Confronted with such an alternative, the good lady had no option but to suppress her repugnance toward cow punchers. Irene had expected opposition born of a more subtle reason, but it soon became evident that so deeply was her mother concerned with her own affairs that she had quite failed to associate the proposed change with any possibility of a re-opening of Irene's affair with the young rancher. It was years since they had discussed him, and the probability was that, although the incident remained in the back of Mrs. Hardy's memory, even his name had been forgotten.
Arrangements for the journey were made with the despatch which characterized Mrs. Hardy. She was a stickler for precedent; any departure from the beaten paths was in her decalogue the unpardonable sin, but when she had arrived at a decision she was no trifler. She accepted the situation with the resignation which she deemed to be correct under such circumstances, but the boundless prairies were to her so much desolation and ugliness. It was apparent that dwellers in the little four-cornered houses of the plains must be sadly lacking in any sense of the artistic, and as Mrs. Hardy gazed from the car window she acquired a habit of making with her tongue a sound which, owing to the limitations of the alphabet, cannot be represented to the reader, but which Irene understood to be an expression of mingled surprise, pity, and contempt. Irene gathered that her mother did not approve of prairies. They were something new to her life, and it was greatly to be suspected that they were improper.
With very different emotions did the girl find herself speeding again toward the scene of the first great event of her conscious life. For her the boundlessness, the vastness, the immeasurable sweep of the eye, suggested an environment out of which should grow a manhood and womanhood that should weigh mightily in the scales of destiny of a great nation; a manhood and womanhood defiant of the things that are, eager for the adventure of life untrammeled by traditions. She had a mental vision of the type which such a land must produce; her mind ran to riots of daring as it fashioned a picture which should fairly symbolize this people.… The day was drawing to a close, and a prairie sunset glowed upon them in a flush of colouring that stirred her artist soul. A cloudless sky, transparent as an ocean of glass; fathomless, infinite, save when in the west inverted islands of gold and brass and ruddy copper floated in a sea that gently deepened from saffron to opal; and under that sky the yellow prairies; ever, forever, and ever.… Up from the East came the night, and large, bright stars stood out, and the click-clack of the car wheels came louder and louder, and mimic car lamps raced along against the darkness outside. And then the settlers' lights began to blink across the prairie, and Irene's eyes were wet with an emotion she could not define; but she knew her painting had missed something; it had been all outline and no soul, and the prairies in the night are all soul and no outline; all softness and vagueness and yearning unutterable.…
"How tiresome it is," said her mother. "Ask the porter to make up the berths."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mrs. Hardy accepted the surroundings she found in the city that was to be her home with not a little incredulity. For some days she treated the city as a deep rascal which had disguised its true nature in order to deceive her. She smiled at the ease with which she saw through all disguises. One of these days the cloak of respectability would be thrown off, and the shouting and shooting of the cow punchers would proclaim the West as it really was.
Very slowly it dawned upon Mrs. Hardy that this respectable, thriving city, with its well dressed, properly mannered people, its public spirit, its aggressiveness, its churches and theatres and schools, its law and order—and its afternoon teas ("My dear, who would have thought it possible?" She half expected a cowboy to ride in and overthrow the china)—very slowly it dawned upon her that this, after all, was the real West; sincere, earnest; crude, perhaps; bare, certainly; the scars of its recent battle with the wilderness still fresh upon its person; lacking the finish that only time can give to a landscape or a civilization; but lacking also the mouldiness, the mustiness, the insufferable artificiality of older communities. And the atmosphere! Day after day brought its cloudless sky, the weather, for once, having failed to observe the rule of contraries; evening after evening flooded valley and hilltop with its deluge of golden glory; night after night a crisp temperature sent her reaching for comforters. Sleep? She felt that she had never slept before. Eat? Her appetite was insatiable; all day long she lived in a semi-intoxication born of an unaccustomed altitude. And, best of all, something had happened to her cough; she did not know just what or when, but presently she discovered it was gone. Even Mrs. Hardy, steeped for sixty years in a life of precedent and rule and caste, began to catch the enthusiasm of a new land where precedent and rule and caste are something of a handicap.
"We must buy a home," she said to Irene. "We cannot afford to continue living at an hotel, and we must have our own home. You must look up a responsible dealer whose advice we can trust in a matter of this kind."
And was it remarkable that Irene Hardy should think at once of the firm of Conward & Elden? It was not. She had, indeed, been thinking of a member of that firm ever since the decision to move to the West. She had felt a peculiar hesitation about enquiring openly for Dave Elden, but, upon meeting a newspaper woman in the person of Miss Morrison she had voiced the great question with an apparent unconcern which did not in the slightest mislead the acute Roberta. It is the business of newspaper people to know things and people, and it seemed to Irene that she could ask such a question of Miss Morrison in a sort of professional way. But she had not been prepared for the reply.