XIII
SEVERAL weeks passed before Ora sent for Miss Ruby Miller. She was busier during those weeks than she had been for many months. Ida came every other day at one o’clock and remained until five. They carved wood in the attic, and looked at pictures or read in the library during the hour and a half that included tea. Ida confessed that during the latter interval she was so bored sometimes she could scream, but added that she would stick it out if she yawned every tooth in her head loose. One thing that never bored her was the picture of Ora—her working blouse changed for a dainty house gown—presiding at the tea-table. She studied every detail, every gesture; she even cultivated a taste for tea, which heretofore she had regarded as fit for invalids only, like jellies and cup-custard.
Ora’s alternate days and many of her evenings were filled with social duties. Butte was indulging in one of its hurricanes of festivity. Mrs. O’Hagan, who lived in the largest and finest house on the West Side, gave a series of dinner dances. Mrs. Burke, who owned the big ugly red house of appalling architecture built by Judge Stratton in the eighties, gave several entertainments in honour of two young visitors from Denver. Mrs. Maginnis, who lived in another palatial residence far west and far from the old Stratton house—which in its day had expressed the extreme limit of the city, as of fashion—gave a ball as brilliant as anything Ora had seen in a distant hemisphere. Flowers may be scarce in Butte, but flowers and palms may be imported by the carload from Helena, and the large rooms looked like an oasis in the grey desert of Butte. Every woman wore a ball gown made by some one of the great reiterative masters, and there were no wall flowers; for, although the tango had not yet set the whole world dancing, the women of Montana never had interpreted grey hairs as a signal to retire.
It was on the day after this ball that Ora had telephoned to Miss Miller. “Can you give me an hour or two tomorrow?” she asked.
“Sure. Can I come early? I’ve got fourteen heads to dress for the Cameron ball, and most of them want a facial too?”
“A what?”
“Face massage, and touchin’ up generally.”
“Oh.”
“It’s fine. Makes you feel as good as you look. What did you want me to do?”
“Ob, shampoo my hair. I want to consult you about it, too—and manicure.”