He forced Gilfoyle to his knees, but he could not make him pray. And Kedzie fell back from him. She was afraid to pose as a saint worthy of genuflection. Connery re-entered the conflict with a sneer:

"Aw, tell it to the judge, Dyckman! Tell it to the judge! See how good it listens to him. We'll tell him how we found you here; and you tell him you were holding a prayer-meeting. You didn't want to be disturbed, so you didn't have even a servant around—all alone together at this hour."

Then a new, strange voice spoke in.

"Who said they were alone?"

The four turned to see Mrs. Thropp filling the hall doorway, and Adna's head back of her shoulder. It was really a little too melodramatic. The village lassie goes to the great city; her father and mother arrive in all their bucolic innocence just in time to save her from destruction.

Connery, whose climax she had spoiled, though she had probably saved his bones, gasped, "Who the hell are you?"

"I'm this child's mother; that's who I am. And that's her father. And what's more, we've been here all evening, and you'd better look out how you swear at me or I'll sick Mr. Dyckman on you."

If there are gallery gods in heaven, and angels with a melodramatic taste (as there must be, for how else could we have acquired it?), they must have shaken the cloudy rafters with applause. Only one touch was needed to perfect the scene, and that was for the First and Second Villains to slink off, cursing and muttering, "Foiled again!"

But these villains were not professionals, and they had not been rehearsed. They were like childish actors in a juvenile production at five pins per admission. An unexpected line threw them into complete disorder.

Connery turned to Gilfoyle. "Did you ever lamp this old lady before?"

Gilfoyle answered, stoutly enough, "I never laid eyes on her."

Connery was about to order Mrs. Thropp out of the room as an impostor, but she would not be denied her retort.

"O' course he never laid eyes on me. If he had have he'd never tried to pull the wool over that innocent baby's eyes; and if I'd ever laid eyes on him I'd have run him out of the country before I'd ever have let my child look at him a second time."

Connery made one last struggle: "What proof have you got that you're her mother?"

"Ask my husband here."

"What good is his word in such a matter?"

Connery did not mean this as in any sense a reflection on Mrs. Thropp's marital integrity, but she took it so. Now, in Nimrim the question of fidelity is not dealt with lightly, at least in repartee. Mrs. Thropp emitted a roar of scandalized virtue and would have attacked the young men with her fists if her husband, who should have attacked them in her stead, had not clung to her, murmuring:

"Now, momma, don't get excited. You young fellers better vamoose quick. I can't holt her very long."

So they vamosed and were much obliged for the opportunity, leaving Kedzie to fling her arms about her mother with spontaneous filial affection, and to present Dyckman to her with genuine pride.

Dyckman had been almost as frightened as Kedzie, He had been more afraid of his own temper than of his assailants, but afraid enough of their shadowy powers. Mrs. Thropp would have had to be far less comely than she was to be unwelcome. She had the ultimate charm of perfect timeliness. He greeted her with that deference he paid to all women, and she adored him at once, independently of his fortune.

Adna said that he had always been an admirer of the old Dyckman and was glad to meet his boy, being as he was a railroad man himself, in a small way. He rather gave the impression that he was at least a third vice-president, but very modest about it.

Mrs. Thropp gleaned from the first words that Kedzie had gone contrary to her advice and had told Dyckman the truth. She took the credit calmly.

"I come on East to clear things up, and I advised my daughter to tell you just the way things were—as I always say to my children, use the truth and shame the devil."

Kedzie was too busy to notice the outrage. She was thanking Heaven for her impulse to reveal the facts, realizing how appalling it would have been if Gilfoyle had been the first to inform Dyckman.

They were all having a joyous family party when it suddenly came over them that Gilfoyle had once more appeared and resubmerged. But Dyckman said: "I'll find him for you, and I'll buy him. He'll be cheap at any price."

He bade good night early and went to his own home, carrying a backload of trouble. He was plainly in for it. Whatever happened, he was the scapegoat-elect.



CHAPTER XXXVII

The villain in melodrama is as likely as not to be as decent a fellow as any. When he slinks from the stage in his final hissed exit he goes to his dressing-room, scours off his grease-paint, and probably returns to his devoted family or seats himself before a bowl of milk-and-crackers in his club.

Gilfoyle was as decent a fellow as ever villain was. Circumstances and not himself cast him in an evil role, and as actors know, once so established, it is almost impossible to return to heroic parts. Gilfoyle could not even remove his grease-paint. He could not go back to his dressing-room, for his landlady had told him that the only key to her front door was cash. He had gone out to bring home a millionaire, and he had achieved nothing but a headache and a moral cataclysm.

He hardly knew how he escaped from the apartment-house. The dark cool of the street brought him into the night of things. It came upon him like a black fog what he had tried to do. The bitter disgrace of a man who has been whipped in a fight was his, but other disgraces were heaped upon it. For the first time he saw himself as Kedzie saw him.

He had neglected his wife till she grew famous in spite of him. He had gone back to her to share her bounty. When she repulsed him he had entered into a conspiracy to spy on her. He had waited impatiently for a rich man to compromise her, so that he could surprise them in guilt and extort money from them.

He had not warned the girl of her danger from the other man or from himself. He had not pleaded with her to be good, had not asked her to come back to honeymoon again in poverty with him; he had preferred to live on borrowed money and on unpaid board while he fooled with verses and refused the manual tasks that waited everywhere about the busy city. He might have cleaned the streets or earned a decent living handling garbage in the city scows. But he had preferred to speculate in blackmail and play the badger-game with his wife as an unwitting accomplice. He had hated millionaires, and counted them all criminals deserving spoliation, but he felt that he had sunk lower than the millionaires.

The remembrance of Kedzie haunted him. She had been supremely beautiful to-night, frightened into greater beauty than ever. She was afraid of him who should have been her refuge, and she hid for protection behind the man who should have seemed her enemy.

He recalled her as she was when he first loved her, the pretty little candy-store clerk, the lissome, living marble in her Greek tunic, the quaint, sweet girl who came to him in the Grand Central Terminal, lugging her suit-case, the shy thing at the License Bureau, the ineffably exquisite bride he had made his wife. He saw her at the gas-stove and loved her very petulance and the pretty way she banged the oven door and pouted at fate.

The lyrics he had written to her sang through his aching head. He was wrung to anguish between the lover and the poet he had meant to be, and the spurned and hated cur he had become. He stumbled along the street at Connery's side, whispering to himself, while his earliest verses to Kedzie ran in and out through his thoughts like a catchy tune:

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

He recalled the sonnets he had begun which were to make them both immortal. He regretted the spitefulness that had led him to write in another name than hers because she had refused to support him. He had been a viler beast than the cutpurse poet of old France, without the lilies of verse that bloom pure white above the dunghill of Villon's life.

Gilfoyle's soul went down into a hell of regret and wriggled in the flames of self-condemnation. He grew maudlin with repentance and clung to his friend Connery with odious garrulity. Connery was disgusted with him, but he was afraid to leave him because he kept sighing:

"I guess the river's the only place for me now."

At length Connery steered him into a saloon for medicine and bought him a stiff bracer of whisky and vermouth. But it only threw Gilfoyle into deeper befuddlement. He was like Charles Lamb, in that a thimbleful of alcohol affected him as much as a tumbler another. He wanted to tell his troubles to the barkeeper, and Connery had to drag him away.

In the hope that a walk in the air might help to steady him, Connery set out toward his own boarding-house. They started across Columbus Avenue under the pillars of the Elevated tracks.

Habituated to the traffic customs, the New-Yorker crossing a street looks to the left for traffic till he gets half-way across, then looks to the right for traffic bound in the opposite direction. Connery led Gilfoyle to the middle of the avenue, paused for a south-bound street-car to go banging by them, darted back of it and looked to the right for a north-bound car or motor. But a taxicab trying to pass the south-bound car was shooting south along the north-bound tracks.

Connery saw it barely in time to jump back. He yanked Gilfoyle's arm, but Gilfoyle had plunged forward. He might have escaped if Connery had let him go. But the cab struck him, hurled him in air against an iron pillar, caught him on the rebound and ran him down. Kedzie Thropp was a widow.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

Deaths from the wheeled torpedoes that shoot along the city streets are too monotonously numerous to make a stir in the newspapers unless the victims have some other claim on the public attention.

Gilfoyle had been writing advertisements of other people's wares, but nobody was going to pay for the advertisement of him. The things that he might have become were even more obscure than the things he was. The pity of his taking-off would have had no more record than a few lines of small type, but for one further accident.

