the best and he

got Ida Hook. I tried to head him off but I might as well have tried to

head off a stampede to a new gold diggings. He ought to have married a

lady, that’s what.”

Ora glanced up quickly, then, thankful that her husband was intent upon

his carving, dropped her eyes. It was the first time he had ever hinted

at the differences of class. In his boyhood there had been a mighty

gulf between his mother and the haughty Mrs. Stratton who employed her

in what was then the finest house in Butte. But he was too thoroughly

imbued with the spirit of the West, in which he had spent his life,

to recognise any difference in class save that which was determined

by income. As soon as his own abilities, industry, and the turn of

Fortune’s wheel, placed him in a position to offer support to the two

dainty women that had been his ideals from boyhood, he knew himself to

be their equal, without exhausting himself in analysis.

As for Ora, the West was quick in her blood, in spite of her heritage

and education. Her father had assumed the virtue of democracy when

he settled in Montana. In the course of a few years a genuine liking

and enthusiasm for his adopted state, as well as daily associations,

transformed him into as typical a Westerner as the West ever turned out

of her ruthless crucible. He even wore a Stetson hat when he visited

New York. His wife’s “airs” had inspired him with an increasing disgust

which was one of the most honest emotions of his life, and the text

of his repeated warnings to his daughter, whom he was forced to leave

to the daily guidance of his legal wife (Ora’s continued presence

in Butte, would, in truth, have caused him much embarrassment), had

been to cherish her Western birthright as the most precious of her

possessions.

“Remember this is the twentieth century,” he had written to her not

long before his death. “There is no society in the world today that

cannot be invaded by a combination of money, brains, and a certain

social talent--common enough. The modern man, particularly in the

United States, makes himself. His ancestors count for nothing, if he

doesn’t. If he does they may be a good asset, for they (possibly) have

given him breeding ready-made, moral fibre, and a brain of better

composition than the average man of the people can expect. But that is

only by the way. The two most potent factors in the world today are

money and the waxing, rising, imperishable democratic spirit. That was

reborn out here in the West, and the West is invading and absorbing

the East. The old un-American social standards of the East are

expiring in the present generation, which resort to every absurdity to

maintain them; its self-consciousness betraying its recognition of the

inevitable. Twenty years hence this class will be, if still clinging

to its spar, as much of a national joke as the Western women were when

they first flashed their diamonds in Peacock Alley. That phase, you

may notice, is so dead that the comic papers have forgotten it. The

phase was inevitable, but our women are now so accustomed to their

money that they are not to be distinguished from wealthy women anywhere

except that their natural hospitality and independence make them seem

more sure of themselves. Of course the innately vulgar are to be found

everywhere, and nowhere more abundantly than in New York.

“Twenty years from now, the West will have overrun the East; it will

have helped itself with both hands to all the older civilisation has to

give, and it will have made New York as democratic as Butte--or London!

So don’t let yourself grow up with any old-fashioned nonsense in your

head. I want you to start out in life modern to the core, unhampered

by any of the obsolete notions that make your mother and most of our

relations a sort of premature has-beens. When your time comes to

marry, select a Western man who either has made his own fortune or

has the ability to make it. Don’t give a thought to his origin if his

education is good, and his manners good enough. You can supply the

frills. I wouldn’t have you marry a man that lacked the fundamentals of

education at least, but better that than one whose brain is so full of

old-fashioned ideas that it has no room for those that are born every

minute. And I hope you will settle here in this state and do something

for it, either through the abilities of the man you marry or with your

own. It isn’t only the men that build up a new state. And if you marry

a foreigner never let me see nor hear from you again. They are all very

well in their way, but it is not our way.”

Ora, who had worshipped her father and admired him above all men, never

forgot a word he uttered, and knew his letters by heart. Possibly it

was the memory of this last of his admonitions which had enabled her

to sustain the shock of a proposal from the son of her mother’s old

seamstress and of a miner who had died in his overalls underground.

It is doubtful if she would have been conscious of the shock had it

not been for Mrs. Stratton’s lamentations. That lady from her sofa in

one of the humbler Blocks, had sent wail after wail in the direction

of the impertinent aspirant. Ora, during the brief period in which

she made her decision, heard so much about the “bluest blood of the

South,” and the titled foreigners whom she apparently could have had

for the accepting when she was supposed to belong to the Millionaire

Sisterhood, that she began to ponder upon the violent contrasts

embodied in Mark with something like rapture. After the marriage was

accomplished, Mrs. Stratton had the grace to wail in solitude, and

shortly after moved on to a world where only the archangels are titled

and never have been known to marry. Ora had not given the matter

another thought. Mark had been carefully brought up by a refined little

woman, his vicious tendencies had been negligible, and he was too

keen to graduate from the High School and make his start in life to

waste time in even the milder forms of dissipation. When he married he

adapted himself imperceptibly to the new social world he entered; if

not a Beau Brummel, nor an Admirable Crichton, he never would disgrace

his aristocratic wife; and, unlike Judge Stratton, he wore a silk hat

in New York.

His last remark apparently had been a mere vapour from his subconscious

mind, for he went on as soon as he had taken the edge from his

appetite, “Perhaps Ida Hook can be made into one. I’ve seen waitresses

and chambermaids metamorphosed by a million or two so that their own

husbands wouldn’t recognise them if they stayed away too long. But

it takes time, and Ida has an opinion of herself that would make an

English duchess feel like a slag dump. Say--do you know it was through

me Greg met her? It was that week you were out on the Kelley ranch.

I met two or three of the old crowd on the street and nothing would

do but that I should go to their picnic for the sake of old times.

Greg was in town and I persuaded him to come along. Didn’t want to,

but I talked him over. Guess there’s no escaping our fate. Possibly

I couldn’t have corralled him if it hadn’t been for reaction--he’d

been whooping it up on The Flat. Well, I wished afterward that I’d

left him to play the wheel and all the rest of it for a while longer.

Greg never loses his head--that is to say he never did till he met Ida

Hook. The sporting life never took a hold on him, for while he went

in for it with the deep deliberation that was born in him, it’s just

that deliberation that saves him from going too far. He cuts loose

the minute he figured out beforehand to cut loose, and all the king’s

horses--or all the other attractions--couldn’t make him put in another

second. A girl shot herself one night out at the Five Mile House

because he suddenly said good-bye and turned on his heel. She knew he

meant it. He never even turned round when he heard her drop----”

“What a brute!”

“Greg? Not he. I’ve known him to sit up all night with a sick dog----”

“I hate people that are kind to animals and cruel to one another.”

“Greg isn’t cruel. He said he was going and he went; that’s all. It’s

his way. Girls of that kind are trash, anyhow, and when a woman goes

into the sporting life she knows enough to take sporting chances.”

“You are as bad as he.”

Mark stared at her in open-eyed amazement. He never had seen her really

roused before. “Don’t you bother your dear little head,” he said

soothingly. “Angels like you don’t know anything about that sort of

life--and don’t need to.”

Ora’s anger vanished in laughter. “Well, suppose you give me a hint

about his wife. I really am interested, and delighted at the prospect

of being of some use in the world.”

“You’re all right! Ida--well, I guess you’ll do a lot for her, by just

having her round. She’s no fool--and she certainly is a looker. If you

tone her down and polish her up I’ll feel it’s a sort of favour to

myself. Greg’ll be one of the richest men in this country some day,--if

he has to walk over a few thousand fellow citizens to get there--and I

don’t want to see him queered by a woman. Seen that before.”

“I intend to do my best, but for her sake, not his----”

“Say!” It was patent that Mark had an inspiration. “Why not take Ida

with you to Europe? I don’t like the idea of a dainty little thing like

you” (Ora was five feet six) “travelling alone, and a husky girl like

Ida could take care of you while putting on a few coats of European

polish. Greg can afford it; he must have cleared a good many thousands

on his ranch during the last two years, besides what I’ve turned over

for him; and he can live here with me and get all the comforts of

home. I’ll let you off for six months. What do you say?”

Ora was looking at him with pink cheeks and bright eyes. “You are sure

you won’t mind?”

“I’ll miss you like fun, of course; especially when you look as pretty

as you do this minute, but I think it would be a good thing for you and

better for Ida--and I’ll fire this cook.”

“Will Mr. Compton give his consent?”

“No one on God’s earth would take chances on what Gregory Compton would

do until he had done it, but I don’t mind throwing a guess that he

could live without Ida for six months and not ask me to dry his tears.

And there isn’t a mean bone in his body.”

“It would interest me immensely to take Mrs. Compton abroad. Now hurry

if you expect to get a seat at one of the bridge tables. It is late----”

“I rather thought I’d like to stay and talk to you----”

“How polite of you! But I’m tired out and going straight to bed. So

toddle along.”

XI

“Tailored suits have to be made by a tailor, but I’d like first rate to

copy this one you call a little afternoon frock. It’s got the style all

right, and I could get some cheap nice-looking stuff.”

Ida was gloating over Ora’s limited but fashionable wardrobe, and

while she held the smart afternoon frock out at arm’s length, her eye

wandered to an evening gown of blue satin and chiffon that lay over the

back of a chair.

“Glory!” she sighed. “But I’d like to wear a real gown like that.

