Kedzie might better have shaken hands with him than have given him the

curt nod she begrudged him. She looked past him to see Mrs. Dyckman,

in whose arms she found herself smothered. Mrs. Dyckman, in her

bride-fright, had rather rushed the situation.

Kedzie hardly knew what to do. She was overawed by the very bulk as well

as the prestige of her mother-in-law. She did not quite dare to embrace

Mrs. Dyckman, and she could think of nothing at all to say.

Mrs. Dyckman was impressed with Kedzie's beauty and paid it immediate

tribute.

“Oh, but you are an exquisite thing! No wonder our boy is mad about

you.”

Kedzie's heart pranced at this, and she barely checked the giggle of

triumph that bounded in her throat. But the only thing she could think

of was what she dared not say: “So you're the famous Mrs. Dyckman! Why,

you're fatter than momma.” She said nothing, but wore one of her most

popular smiles, that look of wistful sweetness that had melted countless

of her movie worshipers.

She was caught from Mrs. Dyckman's shadow by Jim's father, who said,

“Don't I get a kiss?” and took one. Kedzie returned this kiss and found

the old gentleman very handsome, not in the least like her father.

Brides almost always get along beautifully with fathers-in-law. And so

do sons-in-law. Women will learn how to get along together better

as soon as it ceases to be so important to them how they get along

together.

After the thrill of the first collision the four stood in silenced

embarrassment till Jim, eager to escape, said:

“What room do we get?”

“Cicely's, if you like,” his mother answered.

Jim was pleased. Cicely was the duchess of the family, and she and her

duke had occupied that room before they went to England. Cicely was a

war nurse now, bedabbled in gore, and her husband was a mud-daubed major

in the trenches along the Somme. Jim saw that his mother was making no

stint of her hospitality, and he was grateful.

He dragged Kedzie away. She was trying to take in the splendor of the

house without seeming to, and she went up the stairway with her eyes

rolling frantically.

In the Academy at Venice is that famous picture of Titian's representing

the little Virgin climbing up the steps of the Temple, a pathetic,

frightened figure bearing no trace of the supreme radiance that was to

be hers. There was something of the same religious awe in Kedzie's heart

as she mounted the steps of the house that was a temple in her religion.

She was going up to her heaven already. It was perfection because it was

the next thing.

When Kedzie reaches the scriptural heaven, if she does (and it will be

hard for Anybody to deny her anything that she sets her heart on), she

will be happy till she gets there and finds that she is only in the

first of the seven heavens. But what will the poor girl do when she goes

on up and up and up and learns at last that there is no eighth? She will

weep like another Alexander the Great, because there are no more heavens

to hope for.

Jim led her into the best room there was up-stairs, and told her that a

duke had slept there. At first she was thrilled through. Later it would

occur to her, not tragically, yet a bit quellingly, that, after all,

she had not married a duke herself, but only a commoner. She had as much

right to a title as any other American girl. A foreign title is part

of a Yankee woman's birthright. Hundreds of women had acquired theirs.

Kedzie got only a plain “Mr.”

Still, she told herself that she must not be too critical, and she let

her enthusiasm fly. She did not have to pose before Jim, and she ran

about the suite as about a garden.

CHAPTER VIII

Kedzie was smitten with two facts: the canopied bed was raised on a

platform, and the marble bath-tub was sunk in the floor. She sat on

the bed and bounced up and down on the springs. She stared up at the

tasseled baldachin with its furled draperies, and fingered the lace

covering and the silken comforter.

She sat in the best chairs, studied the dressing-table with its royal

equipment. She went to the window and gazed out into Fifth Avenue,

reviewing its slow-flowing lava of humanity--young royalty overlooking

her subjects.

Mrs. Abby, the housekeeper, knocked and came in to be presented to the

new Princess of Wales, and to present the personal maid who had been

assigned to her. Even Mrs. Dyckman was afraid of Mrs. Abby, who lacked

the suavities of Wotton. Mrs. Abby gave Kedzie the chill of her life,

and Kedzie responded with an ardent hatred.

The maid, a young Frenchwoman, found her black dress with its black silk

apron an appropriate uniform, since her father, three brothers, a dozen

cousins, and two or three of her sweethearts were at the wars. Some of

them were dead, she knew, and the others were on their way along the red

stream that was bleeding France white, according to German hopes.

Liliane, being a foreigner, saw in Kedzie the pathos of the alien, and

with the unequaled democracy of the French, forgave her her plebeiance

for that sake. She welcomed Kedzie's beauty, too, and regarded her as

a doll of the finest ware, whom it would be fascinating to dress up.

Kedzie and Liliane would prosper famously.

Liliane resolved that when Kedzie appeared at dinner she should reflect

credit not only on “Monsieur Zheem,” but on Liliane as well. When

Kedzie's trunk arrived and Liliane drew forth the confections of Lady

Powell-Carewe she knew that she had all the necessary weapons for a

sensation.

Kedzie felt more aristocracy in being fluttered over by a French maid

with an accent than in anything she had encountered yet. Liliane's

phrase “Eef madame pair-meet” was a constant tribute to her distinction.

Jim retired to his own dressing-room and faced the veiled contempt of

his valet, leaving Kedzie to the ministrations of Liliane, who drew

the tub and saw that it was just hot enough, sprinkled the aromatic

bath-salts, and laid out the towels and Kedzie's things.

Women are born linen-lovers, and Kedzie was not ashamed to have even a

millionaire maid see the things she wore next to her skin, and Liliane

was delighted to find by this secret wardrobe that her new mistress was

beautifully equipped.

She waited outside the door till Kedzie had stepped from the fragrant

pool--then came in to aid in the harnessing. She saw nothing but the

successive garments and had those ready magically. She laced the stays

and slid the stockings on and locked the garters and set the slippers in

place. She was miraculously deft with Kedzie's hair, and her suggestions

were the last word in tact. Then she fetched the dinner-gown, floated

it about Kedzie as delicately as if it were a ring of smoke, hooked it,

snapped it, and murmured little compliments that were more tonic than

cocktails.

When Jim came in he was struck aglow by Kedzie's comeliness and by a

certain authority she had, Liliane pointed to her, as an artist might

point to a canvas with which he has had success, and demanded his

admiration. His eyes paid the tribute his lips stammered over.

Kedzie was incandescent with her triumph, and she went down the stairway

to collect her dues.

Her parents-in-law were waiting, and she could see how tremendously they

were impressed and relieved by her grace. What did it matter who she was

or whence she came? She was as irresistible as some haunting phrase

from a folk-song, its authorship unknown and unimportant, its perfection

inspired.

Kedzie floated into the dining-room and passed the gantlet of the

servants. Ignoring them haughtily, she did not ignore the sudden change

of their scorn to homage. Nothing was said or done; yet the air was full

of her victory. Much was forgiven her for her beauty, and she forgave

the whole household much because of its surrender.

It was a family dinner and not elaborate. Mr. and Mrs. Dyckman had

arrived at the stage when nearly everything they liked to eat or drink

was forbidden to them. Jim had an athlete's appetite for simples, and

Kedzie had an actress' dread of fattening things and sweets. There was

a procession of dishes submitted to her inspection, but seeing them

refused first by Mrs. Dyckman, she declined most of them in her turn.

Kedzie had been afraid that she would blunder in choice among a

long array of forks, but she escaped the test, since each course was

accompanied by the tools to eat it with. There was a little champagne to

toast the bride in.

She found the grandeur of the room belittling to the small party at

table. There were brave efforts to make her feel at home and brief

sallies of high spirits, but there was no real gaiety. How could there

be, when there was no possible congeniality? The elder couple had lived

in a world unknown to Kedzie. Their son had dazed them by his sudden

return with a strange captive from beyond the pale. She was a pretty

barbarian, but a barbarian she was, and no mistake. She was not so

barbaric as they had feared, but they knew nothing of her past or of

her.

It is not good manners to deal in personal questions; yet how else could

such strangers come to know one another? The Dyckmans were afraid to

quiz her about herself, and she dared not cross-examine them. They had

no common acquaintances or experiences to talk over. The presence of the

servants was depressing, and when the long meal was over and the four

Dyckmans were alone in the drawing-room, they were less at ease than

before. They had not even knives and forks to play with.

Mrs. Dyckman said at length, “Are you going to the theater, do you

think?”

Jim did not care--or dare--to take his bride abroad just yet. He shook

his head. Mrs. Dyckman tried again:

“Does your wife play--or sing, perhaps?”

“No, thank you,” said Kedzie, and sank again.

Mrs. Dyckman was about to ask if she cared for cards, but she was afraid

that she might say yes. She grew so desperate at last that she made a

cowardly escape:

“I think we old people owe it to you youngsters to leave you alone.” She

caught up her husband with a glance like a clutching hand, and he made

haste to follow her into the library.

Jim and Kedzie looked at each other sheepishly. Kedzie was taking her

initiation into the appalling boredom that can close down in a black

fog on the homes and souls of the very wealthy. She was astounded and

terrified to realize that there is no essential delight attending the

possession of vast means. Later she was to find herself often one of

large and glittering companies where nothing imaginable was lacking to

make one happy except the power to be happy. She would go to dinners

where an acute melancholia seemed to poison the food, where people of

the widest travel and unfettered opportunities could find nothing to say

to one another.

If she had loved Jim more truly, or he her, they could have been

blissful in spite of their lack of hardships; but the excitement of

flirtation had gone out of their lives. There seemed to be nothing more

to be afraid of except unhappiness. There seemed to be nothing to be

excited about at all. Time would soon provide them with wild anxieties,

but he withheld his hand for the moment.

Jim saw that Kedzie was growing restless. He dragged himself from his

chair and clasped her in his arms, but the element of pity in his deed

took all the fire out of it. He led her about the house and showed her

the pictures in the art gallery, but she knew nothing about painters

or paintings, and once around the gallery finished that room for her

forever. There were treasures in the library to fascinate a bibliophile

for years, but Kedzie knew nothing and cared less about books as books;

and a glance into the somber chamber where the old people played cards

listlessly drove her from that door.

The dinner had begun at eight and finished at half past nine. It was

ten o'clock now, and too late to go to the theater. The opera season

was over. There would be the dancing-places, but neither of the two felt

vivacity enough for dancing or watching others dance.

For lack of anything better, Jim proposed a drive. He was mad for air

and exercise. He would have preferred a long walk, and so would Kedzie,

but she could not have walked far without changing her costume and her

slippers.

She was glad of the chance to escape from the house. Jim rang for Wotton

and asked to have a car brought round. They put on light wraps and went

down the steps to the limousine.

The Avenue was lonely and the Park was lonelier. And, strangely, now

that they were together in the dark they felt happier; they drew more

closely together. They were common people now, and they had moonlight

and stars, a breeze and a shadowy landscape; they shared them with the

multitude, and they were happy for a while.

Something in Kedzie's heart whispered: “What's the use of being rich?

