“And believe me,” she thought, as she put the finishing touches to her smart morning street costume, and taught the admiring Swede how to pin on a veil, “the gods have provided the goods pretty liberally, and I don’t belong to the immortal order of female jackasses. Nine-tenths of women’s troubles, mental and physical, sprout in that hothouse corner of their skulls they call imagination. None of it in mine. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die. Wait till I’m launched in Butte. And just wait till I give a dinner party to the second son of an English duke. Tra la la!” Before the morning was over even philosophy had folded her wings. If life had been niggardly yesterday she gave with both hands today. When Ida arrived at the bank she was received with exceeding deference by the vice-president and informed that he had recently invested two hundred thousand dollars in her name, acting on instructions from Mr. Compton; and that as a large part of it was in mortgages the interest in some cases ran as high as eight per cent. The money had been placed in his hands for investment shortly after the great land deal, details of which had reached the public ear in due course and greatly added to the prestige of Gregory Compton. In fact it had invested his remote and ambiguous personality with an almost sinister significance. As Ida listened to the story of this transaction (she barely had opened a newspaper in New York and knew nothing of it), she found herself wondering if it could be true that once she had possessed this man of whom even bankers spoke with bated breath. It was patent that they stood in awe not only of the rapid and masterly strokes which had increased his little patrimony by something over two millions in less than a year, but of his colossal luck, his sensational reputation as a “winner”, and his open defiance of the greatest of all great trusts. It seemed to Ida, as she sat in the vice-president’s office listening to his classification of her husband with Marcus Daly, W. A. Clark, and F. Augustus Heinze, the three commanding figures heretofore in the financial history of Montana, and to predictions that Compton would go farther than any one of his predecessors, that she might have known Gregory in his extreme youth or in some previous existence; but that this man who now not only ranked first in the eyes of all Montana, but had focussed the attention of a continent, no longer touched her life save as a fairy-godfather. It was the first time that she had appreciated his fame. She had been absorbed in Europe and its diversions--and diverters; the new wealth had been accepted as a matter of course; her imagination had not been powerful enough to visualise at a distance what her mind grasped the moment the facts were presented to her in the measured yet glowing terms of a bank’s president.