Once more Ora wished that she had gone to work when she found herself penniless after her father’s death. She would have developed normally, and it was unthinkable that in the little world of Butte she would not have met Gregory Compton while he was free. Then not only would she be happy today but know nothing of those abysmal depths in her soul which she execrated while yielding to them and lamenting that for the time being they were no worse. Love may be divine when all goes well, or one is born into the cult of the martyr, but when it comes too late to passionate natures associated with virile and accomplished minds, it can be the very spawn of hell. Ora’s regret that she was not of the breed of those finished wantons of history that rose to fame on the shattered hearts of men was born of expediency. Could she have been given her choice and Gregory Compton she would have elected to be fine and noble, consummating the lofty dictates of her superior intellectual endowment. Not yet had she realised that lacking a ruthless centralised ideal, rarely allied to brilliant intellects, the souls of women even more than those of men (who have less time and more poise) are the playthings of Circumstance. She became aware that her Chinaman was crossing the room, and before she could refocus her wandering mental vision and intercept him, he had opened the front door and admitted Professor Whalen. XXIII Ida had broken a dinner engagement and sat alone in her library. She knew that Gregory had passed through Butte that day on his way from Helena to Pony; she had seen him leave the Block where his lawyers had their offices and jump into a waiting taxi. He was not the man to take a cab for anything but an imminent train. She had rushed home, but he had neither called nor telephoned. She reasoned that he would be more than man if he were not reluctant to see her again after their last embarrassing interview, that there was no cause for fresh doubts, and that there was literally nothing for her to do at present but continue to play her waiting game. But she felt both sad and nervous, and wondered if it were in her to despair, to “cut and run” like other women; or whether it might not be wise to absent herself for a time. Gregory was the sort of man to appreciate delicacy, and after an absence of two months they would meet quite naturally. She could visit Yellowstone and Glacier Park, and send him pleasant impersonal postcards.