Low-neck, short sleeves! I’ve got the neck and arms too, you bet----”

“Why not copy it?” Ora was full of enthusiasm once more. “You can do it

here, and I have an excellent seamstress----”

“Where’d I wear a rig like that? Even if I made it in China silk and

Greg took me anywheres, I couldn’t. We don’t go in for real low necks

in our bunch.”

“But surely you’ll go to the Junior Prom?”

Ida opened her mouth as well as her eyes. “The Junior Prom? I never

thought of it. Of course I’d be asked, Greg being in the Junior Class

and all----”

“Naturally.”

Ida frowned. “Well, I ain’t going. I said I wouldn’t go anywheres--to

any swell blowouts, until I’m as big as anybody there.”

“But the School of Mines is composed of young men of all classes. Each

asks his friends. The Prom is anything but an exclusive affair. You go

out to the Garden dances on Friday nights in summer?”

“Oh, in that jam--and everybody wearing their suits, or any old

thing----”

“Well, I think you should go to the Prom. Mr. Compton is the star pupil

in the School of Mines. The professors talk of no one else. I rather

think your absence would cause comment.”

“Well--maybe I’ll go. I’d like to all right. But I can’t wear low-neck.

I guess you know it wouldn’t do.”

“No doubt you are right.” Ora made no attempt at conversion; it was

encouraging that Ida had certain inclinations toward good taste, even

if they were prompted by expediency.

“Jimminy, but your room’s pretty!” exclaimed Ida. “Mine’s pink--but

lawsy!”

She gazed about the room, which, although she never had seen the sea,

recalled descriptions of its shells washed by its foam. She knit her

brows. “I guess it takes experience, and seein’ things,” she muttered.

Her eyes travelled to the little bed in one corner. It would have

looked like a nun’s, so narrow and inconspicuous was it, had it not

been for its cover of pale pink satin under the same filmy lace.

“Sakes alive!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you sleep with your husband?”

Ora was angry to feel herself coloring. She answered haughtily, “We

have separate rooms. It is the custom--I mean--I have always seen----”

“I’ve heard it was the stunt among swells, but I don’t hold to it. It’s

only at night that you’ve really got a chance to know where a man is;

and the more rope you give him the more he’ll take. What’s to prevent

Mark slippin’ out when he thinks you’re asleep? Or coming home any old

time? Besides, some men talk in their sleep. That gives you another

hold. I’m always hoping Greg will, as he talks so little when he’s

awake. You bet your life he never gets a room to himself.”

“Poor Mr. Compton!” thought Ora. “I fancy he’ll expiate.” “Shall we go

downstairs?” she asked. “I got my portfolios out this morning.”

She tactfully had shown Ida her wardrobe first, and the guest descended

to the library in high good humour. For an hour they hung over the

contents of the Italian portfolios. Ida was enchanted with the castles

and ruins, listened eagerly to the legends, and was proud of her

own knowledge of the horrors enacted in the Coliseum. But over the

photographs of the masterpieces in the Pitti and the Uffizi she frankly

yawned.

“No more cross-eyed saints, and fat babies and shameless sporting women

in mine,” she announced. “Them virgins sitting on thrones, holding

four-year-olds trying to look like six months, make me tired.”

“Oh, well, I fancy you must see the old masters for the first time in

their proper setting--and wonderful colouring----” Ora wondered if the

masterpieces would appear somewhat overrated to herself if seen for the

first time in Butte. It certainly was interesting to watch the effect

of fixed standards--or superstitions--upon an untrained but remarkably

sharp mind.

“That Last Supper looks like they’d been eating the paint,” pursued Ida.

Ora laughed. “I shan’t show you any more pictures today. This furniture

is Italian--Florentine and Venetian. Let me tell you something about

it.”

“I’d like to see all your rooms.” Ida rose and stretched herself

luxuriously. Ora thought she looked like a beautiful Persian cat.

“Houses interest me mor’n pictures, although I’ll buy them too some

day. Not old masters, though. They’d give me the willys. This carved

oak with faded gilt panels is a dream!” she exclaimed with instant

appreciation. “I’d learn wood-carving if there was anyone in this

God-forsaken camp to teach it.”

Ora clapped her hands, and once more, to Ida’s startled eyes she looked

like a very young girl. “I studied several of the crafts when I was in

Germany,” she cried, “wood-carving, brass-hammering, enamelling. I’ll

set up a workshop--let me see, the attic would be the best place, and

the furnace warms it--and teach you, and work myself. It’s just what I

need. I wonder I never thought of it----”

“Need what?” interrupted Ida sharply.

“Oh, a relief from too much study. There’s nothing like a craft for

mental workers--I should have thought of it before,” she repeated.

“What do you say?”

“I’d like it first rate, and I guess you’ll find me quick enough with

my hands, whatever you think of my cocoanut.”

“I think very highly of your cocoanut. This is my little drawing-room.”

Ida stood on the threshold for a few moments without comment. She

had never cast a thought to her Puritan inheritance, but anger,

disapproval, possessed her. She hated the room, but had no reason to

give.

“You don’t like my favourite room?” asked Ora, who was watching her

curiously.

“Is it your favourite room?” She turned this over. “No, I guess I like

the heavy, solid, durable things best.” She struggled for her reasons.

“You get your money’s worth in them. This looks like the first Chinook

would blow it clear over into North Dakota, or as if you might come

in some morning and find a heap of dust where it had been the night

before--like a corpse when the air’s let in. I didn’t mind your bedroom

being dainty and looking like some sea shells I saw once in a picture

frame,--it looks all of a piece, too, you might say; but this--with

them queer thin faded out chairs and sofas--the colours on the wood

even, and them pictures over the doors and mantel look like they would

do the final disappearing act while you wait--well, there’s something

kinder mysterious--ghostly--it looks so stiff--and--at the same

time--so kinder immoral----”

“I wonder if what you are groping for is the atmosphere of the past,

which all old furniture must have, particularly if rearranged in

something like its original setting.” Ora was regarding her with a new

interest. “This furniture came out of a _hôtel_--what we would call a

residence--with a history--several histories, I should think--and I

fancy it was all frivolous, and wicked, and exciting----”

“I ain’t no spiritualist!” said Ida tartly. “Is that what you’re

driving at?”

“I don’t know that I was thinking of occultism, even,” said Ora

lightly. “But it is interesting to find these old things have

atmosphere for you as well as for me----”

“Why is it your favourite room? Because it has ‘atmosphere’?”

“I don’t know. I doubt if I have ever given the matter a thought.”

“So this is your favourite room.” Ida turned her back on it. “H’m.

Well, maybe I’ll understand some things better one of these days than

I do now. Perhaps,” with one of her uncanny dashes of intuition, “I’ll

understand it when I do you.”

“Let us go up to the attic and look it over. I’ll have the table and

benches made tomorrow.” Something was moving toward expression in her

own mind, but she flung it aside and ran up the stair followed by Ida,

who dismissed the subject as promptly.

XII

There had been a good deal of haggling over the lease of the Oro Fino

Primo mine, the engineers demanding a three years’ lease and bond,

proposing to purchase it at the end of that period for fifty thousand

dollars. Nor were they willing to pay more than ten per cent. in

royalty, displaying the assay report on the ore and arguing that after

the necessary outlay on development work, the ore body might be too

small to repay them.

Mark, however, was determined not to close with them until he had

visited the claim with Gregory Compton, and this proved to be

impossible for several weeks. The engineers, unable to proceed, had

dismissed their men. They threatened to withdraw their offer and look

for another abandoned property. Mark told them to go ahead, and they

remained in Butte.

In the course of a month Mark and Gregory were both free on a Sunday.

They took a train for Pony, hired a rig and drove over to the Stratton

claim, dignified by the name of mine.

The claim was on a small tableland between Gregory’s own hill, which

terminated just beyond the borders of his ranch, and another slope

covered with pines and firs. The engineers had put up a windlass,

retimbered the shaft, sunk it twenty feet lower, and added a pile of

dirty looking ore to the original half-obliterated heap about the

collar of the shaft.

Gregory picked up half a dozen pieces of various sizes and examined

them. “Their assay was about right, I should think,” he said. “Looks

like good low grade ore, but not too good. It will do no harm to assay

it myself, however,” and he dropped the sample into the pocket of

his coat. Suddenly he gave a startled exclamation, and Mark saw his

nostrils dilate, his nose almost point, as he darted forward and kicked

aside a heap of loosely piled quartz. Then he knelt down and lifted

out several lumps of greyish-black ore.

“What is it?” asked Mark curiously, and feeling something of the

excitement of the hunter whose gun is trained on a bear. “D’you mean

they’ve found copper glance?”

“At a depth of sixty feet? Not exactly. This is a basic igneous rock

called pyroxenite, that may not be rich in gold but is more than likely

to be--particularly as our friends have hidden it so carefully and said

nothing about it. It may assay anywhere from ten dollars a ton to five

hundred. I’m going down.”

The shaft was inclined, four by eight, and timbered with lagging.

Gregory lit the candle he had brought and descended the ladder. He

remained below about ten minutes; when he returned to the surface he

was excited and triumphant.

“They’ve begun to drift on the vein,” he announced. “They’ve gone about

three feet--it must have been then they learned the history of the

claim. It’s pyroxenite all right, every inch of it.”

“Well, damn them!” said Mark.

“They can’t plead that they didn’t recognise the ore, uncommon as it

is, because they began to drift the moment they struck the vein. It

dips toward the ranch,” he added abruptly.

