CHAPTER XXXIX

Dyckman telephoned to Kedzie and asked if he could see her. She said

that he could, and dressed furiously while he made the distance to her

apartment.

She gleaned from his look and from the way he took her two hands in

his that he had serious news to bring her. She had not been awake long

enough to read the papers, and this was her first death. She cried

helplessly when she learned that her husband was gone away with all her

bitterness for his farewell. She remembered the best of him, and he came

back to her for a while as the poet who had made her his muse--the only

one she could telegraph to when she returned to New York alone, her

first and only husband.

She was afraid that she belittled herself in Dyckman's eyes when she let

slip the remorseful Wail, “I wish I had been kinder to the poor boy!”

But she did not belittle herself in any such tendernesses of regret. She

endeared herself by her grief, her self-reproach, her childish humility

before the power of death. Her tears were beautiful in Jim's sight. But

it is the blessing and the shame of tears that they cure the grief that

causes them. At first they bleed and burn; then they flow soft and cool.

They cleanse and brighten the eyes and even wash away the cinders from

the funeral smoke.

Dyckman's heart was drawn out of him toward Kedzie and his arms held her

shaken body devotedly. But at length she ceased to weep, and a last long

sob became dangerously like a sigh of relief. She smiled through the

rain and apologized for weeping, when she should have apologized for

stopping weeping. Then Dyckman's love of her seemed to withdraw backward

into his heart. And his arms suddenly wearied of clasping her.

When she had seemed hardly to know that he was there he felt necessary

and justified. When she took comfort in his arms and held them about her

he felt ashamed, revolted, profane.

Mrs. Thropp had wept a little in sympathy with Kedzie, and Adna had

looked amiably disconsolate; but by and by Mrs. Thropp was murmuring:

“After all, perhaps it was for the best. The Lord's will be done!”

Dyckman shrank as if a blasphemy had been shouted. In a hideously short

time Mrs. Thropp was saying, briskly:

“Of course, honey, you've got no idea of puttin' on black for him.”

“If I believed in mourning, I would,” Kedzie answered without delay,

“but the true mourning is in the heart.”

Dyckman felt an almost uncontrollable desire to get away before he said

something that might be true. He began to wonder what, after all, poor

Gilfoyle had experienced from this hard-hearted little beauty. He saw

that he was almost forgotten already. He thought, “How fast they go, the

dead!” That same Villon had said it centuries before: “_Les morts vont

vites_.”

The Thropps settled down to a comfortable discussion of future plans.

One ledger had been finished. They would open a new one. Jim saw that

Gilfoyle's departure had been accepted as a Heaven-sent solution of

Kedzie's problems.

Abruptly it came to Dyckman that the solution of their problem was the

beginning of a whole volume of new problems for him. He recalled that

while he had become Kedzie's fiance in ignorance of his predecessor, he

had rashly promised to buy off Gilfoyle as soon as he learned of him.

But death had come in like a perfect waiter and subtly removed from the

banquet-table the thing that offended. Nothing had happened, however, to

release Dyckman from his engagement. Gilfoyle's death ought not to have

made a more important difference than his life would have made, and yet

it made all the difference in the world to Dyckman's feelings.

He could not say this, however. He could not ask to be excused from his

compact. His heart and his brain cried out that they did not want this

merry little widow for their wife, but his lips could not frame the

words. During the long silences and the evasive chatter that alternated

he felt one idea in the air: “Why doesn't Mr. Dyckman offer to go on

with the marriage?” Yet he could not make the offer. Nor could he make

the counterclaim for a dissolving of the betrothal.

He studied the Thropp trio and pictured the ridicule and the hostility

they would arouse among his family and friends--not because they were

poor and simple and lowly, but because they were not honest and sweet

and meek. The Dyckmans had poor relations and friends in poverty and

old peasant-folk whom they loved and admired and were proud to know.

But Dyckman felt that the elder Thropps deserved to be rebuffed with

snobbery because of their own snobbery. Nevertheless, he was absolutely

incapable of administering discipline.

At last Mrs. Thropp grew restive, fearsome that the marriage might not

take place, and desperately fearful that she might be cheated out of

her visit in the spare room, at the home of the great Mrs. Dyckman. She

said, grimly:

“Well, we might as well understand one another, Mr. Dyckman. You asked

my daughter to marry you, didn't you?”

“Yes, Mrs. Thropp.”

“Do you see anything in what's happened to prevent your getting

married?”

“No, Mrs. Thropp.”

“Then I don't see much use wastin' time, do you? Life's too uncertain

to go postponin' happiness when it's right within your reach. Kedzie's

father and I ought to be gettin' back home, and I'd feel a heap more

comfortable if I could know my poor little chick was safe in the care of

a good man.”

The possibility of getting Mr. and Mrs. Thropp out of town soon was the

one bright thought in Dyckman's mind. He felt compelled to say:

“Then let us have the ceremony, by all means. We shall have to wait

awhile, I suppose, for decency's sake.”

“Decency!” said Mrs. Thropp, managerially. “My Kedzie hadn't lived with

the man for a long while. Nobody but us knows that she ever did live

with him. He'd abandoned her, and when he came back it was only to try

to get money out of her. I can't see that she has any call to worry

about decency's sake. He's done her harm enough. She can't do him any

good by keepin' you waitin'.”

“Just as you think best, Mrs. Thropp,” said Dyckman. He began to smile

in spite of himself. He was thinking how many mothers and daughters had

tried to get him to the altar, not because they loved him, but because

they loved his father's money and fame. Jim had dodged them all and made

a kind of sport of it. And now he was cornered and captured by this old

barbarian with her movie-beauty daughter who was a widow and wouldn't

wear weeds.

Mrs. Thropp saw Dyckman's smile, but did not dare to ask its origin. She

asked, instead:

“Would you be having a church wedding, do you think?”

“Indeed not,” said Dyckman, with such incision that Mrs. Thropp felt it

best not to risk a debate.

“Just a quiet wedding, then?”

“As quiet as possible, if you don't mind.”

Kedzie sat speechless through all this. She wished that Jim would show

more ardor for her, but she felt that he was doing fairly well not to

knock her parents' heads together the way he had her husband's and his

friend's. She was as eager as Jim to get rid of the elder Thropps, but

she wanted to make sure of the wedding, and her mother was evidently

to be trusted to bring it about. At length Jim spoke in the tone of the

condemned man who says, “Well, let's hurry up and get the execution off

our minds”.

“I'll go and see a lawyer and make inquiries about how the marriage can

be done.”

He started to say to Kedzie, “You ought to know.”

She started to tell him about the Marriage License Bureau in the

Municipal Building. Both recaptured silence tactfully.

He kissed Kedzie, and he had a narrow escape from being kissed by Mrs.

Thropp.

THE THIRD BOOK

MRS. JIM DYCKMAN IS NOT SATISFIED

CHAPTER I

In the history of nations sometimes a paragraph serves for a certain

decade, while a volume is not enough for a certain day. It is so with

the history of persons.

In the thirty-six hours after he received Charity Coe's invitation to

call Jim Dyckman passed from being Charity's champion against her own

husband to being Kedzie's champion against hers. Charity rewarded his

chivalrous pommeling of Cheever by asking him never to come near her

again. Kedzie rewarded his punishment of Gilfoyle by arranging that he

should never leave her again.

It was Charity that he longed for, and Kedzie that he engaged to marry.

In that period Peter Cheever had traveled a very short distance in a

journey he had postponed too long. Cheever had been hardly conscious

when they smuggled him at midnight from his club to his own home. He had

slept ill and achily. He was ashamed to face the servants, and he wanted

to murder his valet for being aware of the master's defeat.

He did not know how ashamed the household retainers were of him and of

themselves. The valet and butler had earned good sums on occasions by

taking tips from Cheever on prize-fighters and jockeys. But they

felt betrayed now, and as disconsolate as the bottle-holders and

towel-flappers of a defeated pugilist.

They did not know who had whipped their master till the word came from

the Dyckman household that their master had come home glorious from

whipping the stuffing out of somebody. It was easy to put one and one

together and make two.

One of Cheever's worst embarrassments was the matter of Zada. His

battered head suffered tortures before it contrived a proper lie for

her. Then he called Zada up from his house and explained that as he was

leaving his club to fly to her, his car had skidded into another, with

the result that he had been knocked senseless and cut up with flying

glass; otherwise he was in perfect shape. Unfortunately, he had been

recognized and taken to his official home instead of to the residence of

his heart.

Zada was all for dashing to him at once; but he persuaded her that that

would be quite impossible. He was in no real danger in his own house,

and he would come back to his heart's one real first, last, only, and

onliest darling love just as soon as he could.

She subsided in wails of terror and loneliness. They touched his heart

so that he determined to end his effort at amphibian existence, give up

his legal establishment and legalize the illegal.

He wrote a note to Charity with much difficulty, since his knuckles were

sore and his pride was black and blue. His spoken language was of the

same tints. His written language was polite and formal.

It was a silly, tragic situation that led a husband to write his wife

a letter requesting an interview. Charity sent back a scrawl--“_Yes, in

fifteen minutes_.”

Cheever spent a bad quarter of an hour dressing himself. His face was

too raw to endure a razor, and the surgeon had put little cross-patches

of adhesive tape on one of his cheek-bones and at the edge of his mouth,

where his lip had split as the tooth behind it went overboard.

He yowled as he slipped his arms into a long bathrobe, and he struck at

the valet when the wretch suggested a little powder for one eye.

Charity had seen Cheever brought in at midnight and had looked to it

that he had every care. But now she came into his room with a maidenly

timidity. He did not know that she had rebuked Jim Dyckman with

uncharacteristic wrath for the attack. She did not tell Cheever this,

even though his first words to her demanded some such defense.

In the quarrels of lovers, or of those who have exchanged loves, it

makes little difference what the accusation is all about: the thing that

hurts is the fact of accusation.

Charity was so shamed at being stormed at by her husband that it was a

mere detail that he stormed at her with a charge that she had goaded Jim

Dyckman on to attack him.

