Ida entered her car, but scowled at its luxuries. By this time she was “mad clean through.” “The famous American husband!” she thought, gritting her teeth. “Best in the world—not. If it’s my horse, my dog, my wife with an Englishman, it’s business first last and always with an American. European men are courteous whether they mean it or not, but Americans only remember to be polite when they have time. Ten months and he can’t leave his mine long enough to meet me when I arrive at midnight!”
Her pleasure in returning to Butte had turned as flat as spilt champagne. She did not even glance at the gay electric signs and midnight activities of Broadway as her car rolled through that sleepless thoroughfare toward the West Side. But when her chauffeur, who had ignored the speed limit, stopped abruptly before a large house of admirable architecture and blazing with lights, her face flushed with excitement and she forgot her recalcitrant spouse. The door was opened at once and two maid servants ran down the steps. They were young, neatly dressed and capped, and it was evident that their service was dictated not only by curiosity but by sympathy.
“Welcome home, ma’am,” one of them, a Swede, said shyly as Ida stepped to the pavement. “It’s too bad your train was so late. The cook’s got a nice hot supper for you.”
Ida, who was not easily touched, felt as grateful to these smiling girls as to her friendly chauffeur, and for a moment was tempted to “come down off her perch” and revel in human companionship. But she knew that it “wouldn’t work”; she merely thanked them graciously and ascended the wide steps of her new home, that palatial residence of cream-colored pressed brick of her unswerving desires. While the maids were taking her bags and boxes upstairs, she walked through the large rooms of the lower floor. Everything was in the best modern style of furnishing, the prevailing tone dim and rich, with Eastern rugs on the hardwood floors; French tapestries and carved oak furniture and stained glass in the library—also a few books; paler tapestries set in panels in the immense drawing-room, and many beautiful pieces of furniture carefully selected with an eye to both contrast and mating. Out of this room opened a dining-room that looked like a baronial hall, and although the Murphys had taken their silverware they had left their china, imported from Limoges, and their glass ware, made for them by a Venetian firm that had supplied Ida’s grandes dames for thirty years. In short it was one of those stately and sumptuous interiors, furnished by the best houses in New York, which one associates exclusively with the three or four great cities of the United States, and is always unwarrantably surprised to find in the newer cities of the West.
Ida made a pretence of eating her dainty supper, remembered that she was now a grande dame and visited the kitchen to say an appreciative word to the cook, then ascended to her bedroom divided between anger and a depression so foreign to her temperament that she barely recognised it for what it was.
The large upper hall had been fitted up as a billiard room, and with a continuous divan broken only by the doors of the bedrooms. Ida threw it an appreciative glance, but it merely emphasised the fact that there was no man in the house, and she did not linger. Mrs. Murphy, evidently a brunette, had furnished her bedroom and dressing-room in primrose yellow and much lace. Ida approved both as unreservedly as she had the rest of the house, thankful there was nothing to alter; like many women she had consummate taste in dress and none whatever for house decoration; although unlike most of these disparate ladies she was quite aware of her deficiencies. She knew when a room was all that it should be, but could not have conceived one of the details, much less the unimpeachable combination. The sex instinct teaches those subtleties of personal adornment likely to allure the male, and arrest the anxious eye of other females, but ancestral brain-cells are necessary for the more civilised accomplishment.
Ida’s eyes fell on the telephone beside her bed and lingered. She forgot her beautiful room and the successive throbs of gratified ambition, in an overwhelming desire to call up Gregory and tell him what she thought of him. But she was a woman in whom calculation was stronger than impulse, and in the past year she had learned to control her temper, not only because a carefully nourished refinement had crowded out some of the weeds of her nature, but because her ever-growing intelligence despised lack of self-control in all things. So she merely undressed herself, her eyes wandering every few minutes to the telephone. It was incredible that he did not ring her up. That, at least, would take but a few moments of his precious time.
However, she fell asleep immediately after her bath, and it was the telephone bell that awakened her at eight o’clock. This time she frowned at it, for she wanted to sleep; but she sat up, put the receiver to her ear and asked languidly: “Well?”
A strange man’s voice replied: “Is this Mrs. Compton?”
“Yes. Why am I disturbed so early?”