What's the good of living in a palace with a gang of servants hanging

over your shoulder? Happiness evidently doesn't come from ordering

whatever you want, for by the time somebody brings it to you you don't

want it any longer. Happiness must be the going after something yourself

and being anxious about it.”

If she had listened to that airy whisperer she might have had an inkling

of a truth. But she dismissed philosophy as something stupid. She turned

into Jim's arms like a child afraid and clung to him, moaning:

“Jim, what do I want? Tell me. I'm bluer than blue, and I don't know

why.”

This was sufficiently discouraging for Jim. He had given the petulant

child the half of his kingdom, and she was blue. If anything could have

made him bluer than he was it would have been this proclamation of his

failure. He had done the honorable thing, and it had profited nobody.

He petted her as one pets a spoiled and fretful child at the end of a

long, long rainy day, with a rainy to-morrow ahead.

When they returned home the coziness of their hour together was lost.

The big mansion was as cozy as a court-house. It no longer had even

novelty. Climbing the steps had no further mystery than the Louvre has

to an American tourist who has promenaded through it once.

Her room was brilliant and beautiful, but the things she liked about it

most were the homely, comfortable touches: her bedroom slippers by her

chair, her nightgown laid across her pillow, and the turned-down covers

of the bed.

Liliane knocked and came in, and Jim retreated. It was pleasant for

the indolent Kedzie to have the harness taken from her. She yawned and

stretched and rubbed her sides when her corsets were off, and when her

things were whisked from sight and she was only Kedzie Thropp alone in a

nightgown she was more nearly glad than she had been for ever so long.

She flung her hair loose and ran about the room. She sang grotesquely as

she brushed her teeth and scumbled her face with cold-cream, rubbed it

in and rubbed it out again. She was so glad to be a mere girl in her

own flesh and not much else that she went about the room crooning to

herself. She peeked out of the window at the Avenue, as quiet as a

country lane at this hour, save for the motors that slid by as on skees

and the jog-trot of an occasional hansom-horse.

She was crooning when she turned to see her husband come in in a great

bath-robe; he might have been a solemn monk, save for the big cigar he

smoked.

He was so dour that she laughed and ran to him and flung him into a

chair and clambered into his lap and throttled him in her arms, crying:

“Oh, Jim, I am happy. I love you and you love me. Don't we? Say we do!”

“Of course we do,” he laughed, not quite convinced.

He could not resist her beauty, her warmth, her ingratiation. But

somehow he could not love her soul.

He had refused to make her his mistress before they were married. Now

that they were married, that was all he could make of her. Their life

together was thenceforward the life of such a pair. He squandered money

on her and let her squander it on herself. They had ferocious quarrels

and ferocious reconciliations, periods of mutual aversion and tempests

of erotic extravagance, excursions of hilarious good-fellowship, hours

of appalling boredom.

But there was a curious dishonesty about their relation: it was an

intrigue, not a communion. They were never closer to each other than

a reckless flirtation. Sometimes that seemed to be enough for Kedzie.

Sometimes she seemed to flounder in an abyss of gloomy discontent.

But sleep was sweet for her that first night in the bed where the

duchess had lain. She had an odd dream that she also became a duchess.

Her dreams had a way of coming true.

CHAPTER IX

So there lay Kedzie Thropp of Nimrim, Missouri, the Girl Who Had Never

Had Anything. At her side was the Man Who Had Always Had Everything.

Under this canopy a duke and duchess had lain.

There was an element of faery in it; yet far stranger things have

happened and will happen anew.

There was once a Catholic peasant of Lithuania who died of the plague,

leaving a baby named Martha Skovronsky. A Protestant preacher adopted

the waif, and while she was yet a girl got rid of her by marrying her to

a common Swedish soldier, a sergeant. The Russians bombarded the town;

the Swedes fled; and a Russian soldier captured the deserted wife in the

ruins of, the city. He passed her on to his marshal. The marshal sold

her as a kind of white slave to a prince; the prince took her to

Russia as his concubine. Being of a liberal disposition, he shared her

capacious heart with the young czar, who happened to be married. Martha

Skovronsky bore him a daughter and won his heart for keeps. He had her

baptized in the Russian Church as Catherine. He divorced his czaritza

that he might marry the foundling. He set on his bride's head the

imperial crown studded with twenty-five hundred gems. She became the

Empress Catherine I. of Russia and went to the wars with her husband,

Peter the Great, saved him from surrendering to the Turks, and made a

success of a great defeat for him.

He loved her so well that when she was accused of flirting with another

man he had the gentleman decapitated and his head preserved in a jar

of alcohol as a mantel ornament for Catherine's room. When he died she

reigned in his stead, recalling to her side as a favorite the prince who

had purchased her when she was a captive.

Alongside such a fantastic history, the rise of Kedzia Thropp was petty

enough. It did not even compare with the rocket-flight of that Theodosia

who danced naked in a vile theater in Byzantium and later became the

empress of the great Justinian.

Kedzie had never done anything very immoral. She had been a trifle

immodest, according to strict standards, when she danced the Grecian

dances. She had been selfish and hard-hearted, but she had never sold

her body. And there is no sillier lie, as there is no commoner lie, than

the trite old fallacy of the popular novels, sermons, editorials, and

other works of fiction that women succeed by selling their bodies. It

is one of the best ways a girl can find for going bankrupt, and it leads

oftener to the dark streets than to the bright palaces.

The credit for Kedzie's staying virtuous, as the word is used, was not

entirely hers. Probably if all the truth were known women are no oftener

seduced than seducing. Kedzie might have gone wrong half a dozen times

at least if she had not somehow inspired in the men she met a livelier

sense of protection than of spoliation. She happened not to be a

frenzied voluptuary, as are so many of the lost, who are victims

of their own physiological or pathological estates before they make

fellow-victims of the men they encounter.

The trick of success for a woman who has no other stock in trade

than her charm is to awaken the chivalry of men, to promise but not

relinquish the last favors till the last tributes are paid.

Meanwhile the old world is rolling into the daylight when women will

sell their wits instead of their embraces, and when there will be no

more compulsion for a woman to rent her body to pay her house rent than

for men to do the same. The pity of it is that these great purifying,

equalizing, freedom-spreading revolutions are gaining more opposition

than help from the religious and the conservative.

In any case Kedzie Thropp, who slept under a park bench when first she

came to town, found the city honorable, merciful, generous, as most

girls do who have graces to sell and sense enough to set a high price on

them.

And so Kedzie was sheltered and passed on upward by Skip Magruder the

lunch-room waiter, and by Mr. Kalteyer the chewing-gum purveyor, by Eben

E. Kiam the commercial photographer, by Thomas Gilfoyle the advertising

bard, by Ferriday the motion-picture director, on up and up to Jim

Dyckman. Every man gave her the best help he could. And even the women

she met unconsciously assisted her skyward.

But there is always more sky above, and Kedzie's motto was a relentless

_Excelsior!_ She spurned backward the ladders she rose by, and it was

her misfortune (which made her fortune) that whatever rung she stood on

hurt her pretty, restless feet. It was inevitable that when at last she

was bedded in the best bed in one of America's most splendid homes, she

should fall a-dreaming of foreign splendors beyond the Yankee sky.

On the second morning of her honeymoon, when Kedzie woke to find that

she was no duchess, but a plain American “Mrs.” that disappointment

colored her second impression of the Dyckman mansion.

She had her breakfast in bed. But she had enjoyed that dubious luxury in

her own flat. Many poor and lazy and sick people had the same privilege.

The things she had to eat were exquisitely cooked and served, when

Liliane took them from the footman at the door and brought them to the

bedside.

But, after all, there is not much difference between the breakfasts of

the rich and of the poor. There cannot be: one kind of fruit, a cereal,

an egg or two, some coffee, and some bread are about all that it is safe

to put into the morning stomach. Her plutocratic father-in-law was not

permitted to have even that much, and her mother-in-law, who was one

of the converts to Vance Thompson's _Eat and Grow Thin_ scriptures, had

almost none at all.

Busy and anxious days followed that morning. There was a great amount of

shopping to do. There were the wedding-announcement cards to order and

the list of recipients to go over with Mrs. Dyckman's secretary. There

was a secretary to hire for Kedzie, and it was no easy matter for Kedzie

to put herself into the woman's hands without debasing her pride too

utterly.

There was the problem of dinners to relatives, a reception to guests

for the proper exploitation of the new Mrs. Dyckman. There was the

embarrassment of meeting people who brought their prejudices with their

visiting-cards and did not leave their prejudices as they did their

cards.

The newspapers had to have their say, and they did not make pleasant

reading to any of the Dyckmans. Kedzie took a little comfort from

reading what the papers had to say about Mrs. Cheever's divorce, but she

found that Jim was unresponsive to her gibes. This did not sweeten her

heart toward Charity.

Kedzie was hungry for friends and playmates, but she could not find them

among the new acquaintances she made. She saw curiosity in all their

eyes, patronage in those who were cordial, and insult in those who were

not effusive. She got along famously with the men, but their manner was

not quite satisfactory, either. There was a corrosive something in their

flattery, a menace in their approach.

There were the horrible experiences when Mrs. Dyckman called on Mrs.

Thropp and the worse burlesque when Mrs. Thropp called on Mrs. Dyckman.

The servants had a glorious time over it, and Kedzie overheard Mrs.

Dyckman's report of the ordeal to her husband. She was angry at Mrs.

Dyckman, but angrier still at her mother.

Kedzie's father and mother were an increasing annoyance to Kedzie's

pride and her peace. They wanted to get out to Nimrim and make a triumph

through the village. And Jim and Kedzie were glad to pay the freight.

But once the Thropps had gloated they were anxious to get back again to

the flesh-pots of New York.

The financing of the old couple was embarrassing. It did not look right

to Kedzie to have the father and mother of Mrs. Dyckman a couple of

shabby, poor relations, and Kedzie called it shameful that her father,

who was a kind of father-in-law-in-law to the duchess, should earn a

pittance as a claim-agent in the matter of damaged pigs and things.

Jim, like all millionaires, had dozens of poor relations and felt

neither the right nor the obligation to enrich them all. There is no

gesture that grows tiresome quicker than the gesture of shoving the hand

into the cash-pocket, bringing it up full and emptying it. There is no

more painful disease than money-spender's cramp.

Kedzie learned, too, that to assure her father and mother even so poor

an income as five thousand dollars a year would require the setting

aside of a hundred thousand dollars at least in gilt-edged securities.

She began to have places where she could put a hundred thousand

dollars herself. On her neck was one place, for she saw a woman with

a dog-collar of that price, and it made Kedzie feel absolutely nude in

contrast. She met old Mrs. Noxon with her infamously costly stomacher

on, and Kedzie cried that night because she could not have one for her

own midriff.

Jim growled, “When you get a stomach as big as Mrs. Noxon's you can put

a lamp-post on it.”

She said he was indecent, and a miser besides.