Cheever had a favor to ask; so he put the charge more mildly now than

he had in his first bewildered rage. He accepted Charity's silence as

pleading guilty. So he went on:

“The fact that you chose Dyckman for your authorized thug and bravo

proves what I have thought for some time, that you love him and he

loves you. Now I have no desire to come between two such turtle-doves,

especially when one of them is one of those German flying-machine

_Taubes_ and goes around dropping dynamite-bombs on me through club

roofs.

“I'm not afraid of your little friend, and as soon as I get well I'll

get him; but I want it to be purely an exercise in the fistic art, and

not a public fluttering of family linen. So since you want Jim Dyckman,

take him, by all means, and let me bow myself out of the trio.

“I'll give you a nice, quiet little divorce, and do the fair thing in

the alimony line, and then after a proper interval you and little Jimmie

can toddle over to the parson and then toddle off to hell-and-gone, for

all I care. How does that strike you, my dear?”

Charity pondered, and then she said, “And where do you toddle off to?”

“Does that interest you?”

“Anything that concerns your welfare interests me.”

“I see. Well, don't worry about me.”

“There's no hurry, of course?”

“Not on my part,” said Cheever. “But Dyckman must be growing impatient,

since he tries to murder me to save the lawyer's fees.”

“Well, if you're in no hurry, Peter, I'm not. I'll think it over for a

few months. It's bad weather for divorces now, anyway.”

Cheever's heart churned in his breast. He knew that Zada could not

afford to wait. He should have married her long ago, and there was no

time to spare now. Charity's indifference frightened him. He did not

dream that through the dictagraph Charity had shared with him Zada's

annunciation of her approaching motherhood.

He turned and twisted in flesh and spirit, trying to persuade Charity to

proceed immediately for a divorce, but in vain.

Finally she ceased to laugh at him and demanded, sternly, “Why don't you

tell me the truth for once?”

He stared at her, and after a crisis of hesitation broke and informed

her of what she already knew. Now that he was at her feet, Charity felt

only pity for him, and even for Zada. She was sorrier for them than for

herself.

So she said: “All right, old man; let's divorce us. Will you or shall

I?”

“You'd better, of course; but you must not mention poor Zada.”

“Oh, of course not!”

A brief and friendly discussion of ways and means followed, and then

Charity turned to go, saying:

“Well, I'll let you know when you're free. Are there any other little

chores I can do for you?”

“No, thanks. You're one damned good sport, and I'm infernally sorry I--”

“Let's not begin on sorries. Good night!”

And such was unmarriage _a la mode_.

CHAPTER II

And now having felt sorry for everybody else, Charity began to feel

pleasantly sorry for Jim Dyckman. Her own rebuke of him for assaulting

Cheever had absolved him. In the retrospect, the attack took on a

knightliness of devotion. She recalled his lonely dogging of her

footsteps. If he had played the dog, after all, she loved dogs. What was

so faithful, trustworthy, and lovable as a dog?

But how was Charity to get word to Jim of her new heart? She could not

whistle him back. She could hardly go to him and apologize for having

been a good wife to a bad husband. And a married lady simply must not

say to a bachelor: “Pardon me a moment, while I divorce my present

consort. I'd like to wear your name for a change.”

Charity might have been capable even of such a derring-do if she had

known that Jim Dyckman's bachelorhood was threatened with immediate

extinction by the Thropps. But she could not know. For, however Jim's

soul may have been mumbling, “Help, help!” he made no audible sound.

Unwilling brides may shriek for rescue, but unwilling bridegrooms must

not complain.

By a coincidence that was not strange Charity selected for her lawyer

Travers McNiven, the very man that Jim Dyckman selected. All three had

been friends since childhood. McNiven had been taken into the famous

partnership of Hamnett, Dawsey, Coggeshall, Thurlow & McNiven.

When Jim Dyckman telephoned him for an appointment he was told to make

it the next morning, as another client had pre-empted the afternoon. Jim

was glad enough of an excuse to postpone his marriage by a day, never

dreaming that Charity was the client who had preempted McNiven.

McNiven wondered at the synchrony, but naturally mentioned neither

client to the other. His office was far down-town and far up in the air.

Its windows gave an amplitudinous vision of the Harbor which Mr. Ernest

Poole has made his own, but which was now a vestibule to the hell of the

European war. All the adjoining land was choked far backward with a vast

blockade of explosive freight-trains waiting to be unloaded into the

unheard-of multitude of munition-ships waiting to run the gantlet of the

German submarines.

Charity had run that gantlet and was ready to run it again on another

errand of mercy, but first she must make sure that Zada's baby should

not enter the world before its mother entered wedlock.

After McNiven had proffered her a chair and she had exclaimed upon the

grandeur of the harborscape, she began:

“Sandy, I've come to see you about--”

“One moment!” McNiven broke in. “Before you speak I must as an honest

lawyer warn you against the step you contemplate.”

“But you don't know what it is yet.”

“I don't have to. I know that people come to lawyers only to get out

of scrapes or to get into scrapes dishonestly or unwisely. Furthermore,

every step that any human being contemplates is a dangerous one and

bound to lead to trouble.”

“Oh, hush!” said Charity. “Am I supposed to pay you for that sort of

advice?”

“Being a friend, and a woman, and very rich, you will doubtless never

pay me at all. But let me warn you, Charity, that there is nothing in

life more dangerous than taking a step in any possible direction--unless

it is staying where you are.”

“Oh, dear,” sighed Charity, “you're worse than dear Doctor Mosely.”

“Ah, you've been to the dear old doctor! And he's refused to help you.

When the Church denies a woman her way she comes to the devil. You

interest me. It's a divorce, then?”

“Yes.”

McNiven remembered Jim Dyckman's ancient squiredom to Charity and his

recent telephony and he said to himself, “Aha!” But he said to Charity,

“Go on.”

“Sandy, my husband and I have agreed to disagree.”

“Then for Heaven's sake don't tell me about it!”

“But I've got to.”

“But you mustn't! Say, rather, I have decided to divorce my husband.”

“All right. Consider my first break unmade. Peter has asked me--I

mean, Peter has said that he will furnish me with the evidence on one

condition: that I shall not mention a certain person with whom he has

been living. He offers to provide me with any sort of evidence you

lawyers care to cook up.”

McNiven stared at her and spoke with startling rigor. “Are you trying to

involve me in your own crimes?”

“Don't be silly. Peter says it is done all the time.”

“Not in this office. Do you think I'd risk and deserve disbarment even

to oblige a friend?”

“You mean you won't help me, then?” Charity sighed, rising with a

forlorn sense of friendlessness.

McNiven growled: “Sit down! Of course I'll help you, but I don't intend

to let you drag me into ruin, and I won't help you get a divorce that

would be disallowed at the first peep of light.”

“What can I do then? Peter said it could be managed quickly and

quietly.”

“There are ways and ways, Charity Coe. The great curse of divorce is

the awful word 'collusion.' It can be avoided as other curses can with

a little attention to the language. Remember the old song, 'It's not so

much the thing you say, as the nasty way you say it.' That hound of a

husband of yours wants to protect that creature he has been flaunting

before the world. So he offers to arrange to be caught in a trap with

another woman, and make you a present of the evidence. Isn't that so?”

“I believe it is.”

“Now the law says that 'any understanding preceding the act of adultery'

is collusion; it involves the committing of a crime. It would be

appalling for a nice little body like you to connive at such a thing,

wouldn't it?”

Charity turned pale. “I hadn't realized just what it meant.”

“I thought not,” said McNiven.

“He'll have to give me evidence of--of something that has already

happened, then, won't he?”

“The law calls that collusion also.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“Couldn't you get evidence somehow without taking it from him?”

Charity was about to shake her head, but she nodded it violently. She

remembered the detectives she had engaged and the superabundant evidence

they had furnished her. She told McNiven about it and he was delighted

till she reminded him that she had promised not to make use of Zada's

name.

McNiven told her that she had no other recourse, and advised her to see

her husband. She said that it was hopeless and she expressed a bitter

opinion of the law. It seemed harsher than the Church, especially harsh

to those who did not flout its authority.

While Charity talked McNiven let his pipe-smoke trail out of the window

into the infinite where dreams fade from reality and often from memory,

and he thought, “If I can help Jim and Charity to get together after all

this blundering it will be a good job.”

He was tempted to tell her that Jim was coming to see him, too, but he

was afraid that she knew it. If he had told her--but there goes that

eternal “if” again!

CHAPTER III

It is a fierce and searching test of a woman's mettle when first she is

confronted with temptation to rebel against the control of her preacher.

Men are used to it, and women must grow more and more used to it as they

advance into their long-deferred heritage.

Charity Coe Cheever was religious by every instinct. From childhood

she had thrilled to the creed and the music and the eloquence of her

Sundays. The beautiful industries of Christianity had engaged her. She

had been happy within the walls and had felt that her piety gave her

wings rather than chains.

And then she came abruptly to the end of her tether. She found her soul

revolted by a situation which her pastor commanded her to accept as

her lifelong portion. She found that to tolerate, and by tolerating to

collaborate in, the adultery of her husband and his mistress was better

religion than to free herself from odious triplicity. She found that

it was better religion to annul her womanhood and remain childless,

husbandless, and comfortless than to claim the privileges, the freedoms,

the renewing opportunities the law allowed.

She came suddenly face to face with the terrifying fact that the State

offered her help and strength that the Church denied her.

She had reached indeed what the doleful balladists would call “the

parting of the ways,” though no poet has yet chosen for his heroine the

distraught wretch who is driven to the bleak refuge of divorce.

So long as it concerned only her own happiness Charity could put away

the choice. But the more she pondered that unless she divorced her

husband his mistress's baby would come into the world with a hideous

birthmark, the more she felt it her duty to flout the Church. She

shuddered to think of the future for that baby, especially if it should

be a girl. She felt curiously a mother-obligation toward it. She blamed

herself for her husband's infidelity. She humbled herself and bowed her

neck to the shame.