Mark whistled. “It’s pretty close. That would be a kettle of fish--if

it apexed on your land! Lawsuit. Friendship of a lifetime broken. The

beautiful Mrs. Mark Blake brings suit against the now famous Gregory

Compton----”

“Oh, nonsense!” said Gregory shortly. But he was disturbed nevertheless.

“But there’s no nonsense in the idea that your own ore bodies may be

just over the border. Why don’t you sink a shaft, just for nuts.”

Gregory, who was still excited, felt an impulse to confide his

discovery to his friend. But his natural secretiveness overcame him and

he turned abruptly away. “When I have finished at the School,” he said,

“no doubt I’ll begin gophering again, but not before. What are you

going to do about this? Let them have it?”

“I’ll let them have a piece of my mind first. What do you

advise?--that I work the mine, myself? I could easily form a company if

the ore is as rich as you think.”

“I wouldn’t take the chances. Lease the claim to them for a year.

They’ll take it for that time with all this ore in sight. If they’ve

hit a large chamber they’ll soon be netting several thousand dollars a

day. If it’s only a pocket, let them find it out. At the end of a year

you’ll know a good deal more about the mine than you do now. But keep

an eye on them so that they don’t gouge, and make them pay you twenty

per cent. royalty.”

“They’ll pay it through the nose,” said Mark emphatically.

Gregory laughed. “You feel as virtuously indignant as if you had never

tried to do anybody yourself. It’s do or be done out West as well as

back East, and precious few mines have a clean history. Marcus Daly

never would have got the best part of Butte Hill if he hadn’t kept his

mouth shut.”

“It isn’t that I’m so virtuous,” said Mark ingenuously, “but I don’t

like the idea that anybody so nearly got the best of me. And just look

at the way they covered it up.”

Gregory had kicked aside the greater part of a pile of grey ore, and

revealed quite a hillock of the pyroxenite. He put several pieces in

his pocket, discarding the first specimens. “I’ll get to work on this

tonight,” he said, “and let you know first thing in the morning. But

I’m willing to wager that it runs from sixty to a hundred dollars a

ton.”

“And not a fleck of gold to be seen!” Mark, who, like all intelligent

men of mining localities, had some knowledge of ores, examined the dark

rock attentively. “They’re some geologists,” he added with unwilling

admiration. “This would fool any ordinary mining engineer. Say!” he

cried, “I’ll not tell Ora until she’s ready to leave--she’s figuring on

going to Europe in the fall. It will be the surprise of her life, for

I led her to think she’d get only a hundred or so a month. Don’t say a

word about it to Ida.”

Gregory turned away to hide a curl of his lip. “I suppose we’d better

go over and see Oakley, as we’re so close,” he said. “He’ll probably

talk for an hour on his hobby, but any knowledge comes in useful to a

lawyer.”

“What’s he done.”

“He figured out that Iowa and the Dakotas and Kansas were likely to

have a drought next year, so he will sow about five hundred acres with

flax in May. He has already put in about three hundred acres of winter

wheat. The bottoms are reserved for alfalfa. He raises the capital and

gets half profits. If it turns out as he expects he’ll have something

at the end of a year to live on besides enthusiasm for intensive

farming.”

* * * * *

They were driving toward Pony two hours later when Gregory said

abruptly, “I’m glad that your wife and mine have taken to each other.

It is a great thing for Ida. The improvement is wonderful.” He forebore

to add, even to the man who had known his wife since childhood, “I

don’t see what Mrs. Blake gets out it,” but possibly the irrepressible

thought flew into Mark’s mind, for he replied promptly:

“It’s great for Ora. She’s tired of everybody else here; tired of so

much reading too. I’ve seen that for some time, though I haven’t let

on. A new interest was just what she wanted. Every clever woman has

a touch of the school ma’am in her, and no one can deny that Ida’s

refreshing. To Ora she’s almost a novelty. I think she rather hates to

make her over, but she’s working on her as hard as I work on a case.

Ora’s the thorough sort. What she does is done with all her might and

main. Otherwise she don’t do it at all. She’s equally accomplished at

that!”

He decided that this was the propitious moment; Gregory was in an

uncommonly melting mood, for him. “Say!” he continued, “Ora and I have

put up a little job on you. I’ve told her to take her new money and go

to Europe for six months or so--By James, she shall go, even if this

thing hangs fire and I have to sell some stock. It’s over six years

since she’s seen Europe, and I guess she pines for it all right. Well,

she wants to take Ida.”

Gregory demanded with unexpected promptness, “How much would it cost?”

“Oh, about a hundred to New York and a hundred and fifty over,” said

Mark vaguely. “Of course when two are together it costs less. And in

Europe distances are short. Ora says she shall go to _pensions_ instead

of hotels, if only because they would be two young women alone; and

they cost much less. They can also travel second-class, and third in

Germany and Switzerland. Ora says she and her friends always did it in

summer because it was cooler and more interesting. She’s sent for a lot

of Baedekers, is going to make a close estimate, then double it.”

“One of my aunts died the other day and left me a thousand dollars; she

had no family. Ida can have it. Of course I could send her more if she

needed it, but she’s clever with money.”

“That will do it.” (He knew that if it did not Ora, who would pay the

bills, would manage to hoodwink Ida.) “And you must live with me. It’ll

be fine. Bachelor’s Hall. We’ll do as we damn please.”

Gregory shook hands with him, his strong hard face illuminated with

the infrequent smile that gave it something of a sweet woman’s charm.

“Thanks, old man,” he said fervently. “Sounds good!”

XIII

Several weeks passed before Ora sent for Miss Ruby Miller. She was

busier during those weeks than she had been for many months. Ida came

every other day at one o’clock and remained until five. They carved

wood in the attic, and looked at pictures or read in the library during

the hour and a half that included tea. Ida confessed that during the

latter interval she was so bored sometimes she could scream, but added

that she would stick it out if she yawned every tooth in her head

loose. One thing that never bored her was the picture of Ora--her

working blouse changed for a dainty house gown--presiding at the

tea-table. She studied every detail, every gesture; she even cultivated

a taste for tea, which heretofore she had regarded as fit for invalids

only, like jellies and cup-custard.

Ora’s alternate days and many of her evenings were filled with social

duties. Butte was indulging in one of its hurricanes of festivity.

Mrs. O’Hagan, who lived in the largest and finest house on the West

Side, gave a series of dinner dances. Mrs. Burke, who owned the big

ugly red house of appalling architecture built by Judge Stratton in the

eighties, gave several entertainments in honour of two young visitors

from Denver. Mrs. Maginnis, who lived in another palatial residence

far west and far from the old Stratton house--which in its day had

expressed the extreme limit of the city, as of fashion--gave a ball as

brilliant as anything Ora had seen in a distant hemisphere. Flowers

may be scarce in Butte, but flowers and palms may be imported by the

carload from Helena, and the large rooms looked like an oasis in the

grey desert of Butte. Every woman wore a ball gown made by some one of

the great reiterative masters, and there were no wall flowers; for,

although the tango had not yet set the whole world dancing, the women

of Montana never had interpreted grey hairs as a signal to retire.

It was on the day after this ball that Ora had telephoned to Miss

Miller. “Can you give me an hour or two tomorrow?” she asked.

“Sure. Can I come early? I’ve got fourteen heads to dress for the

Cameron ball, and most of them want a facial too?”

“A what?”

“Face massage, and touchin’ up generally.”

“Oh.”

“It’s fine. Makes you feel as good as you look. What did you want me to

do?”

“Ob, shampoo my hair. I want to consult you about it, too--and

manicure.”

“Well, I’ll bring the creams along, and if you want a massage I’ll be

ready.”

Ora had succeeded in making Miss Miller propose what she had quite made

up her mind to try, and she rang off with a smile. The evening before

she had thought herself the plainest woman at the party, and the effect

of this discouraging conclusion had been to kill her animation and

sag her shoulders until she knew she must look as dowdy as she felt.

For the first time she realised how a blighted vanity may demoralise

the proudest intellect. It was time to get a move on, as her new but

rapidly developing friend would put it.

Ora was very proud of her work. She gave Professor Whalen due credit,

and knew that Ida toiled at her exercises, but doubted if the

uninspiring pedant would have been retained had it not been for the

sense of emulation, slightly tinctured by jealousy, she managed to

rouse in her new boon companion when they were together. But Ida was

now exercising something of her latent force of character, determined

to make the most of advantages for which she knew many a sudden-rich

woman would “give her eye teeth.” She would polish up “good and plenty”

before her husband made his strike; and waste no precious time on the

inside of her skull when she had the cash to spend on its outside.

After the first week she dropped no more g’s, her grammar rapidly

improved, and although she never would be a stylist, nor altogether

forswear slang, not only because the ready-made phrase appealed to her

unliterary mind, but because its use was ingrained, she reserved it

more and more for those that best could appreciate it. As it annoyed

Professor Whalen excessively, she went afield for new phrases “for the

fun of seeing him wriggle.”

On the other hand, whenever she felt in the mood, she gazed at him with

penitent languid eyes, promised never to use slang again, and amused

herself racking other nerves. She knew just how far to go and “turned

him off,” or “switched him back on to the track” before any real harm

was done. Some day she might let him make a scene just for the fun of

the thing, but not until she was “good and ready.”

