“Why should I? I never could see that those bonanzerines were so much better’n us, barring clothes.”
“You don’t know the best of ’em, Ide. Madame O’Reilley was too gaudy to catch any but the newest bunch. The old pioneer guard is fine, and their girls have been educated all over this country and the next. Lord! Look at Ora Blake! Where’d you beat her? In these new Western towns it’s generally the sudden rich that move to New York to die of lonesomeness, and nowhere to show their clothes but Peacock Alley in the Waldorf-Astoria. The real people keep their homes here, if they are awful restless; and I guess the Society they make, with their imported gowns and all, ain’t so very different from top Society anywheres. Of course, human nature is human nature, and some of the younger married women are sporty and take too much when a bunch goes over to Boulder Springs for a lark, or get a crush on some other woman’s husband—for want mostly of something to do; but their grammar’s all right. I hope you’ll teach them a lesson when you’re on top, Ide. Good American morals for me, like good American stories. I always skip the Europe stories in the mags. Don’t seem modern and human, somehow, after Butte.”
“Now I like Europe stories,” said Ida, “just because they are so different. The people in ’em ain’t walkin’ round over gold and copper when they’re dishwashin’ or makin’ love, but their mines have been turned centuries ago into castles and pictures and grand old parks. There’s a kind of halo——”
“Halo nothin’!” exclaimed Miss Pearl, who was even more aggressively American than her sister. “It’s them ridiculous titles. And kings and queens and all that antique lot. I despise ’em, and I’m dead set against importin’ foreign notions into God’s own country. We’re dyed-in-the-wool Americans—out West here, anyhow—including every last one of them fools that’s buyin’ new notions with their new money. All their Paris clothes and hats, and smokin’ cigarettes, and loose talk can’t make ’em anything else. Apin’ Europe and its antiquated morals makes me sick to my stomach. Cut it out, kid, before you go any further. Stand by your own country and it’ll stand by you.”
“Well, I’ve got an answer to that. In the first place I’d like to know where you’ll find more girls on the loose than right here in Butte—and I don’t mean the sporting women, either. Why, I meet bunches of schoolgirls every day so painted up they look as if they was fixin’ right now to be bad; and as for these Eastern workin’ girls who come out here after jobs, pretendin’ it’s less pressure and bigger pay they’re after, when it’s really to turn loose and give human nature a chance with free spenders—well, the way they hold down their jobs and racket about all night beats me. None of them’s been to Europe, I notice, and I’d like to bet that the schoolgirls that don’t make monkeys of themselves is the daughters of them that has.”
“Oh, the schoolgirls is just plain little fools and no doubt has their faces held under the spout for ’em when they get home. But as for the Eastern girls, you hit it when you said they come out here to give human nature a chance. Some girls is born bad, thousands and thousands of them; and reformers might just as well try to grow strawberries in a copper smelter as to make a girl run straight when she is lyin’ awake nights thinkin’ up new ways of bein’ crooked. But the rotten girls in this town are not the whole show. And lots of women that would never think of goin’ wrong—don’t naturally care for that sort of thing a bit—just get their minds so mixed up by too much sudden money, and liberty, and too much high livin’ and too much Europe and too much nothin’ to do, that they just don’t know where they’re at; and it isn’t long either before they get to thinkin’ they’re not the dead swell thing unless they do what the nobility of Europe seems to be doin’ all the time——”
“Shucks!” interrupted Ruby, indignantly. “It’s just them stories in the shady mags, and the way our women talk for the sake of effect. There’s bad in America and good in poor old Europe. I’ll bet my new hat on it. Only, over there the good is out of sight under all that sportin’ high life everybody seems to write about. Over here we’ve got a layer of good on top as thick as cream, and every kind of germ swimmin’ round underneath. Lord knows there are plenty of just females in this town, of all towns, but the U. S. is all right because it has such high standards. All sorts of new-fangled notions come and go but them standards never budge. No other country has anything like ’em. Sooner or later we’ll catch up. I’m great on settin’ the right example and I’m dead set on uplift. That’s one reason we’re so strict about our Club membership. Not one of them girls can get in, no matter how good her job or how swell a dresser she is. And they feel it, too, you bet. The line’s drawn like a barbed-wire fence.”
“I guess you’re dead right,” admitted Ida. “And my morals ain’t in any danger, believe me. I’ve got other fish to fry. I’ve had love’s young dream and got over it. I’m just about dead sick of that side of life. I’d cut it out and put it down to profit and loss, but you’ve got to manage men every way nature’s kindly provided, and that’s all there is to it.”
“My land!” exclaimed Ruby. “If I felt that way about my husband I’d leave him too quick.”
“Oh, no, you wouldn’t. You can make up your mind to any old thing. That’s life. And I guess life never holds out both hands full at once. Either, one’s got a knife in it or it’s out of sight altogether.”