The taxicab-driver whose reckless haste had sent him down the wrong side of the street had been spurred on by the reckless haste of his passenger. The pretty Mrs. Twyford had been for years encouraging the reporters to emphasize her social altitude, and had seen that they obtained her photographs at frequent intervals. But on this night she had gone up-town upon one of the few affairs for which she did not wish publicity. She had learned by telephone that her husband had returned to New York unexpectedly, and she was intensely impatient to be at home when he got there.

When her scudding taxicab solved all of Gilfoyle's earthly problems in one fierce erasure she made such efforts to escape from the instantly gathered crowd that she attracted the attention of the policeman who happened to be at the next corner. He proceeded to take the name and addresses of witnesses and principals, and he detained her as an important accessory.

Connery was one of the news-men who had been indebted to Mrs. Twyford for many a half-column of gossip, and he recognized her at once. He was a reporter, first, last, and all the time, and he was very much in need of something to sell.

He was greatly shattered by the annihilation of his friend, but his instinctive journalism led him to control himself long enough to call Mrs. Twyford by name and assure the policeman that she was a lady of high degree who should not be bothered.

Neither the policeman nor Mrs. Twyford thanked him. They were equally rude to him and to each other, Connery thought the incident might interest the night city editor of his paper, and so he telephoned a good story in to the office as soon as he had released himself from the inquisition and had seen an ambulance carry poor Gilfoyle away.

Mrs. Twyford reached home too late, and in such a state of nerves that she made the most unconvincing replies to the cross-examination that ensued. When she saw her name in the paper the next morning her friends also began to make inquiries—and eventually to deny that they were her friends or had ever been.

It was her name in the heavy type that caught the heavy eyes of Jim Dyckman at breakfast the next morning. It was thus that he came upon the fate of Thomas Gilfoyle, whose death had been the cause of all this pother.

Before he could telephone Anita—or Kedzie, as he mentally corrected himself—he was informed that a Mr. Connery was at the door, asking for him. He nodded and went into the library, carrying the newspaper with him.

Connery grinned sadly and mumbled: "I see you've seen it. I thought you'd like to know about it."

"I should," said Dyckman. "Sit down."

Connery sat down and told of the accident and what led up to it. He spoke in a lowered voice and kept his eye on the door. When he had finished his story he said, "Now, of course this all comes out very convenient for you, but I suppose you see how easy it would be for me to tell what I know, and that mightn't be so convenient for you."

"Are you beginning your blackmail again so early in the morning?"

"Cut out that kind of talk or there's nothing doing," said Connery. "I can make a lot of trouble for you, and I can hush up a lot. Unless I speak I don't suppose anybody else is going to peep about Miss Adair being Mrs. Gilfoyle, and about Mr. Dyckman being interested in his wife. If I do speak it would take a lot of explaining."

"I am not afraid of explaining to the whole world that Miss Adair is a friend of mine and that her father and mother were present when I called."

Connery met this with a smile. "But how often were they present when you called?"

Dyckman grew belligerent again: "Do you want me to finish what I began on you last night?"

"I'm in no hurry, thank you. You can outclass me in the ring, but it wouldn't help you much to beat me up, would it?—or Miss Adair, either. She's got some rights, hasn't she?"

"Has she any that you are capable of respecting?"

"Sure she has. I don't want to cause the little lady any inconvenience. She and Tommie Gilfoyle didn't belong together, anyway. She was through with him long ago, and the only thing that saved his face was the fact that he's dead—poor fellow!

"But you see I've got to appear as a witness in the trial of the taxicab-driver, who'll be held for manslaughter or something. If I say that Gilfoyle and I had just come from a battle with you and that he got the wits knocked out of him because he accused you of making a mistress out of his wife—"

"Be careful!"

"The same to you, Mr. Dyckman."

Dyckman felt himself nettled. Kedzie's silence about the existence of a husband had enmeshed him. He would not attempt to justify himself. It would do no good to thresh about. The big gladiator sat still waiting for the retiarius to finish him. But Connery's voice grew merciful. It was a luxury beyond price to extend an alms to this plutocrat.

"What I'm getting at, Mr. Dyckman," he resumed, "is this: Tommie owed some money to his landlady. He owed me some money that I could use. He's got a mother and father up-State. He told me he'd never told them about his marriage. They'll want him back, I suppose. From what he's told me, it would be a real hardship for them to pay the funeral expenses. You could pay all that, and you could even say that he had a little money in the bank and send that along with him, and never know the difference. But they would."

"I see," said Dyckman, very solemnly.

"You called me some rough names, Mr. Dyckman, and I guess I earned 'em. Looking things over the morning after, I'm not so stuck on myself as I was, but you stack up pretty well. I like a man who can use his hands in an argument. My name is Connery, you know. What you did to me was a plenty, but it looks better to me now than it felt last night.

"You know a reporter just gets naturally hungry to see a man face a scandal in a manly way. If you had shown a yellow streak and tried to buy your way out I would have taken your money and thought I was doing a public service in getting it away from a quitter. But when you cracked my bean against poor Gilfoyle's you made me see a lot of things besides stars.

"There's nothing to be gained by keeping up this war. I want to put it all out of sight for your sake and for Gilfoyle's mother's sake, and for the sake of that pretty little Adair lady. I don't know what she's been or done, but she's pretty and she's got a nice, spunky mother.

"I'm a good newspaper man, Mr. Dyckman, and that means I've kept quiet about even better stories than I've sprung. If I had a lot of money now I'd add this story to the list and treat Gilfoyle's folks right without giving you a look-in. But being dead-broke, I thought maybe you'd like to see things done in a decent manner. It's going to be hard enough for that old couple up-State to get Tommie back, as they've got to, without taking any excess heartbreak up in the baggage-car. Do you follow me?"

"I do," said Dyckman; and now he asked the "How much?" that he had refused to speak the night before.

Connery did a little figuring with a pencil, and Dyckman thought that some life-insurance in the mother's name would be a pleasant thing to add. Then he doubled the total, wrote a check for it, and said:

"There'll probably be something left over. I wish you'd keep it as your—attorney-fee, Mr. Connery."

They shook hands as they parted.



CHAPTER XXXIX

Dyckman telephoned to Kedzie and asked if he could see her. She said that he could, and dressed furiously while he made the distance to her apartment.

She gleaned from his look and from the way he took her two hands in his that he had serious news to bring her. She had not been awake long enough to read the papers, and this was her first death. She cried helplessly when she learned that her husband was gone away with all her bitterness for his farewell. She remembered the best of him, and he came back to her for a while as the poet who had made her his muse—the only one she could telegraph to when she returned to New York alone, her first and only husband.

She was afraid that she belittled herself in Dyckman's eyes when she let slip the remorseful Wail, "I wish I had been kinder to the poor boy!"

But she did not belittle herself in any such tendernesses of regret. She endeared herself by her grief, her self-reproach, her childish humility before the power of death. Her tears were beautiful in Jim's sight. But it is the blessing and the shame of tears that they cure the grief that causes them. At first they bleed and burn; then they flow soft and cool. They cleanse and brighten the eyes and even wash away the cinders from the funeral smoke.

Dyckman's heart was drawn out of him toward Kedzie and his arms held her shaken body devotedly. But at length she ceased to weep, and a last long sob became dangerously like a sigh of relief. She smiled through the rain and apologized for weeping, when she should have apologized for stopping weeping. Then Dyckman's love of her seemed to withdraw backward into his heart. And his arms suddenly wearied of clasping her.

When she had seemed hardly to know that he was there he felt necessary and justified. When she took comfort in his arms and held them about her he felt ashamed, revolted, profane.

Mrs. Thropp had wept a little in sympathy with Kedzie, and Adna had looked amiably disconsolate; but by and by Mrs. Thropp was murmuring:

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

Dyckman shrank as if a blasphemy had been shouted. In a hideously short time Mrs. Thropp was saying, briskly:

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

"If I believed in mourning, I would," Kedzie answered without delay, "but the true mourning is in the heart."

Dyckman felt an almost uncontrollable desire to get away before he said something that might be true. He began to wonder what, after all, poor Gilfoyle had experienced from this hard-hearted little beauty. He saw that he was almost forgotten already. He thought, "How fast they go, the dead!" That same Villon had said it centuries before: "Les morts vont vites."

The Thropps settled down to a comfortable discussion of future plans. One ledger had been finished. They would open a new one. Jim saw that Gilfoyle's departure had been accepted as a Heaven-sent solution of Kedzie's problems.

Abruptly it came to Dyckman that the solution of their problem was the beginning of a whole volume of new problems for him. He recalled that while he had become Kedzie's fiance in ignorance of his predecessor, he had rashly promised to buy off Gilfoyle as soon as he learned of him. But death had come in like a perfect waiter and subtly removed from the banquet-table the thing that offended. Nothing had happened, however, to release Dyckman from his engagement. Gilfoyle's death ought not to have made a more important difference than his life would have made, and yet it made all the difference in the world to Dyckman's feelings.

