Page:Leon Wilson - Ruggles of Red Gap.djvu/172

158 what to put on her head. For the most part, the ladies I had met were well enough gotten up yet looked curiously all wrong, lacking a genius for harmony of detail.

This person, I repeat, displayed a taste that was faultless, a knowledge of the peculiar needs of her face and figure that was unimpeachable. Rather with regret it was I found her to be a Mrs. Kenner, the leader of the Bohemian set. And then came the further items that marked her as one that could not be taken up. Perhaps a summary of these may be conveyed when I say that she had long been known as Klondike Kate. She had some years before, it seemed, been a dancing person in the far Alaska north and had there married the proprietor of one of the resorts in which she disported herself—a man who had accumulated a very sizable fortune in his public house and who was shot to death by one of his patrons who had alleged unfairness in a game of chance. The widow had then purchased a townhouse in Red Gap and had quickly gathered about her what was known as the Bohemian set, the county families, of course, refusing to know her.

After that first brief study of her I could more easily account for the undercurrents of bitterness I had felt in Red Gap society. She would be, I saw, a dangerous woman in any situation where she was opposed; there was that about her—a sort of daring disregard of the established social order. I was not surprised to learn that the men of the community strongly favoured her, especially the younger dancing set who were not restrained by domestic considerations. Small wonder then that the women of the "old noblesse," as I may call them, were outspokenly bitter in their comments upon her. This I discovered