XI
“TAILORED suits have to be made by a tailor, but I’d like first rate to copy this one you call a little afternoon frock. It’s got the style all right, and I could get some cheap nice-looking stuff.”
Ida was gloating over Ora’s limited but fashionable wardrobe, and while she held the smart afternoon frock out at arm’s length, her eye wandered to an evening gown of blue satin and chiffon that lay over the back of a chair.
“Glory!” she sighed. “But I’d like to wear a real gown like that. Low-neck, short sleeves! I’ve got the neck and arms too, you bet——”
“Why not copy it?” Ora was full of enthusiasm once more. “You can do it here, and I have an excellent seamstress——”
“Where’d I wear a rig like that? Even if I made it in China silk and Greg took me anywheres, I couldn’t. We don’t go in for real low necks in our bunch.”
“But surely you’ll go to the Junior Prom?”
Ida opened her mouth as well as her eyes. “The Junior Prom? I never thought of it. Of course I’d be asked, Greg being in the Junior Class and all——”
“Naturally.”
Ida frowned. “Well, I ain’t going. I said I wouldn’t go anywheres—to any swell blowouts, until I’m as big as anybody there.”
“But the School of Mines is composed of young men of all classes. Each asks his friends. The Prom is anything but an exclusive affair. You go out to the Garden dances on Friday nights in summer?”
“Oh, in that jam—and everybody wearing their suits, or any old thing——”
“Well, I think you should go to the Prom. Mr. Compton is the star pupil in the School of Mines. The professors talk of no one else. I rather think your absence would cause comment.”
“Well—maybe I’ll go. I’d like to all right. But I can’t wear low-neck. I guess you know it wouldn’t do.”
“No doubt you are right.” Ora made no attempt at conversion; it was encouraging that Ida had certain inclinations toward good taste, even if they were prompted by expediency.
“Jimminy, but your room’s pretty!” exclaimed Ida. “Mine’s pink—but lawsy!”
She gazed about the room, which, although she never had seen the sea, recalled descriptions of its shells washed by its foam. She knit her brows. “I guess it takes experience, and seein’ things,” she muttered. Her eyes travelled to the little bed in one corner. It would have looked like a nun’s, so narrow and inconspicuous was it, had it not been for its cover of pale pink satin under the same filmy lace.
“Sakes alive!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you sleep with your husband?”
Ora was angry to feel herself coloring. She answered haughtily, “We have separate rooms. It is the custom—I mean—I have always seen——”
“I’ve heard it was the stunt among swells, but I don’t hold to it. It’s only at night that you’ve really got a chance to know where a man is; and the more rope you give him the more he’ll take. What’s to prevent Mark slippin’ out when he thinks you’re asleep? Or coming home any old time? Besides, some men talk in their sleep. That gives you another hold. I’m always hoping Greg will, as he talks so little when he’s awake. You bet your life he never gets a room to himself.”
“Poor Mr. Compton!” thought Ora. “I fancy he’ll expiate.” “Shall we go downstairs?” she asked. “I got my portfolios out this morning.”
She tactfully had shown Ida her wardrobe first, and the guest descended to the library in high good humour. For an hour they hung over the contents of the Italian portfolios. Ida was enchanted with the castles and ruins, listened eagerly to the legends, and was proud of her own knowledge of the horrors enacted in the Coliseum. But over the photographs of the masterpieces in the Pitti and the Uffizi she frankly yawned.
“No more cross-eyed saints, and fat babies and shameless sporting women in mine,” she announced. “Them virgins sitting on thrones, holding four-year-olds trying to look like six months, make me tired.”
“Oh, well, I fancy you must see the old masters for the first time in their proper setting—and wonderful colouring——” Ora wondered if the masterpieces would appear somewhat overrated to herself if seen for the first time in Butte. It certainly was interesting to watch the effect of fixed standards—or superstitions—upon an untrained but remarkably sharp mind.
“That Last Supper looks like they’d been eating the paint,” pursued Ida.
Ora laughed. “I shan’t show you any more pictures today. This furniture is Italian—Florentine and Venetian. Let me tell you something about it.”
“I’d like to see all your rooms.” Ida rose and stretched herself luxuriously. Ora thought she looked like a beautiful Persian cat. “Houses interest me mor’n pictures, although I’ll buy them too some day. Not old masters, though. They’d give me the willys. This carved oak with faded gilt panels is a dream!” she exclaimed with instant appreciation. “I’d learn wood-carving if there was anyone in this God-forsaken camp to teach it.”
Ora clapped her hands, and once more, to Ida’s startled eyes she looked like a very young girl. “I studied several of the crafts when I was in Germany,” she cried, “wood-carving, brass-hammering, enamelling. I’ll set up a workshop—let me see, the attic would be the best place, and the furnace warms it—and teach you, and work myself. It’s just what I need. I wonder I never thought of it——”
“Need what?” interrupted Ida sharply.
“Oh, a relief from too much study. There’s nothing like a craft for mental workers—I should have thought of it before,” she repeated. “What do you say?”
“I’d like it first rate, and I guess you’ll find me quick enough with my hands, whatever you think of my cocoanut.”
“I think very highly of your cocoanut. This is my little drawing-room.”
Ida stood on the threshold for a few moments without comment. She had never cast a thought to her Puritan inheritance, but anger, disapproval, possessed her. She hated the room, but had no reason to give.
“You don’t like my favourite room?” asked Ora, who was watching her curiously.
“Is it your favourite room?” She turned this over. “No, I guess I like the heavy, solid, durable things best.” She struggled for her reasons. “You get your money’s worth in them. This looks like the first Chinook would blow it clear over into North Dakota, or as if you might come in some morning and find a heap of dust where it had been the night before—like a corpse when the air’s let in. I didn’t mind your bedroom being dainty and looking like some sea shells I saw once in a picture frame,—it looks all of a piece, too, you might say; but this—with them queer thin faded out chairs and sofas—the colours on the wood even, and them pictures over the doors and mantel look like they would do the final disappearing act while you wait—well, there’s something kinder mysterious—ghostly—it looks so stiff—and—at the same time—so kinder immoral——”
“I wonder if what you are groping for is the atmosphere of the past, which all old furniture must have, particularly if rearranged in something like its original setting.” Ora was regarding her with a new interest. “This furniture came out of ahôtel—what we would call a residence—with a history—several histories, I should think—and I fancy it was all frivolous, and wicked, and exciting——”
“I ain’t no spiritualist!” said Ida tartly. “Is that what you’re driving at?”
“I don’t know that I was thinking of occultism, even,” said Ora lightly. “But it is interesting to find these old things have atmosphere for you as well as for me——”
“Why is it your favourite room? Because it has ‘atmosphere’?”
“I don’t know. I doubt if I have ever given the matter a thought.”
“So this is your favourite room.” Ida turned her back on it. “H’m. Well, maybe I’ll understand some things better one of these days than I do now. Perhaps,” with one of her uncanny dashes of intuition, “I’ll understand it when I do you.”
“Let us go up to the attic and look it over. I’ll have the table and benches made tomorrow.” Something was moving toward expression in her own mind, but she flung it aside and ran up the stair followed by Ida, who dismissed the subject as promptly.