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Title: We Can't Have Everything

Author: Rupert Hughes

Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7077]
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[This file was first posted on March 6, 2003]

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WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING




BOOKS BY RUPERT HUGHES

We Can't Have Everything

In A Little Town

The Thirteenth Commandment

Clipped Wings

What Will People Say?

The Last Rose Of Summer

Empty Pockets




[Illustration: WAR, THE SUNDERER, HAD REACHED THEM WITH HIS GREAT DIVORCE]




WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING

A NOVEL BY RUPERT HUGHES

AUTHOR OF _What Will People Say?_

ILLUSTRATED BY JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG




CONTENTS

THE FIRST BOOK
MISS KEDZIE THROPP COMES TO TOWN

THE SECOND BOOK
MRS. TOMMIE GILFOYLE HAS HER PICTURE TAKEN

THE THIRD BOOK
MRS. JIM DYCKMAN IS NOT SATISFIED

THE FOURTH BOOK
THE MARCHIONESS HAS QUALMS




THE FIRST BOOK

MISS KEDZIE THROPP COMES TO TOWN




CHAPTER I

Kedzie Thropp had never seen Fifth Avenue or a yacht or a butler
or a glass of champagne or an ocean or a person of social prominence.
She wanted to see them.

For each five minutes of the day and night, one girl comes to New
York to make her life; or so the compilers of statistics claim.

This was Kedzie Thropp's five minutes.

She did not know it, and the two highly important, because extremely
wealthy, beings in the same Pullman car never suspected her--never
imagined that the tangle they were already in would be further
knotted, then snipped, then snarled up again, by this little
mediocrity.

We never can know these things, but go blindly groping through
the crowd of fellow-gropers, guessing at our presents and getting
our pasts all wrong. What could we know of our futures?

Jim Dyckman, infamously rich (through no fault of his own), could not
see far enough past Charity Coe Cheever that day to make out Kedzie
Thropp, a few seats removed. Charity Coe--most of Mrs. Cheever's
friends still called her by her maiden name--sat with her back turned
to Kedzie; and latterly Charity Coe was not looking over her shoulder
much. She did not see Kedzie at all.

And Kedzie herself, shabby and commonplace, was so ignorant that
if she looked at either Jim or Charity Coe she gave them no heed,
for she had never even heard of them or seen their pictures,
so frequent in the papers.

They were among the whom-not-to-know-argues-one-self-unknowns.
But there were countless other facts that argued Kedzie Thropp
unknown and unknowing. As she was forever saying, she had never
had anything or been anywhere or seen anybody worth having, being,
or seeing.

But Jim Dyckman, everybody said, had always had everything, been
everywhere, known everybody who was anybody. As for Charity Coe,
she had given away more than most people ever have. And she, too,
had traveled and met.

Yet Kedzie Thropp was destined (if there is such a thing as being
destined--at any rate, it fell to her lot) to turn the lives of those
two bigwigs topsy-turvy, and to get her picture into more papers
than both of them put together. A large part of latter-day existence
has consisted of the fear or the favor of getting pictures in the
papers.

It was Kedzie's unusual distinction to win into the headlines at
her first entrance into New York, and for the quaintest of reasons.
She had somebody's else picture published for her that time; but
later she had her very own published by the thousand until the
little commoner, born in the most neglected corner of oblivion,
grew impudent enough to weary of her fame and prate of the comforts
of obscurity!

Kedzie Thropp was as plebeian as a ripe peach swung in the sun across
an old fence, almost and not quite within the grasp of any passer-by.
She also inspired appetite, but always somehow escaped plucking
and possession. It is doubtful whether anybody ever really tasted
her soul--if she had one. Her flavor was that very inaccessibility.
She was always just a little beyond. Her heart was forever fixed
on the next thing, just quitting the last thing. Eternal, delicious,
harrowing discontent was Kedzie's whole spirit.

Charity Coe's habit was self-denial; Kedzie's self-fostering,
all-demanding. She was what Napoleon would have been if the Little
Corporal had been a pretty girl with a passion for delicacies
instead of powers.

Thanks to Kedzie, two of the best people that could be were plunged
into miseries that their wealth only aggravated.

Thanks to Kedzie, Jim Dyckman, one of the richest men going and one
of the decentest fellows alive, learned what it means to lie in
shabby domicile and to salt dirty bread with tears; to be afraid
to face the public that had fawned on him, and to understand the
portion of the criminal and the pariah.

And sweet Charity Coe, who had no selfishness in any motive, who
ought to have been canonized as a saint in her smart Parisian robes
of martyrdom, found the clergy slamming their doors in her face
and bawling her name from their pulpits; she was, as it were, lynched
by the Church, thanks again to Kedzie.

But one ought not to hate Kedzie. It was not her fault (was it?)
that she was cooked up out of sugar and spice and everything nice
into a little candy allegory of selfishness with one pink hand
over her little heartless heart-place and one pink hand always
outstretched for more.

Kedzie of the sugar lip and the honey eye! She was going to be carried
through New York from the sub-sub-cellar of its poverty to its highest
tower of wealth. She would sleep one night alone under a public bench
in a park, and another night, with all sorts of nights between, she
would sleep in a bed where a duchess had lain, and in arms Americanly
royal.

So much can the grand jumble of causes and effects that we call fate
do with a wanderer through life.

During the same five minutes which were Kedzie's other girls were
making for New York; some of them to succeed apparently, some of them
to fail undeniably, some of them to become fine, clean wives; some
of them to flare, then blacken against the sky because of famous
scandals and fascinating crimes in which they were to be involved.

Their motives were as various as their fates, and only one thing
is safe to say--that their motives and their fates had little to do
with one another. Few of the girls, if any, got what they came for
and strove for; and if they got it, it was not just what they thought
it was going to be.

This is Kedzie's history, and the history of the problem confronting
Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe Cheever: the problem that Kedzie was going
to seem to solve--as one solves any problem humanly, which is by
substituting one or more new problems in place of the old.

This girl Kedzie who had never had anything had one thing--a fetching
pout. Perhaps she had the pout because she had never had anything.
An Elizabethan poet would have said of her upper lip that a bee
in search of honey had stung it in anger at finding it not the rose
it seemed, but something fairer.

She had eyes full of appeal--appeal for something--what? Who knows?
She didn't. Her eyes said, "Have mercy on me; be kind to me."
The shoddy beaux in her home town said that Kedzie's eyes said,
"Kiss me quick!" They had obeyed her eyes, and yet the look of appeal
was not quenched. She came to New York with no plan to stay. But she
did stay, and she left her footprints in many lives, most deeply
in the life of Jim Dyckman.




CHAPTER II

Miss Kedzie Thropp had never seen Fifth Avenue or a yacht or a butler
or a glass of champagne or an ocean or a person of social prominence.
She wanted to see them. To Jim Dyckman these things were commonplace.
What he wanted was simple, complex, cheap, priceless things--love,
home, repose, contentment.

He was on the top of the world, and he wanted to get down or have
somebody else come up to him. Peaks are by definition and necessity
limited to small foothold. Climbing up is hardly more dangerous
than climbing down. Even to bend and lift some one else up alongside
involves a risk of falling or of being pushed overboard.

But at present Jim Dyckman was thinking of the other girl, Charity
Coe Cheever, perched on a peak as cold and high as his own, but far
removed from his reach.

Even the double seat in the sleeping-car was too small for Jim. He
sprawled from back to back, slumped and hunched in curves and angles
that should have looked peasant and yet somehow had the opposite
effect.

His shoes were thick-soled but unquestionably expensive, his clothes
of loose, rough stuff manifestly fashionable. Like them, he had a
kind of burly grace. He had been used to a well-upholstered life.

He was one of those giants that often grow in rich men's homes. His
father was such another, and his mother suggested the Statue of
Liberty in corsets and on high heels.

Dyckman was reading a weekly journal devoted to horses and dogs,
and reading with such interest that he hardly knew when the train
stopped.

He did not see the woman who got out of a motor and got into the
train, and whose small baggage the porter put in the empty place
opposite his. He did not see that she leaned into the aisle and
regarded him with a pathetic amusement in her caressing eyes. She
took her time about making herself known; then she uttered only
a discreet:

"Ahem!"

She put into the cough many subtle implications. Hardly more could
be crowded into a shrug.

Dyckman came out of his kennels and paddocks, blinked, stared, gaped.
Then he began to stand up by first stepping down. He bestrode the
narrow aisle like a Colossus.

He caught her two hands, brought them together, placed them in one
of his, and covered them with the other as in a big muff, and bent
close to pour into her eyes such ardor that for a moment she closed
hers against the flame.

Then, as if in that silent greeting their souls had made a too loud
and startling noise of welcome, both of them looked about with
an effect of surreptition and alarm.

There were not many people in the car, and they were absorbed in
their own books, gossips, or naps. Only a few head-tops showing
above the high-backed seats, and no eyes or ears.

"Do you know anybody on the train?" the woman asked.

The man shook his head and sank into the seat opposite her, still
clinging to her hands. She extricated them:

"But everybody knows you."

He dismissed this with a sniff of reproof. Then they settled down
in the small trench and seemed to take a childish delight in the
peril of their rencounter.

"Lord, but it's good to see you!" he sighed, luxuriously. "And
you're stunninger than ever!"

"I'm a sight!" she said.

She was clad even more plainly than he, and had the same spirit
of neglectful elegance. She was big, too, for a woman; somewhat lank
but well muscled, and decisive in her motions as if she normally
abounded in strength. What grace she had was an athlete's, but she
looked overtrained or undernourished. Seeing that she did not look
well, Dyckman said:

"How well you're looking, Charity."

She did not look like Charity, either; but her name had been given
to her before she was born. There had nearly always been a girl
called Charity in the Coe family. They had brought the name with
them from New England when they settled in Westchester County some
two hundred years before. They had kept little of their Puritanism
except a few of the names.

This sportswoman called Charity had been trying to live up to her
name, of late. That was why she was haggard. She smiled at her
friend's unmerited praise.

"Thanks, Jim. I need a compliment like the devil."

"Where've you been since you got back?"

"Up in the camp, trying to get a little rest and exercise. But it's
too lonesome nights. I rest better when I keep on the jump."

"You're in black; that doesn't mean--?"

She shook her head. A light of eagerness in his eyes was quenched,
and he growled:

"Too bad!" He could afford to say it, since the object of his obloquy
was alive. If the person mentioned had not been alive, the phrase
he used would have been the same more gently intoned.

Charity protested: "Shame on you! I know you mean it for flattery,
but you mustn't, you really mustn't. I'm in black for--for Europe."
She laughed pitifully at the conceit.

He answered, with admiring awe: "I've heard about you. You're a
wonder; that's what you are, Charity Coe, a wonder. Here's a big
hulk like me loafing around trying to kill time, and a little tike
like you over there in France spending a fortune of money and more
strength than even you've got in a slaughter-house of a war hospital.
How did you stand it?"

"It wasn't much fun," she sighed, "but the nurses can't feel sorry
for themselves when they see--what they see."

"I can imagine," he said.

But he could not have imagined her as she daily had been. She and
the other princesses of blood royal or bourgeois had been moiling
among the red human debris of war, the living garbage of battle,
as the wagons and trains emptied it into the receiving stations.

She and they had stood till they slept standing. They had done
harder, filthier jobs than the women who worked in machine-shops and
in furrows, while the male-kind fought. She had gone about bedabbled
in blood, her hair drenched with it. Her delicate hands had performed
tasks that would have been obscene if they had not been sublime
in a realm of suffering where nothing was obscene except the cause
of it all.

She sickened at it more in retrospect than in action, and tried
to shake it from her mind by a change of subject.

"And what have you been up to, Jim?"

"Ah, nothing but the same old useless loafing. Been up in the North
Woods for some hunting and fishing," he snarled. His voice always
grew contemptuous when he spoke of himself, but idolatrous when
he spoke of her--as now when he asked: "I heard you had gone back
abroad. But you're not going, are you?"

"Yes, as soon as I get my nerves a little steadier."

"I won't let you go back!" He checked himself. He had no right to
dictate to her. He amended to: "You mustn't. It's dangerous crossing,
with all those submarines and floating mines. You've done your bit
and more."

"But there's so horribly much to do."

"You've done enough. How many children have you got now?"

"About a hundred."

"Holy mother!" he whispered, with a profane piety. "Can even you
afford as big a family as that?"

"Well, I've had to call for some help."

"Let me chip in? Will you?"

"Sure I will. Go as far as you like."

"All right; it's a bet. Name the sum, and I'll mail it to you."

"You'd better not mail me anything, Jim" she said.

He blenched and mumbled: "Oh, all right! I'll write you a check now."

"Later," she said. "I don't like to talk much about such things,
please."

"Promise me you won't go back."

She simply waived the theme: "Let's talk of something pleasant,
if you don't mind."

"Something pleasant, eh? Then I can't ask about--him, I suppose."

"Of course. Why not?"

"How is the hound?--begging the pardon of all honest hounds."

She was too sure of her own feelings toward her husband to feel it
necessary to rush to his defense--against a former rival. Her answer
was, "He's well enough to raise a handsome row if he saw you and me
together."

He grumbled a full double-barreled oath and did not apologize for it.
She spoke coldly:

"You'd better go back to your seat."

She was as severe as a woman can well be with a man who adores her
and writhes with jealousy of a man she adores.

"I'll be good, Teacher," he said. "Was he over there with you?"

She evidently liked to talk about her husband. She brightened as
she spoke. "Yes, for a while. He drove a motor-ambulance, you know,
but it bored him after a month or two. They wouldn't let him up to
the firing-lines, so he quit. Have you seen him?"

"Once or twice."

"He's looking well, isn't he?"

"Yes, confound him! His handsome features have been my ruin."

She could smile at that inverted compliment. But Dyckman began
to think very hard. He was suddenly confronted with one of
the conundrums in duty which life incessantly propounds--life that
squats at all the crossroads with a sphinxic riddle for every
wayfarer.




CHAPTER III

Kedzie--to say it again--did not know enough about New York or
the world to recognize Mrs. Cheever and Mr. Dyckman when she glanced
at them and glanced away. They did not at all come up to Kedzie's
idea or ideal of what swells should be, and she had not even grown
up enough to study the society news that makes such thrilling reading
to those who thrill to that sort of thing. The society notes in
the town paper in Kedzie's town (Nimrim, Missouri) consisted of
bombastic chronicles of church sociables or lists of those present
at surprise-parties.

This girl's home was one of the cheapest in that cheap town. Her
people not only were poor, but lived more poorly than they had to.
They had, in consequence, a little reserve of funds, which they
took pride in keeping up. The three Thropps came now to New York
for the first time in their three lives. They were almost as ignorant
as the other peasant immigrants that steam in from the sea.

Adna Thropp, the father, was a local claim-agent on a small railroad.
He spent his life pitting his wits against the petty greed of honest
farmers and God-fearing, railroad-hating citizens. If a granger let
his fence fall down and a rickety cow disputed the right of way with
a locomotive's cow-catcher, the granger naturally put in a claim for
the destruction of a prize-winning animal with a record as an amazing
milker; also he added something for damage to the feelings of the
family in the loss of a household pet. It was Adna's business to beat
the shyster lawyers to the granger and beat the granger to the last
penny. One of his best baits was a roll of cash tantalizingly waved
in front of his victim while he breathed proverbs about the delayful
courts.

This being Adna's livelihood, it was not surprising that his habit
of mind gave pennies a grave importance. Of course, he carried his
mind home with him from the office, and every demand of his wife
or children for money was again a test of ability in claim-agency
tactics. He fought so earnestly for every cent he gave down that his
dependents felt that it was generally better to go without things
than to enter into a life-and-death struggle for them with Pa.

For that reason Ma Thropp did the cooking, baked the "light bread,"
and made the clothes and washed them and mended them till they
vanished. She cut the boys' hair; she schooled the girls to help her
in the kitchen and at the sewing-machine and with the preserve-jars.
Her day's work ended when she could no longer see her darning-needle.
It began as soon as she could see daylight to light the fire by. In
winter the day began in her dark, cold kitchen long before the sun
started his fire on the eastern hills.

She upheld a standard of morals as high as Mount Everest and as bleak.
She made home a region of everlasting chores, rebukes, sayings wiser
than tender, complaints and bitter criticisms of husband, children,
merchants, neighbors, weather, prices, fabrics--of everything on
earth but of nothing in heaven.

Strange to say, the children did not appreciate the advantages
of their life. The boys had begun to earn their own money early by
the splitting of wood and the shoveling of snow, by the vending of
soap, and the conduct of delivery-wagons. They spent their evenings
at pool-tables or on corners. The elder girls had accepted positions
in the various emporia of the village as soon as they could. They
counted the long hours of the shop life as an escape from worse.
Their free evenings were not devoted to self-improvement. They
did not turn out to be really very good girls. They were up to all
sorts of village mischief and shabby frivolity. Their poor mother
could not account for it. She could scold them well, but she could
not scold them good.

The daughter on the train, the youngest--named Kedzie after an aunt
who was the least poor of the relatives--was just growing up into
a similar career. Her highest prayer was that her path might lead
her to a clerkship in a candy-shop. Then this miracle! Her father
announced that he was going to New York.

Adna was always traveling on the railroad, but he had never traveled
far. To undertake New York was hardly less remarkable than to run
over to the moon for a few days.

When he brought the news home he could hardly get up the front steps
with it. When he announced it at the table, and tried to be careless,
his hand trembled till the saucerful of coffee at his quivering lips
splashed over on the clean red-plaid table-cloth.

The occasion of Thropp's call to New York was this: he had joined
a "benevolent order" of the Knights of Something-or-other in his
early years and had risen high in the chapter in his home town.
When one of the members died, the others attended his funeral in
full regalia, consisting of each individual's Sunday clothes,
enhanced with a fringed sash and lappets. Also there was a sword
to carry. The advantage of belonging to the order was that the
member got the funeral for nothing and his wife got the further
consolation of a sum of money.

Mrs. Thropp bore her neighbors no more ill-will than they deserved,
but she did enjoy their funerals. They gave her husband an excuse
for his venerable silk hat and his gilded glave. Sometimes as she
took her hands out of the dough and dried them on her apron to fasten
his sash about him, she felt all the glory of a medieval countess
buckling the armor on her doughty earl. She had never heard of such
persons, but she knew their epic uplift.

Now, Mr. Thropp had paid his dues and his insurance premiums
for years and years. They were his one extravagance. Also he had
persuaded Mrs. Thropp's brother Sol to do the same. Sol had died
recently and left his insurance money to Mrs. Thropp. Sol's own wife,
after cherishing long-deferred hopes of spending that money herself,
had been hauled away first. She never got that insurance money.
Neither did any one else; the central office in New York failed
to pay up.

The annual convention was about to be held in the metropolis, and
there was to be a tremendous investigation of the insurance scandal.
Adna was elected the delegate of the Nimrim chapter, for he was known
to be a demon in a money-fight.

And this was the glittering news that Adna brought home. Small wonder
it spilled his coffee. And that wife of his not only had to go and
yell at him about a little coffee-stain, but she had to announce that
she hardly saw how she could get ready to go right away--and who was
to look after those children?

Adna's jaw fell. Perhaps he had ventured on dreams of being set free
in New York all by himself. She soon woke him. She said she wouldn't
no more allow him loose in that wicked place than she would--well,
she didn't know what! He could get a pass for self and wife as easy
as shootin'. Adna yielded to the inevitable with a sorry grace and
told her to come along if she'd a mind to.

And then came a still, small voice from daughter Kedzie. She spoke
with a menacing sweetness: "Goody, goody! Besides seeing New York,
I won't have to go to school for--How long we goin' to be gone,
poppa?"

Both parents stared at her aghast and told her to hush her mouth.
It was a very pretty mouth even in anger, and Kedzie declined to
hush it. She said:

"Well, if you two think you're goin' to leave me home, you got
another think comin'--that's all I got to say."

She betrayed an appalling stubbornness, a fiendish determination
to subdue her parents or talk them to death.

"I never get to go any place," she wailed. "I never been anywhere or
seen anything or had anything; I might as well be a bump on a log.
And now you're goin' to New York. I'd sooner go there than to heaven.
It's my first chance to see a city, and I just tell you right here
and now, I'm not goin' to lose it! You take me or you'll be mighty
sorry. I'll--I'll--"

"You'll what?" her father sneered. What, after all, could a young
girl do?

"I'll run off, that's what I'll do! And disgrace you! I'll run away
and you'll never see me again. If you're mean enough to not take me,
I'm mean enough to do something desprut. You'll see!"

Her father realized that there were several things a young girl
could do to punish her parents. Kedzie frightened hers with her
fanatic zeal. They gave in at last from sheer terror. Immediately
she became almost intolerably rapturous. She shrieked and jumped;
and she kissed and hugged every member of the household, including
the dogs and the cats. She must go down-town and torment her girl
friends with her superiority and she could hardly live through
the hours that intervened before the train started.

The Thropps rode all day in the day-coach to Chicago, and Kedzie
loved every cinder that flew into her gorgeous eyes. Now and then
she slept curled up kittenwise on a seat, and the motion of the train
lulled her as with angelic pinions. She dreamed impossible glories
in unheard-of cities.

But her mother bulked large and had been too long accustomed to
her own rocking-chair to rest in a day-coach. She reached Chicago
in a state of collapse. She told Adna that she would have to travel
the rest of the way in a sleeper or in a baggage-car, for she just
naturally had to lay down. So Adna paid for two berths. It weakened
him like a hemorrhage.

Kedzie's first sorrow was in leaving Chicago. They changed trains
there, bouncing across the town in a bus. That transit colored
Kedzie's soul like dragging a ribbon through a vat of dye. Henceforth
she was of a city hue.

She was enamoured of every cobblestone, and she loved every man,
woman, horse, and motor she passed. She tried to flirt with
the tall buildings. She was afraid to leave Chicago lest she never
get to New York, or find it inferior. She begged to be left there.
It was plenty good enough for her.

But once aboard the sleeping-car she was blissful again, and
embarrassed her mother and father with her adoration. In all
sincerity, Kedzie mechanically worshiped people who got things
for her, and loathed people who forbade things or took them away.

She horrified the porter by calling him "Mister"--almost as much
as her parents scandalized him the next day by eating their meals
out of a filing-cabinet of shoe-boxes compiled by Mrs. Thropp. But
it was all picnic to Kedzie. Fortunately for her repose, she never
knew that there was a dining-car attached.

The ordeal of a night in a sleeping-car coffin was to Kedzie an
experience of faery. She laughed aloud when she bumped her head,
and getting out of and into her clothes was a fascinating exercise
in contortion. She was entranced by the wash-room with its hot and
cold water and its basin of apparent silver, whose contents did not
have to be lifted and splashed into a slop-jar, but magically
emptied themselves at the raising of a medallion.

She had not worn herself out with enthusiasm by the time the first
night was spent and half the next day. She pressed her nose against
the window and ached with regret at the hurry with which towns and
cities were whipped away from her eyes.

She did not care for grass and trees and cows and dull villages,
but she thrilled at the beauty of big, dark railroad stations
and noble street-cars and avenues paved with exquisite asphalt.

The train was late in arriving at New York, and it was nearer ten
than eight when it roared across the Harlem River. Kedzie was glad of
the display, for she saw the town first as one great light-spangled
banner.

The car seemed to be drawn right through people's rooms. Everybody
lived up-stairs. She caught glimpses of kitchens on the fourth floor
and she thought this adorable, except that it would be a job carrying
the wood all the way up.

The streets went by like the glistening spokes of a swift wheel.
They were packed with interesting sights. No wonder most of the
inhabitants were either in the streets or leaning out of the windows
looking down. Here it was ten o'clock, and not a sign of anybody's
having thought of going to bed. New York was a sensible place.
She liked New York.

But the train seemed to quicken its pace out of mere spitefulness
just as they reached wonderful market streets with flaring lights
over little carts all filled with things to buy.

When the wonder world was blotted from view by the tunnel it
frightened her at first with its long, dark noise and the flip-flops
of light. Then a brief glimpse of towers and walls. Then the dark
station. And they were There!




CHAPTER IV

Jim Dyckman had always loved Charity Coe, but he let another man
marry her--a handsomer, livelier, more entertaining man with whom
Dyckman was afraid to compete. A mingling of laziness and of modesty
disarmed him.

As soon as he saw how tempestuously Peter Cheever began his courtship,
Dyckman withdrew from Miss Coe's entourage. When she asked him why,
he said, frankly:

"Pete Cheever's got me beat. I know when I'm licked."

Pete's courtship was what the politicians call a whirlwind campaign.
Charity was Mrs. Cheever before she knew it. Her friends continued
to call her Charity Coe, but she was very much married.

Cheever was a man of shifting ardors. His soul was filled with
automatic fire-extinguishers. He flared up quickly, but when his
temperature reached a certain degree, sprinklers of cold water
opened in his ceiling and doused the blaze, leaving him unharmed
and hardly scorched. It had been so with his loves.

After a brief and blissful honeymoon, Peter Cheever's capricious
soul kindled at the thought of an exploration of war-filled Europe.
His blushing bride was a hurdle-rider, too, and loved a risk-neck
venture. She insisted on going with him.

He accepted the steering-wheel of a motor-ambulance and left his
bride to her own devices while he shot along the poplar-plumed roads
of France at lightning speed.

Charity drifted into hospital service. Her first soldier, the
tortured victim of a gas-attack, was bewailing the fate of his
motherless child. Charity brought a smile to what lips he had by
whispering:

"I am rich. I will adopt your little girl."

It was the first time she had ever boasted of being rich. The man
died, whispering: "_Merci, Madame! Merci, Madame!_" Another
father was writhing in the premature hell of leaving a shy little
unprotected boy to starve. Charity promised to care for him, too.

At a committee meeting, a week later, she learned of a horde of
war orphans and divided them up with Muriel Schuyler, Mrs. Perry
Merithew, and other American angels abroad.

When Charity's husband wearied of being what he called "chauffeur to
a butcher-wagon," he decided that America was a pretty good country,
after all. But Charity could not tear herself away from her privilege
of suffering, even to follow her bridegroom home. He had cooled to
her also, and he made no protest. He promised to come back for her.
He did not come. He cabled often and devotedly, telling her how
lonely he was and how busy. She answered that she hoped he was
lonely, but she knew he was busy. He would be!

When Cheever first returned, Jim Dyckman saw him at a club. He saw
him afterward in a restaurant with one of those astonishing animals
which the moving pictures have hardly caricatured as a "vampire."
This one would have been impossible if she had not been visible.
She was intensely visible.

Jim Dyckman felt that her mere presence in a public restaurant was
offensive. To think of her as displacing Charity Coe in Cheever's
attentions was maddening. He understood for the first time why
people of a sort write anonymous letters. He could not stoop to
that degradation, and yet he wondered if, after all, it would be
as degrading to play the informer as to be an unprotesting and
therefore accessory spectator and confidant.

Gossip began to deal in the name of Cheever. One day at a club
the he-old-maid "Prissy" Atterbury cackled:

"I saw Pete Cheever at a cabaret--"

Jim asked, anxiously, "Was he alone?"

"Nearly."

"What do you mean--nearly alone?"

"Well, what he had with him is my idea of next to nothing. I wonder
what sinking ship Cheever rescued her from. They tell me she was
a cabaret dancer named Zada L'Etoile--that's French for Sadie Starr,
I suppose."

Dyckman's obsession escaped him.

"Somebody ought to write his wife about it."

"That would be nice!" cried Prissy. "Oh, very, very nice! It would be
better to notify the Board of Health. But it would be still better if
his wife would come home and mind her own business. These Americans
who hang about the edges of the war, fishing for sensations, make me
very tired--oh, very, very tired."

Prissy never knew how near he was to annihilation. Jim had to hold
one fist with the other. He was afraid to yield to his impulse to
smash Prissy in the droop of his mustache. Prissy was too frail to
be slugged. That was his chief protection in his gossip-mongering
career.

Besides, it is a questionable courtesy for a former beau to defend
another man's wife's name, and Dyckman proved his devotion to Charity
best by leaving her slanderer unrebuked.

It was no anonymous better that brought Charity Coe home. It was
the breakdown of her powers of resistance. Even the soldiers had to
be granted vacations from the trenches; and so an eminent American
surgeon in charge of the hospital she adorned finally drove Mrs.
Cheever back to America. He disguised his solicitude with brutality;
he told her he did not want her to die on their hands.

When Charity came back, Cheever met her and celebrated her return.
She was a new sensation to him again for a week or two, but her need
of seclusion and quiet drove him frantic and he grew busy once more.
He recalled Miss L'Etoile from the hardships of dancing for her
supper. Unlike Charity, Zada never failed to be exciting. Cheever
was never sure what she would do or say or throw next. She was
delicious.

When Dyckman learned of Cheever's extra establishment it enraged him.
He had let Cheever push him aside and carry off Charity Coe, and now
he must watch Cheever push Charity Coe aside and carry on the next
choice of his whims.

To Dyckman, Charity was perfection. To lose her and find her in
the ash-barrel with Cheever's other discarded dolls was intolerable.
Yet what could Dyckman do about it? He dared not even meet Charity.
He hated her husband, and he knew that her husband hated him. Cheever
somehow realized the dogged fidelity of Dyckman's love for Charity
and resented it--feared it as a menace, perhaps.

Dyckman had two or three narrow escapes from running into Charity,
and he finally took to his heels. He lingered in the Canadian wilds
till he thought it safe to return. And now she chanced to board the
same train. The problem he had run away from had cornered him.

He had cherished a sneaking hope that she would learn the truth
somehow before he met her. He was not sure what she ought to do
when she learned it. He was sure that what she would do would be
the one right thing.

Yet he realized from her placid manner of parrying his threats at
her husband that she still loved the wretch and trusted him. It was
up to Jim to tell her what he knew about Cheever. He felt that he
ought to. Yet how could he?

It was hideous that she should sit there smiling tolerantly at
a critic of her infernal husband as serenely as a priestess who
is patient with an unenlightened skeptic.

It was atrocious that Cheever should be permitted to prosper with
this scandal unrebuked, unpunished, actually unsnubbed, accepting
the worship of an angel like Charity Coe and repaying it with black
treachery! To keep silent was to co-operate in the evil--to pander
to it. Dyckman thought it was hideous. The word he thought was
"rotten"!

He actually opened his mouth to break the news. His voice mutinied.
He could not say a word.

Something throttled him. It was that strange instinct which makes
criminals of every degree feel that no crime is so low but that
tattling on it is a degree lower.

Dyckman tried to assuage his self-contempt by the excuse that Charity
was not in the mood or in the place where such a disclosure should
be made. Some day he would tell her and then ask permission to kill
the blackguard for her.

The train had scuttered across many a mile while he meditated the
answer to the latest riddle. His thoughts were so turbulent that
Charity finally intruded.

"What's on your mind, Jim?"

"Oh, I was just thinking."

"What about?"

"Oh, things."

Suddenly he reached out and seized the hand that drooped at her knee
like a wilted lily. He wrung her fingers with a vigor that hurt her,
then he said, "Got any dogs to show this season?"

She laughed at the violent abruptness of this, and said, "I think
I'll give an orphan-show instead."

He shook his head in despairing admiration and leaned back to watch
the landscape at the window. So did she. On the windows their own
reflections were cast in transparent films of light. Each wraith
watched the other, seeming to read the mood and need no speech.

Dyckman's mind kept shuttling over and over the same rails of
thought, like a switch-engine eternally shunting cars from one track
to another. His very temples throbbed with the _clickety-click_
of the train. At last he groaned:

"This world's too much for me. It's got me guessing."

He seemed to be so impressed with his original and profound discovery
of life's unanswerable complexity that Charity smiled, the same sad,
sweet smile with which she pored on the book of sorrow or listened to
the questions of her orphans who asked where their fathers had gone.

She thought of Jim Dyckman as one of her orphans. There was a good
deal of the mother in her love of him. For she did love him. And she
would have married him if he had asked her earlier--before Peter
Cheever swept over her horizon and carried her away with his zest
and his magnificence.

She rebuked herself for thinking of Jim Dyckman as an orphan. He had
a father and mother who doted on him. He had wealth of his own and
millions to come. He had health and brawn enough for two. What right
had he to anybody's pity? Yet she pitied him.

And he pitied her.

And on this same train, in this same car, unnoticed and unnoticing,
sat Kedzie.

Jim and Charity grew increasingly embarrassed as the train drew into
New York. Charity was uncertain whether her husband would meet her
or not. Jim did not want to leave her to get home alone. She did not
want her husband to find her with Jim.

Cheever had excuse enough in his own life for suspecting other
people. He had always disliked Jim Dyckman because Dyckman had
always disliked him, and Jim's transparent face had announced the
fact with all the clarity of an illuminated signboard.

Also Charity had loved Jim before she met Cheever, and she made no
secret of being fond of him still. In their occasional quarrels,
Cheever had taunted her with wishing she had married Jim, and she
had retorted that she had indeed made a big mistake in her choice.
Lovers say such things--for lack of other weapons in such combats
as lovers inevitably wage, if only for exercise.

Charity did not really mean what she said, but at times Cheever
thought she did. He had warned her to keep away from Dyckman and
keep Dyckman away from her or there would be trouble. Cheever was
a powerful athlete and a boxer who made minor professionals look
ridiculous. Dyckman was bigger, but not so clever. A battle between
the two stags over the forlorn doe would be a horrible spectacle.
Charity was not the sort of woman that longs for such a conflict
of suitors. Just now she had seen too much of the fruits of male
combat. She was sick of hatred and its devastation.

So Charity begged Dyckman to get off at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth
Street, but he would not show himself so poltroon. He answered, "I'd
like to see myself!" meaning that he would not.

She retorted, "Then I'll get off there myself."

"Then I'll get off there with you," he grumbled.

Charity flounced back into her seat with a gasp of mitigated disgust.
The mitigation was the irresistible thrill of his devotion. She had
a husband who would desert her and a cavalier who would not. It was
difficult not to forgive the cavalier a little.

Yet it would have been better if he had obeyed her command or she
her impulse. Or would it have been? The worst might always have been
worse.




CHAPTER V

When Kedzie was angry she called her father an "old country Jake."
Even she did not know how rural he was or how he had oppressed
the sophisticated travelers in the smoking-room of the sleeping-car
with his cocksure criticisms of cities that he had never seen. He
had condemned New York with all the mercilessness of a small-town
superiority, and he had told funny stories that were as funny as
the moss-bearded cypresses in a lone bayou. While he was denouncing
New York as the home of ignorance and vice, the other men were having
sport with him--sport so cruel that only his own cruelty blinded
him to it.

When the porter summoned the passengers to pass under the whisk broom,
Adna remembered that he had not settled upon his headquarters in
New York, and he said to a man on whom he had inflicted a vile cigar:
"Say, I forgot to ask you. What's a good hotel in New York that ain't
too far from the railroad and don't rob you of your last nickel?
Or is they one?"

One of the smoking-room humorists mocked his accent and ventured
a crude jape.

"You can save the price of a hack-ride by going to Mrs. Biltmore's
new boarding-house. It's right across the road from the depot."

If Adna had been as keen as he thought he was, or if the porter
had not alarmed him just then by his affectionate interest, even
Adna would have noted the grins on the faces of the men.

But he broke the porter's heart by dodging the whisk broom and
hustling his excited family to their feet. They were permitted to
hale their own hand-baggage to the platform, where two red-capped
Kaffirs reached for it together. There was danger of an altercation,
but the bigger of the two frightened the smaller away by snapping
his shiny eyeballs alarmingly. The smaller one took a second look
at Adna and retreated with scorn, snickering:

"You kin have him."

The other, who was a good loser at craps or tips, re-examined his
clients, flickered his eyelids, and started down the platform to
have it over with as soon as possible. He paused to say:

"Where you-all want to go to--a taxicab?"

Adna, who was a little nervous about his property, answered with
some asperity:

"No, we don't need any hack to git to Biltmore's."

"Nossah!" said the red-cap.

"Right across the street, ain't it?"

"Yassah!" The porter chuckled. The mention of the family's destination
had cheered him a little. He might get a tip, after all. You couldn't
always sometimes tell by a man's clothes how he tipped.

While Kedzie stood watching the red-cap bestow the various parcels
under his arms and along his fingers, a man bumped into her and
murmured:

"Sorry!"

She turned and said, "Huh?"

He did not look around. She did not see his face. It was the first
conversation between Jim Dyckman and Kedzie Thropp.

Charity Coe, when the train stopped, had flatly refused to walk up
the station platform with Jim Dyckman. She had not only virtue, but
St. Paul's idea of the importance of avoiding even the appearance
of evil. She would not budge from the car till Jim had gone. He
was forced to leave her at last.

He swung through the crowd in a fury, jostling and begging pardon
and staring over the heads of the pack to see if Cheever were at
the barrier. He jolted Kedzie Thropp among others, apologized,
and thought no more of her.

Cheever had not come to meet his wife. Her telegram was waiting
for him at his official home; he was at his other residence.

When Dyckman saw that no one was there to welcome the fagged-out
Charity, he paused and waited for her himself. When Charity
came along her anxious eyes found nobody she knew except Dyckman.
The disappointment she revealed hurt him profoundly. But he would
not be shaken off again. He turned in at her side and walked along,
and the two porters with their luggage walked side by side.

Prissy Atterbury was hurrying to a train that would take him for a
week-end visitation to people who hated him but needed him to cancel
a female bore with. As Prissy saw it and described it, Dyckman came
into the big waiting-room alone, looked about everywhere, paused,
turned back for Charity Coe; then walked away with her, followed by
their twinned porters. Prissy said "Aha!" behind his big mustaches
and stared till he nearly lost his train.

Atterbury had gained a new topic to carry with him, a topic of such
fertile resources that it went far to pay his board and lodging.
He made a snowball out of the clean reputations of Charity and Jim
and started it downhill, gathering dirt and momentum as it rolled.
It was bound to roll before long into the ken of Peter Cheever,
and he was not the man to tolerate any levity in a wife. Cheever
might be as wicked as Caesar, but his wife must be as Caesar's.

When Charity Coe was garrulous and inordinately gay, Jim Dyckman,
who had known her from childhood, knew that she was trying to rush
across the thin ice over some deep grief.

When he saw how hurt she was at not being met, and he insisted on
taking her home, she chattered and snickered hysterically at his
most stupid remarks. So he said:

"Don't let him break your heart in you, old girl."

She laughed uproariously, almost vulgarly, over that, and answered:
"Me? Let a man break my heart? That's very likely, isn't it?"

"Very!" Jim groaned.

When they reached her magnificent home it had a deserted look.

"Wait here a minute," said Charity when Jim got out to help her out.
She ran up the steps and rang the bell. There was a delay before
the second man in an improvised toilet opened the door to her and
expressed as much surprise as delight at seeing her. "Didn't Mr.
Cheever tell you I was coming home?" she gasped.

"We haven't seen him, ma'am. There's a telegram here for him, but
of course--"

Charity was still in a frantic mood. She wanted to escape brooding,
at all costs. She ran back to where Jim waited at the motor door.

"Got any date to-night, Jim?" she demanded. He shook his head
dolefully, and she said: "Go home, jump into your dancing-shoes,
and come back for me. I'll throw on something light and you can
take me somewhere to dance. I'll go crazy mad, insane, if you
don't. I can't endure this empty house. You don't mind my making
a convenience of you, do you, Jim?"

"I love it, Charity Coe," he groaned. He reached for her hand, but
she was fleeting up the steps. He crept into the car and went to
his home, flung off his traveling-togs, passed through a hot tub
and a cold shower into evening clothes, and hastened away.

Charity kept him waiting hardly a moment. She floated down the stairs
in a something fleetily volatile, and he said:

"You look like a dandelion puff."

"That's right, tell me some nice things," she said. She did not tell
the servant where she was going. She did not know. She hardly cared.




CHAPTER VI

To Kedzie Thropp the waiting-room of the Grand Central Terminal was
the terminus of human splendor. It was the waiting-room to heaven.
And indeed it is a majestic chamber.

The girl walked with her face high, staring at the loftily columned
recesses with the bay-trees set between the huge square pillars,
and above all the feigned blue sky and the monsters of the zodiac
in powdered gold.

Kedzie could hardly breathe--it was so beautiful, so much superior
to the plain every-night sky she was used to, with stars of tin
instead of gold like these.

Even her mother said "Well!" and Adna paid the architects the tribute
of an exclamation: "Humph! So this is the new station we was readin'
about. Some bigger'n ours at home, eh, Kedzie?"

But Kedzie was not there. They had lost her and had to turn back. She
was in a trance. When they snatched her down to earth again and pulled
her through the crowds she began to adore the people. They were
dressed in unbelievable splendor--millions, she guessed, in far better
than the best Sunday best she had ever seen. She wondered if she would
ever have nice clothes. She vowed that she would if she had to murder
somebody to get them.

The porter led the way from the vastitude of a corridor under
the street and through vast empty rooms and up a stairway and down
a few steps and through the first squirrel-cage door Kedzie had ever
seen (she had to run round it thrice before they could get her out)
into a sumptuousness beyond her dream.

At the foot of more stairs the porter let down his burdens, and a boy
in a general's uniform seized them. The porter said, mopping his brow
to emphasize his achievement:

"This is fur's I go."

"Oh, all right! Much obliged," said Adna. He just pretended to walk
away as a joke on the porter. When he saw the man's white stare
aggravated sufficiently, Adna smiled and handed him a dime.

The porter stared and turned away in bitter grief. Then his chuckle
returned as he went his way, telling himself: "And the bes' of it
was, I fit for him! I just had to git that man."

He told the little porter about it, and when the little porter, who
had been scared away from the Thropps and left to carry Charity Coe's
dainty hand-bags, showed the big porter what he had received, still
the big porter laughed. He knew how to live, that big porter.

Kedzie followed the little general up the steps and around to
the desk. Her father realized that his fellow-passenger had been
teasing him when he referred to this place as a boarding-house, but
he was not at all crushed by the magnificence he was encountering.
He felt that he was in for it--so he cocked his toothpick pluckily
and wrote on the loose-leaf register the room clerk handed him:

A. Thropp, wife and daughter, Nimrim, Mo.

The room clerk read the name as if it were that of a potentate whose
incognito he would respect, and murmured:

"About what accommodation would you want, Mr. Thropp?"

"Two rooms--one for the wife and m'self, one for the daughter."

"Yes, sir. And about how much would you want to pay?"

"How do they run?"

"We can give you two nice adjoining rooms for twelve dollars--up."

Mr. Thropp made a hasty calculation. Twelve dollars a week for board
and lodging was not so bad. He nodded.

The room clerk marked down a number and slid a key to the page,
who gathered the family treasures together. Kedzie had more or less
helplessly recognized the page's admiration of her when he first
took the things from the porter. The sense of her beauty had choked
the boy's amusement at her parents.

Later Kedzie caught the glance of the room clerk and saw that she
startled him and cheated him of his smile at Adna. Still later
the elevator-boy gave her one respectful look of approval. Kedzie's
New York stir was already beginning.

The page ushered the Thropps into the elevator, and said,
"Nineteen."

It was the number of the floor, not the room. Adna warned his women
folk that "she" was about to go up, but they were not prepared for
that swift vertical leap toward the clouds. Another floor, and
Mrs. Thropp would have screamed. The altitude affected her.

Then the thing stopped, and the boy led them down a corridor so long
that Adna said, "Looks like we'd be stranded a hundred miles from
nowheres."

The boy turned in at a door at last. He flashed on the lights, set
the bags on a bag-rack, hung up the coats, opened a window, adjusted
the shade, lighted the lights in Kedzie's room, opened her window,
adjusted the shade, and asked if there were anything else.

Adna knew what the little villain meant, but he knew what was
expected, and he said, sternly, "Ice-water."

"Right here, sir," said the boy, and indicated in the bathroom
a special faucet marked "Drinking Water."

This startled even Adna so much that it shook a dime out of him.
The boy sighed and went away. Kedzie surprised his eye as he left.
It plainly found no fault with her.

Here in seclusion Mrs. Thropp dared to exclaim at the wonders of
modern invention. Kedzie was enfranchised and began to jump and
squeal at the almost suffocating majesty. Adna took to himself
the credit for everything.

"Well, momma, here we are in New York at last. Here we are, daughter.
You got your wish."

Kedzie nearly broke his neck with her hug, and called him the best
father that ever was. And she meant it at the moment, for the moment.

Mrs. Thropp was already making herself at home, loosening her
waistband and her corset-laces.

Adna made himself at home, too--that is, he took off his coat and
collar and shoes. But Kedzie could not waste her time on comfort
while there was so much ecstasy to be had.

She went to the window, shoved the sash high, and--discovered
New York. She greeted it with an outcry of wonder. She called to
her mother and father to "Come here and looky!"

Her mother moaned, "I wouldn't come that far to look at
New Jerusalem."

Adna yawned noisily and pulled out his watch. His very eyes yawned
at it, and he said: "'Levum o'clock. Good Lord! Git to bed quick!"

Kedzie was furious at ending the day so abruptly. She wanted to
go out for a walk, and they sent her to her room. She watched at
the window as she peeled off her coarse garments and put her soft
body into a rough nightgown as ill-cut and shapeless as she was
neither. She had been turned by a master's lathe.

She waited till she heard her father's well-known snore seesawing
through the panels. Then she went to the window again to gaze her
fill at the town. She fell in love with it and told it so. She vowed
that she would never leave it. She had not come to a strange city;
she had just reached home.

She leaned far out across the ledge to look down at the tremendously
inferior street. She nearly pitched head foremost and scrambled back,
but with a giggle of bliss at the excitement. She stared at the dark
buildings of various heights before her. There was something
awe-inspiring about them.

Across a space of roofs was the electric sign of an electric company,
partly hidden by buildings. All Kedzie could see of it was the huge
phrase LIGHT--HEAT--POWER. She thought that those three graces would
make an excellent motto.

She could see across and down into the well of the Grand Central
Terminal. On its front was some enormous winged figure facing down
the street. She did not know who it was or what street it was. She
did not know any of the streets by name, but she wanted to. She had
a passionate longing for streets.

Farther south or north, east or west, or whichever way it was,
was a tall building with glowing bulbs looped like the strings
of evergreen she had helped to drape the home church with at
Christmas-time. Here it was Christmas every day--all holidays
in one.

Down in the ravine a little in front of her she could read the sign
ATHENS HOTEL. She had heard of Athens. It was the capital of some
place in her geography. She who had so much of Grecian in her soul
was not quite sure of Athens!

In one of the opposite office buildings people were working late.
The curtains were drawn, but the casements were filled with light,
a honey-colored light. The buildings were like great honeycombs;
the dark windows were like the cells that had no honey in them.
Light and life were honey. Kedzie wondered what folks they were behind
those curtains--who they were, and what were they up to. She bet
it was something interesting. She wished she knew them. She wished
she knew a whole lot of city people. But she didn't know a soul.

It was all too glorious to believe. She was in New York! imparadised
in New York!

"Kedzie! Ked-zee-ee!"

"Yes, momma."

"Are you in bed?"

"Yes, momma." She tried to give her voice a faraway, sleepy sound,
for fear that her mother might open the door to be sure.

She crept into bed. The lights burned her weary eyes. She could not
reach them to put them out.

By the head of her bed was a little toy lamp. A chain hung from it.
She tugged at the chain--pouff! Out went the light. She tugged at
the chain. On went the light. A magical chain, that! It put the light
on and off, both. Kedzie could find no chains to pull the ceiling
lights out with. She let them burn.

Kedzie covered her head and yet could not sleep. She sat up quickly.
Was that music she heard? Somebody was giving a party, maybe.

She got up and out again and ran barefoot to the hall door, opened
it an inch, and peeked through. She saw a man and two ladies swishing
along the hall to the elevator. They were not sleepy at all, and
the ladies were dressed--whew! skirts short and no sleeves whatever.
They really were going to a party.

Kedzie closed the door and drooped back to bed--an awful place to go
when all the rest of the world was just starting out to parties.

She flopped and gasped in her bed like a fish ashore. Then a gorgeous
whim came to her. She would dive into her element. Light and fun were
her element. She came out of bed like a watch-spring leaping from
a case. She tiptoed to the parental door--heard nothing but the rumor
of slumber.

She began to dress. She put on her extra-good dress.

She had brought it along in the big valise in case of an accident
to the every-day dress. When she had squirmed through the ordeal
of hooking it up, she realized that its skirts were too long for
decency. She pinned them up at the hem.

The gown had a village low-neck--that is, it was a trifle V'd at
the throat. Kedzie tried to copy the corsage of the women who passed
in the hall. She withdrew from the sleeves, and gathering the waist
together under her arms, fastened it as best she could. The revelation
was terrifying. All of her chest and shoulders and shoulderblades
were bare.

She dared hardly look at herself. Yet she could not possibly deny
the fearful charm of those contours. She put her clothes on again
and prinked as much as she could. Then she sallied forth, opening
and closing the door with pious care. She went to the elevator, and
the car began to drop. The elevator-boy politely lowered it without
plunge or jolt.

Kedzie followed the sound of the music. The lobbies were thronged
with brilliant crowds flocking from theaters for supper and a dance.
Kedzie made her way to the edge of the supper-room. The floor, like
a pool surrounded by chairs and tables, was alive with couples dancing
contentedly. Every woman was in evening dress and so was every man.
The splendor of the costumes made her blink. The shabbiness of her
own made her blush.

She blushed because her own dress was indecent and immoral. It was
indecent and immoral because it was unlike that of the majority.
In this parish, conventionality, which is the one true synonym for
morality, called for bare shoulders and arms unsleeved. Kedzie was
conspicuous, which is a perfect synonym for immoral. If she had
fallen through the ceiling out of a bathtub she could not have felt
more in need of a hiding-place. She shrank into a corner and sought
cover and concealment, for she was afraid to go back to the elevator
through the ceaseless inflow of the decolletees.

She throbbed to the music of the big band; her feet burned to dance;
her waist ached for the sash of a manly arm. She knew that she could
dance better than some of those stodgy old men and block-bodied old
women. But she had no clothes on--for dancing.

But there was one woman whom Kedzie felt she could not surpass,
a dazzling woman with a recklessly graceful young man. The young man
took the woman from a table almost over Kedzie's head. They left at
the table a man in evening dress who smoked a big cigar and seemed
not to be jealous of the two dancers.

Some one among the spectators about Kedzie said that the woman was
Zada L'Etoile, and her partner was Haviland Devoe. Zada was amazing
in her postures and gyrations, but Kedzie thought that she herself
could have danced as well if she had had that music, that costume,
that partner, and a little practice.

When Zada had completed her calisthenics she did not sit down with
Mr. Devoe, but went back to the table where the lone smoker sat. Now
that she looked at him again, Kedzie thought what an extraordinarily
handsome, gloriously wicked-looking, swell-looking man he was. Yet
the girl who had danced called him Peterkin--which didn't sound
very swell to Kedzie.

He had very little to say to Zada, who did most of the talking.
He smiled at her now and then behind his cigar and gave her a queer
look that Kedzie only vaguely understood. She thought little of him,
though, because the next dance began, and she had a whole riot
of costumes to study.

There was a constant movement of new-comers past Kedzie's nook.
Sometimes people halted to look the crowd over before they went
up the steps, and asked two handsome gentlemen in full-dress suits
if they could have a table. The gentlemen--managers, probably, who
got up the party--usually said no. Sometimes they looked at papers
in their hands and marked off something, and then the people got
a table.

By and by two men and an elderly woman dressed like a very youngerly
woman paused near Kedzie. Both of the men were tall, but the one
called Jim was so tall he could see over the rail, or over the moon,
for all Kedzie knew.

The elderly lady said, "Come along, boys; we're missing a love of
a trot."

The less tall of the men said: "Now, mother, restrain yourself.
Remember I've had a hard day and I'm only a young feller. How
about you, Jim?"

"I'll eat something, but I'm not dancing, if you'll pardon me,
Mrs. Duane," said Jim. "And I'm waiting for Charity Coe. She's
in the cloak-room."

"Oh, come along," said Mrs. Duane. "I've got a table and I don't
want to lose it."

She started away, and her son started to follow, but paused as
the other man caught his sleeve and growled:

"I say, isn't that Pete Cheever--there, right there by the rail?
Yes, it is--and with--!"

Then Tom gave a start and said: "Ssh! Here's Charity Coe."

Both men looked confused; then they brightened and greeted a new
batch of drifters, and there was a babble of:

"Why, hello! How are you, Tom! How goes it, Jim? What's the good
word, Mary? What you doing here, Charity, and all in black? Oh,
I have to get out or go mad."

Kedzie, eavesdropping on the chatter, wondered at the commonplace
names and the small-town conversation. With such costumes she
must have expected at least blank verse.

She was interested to see what the stern sentinels would do to
this knot of Toms, Jims, and Marys. She peeked around the corner,
and to her surprise saw them greeted with great cordiality. They
smiled and chatted with the sentinels and were passed through
the silken barrier.

Other people paused and passed in or were rejected. Kedzie watched
Mr. Cheever with new interest, but not much understanding. He had
next to nothing to say. After a time she overheard Zada say to him,
raising her voice to top the noise of the band: "Say, Peterkin,
see that great big lad over there, the human lighthouse by the sea?
Peterkin, you can't miss him--he's just standing up--yes--isn't
that Jim Dyckman? Is he really so rich as they say?"

"He's rotten rich!" said Peterkin.

Then Zada said something and pointed. She seemed to be excited, but
not half so excited as Peter was. His face was all shot up with red,
and he looked as if he had eaten something that didn't sit easy.

Then he looked as if he wanted to fight somebody. He began to chew
on his words.

Kedzie caught only a few phrases in the holes in the noisy music.

"When did she get back? And she's here with him? I'll kill him--"

Kedzie stood on tiptoe, primevally trying to lift her ears higher
still to hear what followed. She saw Zada putting her hand on
Peter's sleeve, and she heard Zada say:

"Don't start anything here. Remember I got a reputation to lose,
if you haven't."

This had the oddest effect on Peter. He stared at Zada, and his anger
ran out of his face just as the water ran out of the silver washbowl
in the sleeping-car. Then he began to laugh softly, but as if he
wanted to laugh right out loud. He put his napkin up and laughed
into that.

And then the anger he had lost ran up into Zada's face, and she
looked at Peter as if she wanted to kill him.