He could not say this, however. He could not ask to be excused from his compact. His heart and his brain cried out that they did not want this merry little widow for their wife, but his lips could not frame the words. During the long silences and the evasive chatter that alternated he felt one idea in the air: "Why doesn't Mr. Dyckman offer to go on with the marriage?" Yet he could not make the offer. Nor could he make the counterclaim for a dissolving of the betrothal.

He studied the Thropp trio and pictured the ridicule and the hostility they would arouse among his family and friends—not because they were poor and simple and lowly, but because they were not honest and sweet and meek. The Dyckmans had poor relations and friends in poverty and old peasant-folk whom they loved and admired and were proud to know. But Dyckman felt that the elder Thropps deserved to be rebuffed with snobbery because of their own snobbery. Nevertheless, he was absolutely incapable of administering discipline.

At last Mrs. Thropp grew restive, fearsome that the marriage might not take place, and desperately fearful that she might be cheated out of her visit in the spare room, at the home of the great Mrs. Dyckman. She said, grimly:

"Well, we might as well understand one another, Mr. Dyckman. You asked my daughter to marry you, didn't you?"

"Yes, Mrs. Thropp."

"Do you see anything in what's happened to prevent your getting married?"

"No, Mrs. Thropp."

"Then I don't see much use wastin' time, do you? Life's too uncertain to go postponin' happiness when it's right within your reach. Kedzie's father and I ought to be gettin' back home, and I'd feel a heap more comfortable if I could know my poor little chick was safe in the care of a good man."

The possibility of getting Mr. and Mrs. Thropp out of town soon was the one bright thought in Dyckman's mind. He felt compelled to say:

"Then let us have the ceremony, by all means. We shall have to wait awhile, I suppose, for decency's sake."

"Decency!" said Mrs. Thropp, managerially. "My Kedzie hadn't lived with the man for a long while. Nobody but us knows that she ever did live with him. He'd abandoned her, and when he came back it was only to try to get money out of her. I can't see that she has any call to worry about decency's sake. He's done her harm enough. She can't do him any good by keepin' you waitin'."

"Just as you think best, Mrs. Thropp," said Dyckman. He began to smile in spite of himself. He was thinking how many mothers and daughters had tried to get him to the altar, not because they loved him, but because they loved his father's money and fame. Jim had dodged them all and made a kind of sport of it. And now he was cornered and captured by this old barbarian with her movie-beauty daughter who was a widow and wouldn't wear weeds.

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

"Would you be having a church wedding, do you think?"

"Indeed not," said Dyckman, with such incision that Mrs. Thropp felt it best not to risk a debate.

"Just a quiet wedding, then?"

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

Kedzie sat speechless through all this. She wished that Jim would show more ardor for her, but she felt that he was doing fairly well not to knock her parents' heads together the way he had her husband's and his friend's. She was as eager as Jim to get rid of the elder Thropps, but she wanted to make sure of the wedding, and her mother was evidently to be trusted to bring it about. At length Jim spoke in the tone of the condemned man who says, "Well, let's hurry up and get the execution off our minds".

"I'll go and see a lawyer and make inquiries about how the marriage can be done."

He started to say to Kedzie, "You ought to know."

She started to tell him about the Marriage License Bureau in the Municipal Building. Both recaptured silence tactfully.

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



THE THIRD BOOK

MRS. JIM DYCKMAN IS NOT SATISFIED



CHAPTER I

In the history of nations sometimes a paragraph serves for a certain decade, while a volume is not enough for a certain day. It is so with the history of persons.

In the thirty-six hours after he received Charity Coe's invitation to call Jim Dyckman passed from being Charity's champion against her own husband to being Kedzie's champion against hers. Charity rewarded his chivalrous pommeling of Cheever by asking him never to come near her again. Kedzie rewarded his punishment of Gilfoyle by arranging that he should never leave her again.

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

In that period Peter Cheever had traveled a very short distance in a journey he had postponed too long. Cheever had been hardly conscious when they smuggled him at midnight from his club to his own home. He had slept ill and achily. He was ashamed to face the servants, and he wanted to murder his valet for being aware of the master's defeat.

He did not know how ashamed the household retainers were of him and of themselves. The valet and butler had earned good sums on occasions by taking tips from Cheever on prize-fighters and jockeys. But they felt betrayed now, and as disconsolate as the bottle-holders and towel-flappers of a defeated pugilist.

They did not know who had whipped their master till the word came from the Dyckman household that their master had come home glorious from whipping the stuffing out of somebody. It was easy to put one and one together and make two.

One of Cheever's worst embarrassments was the matter of Zada. His battered head suffered tortures before it contrived a proper lie for her. Then he called Zada up from his house and explained that as he was leaving his club to fly to her, his car had skidded into another, with the result that he had been knocked senseless and cut up with flying glass; otherwise he was in perfect shape. Unfortunately, he had been recognized and taken to his official home instead of to the residence of his heart.

Zada was all for dashing to him at once; but he persuaded her that that would be quite impossible. He was in no real danger in his own house, and he would come back to his heart's one real first, last, only, and onliest darling love just as soon as he could.

She subsided in wails of terror and loneliness. They touched his heart so that he determined to end his effort at amphibian existence, give up his legal establishment and legalize the illegal.

He wrote a note to Charity with much difficulty, since his knuckles were sore and his pride was black and blue. His spoken language was of the same tints. His written language was polite and formal.

It was a silly, tragic situation that led a husband to write his wife a letter requesting an interview. Charity sent back a scrawl—"Yes, in fifteen minutes."

Cheever spent a bad quarter of an hour dressing himself. His face was too raw to endure a razor, and the surgeon had put little cross-patches of adhesive tape on one of his cheek-bones and at the edge of his mouth, where his lip had split as the tooth behind it went overboard.

He yowled as he slipped his arms into a long bathrobe, and he struck at the valet when the wretch suggested a little powder for one eye.

Charity had seen Cheever brought in at midnight and had looked to it that he had every care. But now she came into his room with a maidenly timidity. He did not know that she had rebuked Jim Dyckman with uncharacteristic wrath for the attack. She did not tell Cheever this, even though his first words to her demanded some such defense.

In the quarrels of lovers, or of those who have exchanged loves, it makes little difference what the accusation is all about: the thing that hurts is the fact of accusation.

Charity was so shamed at being stormed at by her husband that it was a mere detail that he stormed at her with a charge that she had goaded Jim Dyckman on to attack him.

Cheever had a favor to ask; so he put the charge more mildly now than he had in his first bewildered rage. He accepted Charity's silence as pleading guilty. So he went on:

"The fact that you chose Dyckman for your authorized thug and bravo proves what I have thought for some time, that you love him and he loves you. Now I have no desire to come between two such turtle-doves, especially when one of them is one of those German flying-machine Taubes and goes around dropping dynamite-bombs on me through club roofs.

"I'm not afraid of your little friend, and as soon as I get well I'll get him; but I want it to be purely an exercise in the fistic art, and not a public fluttering of family linen. So since you want Jim Dyckman, take him, by all means, and let me bow myself out of the trio.

"I'll give you a nice, quiet little divorce, and do the fair thing in the alimony line, and then after a proper interval you and little Jimmie can toddle over to the parson and then toddle off to hell-and-gone, for all I care. How does that strike you, my dear?"

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

"Does that interest you?"

"Anything that concerns your welfare interests me."

"I see. Well, don't worry about me."

"There's no hurry, of course?"

"Not on my part," said Cheever. "But Dyckman must be growing impatient, since he tries to murder me to save the lawyer's fees."

"Well, if you're in no hurry, Peter, I'm not. I'll think it over for a few months. It's bad weather for divorces now, anyway."

Cheever's heart churned in his breast. He knew that Zada could not afford to wait. He should have married her long ago, and there was no time to spare now. Charity's indifference frightened him. He did not dream that through the dictagraph Charity had shared with him Zada's annunciation of her approaching motherhood.

He turned and twisted in flesh and spirit, trying to persuade Charity to proceed immediately for a divorce, but in vain.

Finally she ceased to laugh at him and demanded, sternly, "Why don't you tell me the truth for once?"

He stared at her, and after a crisis of hesitation broke and informed her of what she already knew. Now that he was at her feet, Charity felt only pity for him, and even for Zada. She was sorrier for them than for herself.

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

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

"Oh, of course not!"

A brief and friendly discussion of ways and means followed, and then Charity turned to go, saying:

"Well, I'll let you know when you're free. Are there any other little chores I can do for you?"

"No, thanks. You're one damned good sport, and I'm infernally sorry I—"

"Let's not begin on sorries. Good night!"

