Ora was too indifferent to the world to care to weave this gossamer bridge, and had grown accustomed to mental solitude. But she had never placed any curb on her imagination. In the days when her only solace was books it enabled her to visualise the _mise-en-scène_ of the remote or immediate past, the procession of the traveller, or the abstractions of science; as if she were in one of those theatres where the great modern manager threatens to atrophy what imagination is left in the world. It even enabled her to enjoy fiction whose scene was a land of which she had no personal knowledge; a rare gift in the American, whose demand for familiar settings and characters keeps our literature commonplace. And she could at will shut her eyes and wander in Europe when Butte became insufferable. Her surrender to the obsession of Gregory Compton had been gradual; she had fought it, not only out of loyalty to her husband and her friend, but because the future menaced terrors against which she had no desire to pit her strength. But she had finally cast defiance to the future, and dismissed her phantom loyalty with a shrug. Mark no doubt had consoled himself for her defection long since; to Ida a husband was a money-maker pure and simple. She herself would never see Gregory Compton again if she could avoid it; or, if life took her inevitably back to Butte, no doubt her infatuation would have been cured by mental satiety, and she would be able to greet him with the indifference that is ever the portion of the discarded lover. Having arrived at this reasonable conclusion, she had dismissed cynicism, cowardice, and qualms, to limbo, and entered upon one of those exalting, tormenting, incredibly sweet, and profoundly depressing mental love affairs, which, lacking the element of comedy inevitable in all actual relations between men and women, obsess the mind and detach it from life.