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

How small a part of time they share—

There was elegy now in Kedzie's graces. Youth was of their essence, and youth shakes off like the dust on the moth's wing. Youth is gone at a touch.

In her sorrow she turned to look up at Jim. She was shocked to see how attentively he regarded Kedzie. He startled her by the fascination in his mien. She looked again at Kedzie.

Somehow the girl immediately grew ugly—or what beauty she had was that of a poisonous snake. And she looked common, too. Who else but a common creature would come out on a lawn thus unclothed for a few dollars?

She looked again at Jim Dyckman, and he was not what he had been. He was as changed as the visions in Lewis Carroll's poem. She saw that he had his common streak, too: he was mere man, animal, temptable. But she forgave him. Curiously, he grew more valuable since she felt that she was losing him.

There was an impatient shaking at her breast. In anybody else she would have called it jealousy. This astounded her, made her afraid of herself and of him. What right had she to be jealous of anybody but Peter Cheever? She felt that she was more indecent than Kedzie. She bowed her head and blushed. Scales fell from her eyes also. She was like Eve after the apple had taught her what she was. She wanted to hide. But she could not break through the crowd. She must stand and watch the dance through.

All this brief while Kedzie had stood wavering. There had been a hitch somewhere. The other nymphs were delayed in their entrance. One of them had stepped on a thorny rose and another had ripped her tunic—she came in at last with a safety-pin to protect her from the law; but then, safety-pins are among the primeval inventions.

According to the libretto, the wood-nymphs, terrified by a hunting- party, ran to take refuge with the water-nymphs. The water-nymphs were late likewise. The dryads came suddenly through Mrs. Noxon's imported shrubs, puncturing them with rhythmic attitudes. These lost something of their poetry from being held so long that equilibria were lost foolishly.

Finally, the water-sprites came forth from cleverly managed concealment in a bower and stood mid-thigh in the water about the fountain. They attitudinized also, with a kind of childish poetry that did not quite convince, for the fountain rained on them, and some of them shivered as cold gouts of water smote their shoulder-blades. One little Yiddish nymph gasped, "Oi, oi!" which was perfect Greek, though she didn't know it. Neither did anybody else. Several people snickered.

The hunting-music died away, and the wood-nymphs decided not to go into the water home; instead, they implored the water-nymphs to come forth from their liquid residence. But the water-nymphs refused. The dryads tried to lure them with gestures and dances. It was all dreadfully puerile, and yet somehow worth while.

The wood-nymphs wreathed a human chain about the marge of the pool. Unfortunately the marble had been splashed in spots by the fountain spray, and it was on the slipperiest of the spots that Kedzie had to execute a pirouette.

Her pivotal foot slid; the other stabbed down in a wild effort to restore her balance. It slipped. She knew that she was gone. She made frenzied clutches at the air, but it would not sustain her. She was strangely sincere now in her gestures. The crowd laughed— then stopped short.

It was funny till it looked as if the nymph might be hurt. Jim Dyckman darted forward to save her. He knocked Charity aside roughly and did not know it. He arrived too late to catch Kedzie.

Kedzie sat into the pool with great violence. The spray she cast up fatally spotted several delicate robes. That would have been of some consolation to Kedzie if she had known it. But all she knew was that she went backward into the wrong element. Her wrath was greater than her sorrow.

Her head went down: she swallowed a lot of water, and when she kicked herself erect at last she was half strangled, entirely drenched, and quite blinded. The other nymphs, wood and water, giggled and shook with sisterly affection.

Kedzie was the wettest dryad that ever was. She stumbled forward, groping. Jim Dyckman bent, slipped his hands under her arms, and hoisted her to land. He felt ludicrous, but his chivalry was automatic.

Kedzie was so angry at herself and everybody else that she flung off his hands and snapped, "Quit it, dog on it!"

Jim Dyckman quit it. He had for his pains an insult and a suit of clothes so drenched that he had to go back to his yacht, running the gantlet of a hundred ridicules.

When he vanished Kedzie found herself in garments doubly clinging from being soaked. She was ashamed now, and hid her face in her arm.

Charity Coe took pity on her, and before the jealous Charity could check the generous Charity she had stepped forward and thrown about the girl's shoulders a light wrap she carried. She led the child to the other wood-nymphs, and they took her back into the shrubbery.

"Wait till you hear what Miss Silsby's gotta say!" said one dryad, and another added:

"Woisse than that is this: you know who that was you flang out at so regardless?"

"I don't know, and I don't care," sobbed Kedzie.

"You would care if you was wise to who His Nibs was!"

"Who was it?" Kedzie gasped.

"Jim Dyckman—no less! You was right in his arms, and you hadda go an' biff him."

"Oh, Lord!" sighed Kedzie. "I'll never do." She was thinking that destiny had tossed her into the very arms of the aristocracy and she had been fool enough to fight her way out.

Jim Dyckman, meanwhile, was clambering into his car with clothes and ardor dampened. He was swearing to cut out the whole herd of women.

And Charity Coe Cheever was chattering flippantly with a group of the dispersing audience, while her heart was in throes of dismay at her own feelings and Jim Dyckman's.



THE SECOND BOOK

MRS. TOMMIE GILFOYLE HAS HER PICTURE TAKEN



CHAPTER I

The scene was like one of the overcrowded tapestries of the Middle Ages. At the top was the Noxon palace, majestic, serene, self-confident in the correctness of its architecture and not afraid even of the ocean outspread below.

The house looked something like Mrs. Noxon at her best. Just now she was at her worst. She stood by her marble pool and glared at her mob of guests dispersing in knots of laughter and indifference. There were hundreds of men and women of all ages and sizes, and almost all of them were startling the summer of 1915 with the fashion-plates of 1916.

Mrs. Noxon turned from them to the dispersing nymphs of Miss Silsby's troupe. The nymphs were dressed in the fashion of 916 B.C. They also were laughing and snickering, as they sauntered toward the clump of trees and shrubs which masked their dressing-tent. One of them was not laughing—Kedzie. She was slinking along in wet clothes and doused pride. The beautiful wrap that Mrs. Charity Cheever had flung about her she had let fall and drag in a damp mess.

Mrs. Noxon was tempted to hobble after Kedzie and smack her for her outrageous mishap. But she could not afford the luxury. She must laugh with her guests. She marched after them to take her medicine of raillery more or less concealed as they went to look at the other sideshows and permit themselves to be robbed handsomely for charity.

Kedzie was afraid to meet Miss Silsby, but there was no escape. The moment the shrubs closed behind her she fell into the ambush. Miss Silsby was shrill with rage and scarlet in the face. She swore, and she looked as if she would scratch.

"You miserable little fool!" she began. "You ought to be whipped within an inch of your life. You have ruined me! It was the biggest chance of my career. I should have been a made woman if it hadn't been for you. Now I shall be the joke of the world!"

"Please, Miss Silsby," Kedzie protested, "if you please, Miss Silsby—I didn't mean to fall into the water. I'm as sorry as I can be."

"What good does it do me for you to be sorry? I'm the one to be sorry. I should think you would have had more sense than to do such a thing!"

"How could I help it, dog on it!" Kedzie retorted, her anger recrudescent.

"Help it? Are you a dancer or are you a cow?"

Kedzie quivered as if she had been lashed. She struck back with her best Nimrim repartee, "You're a nice one to call me a cow, you big, fat, old lummox!"

Miss Silsby fairly mooed at this.

"You—you insolent little rat, you! You—oh, you—you! I'll never let you dance for me again—never!"

"I'd better resign, then, I suppose," said Kedzie.

"Resign? How dare you resign! You're fired! That's how you'll resign. You're fired! The impudence of her! She turns my life-work into a laughing-stock and then says she'd better resign!"

"How about to-night?" Kedzie put in, dazed.

"Never you mind about to-night. I'll get along without you if I have to dance myself."

The other nymphs shook under this, like corn-stalks in a wind.

But Kedzie was a statuette of pathos. She stood cowering barelegged before Miss Silsby, fully clothed in everything but her right mind. There was nothing Grecian about Miss Silsby except the Medusa glare, and that turned Kedzie into stone. She finished her tirade by thrusting some money into Kedzie's hand and clamoring:

"Get into your clothes and get out of my sight."

Rage made Miss Silsby generous. She paid Kedzie an extra week and her fare to New York. Kedzie had no pocket to put her money in. She carried it in her hand and laid it on the table in the tent as she bent to whip her lithe form out of her one dripping garment.

The other nymphs followed her into the tent and made a Parthenonian frieze as they writhed out of their tunics and into their petticoats. They gathered about Kedzie in an ivory cluster and murmured their sympathy—Miss Silsby not being within ear-shot.

