Chapter IV: Part I: I (4)

“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.