Ora laughed with something like her old merriment. “Oh, you’ll have me for an escape valve for a while yet. Valdobia’s mother is dying of some lingering horrible disease. It wouldn’t be decent for me to go to Rome, and I should be lonely anywhere else. So, I’ve made up my mind to stay here during the summer at least, and realise a dream I used to indulge in before I ever knew I could fall in love.” Once more she looked straight at Ida, this time with the slow expectant smile of a child. “I’m going to reopen my mine and run it myself—of course I shall have a manager. Mark has written, or telegraphed, to Mr. Compton to find one for me—but I shall live out there and go down every day, and make believe I am doing something, too—at all events realise that it is my mine. Mining has always—that is, always did fascinate me more than anything else on earth. I shall be devoted to Valdobia when I am married to him, but I simply must have that adventure first——”
“For heaven’s sake don’t go dotty like Gregory over a hole in the ground. If you get that bee buzzing round in your skull I pity poor Valdobia. If it were not for his mother I’d cable to him to come out——”
Ora’s face set with a hardness that arrested Ida’s observant eye. “Don’t you do anything of the sort. Mark said once about my father, ‘It was characteristic of him that when he quit he quit for good.’ I am always discovering more and more of my father in me. I’ll live that old dream and it will finish when Valdobia and I both are free. Then I shall wipe it off the slate—consign it to limbo.” She sprang to her feet and stretched out her arms. “I am going to do exactly as I please as long as I am free. Of course I am mad about Valdobia—you know that I wouldn’t marry him if I were not—but I am mad too about liberty and my mine. This is my only chance. And I am a Montanan, born in the Rocky Mountains. I want something of the life that has made my state famous before I become a European. I’ve never had anything of her but Butte. I want the wild mountains—I want, above all, the mine that has given me my freedom. I’m going to wear overalls and go down into the mine every day.”
“A sweet sight you’ll be!” said Ida disgustedly. “And the miners—Oh, they’ll just love the idea of having a woman at their heels! What on earth has got hold of you? It’s the only time I’ve ever known you to get off your base. Why, there’s nothing a woman can do at a mine unless she’s a graduated mining engineer, and nothing then that a man couldn’t do better. You’ll be in the way and you’ll soon be bored to death yourself. If you’re so crazy about Montana why don’t you do some of those great things for her that your father suggested? And how do you reconcile your marriage to an Italian with your devotion to your father’s memory?”
Ora turned away her head. “My father gave me too much of himself to expect me to play the rôle of ministering angel to anything. I intend to invest in Montana the greater part of all that I take out of my mine. If it gives me one of the great fortunes I shall endow my state in some way—as Mark may suggest. But I cannot live here. That is for ever settled. When I go to Europe I shall never return—not even to America. I shall forget my life here, everything connected with it—everything! One side of me is already European. I shall become wholly so.”
“Somehow,” said Ida slowly, and with the sensation of being so close to something that she couldn’t see it, “I don’t get the idea that you’re so mad about Valdobia. Long since I figured that when you did love a man you’d be a sort of white pillar of flame about him. I firmly believe that Valdobia is the man for you, but, well—he fell too quickly. He didn’t make you suffer, never kept you guessing for a minute. The women that turn men’s heads are a good deal like men themselves; they’ve got to be hurt hard and kept on tenterhooks before they are in a condition to accommodate the virus. You are fond of Valdobia, and well you may be, but mad isn’t the right word——”
“Oh, yes it is! It is!” Ora was walking up and down the room. “You must believe that I love him as I never dreamed I could love anybody——”
“Hi!” cried Ida. “Your letter-man! That’s what! You were more nearly in love with him than you are with Valdobia, and because, for some reason or other, you couldn’t get him. Where is he?”
Ora’s eyes looked large and blank. “That! I had quite forgotten it. It was the last of a long line of mental love affairs. Those always evaporate even from the memory when the real man comes along.” She sighed heavily and sat down once more. “I know that I shall be happy with Valdobia, only I am not happy now. That is so far off! And of course I feel badly about poor Mark. But I couldn’t help it. Not to do it would have been worse. And I should go off my head meanwhile if I didn’t have this mine. Do you think I could remain here in Butte and go to dinners and bridge parties? I should scream in their faces. I must have work. Be sure I can find something to do at the mine—I suppose there are a laboratory and assay office. And there will always be the excitement of hoping to find free milling gold—at present what could be more exciting than to drift for that lost vein?”
“It wouldn’t keep me awake nights. But have your own way. I don’t want you down with nerves, and that will happen if you don’t look out.”