Perch of the Devil #233031

He had seemed to the girls of the only class he knew in Butte an even more romantic figure than the heroes of their magazine fiction, particularly as he took no notice of them until he met Ida Hook at a picnic and surrendered his heart. Ida, forced by her thrifty mother to accept employment with a fashionable dressmaker, and consumed with envy of the West Siders whose measurements she took, did not hesitate longer than feminine prudence dictated. Be fore she gave her hair its nightly brushing her bold un pedantic hand had covered several sheets of pink note-paper with the legend, Mrs. Gregory Compton, the while she assured herself there was no sweller name on West Broadway. To do her justice, she also thrilled with young passion, for more than her vanity had responded to the sombre determined attentions of the man who had been the indifferent hero of so many maiden dreams. Al though she longed to be a Copper Queen, she was too young to be altogether hard; and, now that her hour' was come, every soft enchantment of her sex awoke to bind and blind her mate.