PART I (continued 3)

“I’m in your hands,” murmured Ora. “What next?”

“Did you really lose interest in yourself?” asked Miss Miller curiously, and with the fine freedom of the West from class restraint. “Or didn’t you ever have any?”

“A little of both. When I was a girl I was a frightful pedant—and—Oh, well—Butte is not Europe, and I took refuge more than ever in books, particularly as I could have nothing of the other arts. You know the resources of Butte!”

“I’m glad you’re goin’ to Europe again, where I guess all kinds of variety are on tap.—Say, perhaps you’ll find out all the new kinks for the complexion in Paris, and tell me when you come back.”

“I will indeed!”

“I don’t hold to rippin’ the skin off, or hoistin’ it up,” said Miss Miller firmly. “All any skin needs is steady treatment, and constant care—constant, mind you, and never forget it. Now there’s your profile. It’s grand. The way I’m goin’ to fix your hair’ll show it off, and don’t you let it get scooped round the eyes, like so many women do. Massage’ll prevent that. I wish your eyebrows and lashes was black, like so many heroines in novels has. The contrast would be fine. But brown’ll do, and I guess the natural is your lay. Luckily them black grey eyes is a high note, and when you get your lips real red, you’ll have all the colour your style can carry. The gleamin’ white skin’ll do the rest.”

“How am I to get red lips, and what’s to make my skin gleam?”

“You’re anæmic. You go to a doctor and get a tonic right off. When I get through with your complexion it’ll gleam all right. No powder for you. It improves most women, but you want high lights. I don’t mean shine when I say gleam, either. I mean that you’ve got the kind of skin that when the tan’s off and it’s toned up and is in perfect condition (you’ve got to be that inside, too), sheds a sort of white light. It’s the rarest kind, and I guess it does the most damage.”

“And what good is all this beautifying to do me? And why make me dangerous? Surely you are not counselling that I begin a predatory raid on other women’s husbands, or even on the ‘brownies’?”

“Well, I guess not. I don’t approve of married women lettin’ men make love to them, but I do believe in a woman makin’ the most of herself and gettin’ all the admiration that’s comin’ to her. If you can be a beauty, for the Lord Almighty’s sake be one. Believe me, it’ll make life seem as if it had a lot more to it.”

“I shouldn’t wonder!”

“And you go in right off for deep breathin’ and Swedish exercises night and mornin’. It’s the style to be thin, but you want to develop yourself more. And they keep you limber—don’t forget that. When a woman stiffens up she’s done for. Might as well get fat round her waist. Now shut your eyes, I’m goin’ to massage.”

XV

“I WONDER!” thought Ora, “I wonder!”

It was some four months after her first séance with Miss Ruby Miller. There was no question of the improvement in her looks, owing, perhaps, as much to a new self-confidence as to the becoming arrangement of her hair and the improved tint and texture of her skin. The tonic and a less reckless diet had also done their work; her eyes were even brighter, her lips pink. Moreover, it was patent that the sudden reformation was as obvious to Butte as to herself. Women confessed to a previous fear that the “altitude had got on her nerves or something”; as for the men, they may or may not have observed the more direct results of Miss Miller’s manipulations, but it was not open to doubt that her new interest in herself had revived her magnetism and possibly doubled it.

Ora turned from the mirror in her bedroom, where she had been regarding her convalescing beauty with a puzzled frown, and stared down at the rough red dirt of her half-finished street—she lived far to the west. Her eyes travelled up to the rough elevation upon which stood the School of Mines in its lonely splendour, then down to the rough and dreary Flat. It stretched far to the south, a hideous expanse, with its dusty cemetery, its uninviting but not neglected road houses, its wide section given over to humble dwellings, with here and there a house of more pretensions, but little more beauty. It was in one of these last, no doubt, that her father had kept his mistress, whose children, she was vaguely aware, attended the public schools under his name. These houses, large and small, were crowded together as if pathetically conscious that the human element must be their all, in that sandy, treeless, greenless waste.

There was something pathetic, altogether, thought Ora, in the bright eagerness with which even the wealthy class made the most of their little all. They were so proud of Columbia Gardens, a happy-go-lucky jumble of architectures and a few young trees, a fine conservatory and obese pansies on green checkers of lawn; they patronised its Casino so conscientiously on Friday nights when the weather would permit. During the winter, they skated on their shingled puddle down on The Flat as merrily and thankfully as though it were the West End of London or one of the beautiful lakes in one of the beautiful German “gartens.” They motored about the hideous environs, and hung out of the car to emphasise their rapture at the lonely tree or patch of timid verdure; they entertained royally in their little Club House, out in another desolate waste, or played golf without envy or malice. In short they resolutely made the most of Butte when they were in it; they patted Butte and themselves on the back daily; they loved it and they were loyal to it and they got out of it as often as they possibly could.

“And I!” thought Ora, with a sense of panic. “I, who will probably get away every five years or so—what am I waking up for—to what end? I wonder!”

She walked slowly downstairs and, avoiding the little French drawing-room, went into the library and sat down among her books. Sash curtains of a pale canary colour shut out the rough vacant lots and ugly dwellings above her home, and cast a mellow glow over the brown walls and rows of calf-bound books. Judge Stratton had read in four modern languages and two dead ones. The love of reading, of long evenings alone in his deserted “mansion,” had been as striking a characteristic of his many-sided ego as his contempt for moral standards. Ora, who had grown into a slow but fairly thorough knowledge of her father’s life and character, permitted her thoughts to flow freely this afternoon and to speculate upon what her life might have been had Judge Stratton been as upright as he was intellectually gifted; if her mother had possessed the brains or charm to keep him ensnared; if she herself had been left, an orphan at twenty, with the fortune she inevitably would have inherited had her father behaved himself—instead of finding herself penniless, ignorant of all practical knowledge, a querulous invalid on her hands, her only suitor the “hustling” son of her mother’s old seamstress.

Ora admitted no disloyalty to Mark as she put these questions for the first time squarely to herself. She intended to continue to treat him with unswerving friendship, to give him all the assistance in her power, as long as she lived. And, as husbands went, she made no doubt that he was one to thank her grudging providence for. But that she would have considered him for a moment had she inherited the fortune her father had made and dissipated was as likely as that she would have elected to live her life in Butte.

She knew Mark’s ambitions. Washington was his goal, and he was by no means averse from being governor of his state meanwhile. Nor would he have been a genuine American boy, born in the traditional log cabin—it had been a log cabin as a matter of fact—if he had not cherished secret designs on the White House. In all this, did it prove to be more or less, she could be of incalculable assistance to him. And she was the more determined to render this assistance because she had accepted his bounty and was unable to love him.

She concluded with some cynicism that the account would be squared, being by no means blind to what she had done for him already in the way of social position and prestige; still, it was not only his right, but a penance demanded by her self-respect. She was living the most unidealistic life possible to a woman of her pride and temperament, but she would redeem it as far as lay in her power.

She moved impatiently, her brows puzzled again, and something like fear in her heart. What did this slow awakening portend? Why had she instinctively held it back with all her strength, quite successfully until her new-born vanity, with its infinite suggestions, had quickened it suddenly into imperious expression?

Certainly she was conscious of no desire for a more idealistic union with another man. If she had inherited a fortune, she would have married no one; not then, at all events; nothing had been further from her desire. She would have lived in Europe and travelled in many lands. Beyond a doubt her hunger for the knowledge that lies in books would have been satiated long since, never would have assumed a discrepant importance. She would be uniformly developed, and she would have met many men. With the double passport of birth and wealth, added to the fine manner she owed to her Southern mother, her natural vivacity and magnetism, and a physical endowment that she now knew could have been trained into positive beauty, she would have had her pick of men. And when a woman may choose of the best, with ample time at her disposal, it was incredible that the true mate, the essential companion, should not be found before it was too late. Most marriages are makeshifts; but for the fortunate few, with the intelligence to wait, and the developed instinct to respond, there was always the possibility of the perfect union.

Ora made a wry face at this last collocation. She had no yearning for the “perfect union.” Matrimony had been too unutterably distasteful. She turned hastily from the subject and recalled her father’s impassioned desire that she should make the West her home, her career, marry a Western man, give him and her state the benefit of her endowments and accomplishments. Possibly, surfeited with Europe, she would have returned to Montana to identify herself with its progress, whether she married or not. She was artistic by temperament and training, and correspondingly fastidious; she cordially detested all careers pursued by women outside those that were the natural evolution of an artistic gift. But she could have built herself an immense and splendid house, filled it with the most exquisite treasures American money could coax from the needy aristocracy of Europe, and have a famous salon; invite the pick of the artistic, literary, musical, and political world to visit her for weeks or months at a time, house parties of a hundred or more, and so make her state famous for something besides metals, intensive farming, and political corruption. No one could deny that the state would benefit exceedingly.

Conceivably, in time she would take a husband, assuredly one of high ambitions and abilities, one whose fortunes probably would take him to Washington.

