She felt warmed by the little interview, but as she went down in the elevator she admitted to herself that her future intercourse with her old friends must be sporadic, no matter what her loyalty; and she wondered if her new friends would take their place; or even be to her the half of what Ora had become in the long intimacy of travel. She shrugged her handsome shoulders. If you elected to mount in life, you must pay the toll. Were she abruptly returned to the old cottage in East Granite Street certainly Ruby and Pearl would not compensate her. No, not for a moment. You may slip back in life if you are not strong enough to hold on, but you do not deliberately turn back even for the friends of your youth. Neither does Progress halt and sit down to wait for its failures to catch up. Ida leaned back in her limousine and met the interested eyes of many pedestrians of both sexes as her chauffeur drove her about for an hour to get the air, and incidentally to be looked at.
Today she was in a mood to enjoy Butte, and she deliberately summoned the long anticipated sensations. She revelled in the gaunt grey ugliness of Anaconda Hill which flung its arrogant head high above the eastern end of the great hill itself; in the sensation of driving over miles of subterranean numbered streets, some of them three thousand feet below, to which that famous mass of rock and dirt and angular buildings was the portal. She leaned far out of her car to admire the glittering mountains that looked like blue ice topped with white, and decided that they were far more original and beautiful than the Alps of Austria and Switzerland; certainly they tugged at her heartstrings and at the same time filled her with an unprecedented desire to sing. She noticed for the first time that the violet foothills against the nearer mountain east of the city seemed to close the end of the streets as the Alps did in Innspruck, and gave the ragged overgrown camp clinging to its high perch in the Rockies a redeeming touch of perfect beauty.
She drove out to Columbia Gardens, bought flowers from the conservatory for her rooms, and wandered about recalling the many gay times she had had in the dancing pavilion. But her eye was suddenly arrested by the steep mountain behind, then dropped slowly to the base. It was there that she had promised to marry Gregory Compton. She remembered his young passion and her own. She had never felt anything like it again; nor had he ever been quite the same. Was it one of those “supreme moments” novelists so blithely alluded to? The logical inference of that old bit of bathos was that such moments had no duplicates. She felt faint and dizzy for a moment; then walked back to her car, smiling grimly as she realised that she had experienced a fleeting echo of that vast unattainable desire women live and die cherishing or bewailing. “Poor things! Poor things!” she thought, with the first pang of pity her sex had ever inspired. “No wonder they go in for suffrage, art, work, any old thing. Home,” she added to the chauffeur.
She peremptorily dismissed all thought of the past during the drive back to town and reverted to her pleasure in once more feeling a part of her surroundings, hideous though they might, for the most part, be; instead of walking with alert critical eye through what always must seem to her the animated pages of ancient history. But her complacency received a sudden shock. The car was rolling along Park Street when her eye rested upon a man’s face vaguely familiar. She had bowed graciously and the face was behind her before she realised that the man was Professor Whalen, and that, for a second, she had looked into a pair of pale blue eyes that sent her a swift message of hate.
Ida shuddered. The warm light air of her beloved Rockies turned cold and heavy. “I feel as if I’d stepped on a snake and just missed getting bitten,” she thought, putting her sensations into a concrete form, after her habit. “I had forgotten the little viper was alive, and I wish to goodness he wasn’t.” She had flouted superstition always, but she could not shake off the sense of menace and evil that had vibrated from the man until she was within her own doors once more. Then she became as oblivious of Whalen’s existence as during that late exotic period when everything connected with her old life had seemed too crude to be real.
The parlour maid handed her a note that had arrived an hour before from Mr. Luning, Mark’s partner. Mrs. Blake, he wrote, had bought a present for Mrs. Compton in Paris and sent it to the care of her husband’s firm. Mr. Luning had gone the day before to Great Falls to clear it in the Custom House, and now had the pleasure of forwarding the boxes, etc.
“Good gracious!” exclaimed Ida, “what can it be?”
“There’s four big boxes in the back hall, ma’am.”
Ida lost no time. If Ora had given her a present it must be worth looking at, and she went as rapidly as dignity would permit to the nether regions and ordered the boxes opened. The present proved to be a magnificent silver service, from many dozens of “flat ware” to massive platters, vegetable dishes, flower, fruit and bon-bon pieces, and candelabra. The delighted servants made a shining display on the dining-room table, and after Ida had gloated over it for a time and informed her audience that it was copied from a royal service in the Louvre, she went suddenly up to her bedroom. This time she did shed a few tears, and as she looked at her handkerchief in some wonder she decided that there was at least one person that she loved, “hard-headed” as she was, and that Ora Blake had found the one soft spot in her flinty heart and wormed herself into it. She went to her desk immediately and wrote Ora a letter that was almost tender, admitting that she missed her “like fury”, and begging her to return soon.
“Greg telephoned this morning,” she concluded, oblivious that she was betraying the fact that she had not seen her husband, “and told me to tell you to keep Mark down below for several months. But his lungs must be well by this time or he’d be dead. And the rest of him will mend all the sooner in this magnificent air. Heavens, but it’s good to breathe it again! It makes one feel as if the atmosphere of Europe hadn’t been aired for a century. I’ve got a wonder of a house and a jim dandy of a limousine, but ever since I came I’ve felt kind of homesick, and I’ve just realised it’s for you, old girl. So, come home. Once more ten million thanks.”