Now it was Peter who put his hand on her arm and patted it and said,
"I didn't mean anything."

Mean what? Kedzie wondered. But she had no chance to find out, for
Peter rose from the table and, dodging around the dancing couples,
made his escape. He reappeared in the very nook where Kedzie watched,
and called up to Zada:

"Did they see me?"

Zada shook her head. Peter threw her a kiss. She threw him a shrug
of contempt. Peter went away laughing. Kedzie waited a few minutes
and saw that Mr. Devoe had come to sit with Zada.

After a moment the music was resumed, and Zada rose to dance again
with Mr. Devoe--a curious sort of dance, in which she lifted her feet
high and placed them carefully, as if she were walking on a floor
covered with eggs and didn't want to break any.

But Kedzie's eyes were filling with sand. They had gazed too long
at brilliance. She dashed back to the elevator and to her room.
She was exhausted, and she pulled off her clothes and let them lie
where they fell. She slid her weary frame between the sheets and
instantly slept.

       *       *       *       *       *

Charity Coe danced till all hours with Jim, with Tom Duane and
other men, and no one could have fancied that she had ever known
or cared what horrors filled the war hospitals across the sea.

She was frantic enough to accept a luncheon engagement with Jim and
his mother for the next day. She telephoned him in the morning: "Your
angel of a mother will forgive me when you tell her I'm lunching
down-town with my husband. The poor boy was detained at his office
last night and didn't get my telegram till he got home. When he
learned that I had come in and gone out again he was furious with
himself and me. I hadn't left word where I was, so he couldn't come
running after me. He waited at home and gave me a love of a call-down
for my dissipation. It was a treat. I really think he was jealous."

Jim Dyckman did not laugh with her. He was thinking hard. He had seen
Cheever at the Biltmore, and a little later Cheever vanished. Cheever
must have seen Charity Coe then. And if he saw her, he saw him. Then
why had he kept silent? Dyckman had a chilling intuition that Cheever
was lying in ambush for him.

Again he was wrung with the impulse to tell Charity Coe the truth
about her husband. Again some dubious decency withheld him.




CHAPTER VII

The word "breakfast" was magic stimulant to the Thropps. Kedzie put
on her clothes, and the family went down to the elevator together.

They found their way to the Tudor Room, where a small number of men,
mostly barricaded behind newspapers, ate briskly. A captain showed
the Thropps to a table; three waiters pulled out their chairs and
pushed them in under them. Another laid large pasteboards before
them. Another planted ice-water and butter and salt and pepper
here and there.

Adna had traveled enough to know that the way to order a meal in
a hotel is to give the waiter a wise look and say, "Bring me the
best you got."

This waiter looked a little surprised, but he said, "Yes, sir. Do
you like fruit and eggs and rolls, maybe?"

"Nah," said Adna. "Breakfast's my best meal. Bring us suthin' hearty
and plenty of it. I like a nice piece of steak and fried potatoes
and some griddle-cakes and maple-surrup, and if you got any nice
sawsitch--and the wife usually likes some oatmeal, and she takes tea
and toast, but bring me some hot bread. And the girl--What you want,
Kedzie? The same's I'm takin'? All right. Oh, some grape-fruit, eh?
She wants grape-fruit. Got any good? All right. I guess I'll take
some grape-fruit, too; and let me see--I guess that'll do to start
on--Wait! What's that those folks are eatin' over there? Looks good
--spring chicken--humm! I guess you'd like that better'n steak, ma?
Yes. She'd rather have the chicken. All right, George, you hustle us
in a nice meal and I'll make it all right with you. You understand."

Adna called all waiters "George." It saved their feelings, he
had heard.

The waiter bowed and retired. Adna spoke to his family:

"Since we pay the same, anyway, might's well have the best they got."

The waiter gave the three a meal fitter for the ancient days when
kings had dinner at nine in the morning than for these degenerate
times when breakfast hardly lives up to its name.

The waiter and his cronies stood at a safe distance and watched
the Thropps surround that banquet. They wondered where the old man
got money enough to buy such breakfasts and why he didn't spend some
of it on clothes.

The favorite theory was that he was a farmer on whose acres somebody
had discovered oil or gold and bought him out for a million.
Mr. Thropp's proper waiter hoped that he would be as extravagant
with his tip as he was with his order. He feared not. His waiterly
intuition told him the old man put in with more enthusiasm than he
paid out.

At last the meal was over. The Thropps were groaning. They had not
quite absorbed the feast, but they had wrecked it utterly. Mr. Thropp
found only one omission in the perfect service. The toothpicks had to
be asked for. All three Thropps wanted them.

While Thropp was fishing in his pocket for a quarter, and finding
only half a dollar which he did not want to reveal, the waiter
placed before him a closely written manuscript, face down, with
a lead-pencil on top of it.

"What's this?" said Thropp.

"Will you please to sign your name and room number, sir?" the waiter
suggested.

"Oh, I see," said Thropp, and explained to his little flock. "You see,
they got to keep tabs on the regular boarders."

Then he turned the face of the bill to the light. His pencil could
hardly find a place to put his name in the long catalogue. He noted
a sum scrawled in red ink: "$11.75."

"Wha-what's this?" he said, faintly.

The surprised waiter explained with all suavity: "The price of
the breakfast. If it is not added correctlee--"

Thropp added it with accurate, but tremulous, pencil. The total
was correct, if the items were. He explained:

"But I'm a regular--er--roomer here. I pay by the week."

"Yes, sir--if you will sign, it will be all right."

"But that don't mean they're going to charge me for breakfast? 'Levum
dollars and seventy-five cents for--for breakfast?--for a small family
like mine is? Well, I'd like to see 'em! What do they think I am!"

The waiter maintained his courtesy, but Adna was infuriated. He
put down no tip at all. He lifted his family from the table with
a yank of the eyes and snapped at the waiter:

"I'll soon find out who's tryin' to stick me.--you or the
proprietor."

The old man stalked out, followed by his fat ewe and their ewe lamb.
Adna's very toothpick was like a small bayonet.

His wife and daughter hung back to avoid being spattered with the gore
of the unfortunate hotel clerk. The morning trains were unloading
their mobs, and it was difficult to reach the desk at all.

When finally Adna got to the bar he had lost some of his running
start. With somewhat weakly anger he said to the first clerk
he reached:

"Looky here! I registered here last night, and another young feller
was here said the two rooms would be twelve dollars."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, they sent me up to roost on a cloud, but I didn't kick. Now
they're tryin' to charge me for meals extry. Don't that twelve dollars
include meals?"

"Oh no, sir. The hotel is on the European plan."

Adna took the shock bravely but bitterly: "Well, all I got to say is
the Europeans got mighty poor plans. I kind of suspicioned there was
a ketch in it somewheres. After this we'll eat outside, and at the
end of the week we'll take our custom somewheres else. Maybe there
was a joke in that twelve dollars a week for the rooms, too."

"Twelve dollars a week! Oh no, sir; the charge is by the day."

Adna's knees seemed to turn to sand and run down into his shoes.
He supported himself on his elbows.

"Twelve dollars a day--for those two rooms on the top of the moon?"

"Yes, sir; that's the rate, sir."

Adna was going rapidly. He chattered, "Ain't there no police in
this town at tall?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, I've heard they're the wust robbers of all. We'll see
about this." He went back to his women folk and mumbled, "Come on
up-stairs."

They followed, Mrs. Thropp murmuring to Kedzie: "Looks like poppa
was goin' to be sick. I'm afraid he et too much of that rich food."

The elevator flashed them to their empyrean floor. Adna did not
speak till they were in their room and he had lowered himself feebly
into a chair. He spoke thickly:

"Do you know what that Judas Iscariot down there is doin' to us?
Chargin' us twelve dollars a day for these two cubby-holes--a day!
Twelve dollars a day! Eighty-four dollars a week! And that breakfast
was 'levum dollars and seventy-five cents! If I'd gave the waiter
the quarter I was goin' to, it would have made an even dozen dollars!
for breakfast! I don't suppose anybody would ever dast order a dinner
here. Why, they'd skin a millionaire and pick his bones in a week.
We'd better get out before they slap a mortgage on my house."

"Well, I just wouldn't pay it," said Mrs. Thropp. "I'd see the police
about such goings-on."

"The police!" groaned Thropp. "They're in cahoots with the burglars
here. This hull town is a den of thieves. I've always heard it, and
now I know it."

He was ashamed of himself for being taken in so. He began to throw
into the valises the duds that had been removed.

Throughout the panic Kedzie had stood about in a kind of stupor.
When her father tapped her on the shoulder and repeated his
"C'm'on!" she turned to him eyes all tears glistening like bubbles,
and she whimpered:

"Oh, daddy, the view! The nice things!"

Adna snapped: "View? Our next view will be the poorhouse if we don't
hustle our stumps. We got to get out of here and find the cheapest
place they is in town to live or go back home on the next train."

Kedzie began to cry, to cry as she had cried when she wept in
her cradle because candy had been taken from her, or a box of
carpet-tacks, or the scissors that she had somehow got hold of.

Adna dropped his valises with a thud. He began to upbraid her.
He had endured too much. He had still his bill to pay. He told her
that she was a good-for-nothin' nuisance and he wished he had left
her home. He'd never take her anywheres again, you bet. Kedzie
lost her reason entirely. She was shattered with spasms of grief
aggravated by her mother's ferocity and her father's. She could not
give up this splendor. She would not go to a cheap place to live.
She would never go back home. She would rather die.

Her mother boxed her ears and shook her and scolded with all her
vim. But Kedzie only shook out more sobs till they wondered what
the people next door would think. Adna was wan with wrath. Kedzie
was afraid of her father's look. She had a kind of lockjaw of grief
such as children suffer and suffer for.

All she would answer to her father's threats was: "I won't! I won't!
I tell you I won't!"

Her cheeks were blubbered, her nose red, her mouth swollen, her hair
wet and stringy. She gulped and swallowed and beat her hands together
and stamped her feet.

Adna glared at her in hatred equal to her own for him. He said to
his wife: "Ma, we got to go back to first principles with that girl.
You got to give her a good beatin'."

Mrs. Thropp had the will but not the power. She was palsied with
rage. "I can't," she faltered.

"Then I will!" said Adna, and he roared with ferocity, "Come here
to me, you!"

He put out his hand like a claw, and Kedzie retreated from him. She
stopped sobbing. She had never been so frightened. She felt a new
kind of fright, the fright of a nun at seeing an altar threatened
with desecration. She had not been whipped for years. She had grown
past that. Surely her body was sacred from such infamy now.

"Come here to me, I tell you!" Adna snarled, as he pursued her
slowly around the chairs.

"You better not whip me, poppa," Kedzie mumbled. "You better not
touch me, I tell you. You'll be sorry if you do! You better not!"

"Come here to me!" said Adna.

"Momma, momma, don't let him!" Kedzie whispered as she ran to her
mother and flung herself in her arms for refuge.

Mrs. Thropp then lost a great opportunity forever. She tore the
girl's hands away and handed her over to her father. And he, with
ugly fury and ugly gesture, seized the young woman who had been
his child and dragged her to him and sank into a chair and wrenched
and twisted her arms till he held her prone across his knees. Then
he spanked her with the flat of his hand.

Kedzie made one little outcry; then there was no sound but the thump
of the blows. Adna sickened soon of his task, and Kedzie's silence
and non-resistance robbed him of excuse. He growled:

"I guess that'll learn you who's boss round here."

He thrust her from his knees, and she rolled off to the floor and
lay still. She had not really swooned, but her soul had felt the
need of withdrawing into itself to ponder this awful sacrilege.




CHAPTER VIII

Her mother knew that she had not fainted. She was sick, too, and
blamed Kedzie for the scene. She spurned the girl with her foot
and said:

"You get right up off that floor this minute. Do you hear?"

Kedzie's soul came back. It had made its decision. It gathered
her body together and lifted it up to its knees and then erect,
while the lips said, "All right, momma."

She groped her way into the bathroom and washed her face, and
straightened her hair and came forth, a dazed and pallid thing.
She took up the valise her father gave her and followed her mother
out, pausing to pass her eyes about the beautiful room and the
window where the peaks of splendor were. Then she walked out,
and her father locked the door.

Kedzie saw that the elevator-boy saw that she had been crying, but
what was one shame extra? She had no pride left now, and no father
and no mother, no anybody.

Adna refused the offices of the pages who clutched at the baggage.
He went to the cashier and paid the blood-money with a grin of hate.
Then he gathered up his women and his other baggage and set out
for the station. He would leave all the baggage there while he
hunted a place to stop.

They could not find the tunnelway, but debouched on the street.
Crossing Vanderbilt Avenue was a problem for village folk heavy
laden. The taxicabs were hooting and scurrying.

Adna found himself in the middle of the street, entirely surrounded
by demoniac motors. His wife wanted to lie down there and die. Adna
dared neither to go nor to stay. Suddenly a chauffeur of an empty
limousine, fearing to lose a chance to swear at a taxi-driver,
kept his head turned to the left and steered straight for the spot
where the Thropps awaited their doom.

Adna had his wife pendent from one arm and a valise or two from
the other. Kedzie carried a third valise. Her better than normal
shoulders were sagged out of line by its weight.

When Adna saw the motor coming he had to choose between dropping
his valise or his wife. Characteristically, he saved his valise.

In spite of his wife's squawking and tugging on his left arm, he
achieved safety under the portico of the Grand Central Terminal.
He looked about for Kedzie. She was not to be seen. Adna saw the
taxicab pass over the valise she had carried. It left no trace of
Kedzie. Her annihilation was uncanny. He gaped.

"Where's Kedzie?" Mrs. Thropp screamed.

A policeman checked the traffic with uplifted hand. Adna ran to him.
Mrs. Thropp told him what had happened.

"I saw the goil drop the bag and beat it for the walk," said
the officer.

"Which way'd she go?"

"She lost herself in the crowd," said the officer.

"She was scared out of her wits," Mrs. Thropp sobbed.

The officer shook his head. "She was smilin' when I yelled at her.
It looks to me like a get-away."

"A runaway?" Mrs. Thropp gasped.

"Yes,'m. I'd have went after her, but I was cut off by a taxi."

The two old Thropps stood staring at each other and the unfathomable
New York, while the impatient chauffeurs squawked their horns in
angry protest, and train-missers with important errands thrust
their heads out of cab windows.

The officer led his bewildered charges to the sidewalk, motioned
the traffic to proceed, and beckoned to a patrolman. "Tell your
troubles to him," he said, and went back into his private maelstrom.

The patrolman heard the Thropp story and tried to keep the crowd away.
He patted Mrs. Thropp's back and said they'd find the kid easy, not
to distoib herself. He told the father which station-house to go to
and advised him to have the "skipper" send out a "general."

Thropp wondered what language he spoke, but he went; and a
soft-hearted walrus in uniform sprawling across a lofty desk
took down names and notes and minute descriptions of Kedzie and
her costume. He told the two babes in the wood that such t'ings
happened constant, and the goil would toin up in no time. He sent
out a general alarm.

Mrs. Thropp told him the whole story, putting all the blame on
her husband with such enthusiasm that the sympathy of everybody
went out to him. Everybody included a number of reporters who
asked Mrs. Thropp questions and particularly desired a photograph
of Kedzie.

Mrs. Thropp confessed that she had not brought any along. She
had never dreamed that the girl would run away. If she had have,
she wouldn't have brought the girl along, to say nothing of
her photograph.

The amiable walrus in the cap and brass buttons recommended the
Thropps to a boarding-house whose prices were commensurate with
Adna's ideas and means, and he and his wife went thither, where
they told a shabby and sentimental landlady all their troubles.
She reassured them as best she could, and made a cup of tea for
Mrs. Thropp and told Mr. Thropp there was a young fellow lived in
the house who was working for a private detective bureau. He'd
find the kid sure, for it was a small woild, after all.

There was a lull in the European-war news the next day--only a few
hundreds killed in an interchange of trenches. There was a dearth
of big local news also. So the morning papers all gave Kedzie Thropp
the hospitality of their head-lines. The illustrated journals
published what they said was her photograph. No two of the
photographs were alike, but they were all pretty.

The copy-writers loved the details of the event. They gave the
dialogue of the Thropps in many versions, all emphasizing what
is known as "the human note."

Every one of them gave due emphasis to the historic fact that Kedzie
Thropp had been spanked.

The boarding-house was shaken from attic to basement by the news.
The Thropps read the papers. They were astounded and enraged at
gaining publicity for such a deed. They visited the walrus in his den.
But there was no word of Kedzie Thropp. The sea of people had opened
and swallowed the little girl. Her mother wondered where she had
slept and if she were hungry and into whose hands she had fallen.
But there was no answer from anywhere.




CHAPTER IX

People who call a child in from All Outdoors and make it their infant
owe it to their victim to be rich, brilliant, and generous. Kedzie
Thropp's parents were poor, stupid, and stingy.

They were respectable enough, but not respectful at all. Children
have more dignity than anybody else, because they have not lived
long enough to have their natal dignity knocked out of them.

Kedzie's parents ought to have respected hers, but they subjected her
to odious humiliation. When her father threatened to spank her--and
did--and when her mother aided and abetted him, they forfeited all
claim to her tolerance. The inspiration to run away was forced on
Kedzie, though she would have said that her parents ran away from
her first.

Kedzie had preferred her own life to the security of her valise.
She dropped the bag without hesitation. When the taxicab parted her
family in the middle, Kedzie ran to the opposite sidewalk. She saw
a policeman dashing into the thick of the motors. Her eye caught his.
He beckoned to her that he would ferry her across the torrent. He
was a nice-looking man, but she shook her head at him. She smiled,
however, and hastened away.

Freedom had been forced on her. Why should she relinquish the boon?

She lost herself in the crowd. She had no purpose or destination,
for the whole city was a mystery to her. Soon she noted that part of
the human stream flowed down into the yawning maw of a Subway kiosk
as the water ran out of the bath-tub in the hotel. She floated down
the steps and found herself in a big subterrene room with walls tiled
like those of the hotel bathroom. Everybody was buying tickets from
a man in a funny little cage.

Kedzie had a hand-bag slung at her wrist. In it was some small money.
She fished out a nickel and slid it across the glass sill as the
others did.

Beneath her eyes she saw a card that asked, "How many?" She said,
"One."

The doleful ticket-seller was annoyed at the tautology of passing
him a nickel and saying, "One!" He shot out an angry glance with
the ticket, but he melted at sight of Kedzie's lush beauty, recognized
her unquestionable plebeiance, and hailed her with a "Here you are,
Cutie."

Kedzie was not at all insulted. She gave him smile for smile, took up
her pasteboard and followed the crowd through the gate.

The ticket-chopper yelled at the back of her head, "Here, where you
goin'?"

She turned to him, and his scowl relaxed. He pointed to the box
and pleaded:

"Put her there, miss, if you please."

She smiled at the ticket-chopper and dropped the flake into the box.
She moved down the stairway as an express rolled in. People ran.
Kedzie ran. They squeezed in at the side door, and so did Kedzie.
The wicker seats were full, and so Kedzie stood. She could not reach
the handles that looked like cruppers. Men and women saw how pretty
she was. She was so pretty that one or two men nearly rose and
offered her their seats. When the train whooped round the curve
beneath Times Square Kedzie was spun into the lap of a man reading
a prematurely born "Night Edition."

She came through the paper like a circus-lady, and the man was
indignant till he saw what he held. Then he laughed foolishly,
helped the giggling Kedzie to her feet and rose to his own, gave her
his place, and went blushing into the next car. For an hour after
his arms felt as if they had clasped a fugitive nymph for a moment
before she escaped.

This train chanced to be an express to 180th Street in the Bronx
Borough. If any one had asked Kedzie if she knew the Bronx she would
probably have answered that she did not know them. She did not even
know what a borough was.

It was fascinating how much Kedzie did not know. She had an infinite
fund of things to find out.

She was thrilled thoroughly by the glorious velocity through
the tunnel. The train stopped at Seventy-second Street and at
Ninety-sixth Street and at many other stations. People got on
or off. But Kedzie was too well entertained to care to leave.

She did not know that the train ran under a corner of Central Park
and beneath the Harlem River. She would have liked to know. To run
under a river would tell well at home.

Suddenly the Subway shot out into midair and became a superway.
The street which had been invisible above was suddenly visible below,
with street-cars on it. Also there was a still higher track overhead.
Three layers of tracks! It was heavenly, the noise they made! She
enjoyed hearing the mounting numbers of the streets shouted
antiphonally by the gentlemen at either door.

At 180th Street, however, the train stopped for good, and the handsome
young man at the front door called, "All out!" He said it to Kedzie
with a beautiful courtesy, adding, "This is as far as we go, lady."

That was tremendous, to be called "lady." Kedzie tried to get out
like one. She smiled at the guard and left his protection with some
reluctance. He studied her as she walked along the platform. She
seemed to meet with his approval in general, and in particular.
He sighed when she turned out of his sight.

The station here was very high up in the world. Kedzie counted
seventy-seven steps on her way to the level. She was distressed
to find herself in a shabby, noisy community where streets radiated
in six directions. Her fears were true. She had left New York. She
must get home to it again.

She walked back along the way she had come, on the sidewalk beneath
the tracks. This meandering street was called Boston Road. Kedzie had
no ideas as to the distance of Boston. She only knew that New York
was good enough for her--the New York of Forty-second Street,
of course. Kedzie did not know yet how many, many New Yorks there
are in New York.

She was discouraged by her present surroundings. Along the rough
and neglected streets were little rows of shanty shops, and there
were stubby frame residences.

There was one two-story cottage snuggling against a hill; it had
a little picket fence with a little picket gate leading to a little
ragged yard with an old apple-tree in it; and there was a pair of
steps up to the front door, and a rough trellis from there to the
woodshed with a grapevine draped across it. It was of the James
Whitcomb Riley school of architecture--a house with a woodshed.

Rich people who were tired of the city, and chanced that way,
used to pause and look at that little nook and admire its meek
attractiveness. It made them homesick.

But Kedzie was sick of home. This lowly cot was too much like
her father's. It had a sign on it that said, "To Let." It was
a funny expression. Kedzie studied it a long time before she
decided that it was New-Yorkese for "For Rent."

She shuddered at the idea of renting or letting such a house--
especially as it was so close to a church, a small, seedy,
frame church nearly all roof, a narrow-chested, slope-shouldered
churchlet with a frame cupola for a steeple. It looked abandoned,
and an ivy flourished on it so impudently that it almost closed
the unfrequented portal.

The bill-boards here made mighty interesting reading. There were
magnificent works of an art on the grand scale of a people's
gallery; one structure promulgated the glories of a notorious
chewing-gum. There was a gorgeous proclamation of a fashionable
glove with a picture of an extremely swell slim lady all dressed
up--or rather all dressed down--for the opera.

Kedzie prayed the Lord to send her some day a pair of full-length
white kid gloves like those. As for a box at the opera, she would
take her chances on the sunniest cloud-sofa in heaven for an evening
at the opera. And for a dress cut deckolett and an aigret in her
hair, she would have swapped a halo and a set of wings.

There was no end to the big pages of this literature, and Kedzie read
dozens of them from right to left in a southerly direction. Finally
she abandoned the Boston Road and walked over to a better-groomed
avenue with more of a city atmosphere.

But she saw a police signal-station at 175th Street, and she thought
it better to abandon the Southern Boulevard. She was not sure of her
police yet, and she had an uneasy feeling that her father and mother
were at that moment telling their troubles to some policeman who
would shortly be putting her description in the hands of detectives.
She did not want to be arrested. Poppa might try to spank her again.
She did not want to have to murder anybody, especially her parents.
She liked them better when she was away from them.

She hated to waste five cents on a street-car, but finally she
achieved the extravagance. The car went sliding and grinding through
an amazing amount of paved street, with an inconceivable succession
of apartment-houses and shops.

At length she reached a center of what she most desired--noise and
mob and hurry. At 164th Street she came to a star of streets where
the Third Avenue Elevated collaborated with the surface-cars and the
loose traffic to create a delicious pandemonium. She loved those high
numbers--a hundred and eighty streets! Beautiful! At home Main Street
dissolved into pastures at Tenth Street.

She wanted to find Main Street in New York and see what First Street
looked like. It was probably along the Atlantic Ocean. That also was
one of the things she must see--her first ocean!

But while Kedzie was reveling in the splendors of 164th Street her
eye was caught by the gaudy placards of a moving-picture emporium.
There was a movie-palace at home. It was the town's one metropolitan
charm.

There was a lithograph here that reached out and caught her like
a bale-hook. It represented an impossibly large-eyed girl, cowering
behind a door on whose other side stood a handsome devil in evening
dress. He was tugging villainously at a wicked mustache, and his eyes
were thrillingly leery. Behind a curtain stood a young man who held
a revolver and waited. The title of the picture decided Kedzie. It
was "The Vampire's Victim; a Scathing Exposure of High Society."

Kedzie studied hard. For all her gipsy wildness, she had a trace
of her father's parsimony, and she hated to spend money that was
her very own. Some of the dimes and quarters in that little purse
had been there for ages. Besides, her treasury would have to sustain
her for an indefinite period.

But she wanted to know about high society. She was not sure what
_scathing_ meant, or what the pronunciation of it was. She
rather inclined to _"scat-ting."_ Anyway, it looked important.

She stumbled into the black theater and found a seat among mysterious
persons dully silhouetted against the screen. This was none of
the latter-day temples where moving pictures are run through with
cathedral solemnity, soft lights, flowers, orchestral uplift, and
nearly classic song. This was a dismal little tunnel with one end
lighted by the twinkling pictures. Tired mothers came here to escape
from their children, and children came here to escape from their
tired mothers. The plots of the pictures were as trite and as rancid
as spoiled meat, but they suited the market. This plot concerned
a beautiful girl who came to the city from a small town. She was a
good girl, because she came from a small town and had poor parents.

She was dazzled a little, however, by the attentions of a swell devil
of great wealth, and she neglected her poor--therefore honest--lover
temporarily. She learned the fearful joys of a limousined life, and
was lured into a false marriage which nearly proved her ruin. The
villain got a fellow-demon to pretend to be a minister, put on false
hair, reversed his collar, and read the wedding ceremony; and the
heroine was taken to the rich man's home.

The rooms were as full of furniture as a furniture-store, and so
Kedzie knew it was a swell home. Also there was a butler who walked
and acted like a wooden man.

The heroine was becomingly shy of her husband, but finally went to
her room, where a swell maid put her to bed (with a proper omission
of critical moments) in a bed that must have cost a million dollars.
Some womanly, though welching, intuition led the bride to lock
her door. Some manly intuition led the hero to enter the gardens
and climb in through a window into the house. If he had not been
a hero it would have been a rather reprehensible act. But to the
heroes all things are pure. He prowled through the house heroically
without attracting attention. Every step of his burglarious progress
was applauded by the audience.

The hero hid behind one of those numberless portieres that hang
everywhere in the homes of the _moveaux riches,_ and waited
with drawn revolver for the dastard bridegroom to attempt his
hellish purpose.

The locked door thwarted the villain for the time, and he decided
to wait till he got the girl aboard one of those yachts which rich
people keep for evil purposes. Thus the villain unwittingly saved
the hero from the painful necessity of committing murder, and added
another reel to the picture.

It is not necessary and it might infringe a copyright to tell
the rest of the story. It would be insulting to say that the false
minister, repenting, told the hero, who told the heroine after he
rescued her from the satanic yacht and various other temptations.
Of course she married the plain-clothes man and lived happily ever
after in a sin-proof cottage with a garden of virtuous roses.

Kedzie was so excited that she annoyed the people about her, but
she learned again the invaluable lesson that rich men are unfit
companions for nice girls. Kedzie resolved to prove this for herself.
She prayed for a chance to be tempted so that she might rebuke some
swell villain. But she intended to postpone the rebuke until she had
seen a lot of high life. This would serve a double purpose: Kedzie
would get to see more millionairishness, and the rebuke would be
more--more "_scatting_." It is hard even to think a word you
cannot pronounce.

Kedzie gained one thing further from the pictures--a new name. She
had been musing incessantly on choosing one. She had always hated
both _Thropp_ and _Kedzie,_ and had counted on marriage
to reform her surname. But she could not wait. She wanted an alias
at once. The police were after her. The heroine of this picture
was named _Anita Adair,_ and the name just suited Kedzie. She
intended to be known by it henceforth.

She had not settled on what town she had come from. Perhaps she would
decide to have been born in New York. She rather fancied the notion
of being a daughter of a terrible swell family who wanted to force
her to marry a wicked old nobleman, but she ran away sooner than
submit to the _"imfany"_--that was the way Kedzie pronounced
it in her head. It was a word she had often seen but never heard.

Meanwhile she was sure of one thing: Kedzie Thropp was annihilated
and Anita Adair was born full grown.

At the conclusion of the film Kedzie was saddened by a ballad sung by
an adenoid tenor. The song was a scatting exposure of the wickedness
of Broadway. The refrain touched Kedzie deeply, and alarmed her
somewhat. It reiterated and reiterated:

"There's a browkin hawt for everee light ton Broadway-ee."

Kedzie began to fear that she would furnish one more. And yet
it would be rather nice to have a broken heart, Kedzie thought,
especially on Broadway.




CHAPTER X

Kedzie watched the moving picture twice through. The second time
it was not so good. It lacked spontaneity and sincerity.

At the first vision everything seemed to rise from what preceded;
people did what was natural or noble. The second time it looked
mechanical, rehearsed; the thrill was gone, too, because she knew
positively that the hero was not really going to shoot, and
the villain was not really going to break through the door.

She wandered forth in a tragedy of disillusionment. That was really
the cause of the pout that seemed to say, "Please kiss me!" She pouted
because when she got what she wanted she no longer wanted it.

There are hearts like cold storage. They keep what they get fresh and
cool; and there are hearts that spoil whatever is intrusted to them.
In Kedzie's hot young soul, things spoiled soon.

She was hungry, and she could not resist the impulse to enter a cheap
restaurant. She did not know how cheap it was. It was as good as
the best restaurant in Nimrim, Mo.

Kedzie ordered unfamiliar things for the sake of educating her
illiterate mid-Western stomach. She ordered clam chowder and Hamburger
steak, spaghetti Italienne, lobster salad, and Neapolitan ice-cream.
She ate too much--much too much.

The total bill was ninety-five cents, and she was terrified. She had
thought her father a miser for complaining of the breakfast bill of
eleven-odd dollars at the Biltmore, but that was his money, not hers.

When she finished her meal she did not dream of tipping the waiter.
He seemed not to expect it, but he grinned as he asked her to come
again. He hoped she would. He went to the door and stared after her,
sadly, longingly. The dishes she had left he carried away with
an elegiac solemnity.

The streets were darkened now and the lights bewildered Kedzie.
The town grew more solemn. It withdrew into itself. People were
going home.

Kedzie did not know where to go. She walked for fear of standing
still. The noise fatigued her. She turned west to escape it and
found a little park at 161st Street.

Many streets flowed thence. There were ten ways to follow, and she
could not choose one among them.

She was pretty, but she had not learned the commercial value of
her beauty. She was alone in the great, vicious city, but nobody
had threatened her. Nearly everybody had paid her charm the tribute
of a stare or a smile, but nobody had been polite enough to flatter
her with a menace.

She was very pretty. But then there are so very many very pretty
girls in every big city! June with her millions of exquisite roses
is no richer in beauty than New York. Yet even New York cannot keep
all her beauties supplied with temptation and peril all the time.

Kedzie sat on the bench wondering which of the ten ways to go. It
turned late, but she could not decide. She began to be a little hungry
again, but she was always that, and she told her ever-willing young
stomach that her late luncheon would have to be an early dinner.

As she sat still, people began to peer at her through the enveiling
dark. A tipsy brewery truck-driver who had absorbed too much of his
own cargo sank down by her side. He could not see Kedzie through
the froth in his brain, but she found him fearful. When he began
to talk to himself she fled.

She saw a brilliantly lighted street-car, and she boarded it. She was
all turned around, and the car twisted and turned as it proceeded.
She did not realize that it was going north till she heard the
conductor calling in higher and higher street numbers. Then she
understood, with tired wrath, that she was outbound once more. She
wanted to go toward the heart of town, but she could not afford to
get off without her nickel's worth of ride.

The car was all but empty when the conductor called to a drowsy old
lady, his penultimate passenger:

"Hunneran Semty-seckin! Hey, lady! You ast me to leave you off at
Hunneran Semty-seckin, didn't yah?"

The woman was startled from her reverie and gasped:

"Dear me! is this a Hundred and Seventy-second?"

"Thass wat I said, didn't I?"

She evicted herself with a manner of apology for intruding on
the conductor's attention.

Now Kedzie was alone with the man. His coyote bark changed to an
insinuating murmur. He sat down near Kedzie, took up an abandoned
evening paper, and said:

"Goin' all the way, Cutie, or how about it?"

"I'm get'n' off here!" said Kedzie, with royal scorn. She resented
his familiarity, and she was afraid that he was going to prove
dangerous. Perhaps he meant to abduct her in this chariot.

Being a street-car conductor, the poor fellow neither understood
women nor was understood by them. He accepted Kedzie's blow with
resignation. He helped her down the step, his hand mellowing her
arm and finding it ripe.

She flung him a rebukeful glare that he did not get. He gave the
two bells, and the car went away like a big lamp, leaving the world
to darkness and to Kedzie.

She walked for a block or two and wondered where she should sleep.
There were no hotels up here, and she would have been afraid of
their prices. Probably they all charged as much as the Biltmore.
At that rate, her money would just about pay for the privilege of
walking in and out again.

Boarding-houses there might have been, but they bore no
distinguishing marks.

Kedzie stood and strolled until she was completely fagged. Then she
encountered a huge mass of shadowy foliage, a park--Crotona Park,
although of course Kedzie did not know its name.

There were benches at the edge, and concreted paths went glimmering
among vagueness of foliage, with here and there searing arc-lights
as bright as immediate moons. Kedzie dropped to the first bench, but
a couple of lovers next to her protested, and she retreated into
the park a little.

She felt a trifle chilled with weariness and discouragement and
the lack of light. She clasped her arms together as a kind of wrap
and huddled herself close to herself. Her head teetered and tottered
and gradually sank till her delicate chin rested in her delicate
bosom. Her big hat shaded her face as in a deep blot of ink, and
she slept.

Unprotected, pretty, alone in the wicked city, she slept secure
and unassailed.




CHAPTER XI

Miss Anita Adair (_nee_ Kedzie Thropp) had dozed upon her cozy
park bench for an uncertain while when her bedroom was invaded by
visitors who did not know she was there.

Kedzie was wakened by murmurous voices. A man was talking to a woman.
They might have been Romeo and Juliet in Verona for the poetry of
their grief, but they were in the Bronx Borough, and he was valet
and she a housemaid, or so Kedzie judged. The man was saying in a
dialect new to Kedzie:

"Ah, _ma pauvre p'tite amie,_ for why you have a _jalousie_
of my _patrie_?"

There was a vague discussion from which Kedzie drowsily gleaned
that the man was going to cross the sea to the realm of destruction.
The girl was jealous of somebody that he called his _patrie,_
and he miserably endeavored to persuade her that a man could love
both his _patrie_ and his _amie_, and yet give his life
to the former at her call.

Kedzie was too sleepy to feel much curiosity. A neighbor's woe is
a soothing lullaby. In the very crisis of their debate, the little
moan of Kedzie's yawn startled and silenced the farewellers. They
stole away unseen, and she knew no more of them.

Hours later Kedzie woke, shivering and afraid. All about her was
a woodland hush, but the circle of the horizon was dimly lighted,
as if there were houses on fire everywhere in the distance.

Poor Kedzie was a-cold and filled with the night dread. She was
afraid of burglars, mice, ghosts. She was still more afraid to leave
her bench and hunt through those deep shadows for her lost New York.
Her drugged brain fell asleep as it wrestled with its fears. Her body
protested at its couch. All her limbs like separate serpents tried
to find resting-places. They could not stretch themselves out on
the bench. Fiends had placed cast-iron braces at intervals to prevent
people from doing just that. Kedzie did not know that it is against
the law of New York, if not of Nature, to sleep on park benches.

Half unconsciously she slipped down to the ground and found a bed
on the warm and dewless grass. Her members wriggled and adjusted
themselves. Her head rolled over on one round arm for a pillow;
the other arm bent itself above her head, and finding her hat in
the way, took out the pins, lifted the hat off, set it on the ground,
put the pins back in and returned to its place about her hair--all
without disturbing Kedzie's beauty sleep.

Her two arms were all the maids that Kedzie had ever had. They
were as kind to her as they could be--devoted almost exclusively
to her comfort.




CHAPTER XII

Kedzie slept alone in a meadow, and slept well. Youth spread the
sward with mattresses of eiderdown, and curtained out the stars
with silken tapestry. If she dreamed at all, it was with the full
franchise of youth in the realm of ambition. If she dreamed herself
a great lady, then fancy promised her no more than truth should
redeem. Charity Coe Cheever had a finer bed but a poorer sleep, if
any at all. She had a secretary to do her chores for her and to tell
her her engagements--where she was to go and what she had promised
and what she had better do. Charity dictated letters and committee
reports; she even dictated checks on her bank-account (which kept
filling up faster than she drew from it).

While Kedzie was trying to fit her limber frame among the little
hillocks and tussocks on the ground, Charity Coe was sitting at
her dressing-table, gazing into the mirror, but seeing beyond
her own image. Her lips moved, and her secretary wrote down what
she said aloud, and her maid was kneeling to take off Charity Coe's
ballroom slippers and slip on her bedroom ditto. The secretary was
so sleepy that she tried to keep her eyes open by agitating the lids
violently. The maid was trying to keep from falling forward across
her mistress's insteps and sleeping there.

But Charity was wide-awake--wild awake. Her soul was not in her
dictation, but in her features, which she studied in the mirror as
a rich man studies his bank-account. Charity was wondering if she
had wrecked her beauty beyond repair, or if she could fight it back.

Charity Coe, being very rich, had a hundred arms and hands and feet,
eyes and ears, while Kedzie had but two of each. Charity had some one
to make her clothes for her and cut up her bread and meat and fetch
the wood for her fire and put her shoes on and take them off. She
even had her face washed for her and her hair brushed, and somebody
trimmed her finger-nails and swept out her room, sewed on her buttons
and buttoned them up or unbuttoned them, as she pleased.

If Kedzie had known how much Charity was having done for her she
would have had a colic of envy. But she slept while Charity could
not. Charity could not pay anybody to sleep for her or stay awake
for her, or love or kiss for her, and her wealth could not buy the
fidelity of the one man whose fidelity she wanted to own.

Charity had done work that Kedzie would have flinched from. Charity
had lived in a field hospital and roughed it to a loathsome degree.
She had washed the faces and bodies of grimy soldiers from the bloody
ditches of the war-front; she had been chambermaid to gas-blinded
peasants and had done the hideous chores that follow operations. Now
with a maid to change her slippers and a secretary to make up her
mind, and a score of servants within call, she was afraid that she
had squandered her substance in spendthrift alms. She was a prodigal
benefactress returned from her good works too late, perhaps. She
wondered and took stock of her charms. She rather underrated them.

Peter Cheever had been extravagantly gallant the morning after
her return from the mountains. He had added the last perfect tribute
of suspicion and jealousy. They had even breakfasted together. She
had dragged herself down to the dining-room, and he had neglected
his morning paper, and lingered for mere chatter. He had telephoned
from his office to ask her for the noon hour, too. He had taken her
to the Bankers' Club for luncheon in the big Blue Room. He had then
suggested that they dine together and go to any theater she liked.

Charity Coe's head was turned by all this attention. "Three meals
a day and a show with her own husband" was going the honeymoon pace.

But she returned to the normal speed, for he did not come home
to dress or to dine or to go to the theater. No word came from him
until Charity Coe was all dressed; then a clerk telephoned her that
her husband regretted he could not come home, as he had to rush for
the Philadelphia train.

Charity could not quite disbelieve this, nor quite believe. She
had spent the evening debating married love and honeymoons that
wax and wane and wax again, and a wife's duty and her rights and
might-have-beens, perhapses, and if-only's.

Charity had put on her jewels, which had not been taken out of
the safe for years, but he had not arrived. Alarm and resentment
wrestled for her heart; they prospered alternately. Now she trembled
with fear for her husband; now she smothered with wrath at his
indifference to her.

Who was he that he should keep her waiting, and who were the Cheevers
that they should break engagements with the Coes? It was only at such
times that her pride of birth flared in her, and then only enough
to sustain her through grievous humiliations.

But what are humiliations that we should mind them so? They come
to everybody in turn, and they are as relentless and impersonal as
the sun marching around the sky. Kedzie had hers, and Charity hers,
and the streetcar conductor Kedzie had rebuffed had his, and the Czar
with his driven army had his, with more to come, and the Kaiser with
his victorious army had his, with more to come. Even Peter Cheever
had his in plenty, and of a peculiar secret sort.

He had honestly planned to spend his evening with his wife. She
seemed to be coming back into style with him. But the long arm
of the telephone brought him within the reach of Zada L'Etoile.
Zada had plans of her own for his evening-dinner, theater, supper,
dance till dawn. Peter had answered, gently:

"Sorry, but I'm booked."

Zada had seemed to come right through the wire at him.

"With that--wife of yours, of course!"

She had used a word that fascinated the listening Central, who was
lucky enough to transact a good deal of Zada's telephone business.
Central could almost see Peter flush as he shook his head and
answered:

"Not necessarily. It's business."

"You'd better make it your business not to go out with that woman,
anywhere," Zada had threatened. "It's indecent."

Peter winced. A wife is not ordinarily called "that woman." Peter
sighed. It was a pretty pass when a man could not be allowed to go
to the theater with his own wife. Yet he felt that Zada was right,
in a way. He had forfeited the privilege of a domestic evening. He
was afraid to brave Zada's fantastic rages. He could best protect
Charity Coe by continuing to ignore her.

He consented to Zada's plan and promised to call up his wife. Zada
took a brief triumph from that. But Peter was ashamed and afraid
to speak to Charity even across the wire. He knew that it has become
as difficult to lie by telephone as face to face. The treacherous
little quavers in the voice are multiplied to a rattle, and nothing
can ever quite imitate sincerity. So much is bound to be over or
under done.

Cheever made a pretense of rushing out of his office. He looked at
his watch violently, so that his secretary should be startled--as
he politely pretended to be. Cheever gasped, then rushed his lie
with sickly histrionism:

"I say, Hudspeth, call up my--Mrs. Cheever, will you? And--er--tell
her I've had to dash for the train to--er--Phila"--cough--"delphia.
Tell her I'm awfully sorry about to-night. Back to-morrow."

"Yessir," said Hudspeth, winking at the gaping stenographer, who
looked exclamation points at her typewriter.

Hudspeth called up Mrs. Cheever. He was no more convincing than
Cheever would have been. A note of disgust at his task and of
deprecatory pity for Mrs. Cheever influenced his tone.

Charity was not convinced, but she could hardly reveal that to
Hudspeth--although, of course, she did. She was betrayed by her
very eagerness to be a good sport easily bamboozled.

"Oh, I see. Too bad! I quite understand. Thank you, Mr. Hudspeth.
Good-by."

She did not hear Hudspeth growling to the stenographer as he strolled
over and leaned on her chair unnecessarily--there were other chairs
to lean on, and she was not deaf:

"Rotten business! He ought to be ashamed of himself. A nice wife
like that!"

The stenographer sat forward and snapped, "You got a nice wife
yourself." She was a little jealous of Zada, perhaps--or of
Mrs. Cheever--or of both.

Peter left his office to escape telephoning Charity, but he could
imagine how the message crushed her. He felt as if he had stepped
on a hurt bird. When he met Zada he kept trying to be patient and
forgiving with her, in spite of her blameworthiness.

Zada saw through his sullenness, and for a little moment was proud
of her victory. Then she began to suffer, too. She understood the
frailty of her hold on Cheever. His loyalty to her was in the eyes of
the world a treachery, and his disloyalty to her would be applauded
as a holy deed. She was becoming an old story with him, as Charity
had become one.

She suffered agonies from the cloud on her title and on her name,
and she was afraid of the world. A woman of her sort has no sympathy
to expect; her stock in trade vanishes without replenishment, and
her business does not build. In spite of herself she cannot help
envying and imitating the good women. As a certain great man has
confessed, "There is so much good in the worst of us," that there
is hardly any fun in being bad. It is almost impossible to be very
bad or very good very long at a time.

So here was Zada already copying a virtuous domestic woe and wondering
how she could fasten Cheever to her, win him truly for herself. She
honestly felt that she could be of value to him, and make more of
a man of him than his lawful wife ever could. Perhaps she was right.
At any rate, she was miserable, and if a person is going to be
miserable she might as well be right while her misery is going on.

Zada had dragged Cheever to a cabaret. She could lead him thither,
but she could not make him dance. She was one-stepping unwillingly
with a young cad who insulted her subtly in everything he said and
looked. She could not resent his familiarity beyond sneering at him
and calling him a foolish cub. She left him and returned to the table
where Peter Cheever smoked a bitter cigar. It is astonishing how sad
these notorious revelers look in repose. They are solemner than
deacons.

"Come on, Peterkin--dance the rest of this with me," Zada implored.

Peterkin shook his head. He felt that it was not quite right for him
to dance in public with such persons. He had his code. Even the swine
have their ethics. Zada put her hand in Cheever's arm and cooed
to him, but in vain.

It was then that Jim Dyckman caught sight of them. He was slinking
about the roofs as lonely and dejected as a homeless cat.

His money could not buy him companionship, though his acquaintance
was innumerable and almost anybody would have been proud to be spoken
to by such a money monster. But Jim did not want to be spoken to by
anybody who was ambitious to be spoken to by him. He wanted to talk
to Charity.

He could not even interest himself in dissipation. There was plenty
of it for sale, and markets were open to him that were not available
to average means. Many a foolish woman, irreproachable and counting
herself unapproachable, would have been strangely and memorably
perturbed by an amorous glance from Jim Dyckman.

But Jim did not want what he could get. He was hungry for
the companionship of Charity Coe.

When he saw her lord and master, Peter Cheever, with Zada, Dyckman
was enraged. Cheever owned Charity Coe; he could flatter her with
a smile, beckon her with a gesture, caress her at will, or leave her
in safe deposit, while he spent his precious hours with a public
servant!

Dyckman could usually afford to do what he wanted to. But now he
wanted to go to that table and knock the heads of Cheever and Zada
together; he wanted to make their skulls whack like castanets. But
he could not afford to do that.

He was so forlorn that he went home. His sumptuous chariot with
ninety race-horses concealed in the engine and velvet in its wheels
slid him as on smoothest ice to his father's home near the cathedral.
The house was like a child of the cathedral, and he went up its
steps as a pauper entering a cathedral. He gave up his hat and stick
and went past the masterpieces on his walls as if he were a visitor
to the Metropolitan Art Gallery on a free day. He stumbled up
the stairway, itself a work of art, like a boy sent to bed without
supper: he stumbled upstairs, wanting to cry and not daring to.

His valet undressed him in a motherly way and put him to bed.
The valet was feeling very sad. Dyckman realized that he was about
to lose Jules, and he felt more disconsolate. Still, he surprised
himself by breaking out:

"I wish you wouldn't go to the war, Jules."

Jules smiled with friendship and deference subtly blended:

"I wish I would not, too, sir."

"You might get killed, you know."

"Yes, sir."

"So you're a soldier! How long did you serve?"

"Shree years, sir."

"And I don't know the first thing about soldiering! I ought to be
ashamed of myself! Well--don't get killed, Jules."

"Very good, sir."

But he did.

Jules said, "Good night, sir," and faded through the door. Dyckman
tossed for a while. Then he got up in a rage at his insomnia. He
could not find his other slipper, and he stubbed his toe plebeianly
against an aristocratic table. He cursed and limped to the window
and glowered down into the street. He might have been a jailbird
gaping through iron bars. He could not get out of himself, or his
love for Charity.

He wondered how he could live till morning without her. He went to
his telephone to call her and hear her voice. He lifted the receiver
and when Central answered, the cowardice of decency compelled him
from his resolve, and he shamefully mumbled:

"The correct time, please."

What difference did it make to him what hour it was? He was the
victim of eternity, not time.

He went back to his window-vigil over nothing and fell asleep
murmuring the biggest swear words he could remember. In his weak
mood they had the effect of a spanked boy's last whimpers.

He was a boy, and fate was spanking him hard. He could not have whom
he wanted, and he resolved that there was nothing else in the world
to want. And all the time there was a girl sleeping out in Crotona
Park on the ground. She was pretty and dangerous, another flower
tossing on the girl-tree.




CHAPTER XIII

When the daylight whitened the black air it found Dyckman sprawled
along his window-lounge and woke him to the disgust of another
morning. He had to reach up and draw a curtain between his eyes
and the hateful sun.

But Kedzie had only her vigilant arm. It slipped down across her
brow like a watchful nurse coming in on tiptoe to protect a fretful
patient from broken sleep.

Kedzie slept on and on, till at length the section of Crotona Park
immediately beneath her refused to adapt itself longer to her
squirming search for soft spots. She sat up in startled confusion
at the unfamiliar ceiling. The wall-paper was not at all what she
always woke to. At first she guessed that she must have fallen out
of bed with a vengeance. Then she decided she had fallen out of doors
and windows as well, and into the front yard.

No, these bushes were not those bushes. That beech almost overhead,
seen from below by sleep-thick eyes, was an amazing thing.

She had drowsy childhood memories of being carried up-stairs by her
father and put to bed by her mother. Once or twice she had wakened
with her head to the footboard and endured agonies of confusion
before she got the universe turned round right. But how had she got
outdoors? Her father had never carried her down-stairs and left her
in the yard before.

At last she saw that she had fallen not merely out of bed and out of
doors, but out of town. She remembered her wanderings and her lying
down to sleep. She wondered who had taken her hat off for her.

She looked about for somebody to ask questions of. There was nobody
to be seen. There were a few housetops peering over the horizon
at her.

English sparrows were jumping here and there, engaged in their
everlasting spats, but she could not ask them.

Kedzie sat up straight, her arms back of her, her feet erect on
their heels at a distance, like suspicious squirrels. She yawned
against the back of her wrist and began to remember her escapade.
She gurgled with laughter, but she felt rumpled and lame, and not
in the least like Miss Anita Adair. She almost wished she were at
home, gazing from her bed to the washstand and hearing her mother
puttering about in the kitchen making breakfast; to Kedzie's young
heart it was the superlative human luxury to know you ought to get
up and not get up.

She clambered to her feet and made what toilet she could while
her seclusion lasted. She shook out her skirts like feathers,
and shoved her disheveled hair up under her hat as she had always
swept the dust under the rug.

She was overjoyed to find that her hand-bag had not been stolen.
The powder-puff would serve temporarily for a wash-basin. The small
change in her purse would postpone starvation or surrender for
a while.

She walked out of her sleeping-porch to the path. A few people were
visible now--workmen and workwomen taking a short-cut, and leisurely
gentlemen out of a job already beginning their day's work of holding
down benches. No one asked any questions or showed any interest
in Kedzie.

She found a street-car line, made sure that the car she took was
bound down-town, and resumed her effort to recapture New York.

Nearly everybody was reading one morning paper or another, but Kedzie
was not interested in the news. One man kept brushing her nose with
his paper. She was angry at his absence of mind, but she did not
notice that her nose was being annoyed by her own name in the
head-lines.

She rode and rode and rode till her hunger distracted her. She passed
restaurant after restaurant, till at last she could stand the famine
no longer. She got down from the car and walked till she came to
a bakery lunch-room entitled, "The Bon-Ton Bakery by Joe Gidden." It
was another like the one she ate in the day before. The same kind of
waiter was there, a dish-thrower with the manners of a hostler.

But Kedzie was so meek after her night on the ground that she was
flattered by his grin. "Skip" Magruder was his title, as she learned
in time. The "Skip" came to him from a curious impediment in his gait
that caused him to drop a stitch now and then.

Not long afterward Kedzie was so far beyond this poor hamstrung
stable-soul that she could not hear the word _skip_ without
blushing as if it were an indecency. It was an indecency, too, that
such a little Aphrodite should be reduced to a love-affair with such
a dismal Vulcan. But if it could happen on Olympus, it could happen
on earth.

Proximity is said to breed love, but priority has its virtues no less.
Skip Magruder was the first New-Yorker to help Kedzie in her hour
of dismay, and she thought him a great and powerful being profoundly
informed about the city of her dreams.

Skip did know a thing or two--possibly three. He was a New-Yorker
of a sort, and he had his New York as well as Jim Dyckman had his
or Peter Cheever his. He sized Kedzie up for the ignoramus she was,
but he was good to her in so far as his skippy faculties permitted.
He dropped the paper he was reading when she wandered in, and won
her at once by not calling her "Cutie."

"W'at 'll y'ave, lady?" he said as he skirled a plate and a glass of
ice-water along the oil-cloth with exquisite skill, slapped a knife
and fork and spoon alongside, and flipped her a check to be punched
as she ordered, and a fly-frequented bill of fare to order from.

Kedzie was stumped by the array of dishes. Skip volunteered his aid
--suggested "A nor'nge, ham 'n'eggs, a plate o' wheats, anna cuppa
corfee."

"All right," said Kedzie, wondering how much such a barbecue
would cost.

Skip went to bellow the order through a sliding door and grab it when
it should be pushed forth from a mysterious realm. Kedzie picked up
a newspaper that Skip had picked up after some early client left it.

Kedzie glanced at the front page and saw that the Germans had taken
three towns and the Allies one trench. She could not pronounce
the towns, and trenches meant nothing in her life. She was about to
toss the paper aside when a head-line caught her eye. She read with
pardonable astonishment:

SPANKED GIRL GONE

Beautiful Kedzie Thropp, Western Society Belle, Deserts Her Wealthy
Parents at Biltmore and Vanishes

POLICE OF NATION IN SEARCH

Kedzie felt the world blow up about her. Her name was in the New York
papers the second morning of her first visit! Her father and mother
were called wealthy! She was a society belle! Who could ever hereafter
deny these ideal splendors, now that there had been a piece in the
paper about them?