This brought her back to Mark, and she laughed aloud. She had been romancing wildly; of late she had grudgingly admitted that nature may have composed her to be romantic after she had recovered from the intellectual obsession; and the circle had brought her round to her husband! He was “forging ahead” with extraordinary rapidity. She made no doubt that he would be a millionaire within the ten years’ limit he had set himself. Nor would he rely alone upon his legal equipment and the many opportunities to exercise it when a man was “on the job all the time”; he watched the development of Montana’s every industry, new and established. He “bought in on the ground floor,” gambled discreetly in copper, owned shares in several new and promising mines, and property on the most picturesquely situated of the new lakes constructed for power supply. He invested what he could afford, and with the precision of the man on the spot. Yes, he would be one of the Western millionaires, even if not one of the inordinate ones, and before his ten years had passed, if no untoward event occurred.

And it was on the cards that she would have her own fortune before long. She knew that Mark (who had her power of attorney) had made better terms with the engineers than he had anticipated, and he dropped mysterious hints which, knowing his level head, made her indulge in ornate dreams now and again. But he only smiled teasingly when she demanded a full explanation, and told her that she would realise how good or how bad her mine was when she went to the bank to sign her letter of credit.

For one thing she felt suddenly grateful. She knew that the mine had been leased for a year only and without bond. If, during that time it “panned out,” she would stipulate to mine it herself when the contract expired.

She sat up very straight and smiled. That was what she would have liked! If her father had but willed her this mine and capital enough to work it alone! Her fingers fluttered as they always did when handling ore; she had wondered before if the prospector’s fever were in her blood. How she should have enjoyed watching the rock come up in the buckets as the shaft sank foot by foot, until they struck the vein; always expecting chambers of incredible richness, gold, copper, silver. She would even learn to do the pleasant part of her own assaying; and she suddenly experienced an intense secretive jealous love for this mine that was hers and in which might be hidden shining blocks of those mysterious primary deposits deep in the sulphide zone; forced up through the veins of earth, but born how or where man could only guess. It was a mystery that she wanted to feel close to and alone with, far in the winding depths of her mine.

She got up and moved about impatiently. Her propensity to dream extravagantly was beginning to alarm her, and she wished uneasily that she could discover the gift to write and work it off. Where would it lead her? But she would not admit for a moment that her released imagination, pulsing with vitality, and working on whatever she fed it, only awaited the inevitable moment when it could concentrate on the one object for which the imagination of woman was created.

The pendulum swung back and more evenly. She told herself it was both possible and probable that she had a good property, however short it might fall of Butte Hill. She renewed her determination to mine it herself, and work, work, work. Therein lay safety. The future seemed suddenly full of alarms.

And there was Mark, his career, his demands, dictated not so insistently by him as by herself.

Ora’s soul rose in a sudden and desperate revolt beside which her rising aversion from unmitigated intellect was a mere megrim. She felt herself to be her father’s daughter in all her newly-opened aching brain-cells. He had lived his life to please himself, and if his temptations and weaknesses might never be hers—how could she tell?—his intense vitality survived in her veins, his imperious spirit, his scornful independence. She glanced at the rows of calf-bound books he had handled so often. Something of his sinister powerful personality seemed to steal forth and encompass her, sweep through the quickened corridors of her brain. Mark Blake was not the man he would have chosen for his daughter. Western, Mark might be to the core, but he was second-rate, and second-rate he would remain no matter what his successes.

And, she wondered, what would this proud ambitious parent, whose deepest feeling had been for his one legitimate child, say to her plan to play second fiddle for life to a man of the Mark Blake calibre? He had wanted her to marry in the West, but he had been equally insistent that she should develop a personality and position of her own. No devoted suffragist could have been a more ardent advocate of woman’s personal development than Judge Stratton had been where his daughter was concerned. To the rights of other women he had never cast a thought.

This was the hour of grim self-avowal. She admitted what had long moved in the back of her mind, striving toward expression, that she hated herself for having married any man for the miserable reason that has driven so many lazy inefficient women into loveless marriages. She should have gone to work. More than one of her father’s old friends would have given her a secretaryship. She could have lived on her little capital and taken the four years’ course at the School of Mines, equipping herself for a congenial career. If that had not occurred to her she could have taught French, Italian, German, dancing, literature. In a new state like Montana, with many women raised abruptly from the nethermost to the highest stratum, there was always a longing, generally unfulfilled, for the quick veneer; and women of older fortunes welcomed opportunities to improve themselves. She could have taken parties to Europe.

She had played the coward’s part and not only done a black injustice to herself but to Mark Blake. He was naturally an affectionate creature, and, married to a comfortable sweet little wife, he would have been domestic and quite happy. In spite of his enjoyment of his club, his cards and billiards, and his buoyant nature, she suspected that he was wistful at heart. He was intensely proud of his wife, in certain ways dependent upon her, but she knew he had taken for granted that her girlish coldness would melt in time and womanly fires kindle. Well, they never would for him, poor Mark. And possessing an inherent sense of justice, she felt just then more sympathy for him than for herself, and placed all his good points to his credit.

She was conscious of no sympathy for herself, only of that deep sense of puzzlement, disturbance, apprehension. Revolt passed. Indications—the abrupt bursting into flower of many unsuspected bulbs in her inner garden: softness, sympathy, a more spontaneous interest in and response to others, the tendency to dream, vague formless aspirations—had hinted, even before she took her new-born vanity to Miss Ruby Miller, that she was on the threshold of one of the dangerous ages (there are some ten or fifteen of them), and that unless she had the doubtful wisdom and resolution to burn out her garden as the poisonous fumes of roasting ores had blasted the fruitful soil of Butte, she must prepare to face Life, possibly its terrible joys and sorrows.

She sprang to her feet and ran upstairs and dressed for the street. At least she had one abiding interest and responsibility, Ida Compton. She was a self-imposed and absorbing duty, and always diverting.

XVI

“OH, you give me the willys!”

“My dear Mrs. Compton! How often have you promised me——”

“Well, if you will stare at me like a moonstruck setter dog when I’m trying to think up ’steen synonyms for one old word without looking in the dictionary! I can’t blow up my vocabulary like a paper bag and flirt with you at the same time.”

“I have no desire to flirt with you!” said Professor Whalen with great dignity. “It is quite the reverse. You have been playing with my feelings for months.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve been too set on becoming a real lady before leaving for Europe—haven’t thought about you.”

Professor Whalen turned a deep dull red. His overlapping upper teeth shot forward as if to snap down upon his long rather weak chin. He stared past Ida through the open window. It was May and the snow was melting on the mountains, had disappeared from the streets of Butte; there is a brief springtime in Montana between the snows of winter and the cold rains of June, and today was soft and caressing.

“I’ll tell you what is the matter with you,” said Ida, cruelly. “It’s the spring of the year.”

Whalen sprang to his feet. For the first time in his anæmic life he was furiously angry, and he rejoiced in the sensation. “I wish you were a man,” he stuttered. “I’d beat you. It would do my heart good.”

“If you were a real man you would enjoy beating a woman a long sight more,” goaded Ida, who watched him as a man-eating tigress may watch the squirming victim between her paws. She had fed her vanity and amused herself by playing on the little man’s pale emotions until she was convinced he really was in love with her. She suddenly made up her mind to force him to “let go,” and experience the sensation of being made love to feloniously.

“I am not a brute,” announced Whalen, still in the same stifled voice. His face was purple, but he was conscious of a warning whisper that he was in a fair way to lose this remunerative pupil. He dismissed the warning. There is probably no man so insignificant, in whom passion for the imperative woman does not develop abnormally the purely masculine conceit. He may despair in solitude, when devitalised by reaction and doubt, but when in her presence, under her inviting eye, and hurried to a crisis by hammering pulses and scorching blood, he is merely the primitive male with whom to desire is to have.

Ida laughed, a low throaty husky laugh. “If you were,” she said cuttingly, “you might stand a show.”

“It is you that are brutal,” hissed poor Whalen.

Ida leaned back in her chair and looked at him out of half-closed eyes. “What induced you to fall in love with me, anyhow?” she demanded in her sweet lazy voice. Whalen clenched his hands.

“I am a man if I am not a brute. You are the most fascinating woman on earth, and you have deliberately tried to entice me from the path of rectitude I have trod all my life——”

“What’s that?” Ida sat up straight, her brows drawn in an ominous frown.

“I have resisted you until today, but I yield——”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“I expected to be tormented to the utmost limit. But I have stood all of it that I purpose to stand.” His voice by this time was a subdued roar. “I don’t care whether you love me or not. I don’t think you could love anybody. I have read that sirens never do. But you are an enchantress, and you have shown plainly enough——”

Ida’s frown had relaxed, but her eyes blazed. He misunderstood their expression, as well as the sudden forward thrust of her head. He sprang forward, caught her by the shoulders and kissed her.

“Aw!” Ida’s voice was almost a roar. She leaped to her feet, twirled him about, caught him by the back of his collar and the seat of his trousers, and threw him out of the window as if he had been an offensive dog. She flung his hat and stick after him and slammed the window down. Then she stamped her feet in inarticulate rage, and rubbed and bit her mouth. It was one thing to play with a man’s passions and quite another to be defiled by them. Ida seethed with the fierce virtue of a young inexperienced and temperamentally cold woman. For a few moments she used very bad language indeed, and struggled with an impulse to ran after the “little puppy” and whip him in the street. But, remembering that she was making a heroic attempt to be a grande dame, she finally went into her bedroom and washed her face.

