Ida set the receiver back on the table, but it was some minutes before she lay down again. She sat thinking, with compressed lips. Born with intuitive knowledge of men, she had, as she once remarked to Ora, turned a goodly number of them inside out during the past year. Gregory Compton did not intend to live with her again. She knew this as conclusively as if his kind matter-of-fact tones had expressed the direct message. Before she left home it never had occurred to Ida to wonder if her husband still loved her or not, and she had learned to accept his consuming masculine interest in matters mineralogic as all in the day’s work. Now she wondered if he had ceased to love her then or since. That he took no further interest in her as a woman, although amiably determined to do his duty as her legal provider, would have been almost patent to an imagination as riotous as Ora’s; to Ida, practical and clear-sighted, there was not a loophole for delusion.
In a few moments she relaxed the tension of her body and lay down.
“Well!” she thought impatiently, “what’s the matter with me, anyhow? Isn’t it what I always hopefully looked forward to? Did I ever pretend to be anything but resigned—or to be in love with him after the first few weeks? I guess I’m spoiled with too much devotion, that’s what. Seeing too many men lose their heads. Much their old heads are worth. But I guess I don’t like being turned down for once. Goose. It’s my lay to cut out pique and sing a song of thanksgiving that I’ve got pretty nearly everything I ever romanced about and set my mind on. It’s a pretty good old world when things come your way, and women’ll never be happy till they learn to put men in the same place that men put us—on a handy little side-track. I’ve got a whole parlour car instead of an upper berth like some poor devils, so I’ll quit whining. But if there’s another woman in the case, let them both look out—that’s all!”
III
IDA slept for two hours longer and rose in a philosophical mood. As she more than once had remarked to Ora, “nothing in life is just what you figured it out beforehand”; and this, one of life’s most unwelcome lessons, it had not taken her twenty-six years to learn. She had, in fact, accepted and docketed it while women twice her age were nursing their illusions.
She had expected to be met at the station not only by her husband but by Ruby and Pearl, to say nothing of reporters. “She had slunk in like a nobody,” and her husband declined to feed the fires of her vanity, blazing so merrily these last ten months. Never mind. She had the genius of quick readjustment and a sharp eye for the next move in the great law of compensation.
“And believe me,” she thought, as she put the finishing touches to her smart morning street costume, and taught the admiring Swede how to pin on a veil, “the gods have provided the goods pretty liberally, and I don’t belong to the immortal order of female jackasses. Nine-tenths of women’s troubles, mental and physical, sprout in that hothouse corner of their skulls they call imagination. None of it in mine. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die. Wait till I’m launched in Butte. And just wait till I give a dinner party to the second son of an English duke. Tra la la!”
Before the morning was over even philosophy had folded her wings. If life had been niggardly yesterday she gave with both hands today. When Ida arrived at the bank she was received with exceeding deference by the vice-president and informed that he had recently invested two hundred thousand dollars in her name, acting on instructions from Mr. Compton; and that as a large part of it was in mortgages the interest in some cases ran as high as eight per cent. The money had been placed in his hands for investment shortly after the great land deal, details of which had reached the public ear in due course and greatly added to the prestige of Gregory Compton. In fact it had invested his remote and ambiguous personality with an almost sinister significance. As Ida listened to the story of this transaction (she barely had opened a newspaper in New York and knew nothing of it), she found herself wondering if it could be true that once she had possessed this man of whom even bankers spoke with bated breath. It was patent that they stood in awe not only of the rapid and masterly strokes which had increased his little patrimony by something over two millions in less than a year, but of his colossal luck, his sensational reputation as a “winner”, and his open defiance of the greatest of all great trusts.
It seemed to Ida, as she sat in the vice-president’s office listening to his classification of her husband with Marcus Daly, W. A. Clark, and F. Augustus Heinze, the three commanding figures heretofore in the financial history of Montana, and to predictions that Compton would go farther than any one of his predecessors, that she might have known Gregory in his extreme youth or in some previous existence; but that this man who now not only ranked first in the eyes of all Montana, but had focussed the attention of a continent, no longer touched her life save as a fairy-godfather. It was the first time that she had appreciated his fame. She had been absorbed in Europe and its diversions—and diverters; the new wealth had been accepted as a matter of course; her imagination had not been powerful enough to visualise at a distance what her mind grasped the moment the facts were presented to her in the measured yet glowing terms of a bank’s president.
“He always did feel himself a cut above me,” she thought grimly as she left the building and walked down Main Street. “And now, I suppose, he thinks Perch of the Devil is Mount Olympus, and that he is some god. It would be fun to put a nick or two in his halo—but never mind: I’ve got a cool two hundred thousand—and a palatial residence, and a limousine—sounds like a fairy tale. There’s nothing mean about him, anyhow.”