V
WHEN the cottage was quite in order Mrs. Compton invited two of her old friends to lunch. As the School of Mines was at the opposite end of the city, Gregory took his midday meal with him.
Miss Ruby Miller and her twin-sister Pearl were fine examples of the self-supporting young womanhood of the West. Neither had struggled in the extreme economic sense, although when launched they had taken a man’s chances and asked no quarter. Born in a small town in Illinois, their father, a provident grocer, had permitted each of his daughters to attend school until her fifteenth year, then sent her to Chicago to learn a trade. Ruby had studied the mysteries of the hair, complexion, and hands; Pearl the science that must supplement the knack for trimming hats. Both worked faithfully as apprentice and clerk, saving the greater part of their earnings: they purposed to set up for themselves in some town of the Northwest where money was easier, opportunities abundant and expertness rare. What they heard of Montana appealed to their enterprising minds, and, beginning with cautious modesty, some four years before Ida’s marriage, Ruby was now the leading hair-dresser and manicure of Butte, her pleasant address and natural diplomacy assisting her competent hands to monopolise the West Side custom; Pearl, although less candid and engaging, more frank in reminding her customers of their natural deficiencies, was equally capable; if not the leading milliner in that town of many milliners, where even the miners’ wives bought three hats a season, she was rapidly making a reputation among the feathered tribe. She now ranked as one of the most successful of the young business women in a region where success is ever the prize of the efficient. Both she and her sister were as little concerned for their future as the metal hill of Butte itself.
“Well, what do you know about that?” they criedsimultaneously, as Ida ushered them into the parlour. “Say, it’s grand!” continued Miss Ruby with fervour. “Downright artistic. Ide, you’re a wonder!”
Miss Pearl, attuned to a subtler manipulation of colour, felt too happy in this intimate reunion and the prospect of “home-cooking,” to permit even her spirit to grin. “Me for red, kiddo,” she said. “It’s the colour a hard workin’ man or woman wants at the end of the day—warm, and comfortin’, and sensuous-like, and contrastin’ fine with dirty streets and them hills. Glory be, but this chair’s comfortable! I suppose it’s Greg’s.”
“Of course. Luckily a woman don’t have the least trouble findin’ out a man’s weak points, and Greg has a few, thank the goodness godness. But come on to the dining-room. I’ve got fried chicken and creamed potatoes and raised biscuit.”
The guests shrieked with an abandon that proclaimed them the helpless victims of the Butte restaurant or the kitchenette. The fried chicken in its rich gravy, and the other delicacies, including fruit salad, disappeared so rapidly that there was little chance for the play of intellect until the two girls fled laughing to the parlour.
“It’s all very well for Pearl,” cried Miss Ruby, disposing her plump figure in Gregory’s arm-chair, and taking the pins from a mass of red hair that had brought her many a customer; “for she’s the kind that’ll never have to diet if she gets rich quick. I ought to be shassaying round with my hands on my hips right now, but I won’t.”
Miss Pearl extended herself on the divan, and Ida rocked herself with a complacent smile. One of her vanities was slaked, and she experienced a sense of immense relief in the society of these two old friends of her own sort.
“Say!” exclaimed Miss Miller, “if we was real swell, now, we’d be smokin’ cigarettes.”
“What!” cried Ida, scandalised. “No lady’d do such a thing. Say, I forgot the gum.”
She opened a drawer and flirted an oblong section of chewing-gum at each of her guests, voluptuously inserting a morsel in the back of her own mouth. “Where on earth have you seen ladies smokin’ cigarettes?”
“You forget I’m in and out of some of our best families. In other words them that’s too swell—or too lazy—tocome to me, has me up to them. And they’re just as nice—most of ’em—as they can be; no more airs than their men, and often ask me to stay to lunch. I ain’t mentionin’ no names, as I was asked not to, for you know what an old-fashioned bunch there is in every Western town—well, they out with their gold tips after lunch, and maybe you think they don’t know how. I have my doubts as to their enjoyin’ it, for tobacco is nasty tastin’ stuff, and I notice they blow the smoke out quicker’n they take it in. No inhalin’ for them. But they likedoin’it; that’s the point. And I guess they do it a lot at the Country Club and at some of the dinners where the Old Guard ain’t asked. They smoke, and think it’s vulgar to chew gum! We know it’s the other way round.”
“Well, I guess!” exclaimed the young matron, who had listened to this chronicle of high life with her mouth open. “What their husbands thinkin’ about to permit such a thing! I can see Greg’s face if I lit up.”
“Oh, their husbands don’t care,” said Pearl, the cynic. “Not in that bunch. They’re trained, and they don’t care, anyhow. Make the most of Greg now, kiddo. When he strikes it rich, he’ll be just like the rest of ’em, annexin’ right and left. Matter of principle.”