Meanwhile her own brothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts were calling her

a miser, a snob, a brute. The whole family wanted to move to New York

and make a house-party. They had every right to, too, for did not the

Declaration of Independence make all Americans equal?

Relatives whom Kedzie had never heard of and relatives whom she knew all

too well turned up in New York with schemes for extracting money from

the Dyckman hoard. Kedzie grew nearly wroth enough to stand at the

window and empty things on them as they dared to climb the noble steps

with their ignoble impertinences.

When she was not repelling repulsive relatives Kedzie was trying to

dodge old acquaintances. It seemed that everybody she had ever met

had learned of her rise in the world. Her old landladies wrote whining

letters. Moving-picture people out of a job asked her for temporary

loans.

But the worst trial came one day when she was present at a committee

meeting for a war-relief benefit and that fiend of a Pet Bettany

proposed that one of the numbers should be Miss Silsby's troupe of Greek

dancers. She asked if anybody had any objections, and when nobody spoke

she turned to Kedzie and dared to ask her if she had ever seen the

dancers.

“Not recently,” Kedzie mumbled, while her very legs blushed under their

stockings, remembering how bare they had been in the old days when she

was one of the Silsby slaves.

All the other women simmered pleasantly in the uncomfortable situation

till Mrs. Charity Cheever, who chanced to be there, came to the rescue

amazingly by turning the tables on the Bettany creature:

“Anybody who ever saw you in a bathing-suit, Pet, would know that there

were two good reasons why you were never one of the Silsbies.”

Charity could be cruel to be kind. Everybody roared at Pet, whose

crooked shanks had kept her modest from the knees down, at least. Kedzie

wanted to kiss Charity, but she suffered too much from the reminder of

her past.

She fiercely wanted to have been born of an aristocratic family. Of

all the vain wishes, the retroactive pluperfect are the vainest, and an

antenatal wish is sublimely ridiculous. But Kedzie wished it. This was

one of the wishes she did not get.

CHAPTER X

Mrs. Kedzie Dyckman received many jars of ointment, but her pretty eyes

found a fly in every one. She that should have gone about boasting, “I

came from a village and slept under a park bench, and now look at me!”

was slinking about, wishing that she could rather say: “Oh, see my

wonderful ancestors! Without them you could not see me at all.”

Kedzie had her picture printed at last in the “Social World” departments

of the newspapers. She had full-page portraits of herself by the mystic

Dr. Arnold Genthe and by other camera-masters printed in _Town and

Country_ and _The Spur, Vanity Fair, Vogue_ and _Harper's Bazar_. But

some cursed spite half the time led to the statement under her picture

that she had been in the movies. No adjectives of praise could sweeten

that. Small wonder she pouted!

And she found the competition terrific. She had thought that when she

got into the upper world she would be on a sparsely populated plateau.

But she said to Jim:

“Good Lord! this is a merry-go-round! It's so crowded everybody is

falling off.”

The most “exclusive” restaurants were packed like bargain-counters. She

went to highly advertised balls where there were so many people that the

crowd simply oozed and the effort to dance or to eat was a struggle for

life.

New York's four hundred families had swollen, it seemed, to four hundred

thousand, and the journals of society published countless pictures of

the aristocratic sets of everywhere else. There were aristocrats of the

Long Island sets--a dozen sets for one small island--the Berkshire set,

the Back Bay set, the Rhode Island reds, the Plymouth Rock fowl, the old

Connecticut connections, the Bar Harbor oligarchy, the Tuxedonians,

the Morristown and Germantown noblesse, the pride of Philadelphia,

the Baltimorioles, the diplomatic cliques of Washington, the Virginia

patricians, the Piedmont Hunt set, the North Carolina, South Carolina,

Georgia, Florida, and all the other State sets, the Cleveland coteries,

the Chicagocracy, the St. Louis and New Orleans and San Francisco

optimates.

Exclusiveness was a joke. And yet Kedzie felt lonely and afraid. She

had too many rivals. There were young girls in myriads, beauties by

the drove, sirens in herds, millionaires in packs. The country was so

prosperous with the privilege of selling Europe the weapons of suicide

that the vast destructiveness of the German submarines was a bagatelle.

There was a curious mixture of stupendous Samaritanism and tremendous

indifference. Millions were poured into charities and millions were

squandered on dissipation.

Kedzie's funds were drawn away astoundingly faster than even Dyckman

could replenish them. Hideous accounts of starving legions were

brandished before the eyes of all Americans. Every day Kedzie's mail

contained circulars about blind soldiers, orphan-throngs, bread-lines in

every nation at war. There were hellish chronicles of Armenian women and

children driven like cattle from desert to desert, outraged and flogged

and starved by the thousand.

The imagination gave up the task. The miseries of the earth were more

numerous than the sands, and the eyes came to regard them as impassively

as one looks at the night sky without pausing to count the flakes in

that snowstorm of stars. One says, “It is a nice night.” One said,

“These are terrible times.” Then one said, “May I have the next dance?”

or, “Isn't supper ready yet?”

Kedzie tried for a while to lift herself from the common ruck of the

aristocracy by outshining the others in charities and in splendors. She

soon grew weary of the everlasting appeals for money to send to Europe.

She grew weary of writing checks and putting on costumes for bazaars,

spectacles, parades, and carnivals. She found herself circumscribed

by so much altruism. Her benevolences left her too little for her

magnificences.

She grew frantic for more fun and more personal glory. The extravagance

of other women dazed her. Some of them had inexhaustible resources. Some

of them were bankrupting their own boodle-bag husbands. Some of them

flourished ingeniously by running up bills and never running them down.

The competition was merciless. She kept turning to Jim for money. He

grew less and less gracious, because her extravagances were more and

more selfish. He grew less and less superior to complaints. He started

bank-accounts to get rid of her, but she got rid of them with a speed

that frightened him. He hated to be used.

Kedzie took umbrage at Mrs. Dyckman's manner. Mrs. Dyckman tried for a

while to be good to the child, strove to love her, forgave her for

her youth and her humble origin; but finally she tired of her,

because Kedzie was not making Jim's life happier, more useful, or more

distinguished.

Then one day Mrs. Dyckman asked Kedzie for a few moments of her time.

Kedzie was in a hurry to an appointment at her hairdresser's, but she

seated herself patiently. Mrs. Dyckman said:

“My dear, I have just had a cable from my daughter Cicely. She has

broken down, and her physician has ordered her out of England for a

rest. She is homesick, she says, and Heaven knows we are homesick for

her.

“I am afraid she would not feel at home in any room but her old one, and

I know you won't mind. You can have your choice. Some of the other rooms

are really pleasanter. Will you look them over and let me know, so that

I can have your things moved?”

“Certainly, my dear m'mah!” said Kedzie.

She walked blindly down the Avenue, snubbing her most precious

acquaintances. She was being put out of her room! She was being shoved

back to the second place. They'd ask her to eat at the second table

next, or have her meals in her room as the secretaries did.

Not much! Having slept in a duchess's bed, Kedzie would not backslide.

She would get a bed of her own. She remembered a nice young man she had

met, whose people were in real estate. She telephoned to him from the

Biltmore.

“Is that you, Polly? This is Kedzie Dyckman. Say, Polly, do you know of

a decent house that is for sale or rent right away quick? Oh, I don't

care how much it costs, so it's a cracker jack of a house. I suppose

I've got to take it furnished, being in such a hurry; or could you get

a gang of decorators in and do a rush job? All right, look up your list

right away and telephone me here at the hairdresser's.”

From under her cascade of hair she talked to him later and arranged to

be taken from place to place. She now dismissed chateaux with contempt

as too small, too old-fashioned, lacking in servants' rooms, what not.

She had quite forgotten the poor little Mrs. Gilfoyle she had been, and

her footsore tramp from cheap flat to cheap flat, ending in the place

that cost three hundred dollars a year furnished.

She finally decided not to attempt housekeeping yet awhile, and selected

a double-decked apartment of twenty-four rooms and forty-eight baths.

And she talked the agent down to a rental of ten thousand dollars a year

unfurnished. She would show Jim that she could economize.

When Kedzie told Mrs. Dyckman that she had decided to move, Mrs. Dyckman

was very much concerned lest Kedzie feel put out. But she smiled to

herself: she knew her Kedzie.

Jim was not at all pleased with the arrangement, but he yielded. In

the American family the wife is the quartermaster, selects the camp and

equips it. Jim spent more of his time at his clubs than at his duplex

home. So did Kedzie. She had been railroaded into the Colony and one or

two other clubs before they knew her so well.

When the Duchess Cicely came back Kedzie was invited to the family

dinner, of course. Cicely was Kedzie's first duchess, and though Kedzie

had met any number of titled people by now, she approached this one with

strange apprehensions. She was horribly disappointed. Cicely turned

out to be a poor shred of a woman in black, worn out, meager, forlorn,

broken in heart and soul with what she had been through.

She was plainly not much impressed with Kedzie, and she said to her

mother later: “Poor Jim, he always plays in the rottenest luck, doesn't

he? Still, he's got a pretty doll, and what does anything matter

nowadays?”

She tried to be polite about the family banquet. But the food choked

her. She had seen so many gaunt hands pleading upward for a crust of

bread. She had seen so many shriveled lips guzzling over a bowl of soup.

She had seen so many once beautiful soldiers who had nothing to eat

anything with.

Cicely apologized for being such a death's head at the feast, but she

was ashamed of her people, ashamed of her country for keeping out of the

war and fattening on it. All the motives of pacifism, of neutrality,

of co-operation by financing and munitioning the war, were foul in

her eyes. She knew only her side of the conflict, and she cared for

no other. She found America craven and indifferent either to its own

obligations or its own dangers. She accused the United States of basking

in the protection of the British navy and the Allied armies. She felt

that the immortal crime of the _Lusitania_ with its flotsam of dead

women and children was more disgraceful to the nation that endured it

than to the nation that committed it. She was very, very bitter, and

Kedzie found her most depressing company, especially for a dinner-table.

But she excited Jim Dyckman tremendously. He broke out into fierce

diatribes against the Chinafying of the United States with its

Lilliputian army guarding its gigantic interests. He began to toy with

the idea of enlisting in the Canadian army or of joining the American

aviators flying for France.

“The national bird is an eagle,” he said, with unwonted poesy, “and the

best place an American eagle can fly is over France.”

When Kedzie protested: “But you've got a family to consider. Let the

single men go,” Jim laughed louder and longer than he had laughed for

weeks.

Cicely smiled her first smile and squeezed Jim's hand.

CHAPTER XI

Kedzie went home early. It was depressing there, too. Now that she had

a house of her own, she found an extraordinary isolation in it. Almost

nobody called.

When she lived under the Dyckman roof she was included in the cards left

by all the callers; she was invited into the drawing-room to meet them;

she was present at all the big and little dinners, and breakfasts and

teas and suppers.

