Charity caught herself about to say, "I beg your pardon, Hammond."

She felt as if she ought to beg the pardon of everybody in the world.

She could not stand the lonely dining-room long. She rose and walked out. It seemed that she would never reach the door. It was a via crucis to her. Her back ached with the sense of eyes upon it.

The hall was lonely. The thud of the front door jarred her. She went into the library. It was a dark and frowning cavern. She went into the music-room, approached the piano, looked over the music, turned up "Go, Lovely Rose." The rose that Jim Dyckman said she was had been thrown into the mud. She went up to her room. The maid was arranging her bed for the night. She had turned down one corner of the cover, built up one heap of pillows, set one pair of slippers by the edge.

Charity felt like a rejected old spinster. She sat and mused and her thoughts were bitter. She remembered Doctor Mosely's sermon and wondered if he would preach what he preached if he knew what she knew. She would go to him and tell him.

But what did she know? Enough to convince herself, but nothing at all that even a preacher would call evidence.

She must have proof. She resolved to get it. There must be an abundance of it. She wondered how one went at the getting of evidence.



CHAPTER XV

While Charity was resolving to tear down her life Kedzie Thropp was building herself a new one on the foundations that Charity had laid for her with a card of introduction to Miss Havender.

In the motion-picture world Kedzie had found herself. Her very limitations were to her advantage. She would have failed dismally in the spoken drama, but the flowing photograma was just to her measure.

The actor must not only know how to read his lines and express emotions, but must keep up the same spontaneity night after night, sometimes for a thousand performances or more. The movie actor is expected to respond to a situation once or twice for rehearsal, and once or twice for the camera. There is no audience to struggle against and listen for—and to. The director is always there at the side calling, reminding, pleading, encouraging, threatening, suggesting the thoughts, the lines, and the expression, doing all the work except the pantomime.

That was Kedzie's salvation. Tell her a story and make her the heroine of it, and her excitable heart would thrill to the emotional crisis. Take a snapshot of her, and the picture was caught.

Ferriday soon learned this and protected her from her own helpless vice of discontent. She lapsed always from her enthusiasm after it was once cold. As an actress she would have been one of those frequent flashers who give a splendid rehearsal or two and then sink back into a torpor. She might have risen to an appealing first-night performance. Thereafter, she would have become dismal. The second week would have found the audiences disgusted and the third would have found her breaking her contract and running away with somebody. A horse that has run away once is likely to run away again. Kedzie had run away twice.

But the movie life was just the thing for her. She did not play always the same set scenes in the same scene sets. She was not required even to follow the logic of the story. For a while she would play a bit in a tiny angle representing a drawing-room. When that was taken she would play, not the next moment of the story, but the next scene in that scene. It might be a year further along in the story. It was exciting.

Her second picture had great success. She played the girl brought up as a boy by a cruel Italian padrone who made her steal. Her third picture was as nearly the same as possible.

Now she was a ragged waif, a girl, who dressed as a boy and sold newspapers so as to keep her old father in liquor. The garret was a rickety table, a rusty stove, a broken chair, and a V of painted canvas walls with a broken window and a paper snowstorm falling back of it. There Kedzie was found in very becoming ragged breeches, pouting with starvation. Her father drove her out for gin.

She walked out of the set, picked up a bottle, and brought it back. The scene in the saloon would be taken later: also the street scenes to and from.

An officer of the "Cruelty" came and took her from the garret. That was the beginning of a series of adventures culminating in a marriage with a multimillionaire. While the garret was set, the finish of the story was taken.

She ran and changed her costume to one of wealth with ermine. She came in with the handsome young millionaire. It was the next winter. Her father was dying. He asked her forgiveness and gave her his blessing. Then Kedzie changed back to her first costume and went in the motor to a dismal street where she was shown coming out of the tenement, and going back to it gin-laden, and again with the officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

She changed once more to her wealthy garb with the ermine and was photographed going in with her young millionaire.

The next day the scene in the Cruelty office was built and she acted in it. The drawing-room in the millionaire's home was assembled and she acted in that. Then she went out in rags and sold newspapers on a corner. So it went. The chronology hopelessly jumbled, but the change incessant.

The studio was a palace of industry. Many of the scenes were played on the great glass-covered roof. On bright days she would ride in a closed automobile to some street or some lonely glen or to the home of some wealthy person who had lent his house to the movies on the bribe of a gift to his favorite benevolence.

There was the thrill of sitting in the projection-room and watching herself scamper across the scene, or flirt or weep, look pretty or gorgeous, sad or gay.

One's own portrait is always a terribly fascinating thing, for it is always the inaccurate portrait of a stranger curiously akin to one and curiously alien. But to see one's portrait move and breathe and feel is magic unbelievable.

In the enlarged close-ups when Kedzie was a girl giantess, the effect was uncanny. She loved herself and was glad of the friendly dark that hid her own wild pride in her beauty, but did not prevent her from hearing the exclamations of Ferriday and the backers and the other actors who were admitted to the preliminary views.

There was a quality in her work that surpassed Ferriday's expectations and made her pantomime singularly legible. The modulations of her thought from one extreme mood to another were always traceable. This was true of the least feelings. Ferriday would say: "Now you decide to telephone your lover. You hesitate, you telephone, a girl answers, you wait, he speaks, you smile."

Kedzie would nod with impatient zest and one could read each gradation of thought. "I'd better telephone him. I will. No, I'd better not. Yes. No. Shall I? Well, I will. Hello! Hello, Central! Hurry up! Gramercy 816. What takes so long? Is this Gramercy 816? Mr. Monteith. Oh, isn't she smart? What keeps him? Is he out? No, there he is! Oh, joy! I must be very severe. Hello, Harry."

All these thoughts the spectator could follow. They ran, as it were, under her skin. There was no stolidity or phlegm. She was astoundingly alive and real. Unimportant, without sublimity of emotion or intellectual power, she was irresistibly real. The public understood all she told it, and adored her.

Her petulance, quick temper, pretty discontent, did not harm her on the screen, but helped immensely, for they gave her character. It was delicious to see her eyes narrow with sudden resentment or girlish malice and widen again with equally abrupt affection. She was so pretty that she could afford to act ugly.

It took time, however, to get Kedzie from the studio to the negative, then to the positive. There was editing to do, and it seemed to her that her most delicious bits had to be cut out, because Ferriday always took three or four thousand feet of film for every thousand he used. They had to cut out more Kedzie to let in the titles and subtitles, and it angered her to see how much space was given to other members of the cast. She simply loathed the scenes she was not the center of, and she developed an acerbity of protest against any "trespass" on her "rights" that proved her a genuine business woman.

She learned the tricks of the trade with magnificent speed. She was never so meek and helpless of expression as when she slipped in front of another actor or actress and filled as much of the foreground as her slenderness permitted. When she was crowded into the background she knew how to divert attention to herself during the best moments of the other people in the scene. And she could most innocently spoil any bit that she did not like to do herself or have done by another.

In the studio she was speedily recognized as an ambitious young woman zealous for self-advancement. In fact, they called her a "reel hog" and a "glutton for footage." A number of minor feuds were turned into deep friendships through a common resentment at Kedzie's impartial robberies.

Ferriday did not object to these professional traits. They exist in all trades, and success is never won in large measure without them. Almost all businesses are little trusts, monopolies more or less tiny, more or less ruthless.

Ferriday delighted in Kedzie's battle for space with the other members of the troupe. They kept everybody intense. The lover loved her better on the screen for hating her personal avarice. Her mother in the picture was more meltingly tender in her caresses for wanting to scratch the little cat's eyes out. The clergyman who pointed her the way to heaven grew more ardently devout for having to grip the floor with his feet to keep the adoring Kedzie from edging him off his own pulpit.

This rivalry is better than any number of chaperons, and Kedzie was saved from any danger of falling in love with the unspeakably beautiful leading man by the ferocity of her jealousy of him. She had once, as a little girl in Nimrim, Missouri, nearly swooned at the glory of this Lorraine Melnotte, and she had written him a little letter of adoration, one of some nineteen he received that day from lovelorn girls about the globe.

When she met him first in the studio he was painted as delicately as a barber-pole, and he stood sweating in a scene under the full blast of a battery of sick green Cooper-Hewitt lights. He looked about three days dead and loathsome as an iguana. He was in full evening dress, and Kedzie had always marveled at the snowiness of his linen.

Now she saw how he got the effect. He wore a yellow shirt, collar, tie, and waistcoat in order that the photographic result should be the purest white. The yellow linen was the completing horror under the spoiled mustard color of his face with its mouth the color of an overripe plum.

His expression did not redeem his appalling features that day, nor did his language help. While the cameraman leaned on his idle machine and looked weary Lorraine Melnotte was having a sweet little row with the actress playing his sainted mother. He was threatening to have her fired if she didn't keep her place.

That finished him for Kedzie. She could not tolerate professional jealousy. She never could. Her own was merely a defense of her dignity and her rights against the peculiarly impossible people who infested the studio. That was Kedzie's own phrase, for she had not lived with a poet long before she began to experiment with large words. She practised before a mirror any phrases she particularly liked. She had probably heard Ferriday use the expression and she got herself up on it till she was glib. Anybody who can be glib with "peculiarly impossible" is in a fair way to be articulate. All Kedzie needed was a little more certainty on her grammar; and her ear was giving her that.

