CHAPTER I

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WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING

By Rupert Hughes

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.