People who wanted to be asked to more of the Dyckman meals and parties

swapped meals and parties with them and included Kedzie in their

invitations, since she was one of the family. She went about much in

stately homes, and her name was celebrated in what the newspapers insist

upon calling the “exclusive” circles.

Kedzie laughed at the extraordinary inclusiveness of their High

Exclusivenesses until she got her own home. And then she learned its

bitter meaning. It was not that Mrs. Dyckman meant to freeze her out.

She urged her to “come in any time.” But, as Kedzie told Jim, “an

invitation to come any time is an invitation to stay away all the time.”

Kedzie's pride kept her aloof. She made it so hard to get her to come

that Mrs. Dyckman sincerely said to Cicely:

“We are too old and stupid for the child. She is glad to be rid of us.”

Mrs. Dyckman planned to call often, but she was an extremely busy woman,

doing many good works and many foolish works that were just as hard. She

said, “I ought to call,” and failed to call, just as one says, “I ought

to visit the sick,” and leaves them to their supine loneliness.

Thus Kedzie floated out of the swirling eddies where the social

driftwood jostled in eternal circles. She sulked and considered the

formalities of who should call on whom and who owed whom a call. New

York life had grown too busy for anybody to pay much attention to the

older reciprocities of etiquette.

Almost nobody called on Kedzie. She took a pride in smothering her

complaints from Jim, who was not very much alive to her hours. He was

busy, too. He had joined the Seventh Regiment of the New York National

Guard, and it absorbed a vast amount of his time. He had gone to

the Plattsburg encampment the summer before and had kept up with the

correspondence-school work in map problems, and finally he had obtained

a second lieutenancy in the Seventh Regiment. It was his little protest

against the unpreparedness of the nation as it toppled on the brink of

the crater where the European war boiled and smoked.

One midnight after a drill he found Kedzie crying bitterly. He took her

in his arms, and his tenderness softened her pride so that she wept

like a disconsolate baby and told him how lonely she was. Nobody called;

nobody invited her out; nobody took her places. She had no friends, and

her husband had abandoned her for his old regiment.

He was deeply touched by her woe and promised that he would take better

care of her. But his military engagements were not elastic. He dared not

neglect them. They took more and more of his evenings and invaded his

days. Besides, he was poor company for Kedzie's mood. He had little

of the humming-bird restlessness, and he could not keep up with her

flights. She had darted her beak into a flower, and its nectar was

finished for her before she had realized that it was a flower.

He felt that what she needed was friends of her own sex. There were

women enough who would accept Kedzie's company and gad with her, vie

with her quivering speed. But they were not the sort he wanted her to

fly with. He wanted her to make friends with the Charity Coe type.

The next day Jim grew desperate enough to call on Charity. She was out,

but expected in at any moment. He sat down to wait for her. The room,

the books, the piano--all spoke of her lovingly and lovably. He went

to the piano and found there the song she had played for him once in

Newport--“Go, Lovely Rose!”

He thought it a marvelous coincidence that it should be there on the

rack. Like most coincidences, this was not hard to explain. It chanced

to be there because Charity played it often. She was lonelier than

Kedzie and almost as helpless to amuse herself. She read vastly, but the

stories of other people's unhappy loves were a poor anodyne for her own.

She thought incessantly of Jim Dyckman. Remembering the song she had

played for him, and his bitter comment on the verse, “Tell her that

wastes her time and me,” she hunted it out, and the plaintive chimes of

Carpenter's music made a knell for her own hopes.

She had played it this very afternoon and wrought herself to such

sardonic regret that she forced herself into the open air. She walked a

mile or two, but slunk back home again to be rid of the crowds.

She was thinking of Dyckman when she entered her house. She let herself

in with her own key, and, walking into the drawing-room, surprised him

at the piano, reading the tender elegy of the rose.

“Jim!” she gasped.

“Charity!” he groaned.

Their souls seemed to rush from their bodies and embrace. But their

bodies stood fast before the abyss that gaped between them.

She whipped off her glove before she gave him her hand. That meeting of

the flesh was so bitter-sweet that their hands unclasped guiltily by a

kind of honest instinct of danger.

“What on earth brought you here?” Charity faltered.

“Why--I--Well, you see--it's like this.” He groped for words, but,

having no genius in invention, he blurted the truth helplessly: “I came

to ask you if you wouldn't--You see, my poor wife isn't making out very

well with people--she's lonesome--and blue--and--why can't you lend a

hand and make friends with her?”

Charity laughed aloud. “Oh, Jim, Jim, what a darling old numskull you

are!”

“In general, yes; but why just now?”

“Your wife will never make friends with me.”

“Of course she will. She's lonely enough to take up with anybody.”

“Thanks!”

“Well, will you call?”

“Have you told her you were going to ask me to?”

“Not yet.”

“Then I'll call, on one condition.”

“What's that, Charity Coe?”

“That you don't tell her. You'd better not, or she'll have my eyes and

your scalp.”

“But you'll call, won't you?”

“Of course. Anything you say--always.”

“You're the damnedest decentest woman in the world, Charity Coe; and

if--”

He paused. It is just as well not to go iffing about such matters.

Charity stopped short in her laughter. She and Jim stared at each other

again across that abyss. It was terribly deep, but only a step over.

They heard the door-bell faintly, and a sense of guilt confused them

again. Jim rose and wished himself out of it.

“It's only Prissy Atterbury,” said Charity.

Prissy came in tugging at the ferocious mustaches that only emphasized

his lady-like carriage. He paused on the door-sill to stare and gasp,

“My Gawd, at it again!”

They did not know what he meant, and he would not explain that he had

seen them together ages ago and spread the gossip that they were in

intrigue. The coincidence of his recurrence on their scene was not

strange, for Charity had been using him as a kind of messenger-boy.

Prissy was that sort. He looked the gentleman and was, a somewhat too

gentle gentleman, but very useful to ladies who needed an uncompromising

escort and were no longer young enough to permit of chaperonage. He

was considered perfectly harmless, but he was a fiend of gossip, and he

rejoiced in the recrudescence of the Jim and Charity affair.

Jim confirmed Prissy's eager suspicions by taking himself off with a

maximum of embarrassment. Charity went to the door with him--to kiss him

good-by, as Prissy gloatingly supposed, but actually to say:

“I'll call on your wife to-morrow.”

“You're an angel,” said Jim, and meant it.

He thought all the way home what an angel she was, and Charity was

thinking at the same time what a fool she had been to let Peter Cheever

dazzle her to the fact that Jim Dyckman was the one man in the world

that she belonged to. She needed just him and he just her.

CHAPTER XII

Sometimes Jim Dyckman was foolish enough to wish that he had been his

wife's first lover. But a man has to get up pretty early to be that to

any woman. The minxes begin to flirt with the milk-bottle, then with

the doctor, and then to cherish a precocious passion for the first rag

sailor-doll.

Jim had come as near as any man may to being a woman's first love in

the case of Charity, and what good had it done him? He was the first

boy Charity had ever played with. Her nurse had bragged about her to

his nurse when Charity was just beginning to take notice of other than

alimentary things. By that time Jim was a blase roue of five and his

main interest in Charity was a desire to poke his finger into the soft

spot in her head.

The nurses restrained him in time, and his proud, young, little mother

of then, when she heard of it, decided that he was destined to be a

great explorer. His young father sniffed that he was more likely to be

a gynecologist. They had a grand quarrel over their son's future. He

became none of the things they feared or hoped that he would and he

carried out none of his own early ambitions.

His first impressions of Charity had ranged from contempt, through

curiosity, to protectiveness and affection. She got his heart first by

being helpless. He began by picking up the things she let fall from her

carriage or threw overboard and immediately cried for again. She had

been human enough to do a good deal of that. When things cumbered her

crib or her perambulator she brushed them into space and then repented

after them.

Following her marriage to Peter Cheever she did just that with Jim

Dyckman. His love cluttered up her domestic serenity and she chucked it

overboard. And then she wanted it again. Then her husband chucked her

overboard and she felt that it would not be so lonesome out there since

Jim would be out there, too. But she found that he had picked himself up

and toddled away with Kedzie. And now he could not pick Charity up any

more. His wife wouldn't let him.

Jim did not know that he wanted to pick Charity up again till he called

on her to ask her to call on his wife and pick Kedzie up out of her

loneliness. It was a terrific thought to the simple-minded Jim when it

came over him that the Charity Coe he had adored and given up as beyond

his reach on her high pedestal was now lying at the foot of it with no

worshiper at all.

Jim was the very reverse of a snob. Kedzie had won his devotion by

seeming to need it. She had lost it by showing that she cared less

for him than for the things she thought he could get for her. And now

Charity needed his love.

There were two potent principles in Jim's nature, as in many another

man's and woman's; one was an instant eagerness to help anybody in

trouble; another was an instant resentment of any coercion. Jim could

endure neither bossing nor being bossed; restraint of any sort irked

him. There may have been Irish blood in him, but at any rate the saying

was as true of him as of the typical Irishman--“You can lead him to hell

easier than you can drive him an inch.”

When Jim left Charity's house his heart ached to think of her

distressful with loneliness. When he realized that somehow Kedzie was

automatically preventing him from helping Charity his marital bonds

began to chafe. He began to understand that matrimony was hampering his

freedom. He had something to resent on his own behalf.

He had been so troubled with the thought of his shortcomings in devotion

to Kedzie that he had not pondered how much he had surrendered. He had

repented his inability to give Kedzie his entire and fanatic love. He

saw that he had at least given his precious liberty of soul into her

little hands.

Galled as he was at this comprehension, he began to think over the

lessons of his honeymoon and to see that Kedzie had not given him

entirety of devotion any more than he her. Little selfishnesses,

exactions, tyrannies, petulances, began to recur to him.

He was in the dangerous frame of mind of a bridegroom thinking things

over. At that time it behooves the bride to exert her fascinations and

prove her devotion as never before.

Kedzie, knowing nothing of Jim's call on Charity or of his new mood,

chanced to be in a most unfortunate humor. She criticized Jim; she

declined to be amused or entertained; rebuffed his advances, ridiculed

his pretensions of love. She even chose to denounce his mother for her

heartlessness, his sister for her neglect, his father for his snobbery.

That is always bad business. It puts a husband at bay with his back

against the foundation walls of loyalty. They quarreled wonderfully and

slept dos-a-dos. They did not speak the next morning.

The next afternoon Jim saw to his dismay that Kedzie was putting on her

hat and gloves to go out on a shopping-cruise. If she went she would

miss Charity's call.

He knew that he ought not to tell her of Charity's visit in advance. In

fact, Charity had pledged him to a benevolent conspiracy in the matter.

He put up a flag of truce and resumed diplomatic relations.

With the diplomatic cunning of a hippopotamus he tried to decoy Kedzie

into staying at home awhile. His ponderous subtlety aroused Kedzie's

suspicions, and at length he confirmed them by desperately confessing:

“Mrs. Cheever is going to call.”

