Chapter III: Part I: I (3)

“Then you will enjoy study--expanding and furnishing your mind. It is a wonderful sensation!” Mrs. Blake’s eyes were flashing now, her mouth was soft, her strong little chin with that cleft which always suggests a whirlpool, was lifted as if she were drinking. “The moment you are conscious that you are using the magic keys to the great storehouses of the world, its arts, its sciences, its records of the past--when you begin to help yourself with both hands and pack it away in your memory--always something new--when you realise that the store is inexhaustible--that in study at least there is no ennui--Oh, I can give you no idea of what it all means--you will find it out for yourself!”

“Jimminy!” thought Ida. “I guess not! But that ain’t where her charm for men comes from, you bet!” Aloud she said, with awe in her voice:

“No wonder you know so much when you like it like that. But don’t it make you--well--kinder lonesome?”

“Sometimes--lately----” Mrs. Blake pulled herself up with a deep blush. “It has meant everything to me, that mental life, and it always shall!”

The astute Ida noted the defiant ring in her voice, and plunged in. “I wonder now? Say, you’re a pretty woman and a young one, and they say men would go head over ears about you if you’d give ’em a show. You’ve got a busy husband and so have I. Husbands don’t companion much and you can’t make me believe learning’s all. Don’t you wish these American Turks of husbands would let us have a man friend occasionally? They say that in high society in the East and in Europe, the women have all the men come to call on them afternoons they like, but the ordinary American husband, and particularly out West--Lord! When a woman has a man call on her, she’s about ready to split with her husband--belongs to the fast set--and he’s quail hunting somewheres else. Of course I’ve known Mark all my life--and you who was--were brought up in the real world--it must be awful hard on you. Wouldn’t you like to try your power once in a while, see how far you could go--just for fun? I guess you’re not shocked?”

“No, I’m not shocked,” said Ora, laughing. “But I don’t believe men interest me very much in that way--although, heaven knows, there are few more delightful sensations than talking to a man who makes you feel as if your brain were on fire. I don’t think I care to have American men, at least, become interested in me in any other way. In Europe----” She hesitated, and Ida leaned forward eagerly.

“Oh, do tell me, Mrs. Blake! I don’t know a blamed thing. I’ve never been outside of Montana.”

“Well--I mean--the American man takes love too seriously. I suppose it is because he is so busy--he has to take life so seriously. He specialises intensely. It is all or nothing with him. Of course I am talking about love. When they play about, it is generally with a class of women of which we have no personal knowledge. The European, with his larger leisure, and generations of leisure in his brain, his interest in everything, and knowledge of many things,--above all of the world,--has reduced gallantry to a fine art. He may give his fancy, his sentiment, his passion, even his leisure, to one woman at a time, but his heart--well, unless he is very young--that remains quite intact. Love is the game of his life with a change of partner at reasonable intervals. In other words he is far too accomplished and sophisticated to be romantic. Now, your American man, although he looks the reverse of romantic, and is always afraid of making a fool of himself, when he does fall in love with a woman--say, across a legal barrier--must annihilate the barrier at once; in other words, elope or rush to the divorce court. It isn’t that he is more averse from a liaison than the European, but more thorough. It is all or nothing. In many respects he is far finer than the European, but he makes for turmoil, and, less subtle, he fails to hold our interest.”

“You mean he don’t keep us guessing? Well, you’re right about most of them. I never saw a boy I couldn’t read like a page ad., until I met my husband. I thought I knew him, too, till I’d been married to him awhile. But, my land, he gets deeper every minute. I guess if I hadn’t married him he’d have kidnapped me, he was that gone, and forgetting anything else existed. Of course, I didn’t expect that to last, but I did think he’d go on being transparent. But, believe me, the Sphinx ain’t a patch on him. I sometimes think I don’t know him at all, and that keeps me interested.”

“I should think it might!” exclaimed Mrs. Blake, thinking of her own standard possession. “But then Mr. Compton is a hard student, and is said to have a voracious as well as a brilliant mind. No doubt that is the secret of what appears on the surface as complexity and secretiveness. I know the symptoms!”

