“I’ll give you the details of that scene some other time. I’m too tired now. It is enough to say that she had a pistol and made such an infernal racket with it--shooting at the roof--that something busted in my head and I came to. Then we had it out. She agreed to leave because she knew me too well to believe I had gone to Mowbray’s rooms for any horrid purpose, and he hadn’t been there anyway. I told her that if she told you it would have to be before me, and she knew that she couldn’t brazen it through. So I packed her and got her off this morning. That means that I had no sleep last night.” She stood up and Gregory rose also. “Now, there are two things more,” she said with no lack of decision in her voice, whatever her fatigue of body. “You must settle Whalen, and you must move to Butte and live in my house, even if you are only there once or twice a week. Whalen, the moment he discovers that Ora has gone, will run about Butte defaming me, or carry the story to the papers. It wouldn’t do me much good to prove that Mowbray wasn’t there. People like to believe the worst, and in time would forget that Mowbray had been at the Club on that particular night. My set might be all right. But the rest--and my servants--and Ruby and Pearl! They always use the word ‘bad,’ and, as Ora says, an intrigue is only decent in a foreign language. It gives me the horrors to think of it. But if we are seen together twice a week, and you are known to be living in the house, however often you must be absent, nobody will listen to a story that is not headed toward the divorce court.” “I’ll buy Whalen’s claim and tell him to get out of Montana. He’ll go! As for the rest of your programme--please be sure, Ida, that I stand ready to protect you now and always. You are not only my wife but an extraordinary woman, and I am very proud of you.” “Oh, the extraordinary woman hasn’t been born yet, in spite of the big fight the sex is putting up,” said Ida lightly, as they left the cabin and walked down the hill. “When women really are extraordinary they will be just as happy without men as they now want to be with them. They try with all their might to be hard, and they can ring outside like metal, but inside they are just one perpetual shriek for the right man to come along--that is all but a few hundred thousand tribadists. But they’ve made a beginning, and one day they’ll really be able to take men as incidentally as men take women. Then we’ll all be happy. Don’t you fool yourself that that’s what I’m aiming at, though. I’m the sort that hangs on to her man like grim death.” “You’re all right!” said Gregory, who, man-like, was automatically readjusting himself to the inevitable.