Her contempt for Lorraine Melnotte culminated in a dark suspicion that that was not his real born name. If Anita Adair was Kedzie Thropp what would Lorraine Melnotte have been? It was a pretty problem in algebra. But Kedzie despised a man that would take another name. And such a name—as unworthy of a man as a box of chocolate fudge.

So the image of Mr. Melnotte fell out of the niche in her heart and went over into the gallery of her hates. She fought him with every weapon and every foul thrust known to shy little women in dealing with big, blustering men. She loved to call him "Melnit" or "naughty Mel."

He was lost from the start and was soon begging to be released from his contract. The backers were too sure of his vogue, however, to let him go, and it was none of their affair how fiercely Adair and Melnotte indulged in mutual loathing, so long as their screen-love was so wholesomely sweet.

With Ferriday Kedzie's relations were more perilous. He had invented her and was patenting her. She dreaded his wisdom and accepted his least theory as gospel—at first. He combined a remote and godlike intellect with a bending and fatherly grace. And now and then, like the other gods of all the mythologies, he came down to earth in an amorous mood.

Now Kedzie's surety was her canny realization of the value of tantalism. She was not long left in ignorance of his record for flitting fancy and she felt that he would flit from her as soon as he conquered her. Her duty was plain.

She played him well and drove him frantic. It would have been hard to say whether he hated her or loved her more when he found her always just a little beyond. He had begun with the greatest gift in his power. He had promised her world-wide fame, and no other gift could count till he had made that good. And it would take a long, long while of incessant labor to build.

Ferriday belittled himself in Kedzie's eyes by his groans of baffled egotism. She could read his plots on his countenance, and thwart him in advance. But this was not always easy for her, and again and again he had only himself to blame for his non-success with Kedzie's heart. With Kedzie's fame he was having a very sudden and phenomenal triumph —if anything could be called phenomenal in a field which itself was phenomenal always.



CHAPTER XVI

Ferriday did not know, of course, that Kedzie was married. She hardly knew it herself now. Gilfoyle had been three weeks late in sending her the thirty dollars' fare to Chicago. Then she wrote him that she was doing fairly well at the studio and she would stick to her work. She sent him oceans of love, but she did not send him the thirty dollars.

Besides, he had borrowed it of her in the first place, and she had had to borrow more of Ferriday. She had neglected to pay him back. She needed so much for her new clothes and new expenses innumerable inflicted on her by her improved estate.

And, of course, she left the miserable little flat on the landlord's hands. He wasted a good deal of time trying to get the rent paid. Besides, it was rented in Gilfoyle's name and he was safe in Chicago. And yet not very safe, for Chicago has also its Bohemia, its clusters of real and imitation artists, its talkers and dabblers, as well as its toilers and achievers.

Gilfoyle found some wonderful Western sirens who listened to his poetry. They were new to him and he to them. His Eastern pronunciations fascinated them as they had fascinated Kedzie, and he soon found in them all the breeziness and wholesomeness of the great prairies which are found in the mid-Western women of literature.

Gilfoyle had apparently forgotten that his own wife was a mid-Westerness, and the least breezy, wholesome, prairian thing imaginable. He saw mid-Western women of all sorts about him, but he was of those who must have a type for every section of humanity and who will not be shaken in their belief by any majority of exceptions.

When Gilfoyle got Kedzie's letter saying that she would not join him yet awhile he wrote her a letter of poetic grief at the separation. But poets, like the rest of us, are the better for getting a grief on paper and out of the system.

Kedzie did not answer his letter for a long while and he did not miss her answer much, for he was having his own little triumphs. The advertisements he wrote were receiving honorable mention at the office and he was having success with his poetry and his flirtations of evenings.

He returned to his boarding-house one night and looked at his face in the mirror, stared into the eyes that stared back. A certain melting and molten and molting lady had told him that he had poet's eyes like Julian Street's and was almost as witty. Gilfoyle tried with his shaving-glass and the bureau mirror to study the profile that someone else had compared to the cameonic visage of Richard Le Gallienne.

Gilfoyle was gloriously ashamed of himself. In the voice that someone else had compared to Charlie Towne's reading his own verses he addressed his reflection with scorn:

"You heartless dog! You ought to be shot—forgetting that you have a poor little deserted wife toiling in the great city. You're as bad as Lord Byron ever was."

Then he wrote a sonnet against his own perfidy and accepted confession as atonement and plenary indulgence.

He was one of those who, when they have cried, "I have sinned," hear a mysterious voice saying, "Poor sufferer, go and sin some more."

So he did, and he went the way of millions of lazy-minded, lazy- moraled husbands while Kedzie went the way of men and women who succeed by self-exploitation and count only that bad morals which is also bad business. And that was the status of the matrimonial adventure of the Gilfoyles for the present. It made no perceptible difference to anybody that they were married—least of all to themselves—for the present. But of course Kedzie was obscurely preparing all this while for a tremendous explosion into publicity and into what is known as "the big money." And that was bound to make a vast difference to Gilfoyle as well as to Mrs. Gilfoyle.

In these all-revolutionary days a man had better be a little polite always to his wife, for in some totally unexpectable way she may suddenly prove to be a bigger man than he is, a money-getter, a fame or shame acquirer—if only by way of becoming the president of a suffrage association or a best-seller or an inventor of a popular doll.

And again, all this time—a very short time, considering the changes it made in everybody concerned—Ferriday was Kedzie's alternate hope and despair, good angel and bad, uplifter and down-yanker.

Sometimes he threatened to stop the picture and destroy it unless she kissed him. And she knew that he could and would do almost anything of that sort. Had not his backers threatened to murder him or sue him if he did not finish the big feature? At such times Kedzie usually kissed Ferriday to keep him quiet. But she was as careful not to give too many kisses as she had been not to put too many caramels in half a pound when she had clerked in the little candy-store. Nowadays she would pause and watch the quivering scale of policy intently with one more sweet poised as if it were worth its weight in gold. The ability to stop while the scale wavers in the tiny zone of just-a-little-too- little and just-a-little-too-much is what makes success in any business of man—or woman-kind.

It was not always easy for Kedzie to withhold that extra bonbon. There were times when Ferriday raised her hopes and her pride so high that she fairly squealed with love of him and hugged him. That would have been the destruction of Kedzie if there had not been the counter-weight of conceit in Ferriday's soul, for at those times he would sigh to himself or aloud:

"You are loving me only because I am useful to you."

This thought always sobered and chilled Mr. Ferriday. He worked none the less for her and himself and he tried in a hundred ways to surprise the little witch into an adoration complete enough to make her forget herself, make her capable of that ultimate altruism to which a woman falls or rises when she stretches herself out on the altar of love.

Ferriday began to think seriously that the only way he could break Kedzie's pride completely would be to make her his wife. He began to wonder if that were not, after all, what she was driving at—or trying to drive him to.

Life will be so much more wholesome when women propose marriage as men do and have a plain, frank talk about it instead of their eternal business of veils and reticences, fugitive impulses real or coquettish, modesties real or faked.

Ferriday could not be sure of Kedzie, and he grew so curious to know that finally he broke out, "In the Lord's name, will you or will you not marry me, damn you?"

And Kedzie answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't dream of such a thing."

But that did not prove anything, either. Perhaps she merely wanted to trawl him along.

She had Ferriday almost crazy—at least she had added one more to his manias—when Jim Dyckman wandered into the studio and set up an entirely new series of ambitions and discontents.



CHAPTER XVII

Charity Coe forgot her great moving-picture enterprise for a time in the agony of her discovery that her husband was disloyal and that the Church did not accept that as a cancellation of her own loyalty.

For a long time she was in such misery of uncertainty that she went up to the mountains to recover her strength. She came back at last, made simple and stoical somehow by the contrast of human pettiness with the serenity (as we call it) of those vast masses of debris that we poetize and humanize as patient giants.

Her absence had left Cheever entirely to his own devices and to Zada's. They had made up and fought and made up again dozens of times and settled down at length to that normal alternation of peace and conflict known as domestic life.

With Charity out of the way there was so little interruption to their communion that when she came back Zada forbade Cheever to meet her at the station, and he obeyed.

Charity felt that she had brought with her the weight of the mountains instead of their calm when she detrained in the thronged solitude of the Grand Central Terminal. And the house with its sympathetic family of servants only was as home-like as the Mammoth Cave.

She took up her work with a frenzy. The need of a man to act as her adjutant in the business details was imperative. She thought of Jim Dyckman again, and with a different thought.

When he pleaded to her before she had imagined that she was at least officially a wife. Now she felt divorced and abandoned, a waif on the public mercy.

She wanted to talk to Jim because she felt so disprized and downtrodden that she wanted to see somebody who adored her. She felt wild impulses to throw herself into his keeping. She wanted to be bad just to spite the bad. But she merely convinced herself that she was wicked enough already and deserving of her punishment.

She made the moving-picture scheme a good excuse for asking Jim to grant her a talk—a business talk. To protect herself from him and from herself she made a convenience of Mrs. Neff's home. Jim met her there. She was not looking her best and her mood was one of artificial indirectness that offended him. He never dreamed that it was because she was afraid to show him how glad she was to see him.

