"You see," continued Bessie Falkner, drawing up her pretty feet into the piazza cot, "it was just love at first sight. I was up there at the hotel in the mountains, trying to make up my mind whether I could marry another man, who was awfully rich—owned a mine and a ranch; but he was so dull the horses would go to sleep when we were out driving … And then just as I concluded it was the only thing for me to do, to take him and make the best of him—then Rob rode up to the hotel in his old tattered suit—he was building a dam or something up in the mountains—and I knew I couldn't marry Mr. Mine-and-Ranch. That was all there was to it, my dear. The rest of the story? Why, of course he made the hotel his headquarters while he was at work on the dam; I stayed on, too, and it came along—naturally, you know."
Mrs. Falkner dipped into a box of candy and swung the cot gently to and fro. The men were still talking inside the house and the two wives had come outside for long confidences. Isabelle, amused by this sketch of the Colorado courtship, patted the blond woman's little hand. Mrs. Falkner had large blue eyes, with waving tendrils of hair, which gave her face the look of childish unsophistication;—especially at this moment when her voluptuous lips were closing over a specially desired piece of candy.
"Of course it would come along—with you!"
"I didn't do a thing—just waited," Bessie protested, fishing about the almost empty box for another delectable bit. "He did it all. He was in such a hurry he wanted to marry me then and there at the hotel and go live up in the mountains in a cabin above the dam where he was at work. He's romantic. Men are all like that then, don't you think? But of course it couldn't be that way; so we got married properly in the fall in Denver, and then came straight here. And," with a long sigh, "we've been here ever since. Stuck!"
"I should think you would have preferred the cabin above the dam," Isabelle suggested, recalling her own romantic notion of Dog Mountain. Mrs. Falkner made a little grimace.
"That might do for two or three months. But snowed in all the winter, even with the man you like best in all the world? He'd kill you or escape through the drifts … You see we hadn't a thing, not a cent, except his salary and that ended with the dam. It was only eighty a month anyway. This is better, a hundred and fifty," she explained with childish frankness. "But Rob has to work harder and likes the mountains, is always talking of going back. But I say there are better things than hiding yourself at the land's end. There's St. Louis, or maybe New York!"
Isabelle wondered how the Falkners were able to support such a hospitable house—they had two small children and Bessie had confided that another was coming in the spring—on the engineer's salary.
"And the other one," Mrs. Falkner added in revery, "is more than a millionnaire now."
Her face was full of speculation over what might have been as the wife of all that money.
"But we are happy, Rob and I—except for the bills! Don't you hate bills?"
Isabelle's only answer was a hearty laugh. She found this pretty, frank little "Westerner" very attractive.
"It was bills that made my mother unhappy—broke her heart. Sometimes we had money—most generally not. Such horrid fusses when there wasn't any. But what is one to do? You've got to go on living somehow. Rob says we can't afford this house—Rob is always afraid we won't get through. But we do somehow. I tell him that the good time is coming—we must just anticipate it, draw a little on the future."
At this point the men came through the window to the piazza. Bessie shook her box of candy coquettishly at Lane, who took the chair beside her. Evidently he thought her amusing, as most men did. Falkner leaned against the white pillar and stared up at the heavens. Isabelle, accustomed to men of more conventional social qualities, had found the young engineer glum and odd. He had a stern, rather handsome face, a deep furrow dividing his forehead and meeting the part of his thick brown hair, which curled slightly at the ends. "If he didn't look so cross, he would be quite handsome," thought Isabelle, wondering how long it might be before her host would speak to her. She could see him as he rode up to the hotel piazza that day, when Bessie Falkner had made up her mind on the moment that she could not marry "the other man." Finally Falkner broke his glum silence.
"Do you eat candy, Mrs. Lane? Pounds of it, I mean—so that it is your staple article of diet."
"Tut, tut," remarked his wife from her cot. "Don't complain."
His next remark was equally abrupt.
"There's only one good thing in this Torso hole," he observed with more animation than he had shown all the evening, "and that's the coke-ovens at night—have you noticed them? They are like the fiery pits, smouldering, ready for the damned!"
It was not what she expected from a civil engineer, in Torso, Indiana, and she was at a loss for a reply.
"You'd rather have stayed in Colorado?" she asked frankly.
He turned his face to her and said earnestly, "Did you ever sleep out on a mountain with the stars close above you?—'the vast tellurian galleons' voyaging through space?"
Isabelle suspected that he was quoting poetry, which also seemed odd in
Torso.
"Yes—my brother and I used to camp out at our home in Connecticut. But I don't suppose you would call our Berkshire Hills mountains."
"No," he replied dryly, "I shouldn't."
And their conversation ended. Isabella wished that the Darnells had not been obliged to go home immediately after supper. The young lawyer knew how to talk to women, and had made himself very agreeable, telling stories of his youth spent among the mountains with a primitive people. She had observed that he drank a good deal of whiskey, and there was something in his black eyes that made her uncomfortable. But he was a man that women liked to think about: he touched their imaginations. She did not talk about him to John on their way home, however, but discussed the Falkners.
"Don't you think she is perfectly charming?" (Charming was the word she had found for Bessie Falkner.) "So natural and amusing! She's very Western—she can't have seen much of life—but she isn't a bit ordinary."
"Yes, I like her," Lane replied unenthusiastically, "and he seems original. I shouldn't wonder if he were clever in his profession; he told me a lot about Freke's mines."
What he had learned about the Pleasant Valley mines was the chief thing in the evening to Lane. He did not understand why Isabelle seemed so much more eager to know these people—these Darnells and Falkners—than the Frasers and the Adamses. She had made fun of the solemn dinner that the Frasers had given to introduce them into Torso "society."
"I wonder how they can live on that salary," Isabelle remarked. "One hundred and fifty a month!"
"He must make something outside."
* * * * *
After the Lanes had gone, Bessie Falkner prepared yawningly for bed, leaving her husband to shut up the house. Her weekly excitement of entertaining people over, she always felt let down, like a poet after the stir of creation. It was useless to go over the affair with Rob, as he was merely bored. But she spent hours thinking what the women said and how they looked and deciding whom she could have the next time. On her way to bed she went into the nursery where her two little girls were asleep in their cots beside the nurse, and finding a window open woke the nurse to reprove her for her carelessness. In the hall she met her husband bringing up the silver.
"Emma is so thoughtless," she complained. "I shall have to let her go if I can find another servant in this town."
Her husband listened negligently. The Falkners were perpetually changing their two servants, or were getting on without them.
"Mrs. Lane's maids all wear caps," Mrs. Falkner had observed frequently to her husband.
Bessie had strict ideas of how a house should be run, ideas