When Flora caught sight of Kate, staring at her, behind me, she flopped up one of those spectacles with handles, and her eyebrows went up at the same time. She froze like an ice-pack. I allow the two women didn’t look much alike, but I wouldn’t let anybody snub my wife if I could help it, so I introduced them, calling Kate Mrs. Saul Timney, the way she liked to have me. Flora sprang something about being “charmed,” and then said she had to be going. Said she hoped I’d call, but nothing about Kate, I noticed.
I followed her off with my eyes, she was so pretty and high-toned now, the first decent white woman I’d talked to in years, and, honest—oh, well, hang it, a man’s got no license to be ashamed of his wife, but I don’t know—Kate did look kind of funny in that red Mother Hubbard and the ermine cape and straw hat, with moccasins and five strings of glass beads—doggone it, I hated myself for being ashamed of her, which I wasn’t, really, only somehow she looked different than she did before.
I tried to get her away, but she stood stock-still watching Flora, who had walked off down to the cloak department at the end of the aisle. But if Kate don’t want to move, all hell and an iceberg can’t budge her, and I stood waiting to think how I’d square myself with her, feeling guilty enough, though I was just as fond of my wife as ever. All of a sudden Kate made a break for the counter where Flora Donovan was buying a cloak. The clerks all knew Kate by this time, and the floorwalker chap would come on the hop-skip-and-a-jump and turn the shop upside down for her. So when she came up behind Miss Donovan, and pointed to three or four expensive heavy cloaks and threw out a sack of double eagles to pay for ’em, letting the clerk take out what he wanted, she had everybody around staring at her, Flora included.
I could see well enough what was in Kate’s mind. She had seen that I was just a little ashamed of her, for some reason, and that Flora didn’t think she was in her class. Kate wanted to show that she was the real thing, and a sure lady, and the only way she knew how to prove it was to beat Flora at buying. Kate didn’t exactly want to put it over her, she only wanted to make good as the wife of Saul Timney.
Flora only said: “Your wife has very good taste, Mr. Timney,” and sailed into the ladies’ underwear corner. Kate stuck to her like a burr. She was right at home there, and for about fifteen minutes it seemed like all the cash-boys in the world were running in and out packing away white things, just like Kate was a fairy queen giving orders. She laid down “medicine stones” on the counter till the flim-flams and thingumbobs almost dropped down off the shelves of themselves. I s’pose a man really has no business to be in a place like that, but I watched the two of ’em buy. Kate had actually got Flora going, and both of ’em emptied their sacks. Then Flora swept out, looking a hole through me, but never saying a word. I’ve heard afterward that Miss Donovan was pretty well known to be close-fisted, and it must have hurt her some to let go of all that money, just on account of an Indian squaw. But the clerks behind the counter nearly went into fits.
Kate came up to me and said, “I can buy more things than she can, can’t I?” And I said, “Sure, you can, Kate; you could buy her right out of house and home!”
She looked a little relieved then, but I saw she was jealous, and the worst of it was, I’d given her license to be. I tried to be as nice as I could, and bought her another necklace, and took her to see the kinetoscopes and let her look through the telescope at the moon, but I saw she was still fretting about Flora. That night I met a fellow from the Yukon, and I left Kate at the hotel and made a night of it. I went to bed with considerable of a head, and when I woke up, toward noon, Kate was gone. She didn’t show up till the next day after that. I learned afterward what happened.
Kate started out bright and early to find Flora. She had got into a black dress with spangles, patent-leather shoes, and a hat as big as a penguin. She carried with her all the cash we had at the hotel, running into four figures easy. The shopping district of San Francisco ain’t such a big place, after all, and Kate and Flora only went to the best and highest-priced stores, so it wasn’t long before they met.
As far as I could find out, Kate didn’t have her hatchet out at all, this trip, but she was just trying to make up to Flora, and be nice to her and show she was ready to get acquainted. You can guess what happened. Flora tried to pass Kate, but Kate just stood in the aisle like a house. It was no use for Flora to try and snub her, for Kate couldn’t understand the kind of polite slaps in the face that ladies know how to give. The only thing was to get rid of her, so Flora up and went out the front door to her carriage.
Kate followed her out to the sidewalk. When Flora got in, Kate got in right alongside, grinning all over, showing her sack of gold, and trying her best to be as nice as she could. Flora was clean flabbergasted. She didn’t want to make a holy show of herself on the street by calling the police, and so she told her driver to go home, as the best way out of it. So they drove to Van Ness Avenue, Flora throwing conniption fits, she was so mad, and Kate smiling and talking Chinook, with her big hat on one ear.