The Honourable Dave’s head was like a cannon-ball painted white.  Across the top of it (a blemish that would undoubtedly have spoiled the tune) was a long scar,—­a relic of one of the gentleman’s many personal difficulties.  He who made the sear, Honora reflected, must have been a strong man.  The Honourable Dave, indeed, had fought his way upward through life to the Congress of the United States; and many were the harrowing tales of frontier life he told Honora in the long winter evenings when the blizzards came down the river valley.  They would fill a book; unfortunately, not this book.  The growing responsibilities of taking care of the lonely ladies that came in increasing numbers to Salomon City from the effeter portions of the continent had at length compelled him to give up his congressional career.  The Honourable Dave was unmarried; and, he told Honora, not likely to become so.  He was thus at once human and invulnerable, a high priest dedicated to freedom.

It is needless to say that the plush rocking-chair and the picture of the liqueur-bottle lady did not jar on his sensibilities.  Like an eminent physician who has never himself experienced neurosis, the Honourable Dave firmly believed that he understood the trouble from which his client was suffering.  He had seen many cases of it in ladies from the Atlantic coast:  the first had surprised him, no doubt.  Salomon City, though it contained the great Boon, was not esthetic.  Being a keen student of human nature, he rightly supposed that she would not care to join the colony, but he thought it his duty to mention that there was a colony.

Honora repeated the word.

“Out there,” he said, waving his cigar to the westward, “some of the ladies have ranches.”  Some of the gentlemen, too, he added, for it appeared that exiles were not confined to one sex.  “It’s social—­a little too social, I guess,” declared Mr. Beckwith, “for you.”  A delicate compliment of differentiation that Honora accepted gravely.  “They’ve got a casino, and they burn a good deal of electricity first and last.  They don’t bother Salomon City much.  Once in a while, in the winter, they come in a bunch to the theatre.  Soon as I looked at you I knew you wouldn’t want to go there.”

Her exclamation was sufficiently eloquent.

“I’ve got just the thing for you,” he said.  “It looks a little as if I was reaching out into the sanitarium business.  Are you acquainted by any chance with Mrs. Boutwell, who married a fellow named Waterford?” he asked, taking momentarily out of his mouth the cigar he was smoking by permission.

Honora confessed, with no great enthusiasm, that she knew the present Mrs. Waterford.  Not the least of her tribulations had been to listen to a partial recapitulation, by the Honourable Dave, of the ladies he had assisted to a transfer of husbands.  What, indeed, had these ladies to do with her?  She felt that the very mention of them tended to soil the pure garments of her martyrdom.