Perch of the Devil by Gertrude Atherton — Read

The next week was the busiest she had ever known. All the people that had called on her called again on Ora. Her cook collapsed when told to prepare a dinner for twenty-eight people, and Ida, who would not hearken to a public caterer and his too familiar idiosyncrasies, telegraphed to St. Paul for a chef. What moments she had to spare after consultations with this autocrat, with a temperamental designer of menu cards, and with two high-handed young women whom she had been persuaded by the charitable Mrs. Cameron to engage to decorate her rooms, were spent with certain works on copper and mining that she had procured from the public library.

She looked forward to the evening of her dinner party with a secret excitement that seemed to fork its lightning into every recess of her brain, and electrify it with a sense of the fulness of life -- that hinted intoxicatingly of life's perfections. Not only was she to live the wildest dream of Ida Hook, but she had made up her mind to bring the most important man in Montana to her feet on that triumphant night. That the man was her husband, won the first time without an effort, lost through her own indifference and ignorance, added tenfold to the zest of the game. She knew the impression he must retain of her: crude, obvious in her sex allurement, cheaply dressed, a sort of respectable mining-camp siren; all her fascinations second-rate, and her best points in the eyes of an absent-minded husband her good-natured mothering and admirable cooking.