But dog on it! Why did they have to go and do such a thing as put
in about her being spanked? She blushed all over with rage. She had
once planned to go back home with wondrous gossip of her visit to
the big city. She had seen herself gloating over the other girls
who had never been to a big city.

Now they would all give her the laugh. The boys would make up rhymes
and yell them at her from a safe distance. She could kill her father
for being so mean to her. It was bad enough to hurt her as he did,
but to go and tattle when her back was turned was simply awful. She
could never go home now. She'd rather die.

Yet the paper said the police of the nation were searching for her.
She understood how Eliza felt with the bloodhounds after her. She
must keep out of sight of the police. One good thing was the picture
of her that they printed in the paper. It was not her picture at all,
and nothing like her. Besides, she had selected a new name. "Anita
Adair" was a fine disguise. It sounded awful swell, too. It sounded
like her folks had money. She was glad to be rid of "Kedzie Thropp."
She would never be Kedzie Thropp again.

Then the waiter came with her breakfast. It smelled so grand that
she forgot to be afraid for a while. The coffee smoked aroma; the
ham and eggs were fragrant; and the orange sent up a golden fume
of delight.

Skip entered into conversation as she entered into the orange.
"Where you woikin' now?" he said.

Kedzie did not know what his dialect meant at first. When she learned
that "woikin'" was the same as "wurrkin"' she confessed that she
had no job. She trembled lest he should recognize her from the paper.
He eyed her narrowly and tried to flirt with her across the very
head-lines that told who she was.

She could not be sure that he did not know her. He might be
a detective in disguise looking for a reward.

Skip had been reading about Kedzie when she came in. But he
never dreamed that she was she. He befriended her, however, out
of the goodness of his heart and the desire to retain her in
the neighborhood--also out of respect for the good old brass rule,
"Do good unto others now, so that they will do good to you later."

Slap told Kedzie that he knew a place right near where a goil was
wanted. When he told her that it was a candy-store she was elated.
A candy-store was her idea of a good place to work.

Skip told Kedzie where to go and what to say, and to mention that
Skip sent her.

Skip also recommended lodgings next his own in the flat of Mr. and
Mrs. Rietzvoller, delicatessen merchants.

"Nice rooms reasonable," he said, "and I'll be near to look after
you."

"You're awful fresh, seems to me, on short acquaintance," was
Kedzie's stinging rebuke.

Skip laughed. "Didn't you see the special-delivery stamp on
me forehead? But I guess you're a goil can take care yourself."

Kedzie guessed she was. But she was in need of help. Where else
could she turn? Whom else had she for a beau in this multitude
of strangers? So she laughed encouragingly.

"All right. You're elected. Gimme the address."

Skip wrote it on one of the business cards of the bakery. He added:

"Another thing: I know a good expressman will rustle your trunk
over from--Where you boardin' at now?"

Kedzie flushed. She could hardly tell him that she had boarded
in a park up-town somewhere.

Skip saw that she was confused. He showed exquisite tact.

"I'm wise, goilie. She's holdin' your trunk out on you. I been
in the same boat m'self."

Kedzie was willing to let it go at that, but Skip pondered:

"But, say--that ain't goin' to make such a hell of a hit--scuse me,
lady--but I mean if you tell your new landlady about your trunk
bein' left on your old one, that ain't goin' to get you nothin' but
the door-slam in the snoot.... I tell you: tell her you just come
in on the train and your wardrobe-trunk is on the way unless it
got delayed in changin' cars at--oh, any old place. I guess you did
come in, at that, from Buffalo or Pittsboig or some them Western
joints, didn' you?"

Kedzie just looked at him. Her big eyes lied for her, and he
hastened to say:

"Well, scuse me nosin' in on your own business. Tell the landlady
what you want to, only tell her it was me sent you. That's as good
as a guarantee--that she'll have to wait for her money."

Kedzie laughed at his excruciating wit, but she was touched also
by his courtesy, and she told him he was awful kind and she was
terrible obliged.

That bowled him over. But when she rose with stateliness and,
reaching for her money, offered to pay, he had the presence of mind
to snarl, amiably:

"Ah, ferget it and beat it. This meal's on me, and wishing you many
happy returns of the same."

He certainly was one grand gentleman. The proprietor was away,
and Skip could afford to be generous.

Kedzie left him and found the landlady and got a home; and then she
found the store and got a job. For a time she was in Eden. The doleful
proprietor's doleful wife was usually down-cellar making ice-cream
while her husband was out in the kitchen cooking candy. Kedzie was
free to guzzle soda-water at her will. Her forefinger and thumb went
along the stacks of candy, dipping like a robin's beak. She was
forever licking her fingers and brushing marshmallow dust off her
chest. She usually had a large, square caramel outlined in one round
cheek.

But the ecstasy did not abide. Kedzie began to realize why Mr. and
Mrs. Fleissig were sad. Sweets were a sour business; the people who
came into the shop were mainly children who spent whole half-hours
choosing a cent's worth of burnt sugar, or young, foolish girls who
giggled into the soda bubbles, or housewives ordering ice-cream for
Sunday.

If a young man appeared it was always to buy a box of candy for
some other girl. It made Kedzie cynical to see him haggle and ponder,
trying to make the maximum hit with a minimum of ammunition. It made
her more distrustful to see young men trying to flirt with her while
they bought tributes of devotion to somebody else. But Kedzie also
found out that several of the neighborhood girls accepted candy
from several gentlemen simultaneously, and she drew many cynical
conclusions from the candy business.

Skip Magruder was attentive and took her out to moving pictures
when he was free. In return for the courtesy she took her meals at
"The Bon-Ton Bakery by Joe Gidden." Whenever he dared, Skip skipped
the change. He could always slip her an extra titbit.

On that account she had to be a little extra gracious to him when
he took her to the movies. Holding hands didn't hurt.

Not a week had gone before Skip had rivals. He caught Kedzie in
deceptions. She kept him guessing, and the poor fool suffered
the torments and thrills of jealousy. A flip young fellow named Hoke,
agent for a jobber in ice-cream cones, and a tubby old codger named
Kalteyer, who facetiously claimed to own a chewing-gum mine, were
added competitors for Kedzie's smiles, while Skip teetered between
homicide and suicide.

Skip was wretched, and Kedzie was enthralled by her own success.
She had conquered New York. She had a job in a candy-store, a room
in a flat with the family of a delicatessen merchant; she had as
many flirtations as she could carry, and an increasing waiting-list.
What more could woman ask?

And all this was in far upper Third Avenue. She had not yet been
down to First Street. In fact, she was in New York two weeks before
she got as far south as 100th Street. She had almost forgotten that
she had ever dwelt elsewhere than in New York. Her imitative instinct
was already exchanging her Western burr for a New York purr.

Her father and mother would hardly have known her voice if they
had heard it. And they would hardly meet her, since they had
given her up and gone back home, far sadder, no wiser, much poorer.
They did not capture the insurance money, and they had no rewards
to offer for Kedzie.

Now and then a Kedzie would be reported in some part of the country,
and a wild paragraph would be printed about her. Now and then she
would be found dead in a river or would be traced as a white slave
drugged and sold and shipped to the Philippine Islands. The stories
were heinously cruel to her father and mother, who mourned her
in Nimrim and repented dismally of their harshness to the best
and pirtiest girl ever lived.

Meanwhile Kedzie sold candy and ate less and less of it. She began
to see more pretentious phases of city life and to be discontent
with her social triumph. She began to understand how cheap her lovers
were. She called them "mutts." She came to suffer agonies of remorse
at the liberties she had given them.

Mr. Kalteyer, the chewing-gum prince, in an effort to overcome
the handicap of weight and age which Mr. Hoke did not carry, told
Kedzie that her picture ought to be on every counter in the world,
and he could get it there. He'd love to see her presented as a classy
dame showing her ivories and proving how "beneficiary" his chewing-gum
was for the teeth as well as the digestion.

Kedzie told the delicatessen merchant's wife all about his glorious
promises, and she said, very sagely:

"Bevare vit dose bo'quet fellers. Better as so many roses is it
he should brink you a slice roastbif once. Lengwidge of flowers is
nice, but money is de svell talker. Take it by me, money is de svell
talker!"

Kedzie was glad of such wisdom, and she convinced Mr. Kalteyer
that it took more than conversation to buy her favor. He kept
his word under some duress, and took Kedzie to Mr. Eben E. Kiam,
a manufacturer of show-cards and lithographs, with an advertising
agency besides.

Mr. Edam studied her poses and smiles for days before he got
her at her best. An interested observer and a fertile suggester
in his office was a young Mr. Gilfoyle, who wrote legends for
show-cards, catch-lines for new wares, and poems, if pressed.

Gilfoyle had the poet's prophetic eye, and he murmured to Mr. Kiam
that there were millions in "Miss Adair's" face and form if they were
worked right. He took pains to let Kedzie overhear this. It pleased
her. Millions were something she decided she would like.

Gilfoyle developed wonderfully in the sun of Kedzie's interest. He
told Kalteyer that there was no money in handling chewing-gum in
a small way as a piker; what he wanted was a catchy name, a special
selling-argument, and a national publicity campaign. He advised
Kalteyer to borrow a lot of money at the banks and sling himself.

Kalteyer breathed hard. Gilfoyle was assailed by an epilepsy
of inspirations. In place of "Kalteyer's Peerless Gum," he proposed
the enthralling title, "Breathasweeta." Others had mixed pepsin
in their edible rubber goods of various flavors. Gilfoyle proposed
perfume!

Kalteyer was astounded at the boy's genius. He praised him till
Kedzie began to think him worth cultivation, especially as he proposed
to flood the country with portraits of Kedzie as the Breathasweeta
Girl.

The muse of advertising swooped down and whispered to Gilfoyle
the delicious lines to be printed under Kedzie's smile.

  Kiss me again. Who are you?
  You use Breathasweeta. You must be all right.

Kalteyer was swept off his feet. He ran to the bank while Kiam raised
Gilfoyle's salary.

The life-size card of Kedzie was made with a prop to hold it up. It
was so much retouched and altered in the printing that her own father,
seeing it in a Nimrim drugstore, never recognized it. Nearly every
drug-store in the country set up a Kedzie in its show-window.

The Breathasweeta came into such demand that Kalteyer was temporarily
bankrupted by prosperity. He had to borrow so much money to float
his wares that he had none for Kedzie's entertainment.

Mr. Kiam took her up as a valuable model for advertising purposes.

He aroused in Kedzie an inordinate appetite for pictures of herself.
All day long she was posed in costumes for various calendars, as
a farmer's daughter, as a society queen, as a camera girl, as
a sausage nymph, and as the patron saint of a brewery.

In a week she had arrived at classic poses in Greek robes. One by one
these were abbreviated, till Kedzie was being very generally revealed
to the public eye.

The modesty her mother had whipped into her was gradually unlearned
step by step, garment by garment, without Kedzie's noticing the change
in her soul.




CHAPTER XIV

Just about the hour of that historic day when Kedzie was running away
from her father and mother Prissy Atterbury was springing his great
story about Jim Dyckman and Charity.

Prissy had gone on to his destination, the home of the Winnsboros
in Greenwich, but he arrived late, and the house guests were too
profoundly absorbed in their games of auction to make a fit audience
for such a story. So Prissy saved it for a correct moment, though he
nearly burst with it. He slept ill that night from indigestion due
to retention of gossip.

The next forenoon he watched as the week-end prisoners dawdled down
from their gorgeous cells, to a living-room as big and as full
of seats as a hotel lobby. They threw themselves, on lounges and
huge chairs and every form of encouragement to indolence. They threw
themselves also on the mercy and the ingenuity of their hostess.
But Mrs. Winnsboro expected her guests to bring their own plans
and take care of themselves. They were marooned.

When the last malingerer arrived with yawns still unfinished, Prissy
seized upon a temporary hush and began to laugh. Pet Bettany, who was
always sullen before luncheon, grumbled:

"What ails you, Priss? Just seeing some joke you heard last night?"

Priss snapped, "I was thinking."

"You flatter yourself," said Pet. "But I suppose you've got to
get it off your chest. I'll be the goat. What is it?"

Prissy would have liked to punish the cat by not telling her a single
word of it, but he could not withhold the scandal another moment.

"Well, I'll tell you the oddest thing you ever heard in all
your life."

Pretending to tell it to Pet, he was reaching out with voice and eyes
to muster the rest. He longed for a megaphone and cursed such big
rooms.

"I was passing through the Grand Central to take my train up here,
you understand, and who should I see walk in from an incoming
express, you understand, but--who, I say, should I see but--oh,
you never would guess--you simply never would guess. Nev-vir-ir!"

"Who cares who you saw," said Pet, and viciously started to change
the subject, so that Prissy had to jump the prelude.

"It was Jim Dyckman. Well, in he comes from the train, you
understand, and looks about among the crowd of people waiting
for the train--to meet people, you understand."

Pet broke in, frantically: "Yes, I understand! But if you say
'understand' once more I'll scream and chew up the furniture!"

Prissy regarded her with patient pity and went on:

"Jim didn't see me, you un--you see--and--but just as I was about
to say hello to him he turns around and begins to stare into the
crowd of other people getting off the same train that he got off, you
underst--Well, I had plenty of time for my train, so I waited--not
to see what was up, you un--I do say it a lot, don't I? Well, I
waited, and who should come along but--well, this you never would
guess--not in a month of Sundays."

A couple of flanneled oaves impatient for the tennis-court stole
away, and Pet said,

"Speed it up, Priss; they're walking out on you."

"Well, they won't walk out when they know who the woman was. Jim
was waiting for--he was waiting for--"

He paused a moment. Nobody seemed interested, and so he hastened
to explode the name of the woman.

"Charity Coe! It was Charity Coe Jim was waiting for! They had come
in on the same train, you understand, and yet they didn't come up
the platform together. Why? I ask you. Why didn't they come up
the platform together? Why did Jim come along first and wait? Was
it to see if the coast was clear? Now, I ask you!"

There was respect enough paid to Prissy's narrative now. In fact,
the name of Charity in such a story made the blood of everybody
run cold--not unpleasantly--yet not altogether pleasantly.

Some of the guests scouted Prissy's theory. Mrs. Neff was there,
and she liked Charity. She puffed contempt and cigarette-smoke at
Atterbury, and murmured, sweetly, "Prissy, you're a dirty little
liar, and your long tongue ought to be cut out and nailed up on
a wall."

Prissy nearly wept at the injustice of such skepticism. It was Pet
Bettany, of all people, who came to his rescue with credulity. She
was sincerely convinced. A voluptuary and intrigante herself, she
believed that her own ideas of happiness and her own impulses were
shared by everybody, and that people who frowned on vice were either
hypocrites or cowards.

She could not imagine how small a part and how momentary a part evil
ambitions play in the lives of clean, busy souls like Charity. In
fact, Pet flattered herself as to her own wickedness, and pretended
to be worse than she was, in order to establish a reputation for
candor.

Vice has its hypocrisies as well as virtue.

Pet had long been impatient of the celebration of Charity Coe's
saintly attributes, and it had irked her to see so desirable
a catch as Jim Dyckman squandering his time on a woman who was
already married and liked it. He might have been interested in Pet
if Charity had let him alone.

Pet also was stirred with the detestation of sin in orderly people
that actuates disorderly people. She broke out with surprising
earnestness.

"Well, I thought as much! So Charity Coe is human, after all,
the sly devil! She's fooling even that foxy husband of hers. She's
playing the same game, too--and a sweet little foursome it makes."

She laughed so abominably that Mrs. Neff threw away her cigarette
and growled:

"Oh, shut up, Pet; you make me sick! Let's go out in the air."

Mrs. Neff was old enough to say such things, and Pet dampered
her noise a trifle. But she held Prissy back and made him recount
his adventure again. They had a good laugh over it--Prissy giggling
and hugging one knee, Pet whooping with that peasant mirth of hers.

The same night, at just about the hour when Kedzie Thropp was
falling asleep in Crotona Park and Jim Dyckman was sulking alone
in his home and Charity was brooding alone in hers, Prissy Atterbury
was delighted to see a party of raiders from another house-party
motor up to the Winnsboros' and demand a drink.

Prissy was a trifle glorious by this time. He had been frequenting
a bowl of punch subtly liquored, but too much sweetened. He leaned
heavily on a new-comer as he began his story. The new-comer pushed
Prissy aside with scant courtesy.

"Ah, tell us a new one!" he said. "That's ancient history!"

"What-what-what," Prissy stammered. "Who told you s'mush?"

"Pet Bet. telephoned it to us this morning. I heard it from three
other people to-day."

"Well, ain't that abslooshly abdominable."

Prissy began to cry softly. He knew the pangs of an author
circumvented by a plagiarist.

The next morning his head ached and he rang up an eye-opener or
two. The valet found him in violet pajamas, holding his jangling
head and moaning:

"There was too much sugar in the punch."

He remembered Pet's treachery, and he groaned that there was too much
vinegar in life. But he determined to fight for his story, and he did.
Long after Pet had turned her attention to other reputations, Prissy
was still peddling his yarn.

The story went circlewise outward and onward like the influence of
a pebble thrown into a pool. Two people who had heard the story and
doubted it met; one told it to the other; the other said she had
heard it before; and they parted mutually supported and definitely
convinced that the rumor was fact. Repetition is confirmation, and
history is made up of just such self-propelled lies--fact founded
on fiction.

We create for ourselves a Nero or a Cleopatra, a Washington or
a Molly Pitcher, from the gossip of enemies or friends or imaginers,
and we can be sure of only one thing--that we do not know the true
truth.

But we also do wrong to hold gossip in too much discredit. It gives
life fascination, makes the most stupid neighbors interesting. It
keeps up the love of the great art of fiction and the industry of
character-analysis. A small wonder that human beings are addicted
to it, when we are so emphatically assured that heaven itself is
devoted to it, and that we are under the incessant espionage of our
Deity, while the angels are eavesdroppers and reporters carrying
note-books in which they write with indelible ink the least things
we do or say or think.




CHAPTER XV

To see into other people's hearts and homes and lives is one of
the primeval instincts. In that curiosity all the sciences are
rooted; and it is a scientific impulse that makes us hanker to
get back of faces into brains, to push through words into thoughts,
and to ferret out of silences the emotions they smother.

Gossip is one of the great vibrations of the universe. Like rain,
it falls on the just and on the unjust; it ruins and it revives;
it quenches thirst; it makes the desert bloom with cactuses and
grotesque flowers, and it beats down violets and drowns little birds
in their nests.

Gossip was now awakening a new and fearful interest in Charity Coe
and Jim Dyckman.

Two women sitting at a hair-dresser's were discussing the gossip
according to Prissy through the shower of their tresses. The manicure
working on the nails of one of them glanced up at the coiffeur and
gasped with her eyes. The manicure whispered it to her next customer
--who told it to her husband in the presence of their baby. The baby
was not interested, but the nurse was, and when she rode out with
the baby she told the chauffeur. The chauffeur used the story as
a weapon of scorn to tease Jim Dyckman's new valet with. Jules would
have gone into a frenzy of denial, but Jules was by now wearing the
livery of his country in the trenches. The new valet--Dallam was
his name--tried to sell the story to a scavenger-editor who did not
dare print it yet, though he put it in the safe where he kept such
material against the day of need. Also he paid Dallam a retainer
to keep him in touch with the comings and goings of Dyckman.

And thus the good name of a good woman went through the mud like
a white flounce torn and dragged and unnoticed. For of course
Charity never dreamed that any one was giving such importance to
the coincidence of her railroad journey with Jim Dyckman.

No more did Dyckman. He knew all too well what gulfs had parted
him from Charity even while he sat with her in the train. He had
suffered such rebuffs from her that he was bitterly aggrieved. He
was telling himself that he hated Charity for her stinginess of
soul at the very time that the whispers were damning her too great
generosity in his favor.

While gossip was recruiting its silent armies against her for her
treason to her husband, Charity was wondering why her loyalty to
him was so ill paid. She did not suspect Cheever of treason to her.
That was so odious that she simply could not give it thought room.

She stumbled on a newspaper article, the same perennial essay in
recurrence, to the effect that many wives lose their husbands by
neglect of their own charms. It was full of advice as to the tricks
by which a woman may lure her spouse back to the hearth and fasten
him there, combining domestic vaudeville with an interest in his
business, but relying above all on keeping Cupid's torch alight by
being Delilah every day.

Charity Coe was startled. She wondered if she were losing Cheever
by neglecting herself. She began to pay more heed to her dress
and her hats, her hair, her complexion, her smile, her general
attractiveness.

Cheever noticed the strange alteration, and it bewildered him. He
could not imagine why his wife was flirting with him. She made it
harder for him to get away to Zada, but far more eager to. He did
not like Charity at all, in that impersonation. Neither did Charity.
She hated herself after a day or two of wooing her official wooer.
"You ought to be arrested," she told her mirror-self.

There were plays and novels that counseled a neglected wife to show
an interest in another man. Charity was tempted to use Jim Dyckman
as a decoy for her own wild duck; but Dyckman had sailed away in
his new yacht, on a cruise with his yacht club.

The gossip did not die in his absence. It oozed along like a dark
stream of fly-gathering molasses. Eventually it came to the notice
of a woman who was Zada's dearest friend and hated her devotedly.

She told it to Zada as a taunt, to show her that Zada's Mr. Cheever
was as much deceived as deceiving. Zada, of course, was horribly
delighted. She promptly told Cheever that his precious wife had been
having a lovely affair with Jim Dyckman. Cheever showed her where
she stood by forbidding her to mention his wife's name. He told Zada
that, whatever his wife might be, she was good as gold.

He left Zada with great dignity and made up his mind to kill Jim
Dyckman. In his fury he was convinced of the high and holy and
cleanly necessity of murder. All of our basest deeds are always
done with the noblest motives. Cheever forgot his own wickednesses
in his mission to punish Dyckman. The assassination of Dyckman, he
was utterly certain, would have been what Browning called "a spittle
wiped from the beard of God."

But he was not permitted to carry out his mission, for he learned
that Dyckman was somewhere on the Atlantic, far beyond Cheever's
reach.

Disappointed bitterly at having to let him live awhile, Cheever
went to his home, to denounce his wife. He found her reading. She
was overjoyed to see him. He stared at her, trying to realize her
inconceivable depravity.

"Hello, honey!" she cried. "What's wrong? You've got a fever,
I'm sure. I'm going to take your temperature."

From her hospital experience she carried a little thermometer
in her hand-bag. She had it by her and rose to put it under his
tongue. He struck it from her, and she stared at him. He stood
quivering like an overdriven horse. He called her a name highly
proper in a kennel club, but inappropriate to the boudoir.

"You thought you'd get away with it, didn't you? You thought you'd
get away with it, didn't you?" he panted.

"Get away with what, honey?" she said, thinking him delirious. She
had seen a hundred men shrieking in wild frenzies from brains too
hot.

"You and Dyckman! humph!" he raged. "So you and Jim Dyckman sneaked
off to the mountains together, did you? And came back on the same
train, eh? And thought I'd never find it out. Why, you--"

What he would have said she did not wait to hear. She was human,
after all, and had thousands of plebeian and primitive ancestors
and ancestresses. They jumped into her muscles with instant instinct.
She slapped his face so hard that it rocked out of her view.

She stood and fumbled at her tingling palm, aghast at herself and
at the lightning-stroke from unknown distances that shattered her
whole being. Then she began to sob.

Peter Cheever's aching jaw dropped, and he gazed at her befuddled.
His illogical belief in her guilt was illogically converted to a
profound conviction of her innocence. The wanton whom he had accused
was metamorphosed into a slandered angel who would not, could not
sin. In his eyes she was hopelessly pure.

"Thank God!" he moaned. "Oh, thank God for one clean woman in
this dirty world!"

He caught her bruised hand and began to kiss it and pour tears on it.
And she looked down at his beautiful bent head and laid her other
hand on it in benison.

It is one way of reconciling families.

Cheever was so filled with remorse that he was tempted to write
Jim Dyckman a note of apology. That was one of the few temptations
he ever resisted.

Now he was going to kill everybody who had been dastard enough
to believe and spread the scandal he had so easily believed himself.
But he would have had to begin with Zada. He was afraid of Zada. He
enjoyed a few days of honeymoon with Charity.

He dodged Zada on the telephone, and he gave Mr. Hudspeth
instructions to say that he was always out in case of a call
from "Miss You Know."

"I know," Mr. Hudspeth answered.

One morning, at an incredibly early hour for Zada, she walked into
his office and asked Mr. Hudspeth to retire--also the suspiciously
good-looking stenographer. Then Zada said:

"Peterkin, it's time you came home."

His laugh was hard and sharp. She took out a little weapon. She had
managed to evade the Sullivan law against the purchase or possession
of weapons. Peter was nauseated. Zada was calm.

"Peterkin," she said, "did you read yesterday about that woman who
shot a man and then herself?"

Peter had read it several times recently--the same story with
different names. It had long been a fashionable thing: the disprized
lover murders the disprizing lover and then executes the murderer.
It was expensive to rugs and cheated lawyers and jurors out of fees,
but saved the State no end of money.

Cheever surrendered.

"I'll come home," he said, gulping the last quinine word. It seemed
to him the most loyal thing he could do at the moment. It would have
been unpardonably unkind to Charity to let himself be spattered all
over his office and the newspapers by a well-known like Zada.

Once "home" with Zada, he took the pistol away from her. But she
laughed and said:

"I can always buy another one, deary."

Thus Zada re-established her rights. Cheever was very sorry. He
cursed himself for being so easily led astray. He wondered why it
was his lot to be so fickle and incapable of loyalty. He did not
know. He could only accept himself as he was. Oneself is the most
wonderful, inexplicable thing in the world.

So Charity's brief honeymoon waned, blinked out again.

Jim Dyckman came home from the yacht cruise in blissless ignorance
of all this frustrated drama. He longed to see Charity, but dared
not. He took sudden hope from remembering her determination to go
back abroad to her nursery of wounded soldiers.

He had an inspiration. He would go abroad also--as a member of
the aviation, corps. He already owned a fairly good hydro-aeroplane
which had not killed him yet--he was a good swimmer, and lucky.

He ordered the best war-eagle that could be made, and began to take
lessons in military maps, bird's-eye views, and explosives. He was
almost happy. He would improve on the poet's dream-ideal, "Were I
a little bird, I'd fly to thee."

He would be a big bird, and he'd fly with his Thee. He would call on
Charity in France when they both had an evening off, and take her up
into the clouds for a sky-ride.

He had an ambition. At worst, he could die for France. It is splendid
to have something to die for. It makes life worth living.

He was so ecstatic in his first flight with his finished machine
that he fell and broke one of its wings, also one of his own. Charity
heard of his accident and called on him at his mother's house. He
told her his plans.

"Too bad!" she sighed. "I'm not going abroad. Besides, I couldn't see
you if I did."

Then she told him what Cheever had said, but not how she had slapped.
Jim was wild. He rose on his bad arm and fell back again, groaning:

"I'll kill him for that."

Everybody is always going to kill everybody. Sometimes somebody does
kill somebody. But Dyckman went over to the great majority. Charity
begged him not to kill her husband, and to please her he promised
not to.

Charity, having insured her husband's life, said: "And now, Jimmie
old boy, I mustn't see you any more. Gossip has linked our names. We
must unlink them. My husband and you will butcher each other if I'm
not careful, so it's good-by for keeps, and God bless you, isn't it?
Promise?"

"I'll promise anything, if you'll go on away and let me alone,"
Jim groaned, his broken arm being quite sufficient trouble for him
at the moment.

Charity laughed and went on away. She was deeply comforted by
a promise which she knew he would not keep.

Dyckman himself, as soon as his broken bones ceased to shake his soul,
groaned with loneliness and despaired of living without Charity--vowed
in his sick misery that nobody could ever come between them. He
could not, would not, live without her.

Still the gossip oozed along that he had not lived without her.




CHAPTER XVI

Kedzie had come to town with no social ambitions whatsoever beyond
a childish desire to be enormously rich and marry a beautiful prince.
Her ideal of heaven at first was an eternal movie show interrupted
at will by several meals a day, incessant soda-water and ice-cream
and a fellow or two to spoon with, and some up-to-date duds--most
of all, several pairs of those white-topped shoes all the girls
in town were wearing.

The time would shortly come when Kedzie would abhor the word
_swell_ and despise the people who used it, violently forgetting
that she had herself used it. She would soon be overheard saying
to a mixed girl of her mixed acquaintance: "Take it from me, chick,
when you find a dame calls herself a lady, she ain't. Nobody who
is it says it, and if you want to be right, lay off such words as
_swell_ and _classy_."

Later, she would be finding that it took something still more than
avoiding the word _lady_ to deserve it. She would writhe to
believe that she could never quite make herself exact with the term.
She would hate those who had been born and made to the title, and
she would revert at times to common instincts with fierce anarchy.

But one must go forward before one can backslide, and Kedzie was
on the way up the slippery hill.

She had greatly improved the quality of her lodgings, her suitors,
and her clothes. Her photographic successes in risky exposures had
brought her a marked increase of wages. She wore as many clothes
as she could in private, to make up for her self-denial before
the camera. Her taste in dress was soubrettish and flagrant, but
it was not small-town. She was beginning to dislike ice-cream soda
and candy and to call for beer and Welsh rabbit. She would soon
be liking salads with garlic and Roquefort cheese in the dressing.
She was mounting with splendid assiduity toward the cigarette and
the high-ball. There was no stopping Kedzie. She kept rising on
stepping-stones of her dead selves.

Landladies are ladder-rungs of progress, too; Kedzie's history
might have been traced by hers.

Her camera career had led her from the flat of the delicatessen
merchant, through various shabby lairs, into the pension of a
vaudeville favorite of prehistoric fame. The house was dilapidated,
and the brownstone front had the moth-eaten look of the plush
furniture within.

Mrs. Jambers was as fat as if she fed on her own boarders, but she
was once no less a person than Mrs. Trixie Jambers Coogan, of Coogan
and Jambers. She had once evoked wild applause at Tony Pastor's by
her clog-dancing.

There was another dancer there, an old grenadier of a woman who
had been famous in her time as a _premiere danseuse_ at
the opera. Mrs. Bottger had spent a large part of her early life
on one toe, but now she could hardly balance herself sitting down.
She held on to the table while she ate. She did not look as if
she needed to eat any more.

Kedzie was proud to know people who had been as famous as these two
said they had been, but Bottger and Jambers used to fight bitterly
over their respective schools of expression. Bottger insisted that
the buck-and-wing and the double shuffle and other forms of jiggery
were low. Jambers insisted that the ballet was immoral and, what
was more, insincere. Mrs. Bottger was furious at the latter charge,
but the former was now rather flattering. She used secretly to take
out old photographs of herself as a slim young thing in tights with
one toe for support and the other resting on one knee. She would
gloat over these as a miser over his gold; and she would shake her
finger at her quondam self and scold it lovingly--"You wicked little
thing, you!" Then she would hastily move it out of the reach of her
tears. It was safe under the eaves of her bosom against her heart.

It was a merry war, with dishonors even, till a new-comer appeared,
a Miss Eleanor Silsby, who taught the ultimate word in dancing; she
admitted it herself. As she explained it, she went back to nature
for her inspiration. Her pupils dressed as near to what nature
had provided them with as they really dared. Miss Silsby said that
they were trying to catch the spirit of wind and waves and trees
and flowers, and translate it into the dance. They translated
seaweed and whitecaps and clouds into steps. Miss Silsby was booking
a few vaudeville dates "in order to bring the art of nature back
to the people and bring the people back to the art of nature." What
the people would do with it she did not explain--nor what the police
would do to them if they tried it.

Miss Silsby had by the use of the most high-sounding phrases
attained about the final word in candor. What clothes her pupils
wore were transparent and flighty. The only way to reveal more skin
would have been to grow it. Her pupils were much photographed in
airy attitudes on beaches, dancing with the high knee-action so much
prized in horses; flinging themselves into the air; curveting, with
the accent on the curve; clasping one another in groups of nymphish
innocence and artificial grace. It was all, somehow, so shocking for
its insincerity that its next to nudity was a minor consideration.
It was so full of affectation that it seemed quite lacking in the
dangers of passion.

So gradually indeed had the mania for disrobing spread about
the world that there was little or no shock to be had. People
generally assumed to be respectable took their children to see
the dances, even permitted them to learn them. According to Miss
Silsby's press-notices, "Members of wealthy and prominent families
are taking up the new art." And perhaps they were doing as well by
their children as more careful parents, since nothing is decent or
indecent except by acclamation, and if nudity is made commonplace,
there is one multitude of temptations removed from our curiosity.

But Bottger, whose ballet-tights and tulle skirt were once the
horror of all good people--Bottger was disgusted with the dances
of Miss Silsby, and said so.

Miss Silsby was merely amused by Bottger's hostility. She scorned
her scorn, and with the utmost scientific and ethnological support
declared that clothes were immoral in origin, and the cause
of immorality and extravagance, since they were not the human
integument. Jambers was not quite sure what "integument" was,
but she thanked God she had never had it in her family.

An interested onlooker and in-listener at these boarding-house battles
was Kedzie. By now she was weary of her present occupation--of course!
She was tired of photographs of herself, especially as they were
secured at the cost of long hours of posing under the hot skylight
of a photograph gallery. Miss Silsby gave Kedzie a pair of
complimentary seats to an entertainment at which the Silsby sirens
were to dance. Kedzie was swept away with envy of the hilarity,
the grace, the wild animal effervescence and elegance of motion.

She contrasted the vivacity of the dancer's existence with the
stupidity of her still-life poses. She longed to run and pirouette
and leap into the air. She wished she could kick herself in the back
of the head to music the way the Silsby girls did.

When she told this to Miss Silsby the next day Miss Silsby was
politely indifferent. Kedzie added:

"You know, I'm up on that classic stuff, too. Oh, yessum, Greek
costumes are just everyday duds to me."

"Indeed!" Miss Silsby exclaimed.

Kedzie showed her some trade photographs of herself as an Athenienne,
and Miss Silsby pondered. Although her dances were supposed to purify
and sweeten the soul, one of her darlings had so fiendish a temper
that she had torn out several Psyche knots. She was the demurest of
all in seeming when she danced, but she was uncontrollably jealous.

Miss Silsby saw that Kedzie's pout had commercial value. She
invited Kedzie to join her troupe. And Kedzie did. The wages were
small, but the world was new. She became one of the most attractive
of the dancers. But once more the rehearsals and the long hours
of idleness wore out her enthusiasm. She hated the regularity
of the performances; every afternoon and evening she must express
raptures she did not feel, by means of laborious jumpings and
runnings to the same music. And she abominated the requirement
to keep kicking herself in the back of the head.

Even the thrill of clotheslessness became stupid. It was disgusting
not to have beautiful gowns to dance in. Zada L'Etoile and others had
a new costume for every dance. Kedzie had one tiresome hip-length
shift and little else. As usual, poor Kedzie found that realization
was for her the parody of anticipation.

Kedzie's new art danced into her life a few new suitors, but they
came at a time when she was almost imbecile over Thomas Gilfoyle, the
advertising bard. He was the first intellectual man she had met--that
is, he was intellectual compared with any other of her men friends.
He could read and write something besides business literature.
In fact, he was a fellow of startling ideas. He called himself
a socialist. What the socialists would have called him it would be
hard to say; they are given to strong language.

Kedzie had known in Nimrim what church socials were, for they were
about the height of Nimrim excitement. But young Mr. Gilfoyle was not
a church socialist. He detested all creeds and all churches and said
things about them and about religion that at first made Kedzie look
up at the ceiling and dodge. But no brimstone ever broke through
the plaster and she grew used to his diatribes.

She had never met one of these familiar enough figures before, and
she was vaguely stirred by his chantings in behalf of humanity. He
adored the poor laborers, though he did not treat the office-boy well
and he was not gallant to the scrub-woman. But his theories were as
beautiful as music, and he intoned them with ringing oratory. Kedzie
did not know what he was talking about, any more than she knew what
Caruso was singing about when she turned him on in Mrs. Jambers's
phonograph, but his melodies put her heart to its paces, and so did
Gilfoyle's.

Gilfoyle wrote her poems, too, real poems not meant for publication
at advertising rates. Kedzie had never had anybody commit poetry
at her before. It lifted her like that Biltmore elevator and sent
her heart up into her head. He lauded Kedzie's pout as well as her
more saltant expressions. He voiced a belief that life in a little
hut with her would be luxury beyond the contemptible stupidities
of life in a palace with another. Kedzie did not care for the hut
detail, but the idolatry of so "brainy" a man was inspiring.

Kedzie and Gilfoyle were mutually afraid: she of his intellect, he
of her beauty and of her very fragility. Of course, he called her
by her new name, "Miss Adair." Later he implored the priceless joy
of calling her by her first name.

Gilfoyle feared to ask this privilege in prose, and so he put it
in verse. Kedzie found it in her mail at the stage door. She huddled
in a corner of the big undressing-room where the nymphs prepared for
their task. The young rowdies kept peeking over her shoulder and
snatching at her letter, but when finally she read it aloud to them
as a punishment and a triumph, they were stricken with awe. It ran
thus:

  Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you "Anita"?
  Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.

Kedzie stumbled over this, because she had not yet eradicated
the Western final "r" from her pronunciation. She thought Mr.
Gilfoyle was awful swell because he dropped it naturally. But she
read on, scrambling over some of the words the way a horse jumps
a fence one rail too high.

  You are so adorable
  I find it deplorable,
      Absurd and abnormal.
      To cling to the formal
  'Twere such a good omen
  To drop the cognomen.
      So I beg you to promise
      That you'll call me "Thomas,"
  Or better yet, "Tommie,"
  Instead of th' abomi-
      Nable "Mr. Gilfoyle."
      You can, and you will foil
  My torments Mephistian
  By using my Christian
      Name and permitting Yours Truly
      To call you yours too-ly.

  Miss Adair,
  Hear my prayer
  Do I dare
      Call my love when I meet her
      "Anita"? Anita! Anita!!

In the silence that followed she whisked out a box of shrimp-pink
letter-paper she had bought at a drugstore. It was daintily ruled
in violet lines and had a mauve "A" at the top. It was called
"The Nobby Note," and so she knew that it was all right.

She wrote on it the simple but thrilling answer:

DEAR TOMMIE,--You bet your boots!
      ANITA.

By the time she had sealed and addressed the shrimpy envelope and
begun feverishly to make up for lost time in changing her costume,
the other girls had recovered a little from the suffocation of her
glory. One of them murmured:

"Say, Aneet, what is your first name? Your really truly one."

Another snarled, "What's your really truly last name?"

A third dryad whooped, "I bet it's Lizzie Smoots or Mag Wimpfhauser."

The others had other suggestions to howl, and Anita cowered in
silence, wondering if one of the fiends would not at any moment
guess "Kedzie Thropp."

The call to arms and legs cut short her torment, and for once
the music seemed appropriate. Never had she danced with such
lyricism.

Gilfoyle had the presence of mind to be waiting in the alley after
the matinee, and took from her hand the note she was carrying to
the mail-box. When he read it he almost embraced her right there.

They took a street-car to Mrs. Jambers's boarding-house, but cruel
disappointment waited for them. Another boarder was entertaining
her gentleman friend in the parlor. Kedzie was furious. So was
the other boarder.

That night Gilfoyle met Kedzie again at the stage door, but they
could not go to the boarding-house, for Mrs. Jambers occupied at
that time a kind of false mantelpiece that turned out to be a bed
in disguise. So they went to the Park.

Young Gilfoyle treated Kedzie with almost more respect than she
might have desired. He was one of those self-chaperoning young men
who spout anarchy and practise asceticism. Even in his poetry it
was the necessitous limitations of rhyme-words that dragged him
into his boldest thoughts.

Sitting on a dark Park bench with Kedzie, he could not have been
more circumspect if there had been sixteen duennas gathered around.
The first time he hugged her was a rainy night when Kedzie had to
snuggle close and haul his arm around her, and then his heart beat
so fast against her shoulder that she was afraid he would die of it.

Cool, wet, windy nights in late summer feel very cold, and a damp
bench under dripping trees was a nuisance to a tired dancing-girl.
Love was so inconvenient that when Kedzie bewailed the restrictions
imposed on unmarried people Gilfoyle proposed marriage. It popped
out of him so suddenly that Kedzie felt his heart stop and listen.
Then it began to race, and hers ran away, too.

"Why, Mr. Gilfoyle! Why, Tommie!" she gurgled. It was her first
proposal of marriage, and she lost her head. "And you a socialist
and telling me you didn't believe in marriages!"

"I don't," said Gilfoyle, with lovely sublimity above petty
consistencies, "except with you, Anita. I don't believe in anything
exclusive for anybody except you for me and me for you. We've just
got to be each other's own, haven't we?"

Kedzie could think of nothing to add except a little emphasis; so
she cried, "Each other's very ownest own!"

Thus they became engaged. That made it possible for her to have him
in her own room at the boarding-house. Also it enabled him to borrow
money from her with propriety when they were hungry for supper.
Fortunately, he did not mind her going on working. Not at all.

Gilfoyle was a fiend of jealousy concerning individuals, but he was
not jealous of the public. It did not hurt him at all to have Kedzie
publishing her structural design to the public, because he loved
the public, and the public paid indirectly. He wanted the masses
to have what the classes have. That delighted Kedzie, at first.

What she thought she understood of his socialistic scheme was that
every poor girl like herself was going to have her limousine and
her maid and a couple of footmen. She did not pause to figure out
how complicated that would be, since the maid would have to have
her maid, and that maid hers, and so on, _ad infinitum, ad
absurdum._

Later Kedzie found that Gilfoyle's first intention was to impoverish
the rich, elimousinate their wives, and put an end to luxury. It
astonished her how furious he got when he read of a ball given by
people of wealth, though a Bohemian dance at Webster Hall pleased
him very much, even though some of the costumes made Kedzie's Greek
vest look prudish.

But all this Kedzie was to find out after she had married the wretch.
One finds out so many things when one marries one. It is like going
behind the scenes at a performance of "Romeo and Juliet," seeing
the stage-braces that prop the canvas palaces, and hearing Juliet
bawl out Romeo for crabbing her big scene. The shock is apt to be
fatal to romance unless one is prepared for it in advance as
an inevitable and natural conflict.




CHAPTER XVII

Kedzie and Tommie enjoyed a cozy betrothal. He was busy at his shop,
and she was busy at hers. They did not see much of each other, and
that made for the prosperity of their love. They talked a great deal
of marriage, but it seemed expedient to wait till one or the other
acquired a raise of wage. The Silsby dancers were playing at cut
salaries in accord with the summer schedules, and business was very
light at the advertising agency.

The last week the troupe was playing at the Bronx Opera House, and
there Skip Magruder chanced to see her--to see more of her than he
had ever expected to on the hither side of matrimony.

His old love came back with a tidal rush, and he sent her a note
written with care in a barroom--or so Kedzie judged from the beery
fragrance of it. It said:

DEAR ANITA,--Was considerable supprise to see you to-night as didn't
know you was working in vawdvul and as I have been very loansome
for you thought would ask you would you care to take supper after
show with your loveing admirror and friend will wait for anser at
stage door hopping to see you for Old Lang's Sign.

PATRICK X. MAGRUDER--"SKIP."

Kedzie did not read this letter to the gang of nymphs. She blushed
bitterly and mumbled, "Well, of all the nerve!" After some hesitation
she wrote on Skip's note the "scatting" words, _"Nothing doing"_
and sent it back by the dismal stage doorkeeper.

She had hoped Skip would have the decency to go away and die quietly
and not hang round to see her leave with Mr. Gilfoyle. Skip had
a hitch in one leg, but Mr. Gilfoyle had a touch of writer's cramp,
and Kedzie had no desire to see the result of a conflict between two
such victims of unpreparedness.

She forgot both rivals in the excitement of a sudden incursion
of Miss Silsby, who came crying:

"Oh, girls, girls, what Do you sup-Pose has Happened? I have been
en-Gaged to give my dances at Noxon's--old Mrs. Noxon's, in Newport."

Miss Silsby always used the first person singular, though she never
danced; and if she had, in the costume of her charges, the effect
would have been a fatal satire.

By now Kedzie was familiar enough with names of great places
to realize the accolade. To be recognized by the Noxons was to
be patented by royalty. And Newport was Mecca.

The pilgrimage thither was a voyage of discovery with all
an explorer's zest. Her first view of the city disappointed her,
but her education had progressed so far that she was able to call
the pleasant, crooked streets of the older towns "picturesque."
A person who is able to murmur "How picturesque!" has made progress
in snobbical education. Kedzie murmured, "How picturesque!" when
she saw the humbler portions of Newport.

But there was a poignant sincerity in her admiration of the homes
of the rich. Bad taste with ostentation moved her as deeply as true
stateliness. Her heart made outcry for experience of opulence. She
now despised the palaces of New York because they had no yards.
Newport houses had parks. Newport was the next candy-shop she wanted
to work in.

The splendor of the visit was dimmed for her, however, when she
learned that she would not be permitted to swim at Bailey's Beach.
Immediately she felt that swimming anywhere else was contemptible.

Still, she was seeing Newport, and she could not tell what swagger
fate might now be within reach of her hands--or her feet, rather--for
Kedzie was gaining her golden apples not by clutching at them, but by
kicking them off the tree of opportunity with her carefully manicured
little toes.

Also she said "swagger" now instead of "classy" or "swell." Also she
forgot to telegraph Tommie Gilfoyle, as she promised, of her safe
arrival. Also she was too busy to write to him that first night.




CHAPTER XVIII

When Prissy Atterbury started the gossip rolling that he had seen
Jim Dyckman enter the Grand Central Terminal alone and wait for
Charity Coe Cheever to come from the same train it did not take
long for the story to roll on to Newport. By then it was a pretty
definite testimony of guilt in a vile intrigue. When Mrs. Noxon
announced her charity circus people wondered if even she would dare
include Mrs. Cheever on her bead-roll. The afternoon was for guests;
the evening was for the public at five dollars a head.

One old crony of Charity's, a Mrs. Platen, revived the story for
Mrs. Noxon at the time when she was editing the list of invitations
for the afternoon. Mrs. Noxon seemed to be properly shocked.

"Of course, you'll not invite her now," said Mrs. Platen.

"Not invite her!" Mrs. Noxon snorted. "I'll invite her twice. In
the first place, I don't believe it of Charity Coe. I knew her mother.
In the second, if it's true, what of it? Charity Coe has done so much
good that she has a right to do no end of bad to balance her books."

To emphasize her support, Mrs. Noxon insisted on Charity Coe's coming
to her as a house-guest for a week before the fete. This got into all
the papers and redeemed Charity's good name amazingly. Perhaps Jim
Dyckman saw it in the papers. At least he and his yacht drifted into
the harbor the day of the affair. Of course he had an invitation.

The Noxon affair was the usual thing, only a little more so. People
dressed themselves as costlily as they could, for hours beforehand
--then spent a half-hour or more fuming in a carriage-and-motor
tangle waiting to arrive at the entrance, while the heat sweat all
the starch out of themselves and their clothes.

A constant flood poured in upon Mrs. Noxon, or tried to find her
at the receiving-post. She was usually not there. She was like
a general running a big battle. She had to gallop to odd spots
now and then.

The tradition of her selectness received a severe strain in the
presence of such hordes of guests. They trod on one another's toes,
tripped on one another's parasols, beg-pardoned with ill-restrained
wrath, failed to get near enough to see the sights, stood on tiptoe
or bent down to peer through elbows like children outside a
ball-park.

The entertainment was vaudeville disguised by expense. It was not
easy to hold the attention of those surfeited eyes and ears. Actors
and actresses of note almost perished with wrath and humiliation
at the indifference to their arts. Loud laughter from the back rows
broke in at the wrong time, and appalling silences greeted the times
to laugh.

The fame, or notoriety, of the Silsby dancers attracted a part of
the throng to the marble swimming-pool and the terraced fountain
with its deluged statuary. Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe suddenly
found themselves together. They hated it, but they could not easily
escape. Jim felt that all eyes were bulging out at them. He had
murder in his heart.

There was the usual delay, the frank impatience and leg-fag of people
unused to standing about except at receptions and dressmakers'.
Finally the snobbish string-orchestra from Boston, which played only
the most exclusive music, began to tune up, and at length, after much
mysterious wigwagging of signals to play, it played a hunting-piece.

Suddenly from the foliage came what was supposed to be a startled
nymph. The spectators were startled, too, for a moment, for her
costume was amazing. Even on Bailey's Beach it would have attracted
attention.

Kedzie was the nymph. She was making her debut into great society.
What would her mother have said if she could have seen her there?
Her father would have said nothing. He would have fainted
unobtrusively, for the first time in his life.

Kedzie was scared. She had stage-fright of all these great people
so overdressed when she was not even underclothed.

"Poor little thing!" said Charity, and began to applaud to cheer her
up. She nudged Jim. "Come on, help her out. Isn't she beautiful?"

"Is she?" said Jim, applauding.

It did not seem right to praise one woman's beauty to another. It
was like praising one author's work to another, or praising another
preacher's sermon to a preacher's face.

Still, Jim had to admit that Kedzie was pretty. Suddenly he wanted
to torment Charity, and so he exclaimed:

"You're right, she is a little corker, a very pleasant dream!" Anger
at Charity snatched away the blindfold which is another name for
fidelity. Scales fell from his eyes, and he saw truth in nakedness.
He saw beauty everywhere. All about him were beautiful women in rich
costume. He saw that beauty is not a matter of opinion, a decision
of love's, but a happening to be regular or curvilinear or warm of
color or hospitable in expression.

Particularly he saw the beauty of Kedzie. There was more of her
to see than of those other women behind their screens of silk and
lace and linen. His infatuation for Charity Coe had befuddled him,
wrapped him in a fog through which all other women passed like
swaddled figures. He felt free now.

Over Charity's shoulder and through the spray of the goura on
her hat he saw Kedzie sharp and stark, her suavities of line and
the milk-smooth fabric of her envelope. He studied Kedzie with
emancipation, not seeing Charity at all any more--nor she him.

For Charity studied Kedzie, too. She felt academically the delight
of the girl's beauty, a statue coming to life, or a living being
going back into statue--Galatea in one phase or the other. She felt
the delight of the girl's successful drawing. She smiled to behold
it. Then her smile drooped, for the words of the old song came back
crooning the ancient regret:

  How small a part of time they share--

There was elegy now in Kedzie's graces. Youth was of their essence,
and youth shakes off like the dust on the moth's wing. Youth is gone
at a touch.

In her sorrow she turned to look up at Jim. She was shocked to
see how attentively he regarded Kedzie. He startled her by the
fascination in his mien. She looked again at Kedzie.

Somehow the girl immediately grew ugly--or what beauty she had was
that of a poisonous snake. And she looked common, too. Who else but
a common creature would come out on a lawn thus unclothed for a few
dollars?

She looked again at Jim Dyckman, and he was not what he had been. He
was as changed as the visions in Lewis Carroll's poem. She saw that
he had his common streak, too: he was mere man, animal, temptable.
But she forgave him. Curiously, he grew more valuable since she felt
that she was losing him.

There was an impatient shaking at her breast. In anybody else she
would have called it jealousy. This astounded her, made her afraid
of herself and of him. What right had she to be jealous of anybody
but Peter Cheever? She felt that she was more indecent than Kedzie.
She bowed her head and blushed. Scales fell from her eyes also. She
was like Eve after the apple had taught her what she was. She wanted
to hide. But she could not break through the crowd. She must stand
and watch the dance through.

All this brief while Kedzie had stood wavering. There had been
a hitch somewhere. The other nymphs were delayed in their entrance.
One of them had stepped on a thorny rose and another had ripped her
tunic--she came in at last with a safety-pin to protect her from
the law; but then, safety-pins are among the primeval inventions.

According to the libretto, the wood-nymphs, terrified by a hunting-
party, ran to take refuge with the water-nymphs. The water-nymphs
were late likewise. The dryads came suddenly through Mrs. Noxon's
imported shrubs, puncturing them with rhythmic attitudes. These lost
something of their poetry from being held so long that equilibria
were lost foolishly.

Finally, the water-sprites came forth from cleverly managed
concealment in a bower and stood mid-thigh in the water about
the fountain. They attitudinized also, with a kind of childish
poetry that did not quite convince, for the fountain rained on
them, and some of them shivered as cold gouts of water smote their
shoulder-blades. One little Yiddish nymph gasped, "Oi, oi!" which
was perfect Greek, though she didn't know it. Neither did anybody
else. Several people snickered.

The hunting-music died away, and the wood-nymphs decided not to go
into the water home; instead, they implored the water-nymphs to come
forth from their liquid residence. But the water-nymphs refused.
The dryads tried to lure them with gestures and dances. It was all
dreadfully puerile, and yet somehow worth while.

The wood-nymphs wreathed a human chain about the marge of the pool.
Unfortunately the marble had been splashed in spots by the fountain
spray, and it was on the slipperiest of the spots that Kedzie had to
execute a pirouette.

Her pivotal foot slid; the other stabbed down in a wild effort
to restore her balance. It slipped. She knew that she was gone.
She made frenzied clutches at the air, but it would not sustain her.
She was strangely sincere now in her gestures. The crowd laughed--
then stopped short.

It was funny till it looked as if the nymph might be hurt. Jim
Dyckman darted forward to save her. He knocked Charity aside roughly
and did not know it. He arrived too late to catch Kedzie.

Kedzie sat into the pool with great violence. The spray she cast up
fatally spotted several delicate robes. That would have been of some
consolation to Kedzie if she had known it. But all she knew was that
she went backward into the wrong element. Her wrath was greater than
her sorrow.

Her head went down: she swallowed a lot of water, and when she kicked
herself erect at last she was half strangled, entirely drenched, and
quite blinded. The other nymphs, wood and water, giggled and shook
with sisterly affection.

Kedzie was the wettest dryad that ever was. She stumbled forward,
groping. Jim Dyckman bent, slipped his hands under her arms,
and hoisted her to land. He felt ludicrous, but his chivalry was
automatic.

Kedzie was so angry at herself and everybody else that she flung
off his hands and snapped, "Quit it, dog on it!"

Jim Dyckman quit it. He had for his pains an insult and a suit
of clothes so drenched that he had to go back to his yacht, running
the gantlet of a hundred ridicules.

When he vanished Kedzie found herself in garments doubly clinging
from being soaked. She was ashamed now, and hid her face in her arm.