And such was unmarriage a la mode.



CHAPTER II

And now having felt sorry for everybody else, Charity began to feel pleasantly sorry for Jim Dyckman. Her own rebuke of him for assaulting Cheever had absolved him. In the retrospect, the attack took on a knightliness of devotion. She recalled his lonely dogging of her footsteps. If he had played the dog, after all, she loved dogs. What was so faithful, trustworthy, and lovable as a dog?

But how was Charity to get word to Jim of her new heart? She could not whistle him back. She could hardly go to him and apologize for having been a good wife to a bad husband. And a married lady simply must not say to a bachelor: "Pardon me a moment, while I divorce my present consort. I'd like to wear your name for a change."

Charity might have been capable even of such a derring-do if she had known that Jim Dyckman's bachelorhood was threatened with immediate extinction by the Thropps. But she could not know. For, however Jim's soul may have been mumbling, "Help, help!" he made no audible sound. Unwilling brides may shriek for rescue, but unwilling bridegrooms must not complain.

By a coincidence that was not strange Charity selected for her lawyer Travers McNiven, the very man that Jim Dyckman selected. All three had been friends since childhood. McNiven had been taken into the famous partnership of Hamnett, Dawsey, Coggeshall, Thurlow & McNiven.

When Jim Dyckman telephoned him for an appointment he was told to make it the next morning, as another client had pre-empted the afternoon. Jim was glad enough of an excuse to postpone his marriage by a day, never dreaming that Charity was the client who had preempted McNiven.

McNiven wondered at the synchrony, but naturally mentioned neither client to the other. His office was far down-town and far up in the air. Its windows gave an amplitudinous vision of the Harbor which Mr. Ernest Poole has made his own, but which was now a vestibule to the hell of the European war. All the adjoining land was choked far backward with a vast blockade of explosive freight-trains waiting to be unloaded into the unheard-of multitude of munition-ships waiting to run the gantlet of the German submarines.

Charity had run that gantlet and was ready to run it again on another errand of mercy, but first she must make sure that Zada's baby should not enter the world before its mother entered wedlock.

After McNiven had proffered her a chair and she had exclaimed upon the grandeur of the harborscape, she began:

"Sandy, I've come to see you about—"

"One moment!" McNiven broke in. "Before you speak I must as an honest lawyer warn you against the step you contemplate."

"But you don't know what it is yet."

"I don't have to. I know that people come to lawyers only to get out of scrapes or to get into scrapes dishonestly or unwisely. Furthermore, every step that any human being contemplates is a dangerous one and bound to lead to trouble."

"Oh, hush!" said Charity. "Am I supposed to pay you for that sort of advice?"

"Being a friend, and a woman, and very rich, you will doubtless never pay me at all. But let me warn you, Charity, that there is nothing in life more dangerous than taking a step in any possible direction—unless it is staying where you are."

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

"Ah, you've been to the dear old doctor! And he's refused to help you. When the Church denies a woman her way she comes to the devil. You interest me. It's a divorce, then?"

"Yes."

McNiven remembered Jim Dyckman's ancient squiredom to Charity and his recent telephony and he said to himself, "Aha!" But he said to Charity, "Go on."

"Sandy, my husband and I have agreed to disagree."

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

"But I've got to."

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

"All right. Consider my first break unmade. Peter has asked me—I mean, Peter has said that he will furnish me with the evidence on one condition: that I shall not mention a certain person with whom he has been living. He offers to provide me with any sort of evidence you lawyers care to cook up."

McNiven stared at her and spoke with startling rigor. "Are you trying to involve me in your own crimes?"

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

"Not in this office. Do you think I'd risk and deserve disbarment even to oblige a friend?"

"You mean you won't help me, then?" Charity sighed, rising with a forlorn sense of friendlessness.

McNiven growled: "Sit down! Of course I'll help you, but I don't intend to let you drag me into ruin, and I won't help you get a divorce that would be disallowed at the first peep of light."

"What can I do then? Peter said it could be managed quickly and quietly."

"There are ways and ways, Charity Coe. The great curse of divorce is the awful word 'collusion.' It can be avoided as other curses can with a little attention to the language. Remember the old song, 'It's not so much the thing you say, as the nasty way you say it.' That hound of a husband of yours wants to protect that creature he has been flaunting before the world. So he offers to arrange to be caught in a trap with another woman, and make you a present of the evidence. Isn't that so?"

"I believe it is."

"Now the law says that 'any understanding preceding the act of adultery' is collusion; it involves the committing of a crime. It would be appalling for a nice little body like you to connive at such a thing, wouldn't it?"

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

"I thought not," said McNiven.

"He'll have to give me evidence of—of something that has already happened, then, won't he?"

"The law calls that collusion also."

"Then what am I to do?"

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

Charity was about to shake her head, but she nodded it violently. She remembered the detectives she had engaged and the superabundant evidence they had furnished her. She told McNiven about it and he was delighted till she reminded him that she had promised not to make use of Zada's name.

McNiven told her that she had no other recourse, and advised her to see her husband. She said that it was hopeless and she expressed a bitter opinion of the law. It seemed harsher than the Church, especially harsh to those who did not flout its authority.

While Charity talked McNiven let his pipe-smoke trail out of the window into the infinite where dreams fade from reality and often from memory, and he thought, "If I can help Jim and Charity to get together after all this blundering it will be a good job."

He was tempted to tell her that Jim was coming to see him, too, but he was afraid that she knew it. If he had told her—but there goes that eternal "if" again!



CHAPTER III

It is a fierce and searching test of a woman's mettle when first she is confronted with temptation to rebel against the control of her preacher. Men are used to it, and women must grow more and more used to it as they advance into their long-deferred heritage.

Charity Coe Cheever was religious by every instinct. From childhood she had thrilled to the creed and the music and the eloquence of her Sundays. The beautiful industries of Christianity had engaged her. She had been happy within the walls and had felt that her piety gave her wings rather than chains.

And then she came abruptly to the end of her tether. She found her soul revolted by a situation which her pastor commanded her to accept as her lifelong portion. She found that to tolerate, and by tolerating to collaborate in, the adultery of her husband and his mistress was better religion than to free herself from odious triplicity. She found that it was better religion to annul her womanhood and remain childless, husbandless, and comfortless than to claim the privileges, the freedoms, the renewing opportunities the law allowed.

She came suddenly face to face with the terrifying fact that the State offered her help and strength that the Church denied her.

She had reached indeed what the doleful balladists would call "the parting of the ways," though no poet has yet chosen for his heroine the distraught wretch who is driven to the bleak refuge of divorce.

So long as it concerned only her own happiness Charity could put away the choice. But the more she pondered that unless she divorced her husband his mistress's baby would come into the world with a hideous birthmark, the more she felt it her duty to flout the Church. She shuddered to think of the future for that baby, especially if it should be a girl. She felt curiously a mother-obligation toward it. She blamed herself for her husband's infidelity. She humbled herself and bowed her neck to the shame.

She left the Church and went to the law. And then she found that the law had its own cruelties, its own fetters and walls and loopholes and hypocrisies. She found that it is not even possible to be a martyr and retain all one's dignity. One cannot even go to the stake without some guile.

The wicked law which the Church abhorred had its own idea of wickedness, and in the eyes of the law the agreement of a husband and a wife to part was something loathsome. She expressed her amazement to McNiven.

"It seems to me," she sighed, "if both husband and wife want a divorce, they know best; and that fact ought to be sufficient grounds in itself. And yet you tell me that if the law once gets wind of the fact they've got to live together forever."

"That's it. They've got to live together whether they love together or not—though of course you can get a separation very easily, on almost any ground."

"But a separation is only a guarantee of—of infidelity, I should think."

"Of course it is," said Lawyer McNiven.

"Then everything seems all wrong."

"Of course it is."

"Then why doesn't somebody correct it?"

"Who's going to bell the cat? Anybody who advocates divorce by mutual consent is sure to be lynched more or less fatally, and especially lynched by the very people who are making a mockery of matrimony in their own lives.

"One marriage in twelve in the United States ends in divorce. You'll not find anybody who dares to say that that is not a crying scandal. Yet you and I know that home life in America is as pure and honorable as in any other country. I'm an awful heathen, of course, but I'll bet you I'm a true prophet when I say that divorce will increase as the world goes on, instead of decreasing, and that in all the countries where divorce is forbidden or restricted it will grow freer and freer. Statistics prove it all over the globe."

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

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

"That's what they said when men asked for the vote and for education, when women asked for education and the vote; that's what they said when people opposed the divine right of kings, and when they asked for religious freedom; that's what they said when people opposed slavery; that's what they said when people said that insane people were not inhabited by devils and should be treated as invalids. The trouble, Charity, is that a certain spirit has always been abroad in the world fighting imaginary devils with the best intentions in the world. And in all history there has never been anybody so dangerous to human welfare as the zealot who wants to protect other people from themselves and from the devils.