XVII

THERE was a knock on the front door. Ida, smoothing her hair, hastened to open it, glad of diversion. Ora stood there. For a moment the girls looked hard at each other, then burst into laughter.

“What’s up?” asked Ida. “You look——”

“My dear, it is I who should ask? Your face is crimson; you look as if you had just given someone a beating, and I met poor little Whalen, dusty, dishevelled, growling like a mad dog—he didn’t know me.”

“Well, I guess he won’t know himself for a while,” said Ida drily, leading the way into the parlour. “When he comes to he’ll have his work cut out to climb back to his little two-cent pedestal and fit on his battered halo.” She related the incident. “What do you know about that?” she demanded in conclusion. “Wouldn’t it come and get you?”

“I am afraid you have made an enemy. It is always best to let them down gently, save their pride—and—ah!—it isn’t customary to throw gentlemen out of the window!”

“Gentlemen!” snorted Ida. “He’s no gentleman. He not only kissed me with his horrid front teeth, but he insinuated that I was just languishing for him, the——” Once more Ida’s feelings overflowed in language not intended for print. “It made me so mad I’d have lammed him with the umbrella if we’d been in the hall.”

“Ida,” asked Ora abruptly, “would you have minded so much if he had been good-looking and attractive?”

“Well—perhaps—I guess in that case I’d simply have smacked him and let him get out quick by the front door. But I don’t want any man touching me. I’m a married woman.”

“But if you flirt and lead them on——”

“You said once yourself that American men understood the game and knew how to take their medicine.”

“I also said that they can fall more tiresomely in love than any other men. Of course the Whalens don’t count. But do you intend to go on making men fall in love with you and throwing them—metaphorically—out of the window?”

“Much chance I’ll get.”

“You’ll find plenty of chances in Europe. You are a remarkably beautiful woman. And Europeans take what we call flirting for shameless encouragement.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be getting experience of the world all right. And the Lord knows I’d like to be admired by men who have seen something. I can take care of myself, and Greg don’t need to worry.”

“I’ve no doubt of that. Of course you are awfully fond of Mr. Compton, aren’t you?” Ora spoke somewhat wistfully.

“Oh, yes; fond enough, fonder than a good many wives, I guess, for he’s kind and pleasant, and no earthly trouble about the house. But when a woman marries she gets a kid right there at the altar, and he’s her biggest kid till his false teeth drop out on his death-bed, and his great-grandchildren are feeding him through a tube. I don’t want any of the other sort of kids, and I guess I’m not what you call the maternal woman, but the Lord knows I’m a mother to Greg and a good one. I’d like to know what he’d do without me—that’s the only reason I hate leaving. He never thinks of changing his shoes when they’re wet, and half the time wouldn’t eat anything but his book if I didn’t put the stuff right in front of him.”

“Mark knows him almost as well as you do, and will look after him. My maid, who is practically my housekeeper, and an old family servant, will also keep a maternal eye on him.”

“He keeps himself tidy,” conceded Ida handsomely. “Wants clean things every day, but never knows where to find them. He’ll wander out into the kitchen where I’m cooking breakfast and ask where his socks are, and they always in the same drawer.”

“I fancy you’ve spoiled him.”

“Not I. I don’t hold with spoiling men. They’re born spoiled anyhow. I found Greg walking round in a dream when I married, and a pile of socks as high as the door knob he’d thrown away because they’d holes in them so tiny you could hardly see them. I darned every one, you bet, and he’s wearing them now, though he don’t know it. He’s like that, as dainty as a cat, and as helpless as a blind kitten. I am a wife and I know my duty,” concluded Ida virtuously.

“I certainly shall give Custer minute directions. I can’t have you worrying.”

“I’ll not worry, once I’m started. Don’t you fret! But what’s the matter with you, Ora? You look kinder excited, and kinder—well, harassed. How’s that out of the new pocket dictionary I’ve set up in my head?”

“I’ll soon have to look to my own vocabulary. Oh—I——”

“Something’s up. Spit it out. It’ll do you good.”

“Dear Ida! If you must use slang, do confine yourself to that which has passed through the mint of polite society. There is an abundance to choose from!”

“Don’t you worry; I won’t disgrace you. But I must let out a tuck occasionally when we’re alone. Greg wouldn’t let me go to any of the Club dances, and I scarcely ever see Ruby or Pearl, they’re so busy—to say nothing of myself!”

“Very well,” said Ora, laughing. “Let me be your safety valve, by all means.”

“Fire away.”

“Oh—how am I to tell you—I scarcely know, myself——”

“I guess you’re waking up. Ruby, who knows human nature like a book——”

Ora half rose. “Have you been talking me over with Miss Miller?” she asked haughtily.

“Not much. Hardly seen her since we met. But you interest Butte, you know. I guess they talk you over good and plenty. It was only a few days before you called that the Miller girls visited with me all day, and they talked a lot about you. Ruby said that if you’d come to out of the sleeping beauty stage, you’d make things hum, and that her fingers just itched to get at your skin and hair.”

“She said that to me once; and I don’t mind telling you that I called her in some time ago.”

“Oh, I’m not a bat. I’ve seen you looking prettier every day, and there’s only one way to do it, when you’ve let yourself go. I’ve had the benefit of Ruby’s advice for years, and I don’t propose to let myself go, not for a minute.”

“Right you are. And do live your life normally from day to day, developing normally. The awakening process, when the Nature that made you is no longer content to be a mere footstool for the mind, is almost as painful as coming to after drowning. I suddenly have become conscious of myself, as it were; I am interested in many more things—personal things—I seem to want far more of life than I did a few months ago——”

“In other words, you don’t know where you’re at.”

Ora laughed merrily. “My present condition could not be stated more patly!”

“Ora, I don’t want to pry into your confidence, and you’re not one to give much of that anyhow, but everybody in Butte knows that you’re not in love with Mark, and never were, nice as you treat him—only because you couldn’t be anything but a lady if you tried. Mrs. O’Neil, one day when she was having a massage, told Ruby all about your marriage. She said you were the most bewildered young thing she ever saw, and that Mark snapped you up before another young man could get a look at you. Now, I’ve known Mark all my life—he beaued my sister who died, for a year or two, and his mother’s cottage was just up the hill anyhow; and although he’s a good chap and a born hustler, and bound to get rich, he’s not the sort of man women fall in love with. You wouldn’t have fallen in love with him, if he’d been born a millionaire, and travelled and got Butte out of his system. And if your father had left you well off, you wouldn’t have looked at him. There’s men, bad and good—that’s to say, better—that women fall in love with, and there’s men bad and good that they don’t, not in a thousand years. Poor old Mark’s a Don’t all right. You ain’t angry at my saying all this, but Mark was like my own brother for years?”

“Oh, no, I am not angry. You are far too matter-of-fact. You might be discussing different grades of ore!”

“Well, that’s about it, and the poor ore can’t help itself, any more than the slag and gangue can, and Mark’s not either of those, you bet. He’s good metal, all right, only he didn’t come out of the Anaconda mine—What have you turned so red about? My! But you do blush easy!”

“It’s this—do you despise me—do you think I did wrong—Oh, I mean I have quite suddenly realised that I never should have married any man for so contemptible a reason. I should have gone to work——”

“Work? You?”

“Why not? Many a delicately nurtured woman has earned her bread.”

“The more fool she if she could get a man to earn it for her. That’s what they’re for. The Lord knows they pride themselves on the way they do it, being the stronger sex, and a lot more words. I guess I’d have married before Greg turned up if I’d met a man I was sure was going to make something of himself. You did just right to take a good husband and take him quick when you found yourself in a hole.”

“Yes—but——” Her blush deepened. “You see—” Ora never had had an intimate confidant. It was doubtful if she ever would have; not, at all events, a woman. But Ida, as she herself would have expressed it, could always see through a stone wall when there was a crack in it.

“Oh, shucks!” she said. “Don’t let that worry you. If you don’t feel that way first you do last, I guess. Most of us are bored to death, but women have stood it for a few thousand years, and I guess they can stand it for a few thousand more. We all of us have to pay high for anything we want. That’s about the size of it. Forget it.”

“Thanks, dear, you console me.” Ora smiled with closed eyes, but she was thrilled with a sudden inexplicable longing; like other of her recent sensations, it puzzled and alarmed her.

“Ora!” exclaimed Ida suddenly. “There’s one thing that’s just as sure as death and taxes; and knowing men and knowing life don’t help women one little bit. It’s this: A woman’s got to have her love affair sooner or later. If she marries for love she’s pretty safe, for ten or fifteen years, anyhow. But if she doesn’t, well, she’ll get it in the neck sooner or later—and it’ll be about the time she begins to sit up and take notice. She’s a regular magnet then, too. So watch out.”

