ngue which
made plain even to her unsuspecting nature that they put no high value
on her virtue--in fact, one fellow went so far as to facetiously ask,
"Where did Mart find you? Are there any more out there?" And she felt
the insult, though she did not know how to resent it.

Haney, so astute in many things, saw nothing out of the way in this
off-hand treatment of his wife. He would have killed the man who dared
to touch her, and yet he stood smilingly by while some chance
acquaintance treated her as if she had been picked out of a Denver
gutter. This threw Bertha upon her own defence, and at last she made
even impudence humble itself. She carried herself like a young warrior,
sure of her power and quick of defence.

She refused to invite her husband's friends to lunch, and the first real
argument she had thus far held with him came about in this way. She
said, "Yes, you can ask Mr. Black or Mr. Brown to dinner, but I won't
set at the same table with them."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because they're not the kind of men I want to eat with," she bluntly
replied. "They're just a little too coarse for me."

"They're good business men and have fine homes--"

"Do they invite you to their homes?"

"They do not," he admitted, "but they may--after our dinner."

"Lucius says it's their business to lead out--and he knows. I don't mind
your lunching these dubs every day if you want to, but I keep clear of
'em. I tell you those!"

And so it fell out that while she was going about with the Mosses and
their kind, Mart was explaining to Black and Brown that his wife "was a
little shy." "You see she grew up in the hills like a doe antelope, and
it's hard for her to get wonted to the noise of a great city," he
laboriously set forth, but at heart he did not blame her. He was coming
to find them a little "coarse" himself.

Humiston was deeply enthralled by Bertha's odd speech, her beauty, her
calm use of money, and lingered on day by day, spending nearly all his
time at Moss's studio or at the hotel, seeking Mrs. Haney's company. He
had never met her like, and confessed as much to Moss, who jocularly
retorted: "That's saying a good deal--for you've seen quite a few."

Humiston ignored this thrust. "She has beauty, imagination, and immense
possibilities. She don't know herself. When she wakes up to her power,
then look out! She can't go on long with this old, worn-out gambler."

"Oh, Haney isn't such a beast as you make him out.