He was furious at her—so he said he would do her bidding. She dumped the financial and mechanical ends of the enterprise on his hands and he accepted the burden. He had nothing else pressing for his time.

One of his first duties, Charity told him, was to call at the Hyperfilm Studio and try to engage that Mr. Ferriday for director and learn the ropes.

"While you're there you might inquire about that little girl you pulled out of the pool. I sent her there. They promised her a job. Her name was—I have it at home in my address-book. I'll telephone it to you."

And she did. She had no more acquaintance with the history Kedzie was making in the moving-picture world than she had of the sensational rise of the latest politician in Tibet. Neither had Jim.

He had been traveling about on his mother's yacht and in less correct societies, trying to convince himself that he was cured of Charity. He did not know that the first pictures of Anita Adair were causing lines to gather outside the moving-picture theaters of numberless cities and towns.

When his car halted before the big studio where Ferriday was high priest Jim might have been a traveler entering a temple in Lassa, for all he knew of its rites and its powers.

No more did the doorman know the power and place of Jim Dyckman. When Jim said he had an appointment with Mr. Ferriday the doorman thumbed him up the marble stairs. There were many doors, but no signs on them, and Dyckman blundered about. At length he turned down a corridor and found himself in the workshop.

A vast room it was, the floor hidden with low canvas walls and doors marked "Keep out." Overhead were girders of steel from which depended heavy chains supporting hundreds of slanting tubes glowing with green fire.

From somewhere in the inclosures came a voice in distress. It was the first time Dyckman ever heard Ferriday's voice, and it puzzled him as it cried:

"Come on, choke her—choke harder, you fool; you're not a masseur— you're a murderer. Now drag her across to the edge of the well. Pause, look back. Come on, Melnotte: yell at him! 'Stop, stop, you dog!' Turn round, Higgins; draw your knife. Go to it now! Give 'em a real fight. That's all right. Only a little cut. The blood looks good. Get up, Miss Adair; crawl away on hands and knees. Don't forget you've been choked. Now take the knife away, Melnotte. Rise; look triumphant; see the girl. Get to him, Miss Adair. Easy on the embrace: you're a shy little thing. 'My hero! you have saved me!' Now, Melnotte: 'Clarice! it is you! you!' Cut! How many feet, Jones?

"Now we'll take the scene in the vat of sulphuric acid. Is the tank ready? You go lie down and rest, Miss Adair. We won't want you for half an hour."

As Kedzie left the scene she found Dyckman waiting for her. He lifted his hat and spoke down at her:

"Pardon me, but you're Miss Adair, aren't you?"

"Yes," said Kedzie, with as much modesty as a queen could show, incidentally noting that the man who bespoke her so timidly was plainly a real swell. She was getting so now that she could tell the real from the plated.

"I heard them murdering you in there and I—Well, Mrs. Cheever asked me to look you up and see how you were getting along. I see you are."

"Mrs. Cheever!" said Kedzie, searching her memory. Then, with great kindliness, "Oh yes! I remember her."

"You've forgotten me, I suppose. I had the pleasure—the sad pleasure of helping you out of the water at Mrs. Noxon's."

"Oh, Lord, yes," Kedzie cried, forgetting her rank. "You're Jim Dyckman—I mean, Mr. Dyckman."

"So you remember my name," he flushed. "Well, I must say!"

"I didn't remember to thank you," said Kedzie. "I was all damp and mad. I've often thought of writing to you." And she had.

"I wish you had," said Dyckman. "Well, well!"

He didn't know what to say, and so he laughed and she laughed and they were well acquainted. Then he thought of a good one.

"I pulled you out of the cold water, so it's your turn to pull me out of the hot."

"What hot?" said Kedzie.

"I've been sent up here to learn the trade."

Kedzie had a horrible feeling that he must have lost his money. Wouldn't it be just her luck to meet her first millionaire after he had become an ex-?

But Dyckman said that he had come to try and engage Mr. Ferriday, and that sounded so splendid to Kedzie that she snuggled closer. Ordinarily when a woman cowers under the eaves of a man's shoulder it is taken for a signal for amiabilities to begin.

Dyckman could not imagine that Kedzie was already as bad as all that. She wasn't. She was just trying to get as close as she could to a million dollars. Her feelings were as innocent and as imbecile as those of the mobs that stand in line for the privilege of pump-handling a politician.

Jim Dyckman kept forgetting that he was so rich. He hated to be reminded of it. He did not suspect Kedzie of such a thought. He stared down at her and thought she was cruelly pretty. He wanted to tell her so, but he found himself saying:

"But I mustn't keep you. I heard somebody say that you were to lie down and rest up."

"Oh, that was only Mr. Ferriday. I'm not tired a bit."

"Ferriday. Oh yes, I'm forgetting him. He's the feller I've come to see."

"He can't be approached when he's working. Sit down, won't you?"

He sat down on an old bench and she sat down, too. She had never felt quite so contented as this. And Dyckman had not felt so teased by beauty in a longer time than he could remember.

Kedzie was as exotic to him as a Japanese doll. Her face was painted in picturesque blotches that reminded him of a toy-shop. Her eyes were made up with a delicate green that gave them an effect unknown to him.

She was dressed as a young farm girl with a sunbonnet a-dangle at the back of her neck, her curls trailing across her rounded shoulders and down upon her dreamy bosom. She sat and swung her little feet and looked up at him sidewise.

He forgot all about Ferriday, and when Ferriday came along did not see him. Kedzie did not tell him. She pretended not to see Ferriday, though she enjoyed enormously the shock it gave him to find her so much at ease with that big stranger.

Ferriday was so indignant at being snubbed in his own domain by his own creation that he sent Garfinkel to see who the fellow was and throw him out. Garfinkel came back with Dyckman, followed by Kedzie.

Before Garfinkel could present Dyckman to the great Ferriday, Kedzie made the introduction. Dyckman was already her own property. She had seen him first.

Ferriday was jolted by the impact of the great name of Dyckman. He was restored by the suppliant attitude of his visitor. He said that he doubted if he could find the time to direct an amateur picture. Dyckman hastened to say:

"Of course, money is no object to us...."

"Nor to me," Ferriday said, coldly.

Dyckman went on as if he had not heard: "... Except that the more the show costs the less there is for the charity."

"I should be glad to donate my services to the cause," said Ferriday, who could be magnificent.

"Three cheers for you!" said Dyckman, who could not.

Ferriday had neither the time nor the patience for the task. But when the chance came to dazzle the rich by the rich generosity of working for nothing, he could not afford to let it pass. To tip a millionaire! He had to do that.

He saw incidentally that Kedzie was fairly hypnotized by Dyckman and Dyckman by her. His first flare of jealousy died out. To be cut out by a prince has always been a kind of ennoblement in itself.

Also one of Ferriday's inspirations came to him. If he could get those two infatuated with each other it would not only take Kedzie off his heart, but it might be made to redound to the further advantage of his own genius. A scheme occurred to him. He was building the scenario of it in the back room of his head while his guest occupied his parlor.

He wanted to be alone and he wanted Dyckman and Kedzie to be alone together. And so did Kedzie. Ferriday suggested:

"Perhaps Mr. Dyckman would like to look over the studio—and perhaps Miss Adair would show him about."

Kedzie started to cry, "You bet your boots," but she caught herself in time and shifted to, "I should be chawmed." Millionaires did not use plain words.

Then Dyckman said, "Great!"

He followed Kedzie wherever she led. He was as awkward and out of place as a school-boy at his first big dance. Kedzie showed him a murder scene being enacted under the bluesome light. She took great pains not to let any of it stain her skin. She showed him a comic scene with a skeletonic man on a comic bicycle. Dyckman roared when the other comedian lubricated the cyclist's joints with an oil-can.

Kedzie showed him the projection-room and told the operator to run off a bit of a scene in which she was revealed to no disadvantage. She sat alone in the dark with a million dollars that were crazy about her. She could tell that Dyckman was tremendously excited.

Here at last was her long-sought opportunity to rebuff the advances of a wicked plutocrat. But he didn't make any, and she might not have rebuffed them. Still, the air was a-quiver with that electricity generated almost audibly by a man and a woman alone in the dark.

Dyckman was ashamed of himself and of his arm for wanting to gather in that delectable partridge, but he behaved himself admirably.

He told her that she was a "corker," a "dream," and "one sweet song," and that the picture did not do her justice.

Kedzie showed him the other departments of the picture-factory and he was amazed at all she knew. So was she. He stayed a long while and saw everything and yet he said he would come again.

He suggested that it might be nice if Mr. Ferriday and Miss Adair would dine with him soon. Ferriday was free "to-morrow," and so they made it to-morrow evening at the Vanderbilt.

Kedzie was there and Dyckman was there, but a boy brought a note from Mr. Ferriday saying that he was unavoidably prevented from being present.

Dyckman grinned: "We'll have to bear up under it the best we can. You won't run away just because your chaperon is gone, will you?"

Kedzie smiled and said she would stay. But she was puzzled. What was Ferriday up to? One always suspected that Ferriday was up to something and thinking of something other than what he did or said.

