The day after the Apex mine closed down, she rang him up and offered her congratulations, told him something of the excitement in Butte, then rang off before he began to feel detained. As he passed through Butte later, on his way to Helena, he could do no less than call on her, and, to his relief and her secret rage, he found several pleasant people taking tea in the library. But she showed her pride in him so frankly that he could not but be flattered, and talked so intelligently of the undoubted sequel of the battle underground that he forgot her guests and addressed his conversation to her. She drew him on to describe that grim but picturesque episode underground, and he would have been less than man had he failed to be sensible of the rise of his chest while surrounded by a breathless circle of charming women. When they were about to withdraw tactfully and leave him alone with his wife, he glanced at his watch, bade them all a hasty good-bye and bolted out to catch his train. Ida once more had been able to exhibit to her little world an evidence of the pleasant understanding between herself and her busy husband, and got what consolation out of this fact that she could. “I can wait,” she thought grimly. “I can wait! I guess patience is my one all-wool-and-a-yard-wide virtue. I’ll wait!” She gave several small dinners and a dancing party, devoted to the new excitement of “ragging,” in which no one became more proficient than herself. She “went” harder than ever, and even joined the more extreme younger set (elegantly known as “The Bunch”) one night in a progress among the road houses of The Flat, and danced in the ballroom of the Five Mile House until dawn. But she had no real taste for this side of life; and did penance by visiting the Poor Farm and several other charities under the wing of Mrs. Cameron. Her popularity on all sides was unchallenged, and not only was she firmly established in the city of her heart, but Mrs. Cameron had offered to take a house with her in New York for the following winter if she cared to mount still higher. She was gratified and grateful, but she was filled with that desperate loneliness that only a man can banish. On the night of the opera she wore black velvet unrelieved and never had looked handsomer. The neck of the apparently inseverable gown was cut square, and her beautiful arms were exposed as far to the top as fashion permitted; she wore her hair banded closely about her head, and, at the base of her throat, a barbaric necklace of dull red and blue stones that she had picked up in an antiquity shop in Munich. As she sat in her box between Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Collier, one of the handsomest and best dressed of the younger women of Butte, Gregory, who sat behind and facing the house, saw that during the first entr’acte the audience levelled its glasses at her constantly, and that, indisputably, she divided the honours of the night with the prima donna.