Ora opened her eyes. They looked like steel. “I have never given a thought to love. There is nothing I want less. I shall continue to make Mark as good a wife as I know how to be——”

“Oh, I’m not saying you’ll go off the hooks, like some I could mention in your own bunch, but if the man comes along you’ll fall in love all right. Might as well try to stop a waterfall from jumping over the rocks. I’m not so dead sure I do know what you’d do. Pride, and high breeding, and duty would pull one way, but—well, I guess when you marble women get waked up good and plenty, what they call roused, you’re the worst kind. A considerable number of other things would pull from the opposite direction, and one of them would be the man.”

“Ida!” said Ora, aghast. “How do you know so much? Your opportunities have been very limited.”

“Oh, have they? Wasn’t I born and brought up in a mining camp? Butte is some education, believe me. I ran straight all right, not only because the sporting life had no charms for me but because I figured on moving over one of these days to Millionaire Gulch. But it wasn’t for want of opportunity, and the same opportunities were handed over by men of your crowd—or fixin’ to be. Besides, some women are born wise that way, I guess, and I’m one of ’em. You’ve been living in a sort of self-made heaven all your life, with only books for inhabitants. I could put you wise every day in the week.”

“It is true that although I saw a good deal of life while my mother lived so much in the world, and always have been deeply interested in the work of the psychological novelists, particularly the Europeans—I—well, I never applied it to my—never thought much about it until lately. I do not seem to know myself the least little bit.”

“I guess it’ll be me—Oh, Lord, I—taking you to Europe, not you me. I’ll see that you don’t get into mischief, for I’d hate like the dickens to have you go to pieces over any man. Not one of them that ever lived since Adam is worth it. They’re all right to marry, all things being equal, but to sacrifice your life for, nixie. Any style of man you are partial to? I’ll keep his sort off with a broom.”

“I’ve never gone so far as even to think——”

“Every woman has her style in men,” said Ida firmly. “I heard of a woman once who had three husbands and each one had a wart on his nose.”

“Oh, you are funny! I have heard that a woman falls in love with a type, not with the man, and, like all epigrams, that one contains a half-truth. I had two or three girlish fancies; one was an Austrian officer, another a French nobleman—and not impecunious—he wasn’t a fortune hunter. The third was a New Yorker who fell in love with my cousin and married her. I had a few heart spasms over him, in particular; possibly because he was quite out of reach. It is true that they were all more of or less of a type—tall and thin and dark, with something very keen and clever and modern in their lean—rather hard faces.”

“Hi!” cried Ida.

“What is the matter? You look at me as if you had seen a ghost.”

Ida threw back her head and laughed, showing her sharp little white teeth, and straining her throat until the firm flesh looked thin and drawn, over too strong muscles. “Oh, Lord! I was just thinking what a lot of trouble I’m in for, playing dragon to my lily-white lady. I guess about half the men in the world are brunettes, fat or lean. Say, are you going to the Prom? It’s only a month off.”

“I hadn’t thought about it. Probably. I have been asked to be a patroness, and Mark is sure to want to go. Have you decided what to wear?”

“Ma gave me a coral-red silk when I married, and I’m going to make it over and veil it with black net.”

“Splendid!” cried Ora warmly. “Bring it up to the house. Mrs. Finley is really an excellent seamstress. We’ll all take a hand. It will be great fun. And you will look stunning.”

“What will you wear?”

“I expect some gowns from my New York dressmaker in a few days. It will depend upon the state of my complexion, I fancy.”

XVIII

ORA received another budget of Ida’s philosophy on the day before the Prom; she had taken her a long string of pink coral she had found among her old possessions, and after Ida had wound it in her hair and round her neck, and finally tried on her gown, and then draped Ora successively in various scarves, remnants of her own wedding finery—being almost as interested in the new complexion as Ora herself—they had suddenly come to the conclusion that while in Europe they would assume the mental attitude of girls travelling without a chaperon. They would see the world from the independent girl’s point of view, flirt like girls, not like married women (which at least would save their consciences), force men to accept the phenomenon. For a time they discussed the superior advantages of being young widows, but, alluring and even thrilling as were the possibilities evoked, they dismissed the alternative on the ground that it might prove a bore always to be on the defensive; man making no secret of his attitude toward widows. Besides, they felt a delicacy about burying their indulgent husbands even in mental effigy. As counterfeit girls they could crowd enough excitement into six months to serve them in memory during long periods of Butte.

“It will be some bluff,” cried Ida. “And believe me, we’ll have the time of our lives. And no remorse in mine. I intend to flirt the limit, for I’m just ready to quit being a mother for a while and see a man’s eyes kindle when he comes nigh—see him playing about at the end of a string. I didn’t have near enough of it even when I had half Butte at my feet—excuse what sounds like conceit but is cold fact. Now, I’m going to light up every man I take a fancy to. I don’t care an abandoned prospect hole whether I hurt ’em or not. All they are good for is to give us a good time.”

“Ida!” Ora was aghast as she often had been before at these naked feminine revelations. “You talk like a man-eater. I hope to heaven I am not like that down deep.”

“Oh, maybe you won’t be so bad because you haven’t got as much vanity. Mine’s insatiable, I guess, and good old Mother Nature taught me the trick of covering it up with the don’t-care-a-damn air combined with the come-hither eye. That does the trick. And they get what hurt’s going. I don’t. You’ll cultivate men, thinking it’s your vanity waked up, or mere youth, or because it’s time to have a fling, but what you really are after is the one and only man. The Companion. The Sympathetic Soul. The Mate. All that rot. He don’t exist, kiddo. He’s the modern immaculate conception, and he’s generally stillborn; the bungling doctor being the plain unadulterated male inside of himself. You’ve got to be your own companion, and if you want happiness you can get it by expecting just nothing of men. Use them. Throw them on the ash heap. Pass on to the next. Quit sitting on the watch tower with your eyes trained on the horizon for the prince that is born and lives and dies in a woman’s imagination.”

“I have seen happy—united couples—who had been married for years.”

“Oh, yes; some couples are born to jog along together, and some wives are born man-tamers, and get a lot of satisfaction out of it. But you’re much too high-falutin’ for that. You’ll always dream of the impossible—not only in man but of what he’s got to give—which ain’t much. And I didn’t need all them—those—psychological and problem and worldly novels you made me read, translated from half a dozen languages, either. You take my advice, Ora, and don’t start off on any fool hunt for an ideal. Men are just matter-of-fact two-legged animals, and as selfish as a few thousand years of fool women have naturally made them. He does well while he’s courting because he’s naturally good at bluff. But every bit of romance oozes out of him after he’s eaten his first breakfast of ham and eggs at home. We can keep up the bluff forever. Men can’t. Each one of them’s got a kid twin brother inside that plays marbles till he dies and makes you feel older every day. No, sir! If I ever had any delusions, I’ve got over them good and plenty. And I thank the Lord,” she added piously.

“I think that rather adorable, you know: the eternal boy. And I fancy it is all that saves men from becoming horrors; in this country, at least—when you consider the unending struggle, and strain, and sordid business of money getting. They use up all their bluff in the battle of life, poor things. Why shouldn’t they be natural with us?...”

Ora was recalling this conversation as she sat in her bedroom on the following evening. Her elemental yet uncannily sophisticated friend had a way of crashing chords out of jealously hidden nerves, which no exercise of will could disconnect from the logical parts of the brain. If it were true that what her now rampant ego, too long starved, really demanded was man and romance, she wished she had let herself run to seed until it was too late to reclaim her lost beauty and adventure into temptation. But a glance into the mirror deprived her of any further desire to join the vast sisterhood of unattractive females. Moreover, she had faith in the dominance of her will and common sense, and if her beauty would help her to the mental contacts she craved with brilliant and interesting men, far be it from her to execrate it.

She dismissed the mood of self-analysis impatiently and opened her wardrobe, although half inclined not to attend the Prom. She was one of the patronesses, but her presence was not essential. It was pre-eminently the night of nights for young folks—brownies and squabs—and the absence of a married woman of twenty-six would pass unrecorded. Not a man in Butte interested her personally, nor was she in a frame of mind to be interested by any of the too specialised products of the West. Nor was she inordinately fond of dancing; there really was no object in going to this party save to witness the début and possible triumph of her protégée.

But she felt something more than indifference toward this party. It was as if a gong sounded a warning in the depths of her brain—in her subconsciousness, perhaps, where instinct, that child of ancestral experience, dwelt. But even while she hesitated she knew that she should go, and she took one of her new gowns from a long drawer, and then began to arrange her hair.

It was now some five months since Miss Ruby Miller had taken her in hand, and if the young woman’s bank account was heavier her pride as an artist far outweighed it. Ora’s hair was soft, abundant, the colour of warm ashes. The skin of her face was as white and transparent, as “pearly” to use its doctor’s own descriptive word, as the fine protected surface of her slender throat, her thin but by no means bony neck. Her lips were pink; they never would be red; and after one taste of “lip stick,” Ora had declined to have them improved by art. But they were a soft country-rose pink and suited her clear whiteness far better than scarlet. Her eyes, never so clear and startling as now, lighted up the cold whiteness of her face and made her pink mouth look childish and somewhat pathetic. If her lips had been red, her face would have had the sinister suggestion so many women achieve with the assistance of art; as it was she looked by no means harmless as she smiled at herself in the mirror and coiled her hair softly on the top of her head. After some experimenting she had decided that she could not improve upon an arrangement which for the present at least was all her own.