Charity Coe took pity on her, and before the jealous Charity could
check the generous Charity she had stepped forward and thrown about
the girl's shoulders a light wrap she carried. She led the child to
the other wood-nymphs, and they took her back into the shrubbery.

"Wait till you hear what Miss Silsby's gotta say!" said one dryad,
and another added:

"Woisse than that is this: you know who that was you flang out at
so regardless?"

"I don't know, and I don't care," sobbed Kedzie.

"You would care if you was wise to who His Nibs was!"

"Who was it?" Kedzie gasped.

"Jim Dyckman--no less! You was right in his arms, and you hadda go
an' biff him."

"Oh, Lord!" sighed Kedzie. "I'll never do." She was thinking that
destiny had tossed her into the very arms of the aristocracy and
she had been fool enough to fight her way out.

Jim Dyckman, meanwhile, was clambering into his car with clothes
and ardor dampened. He was swearing to cut out the whole herd of
women.

And Charity Coe Cheever was chattering flippantly with a group of
the dispersing audience, while her heart was in throes of dismay
at her own feelings and Jim Dyckman's.




THE SECOND BOOK

MRS. TOMMIE GILFOYLE HAS HER PICTURE TAKEN




CHAPTER I

The scene was like one of the overcrowded tapestries of the
Middle Ages. At the top was the Noxon palace, majestic, serene,
self-confident in the correctness of its architecture and not
afraid even of the ocean outspread below.

The house looked something like Mrs. Noxon at her best. Just now she
was at her worst. She stood by her marble pool and glared at her mob
of guests dispersing in knots of laughter and indifference. There
were hundreds of men and women of all ages and sizes, and almost all
of them were startling the summer of 1915 with the fashion-plates
of 1916.

Mrs. Noxon turned from them to the dispersing nymphs of Miss Silsby's
troupe. The nymphs were dressed in the fashion of 916 B.C. They also
were laughing and snickering, as they sauntered toward the clump
of trees and shrubs which masked their dressing-tent. One of them
was not laughing--Kedzie. She was slinking along in wet clothes and
doused pride. The beautiful wrap that Mrs. Charity Cheever had flung
about her she had let fall and drag in a damp mess.

Mrs. Noxon was tempted to hobble after Kedzie and smack her for
her outrageous mishap. But she could not afford the luxury. She must
laugh with her guests. She marched after them to take her medicine
of raillery more or less concealed as they went to look at the other
sideshows and permit themselves to be robbed handsomely for charity.

Kedzie was afraid to meet Miss Silsby, but there was no escape.
The moment the shrubs closed behind her she fell into the ambush.
Miss Silsby was shrill with rage and scarlet in the face. She swore,
and she looked as if she would scratch.

"You miserable little fool!" she began. "You ought to be whipped
within an inch of your life. You have ruined me! It was the biggest
chance of my career. I should have been a made woman if it hadn't
been for you. Now I shall be the joke of the world!"

"Please, Miss Silsby," Kedzie protested, "if you please, Miss
Silsby--I didn't mean to fall into the water. I'm as sorry as
I can be."

"What good does it do me for you to be sorry? I'm the one to be
sorry. I should think you would have had more sense than to do
such a thing!"

"How could I help it, dog on it!" Kedzie retorted, her anger
recrudescent.

"Help it? Are you a dancer or are you a cow?"

Kedzie quivered as if she had been lashed. She struck back with
her best Nimrim repartee, "You're a nice one to call me a cow,
you big, fat, old lummox!"

Miss Silsby fairly mooed at this.

"You--you insolent little rat, you! You--oh, you--you! I'll never
let you dance for me again--never!"

"I'd better resign, then, I suppose," said Kedzie.

"Resign? How dare you resign! You're fired! That's how you'll resign.
You're fired! The impudence of her! She turns my life-work into
a laughing-stock and then says she'd better resign!"

"How about to-night?" Kedzie put in, dazed.

"Never you mind about to-night. I'll get along without you if
I have to dance myself."

The other nymphs shook under this, like corn-stalks in a wind.

But Kedzie was a statuette of pathos. She stood cowering barelegged
before Miss Silsby, fully clothed in everything but her right mind.
There was nothing Grecian about Miss Silsby except the Medusa glare,
and that turned Kedzie into stone. She finished her tirade by
thrusting some money into Kedzie's hand and clamoring:

"Get into your clothes and get out of my sight."

Rage made Miss Silsby generous. She paid Kedzie an extra week and
her fare to New York. Kedzie had no pocket to put her money in. She
carried it in her hand and laid it on the table in the tent as she
bent to whip her lithe form out of her one dripping garment.

The other nymphs followed her into the tent and made a Parthenonian
frieze as they writhed out of their tunics and into their petticoats.
They gathered about Kedzie in an ivory cluster and murmured their
sympathy--Miss Silsby not being within ear-shot.

Kedzie blubbered bitterly as she glided into her everyday things,
hooking her corsets askew, drawing her stockings up loosely, and
lacing her boots all wrong. She was still jolted with sobs as she
pushed the hat-pins home in her traveling-hat.

She kissed the other girls good-by. They were sorry to see her go,
now that she was going. And she was very sorry to go, now that she
had to.

If she had lingered awhile Miss Silsby would have found her there
when she relented from sheer exhaustion of wrath, and would have
restored her to favor. But Kedzie had stolen away in craven
meekness.

To reach the trade-entrance Kedzie had to skirt the accursed pool of
her destruction. Charity Coe was near it, seated on a marble bench
alone. She was pensive with curious thoughts. She heard Kedzie's
childish snivel as she passed. Charity looked up, recognized the
girl with difficulty, and after a moment's hesitation called to her:

"What's the matter, you poor child? Come here! What's wrong?"

Kedzie suffered herself to be checked. She dropped on the bench
alongside Charity and wailed:

"I fell into that damn' pool, and I've lost my jah-ob!"

Charity patted the shaken back a moment, and said, "But there are
other jobs, aren't there?"

"I don't know of any."

"Well, I'll find you one, my dear, if you'll only smile. You have
such a pretty smile."

"How do you know?" Kedzie queried, giving her a sample of her best.

Charity laughed. "See! That proves it. You are a darling, and too
pretty to lack for a job. Give me your address, and I'll get you
a better place than you lost. I promise you."

Kedzie ransacked her hand-bag and found a printed card, crumpled
and rouge-stained. She poked it at Charity, who read and commented:

"Miss Anita Adair, eh? Such a pretty name! And the address, my
dear--if you don't mind. I am Mrs. Cheever."

"Oh, are you!" Kedzie exclaimed. "I've heard of you. Pleased to
meet you."

Then Kedzie whimpered, and Charity wrote the address and repeated
her assurances. She also gave Kedzie her own card and asked her to
write to her. That seemed to end the interview, and so Kedzie rose
and said: "Much obliged. I guess I gotta go now. G'-by!"

"Good-by," said Charity. "I'll not forget you."

Kedzie moved on humbly. She looked back. Charity had fallen again
into a listless reverie. She seemed sad. Kedzie wondered what on
earth she could have to be sorry about. She had money and a husband,
and she was swagger.

Kedzie slipped through the gate out to the road. She did not dare
hire a carriage, now that she was jobless. She wished she had not
left paradise. But she dared not try to return. She was not "classy"
enough. Suddenly a spasm of resentment shook the girl.

She felt the hatred of the rich that always set Tommie Gilfoyle afire.
What right had such people to such majesty when Kedzie must walk?
What right had they to homes and yards so big that it tired Kedzie
out just to trudge past? Who was this Mrs. Cheever, that she should
be so top-lofty and bend-downy? Kedzie ground her teeth in anger and
tore Charity's card to bits. She flung them at the sea, but the wind
brought them back about her face stingingly. She walked on, loathing
the very motors that flashed by, flocks of geese squawking contempt.

She walked and walked and walked. The overpowering might of the big
houses in their green demesnes made her feel smaller and wearier, but
big with bitterness. She would have been glad to have a suit-case
full of bombs to blow those snobbish residences into flinders.

She was dog tired when, after losing her way again and again, she
reached the boarding-house where the dancers lodged. She packed
her things and went to the train, lugging her own baggage. When she
reached the station she was footsore, heartsore, soulsore. Her only
comfort was that the Silsby dancers had been placed early enough
on Mrs. Noxon's program for her to have failed in time to get home
the same day. She hated Newport now. It had not been good to her.
New York was home once more.

"When's the next train to New York?" she asked a porter.

"It's wint," said the porter. "Wint at four-five."

"I said when's the next train," Kedzie snapped.

"T'-marra' marnin'," said the porter.

"My Gawd!" said Kedzie. "Have I gotta spend the night in this hole?"

The porter stared. He was not used to hearing Mecca called a hole.

"Well, if it's that bad," he grinned, "you might take the five-five
to Providence and pick up the six-forty there. But you'll have to
git a move on."

Kedzie got a move on. The train swept her out along the edge of
Rhode Island. She knew nothing of its heroic history. She cared
nothing for its heroic splendor. She thought of it only as the
stronghold of an embattled aristocracy. She did not blame Miss
Silsby for her disgrace, nor herself. She blamed the audience,
as other actors and authors and politicians do. She blazed with
the merciless hatred of the rich that poor people feel when they
are thwarted in their efforts to rival or cultivate or sell to
the rich. Their own sins they forget as absolved, because the
sins have failed. It is the success of sin and the sin of success
that cannot be forgiven.

The little dancer whose foot had slipped on the wet marble of
wealth was shaken almost to pieces by philosophic vibrations too
big for her exquisite frame. They reminded her of her poet, of
Tommie Gilfoyle, who was afraid of her and paid court to her.
He appeared to her now as a radiant angel of redemption. From
Providence she telegraphed him that she would arrive at New York
at eleven-fifteen, and he would meet her if he loved her.

This done, she went to the lunch-counter, climbed on a tall stool,
and bought herself a cheap dinner. She was paying for it out of
her final moneys, and her brain once more told her stomach that
it would have to be prudent. She swung aboard the train when it
came in, and felt as secure as a lamb with a good shepherd on the
horizon. When she grew drowsy she curled up on the seat and slept
to perfection.

Her invasion of Newport was over and done--disastrously done, she
thought; but its results were just beginning for Jim Dyckman and
Charity Coe.

Eventually Kedzie reached the Grand Central Terminal--a much
different Kedzie from the one that once followed her father and
mother up that platform to that concourse! Her very name was
different, and her mind had learned multitudes of things good
and bad. She had a young man waiting for her--a poet, a socialist,
a worshiper. Her heavy suit-case could not detain her steps. She
dragged it as a little sloop drags its anchor in a gale.

Gilfoyle was waiting for her at the barrier. He bent to snatch
the suit-case from her and snatched a kiss at the same time. His
bravery thrilled her; his gallantry comforted her immeasurably.
She was so proud of herself and of him that she wasted never a
glance at the powdered gold on the blue ceiling.

"I'm terrible glad to see you, Tommie," she said.

"Are you? Honest?" he chortled.

They jostled into each other and the crowd.

"I'm awful hungry, though," she said, "and I've got oodles of
things to tell you."

"Let's eat," he said. They went to the all-night dairy restaurant
in the Terminal. He led her to one of the broad-armed chairs and
fetched her dainties--a triangle of apple pie, a circle of cruller,
and a cylinder of milk.

She leaned across the arm of the chair and told him of her mishaps.
He was so enraged that he knocked a plate to the floor. She snatched
the cruller off just in time to save it, and the room echoed
her laughter.

They talked and talked until she was talked out, and it was
midnight. He began to worry about the hour. It was a long ride
on the Subway and then a long walk to her boarding-house and then
a long walk and a long ride to his.

"I hate to go back to that awful Jambers woman and let her know
I'm fired," Kedzie moaned. "My trunk's in storage, anyhow, and
maybe she's got no room."

"Why go back?" said Tommie, not realizing the import of his words.
It was merely his philosophical habit to ask every custom "Why?"

"Where else is there to go to?" she sighed.

"If we were only married--" he sighed.

"Why, Tommie!"

"As we ought to be!"

"Why, Tommie Gilfoyle!"

And now he was committed. As when he wrote poetry the grappling-hooks
of rhyme dragged him into statements he had not dreamed of at
the start and was afraid of at the finish--so now he stumbled into
a proposal he could not clamber out of. He must flounder through.

The idea was so deliriously unexpected, so fascinatingly novel to
Kedzie, that she fell in love with it. Immediately she would rather
have died than remain unmarried to Tommie Gilfoyle.

But there were difficulties.




CHAPTER II

In the good old idyllic days it had been possible for romantic
youth to get married as easily as to get dinner--and as hard to get
unmarried as to get wings. Couples who spooned too long at seaside
resorts and missed the last train home could wake up a preacher and
be united in indissoluble bonds of holy matrimony for two dollars.
The preachers of that day slept light, in order to save the
reputations of foolish virgins.

But now a greedy and impertinent civil government had stepped in
and sacrilegiously insisted on having a license bought and paid for
before the Church could officiate. And the license bureau was not
open all night, as it should have been.

Kedzie knew nothing of this, but Gilfoyle was informed. Theoretically
he believed that marriage should be rendered impossible and divorce
easy. But he could no more have proposed an informal alliance with
his precious Kedzie than he could have wished that his mother had
made one with his father. His mother and father had eloped and been
married by a sleepy preacher, but that was poetic and picturesque,
seeing that they did not fail to wake the preacher. Gilfoyle's
reverence for Kedzie demanded at least as much sanctity about his
union with her.

It is curious how habits complicate life. Here were two people whom
it would greatly inconvenience to separate. Yet just because it was
a custom to close the license bureau in the late afternoon they
must wait half a night while the license clerk slept and snored,
or played cards or read detective stories or did whatever license
clerks do between midnight and office hours. And just because people
habitually crawl into bed and sleep between midnight and forenoon,
these two lovers were already finding it hard to keep awake in spite
of all their exaltation. They simply must sleep. Romance could wait.

Gilfoyle knew that there were places enough where Kedzie and he
could go and have no questions asked except, "Have you got baggage,
or will you pay in advance?" But he would not take his Kedzie to
any such place, any more than he would leave a chalice in a saloon
for safe-keeping.

In their drowsy brains projects danced sparklingly, but they could
find nothing to do except to part for the eternity of the remnant
of the night. So Gilfoyle escorted Kedzie to the Hotel Belmont door,
and told her to say she was an actress arrived on a late train. He
stood off at a distance while he saw that she registered and was
respectfully treated and led to the elevator by a page.

Then he moved west to the Hotel Manhattan and found shelter. And
thus they slept with propriety, Forty-second Street lying between
them like a sword.

The alarm-clock in Gilfoyle's head woke him at seven. He hated to
interrupt Kedzie's sleep, but he was afraid of his boss and he needed
his salary more than ever--twice as much as ever. He telephoned from
his room to Kedzie's room down the street and up ten stories and was
comforted to find that he woke her out of a sleep so sound that he
could hardly understand her words. But he eventually made sure that
she would make haste to dress and meet him in the restaurant.

They breakfasted together at half past eight. Kedzie was aglow with
the whole procedure.

"You ought to write a novel about us," she told Gilfoyle. "It would
be a lot better than most of the awful stories folks write nowadays.
And you'd make a million dollars, I bet. We need a lot of money now,
too, don't we?"

"A whole lot," said Gilfoyle, who was beginning to fret over the
probable cost of the breakfast.

It cost more than he expected--as he expected. But he was in for it,
and he trusted that the Lord would provide. They bought a ring at
a petty jewelry-shop in Forty-second Street and then descended to
a Subway express and emerged at the Brooklyn Bridge Station.

The little old City Hall sat among the overtowering buildings like
an exquisite kitten surrounded by mastiffs, but Gilfoyle's business
took him and his conquest into the enormous Municipal Building,
whose windy arcades blew Kedzie against him with a pleasant clash.

The winds of life indeed had blown them together as casually as
two leaves met in the same gutter. But they thought it a divine
encounter arranged from eons back and to continue for eons forward.
They thought it so at that time.

They went up in the elevator to the second floor, where, in the
fatal Room 258, clerks at several windows vended for a dollar apiece
the State's permission to experiment with matrimony.

There was a throng ahead of them--brides, grooms, parents, and
witnesses of various nationalities. All of them looked shabby and
common, even to Kedzie in her humility. All over the world couples
were mating, as the birds and animals and flowers and chemicals
mate in their seasons. The human pairs advertised their union by
numberless rites of numberless religions and non-religions. The
presence or absence of rite or its nature seemed to make little
difference in the prosperity of the emulsion. The presence or
absence of romance seemed to make little difference, either. But
it seemed to be generally agreed upon as a policy around the world
that marriage should be made exceedingly easy, and unmarriage
exceedingly difficult. In recruiting armies the same plan is
observed; every encouragement is offered to enlist; one has only
to step in off the street and enlist. But getting free! That is
not the object of the recruiting business.

Gilfoyle and Kedzie had to wait their turns before they could reach
a window. Then they had a cross-examination to face.

Kedzie giggled a good deal, and she leaned softly against the hard
shoulder of Gilfoyle while the clerk quizzed him as to his full name,
color, residence, age, occupation, birthplace, the name of his father
and mother and the country of their birth, and the number of his
previous marriages.

She grew abruptly solemn when the clerk looked at her for answers
to the same questions on her part; for she realized that she was
expected to tell her real name and her parents' real names. She
would have to confess to Tommie that she had deceived him and
cheated him out of a beautiful poem. Had he known the truth he
would never have written:

  Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you Kedzie?
  Your last name is Thropp, but your first name is--

Nothing rhymed with _Kedzie_.

While she gaped, wordless, Gilfoyle magnificently spoke for her,
proudly informed the clerk that her name was "Anita Adair," that
she was white (he nearly said "pink"), that her age was--he had
to ask that, and she told him nineteen. He gave her residence as
New York and her occupation as "none."

"What is your father's first name, honey?" he said, a little
startled to realize how little he knew of her or her past. She
had learned much news of him, too, in hearing his own answers.

"Adna," she whispered, and he told the clerk that her father's name
was Adna Adair. She told the truth about her mother's maiden name.
She could afford to do that, and she could honestly aver that she
had never had any husband or husbands "up to yet," and that she
had not been divorced "so far." Also both declared that they knew
of no legal impediment to their marriage. There are so few legal
impediments to marriage, and so many to the untying of the knot
into which almost anybody can tie almost anybody!

The clerk's facile pen ran here and there, and the license was
delivered at length on the payment of a dollar. For one almighty
dollar the State gave the two souls permission to commit mutual
mortgage for life.

Gilfoyle was growing nervous. He told Kedzie that he was expected
at the office. There were several advertisements to write for the
next day's papers, and he had given the firm no warning of what
he had not foreseen the day before. If they hunted for a preacher,
Gilfoyle would get into trouble with Mr. Kiam.

If they had listened to the excellent motto, "Business before
pleasure," they might never have been married. That would have
saved them a vast amount of heartache, both blissful and hateful.
But they were afraid to postpone their nuptials. The mating
instinct had them in its grip.

They fretted awhile in the hurlyburly of other love-mad couples
and wondered what to do. Gilfoyle finally pushed up to one of
the windows again and asked:

"What's the quickest way to get married? Isn't there a preacher
or alderman or something handy?"

"Aldermen are not allowed to marry folks any more," he was told.
"But the City Clerk will hitch you up for a couple of dollars.
The marriage-room is right up-stairs."

This seemed the antipodes of romance and Gilfoyle hesitated
to decide.

But Kedzie, knowing his religious ardor against religions, said:

"What's the diff? I don't mind."

Gilfoyle smiled at last, and the impatient lovers hurried out
into the corridor. They would not wait for the elevator, but ran
up the steps. They passed a trio of youth, a girl and two young
fellows. One of the lads gave the other a shove that identified
the bridegroom. The girl was holding her left hand up and staring
at her new ring. A pessimist might have seen a portent in the
cynical amusement of her smile, and another in the aweless speed
with which Gilfoyle and Kedzie hustled toward the awful mystery
of such a union as marriage attempts.

The wedlock-factory was busy. In spite of the earliness of the hour
the waiting-room was crowded, its benches full. The only place for
Kedzie to sit was next to a couple of negroes, the man in Ethiopian
foppery grinning up into the face of a woman who held his hat and
cane, and simpered in ebony.

Kedzie whispered to Gilfoyle her displeased surprise:

"Why, they act just like we do."

Kedzie liked to use _like_ like that. She felt belittled at
sharing with such people an emotion that seemed to her far too good
for them. Also she felt that the emotion itself was cheapened by
such company. She wished she had not consented to the marriage. But
it would excite attention to back out now, and the dollar already
invested would be wasted. For all she knew, the purchase of the
license compelled the completion of the project.

A group of Italians came from Room 365--two girls in white, a
bareheaded mother who had been weeping, a fat and relieved-looking
father, an insignificant youth who was unquestionably the new-born
husband.

Gilfoyle kept looking at his watch, but he had to wait his turn.
There was a book to be signed and a two-dollar bill to be paid.
At last, when the negro pair came forth chuckling, Kedzie and
Gilfoyle rushed into the so-called "chapel" to meet their fate.

The chapel was a barrenly furnished office. Its nearest approach
to an altar was a washstand with hot and cold running water. At
the small desk the couple stood while the City Clerk read the pledge
drawn up in the Corporation Counsel's office with a sad mixture of
religious, legal, and commercial cant:

"In the name of God, Amen.

"Do either of you know of any impediment why you should not be
legally joined together in matrimony, or if any one present can
show any just cause why these parties should not be legally joined
together in matrimony let them now speak or hereafter hold their
peace.

"Do you, Thomas Gilfoyle, take this woman as your lawfully wedded
wife, to live together in the state of matrimony? Will you love,
honor, and keep her, as a faithful man is bound to do, in health,
sickness, prosperity, and adversities, and forsaking all others
keep you alone unto her as long as you both shall live?

"Do you, Anita Adair, take this man for your lawfully wedded husband
to live together in the state of matrimony? Will you love, honor,
and cherish him as a faithful woman is bound to do, in health,
sickness, prosperity, and adversities, and forsaking all others
keep you alone unto him as along as you both shall live?

"For as both have consented in wedlock and have acknowledged same
before this company I do by virtue of the authority vested in me
by the laws of the State of New York now pronounce you husband
and wife.

"And may God bless your union."

The City Clerk had to furnish witnesses from his own staff while
he administered the secular rites and exacted the solemn promises
which so few have kept, and invoked the help of God which is so
rarely manifest or so subtly hidden, in the human-animal-angel
relation of marriage.

And now Anita Adair and Thomas Gilfoyle were officially welded into
one. They had received the full franchise each of the other's body,
soul, brain, time, temper, liberty, leisure, admiration, education,
past, future, health, wealth, strength, weakness, virtue, vice,
destructive power, procreative power, parental gift or lack,
domestic or bedouin genius, prejudice, inheritance--all.

It was a large purchase for three dollars, and it remained to be
seen whether either or both delivered the goods. At the altar of
Hymen, Kedzie had publicly vowed to love, honor, and cherish under
all circumstances. It was like swearing to walk in air or water as
well as on earth. The futile old oath to "obey" had been omitted
as a perjury enforced.

Kedzie Thropp, who had dome to New York only a few months before,
had done one more impulsive thing. First she had run away from her
parents. Now she had run away from herself. She had loved New York
first. Now she was infatuated with Tommie Gilfoyle. He was as
complex and mysterious a city as Manhattan. She would be as long
in reaching the heart of him.

There had been no bridesmaids to give the scene social grace, no
music or flowers to give it poetry, no minister to give it an odor
of sanctity. It was marriage in its cold, business-like actuality,
without hypnotism, superstition, or false pretense. Small wonder
that Kedzie had hardly left the marriage-room before she felt that
she was not married at all. The vaccination had not taken. She
was not one with Gilfoyle. And yet she must pretend that she was.
She must act as if they were one soul, one flesh; must share his
tenement, his food, his joys and anxieties. Of these last there
promised to be no famine.

Gilfoyle was in a panic about his office. He told Kedzie to devote
the morning to looking up some place to live. He would join her
at luncheon. He fidgeted while they waited for the elevator, Kedzie
staring at her ring with the same curious smile as the other girl.




CHAPTER III

They rode up-town in a Subway express to Forty-second Street.
heir first business treaty had to be drawn up in the crowd.

"How much do you want to pay for the flat, honey?" said Kedzie.

Gilfoyle was startled. Already the money-snake was in their Eden.
And she asked him how much he "wanted" to pay! It was only a form
of speech, but it grated on him.

"I haven't time to figure it out," he fretted. "I get twenty-five
dollars a week--darling. That's a hundred a month--dear." His pet
names came afterward, mere trailers. "Out of that we've got to get
something to eat and to wear, and there'll be street-car fare to
pay and--tooth-powder to buy, and we'll want something for theater
tickets, and--" He was aghast; at the multitude of things married
people need. He added, "And we ought to save a little, I suppose."

"I suppose so," said Kedzie, who was as much taken aback by the
mention of economy at such a time as he was by the mention of
expenditure. But she rose bravely to the responsibility: "I'll
do the best I can, and we'll be so cozy--ooh!"

Kedzie was used to small figures. He put into her hand all the cash
he had with him, which was all he had on earth--forty-two dollars.
He borrowed back the two dollars. Kedzie had her own money, about
forty more dollars. This, with twenty-five dollars a week, seemed
big; enough to her to keep them in luxury. They parted at the Grand
Central Terminal with looks of devoted agony.

She set out at once to look at flats and to visit furniture-stores.
She bought a _Herald_ and read the numberless advertisements.
Something was the matter everywhere. She had gone far and found
nothing but discouragement when the luncheon hour arrived.

Humble as her ideas were, they rebelled at what she and her
bridegroom would have to accept for their home. She had always
dreamed of marrying a beautiful man with a million dollars and
a steam yacht. She was to have been married by a swagger parson,
in a swagger church, and to have gone on a long voyage somewhere,
and come back at last to a castle on Fifth Avenue. She had lost
the parson; the voyage was not to be thought of; and the castle
was not even in the air.

She looked at one or two expensive apartments, just to see what real
apartments could be like. They stunned her with their splendors,
their liveried outguards, their elevators clanking like caparisoned
chariot-horses, their conveniences, their rentals--six or eight
thousand dollars a year, unfurnished!--six or seven times her
husband's whole annual earnings. They were beyond the folly of
a dream.

She would have to be content with what one could rent furnished
for twenty-five dollars a month. She would have to be her own
hired girl. She would have to toil in a few cells of a beehive
on a side-street. She would be chauffeuse to a gas-stove only.

She went to the luncheon tryst with a load of forebodings, but
Gilfoyle did not appear. She heard her name paged by a corridor-crier
and was called to the telephone, where her husband's voice told her
that there was a big upset at the office and he dared not leave.
He forgot to be tender in his endearments, and he forgot to explain
to her that he was talking in a crowded office with an impatient
boss waiting for him and a telephone-girl probably listening in.

Kedzie lunched alone, already a business man's wife.

She scoured the town all afternoon, and at last, in desperation,
took the furnished flat she happened to be in when she could go
no farther. She had to sign a year's lease, and pay twenty-five
dollars in advance.

They would live a condensed life there. Even the hall was shared
with another family. The secrets were also to be shared, evidently,
for Kedzie could hear all that went on in the other home--all, all!

But by this time she was so tired that any cranny would have been
welcome. She was even wearier than she had been when she occupied
the outdoor apartment under the park bench where she spent her second
night in New York. She called that an "aparkment" and liked the pun
so well that she longed to tell her husband. But that would have
compelled the telling of her real name, and she did not know him
well enough for that yet. She found that she did not know him
well enough yet for an increasing number of things. She began to be
afraid to have him come home. What would he be like as a husband?
What would she be like as a wife? Those are all-important facts that
one is permitted to learn after the vows of perfection are sealed.

When Kedzie had rested awhile she grew braver and lonelier. She would
welcome almost any husband for companionship's sake. She resolved to
have Tom's dinner ready for him. She dragged herself down the stairs
and up the hill to the grocer's and the butcher's and bought the raw
material for dinner and breakfast.

She telephoned Gilfoyle at his office, gave him the address and
invited him to dine with "Mrs. Gilfoyle." She chuckled over the
romance of it, but he was harrowed with office troubles. Her ardor
was a trifle dampened by his voice, but she found new thrills in
the gas-stove, a most dramatic instrument to play. It frightened
her with every manifestation. She turned the wrong handles and got
bad odors from it, and explosions. She burned her fingers and
the chops.

She stared in dismay at the charred first banquet and then marched
her weary feet down the stairs again and up the hill again to
a delicatessen shop. She had previously learned the fatal ease of
the ready-made meals they vend at such places, and she compiled
her first menu there.

When Gilfoyle came down the street and up the steps into his new
home and into her arms he tried to lay off care for a while. But
he could not hide his anxiety--and his ecstasy was half an ecstasy
of dread.

He did not like the shabby, showy furniture the landlord had selected.
But the warmed-up dinner amazed him. He had not imagined Kedzie so
scholarly a cook. She dared not tell him that she had cheated. He
found her wonderfully refreshing after a day of office toil and told
her how happy they would be, and she said, "You bet." Kedzie cleared
the table by scooping up all the dishes and dumping them into a big
pan and turning the hot water into it with a cake of soap. Then she
retreated to the wabbly divan in the living-room.

Gilfoyle went over to Kedzie like a lonely hound; and she laced still
tighter the arms that encircled her. They told each other that they
were all they had in the world, and they forgot the outside world for
the world within themselves. But the evening was maliciously hot and
muggy; it was going to rain in a day or so. That divan would hardly
support two, and there was no comfort in sitting close; it merely
added two furnaces together.

Clamor rose in the adjoining apartment. Their neighbors had children,
and the children did not want to go to bed. The parents nagged the
children and each other. The wrangle was insufferable. And the idea
came to Kedzie and Gilfoyle that children were one of the liabilities
of their own marriage. They were afraid of each other, now, as well
as of the world. If only they had not been in such haste to be
married! If only they could recall those hasty words!

Gilfoyle put out the lights--"because they draw the insects," he
said, but Kedzie thought that he was beginning to economize. He
was. Across the street they could see other heat-victims miserably
preparing for the night. They were careless of appearances.

In the back of the parlor was a window opening into a narrow
air-shaft. The one bedroom's one window opened on the same cleft.
If the curtain were not kept down the neighbors across the area
could see and be seen. If the window were left open they could be
heard; and when the curtain flapped in the occasional little puffs
of hot air, it gave brief glimpses of family life next door. That
family had a squalling child, too. Somewhere above, a rickety
phonograph was at work; and somewhere below, a piano was being
mauled; and somewhere else a ukelele was being thumped and a
doleful singer was snarling "The Beach at Waikiki." This racket
was their only epithalamium. It was more like the "chivaree" with
which ironic crowds tormented bridal couples back in Nimrim, Mo.

Gilfoyle was poet enough to enjoy a little extra doldrums at what
might have made a longshoreman peevish. He mopped sweat and fanned
himself with a newspaper till he grew frantic. He flung down the
paper and rose with a yawn.

"Well, this is one helluva honeymoon. I'm going to crawl into
the oven and fry."

Kedzie sat alone in the dark parlor a long while. She was cold now.
She had danced Greek dances in public, but she blushed in the dark
as she loitered over her shoelaces. She was so forlorn and so
disappointed with life that tears would have been bliss.

Somebody on that populous, mysterious air-shaft kept a parrot.
It woke Kedzie early in the morning with hysterical laughter that
pierced the ears like steel saws. There was something uncannily
real but hideously mirthless in its Ha-ha-ha! It would gurgle with
thick-tongued idiocy: "Polly? Polly? Polly wanny clacky? Polly?
Polly?"

Kedzie wondered how any one could care or dare to keep such a pest.
She wanted to kill it. She leaned out of the window and stared up.
Somewhere above the fire-escape rungs she could see the bottom of
its cage. If only she had a gun, how gladly she would have blown
Polly to bits.

She saw a frowsy-haired man in a nightgown staring up from another
window and yelling at the parrot. She drew her head in hastily.

The idol of her soul slept on. The inpouring day illumined him to
his disadvantage. His head was far back, his jaw down, his mouth
agape. During the night a beard had crept out on his cheeks. He was
startlingly unattractive.

Kedzie crouched on the bed and stared at him in wonder, in a
fascination of disgust. This was the being she had selected from
all mankind for her companion through the long, long years to come.
This was her playmate, partner, hero, master, financier, bedfellow,
lifefellow. For him she had given up her rights to freedom, to
praise, to chivalry, to individuality, her hopes of wealth, luxury,
flattery.

She glanced about the room--the pine bureau with its imitation
stain, broken handles, and curdled mirror, the ugly chairs, the
gilt radiator, the worn rug, the bed that other wretches had
occupied. She wondered who they were and where they were.

She remembered Newport, the Noxon home. She tried to picture a
bedroom there. She saw a palace of the best moving-picture period.
She remembered the first moving picture she had seen in New York,
and contrasted the Anita Adair of that adventure with the Anita
Adair of this. She recalled that girl locking her door against the
swell husband, and the poor but honest lover with the revolver.

Kedzie wished she had locked her own door--only there was no door,
merely a shoddy portiere, for there was not room to open a door.
Her old ambitions came back to her. She had planned to know rich
people and rebuke their wicked wiles. One rich man had held her in
his arms, lifted her out of the pool. It was no less a man than
Jim Dyckman, and she had repulsed him.

She caught a glimpse of her own tousled head in the mirror,
and she sneered at it. "You darn fool--oh, you darn fool!"

At last the parrot woke Gilfoyle. He snorted, bored his fists
into his eyes, yawned, scratched his head, stared at the unusual
furniture, flounced over, saw his mate, stared again, grinned,
said:

"Why, hello, Anita!"

He put out his hand to her. She wiggled away; he followed. She
slid to the floor and gasped:

"Don't touch me!"

"Why, what's the matter, honey?"

"Huh! What isn't the matter?"

He fumbled under the pillow for his watch, looked at it, yawned:

"Lord, it's only five o'clock. Good _night_!" He disposed
himself for sleep again. The parrot broke out in another horrible
Ha-ha! He sat up with an oath. "I'd like to murder the beast."

"Don't! I'm much obliged to it."

"Obliged to it? You must be crazy. Good Lord! hear it scream."

"Well, ain't life a scream?"

Gilfoyle was a graceless sleeper and a surly waker. He forgot that
he was a bridegroom.

He sniffed, yawned, flopped, buried one ear in the pillow and pulled
the cover over the other and almost instantly slept. His head on
the pillow looked like some ugly, shaggy vegetable. Kedzie wanted to
uproot the object and throw it out of the window, out of her life.
That was the head of her husband, the lord and master of her dreams!

Dainty-minded couples have separate bedrooms. Ordinary people accept
the homely phases of coexistence as inevitable and therefore
unimportant. They grow to enjoy the intimacy: they give and take
informality as one of the comforts of a home. They see frowsy hair
and unshaven cheeks and yawns as a homely, wholesome part of life
and make a pleasant indolence of them.

But Kedzie was in an unreasoning mood. She had hoped for unreasonable
delights. Marriage had been a goal beyond the horizon, at the base of
the rainbow. She had reached it. The girl Kedzie was no more. She was
a wife. Kedzie Thropp and Anita Adair were now Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle.
Her soul cried out:

"This is my honeymoon! I am married, married forever to that
tousle-headed, bristle-jawed, brainless, heartless dub. I won't
stand for it. I won't! I won't!"

She wanted to outscream the parrot. Its inarticulate, horrible
cachinnations voiced her humor uncannily. She had to bury her
pouting lips in her round young arm to keep from insanely echoing
that maniacal Ha-ha-ha! That green-and-red philosopher expressed
her own mockery of life and love, with its profound and eloquent
Ha-ha-ha! Oh, ha-ha-ha! Ee, ha-ha-ha!




CHAPTER IV

Now, of course, Kedzie ought to have been happy. Millions of girls
of her age were waking up that morning and calling themselves wretched
because their parents or distance or some other cause prevented them
from marrying young fellows no more prepossessing asleep than Gilfoyle
was.

In Europe that morning myriads of young girls tossed in their beds
and shivered lest their young men in the trenches might have been
killed or mangled by some shell dropped from an airship or sent over
from a cannon or shot up from a mine. And those young men, alive or
dead, looked no better than Gilfoyle, if as neat.

In Europe and in Asia, that morning, there were young girls and nuns
and wives who were in the power of foreign soldiers whose language
they could not speak but could understand all too well--poor, ruined
victims of the tidal waves of battle. There were wives, young and
old, who had got their husbands back from war blind, crippled,
foolish, petulant. They had left part of their souls on the field
with their blood.

It was a time when it seemed that nobody had a right to be unhappy
who had life, health, shelter, and food. Yet America was perhaps as
discontented as Europe.

Kedzie had reason enough to make peace with life. Gilfoyle was as
valuable a citizen as she. She might have helped to make him a good
business man or a genuine poet. What is poetry, anyway, but the
skilful advertisement of emotions? She might at least have made of
Gilfoyle that all-important element of the Republic, a respectable,
amiable, ordinary man, perhaps the father of children who would be
of value, even of glory, to the world.

There was romance enough in their wedding. Others of the couples who
had bought licenses that day were rapturous in yet cheaper tenements,
greeting the new day with laughter and kisses and ambition to earn
and to save, to breed and grow old well.

But to be content with what or whom she had, Kedzie would have had
to be somebody else besides Kedzie; and then Gilfoyle would not
perhaps have met her or married her. Some man in Nimrim, Mo., would
have wed the little stay-at-home.

Kedzie, the pretty fool, apparently fancied that she would have been
happy if Gilfoyle had been a handsomer sleeper, and the apartment
a handsomer apartment, and the bank-account an inexhaustible fountain
of gold.

But would she have been? Peter Cheever was as handsome as a man
dares to be, awake or asleep; he had vast quantities of money, and
he was generous with it. But Zada L'Etoile was not happy. She dwelt
in an apartment that would have overwhelmed Kedzie by the depth of
its velvets and the height of its colors.

Yet Zada was crying this very morning--crying like mad because
while she had Cheever she had no marriage license. She tore her
hair and bit it, and peeled diamonds off her fingers and threw them
at the mirror like pebbles, and sopped up her tears with point-lace
handkerchiefs and hurled those to the floor--then hurled herself
after them. She was a tremendous weeper, Zada.

And in Newport there was a woman who had a marriage license but no
husband. She slept in a room too beautiful for Kedzie to have liked.
She did not know enough to like it. She would have found it cold.
Charity Cheever found it cold, but she slept at last, though the
salt wind blowing in from the sea tormented the light curtains and
plucked at the curls about Charity's face. There was salt in the
air, and her eyelashes were still wet with tears. She was crying
in her sleep, for loneliness.

Kedzie thought her room was small, but it was nearly as big as
the bedroom where Jim Dyckman had slept. He had a bigger room, but
he had given it to his father and mother, who had come to Newport
with him. They were a stodgy old couple enough now, and snoring
idyllically in duet after a life of storms and tears and discontents
in spite of wealth.

Jim's room was big for a yacht, but the yacht was narrow, built for
speed. Thirty-six miles an hour its turbines could shoot it through
the sea. It had to be narrow. We can't have everything--especially
on yachts.

Jim was barefoot, standing in his pajamas at a port-hole and trying
to see the Noxon home, imagining Charity there. He was denied her
presence and was as miserable as any waif in a poor farm attic.
Money seemed to make no visible difference in his despair.

If he thought of Kedzie at all, he dismissed her as a trifling
memory. He wanted Charity, who did not want him. Charity had
Cheever, who did not want her. Kedzie had Gilfoyle, and did not want
him. It looked as if the old jingle ought to be changed from "Finders
keepers, losers weepers" to "Losers keepers, finders weepers."

The day after Jim Dyckman pulled Kedzie out of the water he made
a desperate effort to convince himself that he could be happy
without the forbidden Charity Coe.

He breakfasted and played tennis, then swam at Bailey's Beach.
Beauties of every type and every conscience were there--pale, slim
ash blondes with legs like banister-spindles, and swarthy, slender
brunettes of the same Sheraton furniture. There were brunettes of
generous ovals, and blondes of heroic rotundities, and every scheme
of shape between. Minds were equally diversified--maternal young
girls and wicked old ladies, hilarious and sinister, intellectual
and athletic, bookish and horsy, a woman of a sort for every mood.

And Jim Dyckman was so wealthy and so simple and so likable and
important that it seemed nobody would refuse to accept him. But
he wanted Charity.

Later in the afternoon he gave up the effort to snub her and went
to the Noxon home. It was about the hour when Kedzie in her new
flat had been burning her fingers at the gas-stove. Jim Dyckman
was preparing to burn his fingers at the shrine of Mrs. Cheever.

He rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Noxon, though her motor was
waiting at the door, as he was glad to note. Mrs. Noxon came down
with her hat on and her gloves going on. She pinched Dyckman's cheek
and kissed him and said:

"It's sweet of you, Jimmie, to call on an old crone like me, and so
promptly. She'll be down in a minute. But you must be on your good
behavior, Jim, for they're talking about you, you know. They're
bracketing your name with Charity's."

"The dirty beasts! I'll--"

"You can't, Jim. But you can behave. Cheer her up a little. She's
blue about that dog of a Cheever. I've got to go and turn over the
money we earned yesterday. Quite a tidy sum, but I'll never give
another damned show as long as I live."

She left, and by and by Charity Coe drifted in, bringing strange
contentment with her. She greeted Jim with a weary cordiality. He
took her hand and kissed it and laid his other hand over it as usual.
She put her other hand on top of his and patted it--then withdrew her
slender fingers and sat down.

They glanced at each other and sighed. Jim was miserably informed now
that he had made the angelic Charity Coe a theme for gossip. He felt
guilty--irritatedly guilty, because he had the name without the game.

Charity Coe was in a dull mood. She was in a love lethargy. Her mind
was trying to persuade her heart that her devotion to Peter Cheever
was a wasted lealty, but her heart would not be convinced, though it
began to be afraid. She was as a watcher who sits in the next room
to one who is dying slowly and quietly. She could neither lose hope
nor use it.

Jim and Charity sat brooding for a long while. He had outstretched
himself on a sumptuous divan. She was seated on a carved chair,
leaning against the tall back of it like a figure in high relief.
About them the great room brooded colossally.

Gilfoyle would have hated Charity and Jim as perfect examples of the
idle rich, too stupid to work, too pampered to be worthy of sympathy.
But whether these two had a right to suffer or not, suffer they did.

The mansion was quiet. The other house-guests were motoring or darting
about the twilit tennis-court or trading in the gossip-exchange at
the Casino. Jim and Charity were marooned in a sleeping castle.

At length Jim broke forth, "For God's sake, sing."

Charity laughed a little and said, "All right--anything to make
you talk."

She went to the piano and shifted the music. There were dozens of
songs about roses. She dropped to the bench and began to play and
croon Edward Carpenter's luscious music to Waller's old poem,
"Go, Lovely Rose."

Jim began to talk almost at once. Charity went on singing, smiling
a little at the familiar experience of being asked to sing only to
be talked over. Jim grew garrulous as he read across her shoulder
with characteristic impoliteness.

_"Tell her that wastes her time and me,"_ he quoted; then
he groaned: "That's you and me, Charity Coe. But you're wasting
yourself most of all."

He bent closer to peek at the name of the author. "Who's this
feller Waller, who knows so much?"

"Hush and listen," she said, and hummed the song through. It made
a new and deep impression on her in that humor. She felt that she
had wasted the rosiness of her own life. Girlhood was gone; youth
was gone; carefreedom was gone. Like petals they had fallen from
the core of her soul. The words of the lyric stabbed her:

  Then die that she
    The common fate of all things rare
  May read in thee.
    How small a part of time they share
    That are so sweet and fair.

Her fingers slipped from the keys and, as it were, died in her lap.
Jim Dyckman understood a woman for once, and in a gush of pity for
her and of resentment for her disprized preciousness caught at her
to embrace her. Her hands came to life. The wifely instinct leaped
to the fore. She struck and wrenched and drove him off. She was
panting with wrath.

"What a rotten thing to do! Go away and don't come near me again.
I'm ashamed of you."

"Me, too," he snarled.




CHAPTER V

Jim slunk out and slunk down the marble steps and down the winding
walk and through the monstrous gate into the highway along the sea,
enraged at himself and at Charity and at Peter Cheever. If he had met
Cheever he would have picked him up and flung him over the sea-wall.
But there was little danger of Peter Cheever's being found so near
his wife.

_"Tell her that wastes her time and me,"_ kept running through
Jim's head. He was furious at Charity for wasting so much of him. He
had followed her about and moped at her closed door like a stray dog.
And she had never even thrown him a bone.

A wave ran up on the beach and seemed to try to embrace the earth,
possess it. But it fell away baffled. Over its subsiding pother sprang
a new wave with the same bosomful of desire and the same frantic
clutching here and there--the same rebuff, the same destruction
under the surge of the next and the next. The descending night gave
a strange pathos to the eternal vanity.

Jim Dyckman stood and faced the ocean. Once more he discovered that
life was too much for him to understand. He was ashamed of himself
for his vain endeavor to envelop Charity Coe and absorb her into
the deeps of his love. He was most ashamed because he had failed
and must slither back into the undertow with the many other men
whom Charity had refused to love.

He was ashamed of Charity Coe, too, for squandering her prime
and her pride. He was enraged at her blindness to Pete Cheever's
duplicity or her complacency with it. He hated Charity for a
while--nearly. At any rate he was ashamed of her, ashamed of
the world, in a rebel mood.

As he stood wind-blown and spray-flogged and glad to be beaten, a
shabby old carriage went by. It was piled to overflowing with some
of Miss Silsby's girls taking a seeing-Newport tour on the cheap.

The driver was, or said he had been in his time, coachman to some
of the oldest families. He ventured their names with familiarity
and knew their houses by heart. He told quaint stories of their
ways, how old Mrs. Noxon once swore down a mutinous stableman, how
Miss Wossom ran away with her coachman. There was something finely
old-fashioned and conservative about that. A new-rich would have
run away with a chauffeur.

The driver knew Jim Dyckman's back and pointed him out. The girls
laughed, remembering Kedzie's encounter with him. They laughed so
loud that Dyckman turned, startled by the racket. But the carriage
rolled them away and he did not hear them wondering what had become
of Kedzie. The gloaming saddened them, and they felt very sorry for
her. But Jim Dyckman gave her no thought.

He was tearing apart his emotions toward Charity and resolving that
he must never see her again. In the analytical chemistry of the soul
he found that this resolution was three parts hopelessness of winning
her, three parts a decent sense of the wickedness of courting another
man's woman, three parts resentment at her for treating him properly,
and one part a feeling that he would make himself most valuable to
her by staying away.

Never a homeless dog slinking through an alley in search of a
sidelong ash-barrel to sleep in felt more poverty-stricken, woebegone,
than Jim Dyckman. He moped along the stately road, as much afraid of
his future as Kedzie had been, trudging the same highway. She had
wondered if board and lodging would fail her. This was not Jim
Dyckman's fear, but his own was as great, for everybody was some
dreadful elbow-companion.

Lucian showed Jupiter himself cowering on his throne in the sky and
twiddling his thunderbolt with trembling hand as he wondered what
the fates held in store for him, and saw on earth the increasing
impudence of the skeptics.

So Jim Dyckman, unconscious that he was following in Kedzie's
footsteps, walked miserably on his way. He had no place to go to
but the finest yacht in the harbor. He had no money to depend on
but a few millions of his own and the Pelion plus Ossa fortunes
of his father and mother and their relatives--a mere sierra of
gold mountains.

He drifted down to the landing-place and went out to his yacht
in a hackney launch. He was received at her snowy sides as if he
were the emperor of somewhere come to visit one of his rear admirals.
He went up the steps as if he were a school-boy caught playing hooky
and going up-stairs to play the bass drum to his mother's slipper.

His mother was on the shade-deck, reclining. The big white wicker
lounge looked as if a small avalanche had fallen on it. From the
upturned points of her white shoes back to her white hair she was
a study in foreshortening that would have interested a draftsman.

Spread out on a huge wicker arm-chair sat Jim's father, also all
white, except for his big pink hands and his big pink face. It
seemed that he ought to have been smoking a white cigar. As a matter
of fact, he had sat so still that half the weed was ash.

When the two moved to greet Jim there was a mighty creaking of wicker.
There was another when Jim spilled his own great weight into a chair.
A steward in white raised his eyebrows inquiringly and Jim nodded
the eighth of an inch. It was the equivalent of ordering a drink.

Dyckman senior turned to Dyckman seniora and said, "Enter Hamlet in
the graveyard! Where's the skull, my boy, where's the skull?"

"Let the child alone," Mrs. Dyckman protested. "It's too hot for
fooling. You might kiss your poor mother, though. No, don't get up,
just throw me one."

Jim rose heavily, went to her, bent far down, kissed her, and
would have risen again, but her big arms encompassed his neck and
held him, uncomfortably, till he knelt by her side and laid his
head on her bosom.

He felt exceedingly foolish, but nearer to comfort than he had been
for a long while. He wished that he might be a boy again in his
mother's arms and be altogether content and carefree as he had been
there. As if children were content and carefree! Great Heavens!
do they not begin to squirm and kick before they are born?

Mrs. Dyckman was suffocated a trifle by his weight and her own and
her corsets, but her heart ached for him somewhere down deep and
she whispered:

"Can't he tell his mother what he wants? Maybe she can get it
for him."

He laughed bitterly and extricated himself from her clasp, patted
her fat arm, and turned away. His father jealously seized his
sleeve.

"Anything serious, old man? You know I'm here."

Jim squeezed his father's hand and shook his head and turned to
the drink which had arrived. He took it from the tray to his chair
and sat meditating Newport across the top of his glass. Between
the rail of the deck and the edge of the awning he saw a long slice
of it. It was vanity and emptiness to him. He spoke at length.

"Fact is, folks, I've got to go back to New York or somewhere."

"Good Lord!" his father said. "I'm all mixed up in a golf tournament.
I think I've got a chance to lick the boots off old Wainwright."

"Oh dear!" sighed Mrs. Dyckman, "there's to be the most interesting
lecture by that Hindu poet. And it's so much more comfortable here
than ashore. This boat is the coziest you've ever had."

"Stay here, darling," said Jim. "I'll make you a present of her."

"Oh, that's glorious," said Mrs. Dyckman. "I've never had a yacht
of my own. It's a shame to take it from you, but you can get another.
And of course you'll always be welcome here--which is more than
a certain other big Dyckman will be if he doesn't look sharp."

"For the Lord's sake, Jim, don't give it to her. She's the meanest
old miser about her own things." Dyckman senior pushed his chair
back against the rail.

"Watch out!" Mrs. Dyckman gasped. "You're scraping the paint off
my yacht."

Jim rose again. "I've just about time to make the last train
for the day," he said.

His mother sat up and clutched at his hand. "Can't I help you, honey?
Please let me! What is the matter?"

"The matter is I'm a lunkhead and Newport bores me stiff. That's all.
Don't worry. I'll go get the packing started."

He went along the deck, and his parents helplessly craned their
necks after him. His father groaned. Jim had "everything." There
was nothing to get for him, no toy to buy to divert him with.

"He wants a new toy, and he doesn't know what it is," said
the old man.

But Jim wanted an old toy on a shelf too high for his reach. He
ran away from the sight of it.

And Dyckman was fleeing to Charity's next resting-place, after all,
for she also returned in a few days to New York. She was restive
under the goad to return to France. She repented her selfish neglect
of the children of all ages she had adopted abroad. One thing
held her back--the dread of putting the ocean again between her
and her husband.

She thought it small of her to leave so many heroes to suffer without
her ministrations, in order that she might prevent one non-hero
from having too good a time without her ministrations. But womankind
has never been encouraged to adopt the policy of the greatest good
to the greatest number. Hardly!

Charity was conscience-smitten, however, and she cast about for a way
to absolve herself. Money is the old and ever-reliable way of paying
debts physical, moral, and religious. Charity determined to arrange
some big fete to bring in a heap of money for the wounded of France,
the blind fathers, and the fatherless children.

Everybody was giving entertainments at this time in behalf of
some school of victims of the war. The only excuse for amusements
in America seemed to be that the profits went to the belligerents
in one way or another.

Charity was distressed by the need of an oddity, a novel note which
should make itself heard among the clamors for Belgian relief, for
Polish relief, for Armenian succor, for German, French, Italian,
Russian widows and orphans.

Charity's secretary, Miss Gurdon, made dozens of suggestions, but
none of them was big enough to interest Charity. One day a card
came up to her with a letter of introduction from Mrs. Noxon:


CHARITY DEAR,--This will acquaint you with a very clever girl, Miss
Grace Havender. Her mother was a school friend of mine. Miss Havender
arranges to have moving pictures taken of people. They are ever
so much quainter than stupid still-life pictures. Posterity ought
to see you with your poor wounded soldiers, but meanwhile we really
should have a chance to perpetuate you as you are. You are always
on the go, and an ordinary picture does not represent you.

Anyway, you will be nice to Miss Havender, for the sake of

Yours affectionately,

MARTHA NOXON.


Charity did not want a picture of herself, but she went down to
get rid of Miss Havender politely and to recommend her to friends
of greater passion for their own likenesses. Miss Havender was
a forward young person and launched at once into a defense of
moving pictures.

"Oh, I admire the movies immensely," Charity interposed. "We had
some of them in the hospitals abroad. If you could have seen that
dear Charlie Chaplin convulse a whole ward of battered soldiers
and make them forget their pain and their anxieties! He was more
of a nurse than a hundred of us. If he isn't a benefactor, I don't
know who is. Oh, I admire the movies, but I'd rather see them than
be them, you know.

"Still, an idea has just occurred to me. You know I'm terribly in
need of a pile of money."

Miss Havender looked about her and smiled.

"Oh, I don't mean for myself. I have far too much, but for the
soldiers. I want something that will bring in a big sum. It occurs
to me that if a lot of us got up a story and acted it ourselves,
it would be tremendously interesting to--well, to ourselves. And
our friends would flock to see it. Amateur performances are ghastly
from an artistic standpoint, but they're great fun.

