She indicated a man leaning against one of the doorways, and looking over the crowd with unseeing eyes. “Heavens! What a jaw! Is he as ‘strong’ as he looks, or is he one of Bismarck’s wooden posts painted to look like a man of iron?--Why, it’s----” “That is Gregory Compton, and he is no wooden post, believe me.” “I haven’t seen him for years. _Can_ any man be as strong as _he_ looks?” “Probably not. He hasn’t had time to discover his master weaknesses yet, so I don’t pretend to guess at them myself. At present he is too absorbed in squeezing our poor brains dry----” “Doesn’t he ever smile?” “So rarely that the boys, who have a nickname for all their fellow students, call him ‘Sunny Jim.’” “What do you think of his wife?” asked Ora abruptly. She hardly knew why she asked the question, nor why she felt a secret glow at the expected answer. The Professor turned his appraising eye upon the substantial vision in coral and black that tonight had been pronounced the handsomest woman in Butte. “There could be no finer example of the obvious. All her goods are in the front window. There are no surprises behind that superlative beauty; certainly no revelations.” “I wonder! Ida is far cleverer than you think, and quite capable of affording your sex a good deal in the way of surprises, not to say shocks.” “Not in the way I mean--not as you will do, worse luck for my helpless sex. There is no soul there, and, I fancy, little heart. She is the last woman Gregory Compton should have married.” “Why?” Ora tried to look bored but polite. “Oh--whatever she may have for other men she has nothing for him. She looks the concentrated essence of female--American female--egoism. Compton needs a woman who would give him companionship when he wanted it, and, at the same time, be willing in service.” Ora bristled. “Service? How like a man. Are we still expected to serve men? I thought the world was moving on.” Professor Becke, who, like most men married to a domestic commander-in-chief, was strenuously opposed to giving women any powers backed up by law, asked with cold reserve: “Are you a suffragette?” Ora laughed. “Not yet. But I just escaped being born in the Twentieth Century. I belong to it at all events.” “So you do, but you never have been in love----” He broke off in embarrassment; he had forgotten for the moment that this white virginal creature had been married for six years. She showed no resentment, for she barely had heard him; she was looking at Gregory Compton again, and concluding that he might appeal strongly to the supplementary female, but must antagonise women whose highly specialised intellects, at home only on the heights of civilisation, had submerged their primal inheritance. Professor Becke went on: “Even a clever woman’s best career is a man. If you women develop beyond nature that powerful old tyrant will simply snuff you out.” “Well, man will go too. That may be our final triumph.”