She rang for Custer to hook her gown. It was a very soft gown of white satin draped about the bust with lace and chiffon. It was cut to the waist line in the back and almost as low in front, for her figure was hardly more developed than a growing girl’s; and it was unrelieved by colour. She had already put on the string of pearls her mother had hidden when the other jewels were sold in Paris. Altogether it was a costume she would not have dared to wear even two months ago, when a touch of colour on the bodice or in her hair was necessary to divert attention from her spoiled complexion.

Custer had been her mother’s maid for many years and had returned with her to Butte. After an interval of employment elsewhere, she had come to Ora as soon as Mark had built his house. She hooked the gown, pinned up a stray lock with an invisible hairpin, shook out the little train, and stood off.

“It reminds me of the way your mother used to look,” she said, “and you’re even prettier than she was, Miss Ora—now. But I fancy you’ll be more comfortable in this gown when you wear it in London. These ladies dress smartly enough, but never as low as the English ladies do, leastways out here. I fancy it’s the Western men. They don’t seem to approve of showing too much.”

“Well, I think I’ll rather enjoy startling the natives. Quick—give me my wrap! I hear Mr. Blake coming. No controversy here.”

XIX

THE Prom was held not in the School of Mines but in The Coliseum, a large hall over a saloon and garage, half way between The Hill and The Flat, requisitioned by all classes when the weather forbade the use of Columbia Gardens. The walls were covered with the School colours, copper and green, flags, and college pennants. The ceiling was a network of electric lights with coloured globes, copper and green, fluttering paper and sprays of apple blossoms, brought from far! “Cozy corners” looked like fragments of a lower altitude, and the faithful palm was on duty everywhere. The orchestra, on a suspended balcony in the centre of the room, was invisible within the same elaborate scheme of decoration.

When Ora entered with her husband the Grand March had finished and the instruments were tuning for a waltz. She saw Ida standing directly under the orchestra surrounded by several men who patently were clamouring for dances. Even in that great room full of women dressed from New York and Paris, Ida looked distinctive and superb. Ora smiled proudly, as she observed her, quite oblivious that the throng of men and women and indignant “squabs,” who had been discussing the wife of Gregory Compton, had transferred their attention to the dazzling apparition in white. Ida wore her gown of coral silk, whose flimsiness was concealed under a mist of black shadow lace. The coral beads clasped her strong white throat and fell to her supple waist. There was a twist of coral tulle in her black hair, which was arranged in the rolling fashion of the moment, obeyed by every other woman in the room save Ora Blake. And her cheeks, her lips, were as coral as the fruit of the sea. She had powdered her face lightly to preserve its tone through exercise and heat. All the arrogance of youth and beauty and powerful magnetism was expressed in the high poise of her head; a faint smile of triumph curved above her little white teeth; her body was in perfect repose yet as alert as that of a healthy young cat. The waltz began and she glided off in the arm of a young mining engineer from the East. She danced precisely as the best-bred women in the room danced (early in the evening): ease without abandon, dignity without stiffness.

“Heavens, but the American woman is adaptable!” thought Ora. “I never realised before exactly what that time-worn platitude meant. Probably the standards in the Ida set are not so different from ours, after all. As for looks and carriage she might have three generations behind her. Is it democracy or the actress instinct of woman—permitted its full development in this country for the first time in her history?”

This was not entirely a monologue, but addressed for the most part to Professor Becke, one of the most distinguished instructors of the School of Mines, and one of the men she liked best in Butte. He was a tall fair man, with a keen thin fimbriated face, and long fine hands. Ora made a point of asking him to dine with her once or twice a month.

He led the way to two of the chairs on the side of the hall after she had announced that she did not intend to dance.

“But this is the first party we have had for weeks,” he said. “They won’t leave you to me for long.”

“I don’t feel in the mood for dancing. Besides,” she added with a new daring, “I’m all in white and looking very white once more; I don’t want to get warm and spoil the effect.”

He stared into her challenging eyes as if he saw her for the first time. In that room, full of colour and of vivid women and young girls, she produced an almost disconcerting effect with her statuesque beauty, her gleaming whiteness, her frail white body so daringly displayed in its white gown. And, oddly enough, to those staring at her, she made the other women look not only commonplace but cold.

Ora smiled to herself; she was quite aware of the impression at work, not only on the scientific brain, but on others more readily responsive; she had considered the prudence of practising on Butte before departing for wider fields.

The Professor changed colour, but replied steadily: “Fancy you two extraordinary creatures loose in Europe! You should take a bodyguard. I can understand Compton giving his consent, for he is the kind of man that wouldn’t remember whether his wife were twenty or forty at the end of his honeymoon, and there can be little between them in any case. But Blake!”

“Oh, we’ll come home without a scandal,” said Ora lightly. “Ida is the reverse of what she looks, and I—well, I am the proverbial ‘cold’ American woman—that the European anathematises. Ida, of course, looks the siren, and I shall have some trouble protecting her, until she learns how far she can go. But at least I am forewarned.”

“I fancy you will have more trouble protecting yourself!” Professor Becke’s voice was not as even as usual. His intellect was brilliant, and illuminating, and never more so than when in the society of this young woman whom heretofore he had admired merely as a vivacious and exceptional mind; but, startling as this revelation of subtle and alluring womanhood was, he remembered that he was no longer young and that he had an admirable wife with an eagle eye; he had no intention of scorching his fingers in the attempt to light a flame that would guide him to the rocks even were he invited to apply the torch. But he was a man and he sighed a little for his vanished youth. If he had been twenty years younger he fancied that he would have forgotten his good lady and risked burning his heart out. He moved his eyes away deliberately and they rested on Mark Blake, mopping his scarlet face after a lively waltz. He was a kindly man, but all that was deathlessly masculine in him grinned with a cynical satisfaction.

“Who is that?” asked Ora abruptly, and forgetting a faint sensation of pique.

“Ah! Who?”

She indicated a man leaning against one of the doorways, and looking over the crowd with unseeing eyes. “Heavens! What a jaw! Is he as ‘strong’ as he looks, or is he one of Bismarck’s wooden posts painted to look like a man of iron?—Why, it’s——”

“That is Gregory Compton, and he is no wooden post, believe me.”

“I haven’t seen him for years. Can any man be as strong as he looks?”

“Probably not. He hasn’t had time to discover his master weaknesses yet, so I don’t pretend to guess at them myself. At present he is too absorbed in squeezing our poor brains dry——”

“Doesn’t he ever smile?”

“So rarely that the boys, who have a nickname for all their fellow students, call him ‘Sunny Jim.’”

“What do you think of his wife?” asked Ora abruptly. She hardly knew why she asked the question, nor why she felt a secret glow at the expected answer.

The Professor turned his appraising eye upon the substantial vision in coral and black that tonight had been pronounced the handsomest woman in Butte. “There could be no finer example of the obvious. All her goods are in the front window. There are no surprises behind that superlative beauty; certainly no revelations.”

“I wonder! Ida is far cleverer than you think, and quite capable of affording your sex a good deal in the way of surprises, not to say shocks.”

“Not in the way I mean—not as you will do, worse luck for my helpless sex. There is no soul there, and, I fancy, little heart. She is the last woman Gregory Compton should have married.”

“Why?” Ora tried to look bored but polite.

“Oh—whatever she may have for other men she has nothing for him. She looks the concentrated essence of female—American female—egoism. Compton needs a woman who would give him companionship when he wanted it, and, at the same time, be willing in service.”

Ora bristled. “Service? How like a man. Are we still expected to serve men? I thought the world was moving on.”

Professor Becke, who, like most men married to a domestic commander-in-chief, was strenuously opposed to giving women any powers backed up by law, asked with cold reserve: “Are you a suffragette?”

Ora laughed. “Not yet. But I just escaped being born in the Twentieth Century. I belong to it at all events.”

“So you do, but you never have been in love——” He broke off in embarrassment; he had forgotten for the moment that this white virginal creature had been married for six years. She showed no resentment, for she barely had heard him; she was looking at Gregory Compton again, and concluding that he might appeal strongly to the supplementary female, but must antagonise women whose highly specialised intellects, at home only on the heights of civilisation, had submerged their primal inheritance.

Professor Becke went on:

“Even a clever woman’s best career is a man. If you women develop beyond nature that powerful old tyrant will simply snuff you out.”

“Well, man will go too. That may be our final triumph.”

“Atlantis over again! And quite in order that the race should perish through the excesses of woman. Then Nature, having wiped her slate clean with a whoop, will begin all over again and precisely where she did before. No doubt she will permit a few records to survive as a warning.”

“You may be right—but, although I have an idea I shall one day want to justify my existence by being of some use, it won’t be because my sex instinct has got the better of my intelligence. But I refuse to think of that until I have had a royal good time for a few years.”