Kedzie was not ashamed of her clothes this time. Indeed, when she gave her opera-cloak to the maid she came out so resplendent that Jim Dyckman said:

"Zowie! but you're a—Whew! aren't you great? Some change-o from the little farm girl I saw up at the studio. I don't suppose you'll eat anything but a little bird-seed."

She was elated to see the maitre d'hotel shake hands with her escort and ask him how he was and where he had been. Jim apologized for neglecting to call recently, and the two sauntered like friends across to a table where half a dozen waiters bowed and smiled and welcomed the prodigal home.

When they were seated the headwaiter said, "The moosels vit sauce mariniere are nize to-nide."

Dyckman shook his head: "Ump-umm! I'm on the water-wagon and the diet kitchen. Miss Adair can go as far as she likes, but I've got to stick to a little thick soup, a big, thick steak, and after, a little French pastry, some coffee, and a bottle of polly water—and I'll risk a mug of old musty." He turned to Kedzie: "And now I've ordered, what do you want? I never could order for anybody else."

Kedzie was disappointed in him. He was nothing like Ferriday. He didn't use a French word once. She was afraid to venture on her own.

"I'll take the same things," she said.

"Sensible lady," said Jim. "Women who work must eat."

Kedzie hated to be referred to as a worker by an idler. She little knew how much Jim Dyckman wished he were a worker.

She could not make him out. Her little hook had dragged out Leviathan and she was surprised to find how unlike he was to her plans for her first millionaire. He ate like a hungry man who ordered what he wanted and made no effort to want what he did not want. He had had so much elaborated food that he craved few courses and simple. He said what came into his head, without frills or pose. He was sincerely delighted with Kedzie and made neither secret nor poetry of it.

Toward the last of the dinner Kedzie ceased to try to find in him what was not there. She accepted him as the least affected person she had ever met. He could afford to be unaffected and careless and spontaneous. He had nothing to gain. He had everything already. Kedzie would have said that he ought to have been happy because of that, as if that were not as good an excuse for discontent as any. In any case, Kedzie said to herself:

"He's the real thing."

She wanted to be that very thing—that most difficult thing—real. It became her new ambition.

After the dinner Dyckman offered to take her home. He had a limousine waiting for him. She did not ask him to put her into a taxicab. She was not afraid to have him ride home with her. She was afraid he wouldn't. She was not ashamed of the apartment-house she was living in now. It was nothing wonderful, but all the money had been spent on the hall. And that was as far as Dyckman would get—yet.

Kedzie had acquired a serenity toward all the world except what she called "high society." In her mind the word high had the significance it has with reference to game that has been kept to the last critical moments, and trembles, exquisitely putrid, between being eaten immediately and being thrown away soon.

There is enough and to spare of that high element among the wealthy, but so there is among the poor and among all the middlings. Kedzie had met with it on her way up, and she expected to find it in Dyckman. She looked forward to a thrilling adventure.

She could not have imagined that Dyckman was far more afraid of her than she of him. She was so tiny and he so big that she terrorized him as a mouse an elephant, or a baby a saddle-horse. The elephant is probably afraid that he will squash the little gliding insect, the horse that he might step on the child.

The disparity between Jim Dyckman and Kedzie was not so great, and they were both of the same species. But he felt a kind of terror of her. And yet she fascinated him as an interesting toy that laughed and talked and probably would not say "Mamma!" if squeezed.

Dyckman had been lonely and blue, rejected and dejected. Kedzie was something different. He had known lots of actresses, large and small, stately, learned, cheap, stupid, brilliant, bad, good, gorgeous, shabby, wanton, icy. But Kedzie was his first movie actress. She dwelt in a strange realm of unknown colors and machineries.

She was a new toy in a new toyhouse—a whole Noah's ark of queer toys. He wanted to play with those toys. She made him a revenant to childhood. Or, as he put it:

"Gee! but you make me feel as silly as a kid."

That surprised Kedzie. It was not the sort of talk she expected from a world which was stranger to her than the movie studio to him. He was perfectly natural, and that threw her into a spasm of artificiality.

He sat staring down at her. He put his hands under his knees and sat on them to keep them from touching her, as they wanted to. For all he knew, she was covered with fresh paint. That made her practically irresistible. Would it come off if he kissed her? He had to find out.

Finally he said, so helplessly, passively, that it would be more accurate to say it was said by him:

"Say, Miss Adair, I'm a dead-goner if you don't gimme a kiss."

Kedzie was horrified. Skip Magruder would have been eleganter than that. She answered, with dignity:

"Certainly, if you so desire."

That ought to have chaperoned him back to his senses, but he was too far gone. His long arms shot out, went round her, gathered her up to his breast. His high head came down like a swan's, and his lips pressed hers.

Whatever her soul was, her flesh was all girlhood in one flower of lithe stem, leaf, petal, sepal, and perfume. There was nothing of the opiate poppy, the ominous orchid, or even that velvet voluptuary, the rose. She was like a great pink, sweet, shy, fragrant, common wild honeysuckle blossom.

Jim Dyckman was so whelmed by the youth and flavor of her that his rapture exploded in an unsmothered gasp:

"Golly! but you're great!"

Kedzie was heartbroken. Gilfoyle had done better than that. She had been kissed by several million dollars, and she was not satisfied!

But Dyckman was. He felt that Kedzie had solved the problem of Charity Coe. She had cleared his soul of that hopeless obsession—he thought—just then.



CHAPTER XVIII

When a young man suddenly goes mad in a cab, grapples the young woman who has intrusted herself to his protection, pins her arms to her sides, squeezes her torso till her bones crunch and she has no breath to squawk with, then kisses her deaf and dumb and blind, it is still a nice question which of the two is the helpless one and which has overpowered the other.

Appearances are never more deceitful than in such attacks, and while eye-witnesses are infrequent, they are also untrustworthy. They cannot even tell which of the two is victim of the outrage. The motionless gazelle in the folds of the constrictor may be in full control of the situation.

It undoubtedly has happened, oftener than it should have, in the history of the world that young men have made these onsets without just provocation and have been properly slapped, horsewhipped, or shot for their unwelcome violence. It has also happened that young men have failed to make these onsets when they would have been welcome.

But the perfection of the womanly art of self-pretense is when she subtly wills the young man to overpower her and is so carried away by her own success that she forgets who started it. She droops, swoons, shivers before the fury of her own inspiration, and cries out, with absolute sincerity: "How dare you! How could you! What made you!" or simply moans, "Why, Oswald!" and resists invitingly.

Kedzie had been hoping and praying that Jim Dyckman would kiss her, and mutely daring him to. Yet when he obeyed her tacit behest and asked her permission she was too frightened to refuse. He was stronger than she expected, and he held her longer. When at last she came out for air she was shattered with a pleasant horror.

She barely had the strength to gasp, "Why, Mr. Dyckman, aren't you awful?" and time to straighten her jumbled hat and hair when her apartment-building drew up alongside the limousine and came to a halt.

Dyckman pleaded, like a half-witted booby, "Let's take a little longer ride."

But she remembered her dignity and said, with imperial scorn, "I should hope not!"

She permitted him to help her out.

He said: "When may I see you again? Soon, please!"

She smiled, with a hurt patience, and answered, "Not for a long while."

He chuckled: "To-morrow, eh? That's great!"

She wished that he would not say, "That's great." If he would only say, "Ripping!" or, "I say, that's ripping!" or, "Awfully good of you," or, "No end"—anything swagger. But he would not swagger.

He escorted her to the elevator, where she gave him a queenly hand and murmured, "Good night!"

He watched her go up like Medea in machina; then he turned away and stumbled back into his limousine. It was still fragrant from her presence. The perfume she was using then was a rather aggressive essence of a lingering tenacity upon the atmosphere. But Dyckman was so excited that he liked it. The limousine could hardly contain him.

Kedzie felicitated herself on escaping from his thrall just in time to avoid being stupefied by it. She thanked Heaven that she had not flung her arms around him and claimed him for her own. She had the cleverness of elusion that her sex displays in all the species, from Cleopatras to clams, from butterflies to rhinoceroses. How wisely they practise to evade what they demand, leaving the stupid male to ponder the mysteries of womankind!

When Kedzie reached her mirror she told the approving person she found there that she was doing pretty well for a poor young girl not long in from the country. She postured joyously as she undressed, and danced a feminine war-dance in much the same costume that she wore when Jim Dyckman fished her out of the pool at Newport. She sang:

"I dreamt that I fell in a mar-arble pool With nobles and swells on all si-i-ides."

She had slapped her rescuer's hands away then and groaned to learn that she had driven off a famous plutocrat. But now he was back; indeed he was in the pool now, and she had him on her hook. He had grievously disappointed her by turning out to be a commonplace young man with no gilt on his phrases. But one must be merciful to a million dollars.

The next morning she dreamed of him as a suitor presenting her with a bag of gold instead of a bouquet. Just as she reached for it the telephone rang and a hall-boyish voice told her that it was seven o'clock.

This was the midnight alarm to Cinderella, and she became again a poor working-girl. She had to abandon her prince and run from the palace of dreams to the studio of toil.

She was a trifle surly when she confronted Ferriday. He studied her, smilingly queerly and overplaying indifference:

"Have a nice dinner last night?"