"It just struck me that if we got up a play and had a cast made up
of Mr. Jim Dyckman and Tom Duane and Winnie Nicolls and Miss Bettany
and the young Stowe Webbs and Mrs. Neff and people like that it
would be dreadfully bad art, but much more amusing than if we had
all the stars in the world--Mr. Drew and his daughter and his niece
Miss Barrymore and her brothers, and Miss Anglin and Miss Bates or
Miss Adams or anybody like that. Don't you think so? Or what do you
think? Could it be done, or has it been--or what about it?"

Miss Havender gasped. She saw new vistas of business opening
before her.

"Yes, it has been done in a small way, and it was great fun, as you
say; but it would have been more fun if it hadn't been so crude.
What you would need would be a director who was not an amateur.
Now, our director is marvelous--Mr. Ferriday. He's the Belasco of
the photoplays. He's as great as Griffith. He takes his art like
a priest. If you had him you could do wonders."

"Then we must have him, by all means," said Charity, smiling a
little at the gleam in Miss Havender's eyes. She had a feeling
that Miss Havender had a deep, personal interest in Mr. Ferriday.
Miss Havender had; most of the women in his environs had. In the
first place, he was powerful and could increase or diminish or
check salaries. He distributed places and patronage with a royal
prerogative. But he was hungry for praise and suffered from the
lack of social prestige granted "the new art."

Miss Havender seconded Charity's motion with enthusiasm. After a
long conference it was agreed that Miss Havender should broach the
matter to the great Mr. Ferriday while Charity recruited actors
and authors.

As Charity rummaged in her hand-bag for a pencil to write Miss
Havender's telephone number with, she turned out Kedzie Thropp's
crumpled, shabby card. She started.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake! The poor child! I had forgotten her
completely. You might be able to do something for her. This Miss
Adair is the prettiest thing, and I promised to get her a job. She
might photograph splendidly. Won't you try to find her a place?"

"I'll guarantee her one," said Miss Havender, who was sure that the
firm would be glad to put Mrs. Cheever under obligations. The firm
was in need of patronage, as Mr. Ferriday's lavish expenditures
had crippled its treasury, while his artistic whims had held up
the delivery of nearly finished films.

Miss Havender told Charity to send the girl to her at the office
any day and she would take care of her. Charity kept Kedzie's card
in her hand, and, as soon as Miss Havender was gone, ran to her desk
to write Kedzie. She told a pale lie--it seemed a gratuitous insult
to confess that she had forgotten.


DEAR MISS ADAIR,--Please forgive my delay in keeping my promise,
but I have been unable to find anything likely to interest you till
to-day. But now Miss Grace Havender, of the Hyperfilm Company, has
just assured me that if you will call on her at her office she will
see that you are engaged. You will photograph so beautifully that
I am sure you will have a great career. Please don't fail to call
on Miss Havender.

Yours, with best wishes,

CHARITY C. CHEEVER.


She sent the letter to the address Kedzie had given her--which was
that of Kedzie's abandoned boarding-house.




CHAPTER VI

Since Kedzie, by the time her marriage had reached its first
morning-after, had already found her brand-new husband odious,
there was small hope of her learning to like him or their poverty
better on close acquaintance.

When he left her for his office she missed him, and her heart
warmed toward him till he came home again. He always brought new
disillusionment with him. He spent his hours out of office in
bewailing his luck, celebrating the hardness of the times, and
proclaiming the hopelessness of his prospects.

And then one evening he arrived with so doleful a countenance that
Kedzie took pity on him. She perched herself on his lap and asked
him what was worrying him.

"Nothing much, honey," he groaned, "except that I've lost my job."

Kedzie was thunderstruck. She breathed the expletive she learned
from her latest companions. "My Gawd!"

Gilfoyle nodded dreadfully: "Business has been bad, anyway. Kalteyer,
with his chewing-gum, was about our only big customer, and now he's
gone bust. Yep. The bank's shut down on his loans, and he was caught
with a mountain of bills on his hands. And the Breathasweeta Chewing
Gum stopped selling. People didn't seem to take to the perfume idea."

"I just hate people!" Kedzie growled, pacing the floor.

Gilfoyle went on, bitterly: "Remember how they all said I was such
a genius for thinking up the name 'Breathasweeta,' and the perfumery
idea? And how they liked my catch-phrase?"

Kedzie nodded.

Gilfoyle grew sarcastic: "Well, a man's a genius if he succeeds, and
a fool if he doesn't. I'm just as sure as ever that there's a fortune
in Breathasweeta. But when Kalteyer's bankers got cold feet I lost
my halo. He and Kiam have been roasting the life out of me. They
blame me! They've kept knocking me and quoting 'Kiss me again--who
are you?' and then groaning. It's funny. I loved it when everybody
else said it was great. But I didn't care much for it myself, the
way they said it."

Kedzie flung herself on the tremulous wabbly-legged divan. Kedzie
didn't like the phrase, either, now. When he had first smitten it
from his brain she had thought it an inspiration and him a king.
Now it sounded silly, coarse, a little indecent. Of course it had
not succeeded. How could he ever have been so foolish as to utter
it--"Kiss me again--who are you?" Why, it was vulgar!

Gilfoyle looked dismally incompetent as he drooped and mumbled. It
is hard to tell an autobiography of failure and look one's best.

"Didn't you tell him you was--you were married?" queried Kedzie.

"I hadn't the courage."

"Courage! Well, I like that! So you're fired! Just like me. Funny!
And here we are, married and all. My Gaw--"

"Here we are, married and all. They'll let me finish the week, but
my goose is cooked, I guess. Jobs are mighty scarce in my line of
business. Everybody's poor except the munitions crowd. I wish I knew
how to make dynamite."

Kedzie pushed her wet hair back from her brow and tore her waist open
a little deeper at the throat. This was carrying the joke of marriage
a little too far even for her patient soul.

Soon Gilfoyle's office was closed to him and he was at home almost
all day. That finished him with Kedzie.

He had not improved on connubial acquaintance. He was lazy and
sloven of mornings, and since he had no office to go to he grew more
neglectful of his appearance than ever. His end-to-end cigarettes
got on Kedzie's nerves and cost a nagging amount of money, especially
as she could not learn to like them herself.

He tried to write poetry for the magazines and permanently destroyed
what little respect Kedzie had for the art. Hunting for some little
love-word that was unimportant when found threw him into frenzies of
rage. He went about mumbling gibberish.

"What in hell rhymes with _heaven_?" he would snarl. "_Beven,
ceven, Devon, fevon, gevin, given_--" And so on to "_zeven_."
Then "_breven, creven, dreven_" and "_bleven, eleven,
dleven_" and "_pseven, spleven, threven_" and so forth.

At length he would hurl his pen across the room, pull at his hair,
and light another cigarette. Cigarette always rhymed with cigarette.

After a day or two of this drivel he produced a brief lyric with
a certain fleetness of movement; it had small freight to carry. He
took it to a number of editors he knew, and one of them accepted
it as a kindness.

Kedzie was delighted till she heard that it would bring into the
exchequer about seven dollars when the check came, which would be
in two weeks.

When Gilfoyle was not fighting at composition he was calling the
editors hard names and deploring the small remuneration given to
poets by a pork-packing nation. Or he would be hooting ridicule
at the successful poets and growing almost as furious against the
persons addicted to the fashionable _vers libre_ as he was
against the wealthy classes.

It seemed to Kedzie that nothing on earth was less important than
prosody, and that however badly poets were paid, they were paid more
than they earned. She grew so lonely for some one to talk to that
she decided to call on old Mrs. Jambers at the boarding-house. She
planned to stop in at dinner-time, in the hope of being asked to
sit in at a real meal. The task of cooking what she could afford
to buy robbed her of all appetite, and she was living mainly on
fumes of food and gas.

She was growing thinner and shabbier of soul, and she knew it.
She put off the call till she could endure her solitude no longer;
then she visited Mrs. Jambers. A new maid met her at the door and
barred her entrance suspiciously. Mrs. Jambers was out. So was Mrs.
Bottger. So were the old boarders that Kedzie knew. New boarders
had their rooms, Kedzie was exiled indeed.

She turned away, saying: "Tell Mrs. Jambers that Anita Adair stopped
to say hello. I was just passing."

"Anita Adair?" said the maid. "You was Anita Adair, yes? Wait once.
It is a letter for you by downstairs."

She closed the door in Kedzie's face. Some time later she came back
and gave Anita the letter from Charity. It was several days old. She
read it with amazement. The impulse to tear it up as she had torn
up Charity's card in Newport did not last long. She went at once
to a drugstore and looked up the telephone number and the address
of the Hyperfilm Company. She repaid the druggist with a smile and
a word of thanks; then she took a street-car to the office.

Miss Havender, who was also a scenario-writer and editor, was very
busy. She had an executive manner that strangely contradicted her
abilities to suffer under the pangs of love and unrequited idolatry.
But then, business men are no more immune to the foolish venom on
Cupid's arrows than poets--perhaps less, since they have no outlet
of rhapsody. That was one of the troubles with Kedzie's poet. By
the time Gilfoyle had finished a poem of love he was so exhausted
that any other emotion was welcome, best of all a good quarrel and
the healthful exercise of his poetic gifts for hate. He could hate
at the drop of a hat.

When the office-boy brought Charity's letter of introduction to Miss
Havender with the verbal message that Miss Adair was waiting outside
Miss Havender nodded. She decided to procure this Miss Adair a good
job in order to curry favor with Mrs. Cheever. She would advise Mr.
Ferriday to pay her marked attention, too.

But when she caught sight of Kedzie running the gantlet of the
battery of authors and typists, and noted how pretty she was, Miss
Havender decided that it would not be good for Mr. Ferriday to pay
marked attention to this minx. He had a habit of falling in love
with women more ardently than with scenarios. He was a despot with
a scenario, and he could quickly make a famous novel unrecognizable
by its own father or mother. But a pretty woman could rule him
ludicrously while her charm lasted.

Miss Havender would gladly have turned Kedzie from the door, but
she did not dare. She had promised Mrs. Cheever to give the girl
a job. But she had not promised what kind of job it should be.

She received Kedzie with such brusqueness that the frightened girl
almost fell off the small rim of chair she dared to occupy. She
offered Kedzie a post as a typist, but Kedzie could not type; as
a film-cutter's assistant, but Kedzie had never seen a film; as
a printing-machine engineer or a bookkeeper's clerk, but Kedzie
had no ability to do things. She could merely look things.

Finally Miss Havender said: "I'm awfully sorry, Miss Adair, but the
only position open is a place as extra woman. There is a big ballroom
scene to be staged tomorrow, and a low dance-hall the next day, and
on Monday a crowd of starving Belgian peasants. We could use you in
those, but of course you wouldn't care to accept the pay."

She said this hopefully. Kedzie answered, hopelessly:

"What's the pay?"

"Three dollars."

"I'll take it."

Miss Havender accepted the inevitable, gave her the address
of the studio--far up-town in the Bronx--and told her to report
at eight the next morning.

Kedzie went back to her home in a new mood. She was the breadwinner
now, if not a cake-earner. Gilfoyle was depressed by her good news,
and she was indignant because he was not happy. The poor fellow was
simply ashamed of his own inability to support her in the style she
had been accustomed to dreaming about.

Kedzie was sullen at having to get the dinner that night. The hot
water would not help to give her hands the ballroom texture. The
next morning she had to leave early. Gilfoyle was too tired of doing
nothing to get up, and she resolved to buy her breakfast ready-made
outside. Her last glance at her husband with his frowsy hair on his
frowsy pillow infuriated her.

The experience at the big studio assuaged her wrath against life.
It was something new, and there was a thrill in the concerted action
of the crowds. She wore a rented ball-gown which did not fit her.
Seeing how her very shoulders winced at their exposure, one would
not have believed that she was a graduate of the Silsby school of
near to nature in next to nothing.

She danced with an extra man, Mr. Clarence Yoder, a portly actor
out of work. He was a costume-play gentleman, and Kedzie thought him
something grand. He found her an entrancing armload. He was rather
aggressive and held her somewhat straitly to his exuberant form, but
he gave her so much information that she did not snub him. She did
not even tell him that she was married. Indeed, when at the close
of a busy day he hinted at a willingness to take her out to see
a picture that evening, she made other excuses than those that
actually prevented her accepting. She spent a doleful evening at
home with her dour husband and resented him more than ever.

On the second day Kedzie was a slum waif and did not like it. She
pouted with a sincerity that was irresistible.

Mr. Ferriday did not direct the crowd scenes in these pictures. His
assistant, Mr. Garfinkel, was the slave-driver. Mr. Yoder cleverly
called him "Simon Legree." Kedzie did not know who Mr. Legree was,
but she laughed because Mr. Yoder looked as if he wanted her to
laugh, and she had decided that he was worth cultivating.

During the course of the day, however, Mr. Garfinkel fell afoul of
Mr. Yoder because of the way he danced with Kedzie. It was a rough
dance prettily entitled "Walking the Dog." Mr. Yoder, who did a
minuet in satin breeches to his own satisfaction, pleased neither
himself nor Mr. Garfinkel in the more modern expression of the
dancer's art.

Mr. Garfinkel called him a number of names which Mr. Yoder would
never have tolerated if he had not needed the money. He quivered
with humiliation and struggled to conform, but he could not please
the sneering overseer. He sought the last resort of those persecuted
by critics:

"Maybe you can do better yourself!"

"Well, I hope I choke if I can't," Garfinkel said as he passed the
manuscript to the camera-man and summoned Kedzie to his embrace.
"Here, Miss What's-your-name, git to me."

Kedzie slipped into his clutch, and he took her as if she were a
sheaf of wheat. His arms loved her lithe elasticities. He dragged
her through the steps with a wondering increase of interest. "Well,
say!" he muttered for her private consumption, "you're a little bit
of all right. I'm not so worse myself when I have such help."

He danced with her longer than was necessary for the demonstration.
Then he reluctantly turned her over to Mr. Yoder. Kedzie did not
like Mr. Yoder any more. She found him fat and clumsy, and his hands
were fat and clammy.

Mr. Garfinkel had to show him again.

Kedzie could not help murmuring up toward his chin, "I wish I could
dance with you instead of him."

Garfinkel muttered down into her topknot: "You can, girlie, but not
before the camera. There's a reason. How about a little roof garden
this evening, huh?"

Kedzie sighed, "I'm sorry--I can't."

Garfinkel realized that the crowd was sitting up and taking notice,
and so he flung Kedzie back to Yoder and proceeded with the picture.
He was angry at himself and at Kedzie, but Kedzie was angered at her
husband, who was keeping her from every opportunity of advancement.
Even as he loafed at home he prevented her ambitions. "The dog in
the manger!" she called him.

Garfinkel paid her no further attention except to take a close-up
of her standing at a soppy table and drinking a glass of stale beer
with a look of desperate pathos. She was supposed to be a slum waif
who had never had a mother's care. Kedzie had had too much of
the same.

The next day was a Saturday. Kedzie did not work. She was lonely for
toil, and she abhorred the flat and the neighbors. The expressive
parrot was growing tautological. Kedzie went out shopping to be
rid of Gilfoyle's nerves. He was in travail of another love-jingle,
and his tantrums were odious. He kept repeating _love_ and
_dove_ and _above_, and _tender, slender, offend her,
defender_, and _kiss_ and _bliss_ till the very words
grew gibberish, detestable nonsense.

Kedzie wandered the shops in a famine of desire for some of the new
styles. Her pretty body cried out for appropriate adornment as its
birthright. She was ashamed to go to the studio a third time in
the same old suit. She ordered one little slip of a dress sent home
"collect." She had hoarded the remnant of her Silsby dollars. When
she reached home the delivery-wagon was at the curb and the man was
up-stairs. Gilfoyle greeted Kedzie with resentment.

"What's this thing? I've got no money to pay it. You know that."

"Oh, I know that well," said Kedzie, and she went to the kitchen,
where she surreptitiously extracted the money from the depths of
the coffee-canister.

She paid for the dress and put it on. But she would not let Gilfoyle
see her in it. She did not mind buying his cigarettes half so much
as she minded paying for her own clothes. It outraged the very
foundation principles of matrimony to have to pay for her own
clothes.

Sunday was an appallingly long day to get through. She was so
frantic for diversion that she would have gone to church if she
had had anything fashionable enough to worship in. In the afternoon
she went out alone and sat on a bench in upper Riverside Drive.
A number of passers-by tried to flirt with her, but it was rather
her bitterness against men than any scruple that kept her eyes
lowered.

She would have been excited enough if she had known that the
pictures in which she played a small part were being run off in
the projection-room at the studio for Mr. Ferriday's benefit.

Everybody was afraid of him. The heads of the firm were hoping that
he would approve the reels and not order them thrown out. They were
convinced that they would have to break with him before he broke
them. Mr. Garfinkel was hoping for a word of approval from the
artistic tyrant.

But Ferriday was fretful and sarcastic about everything. Suddenly
Miss Havender noted that he was interested, noted it by the negative
proof of his sudden repose and silence. She could tell that he was
leaning forward, taut with interest. She saw that Anita Adair was
floating across the screen in the arms of Mr. Yoder.

There followed various scenes in which Kedzie did not appear,
close-up pictures of other people. Ferriday fell back growling.
Then he came bolt upright as the purring spinning-wheel of
the projection machine poured out more of Kedzie.

Suddenly he shouted through the dark: "Stop! Wait! Go back! Give
us the last twenty feet again. Who is that girl--that dream? Who
is she, Garfinkel?"

"I don't know her name, sir."

"Don't know her name! You wouldn't! Well, the whole world will know
her name before I get through with her. Who is she, anyway?"

Miss Havender spoke. "Her name is Adair--Anita Adair."

"Anita Adair, eh? Well, where did she come from? Who dug her up?"

"I did," said Miss Havender.

"Good for you, old girl! She's just what I need." And now he studied
again the scene in which Kedzie took down the draught of bitter
beer, and there was a superhuman vividness in the close-up, with
its magnified details in which every tiny muscle revealed its soul.

"Look at her!" Ferriday cried. "She's perfect. The pathos of her!
She wants training, like the devil, but, Lord, what material!"

He was as fanatic as a Michelangelo finding in a quarry a neglected
block of marble and seeing through its hard edges the mellow contours
of an ideal. He was as impatient to assail his task and beat off
the encumbering weight.




CHAPTER VII

Kedzie wore her new frock when she reached the studio on Monday
morning. She greeted Mr. Garfinkel with an entreating smile, and
was alarmed by the remoteness of his response. He was cold because
she was not for him. He led her respectfully to the anteroom of
the sacred inclosure where Ferriday was behaving like a lion in
a cage, belching his wrath at his keepers, ordering the fund-finders
to find more funds for his great picture. It threatened to bankrupt
them before it was finished, but he derided them as imbeciles,
moneychangers, misers.

Garfinkel was manifestly afraid of Ferriday's very echo, and he
cowered a little when Ferriday burst through the door with mane
bristling and fangs bared.

"Well, well, well!" Ferriday stormed. "What do you want, Garfinkel?
What do you want, Garfinkel? What do you want?"

"You told me to bring Miss Adair to you as soon as she arrived,
and--"

The lion roared as gentle as a sucking dove.

"And this is Miss Adair, is it? Of course it is. Welcome to our
little boiler-factory, my dear. Come in and sit down. Garfinkel,
get her a chair and then get out. Sit down, child. I never bite
pretty girls."

Kedzie was pleasantly terrified, and she wondered what would befall
her next. She gave the retreating Garfinkel no further thought. She
sat and trembled before the devouring gaze of the great Ferriday.
He studied her professionally, but he was intensely, extravagantly
human. That was why he appealed to the public so potently. He took
their feelings and set them on fire and juggled with them flaming.

He had such caloric that he kindled actors and actresses to
unsuspected brilliances. He made tinder of the dry-as-dusts,
and he brought the warm-hearted to a white-hot glow.

He dealt with primary emotions crudely but vigorously. A soldier
saluting an officer became in a Ferriday picture a zealot rendering
a national homage. A maid watching her lover walk away angry became
a Juliet letting Romeo go; a child weeping over a broken doll was
an epitome of all regret. A mother putting a light in the window for
an erring daughter's guidance was something new, an allegory as great
as Bartholdi's Liberty putting her lamp in the window of the nation.

He was as intense with humor as with sorrow. A girl washing dishes
brought shrieks of laughter at the little things she did--the
struggle with the slippery soap, the recoil from the hot plate,
the carelessness with the towel.

Ferriday had not talked to Kedzie two minutes before she was wringing
her hands with excitement. He was discovering her to herself. He told
her the story of a picture he wanted to put her in. He had withheld
it for months, looking for the right interpreter. He resolved to
postpone the completion of the big picture till he had finished a
five-reel idyl for the apotheosis of Kedzie.

"The backers of the enterprise will have apoplexy when they hear
of it," he laughed. "But what do I care?"

The whole army of the studio stood meanwhile at ease, drawing salary
and waiting for Ferriday to remember his day's program and give the
order to go ahead. But he was busy with his new story, in the throes
of nympholepsy, seeing visions, hearing voices.

Kedzie sat in a marble expectancy, Galatea watching Pygmalion
create her and prepare to bring her to life. She had never lived.
She realized that. All her previous existence had been but blind
gropings in the womb of time.

The backers came to remind Ferriday that there was waiting a costly
mob of actors, wooed from the speaking drama by trebled salaries.
Ferriday howled to them to get out. They did not respect his
inspirations; they suspected his motives toward Kedzie.

But Ferriday was deep in love with his art; he was panting with
the afflation of Apollo. Old motives, old scenes, old characters
that had served as "sure-fire stuff" since the earliest Hindu drama
now fell into their ancient places and he thought them new. Kedzie
was sure she had never heard such original ideas. Her gratitude to
Ferriday was absolute. And he was clever enough, or crazy enough,
to say that he was grateful to her. He had been looking for just
Her, and she had come to him just in time. He made her promises
that Solomon could not have made to Sheba, or Shakespeare to the
dark lady.

Solomon could offer to his visitor Ophirian wealth, and Shakespeare
could guarantee with some show of success (up to date) that his
words of praise would outlive all other monuments. But Ferriday
did not offer Kedzie minerals or adjectives. He cried:

"Little girl, I'll put you on a girdle of films that will encircle
the world. Your smile will run round the globe like the sun, and
light up dark places in Africa. Your tears will shower the earth.
People in thousands of towns will watch your least gesture with
anxiety. Queens will have you brought to their palaces to make them
laugh and cry. The soldiers of the world will call you their mascot
and write love-letters to you from the trenches. I will have a
billion pictures made of you, and you shall breathe and move in all
of them. You shall live a million lives at once. I will have your
other self placed in museums so that centuries from now they can
take you out and bring you to life again."

It was a mighty good speech. It would be hard to find a serenade
to beat it. And he read it superbly. He had sung it to every one
of his only girls in the world, his eternal (pro tem.) passions.
He had had about nineteen muses already.

Kedzie did not know this, of course. And it would not have mattered
much. Better the nine-and-ninetieth muse to such a man than the
first and final gas-stove slave of a Tommie Gilfoyle.

Kedzie sat in the state of nerves of a little girl alone on a
mountain-top with lightning shimmering and striking all round her.
She was so happy, so full of electrical sparks, that she was fairly
incandescent. As she said afterward, she felt "all lit up."

Ferriday spun out the plot of his new five-reel scenario until he
was like an unreeled spider. He was all out. The mechanical details
interested and refreshed him now. He must order the studio scenery
and select the outdoor "locations." He must pick the supporting cast
and devise one or two blood-curdling moments of great peril.

Kedzie was too excited to note the ghoulish joy with which he
planned to put her into the most perilous plights that had ever
threatened even a movie star with death or crippledom.

"Do they scare you, my dear?" he asked.

"Scare me?" said Kedzie. "Why, Mr. Ferriday, if you told me to,
I'd go out to the Bronx Zoo-ological Gardens and bite the ear off
the biggest lion they got in the lion-house."

Ferriday reached out, put his arm about her farther shoulder, and
squeezed her to him after the manner of dosing an accordeon. Kedzie
emitted the same kind of squeak. But she was not unhappy, and she
did not even say, "Sir!"

The plot of The Kedziad was to be based on the From-Rags-to-Riches
_leitmotiv_, Kedzie was to be a cruelly treated waif brought up
as a boy by a demoniac Italian padrone who made her steal. She was
to be sent into a rich man's home to rob it. She would find the rich
man about to commit suicide all over his sumptuous library. She
would save him, and he would save her from the padrone's revenge,
on condition that she should dress as a girl (he had not, of course,
suspected that she really was one at the time--had always been one,
in fact). She would dress as a girl and conduct a very delicate
diplomatic mission with a foreign ambassador, involving a submarine
wrecked (in the studio tank) and a terrific ride across one of
the deadliest battle-fields of Verdun (New Jersey) with a vast army
of three hundred supers.

When Kedzie had saved two or three nations and kept the United
States from war the millionaire would regret that she was, after
all, only a boy and be overcome with rapture when she told him the
truth. The three hundred supers would then serve as wedding-guests
in the biggest church wedding ever pulled off.

Kedzie liked this last touch immensely. It would make up for that
disgusting guestless ceremony in the Municipal Building.

Ferriday got rid of her exquisitely by writing a note and saying
to her:

"Now you run down and hop into my car and take this note to Lady
Powell-Carewe--don't fail to call her 'Pole Cary.' She is to design
your wealthy wardrobe, and I want her to study you and do something
unheard of in novelty and beauty. Tell her that the more she spends
the better I'll like it."

Kedzie was really a heroine. She did not swoon even at that.

When Ferriday dismissed her he enfolded her to his beautiful
waistcoat, and then held her off by her two arms and said:

"Little girl, you've made me so happy! So happy! Ah! We'll do great
things together! This is a red-letter day for the movie art."

Kedzie never feared that it might have a scarlet-letter significance.
She forgot that she was anything but a newborn, full-fledged angel
without a past--only a future with the sky for its limit. Alas! we
always have our pasts. Even the unborn babe has already centuries
of a past.

It was Ferriday who brought Kedzie home to hers.

"What about dinner to-night, my dear? I feel like having a wonderful
dinner to-night! Are partridge in season now? What is your favorite
sherry? Let me call for you at, say, seven. Where shall I call?"

Kedzie flopped back from the empyrean to her flat. Gilfoyle again
blockaded her.

She nearly swooned then. Her soul rummaged frantically through a
brain like her own work-basket. She finally dug up an excuse.

"I'd rather meet you at the restaurant."

Ferriday smiled. He understood. The poor thing was ashamed of her
boarding-house.

"Well, Cinderella, let me send my pumpkin for you, at least. I won't
come. Where shall my chauffeur find you?"

Kedzie whimpered the shabby number of the shabby street.

"Shall he ask for Miss Adair, or--"

Kedzie was inspired: "I live in Mrs. Gilfoyle's flat-partment."

"I see," said Ferriday. "Miss Anita Adair--ring Mrs. Gilfoyle's
bell. All right, my angel, at seven. Run along."

He kissed her, and she was ice-cold. But then women were often
like that before Ferriday's genius.




CHAPTER VIII

The things we are ashamed of are an acid test of our souls. Kedzie
Thropp was constantly improving the quality of her disgusts.

A few months ago she was hardly ashamed of sleeping under a park
bench. And already here she was sliding through the street in
a limousine. It was a shabby limousine, but she was not yet ready
to be ashamed of any limousine. She was proud to have it lent to
her, proud to know anybody who owned such a thing.

What she was ashamed of now was the home it must take her to and
the jobless husband waiting for her there. She was ashamed of
herself for tying up with a husband so soon. She had married in
haste and repented in haste. And there was a lot of leisure for
more repentance.

Already her husband was such a handicap that she had refrained
from mentioning his existence to the great moving-picture director
who had opened a new world of glory to her--thrown on a screen,
as it were, a cinemation of her future, where triumphs followed
one another with moving-picture rapidity. He had made a scenario
of her and invited her to dinner.

She smiled a little at the inspiration that had saved her from
confessing that she was Mrs. Gilfoyle. It was neat of her to tell
Mr. Ferriday that she could be addressed "in care of Mrs. Gilfoyle."
In care of herself! That was just what she was. Who else was so
interested in Kedzie's advancement as Kedzie?

She was a bitterly disappointed Kedzie just now. Ferriday had told
her to go to Lady Powell-Carewe and get herself a bevy of specially
designed gowns at the expense of the firm. There was hardly a woman
alive who would not have rejoiced at such a mission. To Kedzie, who
had never had a gown made by anything higher than a sewing-woman,
the privilege was heavenly. Also, she had never met a Lady with
a capital L.

The dual strain might have been the death of her, but she was saved
by the absence of Lady Powell-Carewe. Kedzie went back to the street,
sick with deferred hope. Ferriday's chauffeur was waiting to take
her home. She felt grateful for the thoughtfulness of Ferriday and
crept in.

The nearer Kedzie came to her lowly highly flat the less she wanted
even the chauffeur of Mr. Ferriday's limousine to see her enter it.
He would come for her again at night, but the building did not look
so bad at night.

So she tapped on the glass and told him to let her out, please,
at the drug-store, as she had some marketing to do.

"Sure, Miss," said the chauffeur.

Kedzie liked that "Miss." It was ever so much prettier than "Mizzuz."
She bought some postage-stamps at the drug-store and some pork chops
at the butcher's and went down the street and up the stairs to her
life-partner, dog on him!

Gilfoyle was just finishing a poem, and he was the least attractive
thing in the world to her, next to his poem. He was in his sock
feet; his suspenders were down--he would wear the hateful things!
his collar was off, his sleeves up; his detachable cuffs were
detached and stuck on the mantelpiece; his hair was crazy, and he
had ink smears on his nose.

"Don't speak to me!" he said, frantically, as he thumped the table
with finger after finger to verify the meter.

"No danger!" said Kedzie, and went into the bedroom to look over
her scant wardrobe and choose the least of its evils to wear.

She shook her head at her poverty and went to the kitchen to cook
lunch for her man. He followed her and read her his poem while she
slammed the oven door of the gas-stove at the exquisitely wrong
moments. She broke his heart by her indifference and he tore up
the poem, carefully saving the pieces.

"A whole day's work and five dollars gone!" he groaned. He was
so sulky that he forgot to ask her why she had come home so early.
He assumed that she had been turned off. She taxed her ingenuity
to devise some way of getting to the dinner with Ferriday without
letting Gilfoyle know of it. At last she made so bold as to tell her
husband that she thought she would drop in at her old boarding-house
and stay for dinner if she got asked.

"I'm sick of my cooking," she said.

"So am I, darling. Go by all means!" said Gilfoyle, who owed her one
for the poem.

Kedzie was suspicious of his willingness to let her go, but already
she had outgrown jealousy of him. As a matter of fact, he had been
invited to join a few cronies at dinner in a grimy Italian boarding-
house. They gave it a little interest by calling it a "speak-easy,"
because the proprietor sold liquor without a license. Gilfoyle's
cronies did not know of his marriage and he was sure that Kedzie
would not fit. She did not even know the names of the successful,
therefore mercenary, writers and illustrators, much less the names
of the unsuccessful, therefore artistic and sincere.

To Kedzie's delight, Gilfoyle took himself off at the end of a
perfect day of misery. He left her alone with her ambitions. She
was in very grand company. She hated the duds she had to wear, but
she solaced herself with planning what she should buy when money
was rolling in.

When Ferriday's car came for her she was standing in the doorway.
She hopped in like the Cinderella that Ferriday had called her. When
the car rolled up to the Knickerbocker Hotel she pretended that it
was her own motor.

Ferriday was standing at the curb, humbly bareheaded. He wore a
dinner-jacket and a soft hat which he tucked under his arm so that
he might clasp her hands in both of his with a costume-play fervor.
He had been an actor once--and he boasted that he had been a very
bad one.

Kedzie felt as if he were helping her from a sedan chair. She
imagined her knee skirts lengthened to a brocaded train, and his
trousers gathered up into knee breeches with silver buckles.

Bitterness came back to her as she entered the hotel and her slimpsy
little cloth gown must brush the Parisian skirts of the richly clad
other women.

She pouted in right earnest and it was infinitely becoming to her.
Ferriday was not thinking of the price or cut of her frock. He
was perceiving the flexile figure that informed it, the virginal
shoulders that curved up out of it, the slender, limber throat
that aspired from them and the flower-poise of her head on its
white stalk.

"You are perfect" he groaned into her ear, with a flattering agony
of appreciation.

That made everything all right and she did not tremble much even
before the _maitre d'hotel_. She was a trifle alarmed at the
covey of waiters who hastened to their table to pull out the chairs
and push them in and fetch the water and bread and butter and silver
and plates. She was glad to have long gloves to take off slowly while
she recovered herself and took in the gorgeous room full of gorgeous
people. Gloves are most useful coming off and going on.

Kedzie was afraid of the bill of fare with its complex French terms,
but Ferriday took command of the menu.

When he was working Ferriday could wolf a sandwich with the greed of
a busy artist and give orders with a shred of meat in one hand and
a mug of coffee in the other. But when he luxuriated he luxuriated.

Tonight he was tired of life and dejected from a battle with the
stingy backers, who had warned him for the last time once more
that he had to economize. He needed to forget such people and
the loathsome enemy of fancy, economy.

"I want to order something as exquisite as you are," he said.
"Of course, there could be nothing as exquisite as you are, Miss
Adair--you were curled up on a silver dish with a little apple
in your mouth like a young roast pig. Ever read Lamb on pig?"

Kedzie laughed with glancing tintinnabulations as if one tapped
a row of glasses with a knife.

Ferriday sighed. He saw that she had never heard of Lamb and thought
he was perpetrating an ancient pun. But he did not like bookish women
and he often said that nothing was more becoming to a woman than
ignorance. They should have wisdom, but no learning.

Ferriday was one of those terrifying persons who know, or pretend
to know, curious secrets about restaurants and their resources.
Wine-cellars and the individualities of chefs had no terror for
him so far as she could see. He expressed contempt for apparent
commonplaces that Kedzie had never heard of. He used French words
with an accent that Kedzie supposed to be perfect.

The waiters knew that he did not know much and had merely picked up
a smattering of dining-room lore, but they humored his affectations.
And of all affectations, what is more futile than the printing of
American bills of fare in French?

"Would you prefer the Astrakhan caviar?" he began on Kedzie, "or
some or-durv? The caviar here is fairly trustworthy."

Kedzie shrugged her perfectly accented shoulders in a cowardly
evasion, and he ordered the first caviar Kedzie had ever eaten.
It looked as if it came from a munitions-factory, but she liked it
immensely, especially as a side-long glance at the bill of fare told
her that it cost one dollar and twenty-five cents per person.

Next he proposed either a potage madrilene or a creme de volaille,
Marie Louise.

Kedzie chose the latter because it was the latter. She mumbled:

"I think a little cremmy vly Marie Louisa would be nice."

She was amazed to find later how much it tasted like chicken soup.

"We don't want any fish, do we?" Ferriday moaned. "Or do we? They
don't really understand the supreme de sole a la Verdi here, so
suppose we skip to the roast, unless you would risk the aigulette
de pompano, Coquelin. The last time I had a troncon de saumon here
I had to send it back."

Kedzie said, "Let's skip."

She shuddered. The word reminded her, as always, of Skip Magruder.
She remembered how he had hung over the table that far-away morning
and recommended ham 'n'eggs. His dirty shirt-sleeves and his grin
came back to her now. The gruesome Banquo reminded her so vividly
of her early guilt of plebeiancy that she shivered. The alert
Ferriday noticed it and called:

"Have that window closed at once. There's an infernal draught here."

Kedzie was thrilled at his autocratic manner. He scared off the ghost
of Magruder.

Ferriday pondered aloud the bill of fare as if it were the plot of
a new feature film.

"Capon en casserole, milk-fed guinea-hen escoffier, plover en
cocotte, English golden pheasant, partridge--do any of those
tiresome things interest you?"

It was like asking her whether she would have a Gorham tea-set,
a Balcom gown, or a Packard landaulet. She wanted them all.

But her eyes caught the prices. Four dollars for an English pheasant!
No wonder they called it golden. It seemed a shame, though, to stick
such a nice man, after he had already ordered two dollars and a
half's worth of caviar.

She chose the cheapest thing. She was already falling in love
with Ferriday.

The plover was only a dollar. She was not quite sure what kind of
animal it would turn out to be. She had a womanly intuition that it
was a fowl of some breed. She wanted to know. She had come to the
stomach school.

"I think I'll take a bit of the plover," she said.

"Nice girl!" thought Ferriday, who recognized her vicarious economy.

"Plover it is," he said to the waiter, and added, "tell Pierre it's
for me and he'd better not burn it again."

The waiter was crushed by Pierre's lapse, especially as the chef's
name was Achille.

Ferriday went on: "With the plover we might have some champignons
frais sous cloche and a salade de laitue avec French dressing,
yes? Then a substantial sweet: a coupe aux marrons or a nesselrode
pudding, yes?"

Kedzie wanted to ask for a plain, familiar vanilla ice-cream, but
she knew better. She ordered the nesselrode--and got her ice-cream,
after all. There were chestnuts in it, too--so she was glad she
had not selected the coupe aux marrons.

Ferriday did not take a sweet, but had a cheese instead, after an
anxious debate with the waiter about the health of the Camembert
and the decadence of the Roquefort. When this weighty matter was
settled he returned to Kedzie:

"Now for something to drink. A little sherry and bitters to begin
with, of course; and a--oh, umm, let me see--simple things are best;
suppose we stick to champagne." He called it "shah pine," according
to Kedzie's ear, but she hoped he meant shampane. She had always
wanted to taste "wealthy water," as Gilfoyle called it, but never
called for it.

Kedzie was a trifle alarmed when Ferriday said: "I hope you don't
like it sweet. It can't be too dry for me."

"Me, either," Kedzie assured him--and made a face implying that she
always took it in the form of a powder.

Ferriday smiled benignly and said to the waiter: "You might bring us
een boo-tay de Bollinger Numero--er--katter--vang--kanz." He knew
that the French for ninety-five was four-twenties-fifteen, but the
waiter could not understand till he placed his finger on the number
with his best French accent. He saved himself from collapse by a
stern post-dictum:

"Remember, it's the vintage of nineteen hundred. If you bring that
loathsome eighteen ninety-three I'll have to crack the bottle over
your head. You wouldn't want that, would you?"

"_Non, m'zoo, oui, monzoo_," said the German waiter.

"Then we'll have some black coffee and a liqueur--a Curacao, say,
or a green Chartreuse, or a white mint. Which?"

Naturally Kedzie said the white mint, please.

With that Ferriday released the waiter, who hurried away, hoping
that Ferriday's affectations included extravagant tips.

Kedzie gobbled prettily the food before her. Ferriday could tell that
she was anxiously watching and copying his methods of attack. He soon
knew that this was her first real meal _de luxe_, but he did not
mind that. Columbus was not angry at America because it had never
seen an explorer before.

It delighted Ferriday to think that he had discovered Kedzie. He
would say later that he invented her. And she wanted tremendously
to be discovered or invented or anything else, by anybody who could
find a gold-mine in her somewhere and pay her a royalty on her own
mineral wealth.

When her lips met the shell-edge of the champagne-glass and the
essence of all mischief flung its spray against the tip of her
cleverly whittled nose she winced at first. But she went boldly
back, and soon the sprites that rained upward in her glass were
sending tiny balloons of hope through her brain. They soared past
her small skull and her braided hair and the crown of her hat and
on up through the ceiling, and none of them broke--as yet.

Her soul was pleasantly a-simmer now and she could not tell whether
the wine made her exultant or she the wine. But she was sure that
she had at last discovered her life.

And with it all she was dreadfully canny. She was only a little
village girl unused to city ways, and the handsome city stranger
was plying her with wine; but she was none of your stencil figures
that blot romance.

Kedzie was thinking over the cold, hard precepts that women acquire
somehow. She was resolving that since she was to be as great as he
said she should be, she must not cheapen herself now.

Many of these little village girls have come to town since time
was and brought with them the level heads of icily wise women who
make love a business and not a folly. Many men are keeping sober
mainly nowadays because it is good business; many women pure for
the same reason.

Turkish sultans as fierce as Suleiman the Magnificent have bought
country girls kidnapped by slave-merchants and have bought tyrants
in the bargain. Ferriday the Magnificent was playing with holocaust
when he set a match to Kedzie.

But now she was an attractive little flame and he watched her soul
flicker and gave it fuel. He also gave it a cigarette; at least he
proffered her his silver case, but she shook her head.

"Why not?" he asked. "All the women, old and young, are smoking
here."

She tightened her plump lips and answered, "I don't like 'em; and
they give me the fidgets."

"You'll do!" he cried, softly, reaching out and clenching her
knuckles in his palm a moment. "You're the wise one! I felt sure
that pretty little face of yours was only a mask for the ugliest
and most valuable thing a woman can possess."

"What's that?" said Kedzie, hoping he was not going to begin big
talk.

"Wisdom," said Ferriday. "A woman ought to be as wise as the serpent,
but she ought to have the eyes of a dove. Your baby sweetness is
worth a fortune on the screen if you have brains enough to manage
it, and I fancy you have. Here's to you, Miss Anita Adair!"

He drank deep, but she only touched the brim. She saw that he was
drinking too much--he had had several cocktails while he waited
for her to arrive. Kedzie felt that one of the two must keep a clear
head. She found that ice-water was a good antidote for champagne.

When Ferriday sharply ordered the waiter to look to her glass she
shook her head. When he finished the bottle and the waiter put it
mouth down in the ice as an eloquent reminder Ferriday accepted
the challenge and ordered another bottle. He was just thickened
of tongue enough to say "boddle."

Kedzie spoke, quickly: "Please, no. I must go home. It's later than
I thought, and--"

"And Mrs. Gilfoyle will wonder," Ferriday laughed. "That's right,
my dear. You've got to keep good hours if you are going to succeethe
on the screen. Early to bed, for you must early-to-rise. _Garcon,
garcon, l'addition, s'il vous_ please."

While he was paying the bill Kedzie was thinking fleetly of her next
problem. He would want to take her home in his car, and it would be
just her luck to find her husband on the door-step. In any case, she
was afraid that Ferriday would be sentimental and she did not want
Ferriday to be sentimental just yet. And she would not tolerate
a sentiment inspired or influenced by wine. Love from a bottle is
the poorest of compliments.

Already she was a little disappointed in Ferriday. He was a great
man, but he had his fault, and she had found him out. If he were
going to be of use to her she must snub that vinous phase at once.

The cool air outside seemed to gratify Ferriday and he took off his
hat while the carriage-starter whistled up his car. Now Kedzie said:

"Please, Mr. Ferriday, just put me in a taxicab."

"Nonsense! I'll take you home. I'll certainly take you home."

"No, please; it's 'way out of your way, and I--I'd rather--really
I would."

Ferriday stared hard at her as if she were just a trifle blurred.
He frowned; then he smiled.

"Why, bless your soul, if you'd rather I wouldn't oppose you, I
wouldn't--not for worlds. But you sha'n't go home in any old cabby
taxishab; you'll take my wagon and I'll walk. The walk will do me
good."

Kedzie thought it would, too, so she consented with appropriate
reluctance. He lifted her in and closed the door--then leaned in
to laugh:

"Give my love to old Mrs. Gilfoyle. And don't fail to be at the
shudio bright and early. We'll have to make sun while the hay
shines, you know. Good night, Miss Adair!"

"Good night, Mr. Ferriday, and thank you ever so much for the
perfectly lovely evening."

"It has been l-l-lovely. Goo-ood night!"

The car swept away and made a big turn. She saw Ferriday marching
grandiosely along the street, with his head bared to the cool
moonlight. She settled back and snuggled into the cushions,
imagining the car her very own.

She left her glory behind her as she climbed the long stairs,
briskly preparing her lies and her defensive temper for her
husband's wrathful greeting.

He was not there.




CHAPTER IX

Kedzie had no sooner rejoiced in the fortunate absence of her
husband than she began to worry because he was away. Where was he
and with whom? She sat by the window and looked up and down the
street, but she could find none among the pedestrians who looked
like her possessor. She forgot him in the beauty of the town--all
black velvet and diamonds.

Once more she sat with her window open toward her Jerusalem and
worshiped the holy city of her desire. That night at the Biltmore
she was an ignorant country-town girl who had never had anything.
Now she had had a good deal, including a husband. But, strangely,
there was just as much to long for as before--more, indeed, for
she knew more things to want.

As the scientist finds in every new discovery a new dark continent,
in each atom a universe, so Kedzie found from each acquired desire
infinite new desires radiating fanwise to the horizon and beyond.

At first she had wanted to know the town--now she wanted to be known
by the town. Then her father stood in her way; now, her husband. She
had eloped from her parents with ease and they had never found her
again. She had succeeded in being lost.

She did not want to be lost any more; but she was lost, utterly
nobody to anybody that mattered. Now was her chance, but she could
not run away from her husband and get famous without his finding her.
If he found her he would spoil her fun and her fame. She did not
know how many public favorites are married, how many matinee idols
are managed by their wives. She had never heard of the prima donna's
husband.

She fell asleep among her worries. She was awakened by the noisy
entrance of her spouse. He was hardly recognizable. She thought
at first that her eyes were bleary with sleep, but it was his face
that was bleary. He was what a Flagg caricature of him would be,
with the same merciless truth in the grotesque.

Kedzie had never seen him boozy before. She groaned, expressively,
"My Gawd! you're pie-eyed."

He sang an old song, "The girl guessed right the very first time,
very firstime, verfirstime."

He tried to take her into his arms. She slapped his hands away. He
laughed and flopped into a chair, giggling. She studied him with
almost more interest than repugnance. He was idiotically jovial,
as sly as an idiot and as inscrutable.

Without waiting to be asked he began a recital of his chronicles.
He was as evidently concealing certain things as boasting of others.
Kedzie rather hoped he had done something to conceal, since that
would be an atonement for her own subtleties.

"I have been in Bohemia," he said, "zhenuine old Bohemia where hearts
are true and eyes are blue and ev'body loves ev'body else. Down
there a handclasp is a pledzh of loyalty. There's no hypocrisy
in Bohemia--not a dambit. No, sirree. The idle rish with their
shnobberies and worship of mere--mere someshing or oth' have no
place in Bohemia, for in Bohemia hearsh are true and wine is blue
and--"

"Oh, shut up!" said Kedzie.

"Thass way you're always repressin' me. You're a hopeless
Philisterine. But I have no intentions of shuttin' up, my darlin'
Anita--Anita--Shh! shh!"

He was hushing himself. He was very patently remembering something
and conspicuously warning himself not to divulge it. Kedzie loathed
him too much to care. Now that he was safely housed he ceased to
interest her. She went to bed. He spiraled into a chair to meditate
his wickedness. He felt that he was as near to being a hypocrite
as was possible in Bohemia.

He had met two talented ladies at the dinner, one was a sculptress
from Mr. Samuel Merwin's Washington Square and the other was a
paintress from Mr. Owen Johnson's Lincoln Square. Neither lady
had had any work accepted by the Academy or bought by a dealer.
Both were consequently as fierce against intrenched art as Gilfoyle
was against intrenched capital and literature.

They were there in the company of two writers. One of these could not
get anything published at all except in the toy magazines, which paid
little and late and died early. The other writer could get published,
but not sold. Both were young and needed only to pound their irons
on the anvil to get them hot, but they blamed the world for being
cold to true art. In time they would make the sparks fly and would
be in their turn assailed as mere blacksmiths by the next line of
younger apprentices. They were at present in the same stage as any
other new business--they were building up custom in a neighborhood
of strangers.

But at present they were suppressed, all four, men and women;
suppressed and smothered as next June's flowers and weeds are held
back by the conspiracy of December's snows and the harsh criticisms
of March.

The sculptress's first name was Marguerite and Gilfoyle longed to
call her by it, after his second goblet of claret-and-water. He had
a passion for first names. He had the quick enthusiasm of a lawyer
or an advertising-man for a new client. Before he quite realized
the enormity of his perfidy he was pretending to compose a poem to
Marguerite. He wrote busily on an old bill of fare which had already
been persecuted by an artist or two. And he wrote his Anita poem
over again in Marguerite's honor, _mutatis mutandis_.

  Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I say Marguerita?
  Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter.

And so on to the bitter end.

He slipped the lyric to Marguerite and she read it with squeals of
delight, while Gilfoyle looked as modest as such a genius could.
The other girl had to read it, of course, while Gilfoyle tried to
look unconscious. He was as successful as one is who tries to hold
a casual expression for a photograph.

The other girl's reward was a shrug and the diluted claret of
a "Very nice!" Gilfoyle said, "You're no judge or else you're
jealous." The two men read it, and said, "Mush!" and "Slushgusher!"
but Marguerite's eyes belonged to Gilfoyle the rest of the evening,
also her hands now and then.

Remembering this, Gilfoyle was uneasy. One ought to be careful to
keep an aseptic memory at home. Yet if this was not infidelity, what
would be? In a rich man Gilfoyle would have called it a typical
result of the evil influence of wealth. In the absence of wealth it
was a gay little Pierrot-perfidy of the _vie de Boheme_. Still,
poets have to be like that. An actor must make love to whatever
leading lady confronts him, and so must poets, the lawyers and press
agents of love.

But when he got home Gilfoyle repented as he remembered. He suffered
on a rack of guilty bliss, but he managed to hold back the secret
which was bubbling up in him with a bromo-seltzer effervescence.
Incidentally his "pretty maid, pretty maid, Marguerite" had kept
back the fact that she had a husband in the hardware business in
Terre Haute. What the husband was keeping back is none of this
history's business.

It was all as old and unoriginal as original sin. The important thing
to Kedzie was the fact that shortly after the poem had been revamped
a stranger had joined, first in song with Gilfoyle's table-load and
then in conversation. He had ended by introducing his companion and
bringing her over. Had it not been for the fine democracy of Bohemia
they would have cut the creature dead. She was a buyer, one of Miss
Ferber's Emma McChesneys on a lark.

Gilfoyle did not tell Kedzie any of this. He told what followed as
he toiled at the fearfully complicated problem of his shoe-laces,
a problem rendered almost insuperable by the fact that he could not
hold his foot high very long and dared not hold his head low at all.

"Wonnerful thing happent t'night, Anita. Just shows you never know
where your lucksh goin' to hit you. I'm down there with--er--er--
couple of old frensh, you know, and who comes over to our table but
big feller from out Wesh--Chicago--Chicago--Gobbless Ch'cag! His name
is entitled Deshler. In coursh conv'sation I mention Breathasweeta
Shewing Gum--see?--he says he knew that gum and he'd sheen the
advershments, bes' ol' ad-vershments ever sheen, thass what Mr.
Beshler said and I'm not lyin' to you, Anita. No, sir.

"Whereupon--whereupon I modesly remark, 'Of course they're clever
--nashurally they're clever, because they were written by l'i'l
Mr. ME!' He says, 'You really wrote 'em?' and I say, 'I roally
wretem!' And Mr. Keshler says, 'Well, I'll be g'dam'.' Then he
says, 'Who coined that name Breathasweeta?' And I says, 'I did!'
and he says, 'Well, I'll be g'dam'!'

"Anyway, to make long shory stort, Mr. Nestor he says, 'What you
doin' now? Writen copy for the Kaiser or the K-zar?' and I says,
'I am a gen'leman of leisure,' and he says, 'There's a good job
waitin' fer lad your size out in Ch'cag! Would you come 'way out
there?' and I says, 'I fear nothing!'

"So Mr. Zeisselberg wrote his name on a card, and if I haven't los'
card, or he doesn't change his old mind, I am now Mr. John J. Job
of Chicago. And now I got a unsolishited posish--imposishible
solishion--solution--unpolusion solishible--you know what I mean.
So kiss me!"

Kedzie escaped the kiss, but she asked, with a sleepy eagerness,
"Did you tell him you were married?"

"Nashurly not, my dear. It was stric'ly business conv'sation.
I didn' ask him how many shildren he had and he didn' ask me if
I was a Benedictine or a--or a pony of brandy--thass pretty good.
Hope I can rememmer it to-mor'."

Kedzie smiled, but not at his boozy pun. She seemed more comfortable.
She fell asleep. Next to being innocent, being absolved is the most
soothing of sensations.




CHAPTER X

The next morning that parrot, still unmurdered, woke Kedzie early.
She buried one ear deep in the pillow and covered the other with
her hair and her hand. The parrot's voice receded to a distance,
but a still smaller voice began to call to her. She was squirming
deeper for a long snooze when her foot struck another.

Her husband!--King Log, audibly a-slumber. She pouted drowsily,
frowned, slid away, and tried to commit temporary suicide by
drowning herself in sleep.

Then her stupor faded as the tiny call resounded again in her soul.
She was no longer merely Mrs. Anita Gilfoyle, the flat-dwelling
nobody. She was now Anita Adair, the screen-queen. She was needed
at the studio.

She sat up, looked at her husband, her unacknowledged and
unacknowledging husband. A mysterious voice drew her from his side
as cogently as the hand of Yahweh drew the rib that became a woman
from under the elbow of Adam.

She rose and looked back and down at the man whom the law had united
her with indissolubly. Eve must have wondered back at Adam with
the same sense of escape while he lay asleep. According to one of
the conflicting legends of the two gods of Genesis, woman was then
actually one with man. Marriage has ever since been an effort to
put her back among his ribs, but she has always refused to be
intercostal. It is an ancient habit to pretend that she is, and
sometimes she pretends to snuggle into place. Yet she has never been,
can never be, re-ribbed--especially not since marriage is an attempt
to fit her into the anatomy of an Adam who is always, in a sense,
a stranger to her.

Kedzie gazed on her Adam with a sense of departure, of farewell.
She felt a trifle sorry for Gilfoyle, and the moment she resolved
to quit him he became a little more attractive.

There was something pitiful about his helpless sprawl: his very
awkwardness endeared him infinitesimally. She nearly felt that
tenderness which good wives and fond mothers feel for the gawky
creatures they hallow with their devotion.

Kedzie leaned forward to kiss the poor wretch good-by, but,
unfortunately (or fortunately), a restlessness seized him, he
rolled over on his other side, and one limp, floppy hand struck
Kedzie on the nose.

She sprang back with a gasp of pain and hurried away, feeling
abused and exiled.

At the studio she was received by Garfinkel with distinction.
Ferriday came out to meet her with a shining morning face and led
her to the office of the two backers.