"The insane people were never inhabited by devils, and neither are the sane people. Most men want one wife and most women want one husband. Even in the polygamous countries you'll not find any more real polygamy than you find in the countries with the strictest marriage laws. Bluebeard was a Mohammedan, but Don Juan was a Christian. Spain has no divorce on any grounds; neither has Italy. Would you point to those countries as models of domestic purity? Does any sane person dare say that home life in Spain is purer than in the United States?

"I tell you, easy divorce goes right along with merciful laws, public schools, clean prisons, free press, free speech."

Mrs. Cheever was a very good woman, and she abominated divorces. She had very peculiar reasons for wanting one herself, as every one has who wants one, but she felt her case to be so exceptional that it proved the rule against divorces. She shrank a little from the iconoclastic lawyer she had come to for aid, and reminded him of the solemnity of the theme.

"Don't you believe in the sanctity of matrimony?"

"Just as much as I believe in the sanctity of personal liberty and a contract and a debt and the obligation to vote and bear arms and equality of opportunity and responsibility and—oh, a lot of other sacred things—just as much and no more."

"But the Church calls marriage a sacrament."

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

"What!"

"It's true. The trouble with you religious people is that you never know the history of your own religion. And remember one more thing: the marriage rules of the Christian Church are all founded on the theories of men who never married. No wonder they found it easy to lay down hard and fast rules. Remember another thing: the early Church fathers, Saint Paul, Hieronymus, and thousands of others, believed that marriage was only a little bit better than the worst evil, and that womankind was hardly more than the devil's natural weapon.

"It was not until the Church was eleven hundred and sixty-four years old that Peter Lombard put marriage among the seven sacraments. And marriage did not become an official matter of Church jurisdiction till the Council of Trent in fifteen hundred and sixty-three. Think of that! Marriage was not a sacrament for fifteen centuries, and it has been one for less than four. And at that the Church could only manage the problem by increasing the number of impediments to marriage, which meant that it increased the number of excuses for annulling it.

"The total number of marriages annulled would amaze you. History is full of the most picturesque devices for granting divorce without seeming to. Sometimes they would illegitimize two or three generations in order to find a marriage within the forbidden degrees.

"According to Saint Matthew, Christ allowed divorce on the ground of adultery; according to Mark and Luke he made no such allowance. New York State follows Saint Matthew. The Catholic Church follows Luke and John. Old Martin Luther said that marriage was none of the Church's business. And that's what I think."

"You don't believe in the religious ceremony?"

"I'm afraid I don't believe in religious ceremonies about anything. I'm rather a heathen, you know—brought up in a good Presbyterian Calvinistic atmosphere, but I've lost it all. I'll give three cheers for virtue and the home as well as anybody; but my study and my experience lead me to distrust preachers and preaching.

"Still, this is a free country, and married people have a right to go to church if they want to, or to stay away. But I believe that marriage must be a civil contract and that no preacher has a right to denounce the State's prerogative, or try to belittle it. It is strange, but true, that when the Church has ruled the State the world has always groaned in corruption and cruelty.

"I believe that the law of New York is ridiculous in allowing only one ground for divorce, and if the United States ever arranges a uniform divorce law it will undoubtedly follow the policy of the more liberal States. I believe, with Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy and a number of other good, great men, in cheap and easy divorce, divorce within reach of the poor.

"As for morality, you have only to read the literature of the time when there was no divorce to realize how little a safeguard it is for the home. Boccaccio gives a social portrait of such a life, and he is almost too indecent to read. Yet the picture he gives is not half so terrible as Saint Catherine of Siena gives. They had to cut that chapter out of her works."

"Oh, do you read her works, too?" said Charity, remembering her experience with that flaming biography.

"I read a little of everybody. But everything I read and see confirms my opinion that too much law is the curse of the world. Still, as I say, I'm not a lawmaker. I'm a law-manipulator. I've been wondering how long you would stand Cheever's scandalous behavior, and how long you could be convinced that you were helping the morals of the world by condoning and encouraging such immorality. Now that you've brought your troubles to my shop I'm going to help you if I can. But I don't want to get you or myself into the clutches of the law. You'll have to take care of your Church relations as best you can. They may turn you out, and you may roast on a gridiron hereafter, but that's your business. Personally, I think the only wicked thing I've ever heard of you doing was permitting your husband to board and lodge at your house while he carried on with that—woman. A harem divided against itself will not stand."

Charity was terrified by the man's profane view of sacred things, and she was horrified to learn that she could only release herself and Cheever from the shackles by a kind of trickery. She would have to make her escape somewhat as she had seen Houdini break from his ropes in the vaudevilles, by retiring behind dark curtains for a while.

She felt guilty and craven whichever way she turned, and she imagined the revulsion with which the good pastor would regard her. Yet she was in a kind of mania to accept the scapegoat's burdens and be off into the wilderness. She was resolved to undergo everything for the sake of that poor child of Zada's hastening toward the world. She thanked Heaven she had no child of her own to complicate her duty.

She understood why Cheever wanted to protect the name of the child's mother from the courts, and she was baffled by the situation. The lawyer, who was so flippant about the things the Church held so sacred, was like a priest in his abhorrence of any tampering with the letter of the law.

She left his office for a conference with Cheever. She found at home that he had been telephoning to her. She called him up, and he came over at once.

"I'm in a devil of a mess, Charity," he said. "My lawyer refuses to help me give you evidence, and Zada—Miss L'Etoile—has developed a peculiar streak of obstinacy. She is determined that no other woman shall be named as the—er—co-respondent. She would rather be named herself. She says everybody knows about our—er—relations, anyway; and she doesn't care if they do."

Zada's character and her career had rendered her as contemptuous of public disapproval as any zealot of a loftier cause than love. There was a kind of barbaric insolence in her passion that Charity could not help admiring a little. She felt a whit ashamed of her own timidities and delicacies. The trouble with these proud defiers of the public, however, is that they do not ask the consent of the babies that are more or less implied in their superb amours.

Cheever was so distracted between the scruples of his lawyer and Zada's lack of them that when Charity confessed how she had set detectives on him and had secured a dictagraphic record of his alliance with Zada he was overcome with gratitude.

So little a shift of circumstances makes all the difference between a spy and a savior. The deed that he would once have cursed his wife for stooping to, perhaps have beaten her for, was now an occasion for overwhelming her with thanks.

He hurried away to his lawyer, and Charity telephoned McNiven for another appointment the next afternoon. Jim Dyckman's appointment was for the next morning.



CHAPTER IV

When Jim reached his office the next morning McNiven recommended the view to him, gave him a chair, refused a cigar, lighted his pipe instead, opened a drawer in his desk, put his feet in it, and leaned far back in his swivel chair.

Jim began, "Well, you see, Sandy, it's like this—"

"One moment," McNiven broke in. "Before you speak I must as an honest lawyer warn you against the step you contemplate."

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

"I don't have to. I know you, and I know that people don't come to lawyers, as a rule, except to get out of a scrape dishonestly or to get into one unwisely."

It was his office joke, and something more, a kind of formula for squaring himself with his conscience, a phrase for warding off the devil—as a beggar spits on the penny he accepts.

Having exorcised the demon, he said, "Go on, tell me: what's her name and how much does she want for silence?"

"How much do you want for silence?" Jim growled.

"Shoot!"

McNiven was startled and grieved when he learned that Jim was not making ready to marry Charity Coe, but some one else. Jim told him as much as he thought necessary, and McNiven guessed the rest. He groaned: "It seems impossible to surround marriage with such difficulties that people won't break in and out. I've got a friend of yours trying to bust a home as quietly as you're trying to build one."

Of course, he did not mention Charity's name. He tried fervently to convince Jim that he ought not to marry Kedzie, but, failing to persuade him from the perils of matrimony, he did his best to help him to a decent secrecy. His best was the program Jim and Kedzie followed.

They motored over to the village of Jolicoeur in New Jersey. There a local attorney, a friend of McNiven's, met them and vouched for them before the town clerk, who made out the license. He asked Kedzie if she had been married before, and she was so young and pretty and so plainly a girl that he laughed when he asked the question. And for answer Kedzie just laughed, too. He wrote down that she had never been married before. Kedzie had not really lied, and they can't arrest a person, surely, for just laughing. Not that she did not believe in the motto which Blanche Bates used to read so convincingly in "The Darling of the Gods": "It is better to lie a little than to be unhappy much."

Jim was shocked at the situation, but he could hardly be so ungallant as to call his fiancee a liar at such a time. Besides, he had heard that the law is interested in people's persons and not their names, and he was marrying Kedzie personally.