Kedzie fixed him with a skewery glare: "What's your little game? Why did you turn up missing?"

"I had another engagement. Didn't you get my note?"

"Ah, behave, behave!" said Kedzie, then blushed at the plebeian phrase. She was beginning to have a quickly remorseful ear. As soon as she should learn to hear her first thoughts first, and suppress them unspoken, she would be a made lady.

"Oh, you're a true artist, Anita," said Ferriday. "Nothing can hinder your flight into the empyrean."

"Don't sing it. Explain it," Kedzie sneered.

Ferriday laughed so delightedly that he must embrace her. She shoved him back and brushed the imaginary dust of his contact from the shoulders that had but lately been compressed by a million dollars.

"I see you landed him," said Ferriday.

"And I see that all your talk about loving me so much was just a fake," said Kedzie.

"Why do you say that? I adore you."

"If you did, would you throw me at the head of another fellow?" asked Kedzie.

"If it was for the advancement of your career, yes," Ferriday insisted.

"What's Mr. Dyckman got to do with my career?"

"He can make it, if he doesn't break it."

"Come again."

"If you fall in love with that big thug, or if you play him for a limousine like a chorus-girl on the make, your career is gone. But if you use him for your future—well, I have a little scheme that might bounce you up to the sky in a hurry. You could have your millionaire and your fame as well."

"What's the little scheme, Ferri darling?"

"I'll tell you later. We've got to go to the projection-room and see your new film run off. It's assembled, cut, subtitled, ready for the market. Come along."

Kedzie went along and sat in the dark room watching the reel go by. Her other selves came forth in troops to reveal themselves: Kedzie the poor little shy girl, for she was that at times; Kedzie the petulant, the revengeful, the forgiving; Kedzie on her knees in prayer—she prayed at times, as everybody does, the most villainous no less ardently than the most blameless; Kedzie dancing; Kedzie flirting, in love, tempted, tipsy; Kedzie seduced, deserted, forgiven, converted, happily married; Kedzie a mother with a little hired baby at her little breast. There was even a picture of her in a vision as a sweet old lady with snowy hair about her face, and she was surrounded by grown men who were her sons, and young mothers who were her daughters. The unending magic of the moving pictures had enabled her to see herself as others saw her, and as she saw herself, and as nobody should ever see her.

Kedzie doted on the picture of herself as a dear old lady leaning on her old husband among their children. She shed tears over that delightful, most unusual, privilege of witnessing herself peacefully, blessedly ancient.

Whether she ever reached old age and had a husband living then and children grown is beyond the knowledge of this chronicle or its prophecy, for this book goes only so far as 1917. But just for a venture, assuming Kedzie to be about twenty in 1916, that would make Kedzie born four years back in the last century. Now, adding sixty to 1896 brings one to 1956; and what the world will be like then—and who'll be in it or what they may be doing, how dressing, if at all, what riding in, fighting about, agreeing upon—it were folly to guess at.

It is safe to say only that people will then be very much at heart what they are to-day and were in the days when the Assyrian women and men felt as we do about most things. Kedzie will be scolding her children or her grandchildren and telling them that in her day little girls did not speak disrespectfully to their parents or run away from them or do immodest, forward things.

That much is certain to be true, as it has always been. The critics of then will be saying that there are no great novelists in 1956 such as there were in 1916, when giants wrote, but not for money or for cheap sensations. They will laud the Wilsonian era when America not only knew a millennium of golden fiction, poetry, drama, humor, sculpture, painting, architecture, and engineering, but revealed its greatness in moving-picture classics, in a lofty conception of the dance as an eloquence; when the nation acted as a sister of charity to bleeding Europe, pouring eleemosynary millions from the cornucopia stretched across the sea, and finally entered the war with reluctant majesty and unexampled might, her citizens unanimously patriotic. Ye gods! even the politicians will be statesmen and their debates classics.

Critics of then will be regretting that American fiction, poetry, drama, art, and journalism are so inferior to foreign work, and foreign critics will admit it and tell them why. Some military writers will be pointing out that war is no longer possible, and others will be crying out that it is inevitable and America unprepared.

Doctors will be complaining that modern restlessness is creating new nervous diseases, as doctors did in 1916 A.D., B.C., and B.A. (which is, Before Adam). Doctors will complain that modern mothers do not nurse their own babies—which has always been both true and untrue—and that women do not wear enough clothes for health, not to mention modesty.

In fact, Kedzie, if she lives, will find the spirit of the world almost altogether what grandmothers have always found it. But Kedzie must be left to find this out for herself.

When, then, Kedzie saw how beautifully she photographed and how well she looked as an old lady, she wept rapturously and sighed, "I'll never give up the pictures."

Ferriday sighed, too, for that meant to his knowing soul that she was not long for this movie world. But he did not tell her so. He told her:

"You're as wise as you are beautiful. You'll be as famous as you'll be rich. And this Dyckman lad can hurry things up."

"How?" asked Kedzie, already foreseeing his game.

"The backers of the Hyperfilm Company are getting writer's cramp in the spending hand. They call it conservatism, but it's really cowardice. The moving-picture business has gone from the Golconda to the gambling stage. A few years ago nearly anybody could get rich in a minute. A lot of cheap photographers and street-car conductors were caught in a cloudburst of money and thought they made it. They treated money like rain, and the wastefulness in this trade has been rivaled by nothing recent except the European war. Some of the biggest studios are dark; some of the leaders of yesterday are so bankrupt that their banks don't dare let 'em drop for fear they'll bust and blow up the whole business. Most of the actors are not getting half what they're advertised to get, but they're getting four times what they ought to get.

"There are a few men and women who are earning even more than they are getting, and that's a million a minute. Now, the one chance for you, Anita, is to have some tremendous personal backing. You've come into the game a little late. This firm you're with is tottering. They blame me for it, but it's not my fault altogether. Anyway, this company is riding for a fall, and down we may all go in the dust with a dozen other big companies, any day."

Kedzie's heart stopped. In the dark she clutched Ferriday's arm so tightly that he ouched. To have her career smashed at its beginning would be just her luck. It grew suddenly more dear than ever, because it was imperiled. The thought of having her pictures fail of their mission throughout the world was as hideous as was the knowledge to Carlyle that the only manuscript of his history was but a shovelful of ashes.

Ferriday put his arm about her, and she crept in under his chin for safety. She felt very cozy to him, there, and he rejoiced that he had her his at last. Then as before he saw that he was no more to her than an umbrella or an awning in a shower. He wanted to fling her away; but she was still to him an invention to patent and promote. So he told her:

"If you can persuade this Dyckman to boost your career, get behind you with a bunch of kale and whoop up the publicity, we can stampede the public, and the little theater managers will mob the exchanges for reels of you. It's only a question of money, Anita. Talk about the Archimedean lever! Give me the crowbar of advertising, and I'll set the earth rolling the other way round so the sun will rise in the west and print no other pictures but yours.

"There isn't room for everybody in the movie business any more. There's room only for the people who wear lightning-rods and stand on solid gold pedestals that won't wash away. Go after your young millionaire, Anita, and put his money to work."

Kedzie pondered. She brought to bear on the problem all the strategic intuition of her sex. She saw the importance of getting Dyckman's money into circulation. She was afraid it might not be easy.

Kedzie sighed: "It's a little early for me to ask a gentleman I've only met a couple o' times to kindly pass the millions. He must have met a lot of women by now who've held out their hands to him and said, 'Please,' and not got anything but the cold boiled eye. I don't know much about millionaires, but I have a feeling that if they started giving the money out to every girl they met, they'd last just about as long as a real bargain does in Macy's. The women would trample them to death and tear one another to pieces."

"But Dyckman's crazy about you, Anita. I could see it in his eyes. He's plumb daffy."

"Maybe so and maybe not. Maybe he's that way with every girl under forty. I've never seen him work, but I've seen him in the midst of that Newport bunch and they've got me lashed to the mast for clothes, looks, language, and everything."

"You're a novelty to him, Anita. He's tired of those blasees creatures."

"They didn't look very blah-zay to me. They seemed to be up and doing every minute. But supposing he was crazy about me, if I said to him, 'You can have two kisses for a million dollars apiece?' can you see him begin to holler: 'Where am I? Please take me home!'"

Ferriday sighed: "Perhaps you're right. It wouldn't do to give a mercenary look to your interest in him too soon. Let me talk to him."

"What's your peculiar charm?"

"I'd put it up to him as a business proposition. I'd say, 'The moving-picture field is the greatest gold-field in the world.' I'd tell him how many hundred thousand theaters there are in the world, all of them eager for your pictures and only needing to be told about them. I'd tell him that for every dollar he put in he'd take out ten, in addition to furthering the artistic glory of the most beautiful genius on the dramatic horizon. I'd show him how he couldn't lose."

"But you just said—"

"Oh, I know, but we can't put on the screen everything we say in the projection-room. And it is a fact that there is big money in the movies."

"There must be," said Kedzie, "if as much has been sunk in 'em as you say."

"Yes, and it's all there for the right man to dig up if he only goes about it intelligently. Let me talk to him."

Kedzie thought hard. Then she said: "No! Not yet! You'd only scare him away. I'll do my best to get him interested in me, and you do your best to get him interested in the business; and then when the time is just right we can talk turkey. But not now, Ferri, not yet."