“Principle nothing!” exclaimed Ruby, who, highly sophisticated as any young woman earning her living in a mining town must be, was always amiable in her cynicism. “It’s too much good food and champagne, to say nothin’ of cocktails and highballs and swell club life after the lean and hungry years. They’re just like kids turned loose in a candy store, helpin’ themselves right and left with both hands. Dear old boys, they’re so happy and so jolly you can’t help feelin’ real maternal over ’em, and spoilin’ ’em some more. I often feel like it, even when they lay for me—they look so innocent and hungry-like; but others I could crack over the ear, and I don’t say I haven’t. Lord, how a girl alone does get to know men! I wouldn’t marry one of them if he’d give me the next level of the Anaconda mine. Me for the lonesome!”
“Well, I’m glad I’m married,” said Ida complacently. “The kind of life I want you can only get through a husband. Greg’s goin’ to make money, all right.”
“Greg won’t be as bad as some,” said the wise Miss Ruby. “He’s got big ideas, and as he don’t say muchabout ’em, he’s likely thinkin’ about nothin’ else. At least that’s the way I figure him out. The Lord knows I’ve seen enough of men. But you watch out just the same. Them long thin ones that looks like they was all brains and jaw is often the worst. They’ve got more nerves. The minute the grind lets up they begin to look out for an adventure, wonderin’ what’s round the next corner. Wives ain’t much at supplyin’ adventure——”
“Well, let’s quit worryin’ about what ain’t happened,” said Miss Pearl abruptly. Men did not interest her. “Will he take you to any of the dances? That’s what I want to know. You’ve been put up and elected to our new and exclusive Club. No more Coliseum Saturday Nights for us—Race Track is a good name for it. We’ve taken a new little hall over Murphy’s store for Saturday nights till the Gardens open up, and we have real fun. No rowdyism. We leave that to the cut below. This Club is composed of real nice girls and young men of Butte who are workin’ hard at something high-toned and respectable, and frown hard on the fast lot.”
“Sounds fine. Perhaps Greg’ll go, though he studies half the night. Do you meet at any other time? Is it one of them mind improvers, too?”
“Nixie. We work all week and want fun when we get a few hours off. I improve my mind readin’ myself to sleep every night——”
“What do you read?” interrupted Ida, eagerly.
“Oh, the mags, of course, and a novel now and then. But you don’t need novels any more. The mags are wonders! They teach you all the life you don’t know—all the way from lords to burglars. Then there’s the movin’ pictures. Lord, but we have advantages our poor mothers never dreamed of!”
“Greg wants me to study with a teacher.” Ida frowned reminiscently and fatidically. “He seems to think I didn’t get nothin’ at school.”
“Well, what do you know about that?” gasped Miss Miller. Pearl removed her gum with a dry laugh.
“If a man insinuated I wasn’t good enough for him—” she began; Ruby, whose quick mind was weather-wise, interrupted her.
“Greg’s right. He’s got education himself and’s proved he don’t mean to be a rancher all his life. What’s more,I’ve heard men say that Gregory Compton is bound one way or another to be one of the big men of Montana. He’s got the brains, he’s got the jaw, and he can outwork any miner that ever struck, and no bad habits. Ide, you go ahead and polish up.”
“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. Therealpeople 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 clothesandhats,andsmokin’ cigarettes,andloose talk can’tmake ’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 ofthem’sbeen 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. Lordknows 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.”
Ruby snorted with disgust. “Once more I vow I’ll marry none of them. Me for self-respect.”
“Now as to Europe,” pursued Ida. “You’re just nothin’ till you’ve been, both as to what you get, and sayin’ you’ve been there——”
“Ida,” said Ruby, shaking her wise red head, “don’t you go leaving your husband summers, like the rest. Men don’t get much chance to go to Europe. They prefer little old New York, anyhow—when they get on there alone. I wonder what ten thousand wives that go to Europe every summer think their husbands are doin’? I haven’t manicured men for nine years without knowin’ they need watchin’ every minute. Why, my lord! they’re so tickled to death when summer comes round they can hardly wait to kiss their wives good-bye and try to look lonesome on the platform. They’d like to be down and kick up their heels right there at the station. And I didn’t have to come to Butte to find that out.”
“Greg’ll never run with that fast lot.”
“No, but he might meet an affinity; and there’s one ofthemlyin’ in wait for every man.”
Ida’s brow darkened. “Well, just let her look out for herself, that’s all. I’ll hang on to Greg. But it ain’t time to worry yet. Let’s have a game of poker.”