Kedzie blubbered bitterly as she glided into her everyday things, hooking her corsets askew, drawing her stockings up loosely, and lacing her boots all wrong. She was still jolted with sobs as she pushed the hat-pins home in her traveling-hat.

She kissed the other girls good-by. They were sorry to see her go, now that she was going. And she was very sorry to go, now that she had to.

If she had lingered awhile Miss Silsby would have found her there when she relented from sheer exhaustion of wrath, and would have restored her to favor. But Kedzie had stolen away in craven meekness.

To reach the trade-entrance Kedzie had to skirt the accursed pool of her destruction. Charity Coe was near it, seated on a marble bench alone. She was pensive with curious thoughts. She heard Kedzie's childish snivel as she passed. Charity looked up, recognized the girl with difficulty, and after a moment's hesitation called to her:

"What's the matter, you poor child? Come here! What's wrong?"

Kedzie suffered herself to be checked. She dropped on the bench alongside Charity and wailed:

"I fell into that damn' pool, and I've lost my jah-ob!"

Charity patted the shaken back a moment, and said, "But there are other jobs, aren't there?"

"I don't know of any."

"Well, I'll find you one, my dear, if you'll only smile. You have such a pretty smile."

"How do you know?" Kedzie queried, giving her a sample of her best.

Charity laughed. "See! That proves it. You are a darling, and too pretty to lack for a job. Give me your address, and I'll get you a better place than you lost. I promise you."

Kedzie ransacked her hand-bag and found a printed card, crumpled and rouge-stained. She poked it at Charity, who read and commented:

"Miss Anita Adair, eh? Such a pretty name! And the address, my dear—if you don't mind. I am Mrs. Cheever."

"Oh, are you!" Kedzie exclaimed. "I've heard of you. Pleased to meet you."

Then Kedzie whimpered, and Charity wrote the address and repeated her assurances. She also gave Kedzie her own card and asked her to write to her. That seemed to end the interview, and so Kedzie rose and said: "Much obliged. I guess I gotta go now. G'-by!"

"Good-by," said Charity. "I'll not forget you."

Kedzie moved on humbly. She looked back. Charity had fallen again into a listless reverie. She seemed sad. Kedzie wondered what on earth she could have to be sorry about. She had money and a husband, and she was swagger.

Kedzie slipped through the gate out to the road. She did not dare hire a carriage, now that she was jobless. She wished she had not left paradise. But she dared not try to return. She was not "classy" enough. Suddenly a spasm of resentment shook the girl.

She felt the hatred of the rich that always set Tommie Gilfoyle afire. What right had such people to such majesty when Kedzie must walk? What right had they to homes and yards so big that it tired Kedzie out just to trudge past? Who was this Mrs. Cheever, that she should be so top-lofty and bend-downy? Kedzie ground her teeth in anger and tore Charity's card to bits. She flung them at the sea, but the wind brought them back about her face stingingly. She walked on, loathing the very motors that flashed by, flocks of geese squawking contempt.

She walked and walked and walked. The overpowering might of the big houses in their green demesnes made her feel smaller and wearier, but big with bitterness. She would have been glad to have a suit-case full of bombs to blow those snobbish residences into flinders.

She was dog tired when, after losing her way again and again, she reached the boarding-house where the dancers lodged. She packed her things and went to the train, lugging her own baggage. When she reached the station she was footsore, heartsore, soulsore. Her only comfort was that the Silsby dancers had been placed early enough on Mrs. Noxon's program for her to have failed in time to get home the same day. She hated Newport now. It had not been good to her. New York was home once more.

"When's the next train to New York?" she asked a porter.

"It's wint," said the porter. "Wint at four-five."

"I said when's the next train," Kedzie snapped.

"T'-marra' marnin'," said the porter.

"My Gawd!" said Kedzie. "Have I gotta spend the night in this hole?"

The porter stared. He was not used to hearing Mecca called a hole.

"Well, if it's that bad," he grinned, "you might take the five-five to Providence and pick up the six-forty there. But you'll have to git a move on."

Kedzie got a move on. The train swept her out along the edge of Rhode Island. She knew nothing of its heroic history. She cared nothing for its heroic splendor. She thought of it only as the stronghold of an embattled aristocracy. She did not blame Miss Silsby for her disgrace, nor herself. She blamed the audience, as other actors and authors and politicians do. She blazed with the merciless hatred of the rich that poor people feel when they are thwarted in their efforts to rival or cultivate or sell to the rich. Their own sins they forget as absolved, because the sins have failed. It is the success of sin and the sin of success that cannot be forgiven.

The little dancer whose foot had slipped on the wet marble of wealth was shaken almost to pieces by philosophic vibrations too big for her exquisite frame. They reminded her of her poet, of Tommie Gilfoyle, who was afraid of her and paid court to her. He appeared to her now as a radiant angel of redemption. From Providence she telegraphed him that she would arrive at New York at eleven-fifteen, and he would meet her if he loved her.

This done, she went to the lunch-counter, climbed on a tall stool, and bought herself a cheap dinner. She was paying for it out of her final moneys, and her brain once more told her stomach that it would have to be prudent. She swung aboard the train when it came in, and felt as secure as a lamb with a good shepherd on the horizon. When she grew drowsy she curled up on the seat and slept to perfection.

Her invasion of Newport was over and done—disastrously done, she thought; but its results were just beginning for Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe.

Eventually Kedzie reached the Grand Central Terminal—a much different Kedzie from the one that once followed her father and mother up that platform to that concourse! Her very name was different, and her mind had learned multitudes of things good and bad. She had a young man waiting for her—a poet, a socialist, a worshiper. Her heavy suit-case could not detain her steps. She dragged it as a little sloop drags its anchor in a gale.

Gilfoyle was waiting for her at the barrier. He bent to snatch the suit-case from her and snatched a kiss at the same time. His bravery thrilled her; his gallantry comforted her immeasurably. She was so proud of herself and of him that she wasted never a glance at the powdered gold on the blue ceiling.

"I'm terrible glad to see you, Tommie," she said.

"Are you? Honest?" he chortled.

They jostled into each other and the crowd.

"I'm awful hungry, though," she said, "and I've got oodles of things to tell you."

"Let's eat," he said. They went to the all-night dairy restaurant in the Terminal. He led her to one of the broad-armed chairs and fetched her dainties—a triangle of apple pie, a circle of cruller, and a cylinder of milk.

She leaned across the arm of the chair and told him of her mishaps. He was so enraged that he knocked a plate to the floor. She snatched the cruller off just in time to save it, and the room echoed her laughter.

They talked and talked until she was talked out, and it was midnight. He began to worry about the hour. It was a long ride on the Subway and then a long walk to her boarding-house and then a long walk and a long ride to his.

"I hate to go back to that awful Jambers woman and let her know I'm fired," Kedzie moaned. "My trunk's in storage, anyhow, and maybe she's got no room."

"Why go back?" said Tommie, not realizing the import of his words. It was merely his philosophical habit to ask every custom "Why?"

"Where else is there to go to?" she sighed.

"If we were only married—" he sighed.

"Why, Tommie!"

"As we ought to be!"

"Why, Tommie Gilfoyle!"

And now he was committed. As when he wrote poetry the grappling-hooks of rhyme dragged him into statements he had not dreamed of at the start and was afraid of at the finish—so now he stumbled into a proposal he could not clamber out of. He must flounder through.

The idea was so deliriously unexpected, so fascinatingly novel to Kedzie, that she fell in love with it. Immediately she would rather have died than remain unmarried to Tommie Gilfoyle.

But there were difficulties.



CHAPTER II

In the good old idyllic days it had been possible for romantic youth to get married as easily as to get dinner—and as hard to get unmarried as to get wings. Couples who spooned too long at seaside resorts and missed the last train home could wake up a preacher and be united in indissoluble bonds of holy matrimony for two dollars. The preachers of that day slept light, in order to save the reputations of foolish virgins.

But now a greedy and impertinent civil government had stepped in and sacrilegiously insisted on having a license bought and paid for before the Church could officiate. And the license bureau was not open all night, as it should have been.

Kedzie knew nothing of this, but Gilfoyle was informed. Theoretically he believed that marriage should be rendered impossible and divorce easy. But he could no more have proposed an informal alliance with his precious Kedzie than he could have wished that his mother had made one with his father. His mother and father had eloped and been married by a sleepy preacher, but that was poetic and picturesque, seeing that they did not fail to wake the preacher. Gilfoyle's reverence for Kedzie demanded at least as much sanctity about his union with her.

It is curious how habits complicate life. Here were two people whom it would greatly inconvenience to separate. Yet just because it was a custom to close the license bureau in the late afternoon they must wait half a night while the license clerk slept and snored, or played cards or read detective stories or did whatever license clerks do between midnight and office hours. And just because people habitually crawl into bed and sleep between midnight and forenoon, these two lovers were already finding it hard to keep awake in spite of all their exaltation. They simply must sleep. Romance could wait.

