“Ah! Good. Well, I must get some breakfast. Amuse yourself.” “And you won’t be in for several days?” “Afraid not. Good-bye.” Ida set the receiver back on the table, but it was some minutes before she lay down again. She sat thinking, with compressed lips. Born with intuitive knowledge of men, she had, as she once remarked to Ora, turned a goodly number of them inside out during the past year. Gregory Compton did not intend to live with her again. She knew this as conclusively as if his kind matter-of-fact tones had expressed the direct message. Before she left home it never had occurred to Ida to wonder if her husband still loved her or not, and she had learned to accept his consuming masculine interest in matters mineralogic as all in the day’s work. Now she wondered if he had ceased to love her then or since. That he took no further interest in her as a woman, although amiably determined to do his duty as her legal provider, would have been almost patent to an imagination as riotous as Ora’s; to Ida, practical and clear-sighted, there was not a loophole for delusion. In a few moments she relaxed the tension of her body and lay down. “Well!” she thought impatiently, “what’s the matter with me, anyhow? Isn’t it what I always hopefully looked forward to? Did I ever pretend to be anything but resigned--or to be in love with him after the first few weeks? I guess I’m spoiled with too much devotion, that’s what. Seeing too many men lose their heads. Much their old heads are worth. But I guess I don’t like being turned down for once. Goose. It’s my lay to cut out pique and sing a song of thanksgiving that I’ve got pretty nearly everything I ever romanced about and set my mind on. It’s a pretty good old world when things come your way, and women’ll never be happy till they learn to put men in the same place that men put us--on a handy little side-track. I’ve got a whole parlour car instead of an upper berth like some poor devils, so I’ll quit whining. But if there’s another woman in the case, let them both look out--that’s all!” III Ida slept for two hours longer and rose in a philosophical mood. As she more than once had remarked to Ora, “nothing in life is just what you figured it out beforehand”; and this, one of life’s most unwelcome lessons, it had not taken her twenty-six years to learn. She had, in fact, accepted and docketed it while women twice her age were nursing their illusions. She had expected to be met at the station not only by her husband but by Ruby and Pearl, to say nothing of reporters. “She had slunk in like a nobody,” and her husband declined to feed the fires of her vanity, blazing so merrily these last ten months. Never mind. She had the genius of quick readjustment and a sharp eye for the next move in the great law of compensation.