When the license was made out the lawyer whispered to the town clerk that it would be made worth his while to suppress the news for thirty days or more, and the clerk winked and grinned. Business was slow in matrimony, and he needed any little tips.

Now that they were licensed, Jim and Kedzie, being non-residents of New Jersey, must wait twenty-four hours before they could be married. They motored back to New York and went to the theater to kill the evening. The next afternoon Jim called for Kedzie, and they motored again to Jolicoeur for the ceremony. Mr. and Mrs. Thropp went along as witnesses and to make sure.

The lawyer had found a starveling parson in Jolicoeur who asked the fatal questions and pronounced the twain man and wife, adding the warning, "Whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder." Jim Dyckman was so befuddled that he heard it, "Let no man join whom God hath put asunder." But he paid the preacher well and added a large sum for the church on condition that the news of the marriage be kept out of the public records till the last legal moment.

Dyckman had tried to do the honorable thing by Kedzie. He was certainly generous, for a man can hardly give a woman more than himself and all he has. Dyckman, however, had been ashamed of a mental reservation or two. He could not repress a sneaking feeling that he had been less the kidnapper than the napped kid in this elopement. If anybody were to be arrested for abduction, it would not be he.

He reviled himself for confessing this to himself, and his sympathies went out to Kedzie because the poor child had to be yoked with a reluctant mate. A bridegroom ought to bring to his bride, above all things else, an eager heart. And that Jim could not bring.

He had been in his time a man and had sowed his measure of wild oats —more than a poor man could, less than a rich man might, far less than his unusual opportunities and the greedy throngs of temptresses encouraged. But he had taken Kedzie seriously, never dreaming how large a part ambition played in her devotion to him. He had been good to her and with her. The marriage ceremony had solemnized him further.

He had made a try at secrecy, because he felt shy about the affair. He knew that his name would lead the newspapers to haze him, as the rustic neighbors deride a rural couple with a noisy "chivaree." He dreaded the head-lines, as a kind of invasion of the bridal chamber.

In any case he had always hated flamboyant weddings with crowds and splendor. He did not believe that a marriage should be circused.

And thus at last he and Kedzie were united into one soul and one flesh, for better, for worse, etc., etc. Then they sped away to the remotest pleasant hotel to be found in darkest Jersey.

Jim registered under his own name, but blushed more hotly than if he had been engaged in an escapade. He could, perhaps, have taken Kedzie so with less regret than under the blessing of the clergy. For now he felt that he owed to her the all-hallowing grace of that utter love which was something he could not bestow.

She was the first wife he had ever had, and he wished a devoutness in that consummation. Lacking the sanctifying ardor, he was remorseful rather than triumphant, feeling himself more of a brute than even a bridegroom usually feels.

Kedzie did not seem to miss any perfection in his devotion, but he imputed that more to her innocent kindliness than to any grace of his own. The more he studied her the more he wondered why he did not love her more. She was tremendously exquisite, ferociously delicate, and almighty pretty. She was altogether too delectable, too cunningly wrought and fragile, for a hulking Titan like him.

He was positively afraid of her, and greatly amazed to see that she was not at all afraid of him. The moment the parson had done his worst a new Kedzie had appeared. She took command of everything instantly: ordered the parson about, shipped her mother and father back to town as if they were bothersome children, gave directions to Jim's chauffeur in a way that taught him who was to be who thenceforward, and made demands upon the hotel clerk in a tone that was more convincing of her wifehood than a marriage license could have been.

The quality missing in Kedzie was the sense of terror and meekness expectable in brides. Her sole distress was, to Jim's amazement, the obscurity and solitude of their retreat. Kedzie was rapturous, but she had not the slightest desire to hide it from the world. She was Mrs. Jim Dyckman, and she didn't care who knew it.

Poor Kedzie had her own sorrows to mar her triumph. She was being driven to believe that the world was as badly managed as the Hyperfilm Studio. Providence seemed to provide tribulations for her like a scenario editor pursuing a movie heroine. The second reel had begun well, the rich but honest lover putting the poor but dishonest husband to flight. And now Honeymoon Number Two! She had dreamed of a gorgeous church ceremony with two pipe-organs, and an enlarged cast of clergymen, and wedding guests composed of real millionaires instead of movie "extras." But lo and behold, her adorer whisks her off to a little town in New Jersey and the great treaty is sealed in the shoddy parlor of a village parsonage! Gilfoyle's Municipal Building was a cathedral compared to this.

Then with never a white ribbon fluttering, not an old shoe or a grain of rice hurtling, the limousine of love rolled away to a neglected roadhouse. It was attractive enough as a roadhouse, but it was wretched as an imitation paradise.

In the face of this outrage everything else was a detail, a minor humiliation. There was no parrot on an area fire-escape to mock her next morning, but there was a still earlier rooster to banish sleep and parody her triumph. She slipped out of bed and went barefoot to the window-seat and gazed out into a garden.

She made a picture there that Ferriday would have loved in a "close-up." Her hair was tumbling down upon and around her shoulders, and her silken nightgown shimmered blissfully about her, sketching her contours in iridescent lines. She gazed, through an Elizabethan of small panes, into a garden where sunrise bloomed rosily in petals of light. She was the prettiest thing in the pretty picture; yet she was pouting at Fate—Fate, the old scenario writer who never could seem to bring off a happy ending.

Jim Dyckman, waking, saw her there and rubbed his eyes. Then he remembered. He pondered her and saw a tear or two slip out of her eyes, run along her cheek and pitch off into the tiny ravine of her bosom. He felt that he was a contemptible fiend who had committed a lynchable crime upon a tender and helpless victim. He closed his eyes in remorse, pretending to sleep, tormented like the repentant purchaser of a "white slave"—or rather a pink slave.

They breakfasted early and prettily. Kedzie was radiant now. She usually was when she was dealing in futures. They took up the question of their future residence. Jim proposed all the honeymoon haunts. Europe was out of the question, so he suggested Bermuda, Jamaica, California, Atlantic City, North Carolina, the Adirondacks. But Kedzie wanted to get back to New York.

This pained and bewildered him at first, because he felt that wedded rapture should hide itself awhile in its own lovely loneliness. Besides, his appearance in New York with a wife would involve him in endless explanations—and there would be reporters to see, and society editors and photographers, and his family and all his friends.

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

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

The only answering argument to this was to take her back to town at once. The question of how and where they were to live was important. They had not settled it in the flurry of their hasty secret marriage.

Jim supposed that a hotel would be necessary till they found a house. He loathed the thought of a hotel, but a suitable furnished house might not be in the market at the moment. He suggested an apartment.

This reminded Kedzie of how Gilfoyle had sent her out on a flat-hunt. She would have more money now, but there would doubtless be something the matter with every place. The most urgent thing was to get out of New Jersey. They could discuss residences in the car.

And they did discuss them. Building a new house would take years. Buying a ready-made house and furnishing it would take days, perhaps weeks. Kedzie could not choose which one of the big hotels she most wanted to camp in. Each had its qualities and their defects.

When they were on the ferry crossing the river she had not yet made up her mind. Jim had no mind to make up. He was reduced to a mere waiter on her orders. He laughed at himself. This morning at daybreak he had been reproaching himself for being a vicious gorilla who had carried off a little girl; now he was realizing that the little girl had carried him off and was making a monkey of him.

Kedzie's mental disarray was the overwhelming influence of infinite money. For the first time in her life she could disregard price-marks entirely. Curiously, that took away half the fun of the thing. It seemed practically impossible for her to be extravagant. She would learn before long that there are countless things that plutocrats cannot afford, that they also must deny themselves much, feel shabby, and envy their neighbors. For the present she realized only that she had oodles of money to sprinkle.

But it takes training to spend money, and Kedzie was now unpractised. Her wisher was so undeveloped that she could only wish for things available to people of moderate affluence. She could not wish for a yacht, because Jim had a yacht. She could not wish for a balloon because she would not go up in it. She could wish for a house, but she could not walk into it without delay. She could not live in two hotels at once. Jewelry she could use in quantities, but even at that she had only so much surface area to hang it on. In fact, when she came right face to face with facts, what was there worth wishing for? What was the use of being so dog-on rich, anyway?

And there she hung on the door-sill of her new life like a child catching sight of a loaded Christmas tree and palsied with inability to decide which toy to grab first, horrified to realize that he cannot suck the orange and blow the trumpet at the same time.

When they reached the New York side of the Hudson the car rolled off the boat into the ferry-house and into the street, and when Jim said again, "Well, where do you want to go?" she had to sigh.