"You're as wise as you are beautiful," said Ferriday, again. "I can't see your beauty, but your wisdom shines in the dark. We'll do great things together, Anita."

His arm tightened around her, reminding her that she was still in his elbow. Before she was quite alive to his purpose his lips touched her cheek.

"Don't do that!" she snapped. "How dare you!"

He laughed: "I forgot. The price on your kisses has just skyrocketed to a million apiece. Don't forget my commission."

She growled pettishly. He spoke more soberly:

"You need me yet, little lady. Don't quench my enthusiasms too roughly or I might take up some other pretty little girl as my medium of expression. There are lots and lots of pretties born every minute, but it takes years to make a director like me."

And she knew that this was true.

"I was only fooling," she said. "Don't be mad at me. You can kiss me if you want to."

"I don't want to," he said, as hurt as an overgrown boy or a prima donna.

The door opened, and a wave of light swept into the room. A voice followed it.

"Is Miss Adair in there?"

"Yes," Kedzie answered, in confusion.

"Gent'man to see you."

It was Jim Dyckman. He followed closely and entered the room just as Ferriday found the electric button and switched on the light.

Kedzie and Ferriday were both encouraged when they saw a look of jealous suspicion cross his face. Ferriday hastened to explain:

"We've been editing Miss Adair's new film. Like to see an advance edition of it?"

"Love to," said Dyckman.

"Oh, Simpson, run that last picture through again," Ferriday called through a little hole in the wall.

A faint "All right, sir" responded.

Kedzie led Dyckman to a chair and took the next one to it.

Ferriday beamed on them and switched on the dark. Then, as if by a divine miracle, the screen at the end of the room became a world of life and light. People were there, and places. Mountains were swung into view and removed. Palaces were decreed and annulled. Fields blossomed with flowers; ballrooms swirled; streets seethed.

Anita Adair was created luminous, seraphic, composed of light and emotion. She came so near and so large that her very thoughts seemed to be photographed. She drifted away; she smiled, danced, wept, and made her human appeal with angelic eloquence.

Dyckman groaned with the very affliction of her charm. She pleased him so fiercely that he swore about it. He cried out in the dark that she was the blank-blankest little witch in the world. Then he groveled in apology, as if his profanity had not been the ultimate gallantry.

When the picture was finished he turned to Kedzie and said, "My God, you're great!" He turned to Ferriday. "Isn't she, Mr.—Fenimore?"

"I think so," said Ferriday; "and the world will think so soon."

Kedzie shook her head. "I'm only a beginner. I don't know anything at all."

"Why, you're a genius!" Dyckman exploded. "You're simply great. You know everything; you—"

Ferriday touched him on the arm. "We mustn't spoil her. There is a charm and meekness about her that we must not lose."

Dyckman swallowed his other great's and after profound thought said, "Let's lunch somewhere."

Ferriday excused himself, but said that the air would be good for Miss Adair. She was working too hard.

So she took the air.

Dyckman had come to the studio with Charity's business as an excuse. He had forgotten to give the excuse, and now he had forgotten the business. He did not know that he was now Kedzie Thropp's business. And she was minding her own business.



CHAPTER XIX

Peter Cheever was going to dictagraph to his wife. The quaint charm of the dictagram is that the sender does not know he is sending it. It is a good deal like an astral something or other.

Peter had often telegraphed his wife, telephoned her, and wirelessed her. Sometimes what he had sent her was not the truth. But now she was going to hear from him straight. She would have all the advantages of the invisible cloak and the ring of Gyges—eavesdropping made easy and brought to a science, a combination of perfect alibi with intimate propinquity.

Small wonder that the device which justice has made such use of should be speedily seized upon by other interests. Everything, indeed, that helps virtue helps evil, too. And love and hate find speedy employment for all the conquests that science can make upon the physical forces of the universe.

How Charity's motives stood in heaven there is no telling. It is safe to say that they were the usual human mixture of selfish and altruistic, wise and foolish, honorable and impudent, profitable and ruinous. She came by the dictagraphic idea very gradually. She had plentiful leisure since she had taken a distaste for good works. She had been so roughly handled by the world she was toiling for that she decided to let it get along for a while without her.

It was a benumbing shock to learn definitely that her husband was in liaison with a definite person, and to be confronted in shabby clothes with that person all dressed up. When she hurried to the Church for mercy it was desolation to learn from the pulpit that her heart clamor for divorce was not a cleanly and aseptic impulse, but an impious contribution to the filthy social condition of the United States.

Charity had no one to confide in, and she had no new grievance to air. Everybody else had evidently been long assured of her husband's profligacy. For her to wake up to it only now and run bruiting the stale information would be a ridiculous nuisance—a newsgirl howling yesterday's extra to to-day's busy crowd.

Besides, she had in her time known how uninteresting and unwelcome is the celebrant of one's own misfortunes. Husbands and wives who tell of their bad luck are entertaining only so long as they are spicy and sportsmanlike. When they ask for a solution they are embarrassing, since advice is impossible for moral people. The truly good must advise him or her either to keep quiet or to quit. But to say "Keep quiet!" is to say "Don't disturb the adultery," while to say "Quit!" is to say "Commit divorce!" which is far worse, according to the best people.

We have always had adultery and got along beautifully, while divorce is new and American and intolerable. Of course, one can and sometimes does advise a legal separation, but that comes hard to minds that face facts, since separation is only a license to—well, we all know what separation amounts to; it really cannot be prettily described.

Charity, left alone at the three-forked road of divorce, complacency, or separation, sank down and waited in dull misery for help or solution, as do most of the poor wayfarers who come upon such a break in their path of matrimony. She imagined Cheever with Zada and wondered what peculiar incantations Zada used to hold him so long. She wished that she had positive evidence against him—not for public use, but as a weapon of self-defense. She felt that from his pulpit Doctor Mosely had challenged her to a spiritual duel in that sermon against divorce and remarriage of either guilty or innocent.

Also she began to want to get evidence to silence her own soul with. She wanted to get over loving Cheever. To want to be cured of such an ailment is already the beginning of cure.

Abruptly the idea came to her to put a detective on the track of Zada and Cheever. She had no acquaintance in that field, and it was a matter of importance that she should not put herself in the hands of an indelicate detective. She ought to have consulted a lawyer first, but her soul preferred the risk of disaster to the shame of asking counsel.

She consulted the newspapers and found a number of advertisements, some of them a little too mysterious, a little too promiseful. But she took a chance on the Hodshon & Hindley Bureau, especially as it advertised a night telephone, and it was night when she reached her decision.

She surprised Mr. Hodshon in the bosom of his family. He was dandling a new baby in the air and trying not to step on the penultimate child, who was treating one of his legs as a tree. When the telephone rang he tossed the latest edition to its mother and hobbled to the table, trying to tear loose the clinger, for it does not sound well to hear a child gurgling at a detective's elbow.

When Charity told Hodshon who she was his eyes popped and he was greatly excited. When she asked Mr. Hodshon to call at once he looked at his family and his slippers and said he didn't see how he could till the next day. Charity did not want to go to a detective's office in broad daylight or to have anybody see a detective coming to her house. She had an idea that a detective could be recognized at once by his disguise. He probably could be if he wore one; and he usually can be, anyway, if any one is looking for him. But she could not get Hodshon till she threatened to telephone elsewhere. At that, he said he would postpone his other engagement and come right up.

Charity was disappointed in Mr. Hodshon. He looked so ordinary, and yet he must know such terrible things about people. We always expect doctors, lawyers, priests, and detectives to show the scars of the searing things they know. As if we did not all of us know enough about ourselves and others to eat our eyes out, if knowledge were corrosive!

Charity was further disappointed in Hodshon's lack of picturesqueness. He was like no detective she had read about between Sherlock Holmes and Philo Gubb. He was like no detective at all. It was almost impossible to accept him as her agent.

He seemed eager to help, however, and when she told him that she suspected her husband of being overly friendly with an insect named Zada L'Etoile, and that she wanted them shadowed, he betrayed a proper agitation.

Now, of course, women's scandals are no more of a luxury to a detective than their legs were to the bus-driver of tradition or to any one in knee-skirted 1916. Mr. Hodshon was a good man as good men go, though he was capable of the little dishonesties and compromises with truth that characterize every profession. A man simply cannot succeed as a teacher, lawyer, doctor, merchant, thief, author, scientist, or anything else if he blurts out everything he knows or believes. No preacher could occupy a pulpit for two Sundays who told just what he actually thought or knew or could find out. The detective is equally compelled to manipulate the truth.

Hodshon gave his soul to Charity's cause. He outlined the various ways of establishing Cheever's guilt and promised that the agency would keep him shadowed and make a record of all his hours.

"It'll take some time to get the goods on 'em good," he explained, "but there's ways we got. When we learn what we got to know we'll arrange it and tip you off. Then you and me will go to the door and break in on the parties at the right moment, and—"

"No, Thank You!" said Charity, with a firm pressure on each word.

"You better get some friend to go with us, for a detective needs c'roboration, you know. The courts won't accept a detective's uns'ported testimony. And if you could know what some of these crooks are capable of you wouldn't wonder. Is that all right? We get the goods on 'em and you have a friend ready, and we'll bust in on the parties, and—"

"No, thank you!" said Charity, with undiminished enthusiasm.