She left the Church and went to the law. And then she found that the

law had its own cruelties, its own fetters and walls and loopholes and

hypocrisies. She found that it is not even possible to be a martyr and

retain all one's dignity. One cannot even go to the stake without some

guile.

The wicked law which the Church abhorred had its own idea of wickedness,

and in the eyes of the law the agreement of a husband and a wife to part

was something loathsome. She expressed her amazement to McNiven.

“It seems to me,” she sighed, “if both husband and wife want a divorce,

they know best; and that fact ought to be sufficient grounds in itself.

And yet you tell me that if the law once gets wind of the fact they've

got to live together forever.”

“That's it. They've got to live together whether they love together or

not--though of course you can get a separation very easily, on almost

any ground.”

“But a separation is only a guarantee of--of infidelity, I should

think.”

“Of course it is,” said Lawyer McNiven.

“Then everything seems all wrong.”

“Of course it is.”

“Then why doesn't somebody correct it?”

“Who's going to bell the cat? Anybody who advocates divorce by mutual

consent is sure to be lynched more or less fatally, and especially

lynched by the very people who are making a mockery of matrimony in

their own lives.

“One marriage in twelve in the United States ends in divorce. You'll not

find anybody who dares to say that that is not a crying scandal. Yet you

and I know that home life in America is as pure and honorable as in any

other country. I'm an awful heathen, of course, but I'll bet you I'm a

true prophet when I say that divorce will increase as the world goes on,

instead of decreasing, and that in all the countries where divorce is

forbidden or restricted it will grow freer and freer. Statistics prove

it all over the globe.”

To Charity Coe, the devout churchwoman, this picture was appalling.

“Oh, in Heaven's name, what will happen? The world will go all to

pieces!”

“That's what they said when men asked for the vote and for education,

when women asked for education and the vote; that's what they said

when people opposed the divine right of kings, and when they asked for

religious freedom; that's what they said when people opposed slavery;

that's what they said when people said that insane people were not

inhabited by devils and should be treated as invalids. The trouble,

Charity, is that a certain spirit has always been abroad in the world

fighting imaginary devils with the best intentions in the world. And in

all history there has never been anybody so dangerous to human welfare

as the zealot who wants to protect other people from themselves and from

the devils.

“The insane people were never inhabited by devils, and neither are the

sane people. Most men want one wife and most women want one husband.

Even in the polygamous countries you'll not find any more real polygamy

than you find in the countries with the strictest marriage laws.

Bluebeard was a Mohammedan, but Don Juan was a Christian. Spain has

no divorce on any grounds; neither has Italy. Would you point to those

countries as models of domestic purity? Does any sane person dare say

that home life in Spain is purer than in the United States?

“I tell you, easy divorce goes right along with merciful laws, public

schools, clean prisons, free press, free speech.”

Mrs. Cheever was a very good woman, and she abominated divorces. She

had very peculiar reasons for wanting one herself, as every one has who

wants one, but she felt her case to be so exceptional that it proved the

rule against divorces. She shrank a little from the iconoclastic lawyer

she had come to for aid, and reminded him of the solemnity of the theme.

“Don't you believe in the sanctity of matrimony?”

“Just as much as I believe in the sanctity of personal liberty and

a contract and a debt and the obligation to vote and bear arms and

equality of opportunity and responsibility and--oh, a lot of other

sacred things--just as much and no more.”

“But the Church calls marriage a sacrament.”

“It does now, yes; but it didn't for over fifteen hundred years.”

“What!”

“It's true. The trouble with you religious people is that you never

know the history of your own religion. And remember one more thing: the

marriage rules of the Christian Church are all founded on the theories

of men who never married. No wonder they found it easy to lay down hard

and fast rules. Remember another thing: the early Church fathers, Saint

Paul, Hieronymus, and thousands of others, believed that marriage was

only a little bit better than the worst evil, and that womankind was

hardly more than the devil's natural weapon.

“It was not until the Church was eleven hundred and sixty-four years old

that Peter Lombard put marriage among the seven sacraments. And marriage

did not become an official matter of Church jurisdiction till the

Council of Trent in fifteen hundred and sixty-three. Think of that!

Marriage was not a sacrament for fifteen centuries, and it has been one

for less than four. And at that the Church could only manage the problem

by increasing the number of impediments to marriage, which meant that it

increased the number of excuses for annulling it.

“The total number of marriages annulled would amaze you. History is full

of the most picturesque devices for granting divorce without seeming to.

Sometimes they would illegitimize two or three generations in order to

find a marriage within the forbidden degrees.

“According to Saint Matthew, Christ allowed divorce on the ground of

adultery; according to Mark and Luke he made no such allowance. New York

State follows Saint Matthew. The Catholic Church follows Luke and John.

Old Martin Luther said that marriage was none of the Church's business.

And that's what I think.”

“You don't believe in the religious ceremony?”

“I'm afraid I don't believe in religious ceremonies about anything.

I'm rather a heathen, you know--brought up in a good Presbyterian

Calvinistic atmosphere, but I've lost it all. I'll give three cheers for

virtue and the home as well as anybody; but my study and my experience

lead me to distrust preachers and preaching.

“Still, this is a free country, and married people have a right to go

to church if they want to, or to stay away. But I believe that marriage

must be a civil contract and that no preacher has a right to denounce

the State's prerogative, or try to belittle it. It is strange, but true,

that when the Church has ruled the State the world has always groaned in

corruption and cruelty.

“I believe that the law of New York is ridiculous in allowing only one

ground for divorce, and if the United States ever arranges a uniform

divorce law it will undoubtedly follow the policy of the more liberal

States. I believe, with Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy and a number of

other good, great men, in cheap and easy divorce, divorce within reach

of the poor.

“As for morality, you have only to read the literature of the time when

there was no divorce to realize how little a safeguard it is for the

home. Boccaccio gives a social portrait of such a life, and he is almost

too indecent to read. Yet the picture he gives is not half so terrible

as Saint Catherine of Siena gives. They had to cut that chapter out of

her works.”

“Oh, do you read her works, too?” said Charity, remembering her

experience with that flaming biography.

“I read a little of everybody. But everything I read and see confirms

my opinion that too much law is the curse of the world. Still, as I say,

I'm not a lawmaker. I'm a law-manipulator. I've been wondering how long

you would stand Cheever's scandalous behavior, and how long you could be

convinced that you were helping the morals of the world by condoning and

encouraging such immorality. Now that you've brought your troubles to

my shop I'm going to help you if I can. But I don't want to get you or

myself into the clutches of the law. You'll have to take care of your

Church relations as best you can. They may turn you out, and you may

roast on a gridiron hereafter, but that's your business. Personally, I

think the only wicked thing I've ever heard of you doing was permitting

your husband to board and lodge at your house while he carried on with

that--woman. A harem divided against itself will not stand.”

Charity was terrified by the man's profane view of sacred things, and

she was horrified to learn that she could only release herself and

Cheever from the shackles by a kind of trickery. She would have to make

her escape somewhat as she had seen Houdini break from his ropes in the

vaudevilles, by retiring behind dark curtains for a while.

She felt guilty and craven whichever way she turned, and she imagined

the revulsion with which the good pastor would regard her. Yet she was

in a kind of mania to accept the scapegoat's burdens and be off into the

wilderness. She was resolved to undergo everything for the sake of that

poor child of Zada's hastening toward the world. She thanked Heaven she

had no child of her own to complicate her duty.

She understood why Cheever wanted to protect the name of the child's

mother from the courts, and she was baffled by the situation. The

lawyer, who was so flippant about the things the Church held so sacred,

was like a priest in his abhorrence of any tampering with the letter of

the law.

She left his office for a conference with Cheever. She found at home

that he had been telephoning to her. She called him up, and he came over

at once.

“I'm in a devil of a mess, Charity,” he said. “My lawyer refuses to help

me give you evidence, and Zada--Miss L'Etoile--has developed a peculiar

streak of obstinacy. She is determined that no other woman shall be

named as the--er--co-respondent. She would rather be named herself. She

says everybody knows about our--er--relations, anyway; and she doesn't

care if they do.”

Zada's character and her career had rendered her as contemptuous of

public disapproval as any zealot of a loftier cause than love. There was

a kind of barbaric insolence in her passion that Charity could not help

admiring a little. She felt a whit ashamed of her own timidities and

delicacies. The trouble with these proud defiers of the public, however,

is that they do not ask the consent of the babies that are more or less

implied in their superb amours.

Cheever was so distracted between the scruples of his lawyer and Zada's

lack of them that when Charity confessed how she had set detectives on

him and had secured a dictagraphic record of his alliance with Zada he

was overcome with gratitude.

So little a shift of circumstances makes all the difference between a

spy and a savior. The deed that he would once have cursed his wife

for stooping to, perhaps have beaten her for, was now an occasion for

overwhelming her with thanks.

He hurried away to his lawyer, and Charity telephoned McNiven for

another appointment the next afternoon. Jim Dyckman's appointment was

for the next morning.

CHAPTER IV

When Jim reached his office the next morning McNiven recommended

the view to him, gave him a chair, refused a cigar, lighted his pipe

instead, opened a drawer in his desk, put his feet in it, and leaned far

back in his swivel chair.

Jim began, “Well, you see, Sandy, it's like this--”

“One moment,” McNiven broke in. “Before you speak I must as an honest

lawyer warn you against the step you contemplate.”

“But, damn it, you don't know what it is yet.”

“I don't have to. I know you, and I know that people don't come to

lawyers, as a rule, except to get out of a scrape dishonestly or to get

into one unwisely.”

It was his office joke, and something more, a kind of formula for

squaring himself with his conscience, a phrase for warding off the

devil--as a beggar spits on the penny he accepts.

Having exorcised the demon, he said, “Go on, tell me: what's her name

and how much does she want for silence?”

“How much do you want for silence?” Jim growled.

“Shoot!”

