The predatory male and his promises had never tempted her, and it was her boast that she had never set foot in the road houses of The Flat. She had made up her mind long since to live on the West Side, the fashionable end of Butte, and was wise enough, to quote her own words, to know that the straight and narrow was the only direct route. Ambition, her sleepless desire to be a grand dame (which she pronounced without any superfluous accent), was stronger than vanity or her natural love of pleasure. By the ordinary romantic yearnings of her age and sex she was unhampered; but when she met Gregory Compton, she played the woman’s game so admirably the long day through that she brushed her heavy black hair at night quite satisfied he would propose when she gave him his chance. This she withheld for several days, it being both pleasant and prudent to torment him. He walked home with her every afternoon from the dressmaking establishment on North Main Street to her mother’s cottage in East Granite, to be dismissed at the gate coyly, reluctantly, indifferently, but always with a glance of startled wonder from the door. In the course of the week she gave him to understand that she should attend the Friday Night dance at Columbia Gardens, and expected him to escort her. Gregory, who by this time was reduced to a mere prowling instinct projected with fatal instantaneity from its napping ego, was as helpless a victim as if born a fool. He thought himself the most fortunate of men to receive permission to sit beside her on the open car during the long ride to the Gardens, to pay for the greater number of her waltzes, to be, in short, her beau for the night. The evening of Friday at Columbia Gardens is Society Night for all respectable Butte, irrespective of class; the best floor and the airiest hall in Silver Bow County proving an irresistible incentive to democracy. Moreover, Butte is a city of few resources, and the Gardens at night look like fairyland: the immense room is hung with Chinese lanterns depending from the rafters, the music is the best in Montana; and the richer the women, the plainer their frocks. A sort of informal propriety reigns, and millionaire or clerk pays ten cents for the privilege of dancing with his lady. Ida, who had expended five of her hard-earned dollars on a bottle of imported perfume, wore a white serge suit cut as well as any in “the grand dame bunch.” After the sixth waltz she draped her head and shoulders with a coral-pink scarf and led Gregory, despite the chill of June, out to his willing fate. The park was infested by other couples, walking briskly to keep themselves warm, and so were the picnic grounds where the cottonwoods and Canadian poplars were being coaxed to grow, now that the smelters which had reduced the neighbourhood of Butte to its bones had been removed to Anaconda.