A contract was waiting for her and the pen and ink were handy. Kedzie
had never seen a contract before and she was as afraid of this one
as if it were her death warrant. It was her life warrant, rather.
She tried to read it as if she had signed dozens of contracts, but
she fooled nobody. She could not make head or tail of "the party of
the first part" and the terms exacted of movie actors. She understood
nothing but the salary. One hundred dollars a week! That bloomed like
a rose in the crabbed text. She would have signed almost anything
for that.

The deed was finally done. Her hundred-odd pounds of flesh belonged
to the Hyperfilm Company. The partners gave her their short, warm
hands. Ferriday wrung her palm with his long, lean fingers. Then he
caught her by the elbow and whisked her into his studio. He began
to describe her first scene in the big production. The backers had
insisted that she prove her ability as a minor character in a play
featuring another woman. Kedzie did not mind, especially when
Ferriday winked and whispered: "We'll make you make her look like
something the cat brought in. First of all, those gowns of yours--"

She had told him of her ill luck the day before in finding Lady
Powell-Carewe out. He sent her flying down again in his limousine.
She stepped into it now with assurance. It was beginning to be
her very own. At least she was beginning to own the owner.

She felt less excitement about the ride now that it was not her
first. She noticed that the upholstery was frayed in spots. Other
cars passed hers. The chauffeur was not so smart as some of the
drivers. And he was alone. On a few of the swagger limousines there
were two men in livery on the box. She felt rather ashamed of having
only one.

Her haughty discontent fell from her when she arrived at Lady
Powell-Carewe's shop. She wished she had not come alone. She did
not know how to behave. And what in Heaven's name did you call
her--"Your Ladyship" or "Your Majesty" or what?

She walked in so meekly and was so simply clad that nobody in
the place paid any heed to her at first. It was a very busy place,
with girls rushing to and fro or sauntering limberly up and down
in tremendously handsome gowns.

Kedzie could not pick out Lady Powell-Carewe. One of the promenaders
was so tall and so haughty that Kedzie thought she must be at least
a "Lady." She was in a silvery, shimmery green-and-gray gown, and
the man whom the customers called "Mr. Charles" said:

"Madame calls this the Blown Poplar. Isn't it bully?"

Kedzie caught Mr. Charles's eye. He spoke to her sharply:

"Well?"

He evidently thought her somebody looking for a job as bundle-carrier.
She was pretty, but there were tons of pretty girls. They bored Mr.
Charles to death. He had a whole beagle-pack of them to care for.

Kedzie poked at him Ferriday's letter of introduction addressed to
Lady Powell-Carewe. Mr. Charles took it and, not knowing what it
contained, bore it into the other room without asking Kedzie to
sit down.

He reappeared at the door and bowed to her with great amazement. She
slipped into a chaotic room where there were heaps of fabrics thrown
about like rubbish, long streamers of samples littering a desk full
of papers.

A sumptuous creature of stately manner bowed creakily to Kedzie,
and Kedzie said, trying to remember the pronunciation:

"Lady Pole-Carrier?"

A little plainly dressed woman replied: "Yes, my child. So you're
the Adair thing that Ferriday is gone half-witted over. He's just
been talking my ear off about you. Sit down. Stop where you are.
Let me see you. Turn around. I see." She turned to the stately dame.
"Rather nice, isn't she, Mrs. Congdon? H'mm!" She beckoned Kedzie
to come close. "What are your eyes like?" She lorgnetted the
terrified girl, as if she were a throat-specialist. "Take off that
horrid hat. Let me see your hair. H'mm! Rather nice hair, isn't it,
Mrs. Congdon?--that is, if she knew how to do it. Let me see. Yes,
I get your color, but it will be a job to suit you and that infernal
movie-camera. It kills my colors so! I have to keep remembering that
crimson photographs black and cream is dirty, and blue and yellow
are just nothing."

Mr. Charles came in to say that Mrs. Noxon was outside. Kedzie
recognized the great name with terror. Lady Powell-Carewe snapped:

"Tell the old camel I'm ill. I can't see her to-day. I'm ill to
everybody to-day. I've taken a big job on."

This was sublime. To have aristocrats turned away for her!

While Madame prowled among the fabrics and bit her lorgnon in
study, Kedzie looked over the big albums filled with photographs
of the creations of the great creatrix. For Lady Powell-Carewe was
a creative artist, taking her ideas where she found them in art
or nature, and in revivals and in inventions. She took her color
schemes from paintings, old and new, from jewels, landscapes. It
was said that she went to Niagara to study the floods of color that
tumble over its brink.

She began to interest herself in Kedzie, to wish to accomplish more
than the mere selling of dress goods made up. She decided to create
Kedzie as well as her clothes.

"Do you wear that pout all the time?" she asked.

"Do I pout?" Kedzie asked, in an amazement.

"Don't pretend that you don't know it and do it intentionally. Also
why do you Americans always answer a question by asking another?"

"Do we?" said Kedzie.

Lady Powell-Carewe decided that Kedzie was as short on brains as
she was long on looks. But it was the looks that Lady Powell-Carewe
was going to dress, and not the brains.

She ordered Kedzie to spend a lot of money having her hair cared
for expertly.

She tried various styles on Kedzie, ordering her to throw off her
frock and stand in her combination while Mrs. Congdon and Mr.
Charles brought up armloads of silks and velvets and draped them
on Kedzie as if she were a clothes-horse.

The feel of the crisp and whispering taffetas, the elevation of
the brocades, the warm nothingness of the chiffons like wisps
of fog, the rich dignity of the cloths, gave Kedzie rapture on
rapture. Standing there with a burden of fabrics upon her and Lady
Powell-Carewe kneeling at her feet pinning them up and tucking them
here and there, Kedzie was reminded of those ancient days of six
months gone when her mother used to kneel about her and fit on her
the home-made school-dress cut according to Butterick patterns.
Now Kedzie had a genuine Lady at her feet. It was a triumph indeed.
It was not hard now to believe that she would have all the world
at her feet one day.

Lady Powell-Carewe used Kedzie's frame as a mere standard to fly
banners from. Leaving the head and shoulders to stand out like
the wax bust of a wistful doll, she started a cloud of fabric
about her in the most extravagant fashion. She reined it in sharply
at the waist, but again it flared to such distances on all sides that
Kedzie could never have sailed through any door but that of a garage
without compression.

On this vast bell of silk she hung streamers of rosettes, flowers of
colors that would have been strident if they had been the eighteenth
of a shade stronger. As it was, they were as delicious as cream
curdled in a syrup of cherries. The whole effect would have been
burlesque if it had not been the whim of a brilliant taste. Men
would look it at and say, "Good Lord!" Women would murmur, enviously,
"Oh, Lord!" Kedzie's soul expanded to the ultimate fringe of the
farthest furbelow.

When the fantasy was assured Lady Powell-Carewe had Kedzie extracted
from it. Then pondering her sapling slenderness, once more she caught
from the air an inspiration. She would incase Kedzie in a sheath of
soft, white kid marked with delicate lines and set off with black
gloves and a hat of green leaves. And this she would call "The White
Birch."

And that was all the creating she felt up to for the day. She had
Kedzie's measure taken in order to have a slip made as a model
for use in the hours when Kedzie should be too busy to stand
for fitting.

It was well for Kedzie that there was a free ride waiting for her.
Her journey to the studio was harrowed by the financial problem
which has often tortured people in limousines. She did not like to
ask Mr. Ferriday for money in advance. He might think she was poor.
There is nothing that bankrupts the poor so much as the effort to
look unconcerned while they wait for their next penny.

Kedzie was frantic with worry and was reduced to prayer. "O Lord,
send me some money somehow." The number of such prayers going up
to heaven must cause some embarrassment, since money can usually
be given to one person only by taking it from another--and that
other is doubtless praying for more at the very moment.

To Kedzie's dismay, when she arrived at the studio and asked for
Mr. Ferriday, Mr. Garfinkel appeared. He was very deferential, but
he was, after all, only a Garfinkel and she needed a Ferriday. He
explained that his chief was very busy and had instructed Garfinkel
to teach Miss Adair the science of make-up for the camera, to take
test pictures of her, and give her valuable hints in lens behavior.

Late in the afternoon Ferriday came in to see the result of the
first lesson. He said, "Much obliged, Garfinkel" and Garfinkel
remembered pressing duty elsewhere.

His departure left Kedzie alone with Ferriday in a cavern pitch
black save for the cone of light spreading from the little hole in
the wall at the back to the screen where the spray of light-dust
became living pictures of Kedzie.

Kedzie did not know that the operator behind the wall could peek and
peer while his picture-wheel rolled out the cataract of photographs.
Ferriday was careful of her--or of himself. He held her hand,
of course, and murmured to her how stunning she was, but he made
no effort to make love, to her great comfort and regret.

At length he invited her to ride home in his limousine, but he did
not invite her to dinner. She told herself that she would have had
to decline. But she would have liked to be asked.

While he rhapsodized once more about her future she was thinking of
her immediate penury. As she approached the street of her residence
she realized that she must either starve till pay-day or borrow.
It was a bad beginning, but better than a hopeless ending. After
several gasps of hesitation she finally made her plea:

"I'm awfully sorry to have to trouble you, Mr. Ferriday, but
I'm--Well, could you lend me twenty-five dollars?"

"My dear child, take fifty," he cried.

She shook her head, but it hurt her to see the roll of bills he
dived for and brought up, and the careless grace with which he
peeled two leaves from the cabbage. Easy money is always attended
with resentment that more did not come along. Kedzie pouted at her
folly in not accepting the fifty. If she had said, "Lend me fifty,"
he would have offered her a hundred. But the twenty-five was
salvation, and it would buy her food enough to keep her and her
useless husband alive, and to buy her a pair of shoes and some
gloves.

As the car drew near her corner she cried that she had some
shopping to do and escaped again at the drug-store.

She found her husband at home. There was an unwonted authority
about his greeting:

"Well, young woman, you may approach and kiss my hand. I am a
gentleman with a job. I am a Chicago gentleman with a job."

"You don't mean it!" Kedzie gasped; and kissed him from habit with
more respect than her recent habit had shown.

"I mean it," said Gilfoyle. "I am now on the staff of the Deshler
Advertising Agency. I was afraid when Mr. D. offered me an
unsolicited position (he could say it to-day) that it was the red
wine and not the real money that was talking, but he was painfully
sober this noon, took me out to lunch, and told me that he would be
proud to avail himself of my services."

"Splendid!" said Kedzie, with sincere enthusiasm. It is always
pleasant to learn that money is setting toward the family.

But something told Kedzie that her late acquisition of twenty-five
dollars would not be with her long. Easy come, easy go. "How much
is the fare to Chicago?" she asked, in a hollow voice.

"Twenty-two dollars is the fare," said Gilfoyle, "with about
eight dollars extra. I couldn't borrow a cent. I've got only
five dollars."

"I thought so," said Kedzie.

"Thought what so?" said Gilfoyle.

"Nothing," said Kedzie. "Well, I happen to have twenty-five
dollars."

"That's funny," said Gilfoyle. "Where did you get it?"

"Oh, I saved it up."

"From what?"

"Well, do you want the twenty-five, or don't you?"

Gilfoyle pondered. If he questioned the source of the money he
might find it out, and be unable to accept it. He wanted the money
more than the hazardous information; so he said:

"Of course I want the twenty-five, darling, but I hate to rob you.
Of course I'll send for you as soon as I can make a nest out there,
but how will you get along?"

"Oh, I'll get along," said Kedzie; "there'll be some movie-money
coming to me Saturday."

"Well, that's fine," Gilfoyle said, feeling a weight of horrible
guilt mingled with superior wings of relief. He hesitated, hemmed,
hawed, perspired, and finally looked to that old source of so many
escapes, his watch. "There's a train at eight-two; I could just
about make it if I scoot now."

"You'd better scoot," said Kedzie. And she gave him the money.

"I'd like to have dinner with you," Gilfoyle faltered, "but--"

"Yes, I'd like to have you, but--"

They looked at each other wretchedly. Their love was so lukewarm
already that they bothered each other. There was no impulse to
the delicious bitter-sweet of a passionate farewell. She was as
eager to have him gone as he to go, and each blamed the other
for that.

"I'll write you every day," he said, "and I'll send the fare to
you as soon as I can get it."

"Yes, of course," Kedzie mumbled. "Well, good-by--don't miss your
train, darling."

"Good-by, honey."

They had to embrace. Their arms went out about each other and
clasped behind each other's backs. Then some impulse moved them
to a fierce clench of desperate sorrow. They were embracing their
dead loves, the corpses that lay dead in these alienated bodies.
It was an embrace across a grave, and they felt the thud of clods
upon their love.

They gasped with the pity of it, and Kedzie's eyes were reeking
with tears and Gilfoyle's lips were shivering when they wrenched
out of that lock of torment.

He caught her back to him and kissed her salt-sweet mouth. Her kiss
was brackish on his lips as life was. She felt a kind of assault in
the fervor of his kiss, but she did not resist. He was a stranger
who sprang at her from the dark, but he was also very like a poet
she had loved poetically long, long ago.

Then they wrung hands and called good-bys and he caught up his
suit-case and rushed through the door.

She hung from the window to wave to him as he ran down the street
to the Subway, pausing now and again to wave to her vaguely, then
stumbling on his course.

At last she could not see him, whether for the tears or for the
distance, and she bowed her head on her lonely sill and wept.

She had a splendid cry that flushed her heart clean as a new whistle.
She washed her eyes with fine cold water and half sobbed, half
laughed, "Well, that's over."




CHAPTER XI

Charity Coe Cheever was making less progress with her amateur
movie-show than Kedzie with her professional cinematic career.

Charity telephoned to ask Jim Dyckman to act, but he proved to be
camera-shy and intractable.

She had difficulties with all her cast. It was impossible to satisfy
the people who were willing to act with the roles they were willing
to assume.

Charity was lunching at the Ritz-Carlton with Mrs. Noxon when she saw
Jim Dyckman come in with his mother. Mrs. Noxon left Charity and went
over to speak to Mrs. Dyckman. So Charity beckoned Jim over and urged
him to accept the job of impresario.

He protested, but she pleaded for his help at least on an errand
or two.

"Jim, I want you to go up to the studio of these people and find
this great man Ferriday and get him to promise to direct for us.
And by the way, that little girl you pulled out of the pool, you
know--well, they promised to get her a job at the studio. You look
her up and find out how she's doing--there's a darling."

He shook his head, resisting her for once, and answered:

"Go to the devil, Charity darling. You won't let me love you, so I'll
be cussed if I'll let you get me to working for you. I've had you bad
and I'm trying to get well of you. So let me alone."

That was how Peter Cheever, talking to the headwaiter at the head of
the stairs, saw his wife and Jim Dyckman with their heads together at
a table. He wanted to go over and crack a water-bottle over Dyckman's
head. He did not do it, for the excellent reason that Zada L'Etoile
was at his side. She had insisted on his taking her there "to lunch
with the bunch," as she expressed it.

She also saw Charity and Jim and Cheever's sudden flush of rage. She
felt that the way was opening for her dreams to come true. She was so
happy over the situation that she helped Cheever out of the appalling
problem before him.

He did not know how to go forward or how to retreat. He could think
of nothing to say to the headwaiter who offered him his choice of
tables.

Zada caught his elbow and murmured in her very best voice just loud
enough for the headwaiter's benefit:

"Mr. Cheever, I'm so sorry--but I'm feeling dizzy. I'm afraid I shall
faint if I don't get out in the air. It's very close in here."

"It is very close, madam," said the headwaiter, and he helped to
support her down the steps quietly and deferentially, just as if
he believed it.

Zada and Cheever thought they were escaping from a crisis, but they
were drifting deeper and deeper into the converging currents. When
they were safe in the motor outside Zada was proud.

"Some get-away, that?" she laughed.

"Wonderful!" said Cheever. "I didn't know you had so much social
skill."

"You don't know me," she said. "I'm learning! You'll be proud of me
yet."

"I am now," he said. "You're the most beautiful thing in the world."

"Oh, that's old stuff," she said. "Any cow can be glossy. But I'm
going in for the real thing, Peterkin. I've cut out the cocktails
and I don't dance with anybody but you lately. Have you noticed
that? It's the quiet life and the nice ways for me. Do you mind?"

"It's very becoming" he said. "Anything for a novelty."

Yet he liked her surprisingly well in this phase. She had been
cutting down his liquor, too. She had been cutting down his
extravagances. She had even achieved the height of denying herself
luxuries--one of the surest and least-trodden short-cuts to a man's
heart--a little secret path he hardly knows himself.

The affair of Zada and Cheever was going the normal course. It had
lost the charm of the wild and wicked--through familiarity; and
it was tending to domestication, as all such moods do if nothing
interrupts them. There are all sorts of endings to such illicit
relations: most of them end with the mutual treachery of two fickle
creatures; some of them end with bitter grief for one or the other
or both; some of them end in crime, or at least disgrace; and some
of them finish, with disconcerting immorality, in an inexcusable
respectability.

The improvement in Zada's mind and heart was, curiously, the most
dangerous thing in the world for Cheever. If she had stayed noisy
and promiscuous and bad, he would have tired of her. But she was
growing soft and homey, gentle as ivy, and as hard to tear away or
to want to tear away. After all, marriage is only the formalizing
of an instinct that existed long before--exists in some animals and
birds who mate without formality and stay mated without compulsion.

When Zada and Cheever had escaped from the Ritz-Carlton they took
lunch at another restaurant. Zada was childishly proud of her tact
and of Cheever's appreciation. But afterward, on the way "home"--as
she called what other people called her "lair"--she grew suddenly
and deeply solemn.

"So your wife is with Dyckman again," she said. "It looks to me
like a sketch."

Cheever flushed. He hated her slang and he did not accept her
conclusion, but this time he did not forbid her to mention his wife.
He could hardly do that when her tact had saved him and Charity from
the results of their double indiscretion and the shame of amusing
that roomful of gossips.

Zada misunderstood his silence for approval; so she spoke her
thoughts aloud:

"If that He and She business goes on I suppose you'll have to
divorce the lady."

"Divorce Charity!" Cheever gasped. "Are you dotty?"

That hit Zada pretty hard, but she bore it. She came back by another
door.

"I guess I am--nearly as dotty as she is about Dyckman. First thing
you know she'll be trying to get free herself. What if she asks you
for a divorce?"

"I'd like to see her!"

"You mean you wouldn't give her her freedom?"

"Not in a thousand years."

He was astounded at the sepulchral woe of Zada's groan. "O Lord,
and I thought--oh--you don't love me at all then! You never really
loved me--really! God help me."

Cheever wondered what Zada would smash first. He hoped it would not
be the window of the car. He hoped he could get her safely indoors
before the smashing began.

He did. She was a grim and murky storm-cloud full of tornado when
they crossed the pavement and the vestibule of the apartment-house
and went up in the elevator.

But once inside the door, her breast began to heave, her nostrils
to quiver, her fingers to work. Her maid came to take her hat, and
paled to see her torment. Zada gave her her things and motioned her
away. She motioned her four or five times. The maid had needed only
one motion.

Cheever watched Zada out of the corner of his eye and wondered why
he had ever been fated to fall in love with such a creature. He was
convinced that he had been fate-forced into the intrigue. He had no
sense whatever of volition or wicked intent. He could only feel that
he had tried to be decent and play fair and be generous.

The thought of what the neighbors were about to hear made him sick
with chagrin. The fact that the neighbors were under suspicion
themselves only aggravated the burden of shame.

The hardest part of Zada's agony was her pitiful effort to take
her medicine like a lady. It was terrific how hard it was for one
of a wildcat heritage and habit to keep the caterwaul back and the
claws muffled. The self-duel nearly wrecked Zada, but she won it.
She was not thoroughbred, but she had tried to be thoroughgoing.
She was evidently not a success as a self-made lady. She kept
whispering to herself:

"What's the use? Oh, why did I try? Oh, oh, oh, what a fool I've
been! To think!--to think!--to think!"

Cheever was distraught. He had waited for the outbreak, and when
it did not come he suffered from the recoil of his own tension.

"For the Lord's sake, yell!" he implored.

She turned on him eyes of extraordinary abjection. She saw at last
where her lawlessness had brought her, and she despised herself. But
she did not love him any the more for understanding him. She saw at
last that one cannot be an honest woman without actually being--an
honest woman. She was going to get honesty if it broke a bone.

She told her accomplice: "I want you to go away and stay away.
Whatever you do, leave me be. There's nothing else you can do for me
except to take back all the stuff you've bought me. Give it to that
wife you love so much and wouldn't suspect no matter what she did.
You love her so much that you wouldn't let her go even if she wanted
to leave you. So go back to her and take these things to her with my
comp'ments."

Now it was Cheever who wanted to scream as he had not screamed
since he was the purple-faced boy who used to kick the floor and
his adoring nurse. But he had lost the safety valve of the scream.
He smothered.

When Zada began to peel off her rings and thrust them out to him he
swiftly turned on his heel and fled. He never knew whether Zada woke
the block with her howls or not when he left her forever.

He forgot to ask when he came back.




CHAPTER XII

First he went home to take his temper to Charity. On the way he
worked up a splendid rage at her for giving such a woman as Zada
grounds for gossip. He went straight to her room and walked in
without knocking.

Charity was dictating a letter to her secretary. Cheever surprised
a phrase before she saw him.

"'Thousands of blind soldiers and thousands of orphans hold out their
hands to us. We must all do what we can--' Why, hello! Where did you
drop from? Give me just a minute while I finish this letter. Let me
see. Where was I?"

The secretary read in a dull, secretarial voice:

"'Thousblinsoldiersorphs--wem'sdo'll we can.'"

"Oh yes," said Charity. "'You have never failed to respond to such
an appeal,' comma; no, semicolon; no, period. 'So I shall put you
down for a subscription of dash 'how much' question-mark. 'Thanking
you in adv'--no, just say, 'My husband joins me in kindest regards
to your dear wife and yourself, cordially yours'--and that will be
all for the present."

The secretary garnered her sheaves and went out. Charity said
to Cheever:

"Well, young man, sit down and tell us what's on your mind. But first
let me tell you my troubles. There's a match on my dresser there.
Peter, I'm in an awful mess with this movie stunt. I can get plenty
of people to pose for the camera, but I can't find a man to manage
the business end of it. I was lunching with Mrs. Noxon at the Ritz
to-day. I called your friend Jim Dyckman over from another table and
begged him to take the job. But he refused flatly, the lazy brute.
Don't you think you could take it on? I wish you would. It's such
a big chance to make a pile of money for those poor soldiers."

Cheever was lost. Unconsciously she had cleared up the scandal of
her talk with Dyckman. He remembered that he had seen Mrs. Noxon
at another table, standing. He felt like a dog and he wanted to
fawn at the heels he had prepared to bite. He felt unworthy to be
the associate of his sainted wife in her good works. He said:

"You flatter me. I couldn't manage a thing like that. I'm busy.
I--I couldn't."

"You've got to play a part, then," she said. "You're looking so well
nowadays, taking such good care of yourself. Will you?"

"I might," he said. "I'll think it over."

She was called to the telephone then and he escaped to his own room.
He moped about and sulked in his uncomfortable virtue. He dressed for
dinner with unusual care. He was trying to make a hit with his wife.

In going through his pocket-book he came across two theater tickets.
He had promised to take Zada. He felt like a low hound, both for
planning to take her and for not taking her. She would have a dismal
evening. And she was capable of such ferocious lonelinesses. He
had driven away all her old friends. She would recall them now, he
supposed. That would be a pity, for they were an odious gang. It
would be his fault if she relapsed. It was his duty, in a way, to
help her to reform.

The ludicrous sublimity of such an ethical snarl reduced him to
inanity. He stayed to dinner. Charity had not expected him to stop.
She had planned an evening's excavation into her correspondence and
had not changed her street dress. She was surprised and childishly
delighted to have him with her--then childishly unhappy as she
observed:

"But you're all togged up. You're going out."

"No--well--that is--er--I was thinking you would like to see a show.
I've got tickets."

"But it's late. I'm not dressed."

"What's the odds? You look all right. There's never anybody but
muckers there Saturday nights. We'll miss it all if you stop
to prink."

"All right," she cried, and hurried through the dinner.

He was glad at least that he had escaped a solemn evening at home.
He could not keep awake at home.

So they went to the theater; but there was not "nobody there," as
he had promised.

Zada was there--alone in a box, dressed in her best, and wearing
her East-Lynniest look of pathos.

The coincidence was not occult. After several hours of brave battle
with grief and a lonely dinner Zada had been faced by the appalling
prospect of an evening alone.

She remembered Cheever's purchase of the theater tickets, and she
was startled with an intuition that he would take his wife in her
place. Men are capable of such indecent economies.

Zada was suffocated with rage at the possibility. She always
believed implicitly in the worst things she could think of. If
Peter Cheever dared do such a thing! And of course he would! Well,
she would just find out!

She threw a lonely wineglass at the fern-dish and smashed a decanter.
Then she pushed off the table about a hundred dollars' worth of
chinaware, and kicked her chair over backward. She had been famous
for her back-kick in her public dancing-days.

She howled to her maid and went into her wardrobe with both hands.
She acted like a windmill in a dress-shop. Finally she came upon
what she was looking for--the most ladylike theater-gown that ever
combined magnificence with dazzling respectability.

She made up her face like a lady's--it took some paint to do that.
Meanwhile, her maid was telephoning speculators for a box. Zada
arrived before Cheever and Charity did. She waited a long time,
haughtily indifferent to the admiration she and her gown were
achieving. At last she was punished and rewarded, revenged, and
destroyed by the sight of Cheever coming down the aisle with Charity.
They had to pause to let a fat couple rise, and they paused, facing
Zada. Cheever caught her eye and halted, petrified, long enough for
Charity to sit down, look up at him, follow the line of his gaze,
and catch a full blast of Zada's beauty and of the fierce look she
fastened on Cheever. Charity's eyes ran back on the almost visible
clothes-line of that taut gaze and found Cheever wilting with
several kinds of shame.

He sat down glum and scarlet, and Charity's heart began to throb.
A second glance told her who Zada was. She had seen the woman often
when Zada had danced in the theaters and the hotel ballrooms.

Charity found herself thinking that she was not Cheever's wife,
but only a poor relation--by marriage. The worst of it was that she
was not dressed for the theater. The gown she wore was exquisite in
its place, but it was dull and informal and it gave her no help in
the ordeal she was suddenly submitted to. Her hair had not been
coiffed by the high-elbowed artist with the waving-tongs. Her brains
were not marceled for a beauty-contest with her rival. She was at
her worst and Zada was at her supreme.

Zada was not entirely unknown to Charity. She had not been able
to escape all the gossip that linked Cheever with her, but she had
naturally heard little of it, and then only from people of the sort
who run to their friends with all the bad news they can collect.
They are easily discredited.

Charity had spent so many bad hours wondering at her husband's
indifference and had heard his name linked with so many names that
she had temporized with the situation. Cheever was of the sort that
looks at every woman with desire, or looks as if he looked so. The
wives of such men grow calloused or quit them.

Charity had not quit Cheever. She had hardly dreamed of it. She had
not outgrown being hurt. Her slow wrath had not begun to manifest
itself. This crushing humiliation smote her from a clear sky.

She was not ready for it. She did not know what to do. She only knew,
by long training, that she must not do what she first wanted to do.
She had been taught from childhood what Zada was only now trying
to learn.

Charity pretended a great interest in her program and laughed
flightily. Cheever was morose. He stole glances at Zada and saw that
she was in anguish. He felt that he had treated her like dirt. He was
unworthy of her, or of his wife, or of anything but a horsewhip.

He glanced at Charity and was fooled by her casual chatter. He
supposed that she was as ignorant of the affair with Zada as he
wanted her to be. He wished that he could pretend to be unconcerned,
but he could not keep his program from shivering; his throat was full
of phlegm; he choked on the simplest words. He thought for some trick
of escape, a pretended illness, a remembered business engagement,
a disgust with the play.

He was afraid to trust his voice to any proposal or even to go out
between the acts.

The worst of it was that he felt sorrier for Zada than for his wife.
Poor Zada had nothing, Charity had everything. How easily we vote
other people everything! Cheever was afraid of the ride home with
Charity; he dreaded to be at home to-night and to-morrow and always.
He longed to go to Zada and help her and let her revile him and
scratch him, perhaps, provided only that she would throw her arms
about him afterward. He never imagined that a duel of self-control,
a mortal combat in refinement, was being fought over him by those
two women.

Zada's strength gave out long before Charity's; she was newer to
the game. During a dark scene she surrendered the field and decamped.
But Cheever and his wife both caught the faint shimmer of her
respectable robe as it floated from the rail and vanished in the
curtains. It was like a dematerialization at a seance.

Cheever wanted to crane his neck and dared not. Charity felt a great
withdrawal of support in the flight of her rival. She had not Zada's
presence now to sustain her through the last act. But she sat it out.

She was bitter against Cheever, and her thoughts dark. The burden
of his infidelity was heavy enough for her to bear, but for him to
subject her to such a confrontation was outrageous. She had no doubt
that it was a cooked-up scheme. That vile creature had planned it
and that worm of a husband had consented to it!

The most unforgivable thing of all, of course, was the clothes
of it.

Charity, in the course of time, forgave nearly everybody everything,
but she never forgave her husband that.

On the way home she had nothing to say. Neither had Cheever. He
felt homesick for Zada. Charity felt homeless. She must have been
the laughing-stock or the pitying-stock of the whole world for
a long time.

When they reached home she bade Cheever a perfectly cheerful
good-night and left him to a cold supper the butler had laid out
for him. She did not know that he stole from the house and flew
to Zada.

Charity was tempted to an immediate denunciation of Cheever and
a declaration of divorce. She would certainly not live with him
another day. That would be to make herself an accomplice, a silent
partner of Zada's. It would be intolerable, immoral, not nice.




CHAPTER XIII

The next morning proved to be a Sunday and she felt a need of
spiritual help in her hour of affliction. Man had betrayed her;
religion would sustain her grim determination to end the unwholesome
condition of her household. The Bible said (didn't it?), "If thy
right hand offend thee, cut it off." That surely meant, "If thy
husband offend thee, divorce him."

She went to church, her ancestral Episcopalian church, where her
revered Doctor Mosely, the kindliest old gentleman in the world,
had poured sermons down at her like ointment and sent prayers up
like smoke since she was a little girl. But on this day he chose
to preach a ferocious harangue against divorce as the chief peril,
the ruination of modern society.

The cowering Charity got from him the impression that home life
had always been flawless in this country until the last few years,
when divorce began to prosper, and that domestic life in countries
where there is little or no divorce had always been an unmitigated
success. If only divorce and remarriage were ended, the millennium
of our fathers would return.

This had not been her previous opinion; it was her vivid impression
from Doctor Mosely, as honest an old darling as ever ran facts
through a sieve and threw away all the big chunks that would not
go through the fine mesh of his prejudices. He abhorred falsehood,
cruelty, skepticism, sectarianism, and narrowness, and his sermons
were unconscious mixtures of hand-picked truth and eloquent legends,
ruthless denunciations of misunderstood people and views, atheism
toward the revelations of all the sciences (particularly the science
of biblical criticism, which he hated worse than he hated Haeckel),
and a narrowness that kept trying to sharpen itself into a razor
edge.

Fortunately he belied in his life almost all of his pulpit crimes
and moved about, a tender, chivalrous, lovable old gentleman. It
was this phase that Charity knew, for she had not heard one of his
sermons for a year or more, though she saw him often in his parish
work. She was the more amenable to his pulpit logic to-day.

Charity had always assumed that the United States was the most
virtuous, enlightened, and humane of nations. According to Doctor
Mosely, it was shockingly corrupt, disgusting. The family as an
institution was almost completely gone; its only salvation would be
an immediate return to a divorceless condition. (Like that of Italy
and Spain and France during the Middle Ages?)

Hitherto Charity had not thought much about divorce, except to regret
that certain friends of hers had not hit it off better and had had to
undergo cruel notoriety after their private distresses. But divorce
was no longer an academic question to her. It had come home.

When she realized that her husband had been not only neglectful
of her, but devoted to a definite other woman, she felt at first
that it would be heinous to receive him back in her arms fresh from
the arms of a vile creature like Zada L'Etoile. Now she got from
the pulpit the distinct message that just this was her one important
duty, and that any attempt to break from such a triple yoke would be
a monstrous iniquity which the Church could not condone.

Doctor Mosely implied that when one partner to a marriage wandered
aside into forbidden paths (as he very prettily phrased the very ugly
matter) it was always the fault of the other partner. He thundered
that the wives of to-day were not like their simple-minded mothers,
because they played bridge and smoked cigarettes and did not attend
prayer-meetings and would not have children. It was small wonder,
he said, that their husbands could not be held. Doctor Mosely had
preached the same sermon at Charity's mother and her generation,
and his father had preached it at his generation, with the necessary
terms changed and the spirit the same. He and his kind had been
trying since time began to cure the inherent ills of human
relationships by railing at old errors and calling them new.

So in the dark ages the good priests had tried to cure insane people
by shouting denunciations at the devils that inhabited them. The
less they cured the louder they shouted, and when the remedy failed
they blamed the patients.

So fathers try to keep their little sons from being naughty and
untruthful by telling them how good and obedient little boys were
when they were little boys. They tell a silly lie to rebuke a lie
and wonder at their non-success.

Marital unrest is no more a sign of wickedness than stomach-ache is;
it is a result of indigestion or ptomaine poisoning, and divorce is
only a strong purge or an emetic, equally distressing and often
the only remedy.

But Doctor Mosely honestly abominated divorce; he regretted it
almost as much as he regretted the Methodist Episcopal heresies
or the perverseness of the low-Church doctrines.

Charity had always been religious; she had wrecked her health
visiting the sick and cherishing the orphan and she had believed
everything she was told to believe. But now when she went to church
for strength and comfort she came away feeling herself a condemned
and branded failure, blameworthy for all her husband's sins and sins
of her own that she had not suspected.

She prayed to be forgiven for causing her husband to sin and asked
strength to win him back to his duty. She reached home in such a
mood of holy devotion that when she found her husband there she
bespoke him tenderly and put out her arms to him and moaned:

"Forgive me!"

"For what?" he said as he went to her from habit before he could
check himself. But even as he clasped her she felt that his very
sleeves were warm from Zada L'Etoile's embrace and she slipped
through his arms to the floor.

When she came to, she was lying on a couch with a cushion under
her heels, and Cheever was chafing her wrists and kissing her hand.
She drew it away feebly and said:

"Thank you. I'll be all right. Just leave me alone."

He remembered that Zada had said much the same thing. He was glad
to leave the room. When he had gone Charity got up and washed her
hands, particularly the hand, particularly the spot, he had kissed.

She seemed to feel that some of the rouge from Zada's lips had been
left there by Cheever's lips. There was a red stain there and she
could not wash it away. Perhaps it was there because she tried so
hard to rub it off. But it tormented her as she went sleep-walking,
rubbing her hand like another Lady Macbeth.




CHAPTER XIV

On Monday there was a meeting of one of the committees she had
organized for the furtherance of what she called the movie stunt.
The committee met at the Colony Club. Most of the committee were
women of large wealth and of executive ability, and they accomplished
a deal of business with expedition in their own way.

There was some chatter, but it was to the point. At length during
a discussion of various forms of entertainment Mrs. Noxon said she
was afraid that the show would be deadly dull with only amateurs in
it. Mrs. Dyckman thought that professionals would make the amateurs
look more amateurish than ever. The debate swayed from side to side,
but finally inclined toward the belief that a few professional bits
would refresh the audience.

And then suddenly Mrs. Neff had to sing out: "Oh, Charity, I've
an idea. Let's get some stunning dancer to do a special number.
I remember one who would be just the ticket. What's the name--Zada
Le Something or other. She's a gorgeous creature. Have you seen her
recently?"

Several women began signaling wildly to Mrs. Neff to keep quiet.
Charity saw their semaphores at work, but Mrs. Neff was blind--blind,
but not speechless. She kept on singing the praises of Zada till
everybody wanted to gag her.

An open mind to gossip is an important thing. We ought to keep up
with all the scandals concerning our friends and enemies. Otherwise
we lose many an opportunity to undercut the latter and we are
constantly annoying the former.

It was Mrs. Neff, of all people--and she loved Charity Coe
dearly--who caused her public shame and suffering. Mrs. Neff
had defended Charity from the slanderous assumptions of Prissy
Atterbury and had refused to listen to Pet Bettany's echoes.

She had, indeed, a bad reputation for rebuking well-meaning
disseminators of spice. This attitude discouraged several persons
who would otherwise have told her all sorts of interesting things
about Charity's husband's _entente cordiale_ with Zada.

Charity had dwelt in a fool's paradise of trust in Peter Cheever
for a while, then had dropped back into a fool's purgatory of doubt,
where she wandered bewildered. Now she was thrown into the fool's
hell. She knew that her love had been betrayed. Everybody else knew
it and was wondering how she would act.

Charity was sick. This was really more than she had bargained for.
As before, she felt it immodest to expose her emotions in public,
so she said:

"Yes, I've seen her. She is very attractive, isn't she? I don't know
if she is dancing in public any more, but I'll find out."

Mrs. Neff sat back triumphantly and let the meeting proceed. But
there was a gray pall on the occasion. Women began to look at their
wrist-watches and pretend to be shocked at the lateness of the hour,
and all of them shook hands solemnly with Charity. There was a poorly
veiled condolence in their tone.

Charity carried it off pluckily, but she was in a dangerous humor.
She really could not endure the patronizing mercy of these women.

That night Cheever made again his appearance at the dinner-table.
He had some notion of putting Charity off her guard or of atoning
to her in part for his resumed alliance with Zada. He could not have
told what his own motives were, for he was in a state of bewilderment
between his duties to Mrs. Charity Tweedledum and Miss Zada
Tweedledee. He could not tell which one had the greater claim
on his favors.

Charity studied him across the table and wondered what he really was,
faun or traitor, Mormon or weakling. He was certainly handsome, but
the influence of Zada L'Etoile seemed to hang about him like a green
slime on a statue.

She could not find any small talk to carry the meal along. At length
Cheever asked:

"What you been up to all day?"

"Oh, committee stuff--that movie thing, you know."

"How's it coming on? Got a manager yet?"

"Not yet. We were talking about getting some professionals in
to brighten up the evening."

"Good work! Those amateurs make me sick."

"Mrs. Neff proposed that we get some stunning dancer to do a turn."

"Not a bad idea. For instance--"

He emptied his glass of Chablis and the butler was standing by
to refill it when Charity answered:

"Mrs. Neff suggested a dancer I haven't seen on the stage for some
time. You used to admire her."

"Yes?" said Cheever, pushing his glass along the table toward
the butler, who began to pour as Charity slid home her _coup
de grace_.

"Zada L'Etoile. What's become of her?"

Cheever's eyes gaped and his jaws dropped. The butler's expression
was the same. He poured the Chablis on the back of Cheever's hand
and neither noticed it till Charity laughed hysterically and drove
the sword a little deeper:

"Is she still alive? Have you seen her?"

Cheever glared at her, breathed hard, swore at the butler, wiped
his hand on his napkin, gnawed his lips, twisted his mustache,
threw down the napkin, rose, and left the table.

Charity's smile turned to a grimace. She saw that the butler was
ashamed of her. He almost told her that she ought to have known
better than subject him and the other servants to such a scene.

Charity caught herself about to say, "I beg your pardon, Hammond."

She felt as if she ought to beg the pardon of everybody in the world.

She could not stand the lonely dining-room long. She rose and walked
out. It seemed that she would never reach the door. It was a _via
crucis_ to her. Her back ached with the sense of eyes upon it.

The hall was lonely. The thud of the front door jarred her. She went
into the library. It was a dark and frowning cavern. She went into
the music-room, approached the piano, looked over the music, turned
up "Go, Lovely Rose." The rose that Jim Dyckman said she was had been
thrown into the mud. She went up to her room. The maid was arranging
her bed for the night. She had turned down one corner of the cover,
built up one heap of pillows, set one pair of slippers by the edge.

Charity felt like a rejected old spinster. She sat and mused and
her thoughts were bitter. She remembered Doctor Mosely's sermon
and wondered if he would preach what he preached if he knew what
she knew. She would go to him and tell him.

But what did she know? Enough to convince herself, but nothing at
all that even a preacher would call evidence.

She must have proof. She resolved to get it. There must be an
abundance of it. She wondered how one went at the getting of
evidence.




CHAPTER XV

While Charity was resolving to tear down her life Kedzie Thropp was
building herself a new one on the foundations that Charity had laid
for her with a card of introduction to Miss Havender.

In the motion-picture world Kedzie had found herself. Her very
limitations were to her advantage. She would have failed dismally
in the spoken drama, but the flowing photograma was just to her
measure.

The actor must not only know how to read his lines and express
emotions, but must keep up the same spontaneity night after night,
sometimes for a thousand performances or more. The movie actor
is expected to respond to a situation once or twice for rehearsal,
and once or twice for the camera. There is no audience to struggle
against and listen for--and to. The director is always there at
the side calling, reminding, pleading, encouraging, threatening,
suggesting the thoughts, the lines, and the expression, doing all
the work except the pantomime.

That was Kedzie's salvation. Tell her a story and make her the
heroine of it, and her excitable heart would thrill to the emotional
crisis. Take a snapshot of her, and the picture was caught.

Ferriday soon learned this and protected her from her own helpless
vice of discontent. She lapsed always from her enthusiasm after
it was once cold. As an actress she would have been one of those
frequent flashers who give a splendid rehearsal or two and then sink
back into a torpor. She might have risen to an appealing first-night
performance. Thereafter, she would have become dismal. The second
week would have found the audiences disgusted and the third would
have found her breaking her contract and running away with somebody.
A horse that has run away once is likely to run away again. Kedzie
had run away twice.

But the movie life was just the thing for her. She did not play
always the same set scenes in the same scene sets. She was not
required even to follow the logic of the story. For a while she
would play a bit in a tiny angle representing a drawing-room. When
that was taken she would play, not the next moment of the story,
but the next scene in that scene. It might be a year further along
in the story. It was exciting.

Her second picture had great success. She played the girl brought up
as a boy by a cruel Italian padrone who made her steal. Her third
picture was as nearly the same as possible.

Now she was a ragged waif, a girl, who dressed as a boy and sold
newspapers so as to keep her old father in liquor. The garret was
a rickety table, a rusty stove, a broken chair, and a V of painted
canvas walls with a broken window and a paper snowstorm falling
back of it. There Kedzie was found in very becoming ragged breeches,
pouting with starvation. Her father drove her out for gin.

She walked out of the set, picked up a bottle, and brought it back.
The scene in the saloon would be taken later: also the street scenes
to and from.

An officer of the "Cruelty" came and took her from the garret. That
was the beginning of a series of adventures culminating in a marriage
with a multimillionaire. While the garret was set, the finish of
the story was taken.

She ran and changed her costume to one of wealth with ermine. She
came in with the handsome young millionaire. It was the next winter.
Her father was dying. He asked her forgiveness and gave her his
blessing. Then Kedzie changed back to her first costume and went
in the motor to a dismal street where she was shown coming out of
the tenement, and going back to it gin-laden, and again with the
officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

She changed once more to her wealthy garb with the ermine and was
photographed going in with her young millionaire.

The next day the scene in the Cruelty office was built and she acted
in it. The drawing-room in the millionaire's home was assembled and
she acted in that. Then she went out in rags and sold newspapers
on a corner. So it went. The chronology hopelessly jumbled, but
the change incessant.

The studio was a palace of industry. Many of the scenes were played
on the great glass-covered roof. On bright days she would ride in
a closed automobile to some street or some lonely glen or to the
home of some wealthy person who had lent his house to the movies
on the bribe of a gift to his favorite benevolence.

There was the thrill of sitting in the projection-room and watching
herself scamper across the scene, or flirt or weep, look pretty or
gorgeous, sad or gay.

One's own portrait is always a terribly fascinating thing, for it
is always the inaccurate portrait of a stranger curiously akin to
one and curiously alien. But to see one's portrait move and breathe
and feel is magic unbelievable.

In the enlarged close-ups when Kedzie was a girl giantess, the effect
was uncanny. She loved herself and was glad of the friendly dark that
hid her own wild pride in her beauty, but did not prevent her from
hearing the exclamations of Ferriday and the backers and the other
actors who were admitted to the preliminary views.

There was a quality in her work that surpassed Ferriday's
expectations and made her pantomime singularly legible. The
modulations of her thought from one extreme mood to another were
always traceable. This was true of the least feelings. Ferriday
would say: "Now you decide to telephone your lover. You hesitate,
you telephone, a girl answers, you wait, he speaks, you smile."

Kedzie would nod with impatient zest and one could read each
gradation of thought. "I'd better telephone him. I will. No, I'd
better not. Yes. No. Shall I? Well, I will. Hello! Hello, Central!
Hurry up! Gramercy 816. What takes so long? Is this Gramercy 816?
Mr. Monteith. Oh, isn't she smart? What keeps him? Is he out? No,
there he is! Oh, joy! I must be very severe. Hello, Harry."

All these thoughts the spectator could follow. They ran, as it
were, under her skin. There was no stolidity or phlegm. She was
astoundingly alive and real. Unimportant, without sublimity of
emotion or intellectual power, she was irresistibly real. The
public understood all she told it, and adored her.

Her petulance, quick temper, pretty discontent, did not harm her
on the screen, but helped immensely, for they gave her character.
It was delicious to see her eyes narrow with sudden resentment or
girlish malice and widen again with equally abrupt affection. She
was so pretty that she could afford to act ugly.

It took time, however, to get Kedzie from the studio to the negative,
then to the positive. There was editing to do, and it seemed to her
that her most delicious bits had to be cut out, because Ferriday
always took three or four thousand feet of film for every thousand
he used. They had to cut out more Kedzie to let in the titles and
subtitles, and it angered her to see how much space was given to
other members of the cast. She simply loathed the scenes she was not
the center of, and she developed an acerbity of protest against any
"trespass" on her "rights" that proved her a genuine business woman.

She learned the tricks of the trade with magnificent speed. She was
never so meek and helpless of expression as when she slipped in front
of another actor or actress and filled as much of the foreground as
her slenderness permitted. When she was crowded into the background
she knew how to divert attention to herself during the best moments
of the other people in the scene. And she could most innocently spoil
any bit that she did not like to do herself or have done by another.

In the studio she was speedily recognized as an ambitious young woman
zealous for self-advancement. In fact, they called her a "reel hog"
and a "glutton for footage." A number of minor feuds were turned into
deep friendships through a common resentment at Kedzie's impartial
robberies.

Ferriday did not object to these professional traits. They exist
in all trades, and success is never won in large measure without
them. Almost all businesses are little trusts, monopolies more or
less tiny, more or less ruthless.

Ferriday delighted in Kedzie's battle for space with the other
members of the troupe. They kept everybody intense. The lover loved
her better on the screen for hating her personal avarice. Her mother
in the picture was more meltingly tender in her caresses for wanting
to scratch the little cat's eyes out. The clergyman who pointed her
the way to heaven grew more ardently devout for having to grip
the floor with his feet to keep the adoring Kedzie from edging him
off his own pulpit.

This rivalry is better than any number of chaperons, and Kedzie
was saved from any danger of falling in love with the unspeakably
beautiful leading man by the ferocity of her jealousy of him. She
had once, as a little girl in Nimrim, Missouri, nearly swooned at
the glory of this Lorraine Melnotte, and she had written him a little
letter of adoration, one of some nineteen he received that day from
lovelorn girls about the globe.

When she met him first in the studio he was painted as delicately as
a barber-pole, and he stood sweating in a scene under the full blast
of a battery of sick green Cooper-Hewitt lights. He looked about
three days dead and loathsome as an iguana. He was in full evening
dress, and Kedzie had always marveled at the snowiness of his linen.

Now she saw how he got the effect. He wore a yellow shirt, collar,
tie, and waistcoat in order that the photographic result should be
the purest white. The yellow linen was the completing horror under
the spoiled mustard color of his face with its mouth the color of
an overripe plum.

His expression did not redeem his appalling features that day, nor
did his language help. While the cameraman leaned on his idle machine
and looked weary Lorraine Melnotte was having a sweet little row with
the actress playing his sainted mother. He was threatening to have
her fired if she didn't keep her place.

That finished him for Kedzie. She could not tolerate professional
jealousy. She never could. Her own was merely a defense of her
dignity and her rights against the peculiarly impossible people who
infested the studio. That was Kedzie's own phrase, for she had not
lived with a poet long before she began to experiment with large
words. She practised before a mirror any phrases she particularly
liked. She had probably heard Ferriday use the expression and she
got herself up on it till she was glib. Anybody who can be glib
with "peculiarly impossible" is in a fair way to be articulate.
All Kedzie needed was a little more certainty on her grammar; and
her ear was giving her that.

Her contempt for Lorraine Melnotte culminated in a dark suspicion
that that was not his real born name. If Anita Adair was Kedzie
Thropp what would Lorraine Melnotte have been? It was a pretty
problem in algebra. But Kedzie despised a man that would take
another name. And such a name--as unworthy of a man as a box of
chocolate fudge.

So the image of Mr. Melnotte fell out of the niche in her heart and
went over into the gallery of her hates. She fought him with every
weapon and every foul thrust known to shy little women in dealing
with big, blustering men. She loved to call him "Melnit" or
"naughty Mel."

He was lost from the start and was soon begging to be released from
his contract. The backers were too sure of his vogue, however, to
let him go, and it was none of their affair how fiercely Adair and
Melnotte indulged in mutual loathing, so long as their screen-love
was so wholesomely sweet.

With Ferriday Kedzie's relations were more perilous. He had invented
her and was patenting her. She dreaded his wisdom and accepted his
least theory as gospel--at first. He combined a remote and godlike
intellect with a bending and fatherly grace. And now and then, like
the other gods of all the mythologies, he came down to earth in
an amorous mood.

Now Kedzie's surety was her canny realization of the value of
tantalism. She was not long left in ignorance of his record for
flitting fancy and she felt that he would flit from her as soon
as he conquered her. Her duty was plain.

She played him well and drove him frantic. It would have been hard
to say whether he hated her or loved her more when he found her
always just a little beyond. He had begun with the greatest gift in
his power. He had promised her world-wide fame, and no other gift
could count till he had made that good. And it would take a long,
long while of incessant labor to build.

Ferriday belittled himself in Kedzie's eyes by his groans of baffled
egotism. She could read his plots on his countenance, and thwart him
in advance. But this was not always easy for her, and again and again
he had only himself to blame for his non-success with Kedzie's heart.
With Kedzie's fame he was having a very sudden and phenomenal triumph
--if anything could be called phenomenal in a field which itself was
phenomenal always.




CHAPTER XVI

Ferriday did not know, of course, that Kedzie was married. She hardly
knew it herself now. Gilfoyle had been three weeks late in sending
her the thirty dollars' fare to Chicago. Then she wrote him that she
was doing fairly well at the studio and she would stick to her work.
She sent him oceans of love, but she did not send him the thirty
dollars.

Besides, he had borrowed it of her in the first place, and she had
had to borrow more of Ferriday. She had neglected to pay him back.
She needed so much for her new clothes and new expenses innumerable
inflicted on her by her improved estate.

And, of course, she left the miserable little flat on the landlord's
hands. He wasted a good deal of time trying to get the rent paid.
Besides, it was rented in Gilfoyle's name and he was safe in Chicago.
And yet not very safe, for Chicago has also its Bohemia, its clusters
of real and imitation artists, its talkers and dabblers, as well as
its toilers and achievers.

Gilfoyle found some wonderful Western sirens who listened to
his poetry. They were new to him and he to them. His Eastern
pronunciations fascinated them as they had fascinated Kedzie,
and he soon found in them all the breeziness and wholesomeness
of the great prairies which are found in the mid-Western women
of literature.

Gilfoyle had apparently forgotten that his own wife was a
mid-Westerness, and the least breezy, wholesome, prairian thing
imaginable. He saw mid-Western women of all sorts about him, but
he was of those who must have a type for every section of humanity
and who will not be shaken in their belief by any majority of
exceptions.

When Gilfoyle got Kedzie's letter saying that she would not join him
yet awhile he wrote her a letter of poetic grief at the separation.
But poets, like the rest of us, are the better for getting a grief
on paper and out of the system.

Kedzie did not answer his letter for a long while and he did not
miss her answer much, for he was having his own little triumphs.
The advertisements he wrote were receiving honorable mention at the
office and he was having success with his poetry and his flirtations
of evenings.

He returned to his boarding-house one night and looked at his face
in the mirror, stared into the eyes that stared back. A certain
melting and molten and molting lady had told him that he had poet's
eyes like Julian Street's and was almost as witty. Gilfoyle tried
with his shaving-glass and the bureau mirror to study the profile
that someone else had compared to the cameonic visage of Richard
Le Gallienne.

Gilfoyle was gloriously ashamed of himself. In the voice that
someone else had compared to Charlie Towne's reading his own verses
he addressed his reflection with scorn:

"You heartless dog! You ought to be shot--forgetting that you have
a poor little deserted wife toiling in the great city. You're as
bad as Lord Byron ever was."

Then he wrote a sonnet against his own perfidy and accepted
confession as atonement and plenary indulgence.

He was one of those who, when they have cried, "I have sinned," hear
a mysterious voice saying, "Poor sufferer, go and sin some more."

So he did, and he went the way of millions of lazy-minded, lazy-
moraled husbands while Kedzie went the way of men and women who
succeed by self-exploitation and count only that bad morals which
is also bad business. And that was the status of the matrimonial
adventure of the Gilfoyles for the present. It made no perceptible
difference to anybody that they were married--least of all to
themselves--for the present. But of course Kedzie was obscurely
preparing all this while for a tremendous explosion into publicity
and into what is known as "the big money." And that was bound to
make a vast difference to Gilfoyle as well as to Mrs. Gilfoyle.

In these all-revolutionary days a man had better be a little polite
always to his wife, for in some totally unexpectable way she may
suddenly prove to be a bigger man than he is, a money-getter, a
fame or shame acquirer--if only by way of becoming the president of
a suffrage association or a best-seller or an inventor of a popular
doll.