“P’raps. But--well, I live with him, and I suspicion otherwise. I suspect him of having as many kind of leads, and cross-cuts, and ‘pockets’, and veins full of different kinds of ore in him as we’ve got right under our feet in Butte Hill. Do you think”--she spoke with a charming wistfulness--“that when I know more, have opened up and let out my top story, as it were, I shall understand him better?”

And again Ora responded warmly, “Indeed, yes, dear Mrs. Compton. It isn’t so much what you put into your mind--it’s more the reflex action of that personal collection in developing not only the mental faculties, but one’s intuitions, one’s power to understand others--even one whose interests are different, or whose knowledge is infinitely greater than our own.”

“I believe you could even understand Greg!” Ida spoke involuntarily and stared with real admiration at the quickened face with its pink cheeks and flashing eyes, its childish mobile mouth. Ora at the moment looked beautiful. Suddenly Ida felt as if half-drowned in a wave of ambiguous terror. She sat up very straight.

“I guess you’re right,” she said slowly. “You’ve made me see it as the others haven’t. I’ll work at all that measly little professor gives me, but--I don’t know--somehow, I can’t think he’ll do much more than make me talk decent. There’s nothing _to_ him.”

Ora’s heart beat more quickly. Her indifference had vanished in this intimate hour, also her first subtle dislike of Ida, who’s commonness now seemed picturesque, and whose wistful almost complete ignorance had made a strong appeal to her sympathies. For the first time in her lonely life she felt that she had something to give. And here was raw and promising material ready and eager to be woven, if not into cloth of silver, at least into a quality of merchandise vastly superior to that which the rude loom of youth had so far produced. All she knew of Gregory Compton, moreover, made her believe in and admire him; the loneliness of his mental life with this woman appalled her. This was not the first time she had been forced to admit of late that under the cool bright surface of her nature were more womanly impulses than formerly, a spontaneous warmth that was almost like the quickening of a child; but she had turned from the consciousness with an impatient: “What nonsense! What on earth should I do with it?” The sense that she was of no vital use to anyone had discouraged her, dimmed her interest in her studies. Her husband could hire a better housekeeper, find a hundred girls who would companion him better. And what if she were _instruite_? So were thousands of women. Nothing was easier.

But this clever girl of the people, who might before many years had passed be one of the rich and conspicuous women of the United States, above all, the wife of one of the nation’s “big men,” working himself beyond human capacity, harassed, needing not only physical comfort at home, but counsel, companionship, perfect understanding,--might it not be her destiny to equip Ida Compton for her double part? Ora’s imagination, the most precious and the most dangerous of her gifts, was at white heat. To her everlasting credit would be the fashioning of a helpmate for one of her country’s great men. It would be enough to do as much for the state which her imperfect father had loved so passionately; but her imagination would not confine Gregory Compton within the limitations of a state. It was more than likely that his destiny would prove to be national; and she had seen the wives of certain men eminent in political Washington, but of obscure origin. They were Ida’s mannered, grooved, crystallised; women to flee from.

She leaned forward and took Ida’s hand in both of hers. “Dear Mrs. Compton!” she exclaimed. “Do let me teach you what little I know. I mean of art--history--the past--the present--I have portfolios of beautiful photographs of great pictures and scenes that I collected for years in Europe. It will do me so much good to go over them. I haven’t had the courage to look at them for years. And the significant movements, social, political, religious,--all this theft under so many different names,--Christian Science, the ‘Uplift’ Movement, Occultism--from the ancient Hindu philosophy--it would be delightful to go into it with someone. I am sure I could make it all most interesting to you.”

“My Gorrd!” thought Ida. “Two of ’em! What am I let in for?” But the undefined sharp sense of terror lingered, and she answered when she got her breath,

“I’d like it first rate. The work in this shack is nothing. Mr. Compton leaves first thing in the morning, and don’t show up till nearly six. The professor’s coming for an hour every other afternoon. But if I go to your house I want it understood that I don’t meet anyone else. I’ve got my reasons.”