Gilfoyle knew that there were places enough where Kedzie and he could go and have no questions asked except, "Have you got baggage, or will you pay in advance?" But he would not take his Kedzie to any such place, any more than he would leave a chalice in a saloon for safe-keeping.

In their drowsy brains projects danced sparklingly, but they could find nothing to do except to part for the eternity of the remnant of the night. So Gilfoyle escorted Kedzie to the Hotel Belmont door, and told her to say she was an actress arrived on a late train. He stood off at a distance while he saw that she registered and was respectfully treated and led to the elevator by a page.

Then he moved west to the Hotel Manhattan and found shelter. And thus they slept with propriety, Forty-second Street lying between them like a sword.

The alarm-clock in Gilfoyle's head woke him at seven. He hated to interrupt Kedzie's sleep, but he was afraid of his boss and he needed his salary more than ever—twice as much as ever. He telephoned from his room to Kedzie's room down the street and up ten stories and was comforted to find that he woke her out of a sleep so sound that he could hardly understand her words. But he eventually made sure that she would make haste to dress and meet him in the restaurant.

They breakfasted together at half past eight. Kedzie was aglow with the whole procedure.

"You ought to write a novel about us," she told Gilfoyle. "It would be a lot better than most of the awful stories folks write nowadays. And you'd make a million dollars, I bet. We need a lot of money now, too, don't we?"

"A whole lot," said Gilfoyle, who was beginning to fret over the probable cost of the breakfast.

It cost more than he expected—as he expected. But he was in for it, and he trusted that the Lord would provide. They bought a ring at a petty jewelry-shop in Forty-second Street and then descended to a Subway express and emerged at the Brooklyn Bridge Station.

The little old City Hall sat among the overtowering buildings like an exquisite kitten surrounded by mastiffs, but Gilfoyle's business took him and his conquest into the enormous Municipal Building, whose windy arcades blew Kedzie against him with a pleasant clash.

The winds of life indeed had blown them together as casually as two leaves met in the same gutter. But they thought it a divine encounter arranged from eons back and to continue for eons forward. They thought it so at that time.

They went up in the elevator to the second floor, where, in the fatal Room 258, clerks at several windows vended for a dollar apiece the State's permission to experiment with matrimony.

There was a throng ahead of them—brides, grooms, parents, and witnesses of various nationalities. All of them looked shabby and common, even to Kedzie in her humility. All over the world couples were mating, as the birds and animals and flowers and chemicals mate in their seasons. The human pairs advertised their union by numberless rites of numberless religions and non-religions. The presence or absence of rite or its nature seemed to make little difference in the prosperity of the emulsion. The presence or absence of romance seemed to make little difference, either. But it seemed to be generally agreed upon as a policy around the world that marriage should be made exceedingly easy, and unmarriage exceedingly difficult. In recruiting armies the same plan is observed; every encouragement is offered to enlist; one has only to step in off the street and enlist. But getting free! That is not the object of the recruiting business.

Gilfoyle and Kedzie had to wait their turns before they could reach a window. Then they had a cross-examination to face.

Kedzie giggled a good deal, and she leaned softly against the hard shoulder of Gilfoyle while the clerk quizzed him as to his full name, color, residence, age, occupation, birthplace, the name of his father and mother and the country of their birth, and the number of his previous marriages.

She grew abruptly solemn when the clerk looked at her for answers to the same questions on her part; for she realized that she was expected to tell her real name and her parents' real names. She would have to confess to Tommie that she had deceived him and cheated him out of a beautiful poem. Had he known the truth he would never have written:

Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you Kedzie? Your last name is Thropp, but your first name is—

Nothing rhymed with Kedzie.

While she gaped, wordless, Gilfoyle magnificently spoke for her, proudly informed the clerk that her name was "Anita Adair," that she was white (he nearly said "pink"), that her age was—he had to ask that, and she told him nineteen. He gave her residence as New York and her occupation as "none."

"What is your father's first name, honey?" he said, a little startled to realize how little he knew of her or her past. She had learned much news of him, too, in hearing his own answers.

"Adna," she whispered, and he told the clerk that her father's name was Adna Adair. She told the truth about her mother's maiden name. She could afford to do that, and she could honestly aver that she had never had any husband or husbands "up to yet," and that she had not been divorced "so far." Also both declared that they knew of no legal impediment to their marriage. There are so few legal impediments to marriage, and so many to the untying of the knot into which almost anybody can tie almost anybody!

The clerk's facile pen ran here and there, and the license was delivered at length on the payment of a dollar. For one almighty dollar the State gave the two souls permission to commit mutual mortgage for life.

Gilfoyle was growing nervous. He told Kedzie that he was expected at the office. There were several advertisements to write for the next day's papers, and he had given the firm no warning of what he had not foreseen the day before. If they hunted for a preacher, Gilfoyle would get into trouble with Mr. Kiam.

If they had listened to the excellent motto, "Business before pleasure," they might never have been married. That would have saved them a vast amount of heartache, both blissful and hateful. But they were afraid to postpone their nuptials. The mating instinct had them in its grip.

They fretted awhile in the hurlyburly of other love-mad couples and wondered what to do. Gilfoyle finally pushed up to one of the windows again and asked:

"What's the quickest way to get married? Isn't there a preacher or alderman or something handy?"

"Aldermen are not allowed to marry folks any more," he was told. "But the City Clerk will hitch you up for a couple of dollars. The marriage-room is right up-stairs."

This seemed the antipodes of romance and Gilfoyle hesitated to decide.

But Kedzie, knowing his religious ardor against religions, said:

"What's the diff? I don't mind."

Gilfoyle smiled at last, and the impatient lovers hurried out into the corridor. They would not wait for the elevator, but ran up the steps. They passed a trio of youth, a girl and two young fellows. One of the lads gave the other a shove that identified the bridegroom. The girl was holding her left hand up and staring at her new ring. A pessimist might have seen a portent in the cynical amusement of her smile, and another in the aweless speed with which Gilfoyle and Kedzie hustled toward the awful mystery of such a union as marriage attempts.

The wedlock-factory was busy. In spite of the earliness of the hour the waiting-room was crowded, its benches full. The only place for Kedzie to sit was next to a couple of negroes, the man in Ethiopian foppery grinning up into the face of a woman who held his hat and cane, and simpered in ebony.

Kedzie whispered to Gilfoyle her displeased surprise:

"Why, they act just like we do."

Kedzie liked to use like like that. She felt belittled at sharing with such people an emotion that seemed to her far too good for them. Also she felt that the emotion itself was cheapened by such company. She wished she had not consented to the marriage. But it would excite attention to back out now, and the dollar already invested would be wasted. For all she knew, the purchase of the license compelled the completion of the project.

A group of Italians came from Room 365—two girls in white, a bareheaded mother who had been weeping, a fat and relieved-looking father, an insignificant youth who was unquestionably the new-born husband.

Gilfoyle kept looking at his watch, but he had to wait his turn. There was a book to be signed and a two-dollar bill to be paid. At last, when the negro pair came forth chuckling, Kedzie and Gilfoyle rushed into the so-called "chapel" to meet their fate.

The chapel was a barrenly furnished office. Its nearest approach to an altar was a washstand with hot and cold running water. At the small desk the couple stood while the City Clerk read the pledge drawn up in the Corporation Counsel's office with a sad mixture of religious, legal, and commercial cant:

"In the name of God, Amen.

"Do either of you know of any impediment why you should not be legally joined together in matrimony, or if any one present can show any just cause why these parties should not be legally joined together in matrimony let them now speak or hereafter hold their peace.

"Do you, Thomas Gilfoyle, take this woman as your lawfully wedded wife, to live together in the state of matrimony? Will you love, honor, and keep her, as a faithful man is bound to do, in health, sickness, prosperity, and adversities, and forsaking all others keep you alone unto her as long as you both shall live?

"Do you, Anita Adair, take this man for your lawfully wedded husband to live together in the state of matrimony? Will you love, honor, and cherish him as a faithful woman is bound to do, in health, sickness, prosperity, and adversities, and forsaking all others keep you alone unto him as along as you both shall live?

"For as both have consented in wedlock and have acknowledged same before this company I do by virtue of the authority vested in me by the laws of the State of New York now pronounce you husband and wife.

"And may God bless your union."

The City Clerk had to furnish witnesses from his own staff while he administered the secular rites and exacted the solemn promises which so few have kept, and invoked the help of God which is so rarely manifest or so subtly hidden, in the human-animal-angel relation of marriage.