McNiven was startled and grieved when he learned that Jim was not making

ready to marry Charity Coe, but some one else. Jim told him as much

as he thought necessary, and McNiven guessed the rest. He groaned: “It

seems impossible to surround marriage with such difficulties that people

won't break in and out. I've got a friend of yours trying to bust a home

as quietly as you're trying to build one.”

Of course, he did not mention Charity's name. He tried fervently to

convince Jim that he ought not to marry Kedzie, but, failing to persuade

him from the perils of matrimony, he did his best to help him to a

decent secrecy. His best was the program Jim and Kedzie followed.

They motored over to the village of Jolicoeur in New Jersey. There a

local attorney, a friend of McNiven's, met them and vouched for them

before the town clerk, who made out the license. He asked Kedzie if she

had been married before, and she was so young and pretty and so plainly

a girl that he laughed when he asked the question. And for answer Kedzie

just laughed, too. He wrote down that she had never been married before.

Kedzie had not really lied, and they can't arrest a person, surely, for

just laughing. Not that she did not believe in the motto which Blanche

Bates used to read so convincingly in “The Darling of the Gods”: “It is

better to lie a little than to be unhappy much.”

Jim was shocked at the situation, but he could hardly be so ungallant

as to call his fiancee a liar at such a time. Besides, he had heard that

the law is interested in people's persons and not their names, and he

was marrying Kedzie personally.

When the license was made out the lawyer whispered to the town clerk

that it would be made worth his while to suppress the news for thirty

days or more, and the clerk winked and grinned. Business was slow in

matrimony, and he needed any little tips.

Now that they were licensed, Jim and Kedzie, being non-residents of New

Jersey, must wait twenty-four hours before they could be married. They

motored back to New York and went to the theater to kill the evening.

The next afternoon Jim called for Kedzie, and they motored again to

Jolicoeur for the ceremony. Mr. and Mrs. Thropp went along as witnesses

and to make sure.

The lawyer had found a starveling parson in Jolicoeur who asked the

fatal questions and pronounced the twain man and wife, adding the

warning, “Whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder.” Jim Dyckman

was so befuddled that he heard it, “Let no man join whom God hath put

asunder.” But he paid the preacher well and added a large sum for the

church on condition that the news of the marriage be kept out of the

public records till the last legal moment.

Dyckman had tried to do the honorable thing by Kedzie. He was certainly

generous, for a man can hardly give a woman more than himself and all he

has. Dyckman, however, had been ashamed of a mental reservation or

two. He could not repress a sneaking feeling that he had been less the

kidnapper than the napped kid in this elopement. If anybody were to be

arrested for abduction, it would not be he.

He reviled himself for confessing this to himself, and his sympathies

went out to Kedzie because the poor child had to be yoked with a

reluctant mate. A bridegroom ought to bring to his bride, above all

things else, an eager heart. And that Jim could not bring.

He had been in his time a man and had sowed his measure of wild

oats--more than a poor man could, less than a rich man might, far less

than his unusual opportunities and the greedy throngs of temptresses

encouraged. But he had taken Kedzie seriously, never dreaming how large

a part ambition played in her devotion to him. He had been good to her

and with her. The marriage ceremony had solemnized him further.

He had made a try at secrecy, because he felt shy about the affair. He

knew that his name would lead the newspapers to haze him, as the rustic

neighbors deride a rural couple with a noisy “chivaree.” He dreaded the

head-lines, as a kind of invasion of the bridal chamber.

In any case he had always hated flamboyant weddings with crowds and

splendor. He did not believe that a marriage should be circused.

And thus at last he and Kedzie were united into one soul and one flesh,

for better, for worse, etc., etc. Then they sped away to the remotest

pleasant hotel to be found in darkest Jersey.

Jim registered under his own name, but blushed more hotly than if he

had been engaged in an escapade. He could, perhaps, have taken Kedzie so

with less regret than under the blessing of the clergy. For now he felt

that he owed to her the all-hallowing grace of that utter love which was

something he could not bestow.

She was the first wife he had ever had, and he wished a devoutness in

that consummation. Lacking the sanctifying ardor, he was remorseful

rather than triumphant, feeling himself more of a brute than even a

bridegroom usually feels.

Kedzie did not seem to miss any perfection in his devotion, but he

imputed that more to her innocent kindliness than to any grace of his

own. The more he studied her the more he wondered why he did not love

her more. She was tremendously exquisite, ferociously delicate, and

almighty pretty. She was altogether too delectable, too cunningly

wrought and fragile, for a hulking Titan like him.

He was positively afraid of her, and greatly amazed to see that she was

not at all afraid of him. The moment the parson had done his worst a new

Kedzie had appeared. She took command of everything instantly: ordered

the parson about, shipped her mother and father back to town as if they

were bothersome children, gave directions to Jim's chauffeur in a way

that taught him who was to be who thenceforward, and made demands upon

the hotel clerk in a tone that was more convincing of her wifehood than

a marriage license could have been.

The quality missing in Kedzie was the sense of terror and meekness

expectable in brides. Her sole distress was, to Jim's amazement, the

obscurity and solitude of their retreat. Kedzie was rapturous, but she

had not the slightest desire to hide it from the world. She was Mrs. Jim

Dyckman, and she didn't care who knew it.

Poor Kedzie had her own sorrows to mar her triumph. She was being driven

to believe that the world was as badly managed as the Hyperfilm Studio.

Providence seemed to provide tribulations for her like a scenario editor

pursuing a movie heroine. The second reel had begun well, the rich but

honest lover putting the poor but dishonest husband to flight. And now

Honeymoon Number Two! She had dreamed of a gorgeous church ceremony with

two pipe-organs, and an enlarged cast of clergymen, and wedding guests

composed of real millionaires instead of movie “extras.” But lo and

behold, her adorer whisks her off to a little town in New Jersey and

the great treaty is sealed in the shoddy parlor of a village parsonage!

Gilfoyle's Municipal Building was a cathedral compared to this.

Then with never a white ribbon fluttering, not an old shoe or a grain

of rice hurtling, the limousine of love rolled away to a neglected

roadhouse. It was attractive enough as a roadhouse, but it was wretched

as an imitation paradise.

In the face of this outrage everything else was a detail, a minor

humiliation. There was no parrot on an area fire-escape to mock her

next morning, but there was a still earlier rooster to banish sleep

and parody her triumph. She slipped out of bed and went barefoot to the

window-seat and gazed out into a garden.

She made a picture there that Ferriday would have loved in a “close-up.”

Her hair was tumbling down upon and around her shoulders, and her silken

nightgown shimmered blissfully about her, sketching her contours in

iridescent lines. She gazed, through an Elizabethan of small panes, into

a garden where sunrise bloomed rosily in petals of light. She was

the prettiest thing in the pretty picture; yet she was pouting at

Fate--Fate, the old scenario writer who never could seem to bring off a

happy ending.

Jim Dyckman, waking, saw her there and rubbed his eyes. Then he

remembered. He pondered her and saw a tear or two slip out of her eyes,

run along her cheek and pitch off into the tiny ravine of her bosom.

He felt that he was a contemptible fiend who had committed a lynchable

crime upon a tender and helpless victim. He closed his eyes in remorse,

pretending to sleep, tormented like the repentant purchaser of a “white

slave”--or rather a pink slave.

They breakfasted early and prettily. Kedzie was radiant now. She usually

was when she was dealing in futures. They took up the question of their

future residence. Jim proposed all the honeymoon haunts. Europe was out

of the question, so he suggested Bermuda, Jamaica, California, Atlantic

City, North Carolina, the Adirondacks. But Kedzie wanted to get back to

New York.

This pained and bewildered him at first, because he felt that wedded

rapture should hide itself awhile in its own lovely loneliness. Besides,

his appearance in New York with a wife would involve him in endless

explanations--and there would be reporters to see, and society editors

and photographers, and his family and all his friends.

But those were just what Kedzie wanted. And at last she told him so.

“You act as if you were ashamed to be seen with me,” she cried out.

The only answering argument to this was to take her back to town at

once. The question of how and where they were to live was important.

They had not settled it in the flurry of their hasty secret marriage.

Jim supposed that a hotel would be necessary till they found a house. He

loathed the thought of a hotel, but a suitable furnished house might not

be in the market at the moment. He suggested an apartment.

This reminded Kedzie of how Gilfoyle had sent her out on a flat-hunt.

She would have more money now, but there would doubtless be something

the matter with every place. The most urgent thing was to get out of New

Jersey. They could discuss residences in the car.

And they did discuss them. Building a new house would take years. Buying

a ready-made house and furnishing it would take days, perhaps weeks.

Kedzie could not choose which one of the big hotels she most wanted to

camp in. Each had its qualities and their defects.

When they were on the ferry crossing the river she had not yet made up

her mind. Jim had no mind to make up. He was reduced to a mere waiter on

her orders. He laughed at himself. This morning at daybreak he had been

reproaching himself for being a vicious gorilla who had carried off a

little girl; now he was realizing that the little girl had carried him

off and was making a monkey of him.

Kedzie's mental disarray was the overwhelming influence of infinite

money. For the first time in her life she could disregard price-marks

entirely. Curiously, that took away half the fun of the thing. It seemed

practically impossible for her to be extravagant. She would learn before

long that there are countless things that plutocrats cannot afford,

that they also must deny themselves much, feel shabby, and envy their

neighbors. For the present she realized only that she had oodles of

money to sprinkle.

But it takes training to spend money, and Kedzie was now unpractised.

Her wisher was so undeveloped that she could only wish for things

available to people of moderate affluence. She could not wish for a

yacht, because Jim had a yacht. She could not wish for a balloon because

she would not go up in it. She could wish for a house, but she could not

walk into it without delay. She could not live in two hotels at once.

Jewelry she could use in quantities, but even at that she had only so

much surface area to hang it on. In fact, when she came right face to

face with facts, what was there worth wishing for? What was the use of

being so dog-on rich, anyway?

And there she hung on the door-sill of her new life like a child

catching sight of a loaded Christmas tree and palsied with inability to

decide which toy to grab first, horrified to realize that he cannot suck

the orange and blow the trumpet at the same time.