Her feeling for Ora was more difficult to define. Sometimes she almost

loved her, not only inspired by gratitude, but because Ora’s personal

magnetism was intensified by every charm of refinement, vivacity,

mental development, as well as by a broad outlook on life and a

sweetness of manner which never infuriated her by becoming consciously

gracious. At other times she hated her, for she knew that no such

combination ever could be hers. Ora was a patrician born of patricians.

She might go to the devil, preside over one of the resorts down on

The Flat, take to drink and every evil way, and still would she be

patrician. Herself might step into millions and carry her unsullied

virtue to her grave and she never would be the “real thing.” For the

first time she understood that being “a lady” had little to do with

morals or behaviour. Nothing irritates the complacent American more

than the sudden appreciation of this fact.

“But I guess I’ll be as good as some others,” Ida consoled herself.

“After all, I don’t see so many Ora Blakes lying round loose. People

don’t bother much these days if your clothes make their mouth water and

your grammar don’t queer you.”

Gregory, when he had time to think about it--he read even at the

breakfast and dinner-table, and had an assay plant in the cellar--was

charmed with her improvement, and told her abruptly one day that if

she kept faithfully to her tasks until November he would give her the

thousand dollars he had received under the will of his aunt. “And you

can do what you like with it,” he added. “I shan’t ask you. That’s the

way I enjoyed money when I was a kid, and I guess women are much the

same.”

“A thousand dollars!” Ida was rigid, her mouth open. “Geewhil--I beg

pardon--My! But you are good!” She paused to rearrange her thoughts,

which were in danger of flying off into language her husband was paying

to remodel. “Can I really do anything with it I like?”

“You can.” He smiled at her bright wide-open eyes and flaming cheeks.

“I ain’t--haven’t said anything about it as I didn’t think it would be

any sort of use, but Ora is going to Europe in the fall, and she told

me Mark was going to try to persuade you to let me go with her. Now I

can go on my thousand dollars, if you don’t mind. Mark wants you to

stay with him.”

“He spoke to me about it--I had forgotten. There couldn’t be a better

arrangement. This is the time for you to go to Europe--while your mind

is still plastic.”

“You don’t seem to mind my going a little bit.” Rapture gave place to

suspicion. Ida was not born with faith in man.

“My dear child! What good am I to you now? You might be keeping house

for a deaf mute. All I need is the right kind of food and a comfortable

bed. I’ll get both at Mark’s. Next year you would see even less of

me than you do now. We get our last and most practical drilling in

ore-dressing, metallurgy, power-utilisation, and geology. We shall

be off half the time on geological expeditions, visits to mines in

other parts of the state, smelters, the most up-to-date of the cyanide

mills. So you see how much I shall be at home. Go to Europe and enjoy

yourself.”

“All right. I’ll go. You bet. And I’ll not miss a trick. There’ll never

be a thousand dollars better spent.”

XIV

“Now I’ve got you where I want you, and I’m goin’ to talk--goin’ to say

something I’ve been dyin’ to say for two or three years.”

Ora’s head was in the wash-basin. Miss Miller was leisurely spraying

out the lime juice with which she had drenched her hair. Ora gasped,

then gurgled something unintelligible, which Miss Ruby interpreted

as encouragement to proceed. Mrs. Blake’s manner ever since the

hairdresser’s arrival had been uncommonly winning, with something

half-appealing, half-confiding that flew straight not only to that

experienced young woman’s sympathies but to her professional instinct.

“It’s this,” she continued. “You need a thorough overhauling. In these

days, particularly in this altitude, women take care of themselves as

they go along, but you don’t. You’ve lost your complexion ridin’ and

walkin’ for hours without a veil, sometimes without a hat, and you with

a delicate skin like a baby’s and not even using creams. I heard a man

say only last Sunday--I was givin’ his wife a facial and he was sittin’

round--that it was an awful pity you had gone off so, as you were the

prettiest thing he ever laid eyes on when you came back after your pa’s

death, and if Mark--Mr. Blake--hadn’t snapped you up before any other

young man got a look at you you’d have had a dozen chances, for all

you’ve got such a reputation for brains. ‘A man can stand brains in a

white lily of a girl,’ says he, ‘but when she gets older she’s either

got to keep her complexion or cut out the brains, and Ora Blake’s done

neither’--Say if you squirm like that you’ll get your mouth and eyes

full of lemon. His wife said she didn’t believe men cared for them thin

white women anyway--she’s bustin’ with health herself--and he gave a

grunt that means a lot to a girl who knows men like I do. You never did

make anything of yourself and you’ve let yourself go these last two or

three years something shameful. If you’d take yourself in hand, get on

to yourself once for all, you’d have people twistin’ their necks off to

look at you and callin’ you a Mariposa lily, or a Princess Pine, or a

White Gladiolus and other poetry names like that. And you could get the

reputation of a beauty all right. It makes me sick.”

“Could you make me into a beauty?” Ora’s voice was remarkably languid

considering the flaming hue of her face, which, however, may have been

due to its prolonged sojourn in the wash-basin. Miss Miller had wrung

her hair out and was rubbing it vigorously.

“Couldn’t I _just_?”

As Mrs. Blake maintained a dignified silence, Miss Ruby proceeded to

develop her theme. “Now, your hair, for instance. That’s the reason

I used lemon today. You’ve been usin’ soap, and, what with this dry

climate, and no care, it’s as harsh and broken as if you’d been usin’

soda on it every day. It’s lemon and hot water for you, first, last

and always, and eggs after a journey. It needs a couple of months of

hand-massage every other day right now; after that it will be up to

you. Brush it night and morning and use a tonic twice a year.”

She paused and Ora waited with eyes closed to conceal her impatience.

Finally she opened them irresistibly and met Miss Ruby’s in the mirror.

They, too, looked embarrassed. Ora’s smile was spontaneous and sweet

and not too frequent. It seldom failed to melt reserve and inspire

confidence. She played this card without delay.

“Why don’t you go on?” she asked. “All that is most interesting and

valuable. I shall remember every word of it.”

“Well--I was afraid that what I want to say most might sound as if I

was drummin’ up trade, and the Lord knows I’ve got more to do than I

could manage if there was ten days in every week. I turned down two

ladies today to come here. I never shampoo the day of a ball.”

“My dear Miss Miller! You are an artist, and like all artists, you

not only aim at perfection yourself but your eyes and fingers ache

at imperfection. I suppose an author rewrites sentences as he reads

them, and painters must long to repaint every picture they see. As

for you--we are your page and canvas, and naturally we have the good

fortune to interest you.”

“That’s it!” cried Miss Ruby, glowing. “That’s the size of it, only I

couldn’t ever say it like that. Well, now, if you want this skin to

look like a complexion and not like a hide, I’ve got to give you a

massage every third day for quite a while. It not only needs creams and

cold applications--hot only once in a while--but an awful lot of hand

massage. It’s all run down and needs stimulating the worst way. Another

year and you’d be havin’ lines. You can’t leave yourself to nature up

here. She’s in too great a hurry to take back what she gave. And you

must cut out hot breads and trash and wear a veil when you go out in

the sun and wind. And you go to Boulder Springs once a week and take a

vapour bath.”

“But I’ll always look washed-out.”

“Not if you look fresh, and wear colours that suit you.”

“And I never was called a beauty. That man, whoever he was, merely

remembered the usual prettiness of youth. Every young girl is pretty

unless she is ugly.”

“Well, I guess you didn’t take enough pains to make people think you

were a beauty. Some--Ida Compton, for instance--don’t need to do

anything but just show themselves. Any fool--particularly a man--can

see black hair and red and white skin, and meltin’ eyes, and lashes

a yard long, and a dashin’ figure. But odd and refined types like

you--well, you’ve got to help it out.”

“How very interesting! Do you mean I must go about telling people

that I am really beautiful, if they will only look at me long enough?

Or--possibly--do you mean that I should make up?”

“I don’t mean either, ’though in a way I mean both. In the first place

you’ve got to make the most of your points. You’re not a red blonde

or a gold blonde, but what the French call sendray; in plain English,

you’ve got ash-coloured hair. Now, that makes the blondest kind of

blonde, but at the same time it’s not so common, and nature has to give

it to you. Art can’t. What you want to do is to let people see that

your colouring is so rare that you can’t get enough of it yourself,

and by and by people will think they can’t either. You’ve been wearin’

all this hair twisted into a hard knot down on your neck. That don’t

show off the hair and don’t suit your face, which is kinder square. I’m

goin’ to pull it soft about your face and ears and then coil it softly

on top of your head. That’ll give length to your face, and look as if

you was proud of your hair--which you will be in a month or two. You

mustn’t pay too much attention to the style of the moment. You’re the

sort to have a style of your own and stick to it.”

“I’m in your hands,” murmured Ora. “What next?”

“Did you really lose interest in yourself?” asked Miss Miller

curiously, and with the fine freedom of the West from class restraint.

“Or didn’t you ever have any?”

“A little of both. When I was a girl I was a frightful pedant--and--Oh,

well--Butte is not Europe, and I took refuge more than ever in books,

particularly as I could have nothing of the other arts. You know the

resources of Butte!”

“I’m glad you’re goin’ to Europe again, where I guess all kinds of

variety are on tap.--Say, perhaps you’ll find out all the new kinks for

the complexion in Paris, and tell me when you come back.”

“I will indeed!”