And now Anita Adair and Thomas Gilfoyle were officially welded into one. They had received the full franchise each of the other's body, soul, brain, time, temper, liberty, leisure, admiration, education, past, future, health, wealth, strength, weakness, virtue, vice, destructive power, procreative power, parental gift or lack, domestic or bedouin genius, prejudice, inheritance—all.

It was a large purchase for three dollars, and it remained to be seen whether either or both delivered the goods. At the altar of Hymen, Kedzie had publicly vowed to love, honor, and cherish under all circumstances. It was like swearing to walk in air or water as well as on earth. The futile old oath to "obey" had been omitted as a perjury enforced.

Kedzie Thropp, who had dome to New York only a few months before, had done one more impulsive thing. First she had run away from her parents. Now she had run away from herself. She had loved New York first. Now she was infatuated with Tommie Gilfoyle. He was as complex and mysterious a city as Manhattan. She would be as long in reaching the heart of him.

There had been no bridesmaids to give the scene social grace, no music or flowers to give it poetry, no minister to give it an odor of sanctity. It was marriage in its cold, business-like actuality, without hypnotism, superstition, or false pretense. Small wonder that Kedzie had hardly left the marriage-room before she felt that she was not married at all. The vaccination had not taken. She was not one with Gilfoyle. And yet she must pretend that she was. She must act as if they were one soul, one flesh; must share his tenement, his food, his joys and anxieties. Of these last there promised to be no famine.

Gilfoyle was in a panic about his office. He told Kedzie to devote the morning to looking up some place to live. He would join her at luncheon. He fidgeted while they waited for the elevator, Kedzie staring at her ring with the same curious smile as the other girl.



CHAPTER III

They rode up-town in a Subway express to Forty-second Street. heir first business treaty had to be drawn up in the crowd.

"How much do you want to pay for the flat, honey?" said Kedzie.

Gilfoyle was startled. Already the money-snake was in their Eden. And she asked him how much he "wanted" to pay! It was only a form of speech, but it grated on him.

"I haven't time to figure it out," he fretted. "I get twenty-five dollars a week—darling. That's a hundred a month—dear." His pet names came afterward, mere trailers. "Out of that we've got to get something to eat and to wear, and there'll be street-car fare to pay and—tooth-powder to buy, and we'll want something for theater tickets, and—" He was aghast; at the multitude of things married people need. He added, "And we ought to save a little, I suppose."

"I suppose so," said Kedzie, who was as much taken aback by the mention of economy at such a time as he was by the mention of expenditure. But she rose bravely to the responsibility: "I'll do the best I can, and we'll be so cozy—ooh!"

Kedzie was used to small figures. He put into her hand all the cash he had with him, which was all he had on earth—forty-two dollars. He borrowed back the two dollars. Kedzie had her own money, about forty more dollars. This, with twenty-five dollars a week, seemed big; enough to her to keep them in luxury. They parted at the Grand Central Terminal with looks of devoted agony.

She set out at once to look at flats and to visit furniture-stores. She bought a Herald and read the numberless advertisements. Something was the matter everywhere. She had gone far and found nothing but discouragement when the luncheon hour arrived.

Humble as her ideas were, they rebelled at what she and her bridegroom would have to accept for their home. She had always dreamed of marrying a beautiful man with a million dollars and a steam yacht. She was to have been married by a swagger parson, in a swagger church, and to have gone on a long voyage somewhere, and come back at last to a castle on Fifth Avenue. She had lost the parson; the voyage was not to be thought of; and the castle was not even in the air.

She looked at one or two expensive apartments, just to see what real apartments could be like. They stunned her with their splendors, their liveried outguards, their elevators clanking like caparisoned chariot-horses, their conveniences, their rentals—six or eight thousand dollars a year, unfurnished!—six or seven times her husband's whole annual earnings. They were beyond the folly of a dream.

She would have to be content with what one could rent furnished for twenty-five dollars a month. She would have to be her own hired girl. She would have to toil in a few cells of a beehive on a side-street. She would be chauffeuse to a gas-stove only.

She went to the luncheon tryst with a load of forebodings, but Gilfoyle did not appear. She heard her name paged by a corridor-crier and was called to the telephone, where her husband's voice told her that there was a big upset at the office and he dared not leave. He forgot to be tender in his endearments, and he forgot to explain to her that he was talking in a crowded office with an impatient boss waiting for him and a telephone-girl probably listening in.

Kedzie lunched alone, already a business man's wife.

She scoured the town all afternoon, and at last, in desperation, took the furnished flat she happened to be in when she could go no farther. She had to sign a year's lease, and pay twenty-five dollars in advance.

They would live a condensed life there. Even the hall was shared with another family. The secrets were also to be shared, evidently, for Kedzie could hear all that went on in the other home—all, all!

But by this time she was so tired that any cranny would have been welcome. She was even wearier than she had been when she occupied the outdoor apartment under the park bench where she spent her second night in New York. She called that an "aparkment" and liked the pun so well that she longed to tell her husband. But that would have compelled the telling of her real name, and she did not know him well enough for that yet. She found that she did not know him well enough yet for an increasing number of things. She began to be afraid to have him come home. What would he be like as a husband? What would she be like as a wife? Those are all-important facts that one is permitted to learn after the vows of perfection are sealed.

When Kedzie had rested awhile she grew braver and lonelier. She would welcome almost any husband for companionship's sake. She resolved to have Tom's dinner ready for him. She dragged herself down the stairs and up the hill to the grocer's and the butcher's and bought the raw material for dinner and breakfast.

She telephoned Gilfoyle at his office, gave him the address and invited him to dine with "Mrs. Gilfoyle." She chuckled over the romance of it, but he was harrowed with office troubles. Her ardor was a trifle dampened by his voice, but she found new thrills in the gas-stove, a most dramatic instrument to play. It frightened her with every manifestation. She turned the wrong handles and got bad odors from it, and explosions. She burned her fingers and the chops.

She stared in dismay at the charred first banquet and then marched her weary feet down the stairs again and up the hill again to a delicatessen shop. She had previously learned the fatal ease of the ready-made meals they vend at such places, and she compiled her first menu there.

When Gilfoyle came down the street and up the steps into his new home and into her arms he tried to lay off care for a while. But he could not hide his anxiety—and his ecstasy was half an ecstasy of dread.

He did not like the shabby, showy furniture the landlord had selected. But the warmed-up dinner amazed him. He had not imagined Kedzie so scholarly a cook. She dared not tell him that she had cheated. He found her wonderfully refreshing after a day of office toil and told her how happy they would be, and she said, "You bet." Kedzie cleared the table by scooping up all the dishes and dumping them into a big pan and turning the hot water into it with a cake of soap. Then she retreated to the wabbly divan in the living-room.

Gilfoyle went over to Kedzie like a lonely hound; and she laced still tighter the arms that encircled her. They told each other that they were all they had in the world, and they forgot the outside world for the world within themselves. But the evening was maliciously hot and muggy; it was going to rain in a day or so. That divan would hardly support two, and there was no comfort in sitting close; it merely added two furnaces together.

Clamor rose in the adjoining apartment. Their neighbors had children, and the children did not want to go to bed. The parents nagged the children and each other. The wrangle was insufferable. And the idea came to Kedzie and Gilfoyle that children were one of the liabilities of their own marriage. They were afraid of each other, now, as well as of the world. If only they had not been in such haste to be married! If only they could recall those hasty words!

Gilfoyle put out the lights—"because they draw the insects," he said, but Kedzie thought that he was beginning to economize. He was. Across the street they could see other heat-victims miserably preparing for the night. They were careless of appearances.

In the back of the parlor was a window opening into a narrow air-shaft. The one bedroom's one window opened on the same cleft. If the curtain were not kept down the neighbors across the area could see and be seen. If the window were left open they could be heard; and when the curtain flapped in the occasional little puffs of hot air, it gave brief glimpses of family life next door. That family had a squalling child, too. Somewhere above, a rickety phonograph was at work; and somewhere below, a piano was being mauled; and somewhere else a ukelele was being thumped and a doleful singer was snarling "The Beach at Waikiki." This racket was their only epithalamium. It was more like the "chivaree" with which ironic crowds tormented bridal couples back in Nimrim, Mo.

Gilfoyle was poet enough to enjoy a little extra doldrums at what might have made a longshoreman peevish. He mopped sweat and fanned himself with a newspaper till he grew frantic. He flung down the paper and rose with a yawn.

"Well, this is one helluva honeymoon. I'm going to crawl into the oven and fry."

Kedzie sat alone in the dark parlor a long while. She was cold now. She had danced Greek dances in public, but she blushed in the dark as she loitered over her shoelaces. She was so forlorn and so disappointed with life that tears would have been bliss.

