“It’s all very well for Pearl,” cried Miss Ruby, disposing her plump figure in Gregory’s arm-chair, and taking the pins from a mass of red hair that had brought her many a customer; “for she’s the kind that’ll never have to diet if she gets rich quick. I ought to be shassaying round with my hands on my hips right now, but I won’t.”
Miss Pearl extended herself on the divan, and Ida rocked herself with a complacent smile. One of her vanities was slaked, and she experienced a sense of immense relief in the society of these two old friends of her own sort.
“Say!” exclaimed Miss Miller, “if we was real swell, now, we’d be smokin’ cigarettes.”
“What!” cried Ida, scandalised. “No lady’d do such a thing. Say, I forgot the gum.”
She opened a drawer and flirted an oblong section of chewing-gum at each of her guests, voluptuously inserting a morsel in the back of her own mouth. “Where on earth have you seen ladies smokin’ cigarettes?”
“You forget I’m in and out of some of our best families. In other words them that’s too swell—or too lazy—to come to me, has me up to them. And they’re just as nice—most of ’em—as they can be; no more airs than their men, and often ask me to stay to lunch. I ain’t mentionin’ no names, as I was asked not to, for you know what an old-fashioned bunch there is in every Western town—well, they out with their gold tips after lunch, and maybe you think they don’t know how. I have my doubts as to their enjoyin’ it, for tobacco is nasty tastin’ stuff, and I notice they blow the smoke out quicker’n they take it in. No inhalin’ for them. But they like doin’ it; that’s the point. And I guess they do it a lot at the Country Club and at some of the dinners where the Old Guard ain’t asked. They smoke, and think it’s vulgar to chew gum! We know it’s the other way round.”
“Well, I guess!” exclaimed the young matron, who had listened to this chronicle of high life with her mouth open. “What their husbands thinkin’ about to permit such a thing! I can see Greg’s face if I lit up.”
“Oh, their husbands don’t care,” said Pearl, the cynic. “Not in that bunch. They’re trained, and they don’t care, anyhow. Make the most of Greg now, kiddo. When he strikes it rich, he’ll be just like the rest of ’em, annexin’ right and left. Matter of principle.”
“Principle nothing!” exclaimed Ruby, who, highly sophisticated as any young woman earning her living in a mining town must be, was always amiable in her cynicism. “It’s too much good food and champagne, to say nothin’ of cocktails and highballs and swell club life after the lean and hungry years. They’re just like kids turned loose in a candy store, helpin’ themselves right and left with both hands. Dear old boys, they’re so happy and so jolly you can’t help feelin’ real maternal over ’em, and spoilin’ ’em some more. I often feel like it, even when they lay for me—they look so innocent and hungry-like; but others I could crack over the ear, and I don’t say I haven’t. Lord, how a girl alone does get to know men! I wouldn’t marry one of them if he’d give me the next level of the Anaconda mine. Me for the lonesome!”
“Well, I’m glad I’m married,” said Ida complacently. “The kind of life I want you can only get through a husband. Greg’s goin’ to make money, all right.”