Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

“ He had admired her always more than any woman he had met in the West, and had come to her blindly to be consoled. Suddenly he saw an indefinable change steal over her face, although her mouth remained curled with the stereotyped smile she kept for the Whalens. It was as if something deep in her brilliant eyes came to life, and her slight bust rose under the stiff shirtwaist. Whalen’s ears were not acute and he did not hear the light footstep that preceded a peremptory knock. Ora crossed the room swiftly and opened the door. Whalen was no fool, and he had written fiction for four years. ”

“ Amalgamated knew when it was beaten and would take its medicine with a grimace and watch for its next opportunity.
Ida, although she disliked the sensation of being underground, the chill of the tunnels and the drip of candle-grease on her smart linen skirt, had been deeply impressed by the scene in the excavation on the Perch vein: the men with their keen upturned faces, their peering eyes so close to the moving candles, the little yellow flames travelling along the beautiful yellow metal, the eager nervous hands of the newspaper men, the intense blackness beyond the radius of the candles. ”

“ If I had a mine like yours, full of the beautiful copper ores instead of that hideous pyroxenite of mine, I should leave a glittering layer in every stope, support the roof with polished stone columns, light with hidden electric bulbs, and wander from one to the other imagining myself in Aladdin’s palace.”
“A fine practical miner you would make. It’s lucky that your mine is pyroxenite, not quartz. That is if you want to live in Europe.—Do you?”
“Of course. What have I in this part of the world? A mine cannot satisfy a woman for ever. I suppose you wouldn’t care if you never saw a woman again!” ”

“ It had not been possible for Ora to see the flash of understanding these two had exchanged after Valdobia’s first puzzled glance, but she did see many heads turn to look at the handsome and well-matched couple. Even the Italian women did not smile ironically as they so often did at the too obvious American tourist. Ida not only had delivered herself of every exterior trace of commonness, but would no more have appeared on the street looking the mere tourist than she could be betrayed into adopting the extreme of any new style by the persuasive Parisian. ”

“ But she had wondered sometimes if life held any happiness as real as that had been, and she wondered again as she switched off her light and flung herself into the bed that had witnessed so much despair before Valdobia had appeared and put a quietus on her imagination. She wondered also if the passion of the soul were so much greater than the common experience of man and woman that its indulgence must forever make life itself unreal. ”

“ Nor did she wish to let a man so absorbed as Gregory feel that he was loved too much, lest he chafe at the thought of feminine exactions, and his mind continue to dwell upon the delights of freedom. He might be capable of moments when the woman alone existed, but there would be long intervals when he would hate a woman’s clinging arms if they made him ten minutes late for his work, particularly if he was headed for his beloved mine. Ida, shrewd, self-controlled, watchful, knew herself, now that her powers were developed, to be the natural mate for such a man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I have heard it estimated that twenty-five thousand American women go abroad every year to indulge in a fleeting liaison that gives them courage to endure the desperately material and commonplace life of this country for another year. You don’t understand that because you never have been in Europe. But Egypt—Italy—in Southern Europe anywhere—with its unbridled beauties of nature and its far more poetic beauties that centuries of art have given it—and a thousand years of love behind us—Oh, cannot you imagine how wonderful love would be? ”

“ Valdobia and Mowbray had put them up at this exclusive resort during the afternoon and they entered the roulette rooms at once. Here the walls were chastely hung with pale grey satin, and all the colour was in the company. The long tables were crowded with smart-looking men and women of both worlds, although only the ladies that had stepped down from ancestral halls dared to show a grey hair or a wrinkle. The cocottes were so young and fresh as well as beautiful that to Ora and Ida they looked much like girls of their own class. ”

“ Her fingers fluttered as they always did when handling ore; she had wondered before if the prospector’s fever were in her blood. How she should have enjoyed watching the rock come up in the buckets as the shaft sank foot by foot, until they struck the vein; always expecting chambers of incredible richness, gold, copper, silver. She would even learn to do the pleasant part of her own assaying; and she suddenly experienced an intense secretive jealous love for this mine that was hers and in which might be hidden shining blocks of those mysterious primary deposits deep in the sulphide zone ”

“ The busiest men in America had their women; she no longer could comfort herself with the delusion that the mine was a controlling and exclusive passion; she merely had ceased completely to attract him—and she remembered how thorough he was; she no more could relight those old fires than she could blow life into the dead ashes of Big Butte. He would turn to another woman one of these days; it was not within human possibility that he would go through life without love ”

“ After she parted from Valdobia, puzzled and wistful, she recalled one week during which she had been completely happy. Ida was visiting friends uncongenial to herself, and she had gone alone to Bruges. In that ancient city of almost perfect beauty, she had given the wildness in her nature uninterrupted liberty. She had written letters that no woman yet has sent to a man without regretting it, for in this stage of man’s progress, at least, he wants little of the soul of woman. ”

“ Ora was recalling this conversation as she sat in her bedroom on the following evening. Her elemental yet uncannily sophisticated friend had a way of crashing chords out of jealously hidden nerves, which no exercise of will could disconnect from the logical parts of the brain. If it were true that what her now rampant ego, too long starved, really demanded was man and romance, she wished she had let herself run to seed until it was too late to reclaim her lost beauty and adventure into temptation. ”

“ The city is scooped out of its south slope, and overflows upon The Flat. Big Butte, an equally abrupt protuberance, but higher, steeper, more symmetrical, stands close beside the treasure vault, but with the aloof and somewhat cynical air of even the apocryphal volcano. On all sides the sterile valley heaves away as if abruptly arrested in a throe of the monstrous convulsion that begat it; but pressing close, cutting the thin brilliant air with its icy peaks, is an irregular and nearly circular chain of mountains, unbroken white in winter, white on the blue enamelled slopes in summer. ”