“And you’re in love with him!”
“Not in the least. He simply jolted my imagination, gave me the idea of what might be—have been. I—it is hard to express—I feel in a sort of mental—spiritual?—affinity with him. When I write I have a queer sense of absolute communion—as if we were talking—I suppose it is because I know he would understand if I could send the letters——”
“And you’ve never sent one?”
“Of course not. It is—well, just a little private one-sided drama I’m living; a sort of book of which I am the heroine. While I write I am alive. The rest of the time I wonder what I was put on this earth at all for.”
“Look at here, Ora, the best thing we can do is to send for old Gower and go back to Rome. You’ll be having nerves first thing you know. No, we’d cut out the annex. I’m dead sick of her, and everybody knows we’re all right; in Rome they don’t care, anyhow. You could have a real romance. We’d take one of those old palaces, haunted, moth-eaten, with one of those antique porters that looks as if he’d let out midnight lovers ten centuries ago, and beds that twenty centuries have died in. That would just suit you. I’d enjoy a second-hand romance first rate, and be the trusted friend.”
“Ida, you are incorrigible! Even if I cared a penny about Valdobia do you suppose I would betray my husband?”
“Rats! Don’t you suppose Mark has a girl down on The Flat? Greg has, I’ll bet—well, don’t look as if you were going to faint. What’s the use of being a dog in the manger? Mark’ll be the same old devoted when you get back.”
“Oh, do keep quiet! And I wish I might never see Butte again. I think I’ll write to Mark and ask him to move to New York. He now has plenty of money to wait, and it wouldn’t take him long to establish himself anywhere——”
“I thought you loved Montana—wanted to do something big for her——”
“We’ve been away a long time. I fancy I’m weaned. It is only once in a while that I feel a pull—merely because I was born there.”