Kedzie's first thought was of Peter Cheever's new wife, who had been

taken up by a certain set of those whom one may call loose-principled or

divinely tolerant, as one's own prejudices direct. Kedzie could not yet

afford to be so forgiving. She flared up.

“Mrs. Cheever! That Zada thing going to call on me? How dare she!”

“Of course not.”

“Oh, the other one, then?”

“Yes.”

“The abandoned one?”

“That's pretty rough. She's been very kind to you and she wants to be

again.”

“Where did you learn so much?”

“We were talking about you.”

“Oh, you were, were you? That's nice! And where was all this?”

He indulged in a concessive lie for the sake or the peace. “I met her in

the street and walked along with her.”

“Fine! And how did my name come to come up?”

“It naturally would. I was saying that I wished she'd--er--I wished that

you and she might be friends.”

“So that you and she could see each other still oftener, I suppose.”

“It's rotten of you to say that.”

“And it's rottener of you to go talking to another woman about your

wife.”

“But it was in the friendliest spirit, and she took it so.”

“I see! Her first name is Charity and I'm to be one of her patients.

Well, you can receive her yourself. I don't want any of her old alms! I

won't be here!”

“Oh yes, you will!”

“Oh no, I won't!”

“You can't be as ill-mannered as that!”

“You talk to me of manners! Why, I've seen manners in your gang that

would disgrace a brakeman and a lunch-counter girl on one of dad's

railroads.” Her father already had railroads! So many people had them in

the crowd she met that Kedzie was not strong enough to deny her father

one or two.

Kedzie had taken the most violent dislike to Charity for a dozen

reasons, all of them perfectly human and natural, and nasty and

unjustifiable, and therefore ineradicable. The first one was that odious

matter of obligation. Gratitude has been wisely diagnosticated as a

lively sense of benefits to come. The deadly sense of benefits gone by

is known as ingratitude.

No one knows just what the divinely unpardonable sin is, but the humanly

or at least womanly unpardonable sin is to have known one's husband well

before the wife met him, and then to try to be nice to the wife. To have

known the wife in her humble days and to have done her a favor makes the

sin unmentionable as well as unpardonable.

Jim Dyckman had involved himself in Charity's crime by trying to get

Charity to help his wife again. It was bad enough that Charity had got

Kedzie a job in the past and had sent Jim Dyckman to make sure that she

got it. But for Jim, after Kedzie and he had been married and all, to

ask Charity to rescue Kedzie from her social failure was monstrous.

The fact that Jim had felt sorry for his lonely Kedzie marooned on an

iceberg in mid-society was humiliating enough; but for Charity to dare

to feel sorry for Kedzie, too, and to come sailing after her--Kedzie

shuddered when she thought of it.

She fought with her husband until it was too late for her to get away.

Charity's card came in while they were still wrangling. Kedzie announced

that she was not at home. Jim told the servant, “Wait!” and gave Kedzie

a look that she rather enjoyed. It was what they call a caveman look.

She felt that he already had his hands in her hair and was dragging her

across the floor bumpitty-bump. It made her scalp creep deliciously.

She was rather tempted to goad him on to action. It would have a movie

thrill.

But the look faded from Jim's eye and the blaze of wrath dulled to a

gray contempt. She was afraid that he might call her what she had once

overheard Pet Bettany call her--“A common little mucker.” That sort of

contempt seared like a splash of vitriol.

Kedzie, like Zada, was a self-made lady and she wanted to conceal the

authorship from the great-grandmother-built ladies she encountered.

She pouted a moment, then she said to the servant, “We'll see her.” She

turned to Jim. “Come along. I'll go and pet your old cat and get her off

my chest.”

CHAPTER XIII

Jim thudded dismally along in her wake. Charity was in the drawing-room

wearing her politest face. She could tell from Kedzie's very pose that

she was as welcome as a submarine.

Kedzie said, “Awfully decent of you to come,” and gave her a handful of

cold, limp fingers.

Charity politely pretended that she had called unexpectedly and that

she was in dire need of Kedzie's aid. She made herself unwittingly

ridiculous in the eyes of Kedzie, who knew and despised her motive, not

appreciating at all the consideration Charity was trying to show.

“I'm sorry to bother you, Mrs. Dyckman,” Charity began, “but I've got to

throw myself on your mercy. A few of us are getting up a new stunt for

the settlement-work fund. It is to be rather elaborate and ought to make

a lot of money. It is to represent a day in the life of a New York Bud.

You can have your choice of several roles, and I hope you will lend us a

hand.”

Kedzie had heard of this project and she had gnawed her bitter heart in

a chagrin of yearning to take part in it. She had not been invited, and

she had blenched every time she thought of it. She was so much relieved

at being asked that she almost forgave Charity for her benevolence. She

stammered: “It's awfully decent of you to ask me. I'll do my bit with

the greatest of pleasure.”

She rather regretted those last five words. They were a bit _Nimrimmy._

Charity sketched the program for her.

“The Bud is discovered in bed. A street piano wakes her. There is to be

a dance to a hurdy-gurdy. Then the Bud has breakfast. It is served by

a dancing maid and butler. Tom Duane is to be the butler. You could

be--no, you wouldn't fancy the maid, I imagine.”

Kedzie did not fancy the maid.

Charity went on: “The girl dresses and goes to a rehearsal of the Junior

League. That's to be a ballet of harlequins and columbines. She goes

from there to her dressmaker's. I am to play the dressmaker. I have

my _mannequins,_ and you might want to play one of those and wear the

latest thing--or you could be one of the customers. You can think it

over.

“Then the girl is seen reading a magazine and there is a dance of cover

girls. If you have any favorite illustrator you could be one of his

types.

“Next the Bud goes to an art exhibition. This year Zuloaga is the craze,

and several of his canvases will come to life. Do you care for Zuloaga?”

“Immensely, but--” Kedzie said, wondering just what Zuloaga did to his

canvases. She had seen a cubist exhibition that gave her a headache, and

she thought it might have something to do with Zulus.

Charity ran on: “After dinner the Bud goes to the theater and sees

a pantomime and a series of ballets, dolls of the nations--Chinese,

Polish, also nursery characters. You could select something in one of

those dances, perhaps.

“And last of all there is a chimney-sweeps' dance as the worn-out Bud

crawls into bed. If none of these suit you we'd be glad to have any

suggestion that occurs to you. Of course, a girl of to-day does a

thousand more things than I've mentioned. But the main thing is, we want

you to help us out.

“You are--if you'll forgive me for slapping you in the face with

a bouquet--you are exquisitely beautiful and I know that you dance

exquisitely.”

“How do you know that?” Kedzie asked, rashly.

“I saw you once as a--” Charity paused, seeing the red run across

Kedzie's face. She had stumbled into Kedzie's past again, and Kedzie's

resentment braced her hurt pride.

Charity tried to mend matters by a little advice: “You mustn't blush, my

dear Mrs. Dyckman. If I were in your place I'd go around bragging about

it. To have been a Greek dancer, what a beautiful past!”

“Thanks!” said Kedzie, curtly, with basilisk eyes. “I think I'd rather

not dance any more. I'm an old married woman now. If you don't

mind, I'll be one of the customers at your shop. I'll come in in the

rippingest gown Jim can buy. I'll feel more comfortable, too, under your

protection, Mrs. Cheever.”

Jim laughed and Kedzie grinned. But she was canny. She was thinking that

she would be safest among that pack of wolves if she relied on her

money to buy something dazzling rather than on the beauty that Charity

alleged. She did not want to dance before those people again. She would

never forget how her foot had slipped at Newport.

Thirdly, she felt that she would be sheltered a little from persecution

beneath the wing of Charity. It rather pleased her to treat Charity as a

motherly sort of person. It is the most deliciously malicious compliment

a woman can pay another.

Charity did not fail to receive the stab. But it amused her so far

as she was concerned. She felt that Kedzie was like one of those

incorrigible _gamines_ who throw things at kindly visitors to the slums.

She felt sorry for Jim, and wondered again by what strange devices he

had been led to marry so incompatible a girl as Kedzie.

Jim wondered, too. He sat and watched the two women, wondering as men

do when they see women painfully courteous to each other; wondering as

women must when they see men polite to their enemies.

Charity and Kedzie prattled on in a kind of two-story conversation, and

Jim studied them with shameless objectivity. He hardly heard what they

said. He watched the pantomime of their so different souls and bodies:

Charity, lean and smart and aristocratic, beautiful in a peculiar

mixture of sophistication and tenderness; Kedzie, small and nymph-like

and plebeian, beautiful in a mixture of innocence and hardness of heart.

Charity's body was like the work of a dashing painter--long lines drawn

with brave force and direction. Kedzie's body was a thing of dainty

curves and timidities. Charity was fashionable and wise, but her wisdom

had lifted her above pettiness. Kedzie was of the village, for all her

Parisian garb, and she had cunning, which is the lowest form of wisdom.

When at length Charity left, Jim and Kedzie sat brooding. Kedzie wanted

to say something nice about Charity and was afraid to. The poor child

always distrusted her generous impulses. She thought it cleverer to

withhold trust from everybody, lest she misplace it in somebody. At

length an imp of perversity taught her how to get rid of the credit she

owed to Charity. She spoke after a long silence.

“Mrs. Cheever must be horribly fond of you.”

“Why do you say that?” said Jim, startled.

“Because she's so nice to me.”

Jim groaned with disgust. Kedzie giggled, accepting the groan as

confession of a palpable hit. She sat musing on various costumes she

might wear. She had a woman's memory for things she had caught a

glimpse of in a shop-window or in a fashion magazine; she had a woman's

imagination for dressing herself up mentally.

As a trained mathematician can do amazing sums in his head, so Kedzie

could juggle modes and combinations, colors and stuffs, and wrap hem

about herself. While Kedzie composed her new gown, her husband studied

her, still wondering at her and his inability to get past the barriers

of her flesh to her soul. Charity's flesh seemed but the expression of

herself. It was cordial and benevolent, warm and expressive in his eyes.

Her hands were for handclasp, her lips for good words, her eyes for

honest language. He had not embraced her except in dances years before,

and in that one quickly broken embrace at Newport. He had not kissed her

since they had been boy and girl lovers, but the savor of her lips was

still sweet in his memory. He felt that he knew her soul utterly.

He had possessed all the advantages of Kedzie without seeming to get

acquainted with the ultimate interior Kedzie at all. She was to him

well-known flesh inhabited by a total stranger, who fled from him

mysteriously. When she embraced him she held him aloof. When she kissed

him her lips pressed him back. He could not outgrow the feeling that

their life together was rather a reckless flirtation than a communion of

merged souls.

He stared at her now and saw dark eyebrows and eyelashes etched on a

white skin, starred with irises of strange hue, a nose deftly shaped,

a mouth as pretty and as impersonal as a flower, a throat of some

ineffably exquisite petal material. She sat with one knee lifted a

little and clasped in her hands, and there was something miraculous

about the felicity of the lines, the arms penciled downward from the

shoulders and meeting in the delicately contoured buckle of her ten

fingers, the thigh springing in a suave arc from the confluent planes

of her torse, the straight shin to the curve of instep and toe and heel.