“You shall not meet a soul. Can’t you imagine how sick I am of Butte? We’ll have heavenly times. I was wondering only the other day of what use was all this heterogeneous mass of stuff I’d put into my head. But,” she added gaily, “I know now it was for you to select from. I am so glad. And--and----” Her keen perceptions suggested a more purely feminine bait. “You were with Madame O’Reilley, were you not? I get my things from a very good dressmaker in New York. Perhaps you would like to copy some of them?”

“Aw! Would I?” Ida gasped and almost strangled. For the first time during this the most trying day of her life she felt wholly herself. “You may just bet your life I would. I need new duds the worst way, even if I’m not a West Sider. I’ve been on a ranch for nearly a year and a half, and although Mr. Compton won’t take me to any balls, there are the movin’ pictures and the mats--matinees; _and_ the street, where I have to show up once in a while! I used to think an awful lot of my looks and style, and I guess it’s time to begin again. I can sew first rate, make any old thing. Do you mean it?”

“Indeed I do! I _want_ to be of help to you in every way.” She rose and held Ida’s hand once more in hers, although she did not kiss her as another woman might have done. “Will you come tomorrow--about two?”

“You may bet your bottom dollar I’ll come. I haven’t thanked you, but maybe I’ll do that some other way.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mrs. Blake lightly.

IX

Butte, “the richest hill in the world” (known at a period when less famous for metals and morals as “Perch of the Devil”), is a long scraggy ridge of granite and red and grey dirt rising abruptly out of a stony uneven plain high in the Rocky Mountains. The city is scooped out of its south slope, and overflows upon The Flat. Big Butte, an equally abrupt protuberance, but higher, steeper, more symmetrical, stands close beside the treasure vault, but with the aloof and somewhat cynical air of even the apocryphal volcano. On all sides the sterile valley heaves away as if abruptly arrested in a throe of the monstrous convulsion that begat it; but pressing close, cutting the thin brilliant air with its icy peaks, is an irregular and nearly circular chain of mountains, unbroken white in winter, white on the blue enamelled slopes in summer.

For nearly half the year the whole scene is white, with not a tree, nor, beyond the straggling town itself, a house to break its frozen beauty. It is only when the warm Chinook wind roars in from the west and melts the snow much as lightning strikes, or when Summer herself has come, that you realize the appalling surface barrenness of this region devastated for many years by the sulphur and arsenic fumes of ore roasted in the open or belching from the smelters. They ate up the vegetation, and the melting snows and heavy June rains washed the weakened earth from the bones of valley and mountain, leaving both as stark as they must have been when the earth ceased to rock and began to cool. Since the smelters have gone to Anaconda, patches of green, of a sad and timid tenderness, like the smile of a child too long neglected, have appeared between the sickly grey boulders of the foothills, and, in Butte, lawns as large as a tablecloth have been cultivated. Anaconda Hill at the precipitous eastern end of the city, with its tangled mass of smokestacks, gallows-frames, shabby grey buildings, trestles, looks like a gigantic shipwreck, but is merely the portal to the precious ore bodies of the mines whose shafts, levels, and cross-cuts to the depth of three thousand feet and more, pierce and ramify under city and valley. These hideous buildings through which so many hundreds of millions have passed, irrupt into the very back yards of some of the homes, built too far east (and before mere gold and silver gave place to copper); but the town improves as it leaps westward. The big severe solid buildings to be found in every modern city sure of its stability crowd the tumble-down wood structures of a day when no man looked upon Butte as aught but a camp. And although the streets are vociferously cobbled, the pavements are civilised here and there.

Farther west the houses of the residence section grow more and more imposing, coinciding with the sense of Butte’s inevitableness. On the high western rim of the city (which exteriorly has as many ups and downs as the story of its vitals) stands the red School of Mines. It has a permanent expression of surprise, natural to a bit of Italian renaissance looking down upon Butte.

Some of the homes, particularly those of light pressed brick, and one that looks like the northeast corner of the upper story of a robber stronghold of the middle ages, are models of taste and not too modest symbols of wealth; but north and south and east and west are the snow wastes in winter and the red or grey untidy desert of sand and rock in summer.

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.”