If she had returned to find him as she had left him, a mere brilliant hard-working student, and automatically attentive to his home partner, no doubt she would have slipped into her original rôle at once, for she was normally amiable, and she had strict ideas of wifely duties, which her insistent vanity and deliberate flirtations never for a moment endangered. They also filled the practical wants of a nature not derived from artistic ancestors. She had had her “flyer”, and, allowing for social triumphs, returned to Butte to settle down; although it had been with a certain complacency that she had reflected during the homeward journey upon the altered circumstances which would enable her to live like a civilised being in her own apartments and see far less of her husband than formerly. Her complacency had been treated to a succession of shocks since her return; it had, in fact, finally gasped out its life; although it had left self-confidence behind to sit at the feet of her shrewd clear mind. She found a zest entirely new in bringing to his knees a man who had been her husband when she was too raw and conceited to appreciate him, who had developed into a personage, and who had conquered his mere maleness and put women out of his life: she had consulted a detective agency and convinced herself that her only rival was the mine. Ida was nothing if not practical. Before preparing for her siege she chose to know exactly where she stood. A rival of her sex would have demanded one sort of tactics; a mere mine and the quickened business instinct of a dreaming but outclassing brain, although she did not underrate their peculiar dead walls and buffers, exacted a different and more impersonal assault--at first. Much that she had failed to understand in her young husband was clear to her now. His silences, his formidable powers of concentration, his habit of thinking out his purposes unto the smallest detail before verbal expression, his tendency to dream, combined with lightning processes of thought, were the indispensable allies of his peculiar gifts: she had talked with too many brilliant and active men during the past year, to say nothing of her daily association with Ora, for whose inherited and progressive intellect she had the highest respect, and her own development had been too positive, rapid, and normal, not to be fully aware that men born with the genius to conquer life were equipped with powerful imaginations that necessarily made them silent thinkers.