“That is your right,” he said impulsively. “You are altogether exceptional—and you have had six years of Butte! I am glad your mine has panned out so splendidly. There is quite an excitement in the Sampling Works——”

“What?” Ora forgot Gregory Compton. “I knew the mine was doing well——”

“Surely you know that your profits in royalties already must be something over a hundred thousand dollars——” He stopped in confusion.

Ora’s face was radiant and she never had liked Mark as sincerely as at that moment. “It is just like him! He wanted to wait and give me a great surprise—my husband, I mean.”

“And I have spoilt it! I am really sorry. Please don’t tell him.”

“I won’t. And I’ll be the most surprised woman in the world when he takes me to the bank to sign my letter of credit. You needn’t mind. I’ll have the fun of thinking about it for five months—and rolling it up in my imagination. Ah!”

“Compton has recognised you, I think.”

Ora had met the long narrow concentrated gaze of her husband’s friend. She bowed slightly. Compton made a step forward, hesitated, braced himself, and walked toward her.

“A constitutionally shy man, but a brave one,” said Professor Becke with a grim smile, as he rose to resign his seat. “A strong magnet has pulled up many a sinking heart. Good evening, Compton. Glad you honour our party, even if you don’t dance.”

“I intend to ask Mrs. Blake to dance.” Gregory betrayed nothing of his inner trepidation although he did not smile. He could always rely upon the stern mask into which he had trained his visage not to betray him.

Ora, oblivious of her resolution not to dance, rose and placed her hand on his shoulder, smiling an absent farewell to Professor Becke. For a moment she forgot her resentful interest in this man in her astonishment that he danced so well. She had the impression of dancing with a light supple creature of the woods, one who could be quite abandoned if he chose, although he held her as if he were embracing a feather. She wondered if it were his drop of aboriginal blood and looked up suddenly. To her surprise he was smiling, and his smile so altered the immobility of his face that she lost her breath.

“I feel as if I were dancing with a snowflake,” was his unexpected remark.

“You look the last man to pay compliments and murmur sweet nothings.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“Perhaps I am. I rather liked your attitude—expression, rather—of cool superiority.”

“Why don’t you use the word prig?”

“Oh, no!—Well, perhaps that is what I did mean.”

He stopped short, regardless of the annoyance he caused several impetuous couples. “If you did I shall leave you right here.”

“I did not. Please go on. Everybody is staring at us. You took me completely by surprise.”

“I? Why?”

“You are the last man I should expect the usual small talk from.”

“Small talk? Heavens knows I have none of that. Girls used to talk my head off in self-defence. I merely said what I thought. What did you expect me to talk about?”

“Oh—mines, I suppose.” Again, to her surprise, his face lit up as if by an inner and jealously hidden torch. But he said soberly:

“Well, there is no more interesting subject. Never has been since the world began. Where shall we find a seat?”

The waltz was over. The chairs were filling. Young couples were flitting toward the embowered corners.

“Let’s go outside,” he said abruptly.

“What? On the street? And nobody goes out of doors from a ballroom in June.”

“Good reason for going. Come with me.”

He led her to the cloak-room. “Get your wrap,” he said.

Ora frowned, but she asked for her heavy white woollen wrap and put it on; then automatically followed him down the stairs and into the street.

“Why don’t you get your coat and hat?” she asked, still dazed. “It’s cold, you know.”

“I never was cold in my life,” he said contemptuously. He hailed a taxi. “I must go up to the School of Mines, and ask the result of some assaying,” he added as he almost lifted her in. “Then we can talk up there. May I smoke?”

“I don’t care what you do.”

He smiled directly into her resentful eyes this time and tucked the lap-robe about her.

XX

HE apparently forgot her during the short drive and stared through the open window of the cab, his thoughts, no doubt, in the assay room of the School, where several students, as ardent as himself, were experimenting with ore they had managed to secure from a recently opened mine. Ora’s resentment vanished, partly because she reflected that a new and original experience was a boon to be grateful for in Butte, but more because she was thrilled with the sense of adventure. Her woman’s instinct gave assurance that he had no intention of making love to her, but it also whispered that, whether she liked or disliked him when the adventure was over, she would have something to remember. And it was the first time she ever had indulged in recklessness. Butte would be by the ears on the morrow if it learned of her escapade.

When they reached the dark School of Mines he dismissed the taxi, and said to Ora, “Wait for me here. I shan’t be a moment.”

He disappeared and Ora shrugged her shoulders and sat down on the steps. He returned in a few moments and extended himself over several steps below her.

“Comfortable?” he asked.

“Very!”

“It’s a night, isn’t it?” he asked abruptly.

He was not looking at her but at the low sulphurous blue sky, with its jewelled lattice, white, yellow, green, blue. There were no tree tops to rustle, but from the window below came the voluptuous strains of the Merry Widow waltz, mingling incongruously with the raucous noises of the sleepless town: the roaring street-cars, the blasts of engines, the monstrous purr of motor-cats.

“If we could cut out that jungle,” he said with a sigh. “Are you warm enough?” He pulled the cloak about the lower part of her body. “I should have taken the rug from the cab——”

“I am warm enough,” she said impatiently, and what she longed to say was, “How in heaven’s name did you marry Ida Hook?” He had transferred his gaze to the city and she studied his face. Then she understood. In spite of its intense reserve and detachment, its strength and power, its thin sensitive mouth, it was the most passionate face she had ever seen. As a matter of fact she had been at pains to ignore the purely masculine side of men, her fastidious mind never indulging in comparisons. She half rose with a sense of panic. Again he looked up solicitously.

“I am sure you are not comfortable. I could find you some cushions——”

“Please don’t. So you love beauty?” She was deeply annoyed with herself, but could think of nothing less banal. He certainly was not easy to talk to.

“Don’t you? It would be odd if you didn’t. One reason I brought you up up here was because I wanted to look at you in the starlight where you belong—the cold starlight—not in that crowded gaudy room full of mere human beings.”

“Are you a poet? I have somehow received the impression that you are a mere walking ambition.”

“I’m no poet if you mean one of those writing fellows.” His tone expressed unmitigated scorn.

“Well, no doubt you have read a great deal of poetry, little as one would suspect it.”

“Never read a line of it except when I had to decline it at school—any more than I’ve ever read a line of fiction.”

“Well, you’ve missed a great deal,” said Ora tartly. “Poetry is an essential part of the beauty of the world, which you seem to appreciate. And the best of fiction is the best expression of current history. What do you think when you star-gaze?”

“You mean, can I think at all when I haven’t read what other men have thought?”

“No.—No doubt the most original brains are those that have not read too much, are not choked up.” Ora made this admission reluctantly, but he had caught her fairly. “Tell me at least what the stars suggest to you. About everything has been said of them that can be said. The poor old stars have been worked to death.”

“The stars above Montana are watchfires protecting the treasure below. Perhaps they are bits of her treasures, gold, silver, copper, sapphire, that flew upward in the final cataclysm.”

“I don’t know whether that is poetical or gross materialism.”

“No mines, no poets. Nearly all conquest from the dawn of history down to the Boer War has had the acquisition of mineral wealth as its real object. The civilisation that follows is incidental; it merely means that the strongest race, which, of course, knows the most, wins. If ever we have a war with Mexico, what will be the cause? Mines. Incidentally we will civilise her. Peru, Mexico, India, the Americas—all have been invaded in their turn by more civilised nations, and all after plunder. They gave as much as they took, but little they cared about that. What opened up California? This great Northwest? Prospectors in search of gold. Excuse this lecture. I am the least talkative of men, but you have jarred my brain, somehow. Read the history of mines and mining if you want romance.”

“As a matter of fact few things interest me more. I am so glad my mine has been leased for a year only. When that is up I am going to mine it myself. I’ll build a bungalow out there and go down every day. Perhaps in time I could be my own manager. At all events, think of the excitement of watching the ore as it comes up the shaft; of running through a lean vein and coming suddenly upon a chamber of an entirely different kind of ore from what you had been taking out. Great shoots full of free gold! Wire gold! Or that crisp brown-gold that looks as if it were boiling out of the ore and makes one want to bite it! Why are you staring so at me?”

His eyes were more widely opened and brilliant than she had seen them. “Do you mean that?” he asked. “I’ve a great notion to tell you something that I’ve not told anyone.”

“Do tell me!”

She leaned down eagerly. She had dismissed the feeling of panic as something to be forgotten as quickly as possible. But her brain was on fire to penetrate his. She felt an extraordinary mental stimulation. But he relapsed into absolute silence, although he held his head, lowered again, at an angle that suggested he might be thinking intently. She moved impatiently, but he sat still, staring downward, his eyes narrow once more. She noticed irrelevantly how black his hair was, and her white hand went out stealthily as if magnetised, but was immediately restored to order. In the vibrating silence she had another glimmer of understanding. He wanted to tell her something personal, but his natural secretiveness and habit of reserve were engaged in a struggle with the unusual impulse. She shifted the ground.

“I wish you would tell me something of your boyhood,” she said abruptly.

He looked up in astonishment. “I never talk about myself——”

“How very egoistical.”

“Ego——”

“No, I did not say egotistical.”

“Ah!” There was another pause, although he looked at her with a frown. “I have talked to you more than I ever talk to anyone,” he said resentfully.

