“Rather.” He was in no mood for small talk, for his mind was full of his suddenly dazzling future, but he recognized that he was host, and if this hitherto agreeably silent guest were suddenly inspired to conversation, it was his duty to humor her. “A very noisy town. There are three shifts, you know, and groups of miners on the street corners at all hours of the day and night. The city never seems to sleep.”
“Rather trying for those who want to sleep, I should think.”
“Decidedly. But I was generally too tired at night to be kept awake even by the eternally bouncing trucks.”
Gita turned to him squarely. She felt no repulsion toward individual men as long as they were impersonal, and Butte roused her curiosity. At the same moment Dr. Pelham was enabled to observe that she had the largest and fiercest black eyes he had ever seen and quite the most remarkable eyelashes. “Please tell me something about Butte,” she said eagerly. “I have lived in a good many places but never in a mining town. I always thought I’d like to go to Johannesburg, but I never heard of Butte until today.”
“The two cities are said to be much alike.” And he launched into a description of the stark hill, once known as Perch of the Devil, for unarguable reasons, where the inhabitants walked over copper-mines a mile in depth and sometimes found outcroppings in their back yards. He was grateful to her for introducing a subject which cost him no effort, and he had been able to see the beauty as well as the smiting ugliness of that ore-scorched region. In winter when the high valley was covered with snow it had a cold loveliness of its own, particularly under the blue dawn of Montana.
That phrase had occurred to him as he walked home before sunrise one morning after a call to The Flat to patch up a woman so severely injured in an amorous dispute that it was impossible to move her. His sentences were brief and unadorned but it seemed to Gita that she had a complete vision of that unique “camp” in the Rocky Mountains with its sinister and unsleeping life underground and its scarred and feverish surface.
“I’ll go there some day,” she said, and not merely to be polite. “It would be a new sensation to telephone to New York in a comfortable office a mile underground.” Bylant and Elsie had fallen silent and were listening, the latter with intense approval: Geoffrey was exerting himself to entertain a woman, and Gita was hanging on his words. Then she frowned. That would be too obvious. One’s darling brother and beloved friend. Old stuff. Wouldn’t do, anyhow. What Geoff needed was a good old-fashioned wife to see that he got proper food at regular hours, and soothing and sufficiently intelligent conversation when at home. Whatever else Gita might become she never would be soothing and adaptable. Eustace Bylant might manage her. But the distinguished author had not manifested the slightest interest in this transitional friend of hers.
Then she became aware that while leaning toward Geoffrey, Bylant was covertly watching Gita Carteret. There was a curious expression in his eyes . . . very curious. Not admiration; that would have been natural enough. Not even speculation—more natural still. Not dubiety. Gita, now that she had abandoned a hopeless pose, more especially when she wore soft and luminous satin and a rope of shimmering pearls, did not look in the least like a boy. She was still more handsome than beautiful, perhaps, for there was no trace of softness in her spirited features, and had it not been for her eyelashes she would have resembled too closely the eagle-like countenance of Mrs. Carteret. . . . His eyes had not even their “psychological look,” as when he was visibly admiring and inwardly impaling some elated woman. . . . No, it was—it was—Elsie almost lost her breath as the expression in Bylant’s eyes deepened to an inner certainty. Expectancy? Hope? She had watched it dawn out of a stare of keen appraisement, as if his critical faculty were determined to make no mistake.
Then she saw him shrug his shoulders, shift his gaze, and give his full attention to Geoffrey. A few moments later, to his friend’s manifest relief, he took over the burden of conversation and talked of old and abandoned mining towns he had seen in Nevada; and told stories both orthodox and unusual, that clung to them. One made even Gita laugh heartily; the tale of a man who had taken refuge in the office of his manager high up and in the side of a mountain still full of silver, which could be approached only by a narrow and precarious flight of steps—from a lady of easy virtue, who, now that he owned much of the mountain, was determined to marry him. While he was smoking a congratulatory pipe his manager, passing the entrance to the eyrie, cried out suddenly: “My God, Jim, she’s coming up the ladder with a pistol in one hand and a priest behind her!” And, corralled and at bay, the millionaire had married the lady, dowered her extravagantly, and left her to her own devices. A few years later she had attained a high and haughty position in European Society.
This time Bylant included Gita in the conversation as he did Mrs. Pelham; with equal and charming politeness, and nothing more. She went home with the sense of having had an agreeable and instructive evening, and of enjoying it more than she deserved. Far more important, she had pleased Elsie and was not compelled to anathematize herself as a boor. Topper had been ordered to call for her in a taxi, lest Elsie should insist upon her brother’s escort. Dr. Pelham, much relieved, pronounced her a sensible young woman, and looked astonished when his sister went off into a paroxysm of laughter.