This stumped Mr. Hodshon. She amazed him further. "I don't intend to bring this case into court. I don't want to satisfy any judge but myself."

But what he had said about the credibility of the unsupported detective had set Charity to thinking. It would be folly to pay these curious persons to collect evidence that was worthless when collected. She mused aloud:

"Would it be possible—of course it wouldn't—but if it were, what I should like would be to be able to see my hu—Mr. Ch—those two persons without their knowing about it at all. Of course that's impossible, isn't it?"

"Well, it was a few years ago, but we can do wonders nowadays. There's the little dictagraph. We could string one up for you and give you the usual stenographic report—or you could go and listen in yourself."

"Could I really?" Charity gasped, and she began to shiver with the frightfulness of the opportunity.

"Surest thing you know," said Hodshon.

"But how could you install a dictagraph without their finding it out?"

"Easiest thing you know. We'll probably have to rent an apartment in the same building or another one near-by, and—one of the hall-boys there may be workin' for us now. If not, we can usually bring him in. There's a hundred ways to get into a house and put the little dictor behind a picture or somewheres and lead the wire out to us."

"But can you really hear—if they talk low?" Charity mumbled, with dread.

"Let 'em whisper!" said Hodshon. "The little fellow just eats a whisper. Leave it to us, madam, and we'll surprise you."

The compact was made. Charity suggested an advance payment as a retainer, and Hodshon permitted her to write a check and hand it to him before he assured her that it wasn't necessary.

He went away and left Charity in a state of nerves. Her curiosity was a mania, but she feared that assuaging it might leave her in a worse plight. She hated herself for her enterprise and was tempted to cancel it. But when she heard Cheever come home at midnight and go to his room without speaking to her she felt a grim resentment toward him that was like a young hate with a big future.

Every night Charity received a typewritten document describing Cheever's itinerary for the day. The mute, inglorious Boswell took him up at the front steps, heeled him to his office, out to lunch, back to the office, thence to wherever he went.

The name of Zada did not appear in the first report at all, but on the second day she met Cheever at luncheon, and he went shopping with her. Charity, reading, flushed to learn that he bought her neither jewelry nor hats, but household supplies and delicacies. He went with her to her apartment and thence with her to dinner and the theater and then back, and thence again after an hour to his home.

The minute chronicle of his outdoor doings, intercalated with the maddening bafflement of his life in that impenetrable apartment, made such dramatic reading as Charity had never known. She grew haggard with waiting for the arrival of her little private daily newspaper. When she saw Cheever she could hardly keep from screaming at him what she knew. His every entrance into the house became a hideous insult. She felt that it was herself who was the kept woman and not the other.

She longed to take the documents and visit the Reverend Doctor Mosely with them, make him read them and tell her if he still thought it was her duty to endure such infamy. She felt that the good doctor would advise her to lay them before Cheever and confound him with guilt, bring him to what the preachers call "a realizing sense" of it and win him home.

She was tempted to try the imaginary advice on Cheever, but something held her back. She wondered what it was, till suddenly she came to a realizing sense of one fearful bit of news: her soul had so changed toward him, her love had turned to such disgust, that she was afraid he might come back to her! He might cast off his discovered partner in guilt and renew his old claim to Charity's soul and body. That would be degradation indeed!

Now she was convinced that her love had starved even unto death, that it was a corpse in her home, corrupted the air and must be removed.



CHAPTER XX

Kedzie lay extended on her chaise longue, looking as much unlike Madame Recamier as one could look who was so pretty a woman. A Sunday supplement dropped from her hand and joined the heap of papers on the floor. Kedzie was tired of looking at pictures of herself.

She had had to look over all the papers, since she was in them all. At least her other self, Anita Adair, was in them.

In every paper there was a large advertisement with a large picture of her and the names of the theaters at which she would appear simultaneously in her new film. In the critical pages devoted to the moving-picture world there were also pictures of her and at least a little text.

In two or three of the papers there were interviews with the new comet; in others were articles by her. These entertained her at first, because she had never seen the interviewers or the articles. She had not thought many of the thoughts attached to her name. The press agent of the Hyperfilm Company had written everything. He reveled in his new star, for the editors were cordial toward her "press stuff." They "ate it up," "gave it spread."

This was the less surprising since the advertising-man of the Hyperfilm Company was so lavish with purchase of space that the publishers could well afford to throw in a little free reading matter—especially since it did not cost them a cent for the copy.

The press agent unaided has a hard life, but when the advertising-man gives him his arm he is welcome to the most select columns.

In some of the interviews Kedzie gave opinions she had never held on themes she had never heard of. When she read that her favorite poet was Rabindranath Tagore she wondered who that "gink" was. When she read that she owed her figure to certain strenuous flexion exercises she decided that they might be worth trying some day. Her advice to beginners in the motion-picture field proved very interesting. She wondered how she had ever got along without it.

She was greatly excited by an article of hers in which she told of the terrific adventures she had had in and out of the studio; there was one time when an angry tiger would have torn her to pieces if she had not had the presence of mind to play dead. She read of another occasion when she had either to spoil a good film or endanger her existence as the automobile she was steering refused to answer the brake and plunged over a cliff. Of course she would not ruin the film. By some miracle she escaped with only a few broken bones, and after a week in the hospital returned to the interrupted picture. These old stories were told with such simple sincerity that she almost believed them. But she tossed them aside and sneered:

"Bunc!"

She yawned over her own published portraits—and to be able to do that is to be surfeited indeed.

Suddenly Kedzie stopped purring, thought fiercely, whirled to her flank; her hands went among the papers. She remembered something, found it at last, an article she had glanced at and forgotten for the moment.

She snatched it up and read. It discussed the earning powers of several film queens. It credited them with salaries ten or twenty times as much as hers. Two or three of them had companies of their own with their names at the head of their films.

Kedzie groaned. She rose and paced the floor, shamed, trapped, humbled. The misers of the Hyperfilm Company paid her a beggarly hundred dollars a week! merely featured her among other stars of greater magnitude, while certain women had two thousand a week and were "incorporated," whatever that was!

Kedzie longed to get at Ferriday and tell him what a sneak he was to lure her into such a web and tie her up with such cheap ropes. She would break her bonds and fling them in his face.

She slid abruptly to the floor and began to go over the film pages again, comparing her portraits with the portraits of those higher-paid creatures. She hated vanity and could not endure it in other women; it was a mere observation of a self-evident fact that she was prettier than all the other film queens put together. She sat there sneering at the presumptuousness of screen idols whom she had almost literally worshiped a year before.

Then something gave her pause. The celluloid-queens had certain pages allotted to them, the actresses certain pages.

But there was another realm where women were portrayed in fashionable gowns—debutantes, brides, matrons. And their realm was called "The Social World." These women toiled not, earned not; they only spent money and time as they pleased. They were in "society," and she was out of it. They were ladies and she was a working-woman.

Now Kedzie's cake was dough indeed. Now her pride was shame. She did not want to be a film queen. She did not want to work for any sum a week. She wanted to be a debutante and a bride and a matron.

She had never had a coming-out party, and never would have. She studied the aristocrats, put their portraits on her dressing-table and tried to copy their simple grandeur in her mirror. But she lacked a certain something. She didn't know a human being who was swell to use as a model.

Oh yes, she did—one—Jim Dyckman.

A dark design came to her to dally with him no longer. He had dragged her out of that pool at Newport; now he must drag her into the swim.

The telephone-bell rang. The hall-boy said:

"A gen'leman to see you—Mistoo Ferriday."

"Send him along."

"He's on the way now."

"Oh, all right."

As Kedzie hung up the receiver it occurred to her that this little interchange was about the un-swellest thing she had ever done. She had been heedless of the convenances. Her business life made her responsible only to herself, and she felt able to take care of herself anywhere.

Now it came over her that she could not aspire to aristocracy and allow negro hall-boys to send men up in the elevator and telephone her afterward. She snatched up the telephone and said:

"That you?"

"Yassum, Miss Adair."

"How dare you send anybody up without sending the name up first?"

"Why, you nevva—"

"Who do you think I am that I permit anybody to walk in on me?"

"Why, we alwiz—"

"The idea of such a thing! It's disgraceful."

"Why, I'm sorry, but—"

"Don't ever do it again."

"No'm."

She slapped the receiver on the hook and fumed again, realizing that a something of elegance had been lacking in her tirade.

The door-bell rang, and she did not wait for her maid, but answered it in angry person. Ferriday beamed on her.

"Oh, it's you. You didn't stop to ask if I was visible. You just came right on up, didn't you?"

He whispered: "Pardon me. Somebody else is here. Exit laughingly!"

That was insult on insult.

"Stop it! There is not anybody else. Come back. What do you want?"

He came back, his laughter changed to rage.

"Look here, you impudent little upstart from nowhere! I invented you, and if you're not careful I'll destroy you."

"Is that so?" she answered; then, like Mr. Charles Van Loan's baseball hero, she realized with regret that the remark was not brilliant as repartee.

Ferriday was too wroth to do much better:

"Yes, that's so. You little nobody!"