“It is the stars, to say nothing of the isolation. We might be up on one of your escaped nuggets. Remember that I have heard of you constantly for six years—and met you before on one of those occasions when all persons look alike. How could I escape curiosity?”

“I brought you out to look at in the proper setting. I can’t say I had any desire to talk to you. I suppose I should not keep you out here——”

“I am much happier and more comfortable than in that hot room. But surely you need more recreation. Why do you never go to dances?”

“Dances? I? I only went tonight——” He, too, apparently, was determined to keep their respective spouses out of the conversation, for he veered off quickly. “It is a sort of religion to attend the Prom even if you only show yourself. I was about to beat a retreat when I saw you. Of course it was my duty to shake hands. Besides, I wanted to see if you were real.” And he smiled up into her eyes.

“Do you know that we are flirting?”

“Well, let us flirt,” he replied comfortably. “I haven’t the least idea what it is, but I am not a bit in love with you, if that is what you mean.”

Ora drew herself up rigidly. “Well, you are——” she began, aware that she had a temper. Then she laughed. Why quarrel with a novel experience? Her anger turned into a more subtle emotion. She was well aware of the dazzling brightness of her eyes. She leaned forward and concentrated her mind in an attempt to project her magnetism through them, although again with a feeling of panic; it was too much like the magnet rushing out to the iron.

He returned that powerful gaze unmoved, although an expression of perplexity crossed his own eyes. She was disconcerted and asked lamely:

“Is it true that you used to run away and prospect in the mountains?”

His face lit up with an enthusiasm her fascinations had been unable to inspire; and a richer note came into his voice. “I was eleven the first time and stayed out for six months. Two years after I ran away again. The next time I went with my father’s permission. I worked in one of the Butte mines one summer—but otherwise—well, you see, there is a good deal to do on a ranch. This is the first time I have been able to do as I please.”

Ora looked at his long slim figure, his brown hands that tonight, at least, expressed a sort of cruel deliberate repose. Whatever they may have been in their ranch days they were smooth and well cared for now.

“Somehow, I can’t see you handling a pick,” she said doubtfully. “Is it true that you intend to work in the mines all summer?”

“Part of it—when I am not working in a mill or a smelter. I’d be ashamed of myself if I couldn’t do anything that another man can do. Some of the best miners look like rats.”

He looked like a highly-bred mettlesome race-horse himself, and Ora wondered, as she had before tonight: “Where did he get it? Who were his ancestors?” She had seen dukes that looked like farm hands, and royal princesses that might have been upper housemaids, but her feminine (and American) mind clung to the fallacy that it takes generations to produce the clean-cut shell. She determined to look up his family tree in Holland.

“Well—Custer—my housekeeper—will look after you,” she said as naturally as if her thoughts had not wandered for a moment. “Shall you do any mining on your own place before we come back from Europe?”

He started and looked at her apprehensively, then scowled.

“What is the matter? You may not know it but at this moment your face looks like an Indian battle-axe.”

To her surprise he laughed boyishly. “You startled me. I have heard of mind readers. Well, I will tell you what I wanted to a while back. But you must promise not to tell—anyone.”

“I promise! I swear it! And do hurry. I’m afraid you’ll shut up tight again.”

“No, I won’t. I don’t know that I’d tell you were it not that your own mine is just over the border; we may have to consolidate some day to save a lawsuit—No, I will be honest; I really want to tell you. It is this: Close to the northeast boundary line of my ranch is an almost barren hill of limestone and granite. Shortly before I left—last October—I discovered float on the side of the hill. There is no doubt in my mind that we have both come upon a new mineral belt, although whether we are in the middle or on one edge of it is another question.”

He told her the story of the storm and of the uncovering of the float. Nor did he end his confidence with a bare statement of fact. He told her of his sensations as he sat on the ragged ground leaning against the roots of the slain trees, his mental struggle, and final resolution. Then he told her of the hopes and dreams of his boyhood, and what it had meant to him—this sudden revelation that he had a mine under his feet—and all his own! He talked for half an hour, with the deep satisfaction that only a shy and silent person feels when talking into a sympathetic mind for the first time. Ora listened with a curious sense of excitement, as if she were overboard in a warm and pleasant but unknown sea. There were times when she felt like talking very fast herself. But she did nothing of the sort, merely jogging him diplomatically when he showed signs of relapsing into silence. Finally he stopped in the middle of a sentence and said abruptly:

“That’s all.”

“Oh! And you really have made up your mind not to begin work for a year?”

“Quite!”

“But—have you thought—it is only tonight I learned that the engineers who leased my mine have struck a rich vein. Suppose it dips toward yours——”

“It does——”

“Have they put on a big force?”

“Naturally. They are rushing things, as they know they will not get the mine another year.”

“Well, suppose their vein runs under your hill—through their side-line?”

He stirred uneasily. “I am watching them. So far the dip is very slight. It may take a turn, or go down straight; or,” and he smiled at her again, “it may pinch out. Nothing is so uncertain as an ore vein.”

“Do you think it will?” asked Ora anxiously.

“No, don’t worry. I was down the other day; and did some prospecting on my own account besides. I think you’ve got a big mine.”

“But suppose the vein should take a sudden dip to the right—you don’t want them burrowing under your hill——”

“They won’t burrow under my hill,” he said grimly. “I should persuade them that there was an even richer vein on their left.”

“Is there?”

“I have reason to think so. They naturally would want to avoid the expenses of a lawsuit, and of course they would waste a lot of time sinking a shaft or driving across. Their lease would be pretty well up by the time——”

“You are cold-blooded! What of me? I should be making nothing, either.”

“You’d make it all later on. How much do you expect to spend in Europe anyway? You must have made a thousand dollars a day since the first carload of ore was smelted.”

She was on the point of replying that a woman could not have enough money in Europe, when she remembered the conspiracy to make him believe that a thousand dollars would cover the expenses of his wife.

“Oh, it is merely that I don’t like being one of the pawns in your game,” she said.

“You’d have all the more later on. Ore doesn’t run away.”

“How can you stay away from your mine? I feel—after all that you have told me!—that you are wild to get at it?”

“So I am! So I am! But I said I wouldn’t and that is the end of it. I want that last year at the School.”

“What shall you do with all that money—if your hill turns out to be full of gold? More, I hope, than the rest of our millionaires have done for Montana—which is exactly nothing. You might give the State a complete irrigating system.”

“Good idea! Perhaps I will. But that is in the future. I want the fun first——”

“Fun? It is the passion of your life, your great romance. You’ll never love a woman like that.”

“Of course not.” But he was staring at her. He had a sensation of something swimming in the depths of his mind, striving to reach the surface. He changed his position suddenly and sat up. “And you?” he asked. “You have the same vision. Couldn’t you feel the same absorbing passion——”

“For ore?” The scorn of her entire sex was in her voice. “Dead cold metal——”

“Every molecule, every individual atom is alive and quivering——”

“I am not interested in chemistry.”

He still stared at her. Her cheeks were scarlet, her eyes blazing. She sprang to her feet.

“Ida is the wife for you! She’ll never ask much of you and you never could hurt her, not even if you tried, she is fortunate in lacking just that which you could hurt.”

“What is it?” He spoke eagerly. He, too, had risen, his eyes still on her face. Unconsciously he held his breath.

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand it I told you—and I haven’t the least desire to tell you. She will make you comfortable, do you credit when you are a rich man, spend your money royally. That is all you will ask of her. Now, I’ll go back.”

He was a step or two below her. Their eyes were on a level. He looked at her sombrely for a moment, then walked past her up the steps.

“You need not call a cab. I shall go home. I should only set them all talking if I appeared in the ballroom again. You can tell Mark that I didn’t feel well and that you took me home.”

They walked along the high terrace until they found a point of easy descent.

“What have I said to make you angry?” he asked.

Ora laughed with determined good humour. “It was not I. It was merely my sex that flared up. Please forget it.”

“I want to thank you for what you have done for Ida,” he said abruptly, and it was evident that the words cost him more than his former revelations. “It was a great thing for you to do.”

“Oh, Ida has become my most intimate friend. I have never enjoyed Butte so much as in these last few months.”

“Has she? And Mark is my best friend.” He jerked his head in annoyance; manifestly the remark had been too spontaneous. They were before her gate. She extended a limp hand, but he held it firmly. He was smiling again although he looked depressed.

“Do give me a friendly shake,” he said. “I do like you and you will be going in a few days.”

“I do not go for five months.”

“You can go next week. I’ll square it with Mark.”

“I don’t wish to go next week. Besides, Mark expects some important people here in the autumn, and needs my help. He has a deal on.”

“I’ll dispossess Mark of any such notion. It’s all nonsense, this idea of a man’s needing his wife’s help in business. It’s a poor sort of man that can’t manage his own affairs, and Mark is not a poor sort. Now, you are angry again!”

“That would be foolish of me,” she said icily. “You merely don’t understand. You never could. Do you want to get rid of me?” she asked abruptly.

“Yes, I think I do.”

Then Ora relented. She also gave him the smile that she reserved as her most devastating weapon. “I am sorry,” she murmured, “but I don’t think I can be ready for at least three months. Nor Ida.”

