She stood up and Gregory rose also. “Now, there are two things more,” she said with no lack of decision in her voice, whatever her fatigue of body. “You must settle Whalen, and you must move to Butte and live in my house, even if you are only there once or twice a week. Whalen, the moment he discovers that Ora has gone, will run about Butte defaming me, or carry the story to the papers. It wouldn’t do me much good to prove that Mowbray wasn’t there. People like to believe the worst, and in time would forget that Mowbray had been at the Club on that particular night. My set might be all right. But the rest—and my servants—and Ruby and Pearl! They always use the word ‘bad,’ and, as Ora says, an intrigue is only decent in a foreign language. It gives me the horrors to think of it. But if we are seen together twice a week, and you are known to be living in the house, however often you must be absent, nobody will listen to a story that is not headed toward the divorce court.”
“I’ll buy Whalen’s claim and tell him to get out of Montana. He’ll go! As for the rest of your programme—please be sure, Ida, that I stand ready to protect you now and always. You are not only my wife but an extraordinary woman, and I am very proud of you.”
“Oh, the extraordinary woman hasn’t been born yet, in spite of the big fight the sex is putting up,” said Ida lightly, as they left the cabin and walked down the hill. “When women really are extraordinary they will be just as happy without men as they now want to be with them. They try with all their might to be hard, and they can ring outside like metal, but inside they are just one perpetual shriek for the right man to come along—that is all but a few hundred thousand tribadists. But they’ve made a beginning, and one day they’ll really be able to take men as incidentally as men take women. Then we’ll all be happy. Don’t you fool yourself that that’s what I’m aiming at, though. I’m the sort that hangs on to her man like grim death.”
“You’re all right!” said Gregory, who, man-like, was automatically readjusting himself to the inevitable.
He handed her into the tonneau of the car, and tucked the robe about her. She gave his hand a hearty friendly shake, for she was much too wise and too tired for sentiment. “Don’t you worry about Ora,” she said. “Custer is with her and she has the drawing-room, and is probably sound asleep at this moment. It must be very restful to get a tragic love affair off your chest.”
And then the car rolled off and she fell asleep at once.
PART III
PART III
THEY stood together in the dawn, the blue dawn of Montana. Silver stars were winking dimly in the silver sky, clear save above the glittering peaks of the distant range, which reflected the blue of a bank of clouds above. And all the vast and snowy expanse was blue; and the snow on the pine trees of the forest.
No one stirred in the two camps, not abroad at least; and even the shacks and larger buildings built with as little regard for beauty were transformed and glorified by the white splendour of winter. On the crest of Perch of the Devil was a long gracefully built bungalow, also heavily laden with snow, and between the posts of its verandah hung icicles, iridescent blue in the dawn.