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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER X

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman was startled from her reverie and gasped:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XI

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

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

"Ah, ma pauvre p'tite amie, for why you have a jalousie of my patrie?"

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sorry, but I'm booked."

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

"With that—wife of yours, of course!"

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

"Not necessarily. It's business."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jules smiled with friendship and deference subtly blended:

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

"You might get killed, you know."

"Yes, sir."

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

"Shree years, sir."

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

"Very good, sir."

But he did.

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

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

"The correct time, please."

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

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

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



CHAPTER XIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPANKED GIRL GONE

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

POLICE OF NATION IN SEARCH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XIV

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

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

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

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

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

Priss snapped, "I was thinking."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prissy regarded her with patient pity and went on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vice has its hypocrisies as well as virtue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, ain't that abslooshly abdominable."

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

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

"There was too much sugar in the punch."

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is one way of reconciling families.

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

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

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

"I know," Mr. Hudspeth answered.

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

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

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

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

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

Cheever surrendered.

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

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

"I can always buy another one, deary."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'll kill him for that."

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XVI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Indeed!" Miss Silsby exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She wrote on it the simple but thrilling answer:

DEAR TOMMIE,—You bet your boots! ANITA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XVII

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

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

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

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

PATRICK X. MAGRUDER—"SKIP."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



CHAPTER XVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is she?" said Jim, applauding.

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

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

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

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

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