And again, all this time--a very short time, considering the changes
it made in everybody concerned--Ferriday was Kedzie's alternate hope
and despair, good angel and bad, uplifter and down-yanker.

Sometimes he threatened to stop the picture and destroy it unless she
kissed him. And she knew that he could and would do almost anything
of that sort. Had not his backers threatened to murder him or sue him
if he did not finish the big feature? At such times Kedzie usually
kissed Ferriday to keep him quiet. But she was as careful not to give
too many kisses as she had been not to put too many caramels in half
a pound when she had clerked in the little candy-store. Nowadays she
would pause and watch the quivering scale of policy intently with one
more sweet poised as if it were worth its weight in gold. The ability
to stop while the scale wavers in the tiny zone of just-a-little-too-
little and just-a-little-too-much is what makes success in any
business of man--or woman-kind.

It was not always easy for Kedzie to withhold that extra bonbon.
There were times when Ferriday raised her hopes and her pride so
high that she fairly squealed with love of him and hugged him. That
would have been the destruction of Kedzie if there had not been the
counter-weight of conceit in Ferriday's soul, for at those times he
would sigh to himself or aloud:

"You are loving me only because I am useful to you."

This thought always sobered and chilled Mr. Ferriday. He worked
none the less for her and himself and he tried in a hundred ways
to surprise the little witch into an adoration complete enough to
make her forget herself, make her capable of that ultimate altruism
to which a woman falls or rises when she stretches herself out on
the altar of love.

Ferriday began to think seriously that the only way he could break
Kedzie's pride completely would be to make her his wife. He began
to wonder if that were not, after all, what she was driving at--or
trying to drive him to.

Life will be so much more wholesome when women propose marriage
as men do and have a plain, frank talk about it instead of their
eternal business of veils and reticences, fugitive impulses real
or coquettish, modesties real or faked.

Ferriday could not be sure of Kedzie, and he grew so curious to know
that finally he broke out, "In the Lord's name, will you or will you
not marry me, damn you?"

And Kedzie answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't dream of such
a thing."

But that did not prove anything, either. Perhaps she merely wanted
to trawl him along.

She had Ferriday almost crazy--at least she had added one more to
his manias--when Jim Dyckman wandered into the studio and set up
an entirely new series of ambitions and discontents.




CHAPTER XVII

Charity Coe forgot her great moving-picture enterprise for a time
in the agony of her discovery that her husband was disloyal and
that the Church did not accept that as a cancellation of her own
loyalty.

For a long time she was in such misery of uncertainty that she went
up to the mountains to recover her strength. She came back at last,
made simple and stoical somehow by the contrast of human pettiness
with the serenity (as we call it) of those vast masses of debris
that we poetize and humanize as patient giants.

Her absence had left Cheever entirely to his own devices and to
Zada's. They had made up and fought and made up again dozens of
times and settled down at length to that normal alternation of
peace and conflict known as domestic life.

With Charity out of the way there was so little interruption to
their communion that when she came back Zada forbade Cheever to
meet her at the station, and he obeyed.

Charity felt that she had brought with her the weight of the
mountains instead of their calm when she detrained in the thronged
solitude of the Grand Central Terminal. And the house with its
sympathetic family of servants only was as home-like as the Mammoth
Cave.

She took up her work with a frenzy. The need of a man to act as her
adjutant in the business details was imperative. She thought of Jim
Dyckman again, and with a different thought.

When he pleaded to her before she had imagined that she was at least
officially a wife. Now she felt divorced and abandoned, a waif on
the public mercy.

She wanted to talk to Jim because she felt so disprized and
downtrodden that she wanted to see somebody who adored her. She
felt wild impulses to throw herself into his keeping. She wanted to
be bad just to spite the bad. But she merely convinced herself that
she was wicked enough already and deserving of her punishment.

She made the moving-picture scheme a good excuse for asking Jim
to grant her a talk--a business talk. To protect herself from him
and from herself she made a convenience of Mrs. Neff's home. Jim
met her there. She was not looking her best and her mood was one of
artificial indirectness that offended him. He never dreamed that it
was because she was afraid to show him how glad she was to see him.

He was furious at her--so he said he would do her bidding. She
dumped the financial and mechanical ends of the enterprise on his
hands and he accepted the burden. He had nothing else pressing for
his time.

One of his first duties, Charity told him, was to call at the
Hyperfilm Studio and try to engage that Mr. Ferriday for director
and learn the ropes.

"While you're there you might inquire about that little girl you
pulled out of the pool. I sent her there. They promised her a job.
Her name was--I have it at home in my address-book. I'll telephone
it to you."

And she did. She had no more acquaintance with the history
Kedzie was making in the moving-picture world than she had of
the sensational rise of the latest politician in Tibet. Neither
had Jim.

He had been traveling about on his mother's yacht and in less
correct societies, trying to convince himself that he was cured
of Charity. He did not know that the first pictures of Anita Adair
were causing lines to gather outside the moving-picture theaters
of numberless cities and towns.

When his car halted before the big studio where Ferriday was high
priest Jim might have been a traveler entering a temple in Lassa,
for all he knew of its rites and its powers.

No more did the doorman know the power and place of Jim Dyckman.
When Jim said he had an appointment with Mr. Ferriday the doorman
thumbed him up the marble stairs. There were many doors, but no
signs on them, and Dyckman blundered about. At length he turned
down a corridor and found himself in the workshop.

A vast room it was, the floor hidden with low canvas walls and doors
marked "Keep out." Overhead were girders of steel from which depended
heavy chains supporting hundreds of slanting tubes glowing with green
fire.

From somewhere in the inclosures came a voice in distress. It was
the first time Dyckman ever heard Ferriday's voice, and it puzzled
him as it cried:

"Come on, choke her--choke harder, you fool; you're not a masseur--
you're a murderer. Now drag her across to the edge of the well.
Pause, look back. Come on, Melnotte: yell at him! 'Stop, stop, you
dog!' Turn round, Higgins; draw your knife. Go to it now! Give 'em
a real fight. That's all right. Only a little cut. The blood looks
good. Get up, Miss Adair; crawl away on hands and knees. Don't
forget you've been choked. Now take the knife away, Melnotte. Rise;
look triumphant; see the girl. Get to him, Miss Adair. Easy on the
embrace: you're a shy little thing. 'My hero! you have saved me!'
Now, Melnotte: 'Clarice! it is you! you!' Cut! How many feet, Jones?

"Now we'll take the scene in the vat of sulphuric acid. Is the tank
ready? You go lie down and rest, Miss Adair. We won't want you for
half an hour."

As Kedzie left the scene she found Dyckman waiting for her. He
lifted his hat and spoke down at her:

"Pardon me, but you're Miss Adair, aren't you?"

"Yes," said Kedzie, with as much modesty as a queen could show,
incidentally noting that the man who bespoke her so timidly was
plainly a real swell. She was getting so now that she could tell
the real from the plated.

"I heard them murdering you in there and I--Well, Mrs. Cheever asked
me to look you up and see how you were getting along. I see you are."

"Mrs. Cheever!" said Kedzie, searching her memory. Then, with great
kindliness, "Oh yes! I remember her."

"You've forgotten me, I suppose. I had the pleasure--the sad pleasure
of helping you out of the water at Mrs. Noxon's."

"Oh, Lord, yes," Kedzie cried, forgetting her rank. "You're Jim
Dyckman--I mean, Mr. Dyckman."

"So you remember my name," he flushed. "Well, I must say!"

"I didn't remember to thank you," said Kedzie. "I was all damp and
mad. I've often thought of writing to you." And she had.

"I wish you had," said Dyckman. "Well, well!"

He didn't know what to say, and so he laughed and she laughed and
they were well acquainted. Then he thought of a good one.

"I pulled you out of the cold water, so it's your turn to pull me
out of the hot."

"What hot?" said Kedzie.

"I've been sent up here to learn the trade."

Kedzie had a horrible feeling that he must have lost his money.
Wouldn't it be just her luck to meet her first millionaire after he
had become an ex-?

But Dyckman said that he had come to try and engage Mr. Ferriday,
and that sounded so splendid to Kedzie that she snuggled closer.
Ordinarily when a woman cowers under the eaves of a man's shoulder
it is taken for a signal for amiabilities to begin.

Dyckman could not imagine that Kedzie was already as bad as all
that. She wasn't. She was just trying to get as close as she could
to a million dollars. Her feelings were as innocent and as imbecile
as those of the mobs that stand in line for the privilege of
pump-handling a politician.

Jim Dyckman kept forgetting that he was so rich. He hated to be
reminded of it. He did not suspect Kedzie of such a thought. He
stared down at her and thought she was cruelly pretty. He wanted
to tell her so, but he found himself saying:

"But I mustn't keep you. I heard somebody say that you were to
lie down and rest up."

"Oh, that was only Mr. Ferriday. I'm not tired a bit."

"Ferriday. Oh yes, I'm forgetting him. He's the feller I've
come to see."

"He can't be approached when he's working. Sit down, won't you?"

He sat down on an old bench and she sat down, too. She had never
felt quite so contented as this. And Dyckman had not felt so teased
by beauty in a longer time than he could remember.

Kedzie was as exotic to him as a Japanese doll. Her face was painted
in picturesque blotches that reminded him of a toy-shop. Her eyes
were made up with a delicate green that gave them an effect unknown
to him.

She was dressed as a young farm girl with a sunbonnet a-dangle at
the back of her neck, her curls trailing across her rounded shoulders
and down upon her dreamy bosom. She sat and swung her little feet
and looked up at him sidewise.

He forgot all about Ferriday, and when Ferriday came along did not
see him. Kedzie did not tell him. She pretended not to see Ferriday,
though she enjoyed enormously the shock it gave him to find her
so much at ease with that big stranger.

Ferriday was so indignant at being snubbed in his own domain by
his own creation that he sent Garfinkel to see who the fellow was
and throw him out. Garfinkel came back with Dyckman, followed
by Kedzie.

Before Garfinkel could present Dyckman to the great Ferriday, Kedzie
made the introduction. Dyckman was already her own property. She had
seen him first.

Ferriday was jolted by the impact of the great name of Dyckman. He
was restored by the suppliant attitude of his visitor. He said that
he doubted if he could find the time to direct an amateur picture.
Dyckman hastened to say:

"Of course, money is no object to us...."

"Nor to me," Ferriday said, coldly.

Dyckman went on as if he had not heard: "... Except that the more
the show costs the less there is for the charity."

"I should be glad to donate my services to the cause," said
Ferriday, who could be magnificent.

"Three cheers for you!" said Dyckman, who could not.

Ferriday had neither the time nor the patience for the task. But
when the chance came to dazzle the rich by the rich generosity of
working for nothing, he could not afford to let it pass. To tip
a millionaire! He had to do that.

He saw incidentally that Kedzie was fairly hypnotized by Dyckman and
Dyckman by her. His first flare of jealousy died out. To be cut out
by a prince has always been a kind of ennoblement in itself.

Also one of Ferriday's inspirations came to him. If he could get
those two infatuated with each other it would not only take Kedzie
off his heart, but it might be made to redound to the further
advantage of his own genius. A scheme occurred to him. He was
building the scenario of it in the back room of his head while
his guest occupied his parlor.

He wanted to be alone and he wanted Dyckman and Kedzie to be alone
together. And so did Kedzie. Ferriday suggested:

"Perhaps Mr. Dyckman would like to look over the studio--and perhaps
Miss Adair would show him about."

Kedzie started to cry, "You bet your boots," but she caught herself
in time and shifted to, "I should be chawmed." Millionaires did not
use plain words.

Then Dyckman said, "Great!"

He followed Kedzie wherever she led. He was as awkward and out of
place as a school-boy at his first big dance. Kedzie showed him
a murder scene being enacted under the bluesome light. She took
great pains not to let any of it stain her skin. She showed him
a comic scene with a skeletonic man on a comic bicycle. Dyckman
roared when the other comedian lubricated the cyclist's joints
with an oil-can.

Kedzie showed him the projection-room and told the operator to run
off a bit of a scene in which she was revealed to no disadvantage.
She sat alone in the dark with a million dollars that were crazy
about her. She could tell that Dyckman was tremendously excited.

Here at last was her long-sought opportunity to rebuff the advances
of a wicked plutocrat. But he didn't make any, and she might not have
rebuffed them. Still, the air was a-quiver with that electricity
generated almost audibly by a man and a woman alone in the dark.

Dyckman was ashamed of himself and of his arm for wanting to gather
in that delectable partridge, but he behaved himself admirably.

He told her that she was a "corker," a "dream," and "one sweet song,"
and that the picture did not do her justice.

Kedzie showed him the other departments of the picture-factory and
he was amazed at all she knew. So was she. He stayed a long while
and saw everything and yet he said he would come again.

He suggested that it might be nice if Mr. Ferriday and Miss Adair
would dine with him soon. Ferriday was free "to-morrow," and so they
made it to-morrow evening at the Vanderbilt.

Kedzie was there and Dyckman was there, but a boy brought a note
from Mr. Ferriday saying that he was unavoidably prevented from
being present.

Dyckman grinned: "We'll have to bear up under it the best we can.
You won't run away just because your chaperon is gone, will you?"

Kedzie smiled and said she would stay. But she was puzzled. What
was Ferriday up to? One always suspected that Ferriday was up to
something and thinking of something other than what he did or said.

Kedzie was not ashamed of her clothes this time. Indeed, when she
gave her opera-cloak to the maid she came out so resplendent that
Jim Dyckman said:

"Zowie! but you're a--Whew! aren't you great? Some change-o from
the little farm girl I saw up at the studio. I don't suppose you'll
eat anything but a little bird-seed."

She was elated to see the _maitre d'hotel_ shake hands with
her escort and ask him how he was and where he had been. Jim
apologized for neglecting to call recently, and the two sauntered
like friends across to a table where half a dozen waiters bowed
and smiled and welcomed the prodigal home.

When they were seated the headwaiter said, "The moosels vit sauce
mariniere are nize to-nide."

Dyckman shook his head: "Ump-umm! I'm on the water-wagon and the
diet kitchen. Miss Adair can go as far as she likes, but I've got
to stick to a little thick soup, a big, thick steak, and after, a
little French pastry, some coffee, and a bottle of polly water--and
I'll risk a mug of old musty." He turned to Kedzie: "And now I've
ordered, what do you want? I never could order for anybody else."

Kedzie was disappointed in him. He was nothing like Ferriday. He
didn't use a French word once. She was afraid to venture on her own.

"I'll take the same things," she said.

"Sensible lady," said Jim. "Women who work must eat."

Kedzie hated to be referred to as a worker by an idler. She little
knew how much Jim Dyckman wished he were a worker.

She could not make him out. Her little hook had dragged out Leviathan
and she was surprised to find how unlike he was to her plans for
her first millionaire. He ate like a hungry man who ordered what he
wanted and made no effort to want what he did not want. He had had so
much elaborated food that he craved few courses and simple. He said
what came into his head, without frills or pose. He was sincerely
delighted with Kedzie and made neither secret nor poetry of it.

Toward the last of the dinner Kedzie ceased to try to find in him
what was not there. She accepted him as the least affected person
she had ever met. He could afford to be unaffected and careless
and spontaneous. He had nothing to gain. He had everything already.
Kedzie would have said that he ought to have been happy because of
that, as if that were not as good an excuse for discontent as any.
In any case, Kedzie said to herself:

"He's the real thing."

She wanted to be that very thing--that most difficult thing--real.
It became her new ambition.

After the dinner Dyckman offered to take her home. He had a limousine
waiting for him. She did not ask him to put her into a taxicab. She
was not afraid to have him ride home with her. She was afraid he
wouldn't. She was not ashamed of the apartment-house she was living
in now. It was nothing wonderful, but all the money had been spent
on the hall. And that was as far as Dyckman would get--yet.

Kedzie had acquired a serenity toward all the world except what
she called "high society." In her mind the word _high_ had
the significance it has with reference to game that has been kept
to the last critical moments, and trembles, exquisitely putrid,
between being eaten immediately and being thrown away soon.

There is enough and to spare of that high element among the wealthy,
but so there is among the poor and among all the middlings. Kedzie
had met with it on her way up, and she expected to find it in
Dyckman. She looked forward to a thrilling adventure.

She could not have imagined that Dyckman was far more afraid of her
than she of him. She was so tiny and he so big that she terrorized
him as a mouse an elephant, or a baby a saddle-horse. The elephant
is probably afraid that he will squash the little gliding insect,
the horse that he might step on the child.

The disparity between Jim Dyckman and Kedzie was not so great, and
they were both of the same species. But he felt a kind of terror of
her. And yet she fascinated him as an interesting toy that laughed
and talked and probably would not say "Mamma!" if squeezed.

Dyckman had been lonely and blue, rejected and dejected. Kedzie was
something different. He had known lots of actresses, large and small,
stately, learned, cheap, stupid, brilliant, bad, good, gorgeous,
shabby, wanton, icy. But Kedzie was his first movie actress. She
dwelt in a strange realm of unknown colors and machineries.

She was a new toy in a new toyhouse--a whole Noah's ark of queer
toys. He wanted to play with those toys. She made him a
_revenant_ to childhood. Or, as he put it:

"Gee! but you make me feel as silly as a kid."

That surprised Kedzie. It was not the sort of talk she expected
from a world which was stranger to her than the movie studio to
him. He was perfectly natural, and that threw her into a spasm of
artificiality.

He sat staring down at her. He put his hands under his knees and sat
on them to keep them from touching her, as they wanted to. For all
he knew, she was covered with fresh paint. That made her practically
irresistible. Would it come off if he kissed her? He had to find out.

Finally he said, so helplessly, passively, that it would be more
accurate to say it was said by him:

"Say, Miss Adair, I'm a dead-goner if you don't gimme a kiss."

Kedzie was horrified. Skip Magruder would have been eleganter than
that. She answered, with dignity:

"Certainly, if you so desire."

That ought to have chaperoned him back to his senses, but he was too
far gone. His long arms shot out, went round her, gathered her up
to his breast. His high head came down like a swan's, and his lips
pressed hers.

Whatever her soul was, her flesh was all girlhood in one flower of
lithe stem, leaf, petal, sepal, and perfume. There was nothing of
the opiate poppy, the ominous orchid, or even that velvet voluptuary,
the rose. She was like a great pink, sweet, shy, fragrant, common
wild honeysuckle blossom.

Jim Dyckman was so whelmed by the youth and flavor of her that
his rapture exploded in an unsmothered gasp:

"Golly! but you're great!"

Kedzie was heartbroken. Gilfoyle had done better than that. She had
been kissed by several million dollars, and she was not satisfied!

But Dyckman was. He felt that Kedzie had solved the problem of
Charity Coe. She had cleared his soul of that hopeless obsession--he
thought--just then.




CHAPTER XVIII

When a young man suddenly goes mad in a cab, grapples the young
woman who has intrusted herself to his protection, pins her arms
to her sides, squeezes her torso till her bones crunch and she has
no breath to squawk with, then kisses her deaf and dumb and blind,
it is still a nice question which of the two is the helpless one
and which has overpowered the other.

Appearances are never more deceitful than in such attacks, and
while eye-witnesses are infrequent, they are also untrustworthy.
They cannot even tell which of the two is victim of the outrage.
The motionless gazelle in the folds of the constrictor may be in
full control of the situation.

It undoubtedly has happened, oftener than it should have, in the
history of the world that young men have made these onsets without
just provocation and have been properly slapped, horsewhipped, or
shot for their unwelcome violence. It has also happened that young
men have failed to make these onsets when they would have been
welcome.

But the perfection of the womanly art of self-pretense is when
she subtly wills the young man to overpower her and is so carried
away by her own success that she forgets who started it. She droops,
swoons, shivers before the fury of her own inspiration, and cries
out, with absolute sincerity: "How dare you! How could you! What
made you!" or simply moans, "Why, Oswald!" and resists invitingly.

Kedzie had been hoping and praying that Jim Dyckman would kiss
her, and mutely daring him to. Yet when he obeyed her tacit behest
and asked her permission she was too frightened to refuse. He was
stronger than she expected, and he held her longer. When at last
she came out for air she was shattered with a pleasant horror.

She barely had the strength to gasp, "Why, Mr. Dyckman, aren't you
awful?" and time to straighten her jumbled hat and hair when her
apartment-building drew up alongside the limousine and came to
a halt.

Dyckman pleaded, like a half-witted booby, "Let's take a little
longer ride."

But she remembered her dignity and said, with imperial scorn,
"I should hope not!"

She permitted him to help her out.

He said: "When may I see you again? Soon, please!"

She smiled, with a hurt patience, and answered, "Not for
a long while."

He chuckled: "To-morrow, eh? That's great!"

She wished that he would not say, "That's great." If he would only
say, "Ripping!" or, "I say, that's ripping!" or, "Awfully good of
you," or, "No end"--anything swagger. But he would not swagger.

He escorted her to the elevator, where she gave him a queenly hand
and murmured, "Good night!"

He watched her go up like _Medea in machina;_ then he turned
away and stumbled back into his limousine. It was still fragrant
from her presence. The perfume she was using then was a rather
aggressive essence of a lingering tenacity upon the atmosphere.
But Dyckman was so excited that he liked it. The limousine could
hardly contain him.

Kedzie felicitated herself on escaping from his thrall just in time
to avoid being stupefied by it. She thanked Heaven that she had not
flung her arms around him and claimed him for her own. She had the
cleverness of elusion that her sex displays in all the species, from
Cleopatras to clams, from butterflies to rhinoceroses. How wisely
they practise to evade what they demand, leaving the stupid male
to ponder the mysteries of womankind!

When Kedzie reached her mirror she told the approving person she
found there that she was doing pretty well for a poor young girl not
long in from the country. She postured joyously as she undressed,
and danced a feminine war-dance in much the same costume that she
wore when Jim Dyckman fished her out of the pool at Newport. She
sang:

  "I dreamt that I fell in a mar-arble pool
  With nobles and swells on all si-i-ides."

She had slapped her rescuer's hands away then and groaned to learn
that she had driven off a famous plutocrat. But now he was back;
indeed he was in the pool now, and she had him on her hook. He
had grievously disappointed her by turning out to be a commonplace
young man with no gilt on his phrases. But one must be merciful
to a million dollars.

The next morning she dreamed of him as a suitor presenting her
with a bag of gold instead of a bouquet. Just as she reached for
it the telephone rang and a hall-boyish voice told her that it was
seven o'clock.

This was the midnight alarm to Cinderella, and she became again
a poor working-girl. She had to abandon her prince and run from
the palace of dreams to the studio of toil.

She was a trifle surly when she confronted Ferriday. He studied
her, smilingly queerly and overplaying indifference:

"Have a nice dinner last night?"

Kedzie fixed him with a skewery glare: "What's your little game?
Why did you turn up missing?"

"I had another engagement. Didn't you get my note?"

"Ah, behave, behave!" said Kedzie, then blushed at the plebeian
phrase. She was beginning to have a quickly remorseful ear. As soon
as she should learn to hear her first thoughts first, and suppress
them unspoken, she would be a made lady.

"Oh, you're a true artist, Anita," said Ferriday. "Nothing can
hinder your flight into the empyrean."

"Don't sing it. Explain it," Kedzie sneered.

Ferriday laughed so delightedly that he must embrace her. She shoved
him back and brushed the imaginary dust of his contact from the
shoulders that had but lately been compressed by a million dollars.

"I see you landed him," said Ferriday.

"And I see that all your talk about loving me so much was just
a fake," said Kedzie.

"Why do you say that? I adore you."

"If you did, would you throw me at the head of another fellow?"
asked Kedzie.

"If it was for the advancement of your career, yes," Ferriday
insisted.

"What's Mr. Dyckman got to do with my career?"

"He can make it, if he doesn't break it."

"Come again."

"If you fall in love with that big thug, or if you play him for
a limousine like a chorus-girl on the make, your career is gone.
But if you use him for your future--well, I have a little scheme
that might bounce you up to the sky in a hurry. You could have your
millionaire and your fame as well."

"What's the little scheme, Ferri darling?"

"I'll tell you later. We've got to go to the projection-room and
see your new film run off. It's assembled, cut, subtitled, ready
for the market. Come along."

Kedzie went along and sat in the dark room watching the reel go by.
Her other selves came forth in troops to reveal themselves: Kedzie
the poor little shy girl, for she was that at times; Kedzie the
petulant, the revengeful, the forgiving; Kedzie on her knees in
prayer--she prayed at times, as everybody does, the most villainous
no less ardently than the most blameless; Kedzie dancing; Kedzie
flirting, in love, tempted, tipsy; Kedzie seduced, deserted,
forgiven, converted, happily married; Kedzie a mother with a little
hired baby at her little breast. There was even a picture of her
in a vision as a sweet old lady with snowy hair about her face, and
she was surrounded by grown men who were her sons, and young mothers
who were her daughters. The unending magic of the moving pictures
had enabled her to see herself as others saw her, and as she saw
herself, and as nobody should ever see her.

Kedzie doted on the picture of herself as a dear old lady leaning
on her old husband among their children. She shed tears over that
delightful, most unusual, privilege of witnessing herself peacefully,
blessedly ancient.

Whether she ever reached old age and had a husband living then
and children grown is beyond the knowledge of this chronicle or
its prophecy, for this book goes only so far as 1917. But just for
a venture, assuming Kedzie to be about twenty in 1916, that would
make Kedzie born four years back in the last century. Now, adding
sixty to 1896 brings one to 1956; and what the world will be like
then--and who'll be in it or what they may be doing, how dressing,
if at all, what riding in, fighting about, agreeing upon--it were
folly to guess at.

It is safe to say only that people will then be very much at heart
what they are to-day and were in the days when the Assyrian women
and men felt as we do about most things. Kedzie will be scolding
her children or her grandchildren and telling them that in her
day little girls did not speak disrespectfully to their parents
or run away from them or do immodest, forward things.

That much is certain to be true, as it has always been. The critics
of then will be saying that there are no great novelists in 1956 such
as there were in 1916, when giants wrote, but not for money or for
cheap sensations. They will laud the Wilsonian era when America
not only knew a millennium of golden fiction, poetry, drama, humor,
sculpture, painting, architecture, and engineering, but revealed
its greatness in moving-picture classics, in a lofty conception
of the dance as an eloquence; when the nation acted as a sister
of charity to bleeding Europe, pouring eleemosynary millions from
the cornucopia stretched across the sea, and finally entered the war
with reluctant majesty and unexampled might, her citizens unanimously
patriotic. Ye gods! even the politicians will be statesmen and their
debates classics.

Critics of then will be regretting that American fiction, poetry,
drama, art, and journalism are so inferior to foreign work, and
foreign critics will admit it and tell them why. Some military
writers will be pointing out that war is no longer possible,
and others will be crying out that it is inevitable and America
unprepared.

Doctors will be complaining that modern restlessness is creating
new nervous diseases, as doctors did in 1916 A.D., B.C., and B.A.
(which is, Before Adam). Doctors will complain that modern mothers
do not nurse their own babies--which has always been both true and
untrue--and that women do not wear enough clothes for health, not
to mention modesty.

In fact, Kedzie, if she lives, will find the spirit of the world
almost altogether what grandmothers have always found it. But Kedzie
must be left to find this out for herself.

When, then, Kedzie saw how beautifully she photographed and how well
she looked as an old lady, she wept rapturously and sighed, "I'll
never give up the pictures."

Ferriday sighed, too, for that meant to his knowing soul that she
was not long for this movie world. But he did not tell her so. He
told her:

"You're as wise as you are beautiful. You'll be as famous as you'll
be rich. And this Dyckman lad can hurry things up."

"How?" asked Kedzie, already foreseeing his game.

"The backers of the Hyperfilm Company are getting writer's cramp
in the spending hand. They call it conservatism, but it's really
cowardice. The moving-picture business has gone from the Golconda
to the gambling stage. A few years ago nearly anybody could get rich
in a minute. A lot of cheap photographers and street-car conductors
were caught in a cloudburst of money and thought they made it. They
treated money like rain, and the wastefulness in this trade has
been rivaled by nothing recent except the European war. Some of the
biggest studios are dark; some of the leaders of yesterday are so
bankrupt that their banks don't dare let 'em drop for fear they'll
bust and blow up the whole business. Most of the actors are not
getting half what they're advertised to get, but they're getting
four times what they ought to get.

"There are a few men and women who are earning even more than they
are getting, and that's a million a minute. Now, the one chance
for you, Anita, is to have some tremendous personal backing. You've
come into the game a little late. This firm you're with is tottering.
They blame me for it, but it's not my fault altogether. Anyway, this
company is riding for a fall, and down we may all go in the dust
with a dozen other big companies, any day."

Kedzie's heart stopped. In the dark she clutched Ferriday's arm so
tightly that he ouched. To have her career smashed at its beginning
would be just her luck. It grew suddenly more dear than ever, because
it was imperiled. The thought of having her pictures fail of their
mission throughout the world was as hideous as was the knowledge
to Carlyle that the only manuscript of his history was but a
shovelful of ashes.

Ferriday put his arm about her, and she crept in under his chin for
safety. She felt very cozy to him, there, and he rejoiced that he
had her his at last. Then as before he saw that he was no more to
her than an umbrella or an awning in a shower. He wanted to fling
her away; but she was still to him an invention to patent and
promote. So he told her:

"If you can persuade this Dyckman to boost your career, get behind
you with a bunch of kale and whoop up the publicity, we can stampede
the public, and the little theater managers will mob the exchanges
for reels of you. It's only a question of money, Anita. Talk about
the Archimedean lever! Give me the crowbar of advertising, and I'll
set the earth rolling the other way round so the sun will rise in
the west and print no other pictures but yours.

"There isn't room for everybody in the movie business any more.
There's room only for the people who wear lightning-rods and stand
on solid gold pedestals that won't wash away. Go after your young
millionaire, Anita, and put his money to work."

Kedzie pondered. She brought to bear on the problem all the strategic
intuition of her sex. She saw the importance of getting Dyckman's
money into circulation. She was afraid it might not be easy.

Kedzie sighed: "It's a little early for me to ask a gentleman I've
only met a couple o' times to kindly pass the millions. He must
have met a lot of women by now who've held out their hands to him
and said, 'Please,' and not got anything but the cold boiled eye.
I don't know much about millionaires, but I have a feeling that if
they started giving the money out to every girl they met, they'd
last just about as long as a real bargain does in Macy's. The women
would trample them to death and tear one another to pieces."

"But Dyckman's crazy about you, Anita. I could see it in his eyes.
He's plumb daffy."

"Maybe so and maybe not. Maybe he's that way with every girl under
forty. I've never seen him work, but I've seen him in the midst of
that Newport bunch and they've got me lashed to the mast for clothes,
looks, language, and everything."

"You're a novelty to him, Anita. He's tired of those _blasees_
creatures."

"They didn't look very blah-zay to me. They seemed to be up and doing
every minute. But supposing he was crazy about me, if I said to him,
'You can have two kisses for a million dollars apiece?' can you see
him begin to holler: 'Where am I? Please take me home!'"

Ferriday sighed: "Perhaps you're right. It wouldn't do to give
a mercenary look to your interest in him too soon. Let me talk
to him."

"What's your peculiar charm?"

"I'd put it up to him as a business proposition. I'd say, 'The
moving-picture field is the greatest gold-field in the world.' I'd
tell him how many hundred thousand theaters there are in the world,
all of them eager for your pictures and only needing to be told about
them. I'd tell him that for every dollar he put in he'd take out ten,
in addition to furthering the artistic glory of the most beautiful
genius on the dramatic horizon. I'd show him how he couldn't lose."

"But you just said--"

"Oh, I know, but we can't put on the screen everything we say in
the projection-room. And it is a fact that there is big money in
the movies."

"There must be," said Kedzie, "if as much has been sunk in 'em
as you say."

"Yes, and it's all there for the right man to dig up if he only
goes about it intelligently. Let me talk to him."

Kedzie thought hard. Then she said: "No! Not yet! You'd only scare
him away. I'll do my best to get him interested in me, and you do
your best to get him interested in the business; and then when the
time is just right we can talk turkey. But not now, Ferri, not yet."

"You're as wise as you are beautiful," said Ferriday, again. "I
can't see your beauty, but your wisdom shines in the dark. We'll
do great things together, Anita."

His arm tightened around her, reminding her that she was still
in his elbow. Before she was quite alive to his purpose his lips
touched her cheek.

"Don't do that!" she snapped. "How dare you!"

He laughed: "I forgot. The price on your kisses has just skyrocketed
to a million apiece. Don't forget my commission."

She growled pettishly. He spoke more soberly:

"You need me yet, little lady. Don't quench my enthusiasms too
roughly or I might take up some other pretty little girl as my
medium of expression. There are lots and lots of pretties born
every minute, but it takes years to make a director like me."

And she knew that this was true.

"I was only fooling," she said. "Don't be mad at me. You can kiss
me if you want to."

"I don't want to," he said, as hurt as an overgrown boy or
a prima donna.

The door opened, and a wave of light swept into the room. A voice
followed it.

"Is Miss Adair in there?"

"Yes," Kedzie answered, in confusion.

"Gent'man to see you."

It was Jim Dyckman. He followed closely and entered the room just as
Ferriday found the electric button and switched on the light.

Kedzie and Ferriday were both encouraged when they saw a look of
jealous suspicion cross his face. Ferriday hastened to explain:

"We've been editing Miss Adair's new film. Like to see an advance
edition of it?"

"Love to," said Dyckman.

"Oh, Simpson, run that last picture through again," Ferriday called
through a little hole in the wall.

A faint "All right, sir" responded.

Kedzie led Dyckman to a chair and took the next one to it.

Ferriday beamed on them and switched on the dark. Then, as if by a
divine miracle, the screen at the end of the room became a world of
life and light. People were there, and places. Mountains were swung
into view and removed. Palaces were decreed and annulled. Fields
blossomed with flowers; ballrooms swirled; streets seethed.

Anita Adair was created luminous, seraphic, composed of light and
emotion. She came so near and so large that her very thoughts seemed
to be photographed. She drifted away; she smiled, danced, wept, and
made her human appeal with angelic eloquence.

Dyckman groaned with the very affliction of her charm. She pleased
him so fiercely that he swore about it. He cried out in the dark
that she was the blank-blankest little witch in the world. Then he
groveled in apology, as if his profanity had not been the ultimate
gallantry.

When the picture was finished he turned to Kedzie and said, "My God,
you're great!" He turned to Ferriday. "Isn't she, Mr.--Fenimore?"

"I think so," said Ferriday; "and the world will think so soon."

Kedzie shook her head. "I'm only a beginner. I don't know anything
at all."

"Why, you're a genius!" Dyckman exploded. "You're simply great.
You know everything; you--"

Ferriday touched him on the arm. "We mustn't spoil her. There is
a charm and meekness about her that we must not lose."

Dyckman swallowed his other great's and after profound thought said,
"Let's lunch somewhere."

Ferriday excused himself, but said that the air would be good for
Miss Adair. She was working too hard.

So she took the air.

Dyckman had come to the studio with Charity's business as an excuse.
He had forgotten to give the excuse, and now he had forgotten the
business. He did not know that he was now Kedzie Thropp's business.
And she was minding her own business.




CHAPTER XIX

Peter Cheever was going to dictagraph to his wife. The quaint charm
of the dictagram is that the sender does not know he is sending it.
It is a good deal like an astral something or other.

Peter had often telegraphed his wife, telephoned her, and wirelessed
her. Sometimes what he had sent her was not the truth. But now
she was going to hear from him straight. She would have all the
advantages of the invisible cloak and the ring of Gyges--eavesdropping
made easy and brought to a science, a combination of perfect alibi
with intimate propinquity.

Small wonder that the device which justice has made such use of
should be speedily seized upon by other interests. Everything,
indeed, that helps virtue helps evil, too. And love and hate find
speedy employment for all the conquests that science can make upon
the physical forces of the universe.

How Charity's motives stood in heaven there is no telling. It is
safe to say that they were the usual human mixture of selfish and
altruistic, wise and foolish, honorable and impudent, profitable
and ruinous. She came by the dictagraphic idea very gradually. She
had plentiful leisure since she had taken a distaste for good works.
She had been so roughly handled by the world she was toiling for
that she decided to let it get along for a while without her.

It was a benumbing shock to learn definitely that her husband was
in liaison with a definite person, and to be confronted in shabby
clothes with that person all dressed up. When she hurried to the
Church for mercy it was desolation to learn from the pulpit that
her heart clamor for divorce was not a cleanly and aseptic impulse,
but an impious contribution to the filthy social condition of the
United States.

Charity had no one to confide in, and she had no new grievance to
air. Everybody else had evidently been long assured of her husband's
profligacy. For her to wake up to it only now and run bruiting the
stale information would be a ridiculous nuisance--a newsgirl howling
yesterday's extra to to-day's busy crowd.

Besides, she had in her time known how uninteresting and unwelcome
is the celebrant of one's own misfortunes. Husbands and wives who
tell of their bad luck are entertaining only so long as they are
spicy and sportsmanlike. When they ask for a solution they are
embarrassing, since advice is impossible for moral people. The truly
good must advise him or her either to keep quiet or to quit. But to
say "Keep quiet!" is to say "Don't disturb the adultery," while to
say "Quit!" is to say "Commit divorce!" which is far worse, according
to the best people.

We have always had adultery and got along beautifully, while divorce
is new and American and intolerable. Of course, one can and sometimes
does advise a legal separation, but that comes hard to minds that
face facts, since separation is only a license to--well, we all know
what separation amounts to; it really cannot be prettily described.

Charity, left alone at the three-forked road of divorce, complacency,
or separation, sank down and waited in dull misery for help or
solution, as do most of the poor wayfarers who come upon such a
break in their path of matrimony. She imagined Cheever with Zada and
wondered what peculiar incantations Zada used to hold him so long.
She wished that she had positive evidence against him--not for public
use, but as a weapon of self-defense. She felt that from his pulpit
Doctor Mosely had challenged her to a spiritual duel in that sermon
against divorce and remarriage of either guilty or innocent.

Also she began to want to get evidence to silence her own soul with.
She wanted to get over loving Cheever. To want to be cured of such
an ailment is already the beginning of cure.

Abruptly the idea came to her to put a detective on the track of
Zada and Cheever. She had no acquaintance in that field, and it was
a matter of importance that she should not put herself in the hands
of an indelicate detective. She ought to have consulted a lawyer
first, but her soul preferred the risk of disaster to the shame
of asking counsel.

She consulted the newspapers and found a number of advertisements,
some of them a little too mysterious, a little too promiseful. But
she took a chance on the Hodshon & Hindley Bureau, especially as it
advertised a night telephone, and it was night when she reached her
decision.

She surprised Mr. Hodshon in the bosom of his family. He was dandling
a new baby in the air and trying not to step on the penultimate
child, who was treating one of his legs as a tree. When the telephone
rang he tossed the latest edition to its mother and hobbled to the
table, trying to tear loose the clinger, for it does not sound well
to hear a child gurgling at a detective's elbow.

When Charity told Hodshon who she was his eyes popped and he was
greatly excited. When she asked Mr. Hodshon to call at once he looked
at his family and his slippers and said he didn't see how he could
till the next day. Charity did not want to go to a detective's office
in broad daylight or to have anybody see a detective coming to her
house. She had an idea that a detective could be recognized at once
by his disguise. He probably could be if he wore one; and he usually
can be, anyway, if any one is looking for him. But she could not get
Hodshon till she threatened to telephone elsewhere. At that, he said
he would postpone his other engagement and come right up.

Charity was disappointed in Mr. Hodshon. He looked so ordinary,
and yet he must know such terrible things about people. We always
expect doctors, lawyers, priests, and detectives to show the scars
of the searing things they know. As if we did not all of us know
enough about ourselves and others to eat our eyes out, if knowledge
were corrosive!

Charity was further disappointed in Hodshon's lack of
picturesqueness. He was like no detective she had read about
between Sherlock Holmes and Philo Gubb. He was like no detective
at all. It was almost impossible to accept him as her agent.

He seemed eager to help, however, and when she told him that she
suspected her husband of being overly friendly with an insect named
Zada L'Etoile, and that she wanted them shadowed, he betrayed a
proper agitation.

Now, of course, women's scandals are no more of a luxury to a
detective than their legs were to the bus-driver of tradition or to
any one in knee-skirted 1916. Mr. Hodshon was a good man as good men
go, though he was capable of the little dishonesties and compromises
with truth that characterize every profession. A man simply cannot
succeed as a teacher, lawyer, doctor, merchant, thief, author,
scientist, or anything else if he blurts out everything he knows
or believes. No preacher could occupy a pulpit for two Sundays who
told just what he actually thought or knew or could find out. The
detective is equally compelled to manipulate the truth.

Hodshon gave his soul to Charity's cause. He outlined the various
ways of establishing Cheever's guilt and promised that the agency
would keep him shadowed and make a record of all his hours.

"It'll take some time to get the goods on 'em good," he explained,
"but there's ways we got. When we learn what we got to know we'll
arrange it and tip you off. Then you and me will go to the door and
break in on the parties at the right moment, and--"

"No, Thank You!" said Charity, with a firm pressure on each word.

"You better get some friend to go with us, for a detective needs
c'roboration, you know. The courts won't accept a detective's
uns'ported testimony. And if you could know what some of these
crooks are capable of you wouldn't wonder. Is that all right? We
get the goods on 'em and you have a friend ready, and we'll bust
in on the parties, and--"

"No, thank you!" said Charity, with undiminished enthusiasm.

This stumped Mr. Hodshon. She amazed him further. "I don't intend
to bring this case into court. I don't want to satisfy any judge
but myself."

But what he had said about the credibility of the unsupported
detective had set Charity to thinking. It would be folly to pay
these curious persons to collect evidence that was worthless when
collected. She mused aloud:

"Would it be possible--of course it wouldn't--but if it were, what
I should like would be to be able to see my hu--Mr. Ch--those two
persons without their knowing about it at all. Of course that's
impossible, isn't it?"

"Well, it was a few years ago, but we can do wonders nowadays.
There's the little dictagraph. We could string one up for you and
give you the usual stenographic report--or you could go and listen
in yourself."

"Could I really?" Charity gasped, and she began to shiver with
the frightfulness of the opportunity.

"Surest thing you know," said Hodshon.

"But how could you install a dictagraph without their finding
it out?"

"Easiest thing you know. We'll probably have to rent an apartment
in the same building or another one near-by, and--one of the
hall-boys there may be workin' for us now. If not, we can usually
bring him in. There's a hundred ways to get into a house and put
the little dictor behind a picture or somewheres and lead the wire
out to us."

"But can you really hear--if they talk low?" Charity mumbled,
with dread.

"Let 'em whisper!" said Hodshon. "The little fellow just eats
a whisper. Leave it to us, madam, and we'll surprise you."

The compact was made. Charity suggested an advance payment as a
retainer, and Hodshon permitted her to write a check and hand it
to him before he assured her that it wasn't necessary.

He went away and left Charity in a state of nerves. Her curiosity
was a mania, but she feared that assuaging it might leave her in a
worse plight. She hated herself for her enterprise and was tempted
to cancel it. But when she heard Cheever come home at midnight and
go to his room without speaking to her she felt a grim resentment
toward him that was like a young hate with a big future.

Every night Charity received a typewritten document describing
Cheever's itinerary for the day. The mute, inglorious Boswell took
him up at the front steps, heeled him to his office, out to lunch,
back to the office, thence to wherever he went.

The name of Zada did not appear in the first report at all, but on
the second day she met Cheever at luncheon, and he went shopping with
her. Charity, reading, flushed to learn that he bought her neither
jewelry nor hats, but household supplies and delicacies. He went with
her to her apartment and thence with her to dinner and the theater
and then back, and thence again after an hour to his home.

The minute chronicle of his outdoor doings, intercalated with the
maddening bafflement of his life in that impenetrable apartment, made
such dramatic reading as Charity had never known. She grew haggard
with waiting for the arrival of her little private daily newspaper.
When she saw Cheever she could hardly keep from screaming at him
what she knew. His every entrance into the house became a hideous
insult. She felt that it was herself who was the kept woman and not
the other.

She longed to take the documents and visit the Reverend Doctor Mosely
with them, make him read them and tell her if he still thought it was
her duty to endure such infamy. She felt that the good doctor would
advise her to lay them before Cheever and confound him with guilt,
bring him to what the preachers call "a realizing sense" of it and
win him home.

She was tempted to try the imaginary advice on Cheever, but something
held her back. She wondered what it was, till suddenly she came to
a realizing sense of one fearful bit of news: her soul had so changed
toward him, her love had turned to such disgust, that she was afraid
he might come back to her! He might cast off his discovered partner
in guilt and renew his old claim to Charity's soul and body. That
would be degradation indeed!

Now she was convinced that her love had starved even unto death, that
it was a corpse in her home, corrupted the air and must be removed.




CHAPTER XX

Kedzie lay extended on her _chaise longue_, looking as much
unlike Madame Recamier as one could look who was so pretty a woman.
A Sunday supplement dropped from her hand and joined the heap of
papers on the floor. Kedzie was tired of looking at pictures of
herself.

She had had to look over all the papers, since she was in them all.
At least her other self, Anita Adair, was in them.

In every paper there was a large advertisement with a large picture
of her and the names of the theaters at which she would appear
simultaneously in her new film. In the critical pages devoted to
the moving-picture world there were also pictures of her and at least
a little text.

In two or three of the papers there were interviews with the new
comet; in others were articles by her. These entertained her at
first, because she had never seen the interviewers or the articles.
She had not thought many of the thoughts attached to her name. The
press agent of the Hyperfilm Company had written everything. He
reveled in his new star, for the editors were cordial toward her
"press stuff." They "ate it up," "gave it spread."

This was the less surprising since the advertising-man of the
Hyperfilm Company was so lavish with purchase of space that the
publishers could well afford to throw in a little free reading
matter--especially since it did not cost them a cent for the copy.

The press agent unaided has a hard life, but when the advertising-man
gives him his arm he is welcome to the most select columns.

In some of the interviews Kedzie gave opinions she had never held on
themes she had never heard of. When she read that her favorite poet
was Rabindranath Tagore she wondered who that "gink" was. When she
read that she owed her figure to certain strenuous flexion exercises
she decided that they might be worth trying some day. Her advice to
beginners in the motion-picture field proved very interesting. She
wondered how she had ever got along without it.

She was greatly excited by an article of hers in which she told of
the terrific adventures she had had in and out of the studio; there
was one time when an angry tiger would have torn her to pieces if she
had not had the presence of mind to play dead. She read of another
occasion when she had either to spoil a good film or endanger her
existence as the automobile she was steering refused to answer the
brake and plunged over a cliff. Of course she would not ruin the
film. By some miracle she escaped with only a few broken bones, and
after a week in the hospital returned to the interrupted picture.
These old stories were told with such simple sincerity that she
almost believed them. But she tossed them aside and sneered:

"Bunc!"

She yawned over her own published portraits--and to be able to do
that is to be surfeited indeed.

Suddenly Kedzie stopped purring, thought fiercely, whirled to her
flank; her hands went among the papers. She remembered something,
found it at last, an article she had glanced at and forgotten
for the moment.

She snatched it up and read. It discussed the earning powers of
several film queens. It credited them with salaries ten or twenty
times as much as hers. Two or three of them had companies of their
own with their names at the head of their films.

Kedzie groaned. She rose and paced the floor, shamed, trapped,
humbled. The misers of the Hyperfilm Company paid her a beggarly
hundred dollars a week! merely featured her among other stars of
greater magnitude, while certain women had two thousand a week
and were "incorporated," whatever that was!

Kedzie longed to get at Ferriday and tell him what a sneak he was
to lure her into such a web and tie her up with such cheap ropes.
She would break her bonds and fling them in his face.

She slid abruptly to the floor and began to go over the film
pages again, comparing her portraits with the portraits of those
higher-paid creatures. She hated vanity and could not endure it in
other women; it was a mere observation of a self-evident fact that
she was prettier than all the other film queens put together. She
sat there sneering at the presumptuousness of screen idols whom she
had almost literally worshiped a year before.

Then something gave her pause. The celluloid-queens had certain
pages allotted to them, the actresses certain pages.

But there was another realm where women were portrayed in fashionable
gowns--debutantes, brides, matrons. And their realm was called "The
Social World." These women toiled not, earned not; they only spent
money and time as they pleased. They were in "society," and she was
out of it. They were ladies and she was a working-woman.

Now Kedzie's cake was dough indeed. Now her pride was shame. She
did not want to be a film queen. She did not want to work for any
sum a week. She wanted to be a debutante and a bride and a matron.

She had never had a coming-out party, and never would have. She
studied the aristocrats, put their portraits on her dressing-table
and tried to copy their simple grandeur in her mirror. But she
lacked a certain something. She didn't know a human being who was
swell to use as a model.

Oh yes, she did--one--Jim Dyckman.

A dark design came to her to dally with him no longer. He had dragged
her out of that pool at Newport; now he must drag her into the swim.

The telephone-bell rang. The hall-boy said:

"A gen'leman to see you--Mistoo Ferriday."

"Send him along."

"He's on the way now."

"Oh, all right."

As Kedzie hung up the receiver it occurred to her that this little
interchange was about the un-swellest thing she had ever done. She
had been heedless of the convenances. Her business life made her
responsible only to herself, and she felt able to take care of
herself anywhere.

Now it came over her that she could not aspire to aristocracy and
allow negro hall-boys to send men up in the elevator and telephone
her afterward. She snatched up the telephone and said:

"That you?"

"Yassum, Miss Adair."

"How dare you send anybody up without sending the name up first?"

"Why, you nevva--"

"Who do you think I am that I permit anybody to walk in on me?"

"Why, we alwiz--"

"The idea of such a thing! It's disgraceful."

"Why, I'm sorry, but--"

"Don't ever do it again."

"No'm."

She slapped the receiver on the hook and fumed again, realizing that
a something of elegance had been lacking in her tirade.

The door-bell rang, and she did not wait for her maid, but answered
it in angry person. Ferriday beamed on her.

"Oh, it's you. You didn't stop to ask if I was visible. You just
came right on up, didn't you?"

He whispered: "Pardon me. Somebody else is here. Exit laughingly!"

That was insult on insult.

"Stop it! There is not anybody else. Come back. What do you want?"

He came back, his laughter changed to rage.

"Look here, you impudent little upstart from nowhere! I invented you,
and if you're not careful I'll destroy you."

"Is that so?" she answered; then, like Mr. Charles Van Loan's
baseball hero, she realized with regret that the remark was not
brilliant as repartee.

Ferriday was too wroth to do much better:

"Yes, that's so. You little nobody!"

"Nobody!" she laughed, pointing to the newspapers spangled with
her portraits.

Ferriday snorted, "Paid for by Jim Dyckman's money."

"What do you mean--Jim Dyckman's money?"

"Oh, when I saw how idiotic he was over you, and how slow you were
in landing him, and when I realized that the Hyperfilm Company was
going to slide your pictures out with no special advertising, I went
to him and tried to get him into the business."

"You had a nerve!"

"Praise from Lady Hubert!"

"Whoever she is! Well, did he bite?"

"Yes and no. He's not such a fool as he looks in your company. He
has a hard head for business; he wouldn't invest a cent."

"I thought you said--"

"But he has a soft head for you. He said he wouldn't invest a cent
in the firm, but he'd donate all I could use for you. It was to be
a little secret present. He told me you refused to accept presents
from him. Did you?"

Kedzie blushed before his cynic understanding.

He laughed: "You're all right. You know the game, but you've got
to quicken your speed. You're taking too much footage in getting
to the climax."

Kedzie was still incandescent with the new information:

"And Jim Dyckman paid for my advertising?"

"On condition that his name was kept out of it. That's why you're
famous. You couldn't have got your face in a paper if you had been
fifty times as pretty if he hadn't swamped the papers with money.
And he would never have thought of it if I hadn't gone after him.
So you'd better waste a little politeness on me or your first flare
will be your last."

Kedzie acknowledged his conquest, bowed her head, and pouted up
at him with such exquisite impudence that he groaned:

"I don't know whether I ought to kiss you or kill you."

"Take your choice, my master," Kedzie cooed.

He snarled at her: "I guess the news I bring will do for you. There
was a fire in the studio last night. You didn't know of it?"

Kedzie, dumbly aghast, shook her head.

"If you'd read any part of the newspapers except your own press stuff
you'd have seen that there was a war in Europe yesterday and a fire
in New York last night. I was there trying to save what I could.
I got a few blisters and not much else. Most of your unfinished work
is finished--gone up in smoke."

"You don't mean that my beautiful, wonderful films are destroyed?"

He nodded--then caught her as her knees gave way. He felt a stab of
pity for her as he dragged her to her _chaise longue_ and let
her fall there. She was dazed with the shock.

She had been indifferent to the destruction of fortresses and
cathedrals--even of Rheims, with its titanic granite lace. She had
read, or might have read, of the airship that dropped a bomb through
the great fresco in Venice where Tiepolo revealed his unequaled
mastery of aerial perspective, taking the eye up through the dome
and the human witnesses, cloud by cloud, past the hierarchies
of angels, past Christ and the Mother of God, on up to Jehovah
himself, bending down from infinite heights. The eternal loss of
this picture meant nothing to her. But the destruction of her own
recorded smiles and tears and the pretty twistings and turnings of
her young body--that was cataclysm.

She was like everybody else, in that no multiplication of other
people's torments could be so vivid as the catching of her own thumb
in a door. Kedzie was too crushed to weep. This little personal
Pompeii brought to the dust all the palaces and turrets of her hope
upon her head. She whispered to Ferriday:

"What are you going to do? Must you make them over again?"

He shook his head. "The Hyperfilm Company will probably shut up
shop now."

"And let my pictures die?"

He nodded.

She beckoned him close and clung to him, babbling: "What will become
of me? Oh, my poor pictures! My pretty pictures! The company owes me
a week's salary. And I had counted on the money. What's to become of
me?"

Ferriday resented her eternal use of him for her own advantages.
"Why do you appeal to me? Where's your friend Dyckman?"

"I was to see him this evening--dine with him."

"Well, he can build you ten new studios and not feel it. Better ask
him to set you up in business."

Kedzie revolted at this, but she had no answer. Ferriday saw the
papers folded open at the society pages. He stared at them, at her,
then sniffed:

"So that's your new ambition!"