“I don’t hold to rippin’ the skin off, or hoistin’ it up,” said Miss

Miller firmly. “All any skin needs is steady treatment, and constant

care--constant, mind you, and never forget it. Now there’s your

profile. It’s grand. The way I’m goin’ to fix your hair’ll show it off,

and don’t you let it get scooped round the eyes, like so many women do.

Massage’ll prevent that. I wish your eyebrows and lashes was black,

like so many heroines in novels has. The contrast would be fine. But

brown’ll do, and I guess the natural is your lay. Luckily them black

grey eyes is a high note, and when you get your lips real red, you’ll

have all the colour your style can carry. The gleamin’ white skin’ll do

the rest.”

“How am I to get red lips, and what’s to make my skin gleam?”

“You’re anæmic. You go to a doctor and get a tonic right off. When I

get through with your complexion it’ll gleam all right. No powder for

you. It improves most women, but you want high lights. I don’t mean

shine when I say gleam, either. I mean that you’ve got the kind of skin

that when the tan’s off and it’s toned up and is in perfect condition

(you’ve got to be that inside, too), sheds a sort of white light. It’s

the rarest kind, and I guess it does the most damage.”

“And what good is all this beautifying to do me? And why make me

dangerous? Surely you are not counselling that I begin a predatory raid

on other women’s husbands, or even on the ‘brownies’?”

“Well, I guess not. I don’t approve of married women lettin’ men make

love to them, but I do believe in a woman makin’ the most of herself

and gettin’ all the admiration that’s comin’ to her. If you can be a

beauty, for the Lord Almighty’s sake be one. Believe me, it’ll make

life seem as if it had a lot more to it.”

“I shouldn’t wonder!”

“And you go in right off for deep breathin’ and Swedish exercises

night and mornin’. It’s the style to be thin, but you want to develop

yourself more. And they keep you limber--don’t forget that. When a

woman stiffens up she’s done for. Might as well get fat round her

waist. Now shut your eyes, I’m goin’ to massage.”

XV

“I wonder!” thought Ora, “I wonder!”

It was some four months after her first séance with Miss Ruby Miller.

There was no question of the improvement in her looks, owing, perhaps,

as much to a new self-confidence as to the becoming arrangement of

her hair and the improved tint and texture of her skin. The tonic and

a less reckless diet had also done their work; her eyes were even

brighter, her lips pink. Moreover, it was patent that the sudden

reformation was as obvious to Butte as to herself. Women confessed to a

previous fear that the “altitude had got on her nerves or something”;

as for the men, they may or may not have observed the more direct

results of Miss Miller’s manipulations, but it was not open to doubt

that her new interest in herself had revived her magnetism and possibly

doubled it.

Ora turned from the mirror in her bedroom, where she had been regarding

her convalescing beauty with a puzzled frown, and stared down at the

rough red dirt of her half-finished street--she lived far to the west.

Her eyes travelled up to the rough elevation upon which stood the

School of Mines in its lonely splendour, then down to the rough and

dreary Flat. It stretched far to the south, a hideous expanse, with its

dusty cemetery, its uninviting but not neglected road houses, its wide

section given over to humble dwellings, with here and there a house of

more pretensions, but little more beauty. It was in one of these last,

no doubt, that her father had kept his mistress, whose children, she

was vaguely aware, attended the public schools under his name. These

houses, large and small, were crowded together as if pathetically

conscious that the human element must be their all, in that sandy,

treeless, greenless waste.

There was something pathetic, altogether, thought Ora, in the bright

eagerness with which even the wealthy class made the most of their

little all. They were so proud of Columbia Gardens, a happy-go-lucky

jumble of architectures and a few young trees, a fine conservatory and

obese pansies on green checkers of lawn; they patronised its Casino so

conscientiously on Friday nights when the weather would permit. During

the winter, they skated on their shingled puddle down on The Flat as

merrily and thankfully as though it were the West End of London or

one of the beautiful lakes in one of the beautiful German “gartens.”

They motored about the hideous environs, and hung out of the car to

emphasise their rapture at the lonely tree or patch of timid verdure;

they entertained royally in their little Club House, out in another

desolate waste, or played golf without envy or malice. In short they

resolutely made the most of Butte when they were in it; they patted

Butte and themselves on the back daily; they loved it and they were

loyal to it and they got out of it as often as they possibly could.

“And I!” thought Ora, with a sense of panic. “I, who will probably get

away every five years or so--what am I waking up for--to what end? I

wonder!”

She walked slowly downstairs and, avoiding the little French

drawing-room, went into the library and sat down among her books.

Sash curtains of a pale canary colour shut out the rough vacant lots

and ugly dwellings above her home, and cast a mellow glow over the

brown walls and rows of calf-bound books. Judge Stratton had read

in four modern languages and two dead ones. The love of reading, of

long evenings alone in his deserted “mansion,” had been as striking

a characteristic of his many-sided ego as his contempt for moral

standards. Ora, who had grown into a slow but fairly thorough knowledge

of her father’s life and character, permitted her thoughts to flow

freely this afternoon and to speculate upon what her life might have

been had Judge Stratton been as upright as he was intellectually

gifted; if her mother had possessed the brains or charm to keep him

ensnared; if she herself had been left, an orphan at twenty, with the

fortune she inevitably would have inherited had her father behaved

himself--instead of finding herself penniless, ignorant of all

practical knowledge, a querulous invalid on her hands, her only suitor

the “hustling” son of her mother’s old seamstress.

Ora admitted no disloyalty to Mark as she put these questions for

the first time squarely to herself. She intended to continue to treat

him with unswerving friendship, to give him all the assistance in her

power, as long as she lived. And, as husbands went, she made no doubt

that he was one to thank her grudging providence for. But that she

would have considered him for a moment had she inherited the fortune

her father had made and dissipated was as likely as that she would have

elected to live her life in Butte.

She knew Mark’s ambitions. Washington was his goal, and he was by no

means averse from being governor of his state meanwhile. Nor would he

have been a genuine American boy, born in the traditional log cabin--it

had been a log cabin as a matter of fact--if he had not cherished

secret designs on the White House. In all this, did it prove to be more

or less, she could be of incalculable assistance to him. And she was

the more determined to render this assistance because she had accepted

his bounty and was unable to love him.

She concluded with some cynicism that the account would be squared,

being by no means blind to what she had done for him already in the

way of social position and prestige; still, it was not only his right,

but a penance demanded by her self-respect. She was living the most

unidealistic life possible to a woman of her pride and temperament, but

she would redeem it as far as lay in her power.

She moved impatiently, her brows puzzled again, and something like

fear in her heart. What did this slow awakening portend? Why had she

instinctively held it back with all her strength, quite successfully

until her new-born vanity, with its infinite suggestions, had quickened

it suddenly into imperious expression?

Certainly she was conscious of no desire for a more idealistic union

with another man. If she had inherited a fortune, she would have

married no one; not then, at all events; nothing had been further from

her desire. She would have lived in Europe and travelled in many lands.

Beyond a doubt her hunger for the knowledge that lies in books would

have been satiated long since, never would have assumed a discrepant

importance. She would be uniformly developed, and she would have met

many men. With the double passport of birth and wealth, added to the

fine manner she owed to her Southern mother, her natural vivacity and

magnetism, and a physical endowment that she now knew could have been

trained into positive beauty, she would have had her pick of men. And

when a woman may choose of the best, with ample time at her disposal,

it was incredible that the true mate, the essential companion, should

not be found before it was too late. Most marriages are makeshifts; but

for the fortunate few, with the intelligence to wait, and the developed

instinct to respond, there was always the possibility of the perfect

union.

Ora made a wry face at this last collocation. She had no yearning for

the “perfect union.” Matrimony had been too unutterably distasteful.

She turned hastily from the subject and recalled her father’s

impassioned desire that she should make the West her home, her career,

marry a Western man, give him and her state the benefit of her

endowments and accomplishments. Possibly, surfeited with Europe, she

would have returned to Montana to identify herself with its progress,

whether she married or not. She was artistic by temperament and

training, and correspondingly fastidious; she cordially detested all

careers pursued by women outside those that were the natural evolution

of an artistic gift. But she could have built herself an immense and

splendid house, filled it with the most exquisite treasures American

money could coax from the needy aristocracy of Europe, and have a

famous salon; invite the pick of the artistic, literary, musical,

and political world to visit her for weeks or months at a time,

house parties of a hundred or more, and so make her state famous for

something besides metals, intensive farming, and political corruption.

No one could deny that the state would benefit exceedingly.

Conceivably, in time she would take a husband, assuredly one of high

ambitions and abilities, one whose fortunes probably would take him to

Washington.

This brought her back to Mark, and she laughed aloud. She had been

romancing wildly; of late she had grudgingly admitted that nature may

have composed her to be romantic after she had recovered from the

intellectual obsession; and the circle had brought her round to her

husband! He was “forging ahead” with extraordinary rapidity. She made

no doubt that he would be a millionaire within the ten years’ limit

he had set himself. Nor would he rely alone upon his legal equipment

and the many opportunities to exercise it when a man was “on the job

all the time”; he watched the development of Montana’s every industry,

new and established. He “bought in on the ground floor,” gambled

discreetly in copper, owned shares in several new and promising mines,

and property on the most picturesquely situated of the new lakes

constructed for power supply. He invested what he could afford, and

with the precision of the man on the spot. Yes, he would be one of

the Western millionaires, even if not one of the inordinate ones, and

before his ten years had passed, if no untoward event occurred.

