After the first week she dropped no more g’s, her grammar rapidly improved, and although she never would be a stylist, nor altogether forswear slang, not only because the ready-made phrase appealed to her unliterary mind, but because its use was ingrained, she reserved it more and more for those that best could appreciate it. As it annoyed Professor Whalen excessively, she went afield for new phrases “for the fun of seeing him wriggle.” On the other hand, whenever she felt in the mood, she gazed at him with penitent languid eyes, promised never to use slang again, and amused herself racking other nerves. She knew just how far to go and “turned him off,” or “switched him back on to the track” before any real harm was done. Some day she might let him make a scene just for the fun of the thing, but not until she was “good and ready.” Her feeling for Ora was more difficult to define. Sometimes she almost loved her, not only inspired by gratitude, but because Ora’s personal magnetism was intensified by every charm of refinement, vivacity, mental development, as well as by a broad outlook on life and a sweetness of manner which never infuriated her by becoming consciously gracious. At other times she hated her, for she knew that no such combination ever could be hers. Ora was a patrician born of patricians. She might go to the devil, preside over one of the resorts down on The Flat, take to drink and every evil way, and still would she be patrician. Herself might step into millions and carry her unsullied virtue to her grave and she never would be the “real thing.” For the first time she understood that being “a lady” had little to do with morals or behaviour. Nothing irritates the complacent American more than the sudden appreciation of this fact. “But I guess I’ll be as good as some others,” Ida consoled herself. “After all, I don’t see so many Ora Blakes lying round loose. People don’t bother much these days if your clothes make their mouth water and your grammar don’t queer you.” Gregory, when he had time to think about it--he read even at the breakfast and dinner-table, and had an assay plant in the cellar--was charmed with her improvement, and told her abruptly one day that if she kept faithfully to her tasks until November he would give her the thousand dollars he had received under the will of his aunt. “And you can do what you like with it,” he added. “I shan’t ask you. That’s the way I enjoyed money when I was a kid, and I guess women are much the same.” “A thousand dollars!” Ida was rigid, her mouth open. “Geewhil--I beg pardon--My! But you are good!” She paused to rearrange her thoughts, which were in danger of flying off into language her husband was paying to remodel. “Can I really do anything with it I like?” “You can.” He smiled at her bright wide-open eyes and flaming cheeks.