"Oh, Heavens! let's go home to my old apartment and talk it over." She gave the address to the chauffeur, and Jim smiled grimly. It gave him a little cynical amusement to act as passenger.

On the way up-town Kedzie realized that she was hungry and that here would be no food in her apartment. They turned to Sherry's. Kedzie left Jim and went into the dressing-room to smooth her hair after the motor flight.

And now, just too late, Charity Coe Cheever happened to arrive as the guest of Mrs. Duane. The sight of Jim alone brought a flush of hope to Charity's eyes. She greeted him with a breeziness she had hardly known since she was a girl. There was nothing about his appearance to indicate that he had just come across from New Jersey, where he had been made the husband of Mrs. Kedzie Thropp Gilfoyle.

Seeing Charity so unusually bright, Jim said, "What's happened to you, Charity, that you look so gay and free?"

"That's what I am."

"What?"

"Gay and free. Can you keep a secret?"

"Yes."

"I'm getting divorced."

"My Lord, no!"

"Yes, my lord."

"Oh, God, and me just married!"

Charity looked for an instant as if an arrow had flashed into her heart and struck her dead. Then with relentless courage she plucked out the steel and let the blood gush while she smiled.

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

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

"The one I asked you to look out for?"

"Yes."

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

"Thanks, Charity—thank you. Mighty nice of you! Of course, you know—er—Well, here she is." He beckoned to Kedzie, who came forward. "Mrs. Cheever, my wife. But you've met, haven't you?"

"Oh yes, indeed," said Charity Coe, with an effusion of cordiality that roused Kedzie's suspicions more than her gratitude. The first woman she met was already trying to get into her good graces! Charity Coe went on, with a little difficulty:

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

"Oh yes," said Kedzie, and a slow, heavy crimson darkened her face like a stream of treacle.

The first woman she met was reminding her of the time she was a poor young dancer with neither clothes nor money. It was outrageous to have this flung in her face at the very gate of Eden.

She was extremely cold to Charity Coe, and Charity saw it. Jim Dyckman died the death at finding Kedzie so cruel to the one who had befriended her. But he could not rebuke his wife, even before his lost love. So he said nothing.

Charity caught the heartsick, hangdog look in his eyes, and she forbore to slice Kedzie up with sarcasm. She bade her a most gracious farewell and moved on.

Kedzie stared after her and her beautiful gown, and said: "Say, Jim, who were the Coes, anyway? Did they make their money in trade?"

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



CHAPTER V

And now Kedzie Thropp was satisfied at last—at least for the time being. She was a plump kitten, replete and purr-full, and the world was her catnip-ball.

There was no visible horizon to her wealth. Her name was one of the oldest, richest, noblest in the republic. She was a Dyckman now, double-riveted to the name with a civil license and a religious certificate. Tommie Gilfoyle had politely died, and like an obliging rat had died outside the premises. Hardly anybody knew that she had married him, and nobody who knew was going to tell.

Kedzie forgot Charity in the joy of ordering a millionaire's luncheon. This was not easy. She was never a glutton for food; excitement dimmed what appetite she had, and her husband, as she knew, hated made dishes with complex sauces.

Kedzie was baffled by the futility of commanding a lot of things she could not eat, just for the fun of making a large bill. She was like the traditional prospector who struck it rich and, hastening to civilization, could think of nothing to order but "forty dollars' worth of pork and beans."

Kedzie had to satisfy her plutocratic pride by bossing the waiter about, by complaining that the oysters were not chilled and the sherry was. She sent back the salad for redressing and insisted that the meat was from cold storage. She was no longer the poor girl afraid of the waiter.

Kedzie was having a good time, but she regretted that her wedding-ring was so small. She felt that wives ought to wear some special kind of plume, the price of the feather varying with the bank account. Kedzie would have had to carry an umbrella of plumes.

Still, she did pretty well on her exit. She went out like a million dollars. But her haughtiness fell from her when she reached home and found Mr. and Mrs. Thropp comfortably installed there, saving hotel bills.

Charity Coe had gone out feeling a million years old. She left the presence of Kedzie in a mood of tragic laughter. She was in one of those contemptible, ridiculous plights in which good people frequently find themselves as a result of kindliness and self-sacrifice.

For well-meant actions are as often and as heavily punished in this world as ill-meant—if indeed the word punishment has any respectability left. It is certainly obsolescent.

Many great good men, such as Brand Whitlock, the saint of Belgium, had been saying that the whole idea of human punishment of human beings is false, cruel, and futile, that it has never accomplished anything worth while for either victim or inflictor. They place it among the ugly follies, the bloody superstitions that mankind has clung to with a fanaticism impervious to experience. They would change the prisons from hells to schools and hospitals.

Even the doctrine of a hell beyond the grave is rather neglected now, except by such sulphuric press agents as Mr. Sunday. But in this world we cannot sanely allege that vice is punished and virtue rewarded until we know better what virtue is and what is vice. All that it is safe to say is that punishment is a something unpleasant and reward a something pleasant that follows a deed—merely follows in point of time, not in proof of judgment.

So the mockery of Charity's good works was neither a punishment nor a ridicule. It was a coincidence, but a sad one. Charity had befriended Kedzie without making a friend thereby; she had lost, indeed, her good friend Jim. Charity's affection for Jim would make her suspect in Kedzie's eyes, and Kedzie's gratitude had evidently already cut its sharper-than-a-serpent's wisdom tooth.

Charity had been patient with her husband and had lost him. She had asked the Church for her freedom and had been threatened with exile. Then her husband had demanded his freedom and forced her to choose between blackening her own soul with the brand "divorcee" or blackening her husband's mistress's baby's soul with the brand "illegitimate."

She had preferred to take the shame upon herself. But who would give her credit? She knew how false was the phrase that old Ovid uttered but could not comfort even himself with, "The mind conscious of rectitude laughs at the lies of gossip." No woman can afford such security.

Charity had such a self-guying meekness, indeed, that instead of clothing herself in the robes of martyrdom she ridiculed herself because of one thing: In a pigeonhole of her brain a little back-thought had lurked, a dim hope that if she gave her husband the divorce he implored she might be free to remold her shattered life nearer to her heart's desire—with Jim Dyckman. Her husband, indeed, had taunted her with that intention, and now she had no sooner launched her good name down the slippery ways of divorce than she found Jim Dyckman married and learned that her premature and unwomanly hopes for him were ludicrously thwarted!

She went to McNiven's office with a dark life ahead of her. She had no desire left except to disentangle herself from Peter Cheever's life as quietly and swiftly as possible. She told McNiven this and said:

"How quickly can the ghastly job be finished?"

"Theoretically it could be done in a day, but practically it takes a little longer. For we must avoid the look of collusion like the plague. So we'll allow, say, a week. If we're lucky with our judges, it may take less."

Then he outlined the steps to be taken. An unusual chain of circumstances enabled him to carry them out with unexpected neatness and despatch, so that the case became a very model of how gracefully the rigid laws of divorce could be manipulated in the Year of Our Lord 1916 and of the Founding of the Republic 140.

It may be interesting to outline the procedure as a social document in chicanery, or social surgery, as one wills to call it.

McNiven first laid under Charity's eyes a summons and complaint against Peter Cheever. She glanced over it and found it true except that Zada L'Etoile was not named; Cheever's alleged income was vastly larger than she imagined, and her claim for alimony was exorbitant.

Her first question was: "Who is this unknown woman going by the name of Sarah Tishler? I thought Miss L'Etoile was to be the only woman mentioned."

McNiven explained: "L'Etoile is her stage name. She doesn't know her real name herself, for she was taken from the foundling-asylum as a child by a family named Tishler. We have taken advantage of that disadvantage."

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

"Peter doesn't earn half as much as that."

"How do you know what he earns?" said McNiven.

"He's told me often enough."

"Do you believe all he told you?"

"No; but, anyway, I don't want any of his old alimony. I have money enough of my own."

"That can be arranged later, but if you don't swear to this as it lies you can't have your divorce."

"Why not?"

"Because there has to be a contest, and we've got to give his lawyer something to fight."

Charity yielded wearily. She fought against making an affidavit to the truth of the complaint, but when NcNiven said, "No affidavit, no divorce," she took her oath before the clerk who was called in as a notary public.

"Now you may go home," said McNiven; and Charity stole out, feeling herself a perjured criminal. Then the divorce-mill began to grind.

A process-server from McNiven's office went across Broadway to Tessier's office, where Cheever was waiting. He handed the papers to Cheever, who handed them to Tessier, who hastily dictated an answer denying the adultery, the alleged income, and the propriety of the alimony claimed.

Tessier and Cheever visited McNiven in his office and served him with this answer. The two lawyers then dictated an agreement to a reference, Tessier adding a statement that he considered his client equipped with a good defense and that he intended to oppose the suit in good faith.