When they reached the New York side of the Hudson the car rolled off the

boat into the ferry-house and into the street, and when Jim said again,

“Well, where do you want to go?” she had to sigh.

“Oh, Heavens! let's go home to my old apartment and talk it over.” She

gave the address to the chauffeur, and Jim smiled grimly. It gave him a

little cynical amusement to act as passenger.

On the way up-town Kedzie realized that she was hungry and that here

would be no food in her apartment. They turned to Sherry's. Kedzie left

Jim and went into the dressing-room to smooth her hair after the motor

flight.

And now, just too late, Charity Coe Cheever happened to arrive as the

guest of Mrs. Duane. The sight of Jim alone brought a flush of hope to

Charity's eyes. She greeted him with a breeziness she had hardly known

since she was a girl. There was nothing about his appearance to indicate

that he had just come across from New Jersey, where he had been made the

husband of Mrs. Kedzie Thropp Gilfoyle.

Seeing Charity so unusually bright, Jim said, “What's happened to you,

Charity, that you look so gay and free?”

“That's what I am.”

“What?”

“Gay and free. Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes.”

“I'm getting divorced.”

“My Lord, no!”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Oh, God, and me just married!”

Charity looked for an instant as if an arrow had flashed into her heart

and struck her dead. Then with relentless courage she plucked out the

steel and let the blood gush while she smiled.

“Congratulations, old boy. Who's the lucky lady?”

“It's the little girl I yanked out of Mrs. Noxon's pool.”

“The one I asked you to look out for?”

“Yes.”

“Well, isn't that fine! She was very pretty. I hope you'll be ever so

happy.”

“Thanks, Charity--thank you. Mighty nice of you! Of course, you

know--er--Well, here she is.” He beckoned to Kedzie, who came forward.

“Mrs. Cheever, my wife. But you've met, haven't you?”

“Oh yes, indeed,” said Charity Coe, with an effusion of cordiality that

roused Kedzie's suspicions more than her gratitude. The first woman she

met was already trying to get into her good graces! Charity Coe went on,

with a little difficulty:

“But Mrs. Dyckman doesn't remember me. I met you at Mrs. Noxon's.”

“Oh yes,” said Kedzie, and a slow, heavy crimson darkened her face like

a stream of treacle.

The first woman she met was reminding her of the time she was a poor

young dancer with neither clothes nor money. It was outrageous to have

this flung in her face at the very gate of Eden.

She was extremely cold to Charity Coe, and Charity saw it. Jim Dyckman

died the death at finding Kedzie so cruel to the one who had befriended

her. But he could not rebuke his wife, even before his lost love. So he

said nothing.

Charity caught the heartsick, hangdog look in his eyes, and she forbore

to slice Kedzie up with sarcasm. She bade her a most gracious farewell

and moved on.

Kedzie stared after her and her beautiful gown, and said: “Say, Jim, who

were the Coes, anyway? Did they make their money in trade?”

Jim said that he would be divinely condemned, or words to that effect.

CHAPTER V

And now Kedzie Thropp was satisfied at last--at least for the time

being. She was a plump kitten, replete and purr-full, and the world was

her catnip-ball.

There was no visible horizon to her wealth. Her name was one of the

oldest, richest, noblest in the republic. She was a Dyckman now,

double-riveted to the name with a civil license and a religious

certificate. Tommie Gilfoyle had politely died, and like an obliging rat

had died outside the premises. Hardly anybody knew that she had married

him, and nobody who knew was going to tell.

Kedzie forgot Charity in the joy of ordering a millionaire's luncheon.

This was not easy. She was never a glutton for food; excitement dimmed

what appetite she had, and her husband, as she knew, hated made dishes

with complex sauces.

Kedzie was baffled by the futility of commanding a lot of things she

could not eat, just for the fun of making a large bill. She was like

the traditional prospector who struck it rich and, hastening to

civilization, could think of nothing to order but “forty dollars' worth

of pork and beans.”

Kedzie had to satisfy her plutocratic pride by bossing the waiter about,

by complaining that the oysters were not chilled and the sherry was. She

sent back the salad for redressing and insisted that the meat was from

cold storage. She was no longer the poor girl afraid of the waiter.

Kedzie was having a good time, but she regretted that her wedding-ring

was so small. She felt that wives ought to wear some special kind of

plume, the price of the feather varying with the bank account. Kedzie

would have had to carry an umbrella of plumes.

Still, she did pretty well on her exit. She went out like a million

dollars. But her haughtiness fell from her when she reached home and

found Mr. and Mrs. Thropp comfortably installed there, saving hotel

bills.

Charity Coe had gone out feeling a million years old. She left the

presence of Kedzie in a mood of tragic laughter. She was in one of those

contemptible, ridiculous plights in which good people frequently find

themselves as a result of kindliness and self-sacrifice.

For well-meant actions are as often and as heavily punished in

this world as ill-meant--if indeed the word _punishment_ has any

respectability left. It is certainly obsolescent.

Many great good men, such as Brand Whitlock, the saint of Belgium, had

been saying that the whole idea of human punishment of human beings is

false, cruel, and futile, that it has never accomplished anything worth

while for either victim or inflictor. They place it among the ugly

follies, the bloody superstitions that mankind has clung to with a

fanaticism impervious to experience. They would change the prisons from

hells to schools and hospitals.

Even the doctrine of a hell beyond the grave is rather neglected now,

except by such sulphuric press agents as Mr. Sunday. But in this world

we cannot sanely allege that vice is punished and virtue rewarded until

we know better what virtue is and what is vice. All that it is safe to

say is that punishment is a something unpleasant and reward a something

pleasant that follows a deed--merely follows in point of time, not in

proof of judgment.

So the mockery of Charity's good works was neither a punishment nor a

ridicule. It was a coincidence, but a sad one. Charity had befriended

Kedzie without making a friend thereby; she had lost, indeed, her

good friend Jim. Charity's affection for Jim would make her suspect

in Kedzie's eyes, and Kedzie's gratitude had evidently already cut its

sharper-than-a-serpent's wisdom tooth.

Charity had been patient with her husband and had lost him. She had

asked the Church for her freedom and had been threatened with exile.

Then her husband had demanded his freedom and forced her to choose

between blackening her own soul with the brand “divorcee” or blackening

her husband's mistress's baby's soul with the brand “illegitimate.”

She had preferred to take the shame upon herself. But who would give

her credit? She knew how false was the phrase that old Ovid uttered but

could not comfort even himself with, “The mind conscious of rectitude

laughs at the lies of gossip.” No woman can afford such security.

Charity had such a self-guying meekness, indeed, that instead of

clothing herself in the robes of martyrdom she ridiculed herself because

of one thing: In a pigeonhole of her brain a little back-thought had

lurked, a dim hope that if she gave her husband the divorce he implored

she might be free to remold her shattered life nearer to her heart's

desire--with Jim Dyckman. Her husband, indeed, had taunted her with that

intention, and now she had no sooner launched her good name down the

slippery ways of divorce than she found Jim Dyckman married and

learned that her premature and unwomanly hopes for him were ludicrously

thwarted!

She went to McNiven's office with a dark life ahead of her. She had no

desire left except to disentangle herself from Peter Cheever's life as

quietly and swiftly as possible. She told McNiven this and said:

“How quickly can the ghastly job be finished?”

“Theoretically it could be done in a day, but practically it takes a

little longer. For we must avoid the look of collusion like the plague.

So we'll allow, say, a week. If we're lucky with our judges, it may take

less.”

Then he outlined the steps to be taken. An unusual chain of

circumstances enabled him to carry them out with unexpected neatness

and despatch, so that the case became a very model of how gracefully the

rigid laws of divorce could be manipulated in the Year of Our Lord 1916

and of the Founding of the Republic 140.

It may be interesting to outline the procedure as a social document in

chicanery, or social surgery, as one wills to call it.

McNiven first laid under Charity's eyes a summons and complaint against

Peter Cheever. She glanced over it and found it true except that Zada

L'Etoile was not named; Cheever's alleged income was vastly larger than

she imagined, and her claim for alimony was exorbitant.

Her first question was: “Who is this unknown woman going by the name

of Sarah Tishler? I thought Miss L'Etoile was to be the only woman

mentioned.”

McNiven explained: “L'Etoile is her stage name. She doesn't know her

real name herself, for she was taken from the foundling-asylum as

a child by a family named Tishler. We have taken advantage of that

disadvantage.”

Charity bowed to this, but she protested the income credited to her

husband.

“Peter doesn't earn half as much as that.”

“How do you know what he earns?” said McNiven.

“He's told me often enough.”

“Do you believe all he told you?”

“No; but, anyway, I don't want any of his old alimony. I have money

enough of my own.”

“That can be arranged later, but if you don't swear to this as it lies

you can't have your divorce.”

“Why not?”

“Because there has to be a contest, and we've got to give his lawyer

something to fight.”

Charity yielded wearily. She fought against making an affidavit to

the truth of the complaint, but when McNiven said, “No affidavit, no

divorce,” she took her oath before the clerk who was called in as a

notary public.

“Now you may go home,” said McNiven; and Charity stole out, feeling

herself a perjured criminal. Then the divorce-mill began to grind.

A process-server from McNiven's office went across Broadway to Tessier's

office, where Cheever was waiting. He handed the papers to Cheever,

who handed them to Tessier, who hastily dictated an answer denying the

adultery, the alleged income, and the propriety of the alimony claimed.

Tessier and Cheever visited McNiven in his office and served him with

this answer. The two lawyers then dictated an agreement to a reference,

Tessier adding a statement that he considered his client equipped with a

good defense and that he intended to oppose the suit in good faith.

Their clerks took this to the County Court House in City Hall Square and

filed it with the clerk of the Supreme Court, Special Term, Part II.

Justice Cardwell, before leaving his chambers, read the papers and

issued an order naming as referee the lawyer Henry Firth.