Somebody on that populous, mysterious air-shaft kept a parrot. It woke Kedzie early in the morning with hysterical laughter that pierced the ears like steel saws. There was something uncannily real but hideously mirthless in its Ha-ha-ha! It would gurgle with thick-tongued idiocy: "Polly? Polly? Polly wanny clacky? Polly? Polly?"

Kedzie wondered how any one could care or dare to keep such a pest. She wanted to kill it. She leaned out of the window and stared up. Somewhere above the fire-escape rungs she could see the bottom of its cage. If only she had a gun, how gladly she would have blown Polly to bits.

She saw a frowsy-haired man in a nightgown staring up from another window and yelling at the parrot. She drew her head in hastily.

The idol of her soul slept on. The inpouring day illumined him to his disadvantage. His head was far back, his jaw down, his mouth agape. During the night a beard had crept out on his cheeks. He was startlingly unattractive.

Kedzie crouched on the bed and stared at him in wonder, in a fascination of disgust. This was the being she had selected from all mankind for her companion through the long, long years to come. This was her playmate, partner, hero, master, financier, bedfellow, lifefellow. For him she had given up her rights to freedom, to praise, to chivalry, to individuality, her hopes of wealth, luxury, flattery.

She glanced about the room—the pine bureau with its imitation stain, broken handles, and curdled mirror, the ugly chairs, the gilt radiator, the worn rug, the bed that other wretches had occupied. She wondered who they were and where they were.

She remembered Newport, the Noxon home. She tried to picture a bedroom there. She saw a palace of the best moving-picture period. She remembered the first moving picture she had seen in New York, and contrasted the Anita Adair of that adventure with the Anita Adair of this. She recalled that girl locking her door against the swell husband, and the poor but honest lover with the revolver.

Kedzie wished she had locked her own door—only there was no door, merely a shoddy portiere, for there was not room to open a door. Her old ambitions came back to her. She had planned to know rich people and rebuke their wicked wiles. One rich man had held her in his arms, lifted her out of the pool. It was no less a man than Jim Dyckman, and she had repulsed him.

She caught a glimpse of her own tousled head in the mirror, and she sneered at it. "You darn fool—oh, you darn fool!"

At last the parrot woke Gilfoyle. He snorted, bored his fists into his eyes, yawned, scratched his head, stared at the unusual furniture, flounced over, saw his mate, stared again, grinned, said:

"Why, hello, Anita!"

He put out his hand to her. She wiggled away; he followed. She slid to the floor and gasped:

"Don't touch me!"

"Why, what's the matter, honey?"

"Huh! What isn't the matter?"

He fumbled under the pillow for his watch, looked at it, yawned:

"Lord, it's only five o'clock. Good night!" He disposed himself for sleep again. The parrot broke out in another horrible Ha-ha! He sat up with an oath. "I'd like to murder the beast."

"Don't! I'm much obliged to it."

"Obliged to it? You must be crazy. Good Lord! hear it scream."

"Well, ain't life a scream?"

Gilfoyle was a graceless sleeper and a surly waker. He forgot that he was a bridegroom.

He sniffed, yawned, flopped, buried one ear in the pillow and pulled the cover over the other and almost instantly slept. His head on the pillow looked like some ugly, shaggy vegetable. Kedzie wanted to uproot the object and throw it out of the window, out of her life. That was the head of her husband, the lord and master of her dreams!

Dainty-minded couples have separate bedrooms. Ordinary people accept the homely phases of coexistence as inevitable and therefore unimportant. They grow to enjoy the intimacy: they give and take informality as one of the comforts of a home. They see frowsy hair and unshaven cheeks and yawns as a homely, wholesome part of life and make a pleasant indolence of them.

But Kedzie was in an unreasoning mood. She had hoped for unreasonable delights. Marriage had been a goal beyond the horizon, at the base of the rainbow. She had reached it. The girl Kedzie was no more. She was a wife. Kedzie Thropp and Anita Adair were now Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle. Her soul cried out:

"This is my honeymoon! I am married, married forever to that tousle-headed, bristle-jawed, brainless, heartless dub. I won't stand for it. I won't! I won't!"

She wanted to outscream the parrot. Its inarticulate, horrible cachinnations voiced her humor uncannily. She had to bury her pouting lips in her round young arm to keep from insanely echoing that maniacal Ha-ha-ha! That green-and-red philosopher expressed her own mockery of life and love, with its profound and eloquent Ha-ha-ha! Oh, ha-ha-ha! Ee, ha-ha-ha!



CHAPTER IV

Now, of course, Kedzie ought to have been happy. Millions of girls of her age were waking up that morning and calling themselves wretched because their parents or distance or some other cause prevented them from marrying young fellows no more prepossessing asleep than Gilfoyle was.

In Europe that morning myriads of young girls tossed in their beds and shivered lest their young men in the trenches might have been killed or mangled by some shell dropped from an airship or sent over from a cannon or shot up from a mine. And those young men, alive or dead, looked no better than Gilfoyle, if as neat.

In Europe and in Asia, that morning, there were young girls and nuns and wives who were in the power of foreign soldiers whose language they could not speak but could understand all too well—poor, ruined victims of the tidal waves of battle. There were wives, young and old, who had got their husbands back from war blind, crippled, foolish, petulant. They had left part of their souls on the field with their blood.

It was a time when it seemed that nobody had a right to be unhappy who had life, health, shelter, and food. Yet America was perhaps as discontented as Europe.

Kedzie had reason enough to make peace with life. Gilfoyle was as valuable a citizen as she. She might have helped to make him a good business man or a genuine poet. What is poetry, anyway, but the skilful advertisement of emotions? She might at least have made of Gilfoyle that all-important element of the Republic, a respectable, amiable, ordinary man, perhaps the father of children who would be of value, even of glory, to the world.

There was romance enough in their wedding. Others of the couples who had bought licenses that day were rapturous in yet cheaper tenements, greeting the new day with laughter and kisses and ambition to earn and to save, to breed and grow old well.

But to be content with what or whom she had, Kedzie would have had to be somebody else besides Kedzie; and then Gilfoyle would not perhaps have met her or married her. Some man in Nimrim, Mo., would have wed the little stay-at-home.

Kedzie, the pretty fool, apparently fancied that she would have been happy if Gilfoyle had been a handsomer sleeper, and the apartment a handsomer apartment, and the bank-account an inexhaustible fountain of gold.

But would she have been? Peter Cheever was as handsome as a man dares to be, awake or asleep; he had vast quantities of money, and he was generous with it. But Zada L'Etoile was not happy. She dwelt in an apartment that would have overwhelmed Kedzie by the depth of its velvets and the height of its colors.

Yet Zada was crying this very morning—crying like mad because while she had Cheever she had no marriage license. She tore her hair and bit it, and peeled diamonds off her fingers and threw them at the mirror like pebbles, and sopped up her tears with point-lace handkerchiefs and hurled those to the floor—then hurled herself after them. She was a tremendous weeper, Zada.

And in Newport there was a woman who had a marriage license but no husband. She slept in a room too beautiful for Kedzie to have liked. She did not know enough to like it. She would have found it cold. Charity Cheever found it cold, but she slept at last, though the salt wind blowing in from the sea tormented the light curtains and plucked at the curls about Charity's face. There was salt in the air, and her eyelashes were still wet with tears. She was crying in her sleep, for loneliness.

Kedzie thought her room was small, but it was nearly as big as the bedroom where Jim Dyckman had slept. He had a bigger room, but he had given it to his father and mother, who had come to Newport with him. They were a stodgy old couple enough now, and snoring idyllically in duet after a life of storms and tears and discontents in spite of wealth.

Jim's room was big for a yacht, but the yacht was narrow, built for speed. Thirty-six miles an hour its turbines could shoot it through the sea. It had to be narrow. We can't have everything—especially on yachts.

Jim was barefoot, standing in his pajamas at a port-hole and trying to see the Noxon home, imagining Charity there. He was denied her presence and was as miserable as any waif in a poor farm attic. Money seemed to make no visible difference in his despair.

If he thought of Kedzie at all, he dismissed her as a trifling memory. He wanted Charity, who did not want him. Charity had Cheever, who did not want her. Kedzie had Gilfoyle, and did not want him. It looked as if the old jingle ought to be changed from "Finders keepers, losers weepers" to "Losers keepers, finders weepers."

The day after Jim Dyckman pulled Kedzie out of the water he made a desperate effort to convince himself that he could be happy without the forbidden Charity Coe.

He breakfasted and played tennis, then swam at Bailey's Beach. Beauties of every type and every conscience were there—pale, slim ash blondes with legs like banister-spindles, and swarthy, slender brunettes of the same Sheraton furniture. There were brunettes of generous ovals, and blondes of heroic rotundities, and every scheme of shape between. Minds were equally diversified—maternal young girls and wicked old ladies, hilarious and sinister, intellectual and athletic, bookish and horsy, a woman of a sort for every mood.