Her hair was an altogether incredible extravagance of manufacture.

George Meredith has described a woman's hair once for all, and if Jim

had ever read anything so important as _The Egoist_ he would have said

that Kedzie's poll was illustrated in that wonderfully coiffed hair-like

sentence picturing Clara Middleton and “the softly dusky nape of her

neck, where this way and that the little lighter-colored irreclaimable

curls running truant from the comb and the knot-curls, half-curls,

root-curls, vine-ringlets, wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of

down, blown wisps--waved or fell, waved over or up to involutedly, or

strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken paws, hardly

any of them much thicker than a crayon shading, cunninger than long,

round locks of gold to trick the heart.”

Kedzie's hair was as fascinating as that, and she had many graces and

charms. For a while they had proved fascinating, but a man does not want

to have a cartoon, however complexly beautiful, for a wife. Jim wanted a

congenial companion--that is to say, he wanted Charity Coe.

But he could not have her. If he had been one of the patriarchs or a

virtuous man of Mohammedan stock he could have tried, by marrying a

female quartet, to make up one good, all-round wife. But he was doomed

to a single try, and he had picked the wrong one.

CHAPTER XIV

What is a man to do who realizes that he has married the wrong woman?

The agonies of the woman who has been married to the wrong man have been

celebrated innumerably and vats of tears spilled over them. She used to

be consigned to a husband by parental choice and compulsion. Those days

are part of the good old times.

For a man there never has been any sympathy, since he has not usually

been the victim of parental despotism in the matter of selecting

a spouse, or, when he has been, he has had certain privileges of

excursion. The excursion is still a popular form of mitigating the

severities of an unsuccessful marriage. Some commit murder, some commit

suicide, some commit other things. Marriage is the one field in which

instinct is least trustworthy and it is the one field in which it is

accounted immoral to repent errors of judgments or to correct them.

The law has found it well to concede a good deal to the criminals. After

centuries of vain cruelty it was found that certain people simply

could not be made good by any rigor of confinement or any heaping up

of punishment. So the law has come down to the criminal with results no

worse at the worst than before, and sublimely better at the best than

before. The civil law is doing the same slowly for the mal-married.

But Jim Dyckman was not even dreaming of seeking a rescue from his

mistake by way of a divorce.

Charity had entered the divorce court and she would always bear the

reproach of some of her most valued friends. She could not imaginably

encourage Jim Dyckman to free himself by the same channel, and if he

did, how could Charity marry him? The marriage of two divorced persons

would provoke a tempest of horror from part of the world, and gales of

ridicule from the rest. Besides, there was no sign that Kedzie would

ever give Jim cause for divorce, or that he would make use of it if she

gave it him.

Charity could not help pondering the situation, for she saw that Jim was

hopelessly mismated. Jim could not help pondering the situation, for he

saw the same thing. But he made no plans for release. Kedzie had given

no hint of an inclination to misconduct. She was certainly not going

to follow Gilfoyle into the beyond. Jim was left helpless with an

unanswerable riddle on his mind.

He could only curse himself for being fool enough to get married, and

join the vast club of the Repenters at Leisure. He felt sorrier for

Kedzie than ever, but he also felt sorry for himself.

The better he came to know his wife the more he came to know how alien

she was to him in how many ways. The things she wanted to be or seem

were utterly foreign to his own ideals, and if people's ambitions war

what hope have they of sympathy?

Jim could not help noticing how Kedzie was progressing in her snobology.

She had had many languages to learn in her brief day. She had had to

change from Missouri to flat New York, then upward through various

strata of diction. She had learned to speak with a certain elegance as

a movie princess. But she had learned that people of social position

do not talk on stilts outside of fiction. She had since been trying to

acquire the rough slang of her set. It was not easy to be glib in

it. She had attained only a careful carelessness as yet. But she was

learning! As soon as she had attained a careless carelessness she would

be qualified.

But there was another difficulty. She had not yet been able to make up

her mind as to what character she should play in her new world. That

had to be settled before she could make her final choice of dialect, for

dialect is character, and she had found, to her surprise, that the upper

world contained as great a variety of characters as any other level.

There were tomboys and hoydens and solemn students; hard-working

sculptresses and dreamy poetesses; girls who wanted to be boys, and

girls who wanted to be nuns; girls who were frantic to vote, and girls

who loathed the thought of independence; girls who ached to shock

people, and girls of the prunes-and-prismatic type, patricians and

precisians, anarchists and Bohemians.

She encountered girls who talked appallingly about breeding dogs and

babies, about Freudian erotics, and new schools of art, Futurism,

Vorticism. Their main interest was Ismism. There were others whose

intellectuality ran to new card-mathematics in pirate bridge, gambling

algebra.

Kedzie was in a chaos of sincere convictions and even more sincere

affectations. She could not select an attitude for herself. She could

not recapture her own soul or decide what she wanted to be.

Her life was busy. She had to learn French and numberless intricacies

of fashionable ethics. She had already learned to ride a horse for her

moving-picture work, but Jim warned her that she must learn to jump

so that she could follow the hounds with him. She watched pupils in

hurdling and dreaded to add that to her accomplishments. It made her

seasick to witness the race to the barrier, the gathering of the

horse, the launch into space, the clatter of the top bar as it came off

sometimes, the grunting thud of the big brute as he returned to earth

and galloped away, not always with the rider still aboard. She imagined

herself skirled along the tan-bark and was afraid.

She had to summon all the courage of her movie days before she

could intrust herself to a riding-master. Soon she grew to like the

excitement; she learned to charge a fence, hand the horse his head at

the right moment, and take him up at the exact second. And by and by

she was laughing at other beginners and talking horsy talk with such

assurance that she rather gave the impression of tracing straight back

to the Centaur family.

Likewise now she watched other new-comers and rank outsiders break into

the sacred inclosure. She mocked them and derided them. She regretted

aloud the unfortunate marriages of well-born fellows with actresses and

commoners from beyond the pale. Among the first French words she learned

to use was _mesalliance_.

She began to wonder if she had not made one herself. She found inside

the paddock so many men more brilliant than her husband. There were

as many types of man as of woman--the earnest, the ascetic, the

socialistic, the pious youth, wastrels, rakes, fops. There were richer

men than Jim and men of still older family, men of even greater wealth.

She had been married only a few weeks and she was already speculating in

comparisons! It was a more or less inescapable result of a marriage

for ambition, since each ambition achieved opens a horizon of further

ambitions.

She had a brief spell of delight in the rehearsals of the “Day of

the Bud.” She met new people informally and they were all so shy and

self-conscious that they were not inclined to resent Kedzie's intrusion.

Kedzie would once have ridiculed them as “amachoors”; now she

wished that she, too, were only an “amaturr” instead of a reformed

professional.

If some of the ladies snubbed her she found others that cultivated her;

a few of the humbler women even toadied to her position; a few of the

men snuggled up to her picturesque beauty. She snubbed them with vigor.

She hated them and felt smirched by their challenges. That was splendid

of her.

She was beginning to find herself and her party, but outside the circle

of Jim's immediate entourage. And Jim was beginning to find himself a

new ambition and a new circle of friends.

CHAPTER XV

Jim was becoming quite the military man. His new passion took him away

from womankind, saved him from temptation, and freed his thoughts from

the obsession of either Kedzie or Charity. The whole nation was

turning again toward soldiering, drifting slowly and resistingly, but

helplessly, into the very things it had long denounced as Prussianism

and conscription. A universal mobilization was brewing that should one

day compel all men and all women, even little boys and girls and the

very old, to become part of a giant machinery for warfare.

England, too, had railed at conscription, and when the war smote her had

seen her little army of a quarter of a million almost annihilated under

the first avalanche of the German descent toward Paris. England had

gathered volunteers and trained them behind the bulwark of her navy and

the red wall of the bleeding French nation. And England had given up

volunteering and gone into the business of making everybody, without

distinction of sex, age, or degree, contribute life and liberty and

luxury to the common cause.

Behind the bulwark of the British fleet and the Allied armies the United

States had debated, not for weeks or months, but for years with academic

sloth the enlargement of its tiny army. It had accomplished only the

debate, a ludicrous haggle between those who turned their backs on the

world war and said that war was impossible and those who declared that

it was inevitable.

Some Americans asserted that it was none of America's business what

happened in Europe or how many American citizens died on the free seas,

and that the one way to bring war into our country was to be prepared

for it. Other Americans grew angry enough to forswear their allegiance

to a nation of poltroons and dotards; they went to France or Canada

to fight or fly for the Allies. Many of them died. Yet others tried to

equip themselves at home somewhat to meet the red flood when it should

break the dam and sweep across the American borders.

Of these last was Jim Dyckman. Since he had joined the National Guard

he gave it more and more of his enthusiasm. Unhappily married men have

always fled to the barracks or the deck as ill-mated women fled to

convents.

Night after night Jim spent at the armory, drilling with his company,

conferring at headquarters, laboring for recruits, toiling over the

paper work.

Kedzie pouted awhile at his patriotism, ridiculed it and hated it, and

then accepted it as a matter of course. She could either stay at home

and read herself to sleep or join the crowds. The rehearsals of the “Day

of the Bud” gave her some business, and she picked up a few new friends.

She made her appearance with the company in a three-nights' performance

that netted several thousands of dollars. Jim saw her once. She was

gorgeous, a little too gorgeous. She did not belong. She felt it

herself, and overworked her carelessness. Her non-success hurt her

bitterly. People did not say of her, as in the movies, “How sweet!” but,

“Rather common!”

And now Kedzie was bewildered and lost. She found no comfort in Jim. She

had to seek companionship somewhere. At first she made her engagements

only on Jim's drill nights. Soon she made them on nights when he was

free.

When they met, each found the other's experiences of no importance. Her

indifference to the portentous meanings and campaigns of the European

war dazed him. He wondered how any human being could live in such

epochal weeks and take no thought of events. She was not interested even

in the accounts of the marvelous sufferings of women and their marvelous

achievements in the munition-plants, the fields, and hospitals. He

watched Kedzie skip the head-lines detailing some sublime feat of

endeavor like the defense of Verdun and turn to the page where her name

was included or not among the guests at a dinner well advertised by the

hostess. She would skip the pages of photographs showing forth the daily

epics of Europe and ponder the illustrations of some new smock. He

shook his head over her as if she were a doll come to life and nothing

stirring within but a music-box and a sawdust heart. He was disappointed

in her--abysmally. He devoted himself to his military work as if he were

a bachelor.

For the third year now the Americans were still discussing just what

sort of army it should have, and meanwhile getting none at all.

The opponents of preparedness grew so ferocious in their attacks on

the pleaders for troops that the word “pacifist” became ironical. They

seemed to think it a crime to assault anybody but a fellow-countryman.