"What?"

"'In the Social World!' You want to get in with that gang, eh? Has
Dyckman asked you to marry him?"

"Of course not."

"Well, if he does, don't ever let him take you into his own set."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Just to warn you. Those social worldlings wouldn't stand for you,
Anita darling. You can make monkeys of us poor men. But those queens
will make a little scared worm out of you and step on you. And they
won't stop smiling for one minute."

"Is that so?" Kedzie snarled. There it was again.

The telephone rang. Kedzie answered it. The hall-boy timidly
announced:

"Mistoo Dyckman is down year askin' kin he see you. Kin he?"

"Send him up, please," said Kedzie. Then she turned to Ferriday.
"He's here--at this hour! I wonder why."

"I'd better slope."

"Do you mind?"

"Not in the least. I'll go up a flight of stairs and take the
elevator after His Majesty has finished with it. Good-by.
Get busy!"

He slid out, and Kedzie scurried about her primping. The bell rang.
She sent her maid to the door. Dyckman came in. She let him wait
awhile--then went to him with an elegiac manner.

She accepted his salute on a martyr-white brow. He said:

"I read about the fire. I was scared to death for you till I learned
that all the people were safe. I motored up to see the ruins. Some
ruins! Like to see'em?"

"I don't think I could stand the sight of them. They're my ruins,
too."

"How so?"

"Because the company won't rebuild or go on, and most of my pictures
were destroyed."

"Your pretty, beautiful, gorgeous pictures gone! Oh, God help us!
That's too terrible to believe."

She sighed, "It's true."

"Why, I'd rather lose the Metropolitan Art Gallery than your films.
Can't they be made over?"

"They could, but who's to stand the expense?"

"I will, if you'll let me."

"Mr. Dyckman!"

"I thought we'd agreed that my name was Jim."

"Jim! You would do that for me!"

"Why not?"

"But why so?"

"Because--why, simply--er--it's the most natural thing in the world,
seeing that--Well, you're not sitting there pretending that you don't
know I love you, are you?"

"Oh dear, oh dear! It's too wonderful to believe, you angel!"

And then for the first time she flung her arms about his neck and
kissed him and hugged him, knelt on his lap and clasped him fiercely.

He felt as if a simoom of rapture had struck him, and when she told
him a dozen times that she loved him he could think of nothing to
say but, "Say, this is great!"

She forgave him the banality this time. When she had calmed herself
a little she said:

"But it would mean a frightful lot of money."

"Whatever it costs, it's cheap--considering this." He indicated
her arm about his neck. "I wouldn't let the world be robbed of
the pictures of you, Anita, not for any money." He told her to tell
Ferriday to make the arrangements and send the estimates to him. And
he said, "I won't ask you to quit being photographed, even when we
are married."

"When we are married?" Kedzie parroted.

"Of course! That's where we're bound for, isn't it? Where else could
we pull up--that is, of course, assuming that you'll do me the honor
of anchoring a great artist like you up to a big dub like me. Will
you?"

"Why--why--I'd like to think it over; this is so sudden."

"Of course, you'd better think it over, you poor angel!"

Kedzie could not think what else to say or even what to think. The
word "marriage" reminded her that she had what the ineffable Bunker
Bean would have called "a little old last year's husband" lying
around in the garret of her past.

She went almost blind with rage at that beast of a Gilfoyle who had
dragged her away and married her while she was not thinking. He must
have hypnotized her or drugged her. If only she could quietly murder
him! But she didn't even know where he was.




CHAPTER XXI

The investigations of Messrs. Hodshon & Hindley in the life of Zada
and Cheever prospered exceedingly. In blissless ignorance of it,
Zada had been inspired to set a firm of sleuths on Charity's trail.
She wanted to be able to convince Cheever that Charity was intrigued
with Dyckman. The operators who kept Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever under
espionage had the most stupid things to report to Zada.

To Zada's disgust, Mrs. Cheever never called upon Jim Dyckman, and
he never called on her. Zada accused the bureau of cheating her,
and finally put another agency to shadowing Jim Dyckman. According
to the reports she had, his neglect of Mrs. Cheever was perfectly
explained. He was a mere satellite of a moving-picture actress,
a new-comer named Anita Adair.

The detectives reported that such gossip as they could pick up about
the studio indicated that Dyckman was putting money into the firm
on her account.

"A movie angel!" sneered Zada. She had wasted a hundred dollars on
him to find this out, and two hundred and fifty on Mrs. Cheever to
find out that she was intensely respectable. That was bitter news
to Zada. She canceled her business with her detective agency. And
they called in the shadows that haunted Charity's life.

The detectives on Zada's trail, however, had more rewarding material
to work with--although they found unexpected difficulties, they said,
in getting the dictagraph installed in her apartment. They did not
wish to ruin the whole enterprise by too great haste--especially as
they were receiving eight dollars a day and liberal expenses per man.

At last, however, Hodshon sent word to Mrs. Cheever that the
dictagraph was installed and working to a T, and she could listen-in
whenever she was ready.

Charity was terrified utterly now. New scales were to be shaken
from her eyes at the new tree of knowledge. She was to hear her man
talking to his leman.

She had almost an epilepsy of terror, but she could not resist the
importunate opportunity.

She selected from her veils a heavy crepe that she had worn during
a period of mourning for one of her husband's relatives. It seemed
appropriate now, for she was going into mourning for her own husband,
living, yet about to die to her.

She left the house alone after dark and walked along Fifth Avenue
till she found a taxicab. She gave the street number Hodshon had
given her and stepped in. She kept an eye on the lighted clock and
in the dark sorted out the exact change and a tip, adding dimes as
they were recorded on the meter. She did not want to have to pause
for change, and she did not wish to make herself conspicuous by an
extravagant tip.

As the taxicab slid along the Avenue Charity wondered if any of the
passengers in other cabs could have an errand so gruesome as hers.
She was tortured by fantastic imaginings of what she might hear. She
wondered how a man would talk to such a person as Zada, and how she
would answer. She imagined the most dreadful things she could.

The taxicab surprised her by stopping suddenly before a brown-fronted
residence adjoining an apartment-house of (more or less literally)
meretricious ornateness. She stepped out, paid her fare, and turned,
to find Mr. Hodshon at her elbow. He had been waiting for her. He
recognized her by her melodramatic veil. He gave her needed help up
a high stoop and opened the door with a key.

She found herself in a shabby, smelly hall where no one else was.

He motioned her up the stairway, and she climbed with timidity. At
each level there were name-plates over the electric buttons. The
very labels seemed illicit. Hodshon motioned her up and up for four
flights.

Then he opened a door and stepped back to let her enter a room
unfurnished except for a few chairs and a table. Two men were in
the room, and they were laughing with uproar. One of them had a
telephone-receiver clamped to his ear, and he was making shorthand
notes, explaining to his companion what he heard.

They turned in surprise at Hodshon's entrance and rose to greet
Charity with the homage due so great a client.

Charity could hardly bespeak them civilly. They took her curtness
for snobbery, but it was not. It swept over her that these people
were laughing over her most sacred tragedy.

She advanced on the operator and put out her hand for the headpiece
he wore. He took it off and rubbed it with his handkerchief, and
told her that she must remove her hat and veil.

She came out startlingly white and brilliant from the black. She
put the elastic clamp over her head and set the receiver to her
ear. Instantly she was assailed by dreadful noises, a jangle of
inarticulate sounds like the barking of two dogs.

"I can't hear a word," she protested.

"They're talkin' too loud," said the operator. "The only way to beat
the dictagraph is to cut the wire or yell."

"Are they quarreling, then?" Charity asked, almost with pleasure.

"Yes, ma'am. But it's the lady and her maid. They been havin' a
terrible scrap about marketin'. He--Mr. Cheever--ain't there yet.
They're expectin' him, though."

Charity felt that she had plumbed the depths of degradation in
listening to a quarrel between such a creature and her maid. What
must it be to be the maid of such a creature! She was about to
snatch away the earpiece when she heard the noise of a door opening.
She looked toward the entrance of the room she was in, but the door
that opened was in the other room in the other building.

The voices of Zada and her maid stopped jangling, and she heard
the most familiar of all voices asking:

"What's the row to-day?"

There was an extra metal in the timbre and it had the effect of an
old phonographic record, but there was no questioning whose voice
it was.

Zada's voice became audibly low in answer.

"She is such a fool she drives me crazy."

A sullen, servile voice answered: "It ain't me's the fool, and as
for crazy--her wantin' me to bring home what they ain't in no market.
How'm I goin' to git what ain't to be got, I asts you. This here war
is stoppin' ev'y kind of food."

Cheever's answer was characteristic. He didn't believe in servants'
rights.

"Get out. If you're impudent again I'll throw you out, and your
baggage after you."

"Yassar," was the soft answer.

There was the sound of shuffling feet and a softly closed door.
Then Zada's voice, very mellow:

"I thought you'd never come, dearie."

"Awfully busy to-day, honey."

"You took dinner with her, of course."

"No. It was a big day on the Street, and there was so much to do at
the office that I dined down-town at the Bankers' Club with several
men and then went back to the office. I ought to be there all night,
but I couldn't keep away from you any longer."

There were mysterious quirks of sound that meant kisses and sighs and
tender inarticulations. There were cooing tones which the dictagraph
repeated with hideous fidelity.

Zada asked, "Did he have hard daydie old office-ums?"

And he answered, with infatuated imbecility, "Yes, he diddums, but
worst was lonelying for his Zadalums."

"Did Peterkin miss his Zadalums truly--truly?"

The inveterate idioms of wooers took on in Charity's ear a grotesque
obscenity, a sacrilegious burlesque of words as holy to her as prayer
or the sacred dialect of priests. When Zada murmured, "Kissings!
kissings!" Charity screamed: "Stop it, you beasts! You beasts!"

Then she clapped her hand over her lips, expecting to hear their
panic at her outcry. But they were as oblivious of her pain or her
rage as if an interplanetary space divided them. They went on with
the murmur and susurrus of their communion, while Charity looked
askance at the three men. They could not hear, but could imagine,
and they stared at her doltishly.

"Leave the room! Go away!" she groaned.

They slipped out through the door and left her to her shame.

In the porches of her ear the hateful courtship purled on with its
tender third-personal terms and its amorous diminutives, suffixed
ridiculously.

"Zada was afaid her booful Peterkin had forgotten her and gone to
the big old house."

"Without coming home first?"

"Home! that's the wordie I want. This is his homie, isn't it,
Peterkin?"

"Yessy."

"He doesn't love old villain who keeps us apart?"

"Nonie, nonie."

"Never did, did he?"

"Never."

"Only married her, didn't he?"

"That's allie."

"Zada is only really wifie?"

"Only onlykins."

Charity listened with a greed of self-torment like a fanatic
penitent. The chatter of the two had none of the indecency she
had expected, and that made it the more intolerably indecent.

She saw that Cheever's affair with Zada had settled down to a state
of comfort, of halcyon delight.

It had taken on domestication. He was at home with her and an alien
in Charity's home. He told the woman his business affairs and little
office jokes. He laughed with a purity of cheer that he had long lost
in his legal establishment. He used many of the love-words that he
had once used to Charity, and her heart was wrung with the mockery
of it.

Charity listened helplessly. She was as one manacled or paralyzed and
submitted to such a torture as she had never endured. She harkened
in vain for some hopeful note of uncongeniality, some reassurance
for her love or at least her vanity, some certainty that her husband,
her first possessor, had given her some emotion that he could never
give another. But he was repeating to Zada the very phrases of his
honeymoon, repeating them with all the fervor of a good actor playing
Romeo for the hundredth time with his new leading lady. Indeed, he
seemed to find in Zada a response and a unity that he had never found
in Charity's society. Her intelligence was cruelly goaded to the
realization that she had never been quite the woman for Cheever.

She had known that he had not been the full complement of her own
soul. They had disagreed fiercely on hundreds of topics. He had been
chilled by many of her ardors, as many of his interests had bored
her. She had supposed it to be an inevitable inability of a man and
a woman to regard the world through the same eyes. She had let him
go his way and had gone her own. And now it seemed that he had in
his wanderings found some one who mated him exactly. The butterfly
had liked the rose, but had fluttered away; when it found the orchid
it closed its wings and rested content.

It was a frightful revelation to Charity, for it meant that Cheever
had been merely flirting with her. She had caught his eye as a girl
in a strange port captivates a sailor. He had haunted her window
with serenades. Finding her to be what we call "a good girl," he had
called upon her father and mother that he might talk to her longer.
And then he had gone to church with her and married her that he might
get rid of her father and mother and her own scruples. And so he had
made her his utterly, and after a few days and nights had sailed away.
He had come back to her now and then as a sailor does.

Meanwhile in another port he had found what we call "a bad woman."
There had been no need to serenade her out into the streets. They
were her shop. No parents had guarded her hours; no priest was
intermediary to her possession. But once within her lair he had
found himself where he had always wanted to be, and she had found
herself with the man she had been hunting. She closed her window,
drove her frequenters, old and new, from the door; and he regretted
that he had given pledges to that other woman.

It was a pitiful state of affairs, no less pitiful for being old
and ugly and innumerously commonplace. It meant that Cheever under
the white cloak of matrimony had despoiled Charity of her innocence,
and under the red domino of intrigue had restored to Zada hers.

If Charity, sitting like a recording angel, invisible but hearing
everything, had found in the communion of Zada and Cheever only
the fervor of an amour, she could have felt that Cheever was merely
a libertine who loved his wife and his home but loved to rove as
well. She had, however, ghastly evidence that Cheever was only now
the rake reformed; his marriage had been merely one of his escapades;
he had settled down now to monogamy with Zada, and she was his wife
in all but style and title.

There was more of Darby and Joan than of Elvira and Don Juan in
their conversation. He told Zada with pride that he had not had a
drink all day, though he had needed alco-help and the other men had
ridiculed him. She told him that she had not had a drink for a week
and only one cigarette since her lonely dinner. They were in a state
of mutual reformation!

Where, then, was the sacrament of marriage? Which of the women held
the chalice now?

It was enforced on Charity that it was she and not Zada who had
been the inspirer and the victim of Cheever's flitting appetite.
It was Zada and not she who had won him to the calm, the dignity,
the sincerity, the purity that make marriage marriage. It was a hard
lesson for Charity, and she did not know what she ought to do with
her costly knowledge. She could only listen.

When Zada complained that she had had a dreadful day of blues Cheever
made jokes for her as for a child, and she laughed like the child
she was. For her amusement he even went to a piano and played, with
blundering three-chord accompaniment, a song or two. He played jokes
on the keyboard. He revealed none of the self-consciousness that he
manifested before Charity when he exploited his little bag of
parlor tricks.

Charity's mood had changed from horror to eager curiosity, and thence
to cold despair, to cold resentment. It went on to cold intelligence
and a belief that her life with Cheever was over. Their marriage was
a proved failure, and any further experiments with its intimacies
would be unspeakably vile. Or so she thought.

She had consented to this dictagraphic inspection of her husband's
intrigue merely to confirm or refute gossip. She had had more than
evidence enough to satisfy her. Her first reaction to it was a
primitive lust for revenge.

Once or twice she blazed with such anger that she rose to tear the
wire loose from the wall and end the torment. But her curiosity
restrained her. She set the earpiece to her ear again.

At length she formed her resolution to act. She called out,
"Mr. Hodshon, come here!"

He came in and found her a pillar of rage.

"I've heard enough. I'll do what I refused before. I'll go with you
and break in."

Hodshon was dazed. He was not ready to act. She had refused his plan
to break in according to the classic standards. He had let the plan
lapse and accepted Mrs. Cheever as a poor rich wretch whom he had
contracted to provide with a certain form of morbid entertainment.
He could do nothing now but stammer:

"Well--well--is that so? Do you really? You know you didn't--
O' course--Well, let's see now. You know we ain't prepared. I told
you we had to have a c'rob'rating witness. It wouldn't be legal if we
were to--Still, they probably would accept you as witness and us as
corroboration, but you wouldn't want to go on the stand and tell what
you found--not a nice refined lady like you are. The witness-stand
is no place for a lady, anyway.

"The thing is if you could get some gentleman friend to go with you
and you two break in. Then you'd both be amateurs, kind of. You see?
Do you know any gentleman who might be willing to do that for you?
The best of friends get very shy when you suggest such a job. But
if you know anybody who would be interested and wanted to help
you--Do you?"

Only two names came to Charity's searching mind--Jim Dyckman's
impossible name and one that was so sublimely unfit that she laughed
as she uttered it.

"There's the Reverend Doctor Mosely."

Hodshon tried to laugh.

"I was reading head-lines of a sermon of his. He's down on divorce."

"That's why he'd be the ideal witness," said Charity.

"But would he come?"

"Of course not," she laughed. "There's no use of carrying this
further. I've had all I can stand to-night. Let me go."

As usual with people who have had all they can stand, Charity wanted
some more. She glanced at the receiver, curious as to what winged
words had flown unattended during her parley with Hodshon.

She put the receiver to her ear and fell back. Again she was greeted
with clamor. They were quarreling ferociously.

That might mean either of two things: there are the quarrels that
enemies maintain, and those that devoted lovers wage. The latter
sort are perhaps the bitterer, the less polite. Charity could not
learn what had started the wrangle between those two.

Slowly it died away. Zada's cries turned to sobs, and her tirade
to sobs.

"You don't love me. Go back to her. You love her still."

"No, I don't, honey. I just don't want her name brought into our
conversation. It doesn't seem decent, somehow. It's like bringing
her in here to listen to our quarrels. I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm
trying not to, but you're so peculiarly hard to keep peace with
lately. What's the reason, darling?"

Charity was smitten with a fear more terrible than any yet. She
heard its confirmation. Zada whispered:

"Can't you guess?"

"No, I can't."

"Stupid!" Zada murmured. "You poor, stupid boy."

Charity heard nothing for a long moment--then a gasp.

"Zada!"

She greeted his alarm with a chuckle and a flurry of proud laughter.
He bombarded her with questions:

"Why didn't you tell me? How long? What will you do? How could
you?--you're no fool."

Her answers were jumbled with his questions--his voice terrified,
hers victorious.

"I've kept it a secret for months, because I was afraid of you.
It's my right. It's too late to do anything now. And now we'll see
whether you love me or not--and how much, if any."

There was again silence. Charity could hardly tolerate the suspense.
Both she and Zada were hanging breathlessly on Cheever's answer.

He did not speak for so long that Zada gave up. "You don't love me,
then? I'd better kill myself, I suppose. It's the only solution now.
And I'm willing, since you don't love me enough."

"No, no--yes, I do. I adore you--more than ever. But it's such a
strange ambition for you; and, God! what a difference it makes,
what a difference!"

That was what Charity thought. For once she agreed with Cheever,
echoed his words and his dismay and stood equally stunned before
the new riddle. It was a perfect riddle now, for there was no end
to the answers, and every one of them was wrong.




CHAPTER XXII

Charity let the receiver fall. She had had enough. She sank into
a chair and would have slipped to the floor, but her swimming eyes
made out the blurred face of Hodshon, terrified at her pallor.

If she fainted he would resuscitate her. She could not add that
to her other ignominies. She clenched herself like one great fist
of resolution till the swoon was frustrated. She sat still for
a while--then rose, put on her hat, swathed her face in the veil,
and went down the flights of stairs and out into the cool, dark
street.

She had forgotten that she had dismissed the taxicab. Fortunately
another was lurking in the lee of the apartment-house. Hodshon
summoned it and would have ridden home with her, but she forbade
him. She passed on the way the church of Doctor Mosely and his
house adjoining. She was tempted to stop, but she was too weary
for more talk.

She slept exceedingly well that night, so well that when she woke
she regretted that she had not slept on out of the world. She fell
asleep again, but was trampled by a nightmare. She woke trying to
scream. Her eyes, opening, found her beautiful room about her and
the dream dangers vanished.

But the horrors of her waking hours of yesterday had not vanished.
They were waiting for her. She could not end them by the closing
of her eyes. In the cool, clear light of day she saw still more
problems than before--problems crying for decisions and contradicting
each other with a hopeless conflict of moralities. To move in any
direction was to commit ugly deeds; to move in no direction was to
commit the ugliest of all.

She rang for her coffee, and she could hardly sit up to it. Her maid
cried out at her age-worn look, and begged her to see a doctor.

"I'm going to as soon as I'm strong enough," said Charity Coe. But
she meant the Reverend Doctor Mosely. She thought that she could
persuade even him that surgery was necessary upon that marriage. At
any rate, she determined to force a decision from him. She telephoned
the unsuspecting old darling, and he readily consented to see her.
She spent an hour or two going over her Bible and concordance. They
gave her little comfort in her plight.

When finally she dragged herself from her home to Doctor Mosely's his
butler ushered her at once into the study. Doctor Mosely welcomed her
both as a grown-up child and as an eminent dealer in good deeds.

She went right at her business. "Doctor Mosely, I loathe myself for
adding to the burdens your parish puts upon your dear shoulders but
you're responsible for my present dilemma."

"My dear child, you don't tell me! Then you must let me help you
out of it. But first tell me--what I'm responsible for."

"You married me to Peter Cheever."

"Why, yes, I believe I did. I marry so many dear girls. Yes, I
remember your wedding perfectly. A very pretty occasion, and you
looked extremely well. So did the bridegroom. I was quite proud
of joining two such--such--"

"Please unjoin us."

"Great Heavens, my child! What are you saying?"

"I am asking you to untie the knot you tied."

The old man stared at her, took his glasses off, rubbed them, put them
on, and peered into her face to make sure of her. Then he said:

"If that were in my power--and you know perfectly well that it is
not--it would be a violation of all that I hold sacred in matrimony."

"Just what do you hold sacred, Doctor Mosely?"

"Dear, dear, this will never do. Really, I don't wish to take
advantage of my cloth, but, really, you know, Charity, you have
been taught better than to snap at the clergy like that."

"Forgive me; I'm excited, not irreverent. But--well, you don't
believe in divorce, do you?"

"I have stated so with all the power of my poor eloquence."

"Do you believe that the seventh commandment is the least important
of the lot?"

"Certainly not!"

"If a man breaks any commandment he ought to do what he can to
remedy the evil?"

"Yes."

"Then if a man violates the seventh, why shouldn't he be compelled
to make restitution, too?"

"What restitution could he make?"

"Not much. He has taken from the girl he marries her name, her
innocence, her youth--he can restore only one thing--her freedom."

"That is not for him to restore. 'What, therefore, God hath joined,
let not man put asunder.'"

The old man grew majestic when he thundered the sonorities of Holy
Writ. Charity was cowed, but she made a craven protest:

"But who is to say what God hath joined?"

"The marriage sacraments administered by the ordained clergy
established that. There is every warrant for clergymen to perform
marriages; no Christian clergyman pretends to undo them."

"You believe that marriage is an indissoluble sacrament, then?"

"Indeed I do."

"Who made my marriage a sacrament?"

"I did, as the agent of God."

"And the minute you pronounce a couple married they are registered
in heaven, and God completes the union?"

"You may put it as you please; the truth is divine."

"In other words, a man like you can pronounce two people man and
wife, but once the words have escaped his lips nothing can ever
correct the mistake."

"There are certain conditions which annul a marriage, but once it
is genuinely ratified on earth it is ratified in heaven."

"In heaven, where, as the New Testament says in several places,
married people do not live together? The woman who had seven
husbands on earth, you know, didn't have any at all in heaven."

"So Christ answered the Sadducee who tempted him with questions."

"Marriage is strictly a matter of the earth, earthy, then?"

"Nothing is strictly that, my child. But what in the name of either
earth or heaven has led you to come over here and break into my
morning's work with such a fusillade of childish questions? You know
a child can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer. Also, a
child can ask questions which a wise man can answer to another wise
man but not to a child. You talk like an excited, an unreasoning
girl. I am surprised to hear you ridiculing the institution of
Christian marriage, but your ridicule does not prove it to be
ridiculous."

"Oh, it's not ridiculous to me, Doctor Mosely; and I'm not
ridiculing it. I am horribly afraid of what it has done to me
and will do to me."

"Explain that, my dear."

She did explain with all bluntness: "My husband openly lives with
a mistress. He prefers her to me."

The old man was stunned. He faltered: "Dear me!"

That is most reprehensible--most! He should be subjected to
discipline."

"Whose? He isn't a member of your church. And how can you discipline
such a man--especially as you don't believe in divorce?"

"Have you tried to win him back to the path of duty, to waken him
to a realizing sense of his obliquity?"

"Often and long. It can't be done, for he loves the other woman."

"Don't use the beautiful word love for such a debasing impulse."

"But I know he loves her!"

"How could you know?"

"I heard him tell her."

"You heard him! Do you ask me to believe that he told her that in
your presence?"

"I heard him on the dictagraph."

"You have been collecting evidence for divorce, then?"

"No, I was collecting it to assure myself that the gossip I had
heard was false--and to submit to you."

"But why to me?"

"When I first learned of this hideous situation my first impulse was
to rush to the courts. I went to church instead. I heard your sermon.
It stopped me from seeing a lawyer."

"I am glad my poor words have served some useful end."

"But have they?"

"If I have prevented one divorce I have not lived in vain."

"You don't think I have a right to ask for one?"

"Absolutely and most emphatically not."

"In spite of anything he may do?"

"Anything! He will come back to you, Charity. Possess your soul
in patience. It may be years, but keep the light burning and he
will return."

"In what condition?"

"My child, you shock me! You've been reading the horrible literature
that gets printed under the guise of science."

"I must wait, then?"

"Yes, if you wish to separate from him for a time, your absence might
waken him to a realizing sense. There are no children, I believe."

"None, yet."

"Yet? Oh, then--"

"If there were, would it make a difference?"

"Of course! an infinite difference!"

"You think a man and woman ought to let their child keep them
together in any event?"

"Need I say it? What greater bond of union could there be? Is it
not God's own seal and blessing on the wedlock, rendering it, so
to speak, even more indissoluble? You blush, my child. Is it true,
then, that--"

"A child is expected."

"Ah, my dear girl! How that proves what I have maintained! The birth
of the little one will bring the errant father to his senses. The
tiny hands will unite its parents as if they were the hands of a
priest drawing them together. That child is the divine messenger
confirming the sacrament."

"You believe that?"

"Utterly. Oh, I am glad. Motherhood is the crowning triumph; it
hallows any woman howsoever lowly or wicked. And you are neither,
Charity. I know you to be good and busy in good works. But were you
never so evil, this heavenly privilege would make of you a very
vessel of sanctity."

Charity turned pale as she sprung the trap. "The child is
expected--not by me, but by the other woman."

Doctor Mosely's beatitude turned to a sick disgust. Red and white
streaked his face. His first definite reaction was wrath at the
trick that had been played upon him.

"Mrs. Cheever! This is unworthy of you! You distress me! Really!"

"I was a little distressed myself. What am I to do?"

"I will not believe what you say."

"I heard her confess it--boast of it. She agrees with you that
the tiny hands will bring her and the father together and confirm
the sacrament."

"It can't be. It must not be!"

"You don't advocate that form of birth-control? They are arresting
people who preach prevention of conception. You are not so modern
as that."

"Hush!"

"What am I to do? You advise me to possess my soul in patience for
years. But the child won't wait that long. Doesn't the situation
alter your opinion of divorce?"

"No!"

"But if I don't divorce Mr. Cheever and let him marry her the child
will have no father--legally."

"The responsibility is his, not yours."

"You don't believe in infant damnation, do you? At least not on
earth, do you?"

"I cannot control the evil impulses of others. The doctrines of the
Church cannot be modified for the convenience of every sinner."

"You advise against divorce, then?"

"I am unalterably opposed to it."

"What is your solution, then, of this situation?"

"I shall have to think it over--and pray. Please go. You have
staggered me."

"When you have thought it over will you give me the help of your
advice?"

"Certainly."

"Then shall I wait till I hear from you?"

"If you will."

"Good-by, Doctor Mosely."

"Good-by, Mrs.--Charity--my child!"

He pressed her long hand in his old palms. He was trembling. He was
like a priest at bay before the altar while the arrows of the infidel
rain upon him. These arrows were soft as rain and keen as silk. He
was more afraid of them than if they had been tipped with flint or
steel.

Charity left the parsonage no wiser than she entered it. She had
accomplished nothing further than to ruin Doctor Mosely's excellent
start on an optimistic discourse in the prevailing fashion of the
enormously popular "Pollyanna" stories: it was to be a "glad" sermon,
an inexorably glad sermon. But poor Doctor Mosely could not preach
it now in the face of this ugly fact.

Charity went home with her miserable triumph, which only emphasized
her defeat.

She found at home a mass of details pressing for immediate action
if the big moving-picture project were not to lapse into inanity.
The mere toil of such a task ought to have been welcomed, at least
as a diversion. But her heart was as if dead in her.

She wondered how Jim Dyckman was progressing with his portion of
the task. He had not reported to her. She wondered why.

She decided to telephone him. She put out her hand, but did not lift
the receiver from the hook. She began to muse upon Jim Dyckman. She
began to think strange thoughts of him. If she had married him she
might not have failed so wretchedly to find happiness. Of course,
she might have failed more wretchedly and more speedily, but the
wayfarer who chooses one of two crossroads and meets a wolf upon
it does not believe that a lion was waiting on the other.




CHAPTER XXIII

Charity pondered her whole history with Jim Dyckman, from their
childhood flirtations on. He had had other flings, and she had flung
herself into Peter Cheever's arms. Peter Cheever had flung her out
again. Jim Dyckman had opened his arms again.

He had told her that she was wasting herself. He had offered her love
and devotion. She had struck his hands away and rebuked him fiercely.
A little later she had felt a pang of jealousy because he looked at
that little Greek dancer so interestedly. She had tried to atone for
this appalling thought by interesting herself in the little dancer's
welfare and hunting a position for her with the moving-picture
company. She had told Jim Dyckman to look for the girl in the studio
and find how she was getting along. He had never reported on that,
either. Charity smiled bitterly.

Last night it had come over her that her love for Peter Cheever
was dead. Was love itself, then, dead for her? or was her heart
already busy down there in the dark of her bosom, busy like a seed
germinating some new lily or fennel to thrust up into the daylight?

The sublime and the ridiculous are as close together as the opposite
sides of a sheet of cloth. The sublime is the obverse of the tapestry
with the figures heroic, saintly or sensuous, in battle or temple or
bower, in conquest, love, martyrdom, adoration. The reverse of the
tapestry is a matter of knots and tufts, broken patterns, ludicrous
accidents of contour. The same threads make up both sides.

On one side of Charity's tapestry she saw herself as a pitiful
figure, a neglected wife returned from errands of mercy to find her
husband enamoured of a wanton. She spurned the proffered heart of
a great knight while her own heart bled openly in her breast.

On the other side she saw the same red threads that crimsoned her
heart running across the arras to and from the heart of Jim Dyckman.
It was the red thread of life and love, blood-color--blood-maker,
blood-spiller, heart-quickener, heart-sickener, the red thread of
romance, of motherhood and of lust, birth and murder, family and
bawdry.

In the tapestry her heart was entire, her eyes upon her faithless
husband. On the other side her eyes faced the other knight; her
heartstrings ran out to his. She laughed harshly at the vision.
Her laugh ended in a fierce contempt of herself and of every body
and thing else in the world.

She was too weak to fight the law and the Church and the public
in order to divorce her husband. Would it be weakness or strength
to sit at home in the ashes and deny herself to life and love? She
could always go to Jim Dyckman and take him as her cavalier. But
then she would become one of those heartbroken, leash-broken women
who are the Maenads of society, more or less circumspect and shy, but
none the less lawless. But wherein were they better than the Zadas?

Charity was wrung with a nausea of love in all its activities; she
forswore them. Yet she was human. She was begotten and conceived in
the flesh of lovers. She was made for love and its immemorial usages.
How could she expect to destroy her own primeval impulse just because
one treacherous man had enjoyed her awhile and passed on to his next
affair?

There was no child of hers to grow up and replace her in the eternal
armies of love and compel her aside among the veteran women who have
been mustered out. She was in a sense already widowed of her husband.
Certainly she would never love Cheever again or receive him into her
arms. He belonged to the mother of his child. Let that woman step
aside into the benches of the spectators, those who have served their
purpose and must become wet-nurses, child-dryers, infant-teachers,
perambulator-motors, question-answerers, nose-blowers,
mischief-punishers, cradleside-bards.

Charity laughed derisively at the vision of Zada as a mother. The
Madonna pose had fascinated this Magdalen, but she would find that
mothers have many, many other things to do for their infants than
to sit for portraits and give them picturesque nourishment--many,
many other things. If Zada's child inherited its father's and
mother's wantonness, laziness, wickedness, and violence of temper,
there was going to be a lively nursery in that apartment.

Zada had so wanted a baby as a reward of love that she was willing
to snatch it out of the vast waiting-room without pausing for a
license. She would find that she had bought punishment at a high
price. The poor baby was in for a hard life, but it would give its
parents one in exchange.

Charity was appalled at this unknown harshness of her soul; it
sneered at all things once held beautiful and sacred. Her soul was
like a big cathedral broken into by a pagan mob that ran about
smashing images, defiling fonts, burlesquing all the solemn rituals.
Her quiet mind was full of sunburnt nymphs and goatish fauns with
shaggy fetlocks. She saw the world as a Brocken and all the Sabbath
there was was a Sabbath orgy of despicably brutish fiends.

She tried to run away. She went to her piano; her fingers would play
no dirges; they grew flippant, profane in rhythm. She could think of
no tunes but dances--andantes turned scherzi, the Handelian largo
became a Castilian tango. She found herself playing a something
strange--she realized that it was a lullaby! She fled from the piano.

She went to her books for nepenthe. There were romances in French,
Italian, German, English, and American, new books, old books, all
repeating the same stencils of passion in different colors. She
could have spat at them and their silly ardors over the same old
banality: I love him; he loves me--beatitude! I love him; he loves
her--tragedy!

The novelists were like stupid children parroting the ancient
monotony--_amo_, _amas_, _amat_; _amamus_,
_amatis_, _amant_; _amo_, _amas_,
_amat_--away with such primer stuff! She had learned the
grammar of love and was graduated from the school-books. She was
a postgraduate of love and wedlock. She had had enough of them--too
much; she would read no more of love, dwell no more upon it; she
would forget it.

She wanted some antiseptic book, something frigid, intellectual,
ascetic. At last she thought she had it. On her shelf she found
an uncut volume, a present from some one who had never read it,
but had bought it because it cost several dollars and would serve
as a gift.

It was Gardner's biography of Saint Catherine of Siena, "a study
in the religion, literature, and history of the fourteenth century
of Italy." That sounded heartless enough. The frontispiece portrait
of the wan, meager, despondent saint promised freedom from romantic
balderdash.

Charity found a chair by a window and began to read. The preface
announced the book to be "history centered in the work and
personality of one of the most wonderful women that ever lived."
This was the medicine Charity wanted--the story of a woman who
had been wonderful without love or marriage.

There followed a description of the evil times--and the wicked
town in which Caterina Benincasa was born--as long ago as 1347. A
pestilence swept away four-fifths of the populace. One man told how
he had buried five of his sons in one trench. People said that the
end of the world had come.

The word _trench_, the perishing of the people and the apparent
end of the world, gave the story a modern sound. It might concern
the murderous years of 1914-16.

Catherine was religious, as little girls are apt to be. She even
wanted to enter a monastery in the disguise of a boy. Later her
sister persuaded her to dye her hair and dress fashionably. Charity
began to fear for her saint, but was reassured to find that already
at sixteen she was a nun and had commenced that "life of almost
incredible austerity," freeing herself from all dependence on food
and sleep and resting on a bare board.

Charity read with envy how Catherine had devoted herself for three
whole years to silence broken only by confessions. How good it would
be not to talk to anybody about anything for years and years! How
blissful to live a calm, gray life in a strait cell, doing no labor
but the errands of mercy and of prayer!

Charity read on, wondering a little at Catherine's idea of God,
and her morbid devotion to His blood as the essence of everything
beautiful and holy. Charity could not put herself back into
that Middle Age when the most concrete materialism was mingled
inextricably with the most fantastic symbolism.

Suddenly she was startled to find that appalling temptations found
even Catherine out even in her cloistral solitude. It frightened
Charity to read such a passage as this:

There came a time, towards the end of these three years, when these
assaults and temptations became horrible and unbearable. Aerial men
and women, with obscene words and still more obscene gestures, seemed
to invade her little cell, sweeping round her like the souls of the
damned in Dante's "Hell," inviting her simple and chaste soul to
the banquet of lust. Their suggestions grew so hideous and persistent
that she fled in terror from the cell that had become like a circle
of the infernal regions, and took refuge in the church; but they
pursued her thither, though there their power seemed checked. And her
Christ seemed far from her. At last she cried out, remembering the
words in the vision: "I have chosen suffering for my consolation,
and will gladly bear these and all other torments, in the name of
the Saviour, for as long as shall please His Majesty." When she said
this, immediately all that assemblage of demons departed in confusion,
and a great light from above appeared that illumined all the room,
and in the light the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, nailed to the Cross
and stained with blood, as He was when by His own blood He entered
into the holy place; and from the Cross He called the holy virgin,
saying: "My daughter Catherine, seest thou how much I have suffered
for thee? Let it not then be hard to thee to endure for Me."

This terrified Charity, and the further she read the less comfort she
gained. Her matter-of-fact Manhattan mind could vaguely understand
Saint Catherine's mystic nuptials with Christ; but that definite gold
ring He placed on her finger, that diamond with four pearls around
it, frustrated her comprehension.

When she read on and learned how Catherine's utter self-denial
offended the other churchmen and church-women; how her confessions
of sinful thought brought accusations of sinful deed; how the friars
actually threw her out of a church at noon and kicked her as she lay
senseless in the dust; how she was threatened with assassination and
was turned from the doors of the people; and in what torment she died
--from these strange events in the progress of a strange soul through
a strange world Charity found no parallel to guide her life along.

For hours she read; but all that remained to her was the vision of
that poor woman who could find no refuge from her flesh and from
the demons that played evil rhapsodies upon the harp-strings of
her nerves.

Charity closed the book and understood fear. She was now not so much
sick of love as afraid of it. She was afraid of solitude, afraid of
religion and of the good works that cause ridicule or resentment.

Darkness gathered about her with the closing of the day. She dreaded
the night and the day, people and the absence of people. She knew no
woman she could take her anguish to for sympathy; it would provoke
only rebuke or laughter. The Church had rebuffed her. There remained
only men, and what could she hope from them? Even Jim Dyckman had not
been a friend merely. He had told her that she wasted herself as well
as him.

Beyond this night there were years of nights, years on years of days.
She could not even be alone; for who was ever actually alone? Even in
the hush and the gloom of the deepening twilight there were figures
here, shadows that sighed, delicate insinuators. There were no satyrs
or bassarids, but gentlemen in polo garb, in evening dress, in
yachting flannels. There were moon-nights in Florida, electric floods
on dancing-floors, this dim corner of this room with some one leaning
on her chair, bending his head and whispering:

"Charity, it's Jim. I love you."

She rose and thrust aside the arms that were not there. She could not
order him away, because he was not there. And yet he was there.

She was afraid that he still loved her and afraid that he did not.
She was afraid that she had always loved him and that she never
could. She was afraid that she would go to him or send for him,
and afraid that she would be afraid to. She thrust away the phantom,
but her palms pleaded against his departure. Softer than a whisper
and noisier than a cry was her thought:

"I don't want to be alone, I am afraid to be alone."




CHAPTER XXIV

Kedzie wanted to be a lady, and with the ladies stand--a tall tiara
in her hair, a lorgnette in her hand.

She had succeeded dizzily, tremendously, in her cinema career. The
timid thing that had watched the moving-picture director to see how
he held his wineglass, and accepted his smile as a beam of sunshine
breaking through the clouds about his godlike head, now found his
gracefulness "actory," his intimacy impudent, and his association
compromising. Ferriday's very picturesqueness and artistry convinced
her now that he was not quite the gentleman.

Kedzie was beginning to imitate the upper dialect already. She who
but a twelvemonth past was dividing people into "hicks" and "swells,"
and whose epithets were "reub" and "classy," was now a generation
advanced.

Ferriday saw it and raged. One day in discussing the cast of a
picture he mentioned the screen-pet Lorraine Melnotte as the man
for the principal male role.

Kedzie sighed; "Oh, he is so hopelessly romantic, never quite the
gentleman. In costume he gets by, but in evening clothes he always
suggests the handsome waiter--don't you think?"

Ferriday roared, with disgust: "Good Lord, but you're growing. What
is this thing I've invented? Are you a _Frankenstein?_"

Kedzie looked blank and sneered, "Are you implying that I have
Yiddish blood in me?"

She wondered why he laughed, but she would not ask. Along many lines
Kedzie did not know much, but in others she was uncannily acute.

Kedzie was gleaning all her ideas of gentlemanship from Jim Dyckman.
She knew that he had lineage and heritage and equipage and all that
sort of thing, and he must be great because he knew great people.
His careless simplicity, artlessness, shyness, all the things that
distressed her at first, were now accepted as the standards of
conduct for everybody.

In life as in other arts, the best artists grow from the complex to
the simple, the tortuous to the direct, from pose to poise, from
tradition to truth, from artifice to reality. Kedzie was beginning
to understand this and to ape what she could not do naturally.

Her comet-like scoot from obscurity to fame in the motion-picture sky
had exhausted the excitement of that sky, and now she was ashamed of
being a wage-earner, a mere actress, especially a movie actress.

If the studio had not caught fire and burned up so many thousands of
yards of her portraiture she would have broken her contract without
scruple. But the shock of the loss of her pretty images drove her
back to the scene. The pity of so much thought, emotion, action,
going up in smoke was too cruel to endure.

It was not necessary for Dyckman to pay the expenses of their
repetition in celluloid, as he offered. The Hyperfilm Company rented
another studio and began to remake the destroyed pictures. They were
speedily renewed because the scenarios had been rescued and there was
little of that appalling waste of time, money, and effort which has
almost wrecked the whole industry. They did not photograph a thousand
feet for every two hundred used.

Kedzie's first pictures had gone to the exchanges before the fire,
and they were continuing their travels about the world while she was
at work revamping the rest.

About this time the Hyperfilm managers decided to move their factory
to California, where the sempiternal sunlight insured better
photography at far less expense. This meant that Kedzie must leave
New York only partly conquered and must tear herself away from Jim
Dyckman.

She broke down and cried when she told Dyckman of this, and for the
first time his sympathies were stampeded on her account. He petted
her, and she slid into his arms with a child-like ingratiation that
made his heart swell with pity.

"What's the odds," he said, attempting consolation, "where you work,
so long as you work?"

"But it would mean," she sobbed--"it would mean taking me away-ay
from you-ou."

This tribute enraptured Dyckman incredibly. That he should mean so
much to so wonderful a thing as she was was unbelievably flattering.
He had dogged Charity's heels with meek and unrewarded loyalty until
he had lost all pride. Kedzie's tears at the thought of leaving him
woke it to life again.

"By golly, you sha'n't go, then!" he cried. "I was thinking of coming
out there to visit you, but--but it would be better yet for you to
stay right here in little old New York."

This brought back Kedzie's smile. But she faltered, "What if they
hold me to my contract, though?"

"Then we'll bust the old contract. I'll buy 'em off. You needn't
work for anybody."

There was enough of the old-fashioned woman of one sort left in
Kedzie to relish the slave-block glory of being fought over by two
purchasers. She spoke rather slyly:

"But I'll be without wages then. How would I live? I've got
to work."

Dyckman answered at once: "Of course not. I'll take care of you.
I offered to before, you know." He had made a proposal of marriage
some time before; it was the only sort of proposal that he had been
tempted to make to Kedzie. He liked her immensely; she fascinated
him; he loved to pet her and kiss her and talk baby talk to her; but
she had never inflamed his emotions.

Either it was the same with her, or she had purposely controlled
herself and him from policy, or had been restrained by coldness or
by a certain decency, of which she had a good deal, after all and
in spite of all.

Throughout their relations they had deceived Ferriday and other
cynics. For all their indifference to appearances, they had behaved
like a well-behaved pair of young betrothed Americans, with a
complete freedom from chaperonage, and a considerable liberality
of endearments, but no serious misdemeanor.

Kedzie knew what he meant, but she wanted to hear him propose again.
So she murmured:

"How do you mean, take care of me?"

"I mean--marry you, of course."

"Oh!" said Kedzie. And in a whirlwind of pride she twined her arms
about his neck and clung to him with a desperate ardor.

Dyckman said: "This isn't my first proposal, you know. You said you
wanted time to think it over. Haven't you thought it over yet?"

"Yes," Kedzie sighed, but she said no more.

"Well, what's the answer?" he urged.

"Yes."

She whispered, torn between rapture and despair.

Any woman might have blazed with pride at being asked to marry Jim
Dyckman. The little villager was almost consumed like another Semele
scorched by Jupiter's rash approach.

In Dyckman's clasp Kedzie felt how lonely she had been. She wanted to
be gathered in from the dangers of the world, from poverty and from
work. She had not realized how tiny a thing she was, to be combating
the big city all alone, until some one offered her shelter.

People can usually be brave and grim in the presence of defeat and
peril and hostility. It is the kind word, the sudden victory, the
discovery of a friend that breaks one down. Even Kedzie wept.

She wept all over Jim Dyckman's waistcoat, sat on his lap and
swallowed throat-lumps and tears and tugged at his cuff-links with
her little fingers.

Then she looked up at him and blushed and kissed him fiercely,
hugging him with all the might of her arms. He was troubled by the
first frenzy she had ever shown for him, and he might have learned
how much more than a merely pretty child she was if she had not
suddenly felt an icy hand laid on her hands, unclasping them.

A cold arm seemed to bend about her throat and drag her back. She
slid from Dyckman's knees, gasping:

"Oh!"

She could not become Mrs. Jim Dyckman, because she was Mrs. Thomas
Gilfoyle.

Dyckman was astounded and frightened by her action. He put his hand
out, but she unclenched his fingers from her wrist, mumbling:

"Don't--please!"

"Why not? What's wrong with you, child?"

How could she tell him? What could she do? She must do a lot of
thinking. On one thing she was resolved: that she would not give
Dyckman up. She would find Gilfoyle and get quit of him. They had
been married so easily; there must be an easy way of unmarrying.

She studied Dyckman. She must not frighten him away, or let him
suspect. She laughed nervously and went back to his arms, giggling:

"Such a wonderful thing it is to have you want me for your wife!
I'm not worthy of your name, or your love, or anything."

Dyckman could hardly agree to this, whatever misgivings might be
shaking his heart. He praised her with the best adjectives in his
scant vocabulary and asked her when they should be wed.

"Oh, not for a long while yet," she pleaded.

"Why?" he wondered.

"Oh, because!" It sickened and alarmed her to put off the day, but
how could she name it?

When he left her at last the situation was still a bit hazy. He had
proposed and been accepted vaguely. But when he had gallantly asked
her to "say when" she had begged for time.

Dyckman, once outside the spell of Kedzie's eyes and her warmth, felt
more and more dubious. He was ashamed of himself for entertaining any
doubts of the perfection of his situation, but he was ashamed also of
his easy surrender. Here he was with his freedom gone. He had escaped
the marriage-net of so many women of so much brilliance and prestige,
and yet a little movie actress had landed him.

He compared Anita Adair with Charity Coe, and he had to admit that
his fiancee suffered woefully in every contrast. He could see the
look of amazement on Charity's face when she heard the news. She
would be completely polite about it, but she would be appalled. So
would his father and mother. They would fight him tremendously. His
friends would give him the laugh, the big ha-ha! They would say he
had made a fool of himself; he had been an easy mark for a little
outsider.

He wondered just how it had happened. The fact was that Kedzie had
appealed to his pity. That was what none of the other eligibles had
ever done, least of all Charity the ineligible.

He went home. He found his father and mother playing double Canfield
and wrangling over it as usual. They were disturbed by his manner.
He would not tell them what was the matter and left them to their
game. It interested them no more. It seemed so unimportant whether
the cards fell right or not. The points were not worth the excitement.
Their son was playing solitaire, and it was not coming out at all.
They discussed the possible reasons for his gloom. There were so
many.

"I wish he'd get married to some nice girl," sighed Mrs. Dyckman.
A mother is pretty desperate when she wants to surrender her son
to another woman.




CHAPTER XXV

Kedzie made a bad night of it. She hated her loneliness. She hated
her room. She hated her maid. She wanted to live in the Dyckman
palace and have a dozen maids and a pair of butlers to boss around,
and valets, and a crest on her paper, and invitations pouring in
from people whose pictures were in "the social world." She wanted
to snub somebody and show certain folks what was what.

The next morning she was sure of only one thing, and that was that
Dyckman had asked her to be his wife; and be his wife she would,
no matter what it cost.

She wondered how she could get rid of Gilfoyle, whom she looked upon
now as nothing less than an abductor. He was one of those "cadets"
the papers had been full of a few years before, who lured young
girls to ruin under the guise of false marriages and then sold them
as "white slaves."

Kedzle's wrath was at the fact that Gilfoyle was not legally an
abductor. She would have been glad merely to be ruined, and she
would have rejoiced at the possibility of a false marriage. In the
movies the second villain only pretended to be a preacher, and then
confessed his guilt. But such an easy solution was not for Kedzie.
New York City had licensed Gilfoyle's outrage; the clerk had sold
her to him for two dollars; the Municipal Building was the too, too
solid witness.

She felt a spiritual solace in the fact that she had not had a
religious marriage. The sacrament was only municipal and did not
count. Her wedding had lacked the blessing of the duly constituted
ministry; therefore it was sacrilegious; therefore it was her
conscientious duty to undo the pagan knot as quickly as possible.
She reverted to the good old way of the Middle Ages. There was
no curse of divorce then, and indeed there was small need of it,
since annulment could usually be managed on one religious ground
or another, or if not, people went about their business as if it
had been managed.

Kedzie felt absolved of any fault of selfishness now, and justified
in taking any steps necessary to the punishment of Gilfoyle.
_Religion_ is a large, loose word, and it can be made to fit
any motive; but once assumed it seems to strengthen every resolution,
to chloroform mercy and hallow any means to the self-sanctified end.
What people would shrink from as inhuman they constantly embrace
as divine.

Kedzie wondered how she could communicate with her adversary. She
might best go to Chicago and fight herself free there. There would
be less risk of Dyckman's hearing about it.

She shuddered at what she would have to tell him unless she kept the
divorce secret. He might not love her if he knew she was not the nice
new girl he thought her, but an old married woman. And what would he
say when he found that her real name was Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle
_nee_ Kedzie Thropp?

But first Kedzie must divorce herself from the Hyperfilm Company.
She went to the studio with rage in her heart. She told Ferriday
that she would not go to California. He proposed that she break
with the Hyperfilm Company and form a corporation of her own with
Dyckman as angel.

Kedzie was wroth at this. From now on, spending Dyckman's money
would be like spending her own. Ferriday, once her accomplice in
the noble business of getting Dyckman to back her, was revealed
now as a cheap swindler trying to keep Mrs. Dyckman in trade at
her husband's expense.

"I'm through with the pictures, I tell you!" she stormed. "I'm sick
of the cheap notoriety. I'm tired of being public property. I can't
go out on the street without being pointed at. It's disgusting. I
don't want to be incorporated or photographed or interviewed. I want
to be let alone. I'm tired. I've worked too hard. I need a rest."

Ferriday hated her with great agility. He had been willing to abet
her breach of contract, provided she let him form a new company, but
if she would not that made a great difference. He reminded her:

"The Hyperfilm Company will hold you to your bond. They want your
hundred and twenty-five pounds of flesh. If you should break with
them they'd have a case against you for damages."

"How much?" said Kedzie, feeling like Mrs. Croesus.

Ferriday whistled and murmured: "Spoken like the wife of a
multimillionaire! So you've got him at last."

"To who," Kedzie began, with an owl-like effect that she corrected
with some confusion,"--to whom do you refer to?"

Ferriday grinned: "You're going to marry out of the movies, and
you're going to try to horn into sassiety. Well, I warned you before
that if you became Dyckman's wife you would find his world vastly
different from the ballroom and drawing-room stuff you pull off in
the studio--strangely and mysteriously different."

He frightened her. She was not sure of herself. She could not forget
Nimrim, Missouri, and her arrival at the edge of society _via_
the Bronx, the candy-shop, and the professional camera.

She felt that the world had not treated her squarely. Why should she
have to carry all this luggage of her past through the gate with her?
She wondered if it would not be better to linger in the studios till
she grew more famous and could bring a little prestige along.

But Ferriday was already ousting her even from that security.

"The managers of the Hyperfilm Company will think you have done them
dirt, but I'll explain that you are not really responsible. You've
seen a million dollars, and you're razzle-dazzled. They'll want a bit
of that million, I suppose, as liquidated damages, but I'll try to
keep them down."

Kedzie was at bay in her terror. She struck back.

"Tell 'em they won't get a cent if they try to play the hog."

"They don't have hogs on Fifth Avenue, Anita. Don't forget that.
Well, good-by and good luck."

This was more like an eviction than a desertion. Kedzie felt a
little softening of her heart toward the old homestead.

"I'm sure I'm much obliged for all you've done for me."

Ferriday roared his scorn.

She went on: "I am. Honest-ly! And I hope I haven't caused you too
much inconvenience."

Ferriday betrayed how much he was hurt by his violent efforts to
conceal it.

"Not at all. It happens that I've just found another little girl to
take your place. This one drifted in among the extras, just as you
did, and she's a dream. I'll show her to the managers, and they may
be so glad to get her they won't charge you a cent. In fact, if you
say the word, I might manage it so that they would pay you something
to cancel your contract."

This was quite too cruel. It crushed the tears out of Kedzie's eyes,
and she had no fight left in her. She simply stammered:

"No, thank you. Don't bother. Well, good-by."

"Good-by, Anita--good luck!"

He let her make her way out of his office alone. She had to skirt
the studio. From behind a canvas wall over which the Cooper-Hewitt
tubes rained a quivering blue glare came the words of the assistant
director:

"Now choke her, Hazlitt! Harder! Register despair, Miss Hardy. Try
to scream and can't! That's good. Now, Walsh, jump in to the rescue.
Slug him. Knock his bean off. 'S enough! Fall, Ha