And Jim Dyckman was so wealthy and so simple and so likable and important that it seemed nobody would refuse to accept him. But he wanted Charity.

Later in the afternoon he gave up the effort to snub her and went to the Noxon home. It was about the hour when Kedzie in her new flat had been burning her fingers at the gas-stove. Jim Dyckman was preparing to burn his fingers at the shrine of Mrs. Cheever.

He rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Noxon, though her motor was waiting at the door, as he was glad to note. Mrs. Noxon came down with her hat on and her gloves going on. She pinched Dyckman's cheek and kissed him and said:

"It's sweet of you, Jimmie, to call on an old crone like me, and so promptly. She'll be down in a minute. But you must be on your good behavior, Jim, for they're talking about you, you know. They're bracketing your name with Charity's."

"The dirty beasts! I'll—"

"You can't, Jim. But you can behave. Cheer her up a little. She's blue about that dog of a Cheever. I've got to go and turn over the money we earned yesterday. Quite a tidy sum, but I'll never give another damned show as long as I live."

She left, and by and by Charity Coe drifted in, bringing strange contentment with her. She greeted Jim with a weary cordiality. He took her hand and kissed it and laid his other hand over it as usual. She put her other hand on top of his and patted it—then withdrew her slender fingers and sat down.

They glanced at each other and sighed. Jim was miserably informed now that he had made the angelic Charity Coe a theme for gossip. He felt guilty—irritatedly guilty, because he had the name without the game.

Charity Coe was in a dull mood. She was in a love lethargy. Her mind was trying to persuade her heart that her devotion to Peter Cheever was a wasted lealty, but her heart would not be convinced, though it began to be afraid. She was as a watcher who sits in the next room to one who is dying slowly and quietly. She could neither lose hope nor use it.

Jim and Charity sat brooding for a long while. He had outstretched himself on a sumptuous divan. She was seated on a carved chair, leaning against the tall back of it like a figure in high relief. About them the great room brooded colossally.

Gilfoyle would have hated Charity and Jim as perfect examples of the idle rich, too stupid to work, too pampered to be worthy of sympathy. But whether these two had a right to suffer or not, suffer they did.

The mansion was quiet. The other house-guests were motoring or darting about the twilit tennis-court or trading in the gossip-exchange at the Casino. Jim and Charity were marooned in a sleeping castle.

At length Jim broke forth, "For God's sake, sing."

Charity laughed a little and said, "All right—anything to make you talk."

She went to the piano and shifted the music. There were dozens of songs about roses. She dropped to the bench and began to play and croon Edward Carpenter's luscious music to Waller's old poem, "Go, Lovely Rose."

Jim began to talk almost at once. Charity went on singing, smiling a little at the familiar experience of being asked to sing only to be talked over. Jim grew garrulous as he read across her shoulder with characteristic impoliteness.

"Tell her that wastes her time and me," he quoted; then he groaned: "That's you and me, Charity Coe. But you're wasting yourself most of all."

He bent closer to peek at the name of the author. "Who's this feller Waller, who knows so much?"

"Hush and listen," she said, and hummed the song through. It made a new and deep impression on her in that humor. She felt that she had wasted the rosiness of her own life. Girlhood was gone; youth was gone; carefreedom was gone. Like petals they had fallen from the core of her soul. The words of the lyric stabbed her:

Then die that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee. How small a part of time they share That are so sweet and fair.

Her fingers slipped from the keys and, as it were, died in her lap. Jim Dyckman understood a woman for once, and in a gush of pity for her and of resentment for her disprized preciousness caught at her to embrace her. Her hands came to life. The wifely instinct leaped to the fore. She struck and wrenched and drove him off. She was panting with wrath.

"What a rotten thing to do! Go away and don't come near me again. I'm ashamed of you."

"Me, too," he snarled.



CHAPTER V

Jim slunk out and slunk down the marble steps and down the winding walk and through the monstrous gate into the highway along the sea, enraged at himself and at Charity and at Peter Cheever. If he had met Cheever he would have picked him up and flung him over the sea-wall. But there was little danger of Peter Cheever's being found so near his wife.

"Tell her that wastes her time and me," kept running through Jim's head. He was furious at Charity for wasting so much of him. He had followed her about and moped at her closed door like a stray dog. And she had never even thrown him a bone.

A wave ran up on the beach and seemed to try to embrace the earth, possess it. But it fell away baffled. Over its subsiding pother sprang a new wave with the same bosomful of desire and the same frantic clutching here and there—the same rebuff, the same destruction under the surge of the next and the next. The descending night gave a strange pathos to the eternal vanity.

Jim Dyckman stood and faced the ocean. Once more he discovered that life was too much for him to understand. He was ashamed of himself for his vain endeavor to envelop Charity Coe and absorb her into the deeps of his love. He was most ashamed because he had failed and must slither back into the undertow with the many other men whom Charity had refused to love.

He was ashamed of Charity Coe, too, for squandering her prime and her pride. He was enraged at her blindness to Pete Cheever's duplicity or her complacency with it. He hated Charity for a while—nearly. At any rate he was ashamed of her, ashamed of the world, in a rebel mood.

As he stood wind-blown and spray-flogged and glad to be beaten, a shabby old carriage went by. It was piled to overflowing with some of Miss Silsby's girls taking a seeing-Newport tour on the cheap.

The driver was, or said he had been in his time, coachman to some of the oldest families. He ventured their names with familiarity and knew their houses by heart. He told quaint stories of their ways, how old Mrs. Noxon once swore down a mutinous stableman, how Miss Wossom ran away with her coachman. There was something finely old-fashioned and conservative about that. A new-rich would have run away with a chauffeur.

The driver knew Jim Dyckman's back and pointed him out. The girls laughed, remembering Kedzie's encounter with him. They laughed so loud that Dyckman turned, startled by the racket. But the carriage rolled them away and he did not hear them wondering what had become of Kedzie. The gloaming saddened them, and they felt very sorry for her. But Jim Dyckman gave her no thought.

He was tearing apart his emotions toward Charity and resolving that he must never see her again. In the analytical chemistry of the soul he found that this resolution was three parts hopelessness of winning her, three parts a decent sense of the wickedness of courting another man's woman, three parts resentment at her for treating him properly, and one part a feeling that he would make himself most valuable to her by staying away.

Never a homeless dog slinking through an alley in search of a sidelong ash-barrel to sleep in felt more poverty-stricken, woebegone, than Jim Dyckman. He moped along the stately road, as much afraid of his future as Kedzie had been, trudging the same highway. She had wondered if board and lodging would fail her. This was not Jim Dyckman's fear, but his own was as great, for everybody was some dreadful elbow-companion.

Lucian showed Jupiter himself cowering on his throne in the sky and twiddling his thunderbolt with trembling hand as he wondered what the fates held in store for him, and saw on earth the increasing impudence of the skeptics.

So Jim Dyckman, unconscious that he was following in Kedzie's footsteps, walked miserably on his way. He had no place to go to but the finest yacht in the harbor. He had no money to depend on but a few millions of his own and the Pelion plus Ossa fortunes of his father and mother and their relatives—a mere sierra of gold mountains.

He drifted down to the landing-place and went out to his yacht in a hackney launch. He was received at her snowy sides as if he were the emperor of somewhere come to visit one of his rear admirals. He went up the steps as if he were a school-boy caught playing hooky and going up-stairs to play the bass drum to his mother's slipper.

His mother was on the shade-deck, reclining. The big white wicker lounge looked as if a small avalanche had fallen on it. From the upturned points of her white shoes back to her white hair she was a study in foreshortening that would have interested a draftsman.

Spread out on a huge wicker arm-chair sat Jim's father, also all white, except for his big pink hands and his big pink face. It seemed that he ought to have been smoking a white cigar. As a matter of fact, he had sat so still that half the weed was ash.

When the two moved to greet Jim there was a mighty creaking of wicker. There was another when Jim spilled his own great weight into a chair. A steward in white raised his eyebrows inquiringly and Jim nodded the eighth of an inch. It was the equivalent of ordering a drink.

Dyckman senior turned to Dyckman seniora and said, "Enter Hamlet in the graveyard! Where's the skull, my boy, where's the skull?"

"Let the child alone," Mrs. Dyckman protested. "It's too hot for fooling. You might kiss your poor mother, though. No, don't get up, just throw me one."

Jim rose heavily, went to her, bent far down, kissed her, and would have risen again, but her big arms encompassed his neck and held him, uncomfortably, till he knelt by her side and laid his head on her bosom.

