“Back they come to New York and young Angus went to the swellest college Ellabelle could learn about, and they had a town house and a country house and Ellabelle prepared to dazzle New York society, having met frayed ends of it in her years abroad.  But she couldn’t seem to put it over.  Lots of male and female society foreigners that she’d met would come and put up with her and linger on in the most friendly manner, but Ellabelle never fools herself so very much.  She knew she wasn’t making the least dent in New York itself.  She got uncomfortable there.  I bet she had that feeling you get when you’re riding your horse over soft ground and all at once he begins to bog down.

“Anyway, they come West after a year or so, where Angus had more drag and Ellabelle could feel more important.  Not back to Wallace, of course.  Ellabelle had forgotten the name of that town, and also they come over a road that misses the thriving little town of North Platte by several hundred miles.  And pretty soon they got into this darned swell little suburb out from San Francisco, through knowing one of the old families that had lived there man and boy for upward of four years.  It’s a town where I believe they won’t let you get off the train unless you got a visitor’s card and a valet.

“Here at last Ellabelle felt she might come into her own, for parties seemed to recognize her true worth at once.  Some of them indeed she could buffalo right on the spot, for she hadn’t lived in Europe and such places all them years for nothing.  So, camping in a miserable rented shack that never cost a penny over seventy thousand dollars, with only thirty-eight rooms and no proper space for the servants, they set to work building their present marble palace—­there’s inside and outside pictures of it in a magazine somewhere round here—­bigger than the state insane asylum and very tasty and expensive, with hand-painted ceilings and pergolas and cafes and hot and cold water and everything.

“It was then I first see Ellabelle after all the years, and I want to tell you she was impressive.  She looked like the descendant of a long line of ancestry or something and she spoke as good as any reciter you ever heard in a hall.  Last time I had seen her she was still forgetting about the r’s—­she’d say:  ‘Oh, there-urr you ah!’ thus showing she was at least half Iowa in breed—­but nothing like that now.  She could give the English cards and spades and beat them at their own game.  Her face looked a little bit overmassaged and she was having trouble keeping her hips down, and wore a patent chin-squeezer nights, and her hair couldn’t be trusted to itself long at a time; but she knew how to dress and she’d learned decency in the use of the diamond except when it was really proper to break out all over with ’em.  You’d look at her twice in any show ring.  Ain’t women the wonders!  Gazing at Ellabelle when she had everything on, you’d never dream that she’d come up from the vilest dregs only a few years before—­helping cook for the harvest hands in Iowa, feeding Union Pacific passengers at twenty-two a month, or splitting her own kindling at Wallace, Idaho, and dreaming about a new silk dress for next year, or mebbe the year after if things went well.