All the while the various factions of unhappy Mexico fought together

and threatened the peace of the United States. The Government that had

helped drag President Huerta from his chair with the help of Villa

and Carranza found itself in turn at odds with both its allies and its

allies at war with each other.

There were scenes of rapine and flights of refugees that brought a

little of Belgium to our frontier. And then the sombreros came over the

border at Columbus, New Mexico, one night with massacre and escape, and

the tiny American army under Pershing went over the border to get its

erstwhile ally, Villa, dead or alive, and got him neither way.

And still Congress pondered the question of the army as if it were

something as remote and patient as a problem in sidereal arithmetic.

Some asked for volunteers and some for universal service and some for

neither. The National Guard was a bone of contention, and when the hour

struck it was the only bone there was.

In June Jim Dyckman went to the officers' school of application at

Peekskill for a week to get a smattering of tuition under Regular Army

instructors. He slept on a cot in a tent and studied map-making and

military bookkeeping and mimic warfare, and was tremendously happy.

Kedzie made a bad week of it. She missed him sadly. There was no one to

quarrel with or make up with. When he came back late Saturday night she

was so glad to see him that she cried blissfully upon his proud bosom.

They had a little imitation honeymoon and went a-motoring on Sunday out

into the lands where June was embroidering the grass with flowers and

shaking the petals off the branches where young fruit was fashioning.

They discussed their summer schemes and she dreaded the knowledge that

in July he must go to the manoeuvers for three weeks. They agreed to get

aboard his yacht for a little cruise before that dreadful interlude.

And then, early the next morning, the morning of the 19th of June, the

knuckles of his valet on the door woke Jim from his slumber and a voice

through the panels murmured:

“Very sorry, sir, but you are wanted on the telephone, sir--it's your

regiment.”

That was the way the Paul Reveres of 1916 summoned the troops to arms.

Mr. Minute-Man Dyckman sat on the edge of his bed in his silk pajamas

with the telephone-receiver at his ear, and yawned: “H'lo.... Who is

it?... What is it?... Oh, it's you, sergeant.... Yes?... No!... For

God's sake!... I'll get out right away.”

“What's the matter? Is the house on fire?” Kedzie gasped from her

pillow, half-awake and only half-afraid, so prettily befuddled she was

with sleep. She would have made a picture if Jim had had eyes to see her

as she struggled to one elbow and thrust with her other hand her

curls back into her nightcap, all askew. Her gown was sliding over one

shoulder down to her elbow and up to one out-thrust knee.

Jim put away the telephone and pondered a moment.

Kedzie caught at his arm. “What's the matter? Why don't you tell me!”

He spoke with a boyish pride of war and a husbandly solemnity: “The

President has called out the National Guard. We're to mobilize to-day

and get to the border as soon as we can. They hope that our regiment

will be the first to move.”

CHAPTER XVI

Kedzie's answer was a fierce seizure of him in her arms. She was palsied

with fright for him. She had seen more pictures of dead soldiers than

he knew, and now she saw her man shattered and tortured with wounds and

thirst. She felt in one swift shock what the wives of Europe had felt by

the million. She clung to Jim and sobbed:

“You sha'n't go! I won't let them take you! You belong to me!”

He gathered her awkwardly into his arms and they were more nearly

married then than they had ever been or should ever be again.

The pity of it! that only their separation could bring them together!

Fate is the original Irish-bullster.

Jim tried hurriedly to console Kedzie. He found her hard to make brave.

The early-morningness of the shock, the panic of scattered sleep, gave

her added terror. He had to be cruel at last. Without intention of humor

he said:

“Really, honey, you know you just can't keep the President waiting.”

He tore loose the tendrils of her fingers and ran to his own

dressing-room. She wept awhile, then rose to help accoutre him. He had

his uniform at home still.

In the Grecian simplicity of her nightgown, the very cream of silk, she

might have been Andromache harnessing Hector. Only there was no baby for

him to leave with her, no baby to shrink in fright from the horsehair

crest of the helmet that he did not wear.

When he was all dressed in his olive-drab she still could not let him

go. She held him with her soft arms and twiddled the gun-metal buttons

of his blouse. And when at length she must make an end of farewells she

hugged him with all her might and was glad that the hard buttons hurt

the delicate breast that he felt against him smotheringly sweet and

perilously yielding.

Not knowing how tame the event of all this war-like circumstance was to

prove, he suffered to the deeps of his being the keen ache of separation

that has wrung so many hearts in this eternally battling world. War, the

sunderer, had reached them with his great divorce.

When he was free of her at last she followed him and caught new kisses.

She ran shamelessly barefoot to the door to have the last of his lips,

called good-by to him when the elevator carried him into the pit, and

flung kisses downward after him. Then she stumbled back to her room and

cried aloud. Liliane, her maid, came to help her and Liliane wept with

her, knowing all too well what war could do to love.

Later Kedzie went to the armory and slipped through the massed crowds

to see Jim again. He was gloriously busy and it stirred her martially to

see his men come up, click heels, salute, report, ask questions, salute,

and retreat again.

A few excited days of recruiting and equipping and then the ceremony of

the muster-in. Jim spent his nights at home, but his terrified mother

and his none too stoical father were there to rival Kedzie in devotion.

Importance was in the air. There was a stir of history in the public

mood. The flags rippled with a new twinkle of stars and a fiercer

writhing of stripes. The red had the omen of blood.

On the third day there was a ruffle of drums and a crying of brass on

Fifth Avenue. People recalled the great days when the boys in blue had

paraded away to the wars. Only this regiment marched up, not down, the

Avenue. It was the Sixty-ninth, its flagstaff solid with the silver

rings of battle. It was moving north to the mobilization-camp.

On the ninth day the Seventh went down the Avenue, twelve hundred

strong, to entrain for Texas. The bullets of the foe were not the only

dangers. It was midsummer and these men were bound for the tropics and

the cursed fields of sand where the tarantula, the rattlesnake, and the

scorpion lurked under the cactus.

Jim's mother thought less of the Mexicans than of the fact that there

were no sleeping-cars even for the officers. They would get them on the

way, but it would be a fearsome journey ever southward into the heat,

six days in the troop-trains.

Kedzie was proud of her husband, quite conceited about him, glad that he

was marching instead of standing on the curb. But her heart, doubled in

bulk, pounded against her side like the leaden clapper of a broken bell.

Jim caught sight of her where she stood on the steps of his father's

house, and her eyes, bright with tears, saddened him. The fond gaze of

his mother touched another well-spring of emotion, and the big, proud

stare of his father another.

But when by chance among the mosaic of faces he saw Charity Coe there

was a sorrow in her look that made him stumble, and his heart lost step

with the music. Somehow it seemed cruelest of all to leave her there.

CHAPTER XVII

The town was monstrously lonely when Kedzie turned back to her

widowhood. Jim's mother and father and sister were touched by her grief

and begged her to make their home hers, but she shook her head.

For a while her grief and her pride sustained her. She was the Spartan

wife of the brave soldier. She even took up knitting as an appropriate

activity. She thought in socks.

But the hateful hours kept coming, the nights would not be brief, and

the days would not curtail their length nor quicken their pace. The

loathsome inevitable result arrived.

Even her grief began to bore her. Fidelity grew inane, and her young

heart shrieked aloud for diversion.

If battles had happened down there, if something stirring had only

appeared in the news, she could have taken some refreshment of

excitement from the situation. Heroic demands breed heroes and heroines,

but all that this crisis demanded was the fidelity of torpor, the

loyalty of a mollusk.

Nothing happened except the stupid chronicles of heat and monotony. The

rattlesnakes did not bite; the tarantulas scuttered away; the scorpions

were no worse than wasps. The Mexicans did not attack or raid or attempt

the assassinations which popular hostility accepted as their favorite

outdoor sport. Mexico continued her siesta while the United States

sentineled the bedroom.

Jim's letters told of scorching heat, of blinding duststorms, and

cloudbursts that made lakes of the camps, but nothing else happened

except the welter of routine.

The regiments had only police work to do, and the task grew irksome. Men

began to think of their neglected businesses. The men who stayed at home

were sharing bountifully in the prosperity of the times. The volunteers

at the Border were wasting their abilities for fifteen dollars a month.

The officers began to resign by the score, by the hundred. As many

enlisted men dropped out as could beg off. Jim could afford to stay; he

would not resign, though Kedzie wrote appeals and finally demands that

he return to his wretched wife.

Resentment replaced sorrow in her heart. She began to impute ugly

motives to his absence. The tradition of the alluring Mexican senorita

obsessed her. She imagined him engaged in wild romances with sullen

beauties. She was worried about guitar music and stilettoes.

If there were beautiful senoritas there in McAllen, Jim did not see

them. His dissipations were visits to the movie shows and excursions for

dinner to Mr. and Mrs. Riley's hotel at Mission. Liquor was forbidden

to officers and men under dire penalties, and Jim's conviviality was

restricted to the soda-water fountains. He became as rabid a consumer of

ice-cream cones and sundaes as a matinee girl. It was a burlesque of

war to make the angels hold their sides, if the angels could forget the

slaughter-house of Europe.

Jim felt that the Government had buncoed him into this comic-opera

chorus. He resented the service as an incarceration. But he would not

resign. For months he plodded the doleful round of his duties, ate bad

food, poured out unbelievable quantities of sweat and easily believable

quantities of profanity.

On the big practice hike through the wilderness who that saw him

staggering along, choked with alkali dust, knouted by the sun, stabbed

by the cactus, carrying two rifles belonging to worn-out soldiers in

addition to his own load, looking forward to the privilege of throwing

himself down by the roadside for ten minutes' respite, praying for the

arrival in camp with its paradise of a little shelter tent and beans

and bacon for dinner or for breakfast or supper--who could have believed

that he did not have to do it? That he had indeed at home soft luxuries,

a rosy little wife, a yacht, and servants to lift his shoes from the

floor for him?

It was easier, however, for him to get along thus there where everybody

did the same than it was for Kedzie to get along ascetically in New York

where nearly everybody she knew was gay.

She might have gone down to Texas to see Jim, but when he wrote her how

meager the accommodations were and how harsh the comforts, she pained

him by taking his advice. Like almost all the other wives, she stayed at

home and made the best of it.

The best was increasingly bad. Her lot, indeed, was none too cheerful.

After her clandestine marriage she had confronted her husband's parents,

and the result was not satisfactory. She had had no honeymoon, and her

husband's friends were chill toward her. Then he marched away and left

her for half a year.

She was young and pretty and restless. She had acquired a greed of

praise. She had given up her public glory to be her husband's private

prima donna; and then her audience had abandoned her.

Though her soul traveled far in a short time by the calendar, every

metamorphosis was slow and painful and imperceptible. She wept her eyes

dry; then moped until her gloom grew intolerable. The first diversion

she sought was really an effort of her grief to renew itself by a little

repose. Her first amusement was for her grief's sake. But before long

her diversions were undertaken for diversion's sake.