He felt exceedingly foolish, but nearer to comfort than he had been for a long while. He wished that he might be a boy again in his mother's arms and be altogether content and carefree as he had been there. As if children were content and carefree! Great Heavens! do they not begin to squirm and kick before they are born?

Mrs. Dyckman was suffocated a trifle by his weight and her own and her corsets, but her heart ached for him somewhere down deep and she whispered:

"Can't he tell his mother what he wants? Maybe she can get it for him."

He laughed bitterly and extricated himself from her clasp, patted her fat arm, and turned away. His father jealously seized his sleeve.

"Anything serious, old man? You know I'm here."

Jim squeezed his father's hand and shook his head and turned to the drink which had arrived. He took it from the tray to his chair and sat meditating Newport across the top of his glass. Between the rail of the deck and the edge of the awning he saw a long slice of it. It was vanity and emptiness to him. He spoke at length.

"Fact is, folks, I've got to go back to New York or somewhere."

"Good Lord!" his father said. "I'm all mixed up in a golf tournament. I think I've got a chance to lick the boots off old Wainwright."

"Oh dear!" sighed Mrs. Dyckman, "there's to be the most interesting lecture by that Hindu poet. And it's so much more comfortable here than ashore. This boat is the coziest you've ever had."

"Stay here, darling," said Jim. "I'll make you a present of her."

"Oh, that's glorious," said Mrs. Dyckman. "I've never had a yacht of my own. It's a shame to take it from you, but you can get another. And of course you'll always be welcome here—which is more than a certain other big Dyckman will be if he doesn't look sharp."

"For the Lord's sake, Jim, don't give it to her. She's the meanest old miser about her own things." Dyckman senior pushed his chair back against the rail.

"Watch out!" Mrs. Dyckman gasped. "You're scraping the paint off my yacht."

Jim rose again. "I've just about time to make the last train for the day," he said.

His mother sat up and clutched at his hand. "Can't I help you, honey? Please let me! What is the matter?"

"The matter is I'm a lunkhead and Newport bores me stiff. That's all. Don't worry. I'll go get the packing started."

He went along the deck, and his parents helplessly craned their necks after him. His father groaned. Jim had "everything." There was nothing to get for him, no toy to buy to divert him with.

"He wants a new toy, and he doesn't know what it is," said the old man.

But Jim wanted an old toy on a shelf too high for his reach. He ran away from the sight of it.

And Dyckman was fleeing to Charity's next resting-place, after all, for she also returned in a few days to New York. She was restive under the goad to return to France. She repented her selfish neglect of the children of all ages she had adopted abroad. One thing held her back—the dread of putting the ocean again between her and her husband.

She thought it small of her to leave so many heroes to suffer without her ministrations, in order that she might prevent one non-hero from having too good a time without her ministrations. But womankind has never been encouraged to adopt the policy of the greatest good to the greatest number. Hardly!

Charity was conscience-smitten, however, and she cast about for a way to absolve herself. Money is the old and ever-reliable way of paying debts physical, moral, and religious. Charity determined to arrange some big fete to bring in a heap of money for the wounded of France, the blind fathers, and the fatherless children.

Everybody was giving entertainments at this time in behalf of some school of victims of the war. The only excuse for amusements in America seemed to be that the profits went to the belligerents in one way or another.

Charity was distressed by the need of an oddity, a novel note which should make itself heard among the clamors for Belgian relief, for Polish relief, for Armenian succor, for German, French, Italian, Russian widows and orphans.

Charity's secretary, Miss Gurdon, made dozens of suggestions, but none of them was big enough to interest Charity. One day a card came up to her with a letter of introduction from Mrs. Noxon:

CHARITY DEAR,—This will acquaint you with a very clever girl, Miss Grace Havender. Her mother was a school friend of mine. Miss Havender arranges to have moving pictures taken of people. They are ever so much quainter than stupid still-life pictures. Posterity ought to see you with your poor wounded soldiers, but meanwhile we really should have a chance to perpetuate you as you are. You are always on the go, and an ordinary picture does not represent you.

Anyway, you will be nice to Miss Havender, for the sake of

Yours affectionately,

MARTHA NOXON.

Charity did not want a picture of herself, but she went down to get rid of Miss Havender politely and to recommend her to friends of greater passion for their own likenesses. Miss Havender was a forward young person and launched at once into a defense of moving pictures.

"Oh, I admire the movies immensely," Charity interposed. "We had some of them in the hospitals abroad. If you could have seen that dear Charlie Chaplin convulse a whole ward of battered soldiers and make them forget their pain and their anxieties! He was more of a nurse than a hundred of us. If he isn't a benefactor, I don't know who is. Oh, I admire the movies, but I'd rather see them than be them, you know.

"Still, an idea has just occurred to me. You know I'm terribly in need of a pile of money."

Miss Havender looked about her and smiled.

"Oh, I don't mean for myself. I have far too much, but for the soldiers. I want something that will bring in a big sum. It occurs to me that if a lot of us got up a story and acted it ourselves, it would be tremendously interesting to—well, to ourselves. And our friends would flock to see it. Amateur performances are ghastly from an artistic standpoint, but they're great fun.

"It just struck me that if we got up a play and had a cast made up of Mr. Jim Dyckman and Tom Duane and Winnie Nicolls and Miss Bettany and the young Stowe Webbs and Mrs. Neff and people like that it would be dreadfully bad art, but much more amusing than if we had all the stars in the world—Mr. Drew and his daughter and his niece Miss Barrymore and her brothers, and Miss Anglin and Miss Bates or Miss Adams or anybody like that. Don't you think so? Or what do you think? Could it be done, or has it been—or what about it?"

Miss Havender gasped. She saw new vistas of business opening before her.

"Yes, it has been done in a small way, and it was great fun, as you say; but it would have been more fun if it hadn't been so crude. What you would need would be a director who was not an amateur. Now, our director is marvelous—Mr. Ferriday. He's the Belasco of the photoplays. He's as great as Griffith. He takes his art like a priest. If you had him you could do wonders."

"Then we must have him, by all means," said Charity, smiling a little at the gleam in Miss Havender's eyes. She had a feeling that Miss Havender had a deep, personal interest in Mr. Ferriday. Miss Havender had; most of the women in his environs had. In the first place, he was powerful and could increase or diminish or check salaries. He distributed places and patronage with a royal prerogative. But he was hungry for praise and suffered from the lack of social prestige granted "the new art."

Miss Havender seconded Charity's motion with enthusiasm. After a long conference it was agreed that Miss Havender should broach the matter to the great Mr. Ferriday while Charity recruited actors and authors.

As Charity rummaged in her hand-bag for a pencil to write Miss Havender's telephone number with, she turned out Kedzie Thropp's crumpled, shabby card. She started.

"Oh, for Heaven's sake! The poor child! I had forgotten her completely. You might be able to do something for her. This Miss Adair is the prettiest thing, and I promised to get her a job. She might photograph splendidly. Won't you try to find her a place?"

"I'll guarantee her one," said Miss Havender, who was sure that the firm would be glad to put Mrs. Cheever under obligations. The firm was in need of patronage, as Mr. Ferriday's lavish expenditures had crippled its treasury, while his artistic whims had held up the delivery of nearly finished films.

Miss Havender told Charity to send the girl to her at the office any day and she would take care of her. Charity kept Kedzie's card in her hand, and, as soon as Miss Havender was gone, ran to her desk to write Kedzie. She told a pale lie—it seemed a gratuitous insult to confess that she had forgotten.

DEAR MISS ADAIR,—Please forgive my delay in keeping my promise, but I have been unable to find anything likely to interest you till to-day. But now Miss Grace Havender, of the Hyperfilm Company, has just assured me that if you will call on her at her office she will see that you are engaged. You will photograph so beautifully that I am sure you will have a great career. Please don't fail to call on Miss Havender.

Yours, with best wishes,

CHARITY C. CHEEVER.

She sent the letter to the address Kedzie had given her—which was that of Kedzie's abandoned boarding-house.



CHAPTER VI

Since Kedzie, by the time her marriage had reached its first morning-after, had already found her brand-new husband odious, there was small hope of her learning to like him or their poverty better on close acquaintance.

When he left her for his office she missed him, and her heart warmed toward him till he came home again. He always brought new disillusionment with him. He spent his hours out of office in bewailing his luck, celebrating the hardness of the times, and proclaiming the hopelessness of his prospects.

And then one evening he arrived with so doleful a countenance that Kedzie took pity on him. She perched herself on his lap and asked him what was worrying him.

"Nothing much, honey," he groaned, "except that I've lost my job."

Kedzie was thunderstruck. She breathed the expletive she learned from her latest companions. "My Gawd!"