Here for a moment the veil of secrecy was rent, for this order could not

be suppressed. It was published in _The Law Journal_ the next morning,

and the eager reporters reading therein that Mrs. Peter Cheever was

suing her husband for a divorce on statutory grounds, dashed to the

records and learned that she accused him of undue intimacy with an

unknown woman going by the name of Sarah Tishler.

By selecting an obscure town this publicity might have been deferred,

but it would have meant delay in the case as well.

A flock of reporters sped like hawks for Charity's home, where they were

denied admittance; for Cheever's office, where they were told that he

was out of town; and even for Zada L'Etoile's apartment, where they were

informed that she had left the State, as indeed she had. Sarah Tishler

had a right, being named as co-respondent, to enter the case and defend

her name, but she waived the privilege.

The evening papers made what they could of the sensation, but nobody

mentioned Zada, for nobody knew that fate had tried to conceal her by

naming her Tishler, and nobody quite dared to mention her without legal

sanction.

On the next day Lawyer Firth held court in his office. Reporters were

excluded, and the lawyers and detectives and Cheever and Charity, who

had to be present, declined to answer any of the questions rained upon

them in the corridors and the elevators.

Mr. Firth was empowered to swear in witnesses and take testimony. The

evidence of the detectives, corroborated by the evidence of a hall-boy

and a janitor and by proof of the installation of the dictagraph, seemed

conclusive to Mr. Firth.

Cheever denied that he had committed the alleged adultery and gave proof

that his income was not as stated. Attorney Tessier evaded the evidence

of adultery, but fought hard against the evidence of prosperity. Referee

Firth made his report finding the defendant guilty of the statutory

offense, and ordered a decree of divorce, with a diminished alimony. He

appended a transcript of the evidence and filed it with the Clerk of the

County of New York. The statutory fee for a referee was ten dollars a

day, but the lawyers had quietly agreed on the payment of a thousand

dollars for expediting the case. With this recompense Mr. Firth ended

his duties in the matter.

McNiven prepared a motion to confirm the report of the referee and took

it to Tessier, who accepted service for his client. McNiven then went to

the county clerk and filed a notice that the motion would be called up

the next morning. The clerk put it on the calendar of Special Term, Part

III.

The next morning McNiven appeared before Justice Palfrey, submitted his

motion, and asked for an interlocutory decree. He left his paper

with the clerk. During the afternoon Justice Palfrey looked over the

referee's report and decided to grant McNiven's motion. In view of the

prominence of the contestants and since he had heard of Charity's good

works, and felt sure that she had suffered enough in the wreck of her

home, he ordered the evidence sealed. This harmed nobody but the hungry

reporters and the gossip-appetite of the public.

McNiven was waiting in the office of the clerk, and as soon as he

learned that the judge had granted the motion he submitted the formal

orders to be signed. The clerk entered the interlocutory decree. And now

the marriage was ended except for three months of grace.

The first day after that period had passed McNiven submitted an

affidavit that there had been no change in the feelings of the parties

and there was no good reason why the decree should not be granted. He

made up the final papers, gave Tessier notice, and deposited the record

with the clerk. Justice Cruden, then sitting in Special Term, Part III.,

signed the judgment. And the deed was done. Mrs. Cheever was permitted

to resume her maiden name, but that meant too much confusion; she needed

the “Mrs.” for protection of a sort.

The divorce carried with it a clause forbidding the guilty husband to

marry any one else before five years had passed. But while the divorce

was legal all over the world, this restriction ended at the State

bounds.

So Peter Cheever and Zada L'Etoile went over into the convenient realm

of New Jersey the next morning, secured a license, and on the following

day were there made man and wife before all the world. This entitled

them to a triumphant return to New York. And now Peter Cheever had also

done the honorable thing. This “honorable thing” business will be one of

the first burdens dropped by the men when the women perfect their claim

to equality.

In about two weeks a daughter was born to the happy twain. Thanks to

Charity's obliging nature, it was christened in church and accepted in

law as a complete Cheever. Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Cheever now began to

live (more or less) happily ever after (temporarily).

Altogether it was a triumph of legal, social, and surgical technic. It

outraged many virtuous people. There was a good deal of harsh criticism

of everybody concerned. The worthies who believe that divorce is the

cause of the present depraved state of the United States bewailed one

more instance of the vile condition of the lawless Gomorrah. The eternal

critics of the rich used the case as another text in proof of the

complete control that wealth has over our courts, though seventy-five

divorces to obscure persons were granted at the same time without

difficulty, with little expense and no newspaper punishment.

Dr. Mosely wrote Charity a letter of heartbroken condemnation, and she

slunk away to the mountains to escape from the reproach of all good

people and to recuperate for another try at the French war hospitals.

She had let her great moving-picture project lapse. She felt hopelessly

out of the world and she was afraid to face her friends. Still, she had

money and her “freedom,” and one really cannot expect everything.

CHAPTER VI

The ninety days following Charity's encounter with Jim Dyckman and

his bride at Sherry's had been busy times for her and epochal in their

changes. From being one of the loneliest and most approved women in

America she had become one of the loneliest and least approved. Altruism

is perhaps the most expensive of the virtues.

No less epochal were those months for the Dyckmans, bride and groom.

Their problems began to bourgeon immediately after they left New Jersey

and went to Kedzie's old apartment for further debate as to their future

lodgings.

Mr. and Mrs. Thropp were amazed by their sudden return. Adna was

a trifle sheepish. They found him sitting in the parlor in his

shirt-sleeves and stocking feet, and staring out of the window at the

neighbors opposite. In Nimrim it was a luxury to be able to spy into the

windows of one neighbor at a time. Opposite Adna there were a hundred

and fifty neighbors whom it cost nothing to watch. Some of them were

very startling; some of them were stupid old ladies who rocked, or

children who flattened their noses against the windows, or Pekingese

doglets who were born with their noses against a pane, apparently. But

some of the neighbors were fascinatingly careless of inspection--and

they always promised to be more careless than they were.

Mrs. Thropp came rushing in from the kitchen. She had been trying in

vain to make a friend of Kedzie's one servant. But this maid, like a

self-respectful employee or a good soldier, resented the familiarity of

an official superior as an indecency and an insult. She made up her mind

to quit.

After Mrs. Thropp had expressed her wonderment at seeing her children

return, she turned the full power of her hospitality on poor Jim

Dyckman. He could not give notice and seek another job.

Mrs. Thropp's first problem was the proper style and title of her

son-in-law.

“What am I goin' to call you, anyhow?” she said. “_Jim_ sounds kind

of familiar on short acquaintance, and _James_ is sort of distant.

_Son-in-law_ is hor'ble, and _Son_ is--How would you like it if I was to

call you '_Son_'? What does your own mother call you?”

“_Jimsy_” Jim admitted, shamefacedly.

“_Jimsy_ is right nice,” said Mrs. Thropp, and she Jimsied him

thenceforward, to his acute distress. He found that he had married not

Kedzie only but all the Thropps there were. The father and mother were

the mere foreground of a vast backward and abyss of relations, beginning

with a number of Kedzie's brothers and sisters and their wives and

husbands. Jim was a trifle stunned to learn what lowly jobs some of his

brothers-in-law were glad to hold.

Mrs. Thropp felt that it was only right to tell Jim as much as she could

about his new family. She told him for hours and hours. She described

people he had never seen or heard of and would travel many a mile to

avoid. He had never cared for genealogy, and his own long and brilliant

ancestry did not interest him in the slightest. He had hundreds of

relations of all degrees of fame and fortune, and he felt under no

further obligation to them than to let alone and be let alone.

His interest in his new horde of relations-in-law was vastly less than

nothing. But Mrs. Thropp gave him their names, their ages, habits,

diseases, vices, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies. She recounted doings and

sayings of infinite unimportance and uninterest.

With the fatuous, blindfolded enthusiasm of an after-dinner speaker who

rambles on and on and on while the victims yawn, groan, or fold their

napkins and silently steal away, Mrs. Thropp poured out her lethal

anecdotes.

Jim went from weariness to restiveness, to amazement, to wrath, to

panic, to catalepsy, before Kedzie realized that he was being suffocated

by these reminiscences. Then she intervened.

Mrs. Thropp's final cadence was a ghastly thought:

“Well, now, I've told you s'much about all our folks, you must tell me

all about yours.”

“The Lord forbid!” said Jim.

Mrs. Thropp took this to mean that he did not dare confess the scandals

of his people. She knew, of course, from reading, that rich people are

very wicked, but she did want to know some of the details.

Jim refused to make disclosures. He was wakened from his coma by Mrs.

Thropp's casual remark:

“Say, Jimsy, how do folks do, on East here? Will your mother call on me

and Kedzie, or will she look for us to call on her first?”

“My God!” thought Jim.

“What say?” said Mrs. Thropp.

Jim floundered and threshed. He had never before realized what his

mother's famous pride might mean. She had always been only mother to

him, devoted, tender, patient, forgiving, amusing, sympathetic, anxious,

flattered by his least attention. Yet he had heard her spoken of as a

human glacier for freezing social climbers and pushers of every sort.

She was huge and slow; she could be frightfully cold and crushing.

Now he understood what congelation the trembling approachers to her

majesty must have suffered. He was afraid to think what she would do to

the Thropps. Her first glance would turn them to icicles and her first

word would snap them to bits.

It is hard enough for any mother to receive the news that her son is in

love with any woman and wants to marry her. Mrs. Dyckman must learn that

her adored child had transferred his loyalty to a foreigner, a girl she

had never seen, could not conceivably have selected, and could never

approve. Even the Prodigal Son, when he went home, did not bring a

wife with him. Ten to one if he had brought one she would have got no

veal--or if she got it she would not have cared for it.

Jim could not be blind even now in his alarm to Kedzie's intense

prettiness, but seeing her as through his mother's eyes coldly, he saw

for the first time the plebeiance of her grace.

If she had been strong and rugged her commonness would have had a

certain vigor; but to be nearly refined without being quite refined is

as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off the

key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is

excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C and

miss it by a comma.