And it was on the cards that she would have her own fortune before

long. She knew that Mark (who had her power of attorney) had made

better terms with the engineers than he had anticipated, and he dropped

mysterious hints which, knowing his level head, made her indulge in

ornate dreams now and again. But he only smiled teasingly when she

demanded a full explanation, and told her that she would realise how

good or how bad her mine was when she went to the bank to sign her

letter of credit.

For one thing she felt suddenly grateful. She knew that the mine had

been leased for a year only and without bond. If, during that time it

“panned out,” she would stipulate to mine it herself when the contract

expired.

She sat up very straight and smiled. That was what she would have

liked! If her father had but willed her this mine and capital enough to

work it alone! Her fingers fluttered as they always did when handling

ore; she had wondered before if the prospector’s fever were in her

blood. How she should have enjoyed watching the rock come up in the

buckets as the shaft sank foot by foot, until they struck the vein;

always expecting chambers of incredible richness, gold, copper, silver.

She would even learn to do the pleasant part of her own assaying; and

she suddenly experienced an intense secretive jealous love for this

mine that was hers and in which might be hidden shining blocks of

those mysterious primary deposits deep in the sulphide zone; forced up

through the veins of earth, but born how or where man could only guess.

It was a mystery that she wanted to feel close to and alone with, far

in the winding depths of her mine.

She got up and moved about impatiently. Her propensity to dream

extravagantly was beginning to alarm her, and she wished uneasily that

she could discover the gift to write and work it off. Where would

it lead her? But she would not admit for a moment that her released

imagination, pulsing with vitality, and working on whatever she fed it,

only awaited the inevitable moment when it could concentrate on the one

object for which the imagination of woman was created.

The pendulum swung back and more evenly. She told herself it was both

possible and probable that she had a good property, however short it

might fall of Butte Hill. She renewed her determination to mine it

herself, and work, work, work. Therein lay safety. The future seemed

suddenly full of alarms.

And there was Mark, his career, his demands, dictated not so

insistently by him as by herself.

Ora’s soul rose in a sudden and desperate revolt beside which her

rising aversion from unmitigated intellect was a mere megrim. She

felt herself to be her father’s daughter in all her newly-opened

aching brain-cells. He had lived his life to please himself, and if

his temptations and weaknesses might never be hers--how could she

tell?--his intense vitality survived in her veins, his imperious

spirit, his scornful independence. She glanced at the rows of

calf-bound books he had handled so often. Something of his sinister

powerful personality seemed to steal forth and encompass her, sweep

through the quickened corridors of her brain. Mark Blake was not the

man he would have chosen for his daughter. Western, Mark might be to

the core, but he was second-rate, and second-rate he would remain no

matter what his successes.

And, she wondered, what would this proud ambitious parent, whose

deepest feeling had been for his one legitimate child, say to her plan

to play second fiddle for life to a man of the Mark Blake calibre? He

had wanted her to marry in the West, but he had been equally insistent

that she should develop a personality and position of her own. No

devoted suffragist could have been a more ardent advocate of woman’s

personal development than Judge Stratton had been where his daughter

was concerned. To the rights of other women he had never cast a

thought.

This was the hour of grim self-avowal. She admitted what had long moved

in the back of her mind, striving toward expression, that she hated

herself for having married any man for the miserable reason that has

driven so many lazy inefficient women into loveless marriages. She

should have gone to work. More than one of her father’s old friends

would have given her a secretaryship. She could have lived on her

little capital and taken the four years’ course at the School of Mines,

equipping herself for a congenial career. If that had not occurred to

her she could have taught French, Italian, German, dancing, literature.

In a new state like Montana, with many women raised abruptly from

the nethermost to the highest stratum, there was always a longing,

generally unfulfilled, for the quick veneer; and women of older

fortunes welcomed opportunities to improve themselves. She could have

taken parties to Europe.

She had played the coward’s part and not only done a black injustice to

herself but to Mark Blake. He was naturally an affectionate creature,

and, married to a comfortable sweet little wife, he would have been

domestic and quite happy. In spite of his enjoyment of his club, his

cards and billiards, and his buoyant nature, she suspected that he was

wistful at heart. He was intensely proud of his wife, in certain ways

dependent upon her, but she knew he had taken for granted that her

girlish coldness would melt in time and womanly fires kindle. Well,

they never would for him, poor Mark. And possessing an inherent sense

of justice, she felt just then more sympathy for him than for herself,

and placed all his good points to his credit.

She was conscious of no sympathy for herself, only of that deep

sense of puzzlement, disturbance, apprehension. Revolt passed.

Indications--the abrupt bursting into flower of many unsuspected bulbs

in her inner garden: softness, sympathy, a more spontaneous interest

in and response to others, the tendency to dream, vague formless

aspirations--had hinted, even before she took her new-born vanity to

Miss Ruby Miller, that she was on the threshold of one of the dangerous

ages (there are some ten or fifteen of them), and that unless she

had the doubtful wisdom and resolution to burn out her garden as the

poisonous fumes of roasting ores had blasted the fruitful soil of

Butte, she must prepare to face Life, possibly its terrible joys and

sorrows.

She sprang to her feet and ran upstairs and dressed for the street. At

least she had one abiding interest and responsibility, Ida Compton. She

was a self-imposed and absorbing duty, and always diverting.

XVI

“Oh, you give me the willys!”

“My dear Mrs. Compton! How often have you promised me----”

“Well, if you will stare at me like a moonstruck setter dog when I’m

trying to think up ’steen synonyms for one old word without looking

in the dictionary! I can’t blow up my vocabulary like a paper bag and

flirt with you at the same time.”

“I have no desire to flirt with you!” said Professor Whalen with great

dignity. “It is quite the reverse. You have been playing with my

feelings for months.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve been too set on becoming a real lady

before leaving for Europe--haven’t thought about you.”

Professor Whalen turned a deep dull red. His overlapping upper teeth

shot forward as if to snap down upon his long rather weak chin. He

stared past Ida through the open window. It was May and the snow was

melting on the mountains, had disappeared from the streets of Butte;

there is a brief springtime in Montana between the snows of winter and

the cold rains of June, and today was soft and caressing.

“I’ll tell you what is the matter with you,” said Ida, cruelly. “It’s

the spring of the year.”

Whalen sprang to his feet. For the first time in his anæmic life he was

furiously angry, and he rejoiced in the sensation. “I wish you were a

man,” he stuttered. “I’d beat you. It would do my heart good.”

“If you were a real man you would enjoy beating a woman a long sight

more,” goaded Ida, who watched him as a man-eating tigress may watch

the squirming victim between her paws. She had fed her vanity and

amused herself by playing on the little man’s pale emotions until she

was convinced he really was in love with her. She suddenly made up her

mind to force him to “let go,” and experience the sensation of being

made love to feloniously.

“I am not a brute,” announced Whalen, still in the same stifled voice.

His face was purple, but he was conscious of a warning whisper that he

was in a fair way to lose this remunerative pupil. He dismissed the

warning. There is probably no man so insignificant, in whom passion for

the imperative woman does not develop abnormally the purely masculine

conceit. He may despair in solitude, when devitalised by reaction and

doubt, but when in her presence, under her inviting eye, and hurried

to a crisis by hammering pulses and scorching blood, he is merely the

primitive male with whom to desire is to have.

Ida laughed, a low throaty husky laugh. “If you were,” she said

cuttingly, “you might stand a show.”

“It is you that are brutal,” hissed poor Whalen.

Ida leaned back in her chair and looked at him out of half-closed eyes.

“What induced you to fall in love with me, anyhow?” she demanded in her

sweet lazy voice. Whalen clenched his hands.

“I am a man if I am not a brute. You are the most fascinating woman on

earth, and you have deliberately tried to entice me from the path of

rectitude I have trod all my life----”

“What’s that?” Ida sat up straight, her brows drawn in an ominous frown.

“I have resisted you until today, but I yield----”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“I expected to be tormented to the utmost limit. But I have stood all

of it that I purpose to stand.” His voice by this time was a subdued

roar. “I don’t care whether you love me or not. I don’t think you

could love anybody. I have read that sirens never do. But you are an

enchantress, and you have shown plainly enough----”

Ida’s frown had relaxed, but her eyes blazed. He misunderstood their

expression, as well as the sudden forward thrust of her head. He sprang

forward, caught her by the shoulders and kissed her.

“Aw!” Ida’s voice was almost a roar. She leaped to her feet, twirled

him about, caught him by the back of his collar and the seat of

his trousers, and threw him out of the window as if he had been an

offensive dog. She flung his hat and stick after him and slammed

the window down. Then she stamped her feet in inarticulate rage,

and rubbed and bit her mouth. It was one thing to play with a man’s

passions and quite another to be defiled by them. Ida seethed with the

fierce virtue of a young inexperienced and temperamentally cold woman.

For a few moments she used very bad language indeed, and struggled with

an impulse to ran after the “little puppy” and whip him in the street.

But, remembering that she was making a heroic attempt to be a grande

dame, she finally went into her bedroom and washed her face.

XVII

There was a knock on the front door. Ida, smoothing her hair, hastened

to open it, glad of diversion. Ora stood there. For a moment the girls

looked hard at each other, then burst into laughter.