“You go next week,” he said.

And go they did.

XXI

GREGORY and Mark established their wives comfortably in a drawing-room of the limited for Chicago, asked the usual masculine questions about tickets and trunk checks, expressed their masculine surprise that nothing had been forgotten, told them to be careful not to lean over the railing of the observation car, nor to make themselves ill with the numerous boxes of candy sent to the train, admonished them not to spend too much money in New York, to send their trunks to the steamer the day before they sailed, and give themselves at least two hours to get to the docks; above all not to mislay their letters of credit; then kissed them dutifully, and, as the train moved out, stood on the platform with solemn faces and hearts of indescribable buoyancy.

“My Lord!” exclaimed Ida, as she blew her last kiss. “If Greg was going along I’d have to take care of him every step of the way. I wouldn’t trust him with the tickets the length of the train. Men do make me tired. They keep up the farce that we’re children just to keep up that other grand farce that they run the Universe. Any old plank to cling to.”

Ora kept her sentiments to herself.

If Mark, who was fond of his wife, and more or less dependent upon her, wondered vaguely that he should rejoice in the prospect of six months of bachelorhood, Gregory was almost puzzled. Ida was now no more to him personally than a responsibility he had voluntarily assumed and was determined to treat with complete justice; but at least she made him more comfortable than he had ever been before, and he had trained her to let him alone. Since her rapid improvement her speech had ceased to irritate him; she was never untidy, never anything but a pleasant picture to look at. He had also noted on the night of the party that she was indisputably the handsomest woman in the room and received the homage of men with dignity and poise. He had felt proud of her, and comfortably certain that he could trust her. Altogether a model wife.

Nevertheless as he walked out Park Street after he left Mark at his office (Ida not only had sent his personal possessions to the Blake house but found time to unpack and put them away) his brain, which had been curiously depressed during the past week, felt as if full of effervescing wine.

“Jove!” he thought, “why do men marry? What has any woman living to give a man half as good as his freedom.”

His freedom was to be reasonably complete. He had told Ida to expect no letters from him and not to write herself unless she were in trouble. With all the fervour of his masculine soul he hated to write letters. Long since he had bought a typewriter, on which he rattled off necessary business communications so briefly that they would have cost him little more on the wire. He knew that he should hear constantly of his wife’s welfare from Mark, and had no desire to be inflicted with descriptions of scenery and shops.

He felt a spasm of envy, however, as he thought of the letters Mark would receive from Ora. Her letters, no doubt, would be worth reading, not only because she had a mind, and already had seen too much of Europe to comment on its obvious phases, but because they would be redolent of her subtle exquisite personality. He had once come upon a package of old letters among his mother’s possessions and read them. They had been written by his great-great-grandmother to her husband while he was a soldier in the War of the Revolution. It was merely the simple life of the family, the farm, and the woods, that she described, but Gregory never recalled those letters without feeling again the subtle psychological emanation of the writer’s sweet and feminine but determinate personality; it hovered like a wraith over the written words, imprisoned, imperishable, until the paper should fall to dust. So, he imagined, something of Ora’s essence would take wing on the rustling sheets of her letters.

But the spasm of envy passed. Ora would write no such letters to Mark Blake. Her correspondence with her husband would be perfunctory, practical, brief. To some man she might write pages that would keep him up at night, reading and rereading, interpreting illusive phrases, searching for hidden and personal meanings, while two individualities met and melted.... But this yearning passed also. To receive such letters a man must answer them and that would be hell.

He was on his way to change his clothes for overalls and get his blue dinner pail, well filled, from Custer. But before he reached the house he conceived an abrupt and violent distaste for life underground, an uncontrollable desire—or one which he made no effort to control—for long rides over the ranch, and a glimpse of Limestone Hill. It was seven months since he had seen his ranch save in snatches, and he wanted it now for months on end. He was not a town-bred man, and he suddenly hated the sight of Butte with her naked angles and feverish energies. He realised also that his mind insistently demanded a rest. To be sure he had intended to work in the mines for eight hours of the day, but he had planned to study for ten. Well, he would have none of it! Caprice was no characteristic of his, but he felt full of it this brilliant morning. If the air was so light in Butte that his feet seemed barely to touch the ground, so clear that the mountains seemed walking down the valley, what must it be in the country?

He went rapidly to the house, left a message for Mark, packed a suit-case and took the next train for Pony. There he hired a horse and rode to his ranch.

One of the sudden June rains had come while he was in the train. It had ceased, but a mass of low clouds brushing the higher tree tops was almost black. Their edges were silver: they were filled with a cold imprisoned sunlight, which transformed the distant mountains into glass, transparent, with black shadows in their depths. Montana looked as giving an exhibition of her astral body. But as he rode the clouds drifted away, the sky deepened to the rich voluptuous blue of that high altitude; even the grey soil showing through the thin grass of the granite hills looked warmer. Where the soil was thicker the ground was covered with a gorgeous tapestry of wildflowers; the birds sang desperately as if they knew how short was their springtime, affected like mortals by the thin intoxicating air. Even the waters in the creek roared as if making the most of their brief span. The mountains lost their glassy look; blue, ice-topped, they were as full of young and vivid life as when they danced about, heedless that the heaving earth purposed they should wait for centuries before settling into things of beauty for unborn man to admire. They never will look old, those mountains of Montana; man may take the treasure from their veins and the jewels from their crowns, but they drink forever the elixir of the air. The blue dawn fills their spirit with a deathless exultation, the long blue-gold days their bodies with immortal life, the starry nights, swinging their lamps so close to the snow fields, unroll the dramas of other worlds. They are no mere masses of rock and dirt or even of metal, these mountains of Montana, but man’s vision of eternal youth.

Gregory drew rein on the crest of one of his own hills. Below lay the De Smet ranch, and he drew a long breath with that sensation of serene pride which comes to men when they contemplate their landed possessions, or their wives on state occasions. All the arable soil, on flat and hillside, was green; alfalfa, with its purple flowers, filled the bottoms; the winter wheat was rippling in the wind; the acres covered with the tender leaves of young flax were like a densely woven lawn. On the hills and the public range roamed his cattle. All of this fair land, including its possible treasure, was his, absolutely. By the terms of his father’s will he paid yearly dividends from the sale of steers and crops to three aunts, now reduced to two. Whether by accident or design, Mr. Compton had omitted all mention of “minerals under the earth.” Gregory had not the least objection to making these ladies rich, when his mines yielded their wealth, but he was jealous of every acre of his inheritance, far more of its secrets. All the passionate intensity of his nature he had poured out on his land and its subterranean mysteries, and he would have hailed an invention which would enable him to dismiss every man from his employ. But his head was hard and he always smiled grimly at the finish of his fanciful desires.

He turned his horse toward the distant group of farm buildings, then wheeled abruptly and rode toward Limestone Hill. He had anticipated a long talk with the enthusiastic Oakley on the subject of crops, but he suddenly realised that he was in no mood to talk to anyone and that his secret reason for coming to the ranch was to visit his hill. Oakley would cling to him for hours. One glance had assured him that the crops would have satisfied a state experimental farm. Mining would fascinate him in its every detail, but as far as agriculture was concerned, he was interested only in results.

As he rode toward the hill he frowned at the signs of activity on the other side of his boundary line. A large gasoline hoist had been installed. The waste dump was almost as high as a hill, four “double-sixes”—six-horse teams—stood waiting to be loaded from the ore bins. There were a group of miners’ cabins, a long mess-house, and a blacksmith’s shop. This was the only shadow on his future: he wanted no lawsuits, nor did he want to enter into partnership with anyone, not even Ora Blake.

But he dismissed the matter from his mind, tied his horse, and, although Montanans are a slow race on foot out of deference to the altitude, ran up the hill. A glance told him that his secret was undiscovered. He knelt down and dug up the float, his heart hammering. And then he deliberately let the prospector’s fever take possession of him. The soles of his feet prickled as if responding to the magnets below; he had a fancy that gold, molten, was running through his veins. But his brain worked clearly. He was aware that his exultation and excitement were not due to the lure of gold alone, but to the still more subtle pleasure that a strong and obstinate nature feels in breaking a vow and deliberately succumbing to temptation. He had vowed in good faith that he would not open his mine until the third of June of the following year. But a week before he had spent an enchanted hour with a woman, and during the rest of that night—he had walked half way to Silver Bow and back—he had wanted that woman more than he had ever wanted anything on earth. He had forgotten his mine.

At first he had lashed himself with scorn, remembering his infatuation for the woman he had married. He felt something of the indignant astonishment of the small boy who imagines himself catching a second attack of measles, before he discovers it is scarlet fever. But it took him only a brief time to realise that the passion inspired by Ora Blake was so much deeper and more various than the blind subservience to Nature that had driven him to Ida (who had not the least idea of being a tool of Nature herself) that it was far more dangerous than the first inevitable attack of youthful madness could ever be. It humiliated his pride to have been the mere victim of the race, the rudimentary male swept into matrimony by the first woman who combined superlative femaleness with virtue. Then he wondered if he could have loved Ora at that time; he certainly felt ten years older today.