She had to have friends and she had to take what she could get. The more

earnest elements of society did not interest her, nor she them. The fast

crowd disgusted her at first, but remained the only one that did not

repulse her advances.

Her first glimpses of the revelers filled her with repugnance and

confirmed her in what she had heard and read of the wickedness of the

rich. The fact that she had seen also the virtuous rich, solemn rich,

religious rich, miserly rich, was forgotten. The fact that in every

stage of means there are the same classes escaped her memory. She had

known of middle classes where libertinism flourished, had known of

licentiousness among the poor shopkeepers, shoddy intriguers in the

humble boarding-houses.

But now she felt that money made vice and forgot that vice is one of the

amusements accessible to the very poorest, to all who inherit flesh and

its appetites.

Gradually she forgot her horror of dissipation. The outswirling eddy

of the gayer crowd began to gather and compel her feet. She lacked

the wisdom to attract the intellectuals, the culture to run with the

artistic and musical sets, the lineage to satisfy that curious few who

find a congeniality in the fact that their ancestors were respectable

and recorded persons.

In the fast gang she did not need to have or use her brains. She did not

need a genealogy. Her beauty was her admission-fee. Her restlessness was

her qualification.

Those who were careless of their own behavior were careless of their

accomplices. They accepted Kedzie without scruple. They accepted

especially the invitations she could well afford. She ceased to be

afraid of a compliment. She grew addicted to flattery. She learned to

take a joke off-color and match it in shade.

She met women of malodorous reputation and found that they were not

so black as they had been painted. She learned how warm-hearted and

charitable a woman could be for whom the world had a cold shoulder and

no charity.

She extended her tolerance from men whose escapades had been national

topics to women who had been involved in distinguished scandals and were

busily involving themselves anew. Being tolerant of them, he had to be

tolerant of their ways. Forgiving the sinner helps to forgive the sin.

There are few things more endearing than forgiveness. One of the most

appealing figures in literature and art is the forgiven woman taken in

adultery.

And thus by easy stages and generous concessions Kedzie, who had begun

her second marriage with the strictest ideals of behavior, found herself

surrounded by people of a loose-reined life. Things once abhorred became

familiar, amusing, charming.

It was increasingly difficult to resent advances toward her own citadel

which she had smiled at in others. She grew more and more gracious

toward a narrowing group of men till the safety-in-numbers approached

the peril-in-fewness. She grew more and more gracious to a widening

group of women, and they brought along their men.

Kedzie even forgave Pet Bettany and struck up a friendship with her.

Pet apologized to her other friends for taking up with Kedzie, by

the sufficient plea, “She gives such good food and drink at her

boarding-house.”

Kedzie found Pet intensely comforting since Pet was full of gossip and

satirized with contempt the people who had been treating Kedzie with

contempt. It is mighty pleasant to hear of the foibles of our superiors.

The illusion of rising is acquired by bringing things down to us as well

as by rising to them. When Pet told Kedzie something belittling about

somebody big Kedzie felt herself enlarged.

Pet had another influence on Kedzie. Pet was no more contemptuous of

aristocrats than she was of people who were good or tried to be, or,

failing that, kept up a decent pretense.

Pet made a snobbery of vice and had many an anecdote of the lapses of

the respectable and the circumspectable. Her railing way brought virtue

itself into disrepute and Kedzie was frightened out of her last few

senses. She fell under the tyranny of the _risque_, which is as fell as

the tyranny of the prudish.

Prissy Atterbury had told Pet without delay of meeting Jim Dyckman at

Charity's home. Now that Pet was a crony of Kedzie's she recalled the

story. Finding Kedzie one day suffering from an attack of scruples, and

declining to accept an invitation because “Jim might not like it,” Pet

laughed:

“Oh, Jim! What right has he got to kick? He didn't lose much time

getting back to his Charity Coe after he married you.”

“His Charity Coe!” Kedzie gasped. “What do you mean by his Charity Coe?”

“Why, his old reliable sweetheart. He's been silly about her since

babyhood. When she married Pete Cheever he moped like a sick hound. And

didn't he beat up Pete in a club only a few days before he married you?”

This was all news to Kedzie and it sickened her. She demanded more

poison, and Pet ladled it out joyously.

She told Kedzie how Prissy Atterbury found Jim at Charity's home.

But Kedzie remembered vividly that Jim had said he met Charity on the

street. And now she had caught him in a lie, a woman-lie! He was not

there to explain that he visited Charity in Kedzie's behalf, and if he

had explained it would only have embittered her the more.

Being quite convinced now of Jim's perfidy, she denied the possibility

of it.

“Jim's square, I'm sure. There couldn't be anything wrong with him. And

Mrs. Cheever is an awful prig, everybody says.”

Pet whooped with laughter: “They're the worst sort. Why, only a couple

of years ago Jim and Charity were up in the Adirondacks alone together.

Prissy Atterbury caught them sneaking back.”

So one lie was used to bolster another. The firmest structures can

be thus established by locking together things that will not stand

alone--as soldiers stack arms. Pet went on stacking lies and Kedzie

grew more and more distressed, then infuriated. Her bitterness against

Charity grew the more acid. Charity's good repute became now the

whitewash on a sepulcher of corruption. Her resentment of the woman's

imagined hypocrisy and of her husband's apparent duplicity blazed into

an eagerness for vengeance--the classic vengeance of punishing a crime

by committing another of the sort. Like revenges like; an eye for an

eye, a tooth for a tooth, a loyalty for a loyalty.

CHAPTER XVIII

But now, as often happens in evil as in virtue, Kedzie had the

willingness, but not the resolution. She threw her scruples into the

waste-basket, accepted Pet's invitation, went with her and her crowd

to one of the most reckless dances in Greenwich Village, where men

and women strove to outdo the saturnalia of Montmartre, vied with one

another in exposure, and costumed themselves as closely according to the

fig-leaf era as the grinning policemen dared to permit.

Kedzie screamed with laughter at some of the ribaldry and danced in

a jostle of fauns, satyrs, nymphs, and maenads. Yet when her partner

clenched her too straitly she could not forget that she was the wife of

an absent soldier. And when on the way home he tried to flirt she could

not quell the nausea in her soul.

But practice makes perfect and Kedzie was learning to be downright bad,

though yet awhile she gave but stingy reward to her assiduous cavaliers.

She was what Pet called a _demi-veuve_ and unprofitable to the men

she used as weapons of her revenge against her innocent and unwitting

husband.

There was another factor working toward her debasement and that was

the emancipation of her pocket-book. It was a fairy's purse now and

she could not scatter her money faster than she found it renewed.

Her entertainments grew more lavish and more reckless. She had an

inspiration at last. She would put Jim's yacht into commission and take

a party of friends on a cruise, well chaperoned, of course.

She sent instructions to the master of the vessel to get steam up.

Knudsen sent back word that he would have to have an order from the

boss. She promised to have him discharged and in her anger fired a

telegram off to Jim, demanding that he rebuke the surly skipper and

order the boat out.

The telegram found Jim in a state of doldrums. The food had turned

against him, homesickness was like a fever in him, and the monotony of

his routine had begun to get his nerves. He was startled and enraged

at Kedzie's request for permission to go yachting and he fired back a

telegram:

Knudsen was right I am astonished at your suggestion

do not approve in the slightest.

He regretted his anger when it was too late. Kedzie, who had already

made up her list of guests and received their hilarious acceptances, was

compelled to withdraw the invitations. She would have bought a yacht

of her own, but she could not afford it! She was not allowed so large a

fund. She, Mrs. Dyckman, wanted something and could not afford it! What

was the use of anything, anyhow?

Times had changed for Kedzie indeed when the little beggar from the

candy-store who had cried once when Skip Magruder, the bakery waiter,

refused to take her to the movies twice in one Sunday, was crying

now because her miser of a husband forbade her a turbine yacht as a

plaything.

She was crushed with chagrin and she felt completely absolved of the

last obligation. What kind of a brute had she married who would go

away on a military picnic among his nice, warm cacti and deny his poor

deserted wife a little boat-ride and a breath of fresh air?

If she had had any lingering inclination to visit Jim in Texas she gave

it up now. She went to Newport instead and took Pet Bettany along for a

companion--at Kedzie's expense, of course.

Charity Coe Cheever was visiting Mrs. Noxon again and Kedzie snubbed her

haughtily when she met her at the Casino or on Bailey's Beach. Kedzie

was admitted to that sacred surf of the Spouting Rock Association now

and she was as pretty a naiad as there was.

But now she encountered occasional rebuffs from certain people, not only

because she was common, but because she was reputed to be fast. When the

gossip-peddlers brought her this fierce verdict she was hardened enough

to scorn the respectables as frumps. She grew a little more impudent

than ever and her pout began to take the form of a sneer.

She lingered in and about Newport till the autumn came. Occasional

excursions on other people's yachts or in her own cars or to

house-parties broke the season, but she loved Newport. Jim's name had

given her entry to places and sets whence nobody quite had the courage

or the authority to dismiss her.

At Newport there was a very handsome fool named Jake Vanderveer,

distantly related to the charming Van-der Veers as well as the Van der

Veers. He was even more distantly related to his own wife at the time

Kedzie met him.

Pet Bettany had told Kedzie what a rotter Mrs. Jake was, and Kedzie felt

awfully sorry for Jakie. So did Jakie. He was sophomoric enough to talk

about his broken heart and she was sophomoric enough to suffer for him

most enjoyably.

A little sympathy is a dangerous thing. Married people run a great risk

unless they keep theirs strictly mutual and for home consumption.

Jakie said he believed in running away from his grief. Kedzie ran with

him for company. People's tongues ran just as fast. Jakie was making

a lot of money in Wall Street and trying to drown his sorrows there.

Kedzie was thrilled by his jargon of the market and he taught her how to

read the confetti streamers that pour out of the ticker. Jakie confided

to her a great scheme.

“The only way I can keep that wife of mine from spending all my money is

to spend it first.”

“You're a genius!” Kedzie said. A woman usually approves almost any

scheme for keeping money away from another woman.

“I'm going to make a killing next week,” said Jakie, “and I'm going just

quietly to put a couple of thou. up for my little pal Kedzie. You can't

lose. If you win you can buy yourself five thousand dollars' worth of

popcorn.”

Kedzie was enraptured. She would have some money at last that she

didn't have to drag out of her husband. She prayed the Lord for a rising

market.

Then Mrs. Dyckman sent for her. When Kedzie called the servants were

extremely solemn. Kedzie had to wait till the doctor left. He was very

solemn, too.

Kedzie found her mother-in-law in bed. She looked like a small mountain

after a snow-storm. It was strange to Kedzie to find one so mighty

brought low and speaking in so tiny a voice. Her husband was there and

he was haggard with sympathy and alarm, a very elephant in terror. He

was less courteous than usual to Kedzie and he left the room at his

wife's signal. Mrs. Dyckman was more gentle than ever.