Yet Jim understood that he could not long prevent the encounter of his

wife and her relatives with his mother and her relatives. He could not

be so boorishly insolent as to forbid the meeting, and he could not be

so blind as to expect success. He got away at length on the pretext of

making arrangements with his mother, who was a very busy woman, he said.

Mrs. Thropp could not imagine why a rich woman should be busy, but she

held her whist.

Jim was glad to escape, even on so gruesome an errand, and now when

he kissed Kedzie good-by he had to kiss momma as well. He would almost

rather have kissed poppa.

He entered his home in the late afternoon with the reluctance of boyhood

days when he had slunk back after some misdemeanor. He loathed his

mission and himself and felt that he had earned a trouncing and a

disinheritance.

He found his mother and father in the library playing, or rather

fighting, a game of double Canfield. In the excitement of the finish

they were like frantic children, tied in knots of hurry, squealing with

emulation. The cards were coming out right, and the speedier of the

two to play the last would score two hundred and fifty to the other's

nothing.

Mrs. Dyckman was the more agile in snatching up her cards and placing

them. Her eyes darted along the stacks with certainty, and she came in

first by a lead of three cards.

Dyckman was puffing with exhaustion and pop-eyed from the effort to look

in seven directions at once. It rendered him scarlet to be outrun by his

wife, who was no Atalanta to look at. Besides, she always crowed over

him insufferably when she won, and that was worse than the winning. When

Jim entered the room she was laughing uproariously, pointing the finger

of derision at her husband and crying:

“Where did you get a reputation as a man of brains? There must be an

awful crowd of simpletons in Wall Street.” Then she caught sight of her

son and beckoned to him. “Come in and hold your father's head, Jimsy.”

“Please don't call me Jimsy!” Jim exploded, prematurely.

His mother did not hear him, because his father exploded at the same

moment:

“Come in and teach your mother how to be a sport. She won't play fair.

She cheats all the time and has no shame when she gets caught. When she

loses she won't pay, and when she wins she wants cash on the nail.”

“Of course I do!”

“Why, there isn't a club in the country that wouldn't expel you twice a

week.”

“Well, pay me what you owe me, before you die of apoplexy.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Eight dollars and thirty-two cents.”

“I do not! That's robbery. Look here: you omitted my score twice and

added your own up wrong.”

“Did I really?”

“Do five and two make nine?”

“Don't they?”

“They do not!”

“Well, must you have hydrophobia about it? What difference does it

make?”

“It makes the difference that I only owe you three dollars and

twenty-six cents.”

“All right, pay it and simmer down. Isn't he wonderful, Jimsy? He just

sent a check for ten thousand dollars to the fund for blind French

soldiers and then begrudges his poor wife five dollars.”

“But that's charity and this is cards; and it's humiliating to think

that you haven't learned addition yet.”

Mrs. Dyckman winked at Jim and motioned him to sit beside her. He could

not help thinking of the humiliating addition he was about to announce

to the family. While his father counted out the change with a miserly

accuracy he winked his off eye at Jim and growled, with a one-sided

smile:

“Where have you been for the past few days, and what mischief have you

been up to? You have a guilty face.”

But Mrs. Dyckman threw her great arm about his great shoulders, stared

at him as she kissed him, and murmured: “You don't look happy. What's

wrong?”

Jim scraped his feet along the floor gawkily and mumbled: “Well, I

suppose I'd better tell you. I was going to break it to you gently, but

I don't know how.”

Mrs. Dyckman took alarm at once. “Break it gently? Bad news? Oh, Jim,

you Haven't gone and got yourself engaged to some fool girl, have you?

Not that?”

“Worse than that, mother!”

“Oh dear! what could be worse? Only one thing, Jim! You haven't--you

haven't married a circus-rider or a settlement-worker or anything like

that, have you?”

“No.”

“Lord! what a relief! I breathe again.”

Jim fired off his secret without further delay. “I've been married,

though.”

“Married? Already? Married to what? Anybody I ever heard of?”

His mother was gasping in a dangerous approach to heart failure. Jim

protested.

“You never saw her, but she's a very nice girl. You'll love her when you

meet her.”

Jim's father sputtered as he pulled himself out of his chair:

“Wha-what's this? You--you damned young cub! You--why--what--who--oh,

you jackass! You big, lumbering, brainless, heartless bonehead!

Oh--whew! Look at your poor mother!”

Jim was frightened. She was pounding at her huge breast with one hand

and clutching her big throat with another. Her husband whirled to a

siphon, filled a glass with vichy, and gave it to Jim to hold to her

lips while he ran to throw open a window.

Jim knelt by his mother and felt like Cain bringing home the news of

the first crime. Her son's remorse was the first thing that Eve felt, no

doubt; at least, it was the first that Mrs. Dyckman understood when

the paroxysm left her. She felt so sorry for her lad that she could not

blame him. She blamed the woman, of course. She cried awhile before she

spoke; then she caressed Jim's cheeks and blubbered:

“But we mustn't make too much of a fuss about a little thing like a

wedding. It's his first offense of the kind. I suppose he fell into the

trap of some little devil with a pretty face. Poor innocent child, with

no mother to protect him!”

“Poor innocent scoundrel!” old Dyckman snarled. “He probably got her

into trouble, and she played on his sympathy.”

This was what Jim sorely needed, some unjust accusation to spur him out

of his shame. He sprang to his feet and confronted his father.

“Don't you dare say a word against my wife.”

“Oh, look at him!” his father smiled. “He's grown so big he can lick his

old dad. Well, let me tell you, my young jackanapes, that if anybody has

said anything against your wife it was you.”

“What have I said?”

“You've said that you married her secretly. You've not dared to let us

see her first. You've not dared to announce your engagement and take

her to the church like a gentleman. Why? Why? Answer me that, before you

grow so tall. And who is she, anyway? I hear that you had a prize-fight

with Peter Cheever and got expelled from the club.”

“When did you hear that?”

“It's all over town. What was the fight about? Was he interested in this

lady, too?”

One set of Jim's muscles leaped to the attack; another set held them in

restraint.

“Be careful, dad!” he groaned. “Peter Cheever never met my wife.”

“Well, then, what were you fighting him about?”

“That's my business.”

“Well, it's my business, too, when I find the name of my son posted for

expulsion on the board of my pet club. You used to be sweet on Cheever's

wife. You weren't fighting about her, were you?”

This chance hit jolted the bridegroom so perceptibly that his father

regretted having made it. He gasped:

“Great Lord, but you're the busy young man! Solomon in all his glory--”

“Let him alone now,” Mrs. Dyckman broke in, “or you'll have me on

your hands.” She needed only her husband's hostility to inflame her

in defense of her son. “If he's married, he's married, and words won't

divorce him. We might as well make the best of it. I've no doubt the

girl is a darling, or Jim wouldn't have cared for her. Would you,

Jimsy?”

“Naturally not,” Jim agreed, with a rather sickly enthusiasm.

“Is she nice-looking?”

“She is famous for her beauty.”

“Famous! Oh, Heavens! That sounds ominous. You mean she's well known?”

“Very--in certain circles.”

“In certain circles!” Mrs. Dyckman was like a terrified echo. She had

known of such appalling misalliances that there was no telling how far

her son might have descended.

Old Dyckman snarled, “Do you mean that you've gone slumming for a wife?”

Jim dared not answer this. His mother ignored it, too. But her thoughts

were in a panic.

“What circles is she famous in, your wife, for her beauty?”

Jim could not achieve the awful word “movies” at the moment. He prowled

round it.

“In professional circles.”

“Oh, an actress, then?”

“Well, sort of.”

“They call everything an actress nowadays. She isn't a--a chorus-girl or

a show-girl?”

“Lord, no!” His indignation was reassuring to a degree.

His father broke in again, “It might save a few hours of dodging and

cross-examination if you'd tell us who and what she is.”

“She is known professionally as Anita Adair.”

So parochial a thing is fame that the title which millions of people had

learned to know and love meant absolutely nothing to the Dyckmans. They

were so ignorant of the new arts that even Mary Pickford meant hardly

more to them than Picasso or Matisse.

Jim brought out a photograph of Kedzie, a small one that he carried

in his pocket-book for company. The problem of what she looked like

distracted attention for the moment from the problem of what she did and

was.

Mrs. Dyckman took the picture and perused it anxiously. Her husband

leaned over her shoulder and studied it, too. He was mollified and won

by the big, gentle eyes and that bee-stung upper lip. He grumbled:

“Well, you're a good chooser for looks, anyway. Sweet little thing.”

Mrs. Dyckman examined the face more knowingly. She saw in those big,

innocent eyes a serene selfishness and a kind of sweet ruthlessness. In

the pouting lips she saw discontent and a gift for wheedling. But all

she said was, “She's a darling.”

Jim caught the knell-tone in her praise and feared that Kedzie was dead

to her already. He saw more elegy in her sigh of resignation to fate

and her resolution to take up her cross--the mother's cross of a pretty,

selfish daughter-in-law.

“You haven't told us yet how she won her--fame, you said.”

And now Jim had to tell it.

“She has had great success in the--the--er--pictures.”

“She's a painter--an illustrator?”

“No, she--well--you know, the moving pictures have become very

important; they're the fifth largest industry in the world, I believe,

and--”

The silence of the parents was deafening. Their eyes rolled together and

clashed, as it were, like cannon-balls meeting. Dyckman senior dropped

back into his chair and whistled “Whew!” Then he laughed a little:

“Well, I'm sure we should be proud of our alliance with the fifth

largest industry. The Dyckmans are coming up in the world.”

“Hush!” said Mrs. Dyckman. She was thinking of the laugh that rival

mothers would have on her. She was thinking of the bitterness of her

other children, of her daughter who was a duchess in England, and of the

squirming of her relatives-in-law. But she was too fond of her boy to

mention her dreads. She passed on to the next topic.

“Where are you living?”

“Nowhere yet,” Jim confessed. “We just got in from our--er--honeymoon

this morning. We haven't decided what to do.”

Then Mrs. Dyckman took one of those heroic steps she was capable of.