“What’s up?” asked Ida. “You look----”

“My dear, it is I who should ask? Your face is crimson; you look as if

you had just given someone a beating, and I met poor little Whalen,

dusty, dishevelled, growling like a mad dog--he didn’t know me.”

“Well, I guess he won’t know himself for a while,” said Ida drily,

leading the way into the parlour. “When he comes to he’ll have his

work cut out to climb back to his little two-cent pedestal and fit on

his battered halo.” She related the incident. “What do you know about

that?” she demanded in conclusion. “Wouldn’t it come and get you?”

“I am afraid you have made an enemy. It is always best to let them

down gently, save their pride--and--ah!--it isn’t customary to throw

gentlemen out of the window!”

“Gentlemen!” snorted Ida. “He’s no gentleman. He not only kissed

me with his horrid front teeth, but he insinuated that I was just

languishing for him, the----” Once more Ida’s feelings overflowed in

language not intended for print. “It made me so mad I’d have lammed him

with the umbrella if we’d been in the hall.”

“Ida,” asked Ora abruptly, “would you have minded so much if he had

been good-looking and attractive?”

“Well--perhaps--I guess in that case I’d simply have smacked him and

let him get out quick by the front door. But I don’t want any man

touching me. I’m a married woman.”

“But if you flirt and lead them on----”

“You said once yourself that American men understood the game and knew

how to take their medicine.”

“I also said that they can fall more tiresomely in love than any other

men. Of course the Whalens don’t count. But do you intend to go on

making men fall in love with you and throwing them--metaphorically--out

of the window?”

“Much chance I’ll get.”

“You’ll find plenty of chances in Europe. You are a remarkably

beautiful woman. And Europeans take what we call flirting for shameless

encouragement.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be getting experience of the world all right. And

the Lord knows I’d like to be admired by men who have seen something. I

can take care of myself, and Greg don’t need to worry.”

“I’ve no doubt of that. Of course you are awfully fond of Mr. Compton,

aren’t you?” Ora spoke somewhat wistfully.

“Oh, yes; fond enough, fonder than a good many wives, I guess, for he’s

kind and pleasant, and no earthly trouble about the house. But when a

woman marries she gets a kid right there at the altar, and he’s her

biggest kid till his false teeth drop out on his death-bed, and his

great-grandchildren are feeding him through a tube. I don’t want any of

the other sort of kids, and I guess I’m not what you call the maternal

woman, but the Lord knows I’m a mother to Greg and a good one. I’d like

to know what he’d do without me--that’s the only reason I hate leaving.

He never thinks of changing his shoes when they’re wet, and half the

time wouldn’t eat anything but his book if I didn’t put the stuff right

in front of him.”

“Mark knows him almost as well as you do, and will look after him. My

maid, who is practically my housekeeper, and an old family servant,

will also keep a maternal eye on him.”

“He keeps himself tidy,” conceded Ida handsomely. “Wants clean things

every day, but never knows where to find them. He’ll wander out into

the kitchen where I’m cooking breakfast and ask where his socks are,

and they always in the same drawer.”

“I fancy you’ve spoiled him.”

“Not I. I don’t hold with spoiling men. They’re born spoiled anyhow.

I found Greg walking round in a dream when I married, and a pile of

socks as high as the door knob he’d thrown away because they’d holes in

them so tiny you could hardly see them. I darned every one, you bet,

and he’s wearing them now, though he don’t know it. He’s like that, as

dainty as a cat, and as helpless as a blind kitten. I am a wife and I

know my duty,” concluded Ida virtuously.

“I certainly shall give Custer minute directions. I can’t have you

worrying.”

“I’ll not worry, once I’m started. Don’t you fret! But what’s the

matter with you, Ora? You look kinder excited, and kinder--well,

harassed. How’s that out of the new pocket dictionary I’ve set up in my

head?”

“I’ll soon have to look to my own vocabulary. Oh--I----”

“Something’s up. Spit it out. It’ll do you good.”

“Dear Ida! If you must use slang, do confine yourself to that which has

passed through the mint of polite society. There is an abundance to

choose from!”

“Don’t you worry; I won’t disgrace you. But I must let out a tuck

occasionally when we’re alone. Greg wouldn’t let me go to any of the

Club dances, and I scarcely ever see Ruby or Pearl, they’re so busy--to

say nothing of myself!”

“Very well,” said Ora, laughing. “Let me be your safety valve, by all

means.”

“Fire away.”

“Oh--how am I to tell you--I scarcely know, myself----”

“I guess you’re waking up. Ruby, who knows human nature like a book----”

Ora half rose. “Have you been talking me over with Miss Miller?” she

asked haughtily.

“Not much. Hardly seen her since we met. But you interest Butte, you

know. I guess they talk you over good and plenty. It was only a few

days before you called that the Miller girls visited with me all day,

and they talked a lot about you. Ruby said that if you’d come to out of

the sleeping beauty stage, you’d make things hum, and that her fingers

just itched to get at your skin and hair.”

“She said that to me once; and I don’t mind telling you that I called

her in some time ago.”

“Oh, I’m not a bat. I’ve seen you looking prettier every day, and

there’s only one way to do it, when you’ve let yourself go. I’ve had

the benefit of Ruby’s advice for years, and I don’t propose to let

myself go, not for a minute.”

“Right you are. And do live your life normally from day to day,

developing normally. The awakening process, when the Nature that

made you is no longer content to be a mere footstool for the mind,

is almost as painful as coming to after drowning. I suddenly have

become conscious of myself, as it were; I am interested in many more

things--personal things--I seem to want far more of life than I did a

few months ago----”

“In other words, you don’t know where you’re at.”

Ora laughed merrily. “My present condition could not be stated more

patly!”

“Ora, I don’t want to pry into your confidence, and you’re not one to

give much of that anyhow, but everybody in Butte knows that you’re not

in love with Mark, and never were, nice as you treat him--only because

you couldn’t be anything but a lady if you tried. Mrs. O’Neil, one day

when she was having a massage, told Ruby all about your marriage. She

said you were the most bewildered young thing she ever saw, and that

Mark snapped you up before another young man could get a look at you.

Now, I’ve known Mark all my life--he beaued my sister who died, for a

year or two, and his mother’s cottage was just up the hill anyhow; and

although he’s a good chap and a born hustler, and bound to get rich,

he’s not the sort of man women fall in love with. You wouldn’t have

fallen in love with him, if he’d been born a millionaire, and travelled

and got Butte out of his system. And if your father had left you well

off, you wouldn’t have looked at him. There’s men, bad and good--that’s

to say, better--that women fall in love with, and there’s men bad and

good that they don’t, not in a thousand years. Poor old Mark’s a Don’t

all right. You ain’t angry at my saying all this, but Mark was like my

own brother for years?”

“Oh, no, I am not angry. You are far too matter-of-fact. You might be

discussing different grades of ore!”

“Well, that’s about it, and the poor ore can’t help itself, any more

than the slag and gangue can, and Mark’s not either of those, you bet.

He’s good metal, all right, only he didn’t come out of the Anaconda

mine--What have you turned so red about? My! But you do blush easy!”

“It’s this--do you despise me--do you think I did wrong--Oh, I mean I

have quite suddenly realised that I never should have married any man

for so contemptible a reason. I should have gone to work----”

“Work? You?”

“Why not? Many a delicately nurtured woman has earned her bread.”

“The more fool she if she could get a man to earn it for her. That’s

what they’re for. The Lord knows they pride themselves on the way they

do it, being the stronger sex, and a lot more words. I guess I’d have

married before Greg turned up if I’d met a man I was sure was going to

make something of himself. You did just right to take a good husband

and take him quick when you found yourself in a hole.”

“Yes--but----” Her blush deepened. “You see--” Ora never had had an

intimate confidant. It was doubtful if she ever would have; not, at all

events, a woman. But Ida, as she herself would have expressed it, could

always see through a stone wall when there was a crack in it.

“Oh, shucks!” she said. “Don’t let that worry you. If you don’t feel

that way first you do last, I guess. Most of us are bored to death,

but women have stood it for a few thousand years, and I guess they can

stand it for a few thousand more. We all of us have to pay high for

anything we want. That’s about the size of it. Forget it.”

“Thanks, dear, you console me.” Ora smiled with closed eyes, but she

was thrilled with a sudden inexplicable longing; like other of her

recent sensations, it puzzled and alarmed her.

“Ora!” exclaimed Ida suddenly. “There’s one thing that’s just as sure

as death and taxes; and knowing men and knowing life don’t help women

one little bit. It’s this: A woman’s got to have her love affair sooner

or later. If she marries for love she’s pretty safe, for ten or fifteen

years, anyhow. But if she doesn’t, well, she’ll get it in the neck

sooner or later--and it’ll be about the time she begins to sit up and

take notice. She’s a regular magnet then, too. So watch out.”

Ora opened her eyes. They looked like steel. “I have never given a

thought to love. There is nothing I want less. I shall continue to

make Mark as good a wife as I know how to be----”

“Oh, I’m not saying you’ll go off the hooks, like some I could mention

in your own bunch, but if the man comes along you’ll fall in love

all right. Might as well try to stop a waterfall from jumping over

the rocks. I’m not so dead sure I do know what you’d do. Pride, and

high breeding, and duty would pull one way, but--well, I guess when

you marble women get waked up good and plenty, what they call roused,

you’re the worst kind. A considerable number of other things would pull

from the opposite direction, and one of them would be the man.”

