“Well, I think you should go to the Prom. Mr. Compton is the star pupil in the School of Mines. The professors talk of no one else. I rather think your absence would cause comment.” “Well--maybe I’ll go. I’d like to all right. But I can’t wear low-neck. I guess you know it wouldn’t do.” “No doubt you are right.” Ora made no attempt at conversion; it was encouraging that Ida had certain inclinations toward good taste, even if they were prompted by expediency. “Jimminy, but your room’s pretty!” exclaimed Ida. “Mine’s pink--but lawsy!” She gazed about the room, which, although she never had seen the sea, recalled descriptions of its shells washed by its foam. She knit her brows. “I guess it takes experience, and seein’ things,” she muttered. Her eyes travelled to the little bed in one corner. It would have looked like a nun’s, so narrow and inconspicuous was it, had it not been for its cover of pale pink satin under the same filmy lace. “Sakes alive!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you sleep with your husband?” Ora was angry to feel herself coloring. She answered haughtily, “We have separate rooms. It is the custom--I mean--I have always seen----” “I’ve heard it was the stunt among swells, but I don’t hold to it. It’s only at night that you’ve really got a chance to know where a man is; and the more rope you give him the more he’ll take. What’s to prevent Mark slippin’ out when he thinks you’re asleep? Or coming home any old time? Besides, some men talk in their sleep. That gives you another hold. I’m always hoping Greg will, as he talks so little when he’s awake. You bet your life he never gets a room to himself.” “Poor Mr. Compton!” thought Ora. “I fancy he’ll expiate.” “Shall we go downstairs?” she asked. “I got my portfolios out this morning.” She tactfully had shown Ida her wardrobe first, and the guest descended to the library in high good humour. For an hour they hung over the contents of the Italian portfolios. Ida was enchanted with the castles and ruins, listened eagerly to the legends, and was proud of her own knowledge of the horrors enacted in the Coliseum. But over the photographs of the masterpieces in the Pitti and the Uffizi she frankly yawned. “No more cross-eyed saints, and fat babies and shameless sporting women in mine,” she announced. “Them virgins sitting on thrones, holding four-year-olds trying to look like six months, make me tired.” “Oh, well, I fancy you must see the old masters for the first time in their proper setting--and wonderful colouring----” Ora wondered if the masterpieces would appear somewhat overrated to herself if seen for the first time in Butte. It certainly was interesting to watch the effect of fixed standards--or superstitions--upon an untrained but remarkably sharp mind. “That Last Supper looks like they’d been eating the paint,” pursued Ida. Ora laughed. “I shan’t show you any more pictures today. This furniture is Italian--Florentine and Venetian. Let me tell you something about it.”