Gilfoyle nodded dreadfully: "Business has been bad, anyway. Kalteyer, with his chewing-gum, was about our only big customer, and now he's gone bust. Yep. The bank's shut down on his loans, and he was caught with a mountain of bills on his hands. And the Breathasweeta Chewing Gum stopped selling. People didn't seem to take to the perfume idea."

"I just hate people!" Kedzie growled, pacing the floor.

Gilfoyle went on, bitterly: "Remember how they all said I was such a genius for thinking up the name 'Breathasweeta,' and the perfumery idea? And how they liked my catch-phrase?"

Kedzie nodded.

Gilfoyle grew sarcastic: "Well, a man's a genius if he succeeds, and a fool if he doesn't. I'm just as sure as ever that there's a fortune in Breathasweeta. But when Kalteyer's bankers got cold feet I lost my halo. He and Kiam have been roasting the life out of me. They blame me! They've kept knocking me and quoting 'Kiss me again—who are you?' and then groaning. It's funny. I loved it when everybody else said it was great. But I didn't care much for it myself, the way they said it."

Kedzie flung herself on the tremulous wabbly-legged divan. Kedzie didn't like the phrase, either, now. When he had first smitten it from his brain she had thought it an inspiration and him a king. Now it sounded silly, coarse, a little indecent. Of course it had not succeeded. How could he ever have been so foolish as to utter it—"Kiss me again—who are you?" Why, it was vulgar!

Gilfoyle looked dismally incompetent as he drooped and mumbled. It is hard to tell an autobiography of failure and look one's best.

"Didn't you tell him you was—you were married?" queried Kedzie.

"I hadn't the courage."

"Courage! Well, I like that! So you're fired! Just like me. Funny! And here we are, married and all. My Gaw—"

"Here we are, married and all. They'll let me finish the week, but my goose is cooked, I guess. Jobs are mighty scarce in my line of business. Everybody's poor except the munitions crowd. I wish I knew how to make dynamite."

Kedzie pushed her wet hair back from her brow and tore her waist open a little deeper at the throat. This was carrying the joke of marriage a little too far even for her patient soul.

Soon Gilfoyle's office was closed to him and he was at home almost all day. That finished him with Kedzie.

He had not improved on connubial acquaintance. He was lazy and sloven of mornings, and since he had no office to go to he grew more neglectful of his appearance than ever. His end-to-end cigarettes got on Kedzie's nerves and cost a nagging amount of money, especially as she could not learn to like them herself.

He tried to write poetry for the magazines and permanently destroyed what little respect Kedzie had for the art. Hunting for some little love-word that was unimportant when found threw him into frenzies of rage. He went about mumbling gibberish.

"What in hell rhymes with heaven?" he would snarl. "Beven, ceven, Devon, fevon, gevin, given—" And so on to "zeven." Then "breven, creven, dreven" and "bleven, eleven, dleven" and "pseven, spleven, threven" and so forth.

At length he would hurl his pen across the room, pull at his hair, and light another cigarette. Cigarette always rhymed with cigarette.

After a day or two of this drivel he produced a brief lyric with a certain fleetness of movement; it had small freight to carry. He took it to a number of editors he knew, and one of them accepted it as a kindness.

Kedzie was delighted till she heard that it would bring into the exchequer about seven dollars when the check came, which would be in two weeks.

When Gilfoyle was not fighting at composition he was calling the editors hard names and deploring the small remuneration given to poets by a pork-packing nation. Or he would be hooting ridicule at the successful poets and growing almost as furious against the persons addicted to the fashionable vers libre as he was against the wealthy classes.

It seemed to Kedzie that nothing on earth was less important than prosody, and that however badly poets were paid, they were paid more than they earned. She grew so lonely for some one to talk to that she decided to call on old Mrs. Jambers at the boarding-house. She planned to stop in at dinner-time, in the hope of being asked to sit in at a real meal. The task of cooking what she could afford to buy robbed her of all appetite, and she was living mainly on fumes of food and gas.

She was growing thinner and shabbier of soul, and she knew it. She put off the call till she could endure her solitude no longer; then she visited Mrs. Jambers. A new maid met her at the door and barred her entrance suspiciously. Mrs. Jambers was out. So was Mrs. Bottger. So were the old boarders that Kedzie knew. New boarders had their rooms, Kedzie was exiled indeed.

She turned away, saying: "Tell Mrs. Jambers that Anita Adair stopped to say hello. I was just passing."

"Anita Adair?" said the maid. "You was Anita Adair, yes? Wait once. It is a letter for you by downstairs."

She closed the door in Kedzie's face. Some time later she came back and gave Anita the letter from Charity. It was several days old. She read it with amazement. The impulse to tear it up as she had torn up Charity's card in Newport did not last long. She went at once to a drugstore and looked up the telephone number and the address of the Hyperfilm Company. She repaid the druggist with a smile and a word of thanks; then she took a street-car to the office.

Miss Havender, who was also a scenario-writer and editor, was very busy. She had an executive manner that strangely contradicted her abilities to suffer under the pangs of love and unrequited idolatry. But then, business men are no more immune to the foolish venom on Cupid's arrows than poets—perhaps less, since they have no outlet of rhapsody. That was one of the troubles with Kedzie's poet. By the time Gilfoyle had finished a poem of love he was so exhausted that any other emotion was welcome, best of all a good quarrel and the healthful exercise of his poetic gifts for hate. He could hate at the drop of a hat.

When the office-boy brought Charity's letter of introduction to Miss Havender with the verbal message that Miss Adair was waiting outside Miss Havender nodded. She decided to procure this Miss Adair a good job in order to curry favor with Mrs. Cheever. She would advise Mr. Ferriday to pay her marked attention, too.

But when she caught sight of Kedzie running the gantlet of the battery of authors and typists, and noted how pretty she was, Miss Havender decided that it would not be good for Mr. Ferriday to pay marked attention to this minx. He had a habit of falling in love with women more ardently than with scenarios. He was a despot with a scenario, and he could quickly make a famous novel unrecognizable by its own father or mother. But a pretty woman could rule him ludicrously while her charm lasted.

Miss Havender would gladly have turned Kedzie from the door, but she did not dare. She had promised Mrs. Cheever to give the girl a job. But she had not promised what kind of job it should be.

She received Kedzie with such brusqueness that the frightened girl almost fell off the small rim of chair she dared to occupy. She offered Kedzie a post as a typist, but Kedzie could not type; as a film-cutter's assistant, but Kedzie had never seen a film; as a printing-machine engineer or a bookkeeper's clerk, but Kedzie had no ability to do things. She could merely look things.

Finally Miss Havender said: "I'm awfully sorry, Miss Adair, but the only position open is a place as extra woman. There is a big ballroom scene to be staged tomorrow, and a low dance-hall the next day, and on Monday a crowd of starving Belgian peasants. We could use you in those, but of course you wouldn't care to accept the pay."

She said this hopefully. Kedzie answered, hopelessly:

"What's the pay?"

"Three dollars."

"I'll take it."

Miss Havender accepted the inevitable, gave her the address of the studio—far up-town in the Bronx—and told her to report at eight the next morning.

Kedzie went back to her home in a new mood. She was the breadwinner now, if not a cake-earner. Gilfoyle was depressed by her good news, and she was indignant because he was not happy. The poor fellow was simply ashamed of his own inability to support her in the style she had been accustomed to dreaming about.

Kedzie was sullen at having to get the dinner that night. The hot water would not help to give her hands the ballroom texture. The next morning she had to leave early. Gilfoyle was too tired of doing nothing to get up, and she resolved to buy her breakfast ready-made outside. Her last glance at her husband with his frowsy hair on his frowsy pillow infuriated her.

The experience at the big studio assuaged her wrath against life. It was something new, and there was a thrill in the concerted action of the crowds. She wore a rented ball-gown which did not fit her. Seeing how her very shoulders winced at their exposure, one would not have believed that she was a graduate of the Silsby school of near to nature in next to nothing.

She danced with an extra man, Mr. Clarence Yoder, a portly actor out of work. He was a costume-play gentleman, and Kedzie thought him something grand. He found her an entrancing armload. He was rather aggressive and held her somewhat straitly to his exuberant form, but he gave her so much information that she did not snub him. She did not even tell him that she was married. Indeed, when at the close of a busy day he hinted at a willingness to take her out to see a picture that evening, she made other excuses than those that actually prevented her accepting. She spent a doleful evening at home with her dour husband and resented him more than ever.

On the second day Kedzie was a slum waif and did not like it. She pouted with a sincerity that was irresistible.

Mr. Ferriday did not direct the crowd scenes in these pictures. His assistant, Mr. Garfinkel, was the slave-driver. Mr. Yoder cleverly called him "Simon Legree." Kedzie did not know who Mr. Legree was, but she laughed because Mr. Yoder looked as if he wanted her to laugh, and she had decided that he was worth cultivating.