In the hearty welcome extended to the newcomer, with either the money or the personality to command its attention, Butte more nearly resembles London than any other city in the world. To pasts she is indifferent, provided they are not resurrected as models for a present: she asks no questions of a pretty, amiable, amusing woman who pays her the compliment of sojourning in her midst, so long as the lady exercises an equal reticence--assuming reticence to be her virtue--and plays the social game with _savoir faire_. Distractions on that high perch are few, social life ebbs oftener than it flows, many of the large houses are closed for the greater part of the year, and only the very young, who care not where they are so long as they may dance, find life in an overgrown mining camp as satisfactory as their elders find New York. But the hospitality of Butte is genuine and founded largely upon common sense. Most of the women composing its society have enjoyed wealth for many years: they have travelled extensively; and if they continue to make their homes in Butte it is solely on account of their own business interests or those of their men. They argue that to deprive themselves of even the casual diversion, assuming the exclusive airs of large and resourceful communities, would merely put them on a level with thousands of other small towns slowly stagnating, be unworthy of their worldly experience, and of the large free spirit of the Northwest which has pervaded that isolated camp since they came with their husbands or fathers to take a hand in its history. As for Mrs. Gregory Compton all they knew of her in her present stage of development was favourable, although several had a lively remembrance of the rosy black-haired Ida Hook delivering her excellent mother’s laundry work at their back door, and receiving more or less of her “cheek.” But they had heard, at the time, of her lessons with Professor Whalen, and of Ora Blake’s coincident interest. Of her social advantages and triumphs in Europe the press had kept them informed; she returned to Butte, in fact, as one new-born. Moreover, she now owned one of the finest houses in the city for entertaining, they knew that she had elected to shine in Butte rather than in London (that Mecca of so many quick-rich women without position in their own country); and above all she was the wife of Gregory Compton, the man in whom Montana was beginning to feel assured it could take an unequivocal pride, not only for his diabolical cleverness, but because he was as “straight” as the Twentieth Century in the United States of America would permit. Butte felt devoutly grateful to Ida for being and returning, and, with that utter lack of affectation that characterised it, began calling two days after her arrival.