“You'd better bring her here.”

“Oh no; she'd be in your way. She'd put you out.”

“I hope not, not so soon,” Mrs. Dyckman laughed, dismally. “She'll

probably not like us at all, but we can start her off right.”

“That's mighty white of you, mother.”

“Did you expect me to be--yellow?”

“No, but I thought you might be a little--blue.”

“If she'll make you happy I'll thank Heaven for her every day and night

of my life. So let's give her every chance we can, and I hope she'll

give us a chance.”

Jim's arms were long enough to encircle her and hug her tight. He

whispered to her, “I never needed you more, you God-blessed--mother!”

Her tears streamed down her cheeks upon his lips, and he had a little

taste of the bitterness of maternal love. She felt better after she had

cried a little, and she said, with courage:

“Now we mustn't keep you away from her. If you want me to, I'll go along

with you and call on her and extend a formal invitation.”

Jim could not permit his revered mother to make so complete a submission

as that. He shook his head:

“That won't be necessary. I'll go get Kedzie.”

“Kedzie? I thought her name was Anita.”

“That was her stage name--her film name.”

“Oh! And her name wasn't Adair, either, perhaps?”

“No, it was--er--Thropp!”

“Oh!” She wanted to say “What a pretty name!” to make it easier for him,

but she could not arrange the words on her tongue. She asked, instead,

“Is she American?”

“American? I should say so! Born in Missouri.”

Another “Oh!” from the mother.

Jim swallowed a bit more of quinine and made his escape, saying:

“You're as fine as they make 'em, mother. I won't be gone long.”

The father was so disgusted with the whole affair that he could only

save himself from breaking the furniture by a sardonic taunt:

“Tell our daughter-in-law that if she wants to bring along her camera

she can have the ballroom for a studio. We never use it, anyway.”

“Shame on you!” his wife cried. “Don't mind him, Jimsy.”

“Jimsy” reminded Jim of Mrs. Thropp and his promise to ask his mother to

call on her. But he had confessed all that he could endure. He was glad

to get away without letting slip the fact that “Thropp” had changed to

“Dyckman” _via_ “Gilfoyle.”

His mother called him back for another embrace and then let him go. She

had nowhere to turn for support but to her raging husband, and she found

herself crying her eyes out in his arms. He had his own heartbreak and

pridebreak, but he was only a man and no sympathy need be wasted on him.

He wasted none on himself. He laughed ruefully.

“You were saying, mother, only awhile ago that you wished he'd marry

some nice girl. Well, he's married, and we'll have to take what he

brings us. But, oh, these children, these damned children!”

A little later he was trying to brace himself and his wife against the

future.

“After all, marriage is only an infernal gamble. We might have scoured

the world and picked out an angel for him, and she might have run off

with the chauffeur the second week. I guess I got the only real angel

that's been captured in the last fifty years. The boy may have stumbled

on a prize unbeknownst. We'll give the kid the benefit of the doubt,

anyway. Won't we?”

“Of course, dear, if she'll give us the same.”

“Well, Jim said she came from Missouri. We've got to show her.”

“Ring for Wotton, will you?”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“The truth.”

“Good Lord! Do you dare do that?”

“I don't dare not to. They'll find it out down-stairs quickly enough in

their own way.”

“I see. You want to beat 'em to it.”

“Exactly.”

For years the American world had been discussing the duty of parents to

teach their children the things they must inevitably learn in uglier and

more perilous ways. There were editorials on it, stories, poems, novels,

numberless volumes. It even reached the stage. Mrs. Dyckman had left her

own children to find things out for themselves. It occurred to her that

she should not make the same mistake with the eager servants who gave

the walls ears and the keyholes eyes.

It was a ferocious test of her courage, but she knew that she would have

all possible help from Wotton. He had not only been the head steward of

the family ship in countless storms, but he had an inherited knowledge

of the sufferings of homes. He had learned his profession as page to his

father, who had been a butler and the son of a butler.

Wotton came in like a sweet old earl and waited while Mrs. Dyckman

gathered strength to say as offhandedly as if she were merely announcing

that Jim was arrested for murder:

“Oh, Wotton, I wanted to tell you that Mr. James Dyckman has just

brought us the news of his marriage.”

Wotton's eyebrows went up and his hands sought each other and whispered

together as he faltered:

“Indeed, ma'am! That is a surprise, isn't it?”

“He has married a very brilliant young lady who has had great success

in--ah--in the--ah--moving pictures.”

The old man gulped a moment, but finally got it down. “The moving

pictures! Indeed, ma'am! My wife and I are very fond of the--the movies,

as the saying is.”

“Everybody is, isn't they--aren't they? Perhaps you have seen Miss Anita

Adair in the--er--pictures.”

“Miss Anita Adair? Oh, I should say we 'ave! And is she the young lady?”

“Yes. They are coming to live with us for a time.”

“Oh, that will be very pleasant! Quite an honor, you might say--That

will make two extra at dinner, then?”

“Yes. No--that is, we were expecting Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler, but I

wish you would telephone them that I am quite ill--not very, you

understand--a bad cold, I think, would be best. Something to keep me to

my room for the day.”

“Very good, ma'am. Was there anything else?”

“No--oh yes--ask Mrs. Abby to have the Louis Seize room made ready, will

you?”

“Very good--and some flowers, per'aps, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

He shuffled out, bowed under the weight of the calamity, as if he had an

invisible trunk on his back. He gathered the servants in solemn conclave

in their sitting-room and delivered a funeral oration over young Mr.

Jim. There were tears in the eyes of the women-servants and curses in

the throats of the men. They all adored Mr. Jim, and their recent pride

in his triumph over Peter Cheever was turned to ashes. He had married

into the movies! They supposed that he must have been drinkin' very

'ard. Jim's valet said:

“This is as good as handin' me my notice.”

But, then, Dallam was a ratty soul and was for deserting a sinking ship.

Wotton and the others felt that their loyalty was only now to be put to

the test. They must help the old folks through it. There was one ray of

hope: such marriages did not last long in America.

CHAPTER VII

Jim hastened to Kedzie, and she greeted him with anxiety. She saw by his

radiant face that he brought cheerful news.

“I've seen mother,” he exclaimed, “and she's tickled to death with

your picture. She wants to see you right away. She wouldn't listen to

anything but your coming right over to live at our house till we decide

what we want to do.”

Kedzie's heart turned a somersault of joy; then it flopped.

“I've got no clothes fit for your house.”

“Oh, Lord!” Jim groaned. “What do you think we are, a continual

reception? You can go out to-morrow and shop all you want to.”

“We-ell, all ri-ight,” Kedzie pondered.

Jim was taken aback at her failure to glow with his success; and when

she said, “I hate to leave momma and poppa,” he writhed.

He had neither the courage nor the inclination to invite them to come

along and make a jolly house-party. There was room enough for a dozen

Thropps in the big house, but he doubted if there were room in his

mother's heart for three Thropps at a time, or for the elder Thropps at

any time. After all, his mother had some rights. He protected them by

lying glibly.

“My mother sent you her compliments, Mrs. Thropp, and said she would

call on you as soon as she could. She's very busy, you know--as I told

you. Well, come along, Kedzie. I'd like to have you home in time for

dinner.”

“You dress for dinner, I suppose.”

“Well, usually--yes.”

“But I haven't--”

“If you dare say it, I'll murder you. What do they care what you've got

on? They want to meet you, not your clothes.”

She saw that he was in no mood to be trifled with; so she delayed only

long enough to fling into a small trunk a few of her best duds. She

remembered with sudden joy that Ferriday had made her a gift of one

or two of the gowns Lady Powell-Carewe had designed for her

camera-appearances, and she took them along for her debut into the

topmost world. Jim arranged by telephone for the transportation of her

luggage, and they set out on their new and hazardous journey.

Kedzie bade her mother and father a farewell implying a beautiful

distress at parting. She thought it looked well, and she felt that she

owed to her mother her present splendor. She was horribly afraid, too,

of the ordeal ahead of her. She was, indeed, approaching one of the most

terrifying of duels: the first meeting of a mother and a wife.

Kedzie was not half so afraid as the elder Dyckmans were; for she had

her youth and her beauty, and they were only a plain, fat old rich

couple whose last remaining son had been stolen from them by a stranger

who might take him from them altogether or fling him back at their feet

with a ruined heart.

In her moving pictures Kedzie had played the millionairess many a time,

had driven up in state to mansions, and been admitted by moving-picture

butlers with frozen faces and only three or four working joints. She had

played the millionairess in boudoir and banquet-hall; she had been loved

by nice princes and had foiled wicked barons. She had known valets and

grooms and footmen familiarly; but they had all been moving-picture

people, actors like herself.

As the motor approached the Dyckman palace she recalled what Ferriday

had told her about how different real life in millionairedom was from

studio luxury, and she almost wished she had stayed married to Tommie

Gilfoyle.

In her terror she seized the usual armor that terror assumes--bluff.

It would have been far better for her and everybody if she had entered

meekly into the presence of the very human old couple at her approach,

and had said to them, not in so many words, but at least by her simple

manner:

“I did not select my birthplace or my parents, my soul or my body or my

environment. I am not ashamed of them, but I want to make the best of

them. I am a new-comer in your world and I am only here because your son

happened to meet me and liked me and asked me to marry him. So excuse me

if I am frightened and ill at ease. I don't want to take him away from

you, but I want to love you as he does and have you love me as he does.

So help me with your wisdom.”

If she had brought such a message or implied it she would have walked

right into the living-room of the parental hearts. But poor Kedzie

lacked the genius and the inspiration of simplicity and frankness, and

she marched up the steps in a panic which she disguised all too well in

a pretense of scorn that proclaimed:

“I am as good as you are. I have been in dozens of finer homes than

this. You can't teach me anything, you old snobs. I've got your son, and

you'd better mind your p's and q's.”

Wotton opened the door and put on as much of a wedding face as he could.

Jim saw that the old man was informed, and he said:

“This is Wotton, my dear. He's the real head of the house.”