Ora led the conversation--no great adroitness was necessary--to the many divorces pending in Butte at the moment. Ida sniffed. Ora asserted gaily that they were merely a casual result of an era of universal progress and individualism; one of the commonplaces of modern life that hardly called for comment. “You are so up to date in everything else, my dear,” she concluded, “that I wonder you cling to such old middle-class prejudices.” “I guess there are a few conservatives and brakes left in this country,” said Ida, drily. “I may look back with horror at the time when I chewed gum and walked out of a restaurant with a toothpick in my mouth, but Ma hammered most of my good old-fashioned prejudices into my back with the broom-handle, and I’m no more likely to forget her opinion of divorce--the poor get it sometimes as well as the rich--than the bastings I got if I played hookey from school, or sneaked out after dark alone with a beau.” “My mother was exactly the same,” said Ora, with that charming spontaneity which so often robbed her words of the subtle insult of condescension, or the more cryptic of irony. “If I hadn’t happened to be a book-worm and had indulged in clandestine love affairs I should have been shut up on bread and water. And she had all a Southern woman’s horror of divorce. But, dear Ida! That was in the dark ages. We live in the most enlightened and individualistic era of the world’s history. I have kept my eyes and ears open ever since. Nor do I believe for a moment that we are getting any worse--we merely have achieved a more well-bred indifference toward other people’s affairs. One can hear a scandal a minute in large towns and small, if one has nothing better to do than listen; but whereas in our mothers’ time a woman was dropped if she was ‘talked about,’ today we don’t turn a hair at anything short of a quite superlative divorce court scandal--not even about girls; always provided that they continue to dress well, and keep on being charming and spending money.” “That is about the most cynical thing I ever heard you say.” “The truth always sounds cynical. You laugh at me for dreaming and being an idealist, but I never have shut my mind to facts as you do.” “I don’t even blink the old facts. I don’t like them, that’s all. I don’t say, of course, that if I were married to a brute who came home drunk and beat me--but this swapping husbands like horses--well, I’m content to be a brake as long as there’s any wheel to freeze to. You know I’m not hitting at you,” she added hastily. “I’d give you the moon if you wanted it; but I put you in a class by yourself, that’s all.” “Oh,” cried Ora, laughing. “Let us change the subject before you prove that your logic turns feminine at the crucial test. Heavens! How hideous Butte is. We drove----” “Hideous? Butte?” demanded Ida indignantly.