"Nobody!" she laughed, pointing to the newspapers spangled with her portraits.

Ferriday snorted, "Paid for by Jim Dyckman's money."

"What do you mean—Jim Dyckman's money?"

"Oh, when I saw how idiotic he was over you, and how slow you were in landing him, and when I realized that the Hyperfilm Company was going to slide your pictures out with no special advertising, I went to him and tried to get him into the business."

"You had a nerve!"

"Praise from Lady Hubert!"

"Whoever she is! Well, did he bite?"

"Yes and no. He's not such a fool as he looks in your company. He has a hard head for business; he wouldn't invest a cent."

"I thought you said—"

"But he has a soft head for you. He said he wouldn't invest a cent in the firm, but he'd donate all I could use for you. It was to be a little secret present. He told me you refused to accept presents from him. Did you?"

Kedzie blushed before his cynic understanding.

He laughed: "You're all right. You know the game, but you've got to quicken your speed. You're taking too much footage in getting to the climax."

Kedzie was still incandescent with the new information:

"And Jim Dyckman paid for my advertising?"

"On condition that his name was kept out of it. That's why you're famous. You couldn't have got your face in a paper if you had been fifty times as pretty if he hadn't swamped the papers with money. And he would never have thought of it if I hadn't gone after him. So you'd better waste a little politeness on me or your first flare will be your last."

Kedzie acknowledged his conquest, bowed her head, and pouted up at him with such exquisite impudence that he groaned:

"I don't know whether I ought to kiss you or kill you."

"Take your choice, my master," Kedzie cooed.

He snarled at her: "I guess the news I bring will do for you. There was a fire in the studio last night. You didn't know of it?"

Kedzie, dumbly aghast, shook her head.

"If you'd read any part of the newspapers except your own press stuff you'd have seen that there was a war in Europe yesterday and a fire in New York last night. I was there trying to save what I could. I got a few blisters and not much else. Most of your unfinished work is finished—gone up in smoke."

"You don't mean that my beautiful, wonderful films are destroyed?"

He nodded—then caught her as her knees gave way. He felt a stab of pity for her as he dragged her to her chaise longue and let her fall there. She was dazed with the shock.

She had been indifferent to the destruction of fortresses and cathedrals—even of Rheims, with its titanic granite lace. She had read, or might have read, of the airship that dropped a bomb through the great fresco in Venice where Tiepolo revealed his unequaled mastery of aerial perspective, taking the eye up through the dome and the human witnesses, cloud by cloud, past the hierarchies of angels, past Christ and the Mother of God, on up to Jehovah himself, bending down from infinite heights. The eternal loss of this picture meant nothing to her. But the destruction of her own recorded smiles and tears and the pretty twistings and turnings of her young body—that was cataclysm.

She was like everybody else, in that no multiplication of other people's torments could be so vivid as the catching of her own thumb in a door. Kedzie was too crushed to weep. This little personal Pompeii brought to the dust all the palaces and turrets of her hope upon her head. She whispered to Ferriday:

"What are you going to do? Must you make them over again?"

He shook his head. "The Hyperfilm Company will probably shut up shop now."

"And let my pictures die?"

He nodded.

She beckoned him close and clung to him, babbling: "What will become of me? Oh, my poor pictures! My pretty pictures! The company owes me a week's salary. And I had counted on the money. What's to become of me?"

Ferriday resented her eternal use of him for her own advantages. "Why do you appeal to me? Where's your friend Dyckman?"

"I was to see him this evening—dine with him."

"Well, he can build you ten new studios and not feel it. Better ask him to set you up in business."

Kedzie revolted at this, but she had no answer. Ferriday saw the papers folded open at the society pages. He stared at them, at her, then sniffed:

"So that's your new ambition!"

"What?"

"'In the Social World!' You want to get in with that gang, eh? Has Dyckman asked you to marry him?"

"Of course not."

"Well, if he does, don't ever let him take you into his own set."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Just to warn you. Those social worldlings wouldn't stand for you, Anita darling. You can make monkeys of us poor men. But those queens will make a little scared worm out of you and step on you. And they won't stop smiling for one minute."

"Is that so?" Kedzie snarled. There it was again.

The telephone rang. Kedzie answered it. The hall-boy timidly announced:

"Mistoo Dyckman is down year askin' kin he see you. Kin he?"

"Send him up, please," said Kedzie. Then she turned to Ferriday. "He's here—at this hour! I wonder why."

"I'd better slope."

"Do you mind?"

"Not in the least. I'll go up a flight of stairs and take the elevator after His Majesty has finished with it. Good-by. Get busy!"

He slid out, and Kedzie scurried about her primping. The bell rang. She sent her maid to the door. Dyckman came in. She let him wait awhile—then went to him with an elegiac manner.

She accepted his salute on a martyr-white brow. He said:

"I read about the fire. I was scared to death for you till I learned that all the people were safe. I motored up to see the ruins. Some ruins! Like to see'em?"

"I don't think I could stand the sight of them. They're my ruins, too."

"How so?"

"Because the company won't rebuild or go on, and most of my pictures were destroyed."

"Your pretty, beautiful, gorgeous pictures gone! Oh, God help us! That's too terrible to believe."

She sighed, "It's true."

"Why, I'd rather lose the Metropolitan Art Gallery than your films. Can't they be made over?"

"They could, but who's to stand the expense?"

"I will, if you'll let me."

"Mr. Dyckman!"

"I thought we'd agreed that my name was Jim."

"Jim! You would do that for me!"

"Why not?"

"But why so?"

"Because—why, simply—er—it's the most natural thing in the world, seeing that—Well, you're not sitting there pretending that you don't know I love you, are you?"

"Oh dear, oh dear! It's too wonderful to believe, you angel!"

And then for the first time she flung her arms about his neck and kissed him and hugged him, knelt on his lap and clasped him fiercely.

He felt as if a simoom of rapture had struck him, and when she told him a dozen times that she loved him he could think of nothing to say but, "Say, this is great!"

She forgave him the banality this time. When she had calmed herself a little she said:

"But it would mean a frightful lot of money."

"Whatever it costs, it's cheap—considering this." He indicated her arm about his neck. "I wouldn't let the world be robbed of the pictures of you, Anita, not for any money." He told her to tell Ferriday to make the arrangements and send the estimates to him. And he said, "I won't ask you to quit being photographed, even when we are married."

"When we are married?" Kedzie parroted.

"Of course! That's where we're bound for, isn't it? Where else could we pull up—that is, of course, assuming that you'll do me the honor of anchoring a great artist like you up to a big dub like me. Will you?"

"Why—why—I'd like to think it over; this is so sudden."

"Of course, you'd better think it over, you poor angel!"

Kedzie could not think what else to say or even what to think. The word "marriage" reminded her that she had what the ineffable Bunker Bean would have called "a little old last year's husband" lying around in the garret of her past.

She went almost blind with rage at that beast of a Gilfoyle who had dragged her away and married her while she was not thinking. He must have hypnotized her or drugged her. If only she could quietly murder him! But she didn't even know where he was.



CHAPTER XXI

The investigations of Messrs. Hodshon & Hindley in the life of Zada and Cheever prospered exceedingly. In blissless ignorance of it, Zada had been inspired to set a firm of sleuths on Charity's trail. She wanted to be able to convince Cheever that Charity was intrigued with Dyckman. The operators who kept Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever under espionage had the most stupid things to report to Zada.

To Zada's disgust, Mrs. Cheever never called upon Jim Dyckman, and he never called on her. Zada accused the bureau of cheating her, and finally put another agency to shadowing Jim Dyckman. According to the reports she had, his neglect of Mrs. Cheever was perfectly explained. He was a mere satellite of a moving-picture actress, a new-comer named Anita Adair.

The detectives reported that such gossip as they could pick up about the studio indicated that Dyckman was putting money into the firm on her account.

"A movie angel!" sneered Zada. She had wasted a hundred dollars on him to find this out, and two hundred and fifty on Mrs. Cheever to find out that she was intensely respectable. That was bitter news to Zada. She canceled her business with her detective agency. And they called in the shadows that haunted Charity's life.

The detectives on Zada's trail, however, had more rewarding material to work with—although they found unexpected difficulties, they said, in getting the dictagraph installed in her apartment. They did not wish to ruin the whole enterprise by too great haste—especially as they were receiving eight dollars a day and liberal expenses per man.

At last, however, Hodshon sent word to Mrs. Cheever that the dictagraph was installed and working to a T, and she could listen-in whenever she was ready.

Charity was terrified utterly now. New scales were to be shaken from her eyes at the new tree of knowledge. She was to hear her man talking to his leman.

She had almost an epilepsy of terror, but she could not resist the importunate opportunity.

She selected from her veils a heavy crepe that she had worn during a period of mourning for one of her husband's relatives. It seemed appropriate now, for she was going into mourning for her own husband, living, yet about to die to her.

She left the house alone after dark and walked along Fifth Avenue till she found a taxicab. She gave the street number Hodshon had given her and stepped in. She kept an eye on the lighted clock and in the dark sorted out the exact change and a tip, adding dimes as they were recorded on the meter. She did not want to have to pause for change, and she did not wish to make herself conspicuous by an extravagant tip.