“Ora, I don’t want to pry into your confidence, and you’re not one to give much of that anyhow, but everybody in Butte knows that you’re not in love with Mark, and never were, nice as you treat him--only because you couldn’t be anything but a lady if you tried. Mrs. O’Neil, one day when she was having a massage, told Ruby all about your marriage. She said you were the most bewildered young thing she ever saw, and that Mark snapped you up before another young man could get a look at you. Now, I’ve known Mark all my life--he beaued my sister who died, for a year or two, and his mother’s cottage was just up the hill anyhow; and although he’s a good chap and a born hustler, and bound to get rich, he’s not the sort of man women fall in love with. You wouldn’t have fallen in love with him, if he’d been born a millionaire, and travelled and got Butte out of his system. And if your father had left you well off, you wouldn’t have looked at him. There’s men, bad and good--that’s to say, better--that women fall in love with, and there’s men bad and good that they don’t, not in a thousand years. Poor old Mark’s a Don’t all right. You ain’t angry at my saying all this, but Mark was like my own brother for years?” “Oh, no, I am not angry. You are far too matter-of-fact. You might be discussing different grades of ore!” “Well, that’s about it, and the poor ore can’t help itself, any more than the slag and gangue can, and Mark’s not either of those, you bet. He’s good metal, all right, only he didn’t come out of the Anaconda mine--What have you turned so red about? My! But you do blush easy!” “It’s this--do you despise me--do you think I did wrong--Oh, I mean I have quite suddenly realised that I never should have married any man for so contemptible a reason. I should have gone to work----” “Work? You?” “Why not? Many a delicately nurtured woman has earned her bread.” “The more fool she if she could get a man to earn it for her. That’s what they’re for. The Lord knows they pride themselves on the way they do it, being the stronger sex, and a lot more words. I guess I’d have married before Greg turned up if I’d met a man I was sure was going to make something of himself. You did just right to take a good husband and take him quick when you found yourself in a hole.” “Yes--but----” Her blush deepened. “You see--” Ora never had had an intimate confidant. It was doubtful if she ever would have; not, at all events, a woman. But Ida, as she herself would have expressed it, could always see through a stone wall when there was a crack in it. “Oh, shucks!” she said. “Don’t let that worry you. If you don’t feel that way first you do last, I guess. Most of us are bored to death, but women have stood it for a few thousand years, and I guess they can stand it for a few thousand more. We all of us have to pay high for anything we want. That’s about the size of it. Forget it.”