“Ida!” said Ora, aghast. “How do you know so much? Your opportunities

have been very limited.”

“Oh, have they? Wasn’t I born and brought up in a mining camp? Butte is

some education, believe me. I ran straight all right, not only because

the sporting life had no charms for me but because I figured on moving

over one of these days to Millionaire Gulch. But it wasn’t for want of

opportunity, and the same opportunities were handed over by men of your

crowd--or fixin’ to be. Besides, some women are born wise that way, I

guess, and I’m one of ’em. You’ve been living in a sort of self-made

heaven all your life, with only books for inhabitants. I could put you

wise every day in the week.”

“It is true that although I saw a good deal of life while my mother

lived so much in the world, and always have been deeply interested

in the work of the psychological novelists, particularly the

Europeans--I--well, I never applied it to my--never thought much about

it until lately. I do not seem to know myself the least little bit.”

“I guess it’ll be me--Oh, Lord, I--taking you to Europe, not you me.

I’ll see that you don’t get into mischief, for I’d hate like the

dickens to have you go to pieces over any man. Not one of them that

ever lived since Adam is worth it. They’re all right to marry, all

things being equal, but to sacrifice your life for, nixie. Any style of

man you are partial to? I’ll keep his sort off with a broom.”

“I’ve never gone so far as even to think----”

“Every woman has her style in men,” said Ida firmly. “I heard of a

woman once who had three husbands and each one had a wart on his nose.”

“Oh, you are funny! I have heard that a woman falls in love with a

type, not with the man, and, like all epigrams, that one contains a

half-truth. I had two or three girlish fancies; one was an Austrian

officer, another a French nobleman--and not impecunious--he wasn’t

a fortune hunter. The third was a New Yorker who fell in love with

my cousin and married her. I had a few heart spasms over him, in

particular; possibly because he was quite out of reach. It is true that

they were all more of or less of a type--tall and thin and dark, with

something very keen and clever and modern in their lean--rather hard

faces.”

“Hi!” cried Ida.

“What is the matter? You look at me as if you had seen a ghost.”

Ida threw back her head and laughed, showing her sharp little white

teeth, and straining her throat until the firm flesh looked thin and

drawn, over too strong muscles. “Oh, Lord! I was just thinking what

a lot of trouble I’m in for, playing dragon to my lily-white lady. I

guess about half the men in the world are brunettes, fat or lean. Say,

are you going to the Prom? It’s only a month off.”

“I hadn’t thought about it. Probably. I have been asked to be a

patroness, and Mark is sure to want to go. Have you decided what to

wear?”

“Ma gave me a coral-red silk when I married, and I’m going to make it

over and veil it with black net.”

“Splendid!” cried Ora warmly. “Bring it up to the house. Mrs. Finley is

really an excellent seamstress. We’ll all take a hand. It will be great

fun. And you will look stunning.”

“What will you wear?”

“I expect some gowns from my New York dressmaker in a few days. It will

depend upon the state of my complexion, I fancy.”

XVIII

Ora received another budget of Ida’s philosophy on the day before the

Prom; she had taken her a long string of pink coral she had found

among her old possessions, and after Ida had wound it in her hair

and round her neck, and finally tried on her gown, and then draped

Ora successively in various scarves, remnants of her own wedding

finery--being almost as interested in the new complexion as Ora

herself--they had suddenly come to the conclusion that while in Europe

they would assume the mental attitude of girls travelling without a

chaperon. They would see the world from the independent girl’s point

of view, flirt like girls, not like married women (which at least

would save their consciences), force men to accept the phenomenon. For

a time they discussed the superior advantages of being young widows,

but, alluring and even thrilling as were the possibilities evoked, they

dismissed the alternative on the ground that it might prove a bore

always to be on the defensive; man making no secret of his attitude

toward widows. Besides, they felt a delicacy about burying their

indulgent husbands even in mental effigy. As counterfeit girls they

could crowd enough excitement into six months to serve them in memory

during long periods of Butte.

“It will be some bluff,” cried Ida. “And believe me, we’ll have the

time of our lives. And no remorse in mine. I intend to flirt the limit,

for I’m just ready to quit being a mother for a while and see a man’s

eyes kindle when he comes nigh--see him playing about at the end of

a string. I didn’t have near enough of it even when I had half Butte

at my feet--excuse what sounds like conceit but is cold fact. Now,

I’m going to light up every man I take a fancy to. I don’t care an

abandoned prospect hole whether I hurt ’em or not. All they are good

for is to give us a good time.”

“Ida!” Ora was aghast as she often had been before at these naked

feminine revelations. “You talk like a man-eater. I hope to heaven I am

not like that down deep.”

“Oh, maybe you won’t be so bad because you haven’t got as much vanity.

Mine’s insatiable, I guess, and good old Mother Nature taught me the

trick of covering it up with the don’t-care-a-damn air combined with

the come-hither eye. That does the trick. And they get what hurt’s

going. I don’t. You’ll cultivate men, thinking it’s your vanity waked

up, or mere youth, or because it’s time to have a fling, but what

you really are after is the one and only man. The Companion. The

Sympathetic Soul. The Mate. All that rot. He don’t exist, kiddo. He’s

the modern immaculate conception, and he’s generally stillborn; the

bungling doctor being the plain unadulterated male inside of himself.

You’ve got to be your own companion, and if you want happiness you can

get it by expecting just nothing of men. Use them. Throw them on the

ash heap. Pass on to the next. Quit sitting on the watch tower with

your eyes trained on the horizon for the prince that is born and lives

and dies in a woman’s imagination.”

“I have seen happy--united couples--who had been married for years.”

“Oh, yes; some couples are born to jog along together, and some wives

are born man-tamers, and get a lot of satisfaction out of it. But

you’re much too high-falutin’ for that. You’ll always dream of the

impossible--not only in man but of what he’s got to give--which ain’t

much. And I didn’t need all them--those--psychological and problem

and worldly novels you made me read, translated from half a dozen

languages, either. You take my advice, Ora, and don’t start off on any

fool hunt for an ideal. Men are just matter-of-fact two-legged animals,

and as selfish as a few thousand years of fool women have naturally

made them. He does well while he’s courting because he’s naturally good

at bluff. But every bit of romance oozes out of him after he’s eaten

his first breakfast of ham and eggs at home. We can keep up the bluff

forever. Men can’t. Each one of them’s got a kid twin brother inside

that plays marbles till he dies and makes you feel older every day. No,

sir! If I ever had any delusions, I’ve got over them good and plenty.

And I thank the Lord,” she added piously.

“I think that rather adorable, you know: the eternal boy. And I fancy

it is all that saves men from becoming horrors; in this country, at

least--when you consider the unending struggle, and strain, and sordid

business of money getting. They use up all their bluff in the battle of

life, poor things. Why shouldn’t they be natural with us?...”

Ora was recalling this conversation as she sat in her bedroom on the

following evening. Her elemental yet uncannily sophisticated friend

had a way of crashing chords out of jealously hidden nerves, which no

exercise of will could disconnect from the logical parts of the brain.

If it were true that what her now rampant ego, too long starved, really

demanded was man and romance, she wished she had let herself run to

seed until it was too late to reclaim her lost beauty and adventure

into temptation. But a glance into the mirror deprived her of any

further desire to join the vast sisterhood of unattractive females.

Moreover, she had faith in the dominance of her will and common sense,

and if her beauty would help her to the mental contacts she craved with

brilliant and interesting men, far be it from her to execrate it.

She dismissed the mood of self-analysis impatiently and opened her

wardrobe, although half inclined not to attend the Prom. She was

one of the patronesses, but her presence was not essential. It was

pre-eminently the night of nights for young folks--brownies and

squabs--and the absence of a married woman of twenty-six would pass

unrecorded. Not a man in Butte interested her personally, nor was she

in a frame of mind to be interested by any of the too specialised

products of the West. Nor was she inordinately fond of dancing; there

really was no object in going to this party save to witness the début

and possible triumph of her protégée.

But she felt something more than indifference toward this party. It

was as if a gong sounded a warning in the depths of her brain--in her

subconsciousness, perhaps, where instinct, that child of ancestral

experience, dwelt. But even while she hesitated she knew that she

should go, and she took one of her new gowns from a long drawer, and

then began to arrange her hair.

It was now some five months since Miss Ruby Miller had taken her in

hand, and if the young woman’s bank account was heavier her pride as

an artist far outweighed it. Ora’s hair was soft, abundant, the colour

of warm ashes. The skin of her face was as white and transparent,

as “pearly” to use its doctor’s own descriptive word, as the fine

protected surface of her slender throat, her thin but by no means bony

neck. Her lips were pink; they never would be red; and after one taste

of “lip stick,” Ora had declined to have them improved by art. But

they were a soft country-rose pink and suited her clear whiteness far

better than scarlet. Her eyes, never so clear and startling as now,

lighted up the cold whiteness of her face and made her pink mouth look

childish and somewhat pathetic. If her lips had been red, her face

would have had the sinister suggestion so many women achieve with the

assistance of art; as it was she looked by no means harmless as she

smiled at herself in the mirror and coiled her hair softly on the top

of her head. After some experimenting she had decided that she could

not improve upon an arrangement which for the present at least was all

her own.