Their clerks took this to the County Court House in City Hall Square and filed it with the clerk of the Supreme Court, Special Term, Part II.

Justice Cardwell, before leaving his chambers, read the papers and issued an order naming as referee the lawyer Henry Firth.

Here for a moment the veil of secrecy was rent, for this order could not be suppressed. It was published in The Law Journal the next morning, and the eager reporters reading therein that Mrs. Peter Cheever was suing her husband for a divorce on statutory grounds, dashed to the records and learned that she accused him of undue intimacy with an unknown woman going by the name of Sarah Tishler.

By selecting an obscure town this publicity might have been deferred, but it would have meant delay in the case as well.

A flock of reporters sped like hawks for Charity's home, where they were denied admittance; for Cheever's office, where they were told that he was out of town; and even for Zada L'Etoile's apartment, where they were informed that she had left the State, as indeed she had. Sarah Tishler had a right, being named as co-respondent, to enter the case and defend her name, but she waived the privilege.

The evening papers made what they could of the sensation, but nobody mentioned Zada, for nobody knew that fate had tried to conceal her by naming her Tishler, and nobody quite dared to mention her without legal sanction.

On the next day Lawyer Firth held court in his office. Reporters were excluded, and the lawyers and detectives and Cheever and Charity, who had to be present, declined to answer any of the questions rained upon them in the corridors and the elevators.

Mr. Firth was empowered to swear in witnesses and take testimony. The evidence of the detectives, corroborated by the evidence of a hall-boy and a janitor and by proof of the installation of the dictagraph, seemed conclusive to Mr. Firth.

Cheever denied that he had committed the alleged adultery and gave proof that his income was not as stated. Attorney Tessier evaded the evidence of adultery, but fought hard against the evidence of prosperity. Referee Firth made his report finding the defendant guilty of the statutory offense, and ordered a decree of divorce, with a diminished alimony. He appended a transcript of the evidence and filed it with the Clerk of the County of New York. The statutory fee for a referee was ten dollars a day, but the lawyers had quietly agreed on the payment of a thousand dollars for expediting the case. With this recompense Mr. Firth ended his duties in the matter.

McNiven prepared a motion to confirm the report of the referee and took it to Tessier, who accepted service for his client. McNiven then went to the county clerk and filed a notice that the motion would be called up the next morning. The clerk put it on the calendar of Special Term, Part III.

The next morning McNiven appeared before Justice Palfrey, submitted his motion, and asked for an interlocutory decree. He left his paper with the clerk. During the afternoon Justice Palfrey looked over the referee's report and decided to grant McNiven's motion. In view of the prominence of the contestants and since he had heard of Charity's good works, and felt sure that she had suffered enough in the wreck of her home, he ordered the evidence sealed. This harmed nobody but the hungry reporters and the gossip-appetite of the public.

McNiven was waiting in the office of the clerk, and as soon as he learned that the judge had granted the motion he submitted the formal orders to be signed. The clerk entered the interlocutory decree. And now the marriage was ended except for three months of grace.

The first day after that period had passed McNiven submitted an affidavit that there had been no change in the feelings of the parties and there was no good reason why the decree should not be granted. He made up the final papers, gave Tessier notice, and deposited the record with the clerk. Justice Cruden, then sitting in Special Term, Part III., signed the judgment. And the deed was done. Mrs. Cheever was permitted to resume her maiden name, but that meant too much confusion; she needed the "Mrs." for protection of a sort.

The divorce carried with it a clause forbidding the guilty husband to marry any one else before five years had passed. But while the divorce was legal all over the world, this restriction ended at the State bounds.

So Peter Cheever and Zada L'Etoile went over into the convenient realm of New Jersey the next morning, secured a license, and on the following day were there made man and wife before all the world. This entitled them to a triumphant return to New York. And now Peter Cheever had also done the honorable thing. This "honorable thing" business will be one of the first burdens dropped by the men when the women perfect their claim to equality.

In about two weeks a daughter was born to the happy twain. Thanks to Charity's obliging nature, it was christened in church and accepted in law as a complete Cheever. Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Cheever now began to live (more or less) happily ever after (temporarily).

Altogether it was a triumph of legal, social, and surgical technic. It outraged many virtuous people. There was a good deal of harsh criticism of everybody concerned. The worthies who believe that divorce is the cause of the present depraved state of the United States bewailed one more instance of the vile condition of the lawless Gomorrah. The eternal critics of the rich used the case as another text in proof of the complete control that wealth has over our courts, though seventy-five divorces to obscure persons were granted at the same time without difficulty, with little expense and no newspaper punishment.

Dr. Mosely wrote Charity a letter of heartbroken condemnation, and she slunk away to the mountains to escape from the reproach of all good people and to recuperate for another try at the French war hospitals. She had let her great moving-picture project lapse. She felt hopelessly out of the world and she was afraid to face her friends. Still, she had money and her "freedom," and one really cannot expect everything.



CHAPTER VI

The ninety days following Charity's encounter with Jim Dyckman and his bride at Sherry's had been busy times for her and epochal in their changes. From being one of the loneliest and most approved women in America she had become one of the loneliest and least approved. Altruism is perhaps the most expensive of the virtues.

No less epochal were those months for the Dyckmans, bride and groom. Their problems began to bourgeon immediately after they left New Jersey and went to Kedzie's old apartment for further debate as to their future lodgings.

Mr. and Mrs. Thropp were amazed by their sudden return. Adna was a trifle sheepish. They found him sitting in the parlor in his shirt-sleeves and stocking feet, and staring out of the window at the neighbors opposite. In Nimrim it was a luxury to be able to spy into the windows of one neighbor at a time. Opposite Adna there were a hundred and fifty neighbors whom it cost nothing to watch. Some of them were very startling; some of them were stupid old ladies who rocked, or children who flattened their noses against the windows, or Pekingese doglets who were born with their noses against a pane, apparently. But some of the neighbors were fascinatingly careless of inspection—and they always promised to be more careless than they were.

Mrs. Thropp came rushing in from the kitchen. She had been trying in vain to make a friend of Kedzie's one servant. But this maid, like a self-respectful employee or a good soldier, resented the familiarity of an official superior as an indecency and an insult. She made up her mind to quit.

After Mrs. Thropp had expressed her wonderment at seeing her children return, she turned the full power of her hospitality on poor Jim Dyckman. He could not give notice and seek another job.

Mrs. Thropp's first problem was the proper style and title of her son-in-law.

"What am I goin' to call you, anyhow?" she said. "Jim sounds kind of familiar on short acquaintance, and James is sort of distant. Son-in-law is hor'ble, and Son is—How would you like it if I was to call you 'Son'? What does your own mother call you?"

"Jimsy" Jim admitted, shamefacedly.

"Jimsy is right nice," said Mrs. Thropp, and she Jimsied him thenceforward, to his acute distress. He found that he had married not Kedzie only but all the Thropps there were. The father and mother were the mere foreground of a vast backward and abyss of relations, beginning with a number of Kedzie's brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands. Jim was a trifle stunned to learn what lowly jobs some of his brothers-in-law were glad to hold.

Mrs. Thropp felt that it was only right to tell Jim as much as she could about his new family. She told him for hours and hours. She described people he had never seen or heard of and would travel many a mile to avoid. He had never cared for genealogy, and his own long and brilliant ancestry did not interest him in the slightest. He had hundreds of relations of all degrees of fame and fortune, and he felt under no further obligation to them than to let alone and be let alone.

His interest in his new horde of relations-in-law was vastly less than nothing. But Mrs. Thropp gave him their names, their ages, habits, diseases, vices, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies. She recounted doings and sayings of infinite unimportance and uninterest.

With the fatuous, blindfolded enthusiasm of an after-dinner speaker who rambles on and on and on while the victims yawn, groan, or fold their napkins and silently steal away, Mrs. Thropp poured out her lethal anecdotes.

Jim went from weariness to restiveness, to amazement, to wrath, to panic, to catalepsy, before Kedzie realized that he was being suffocated by these reminiscences. Then she intervened.

Mrs. Thropp's final cadence was a ghastly thought:

"Well, now, I've told you s'much about all our folks, you must tell me all about yours."

"The Lord forbid!" said Jim.

Mrs. Thropp took this to mean that he did not dare confess the scandals of his people. She knew, of course, from reading, that rich people are very wicked, but she did want to know some of the details.

Jim refused to make disclosures. He was wakened from his coma by Mrs. Thropp's casual remark:

"Say, Jimsy, how do folks do, on East here? Will your mother call on me and Kedzie, or will she look for us to call on her first?"

"My God!" thought Jim.

"What say?" said Mrs. Thropp.

Jim floundered and threshed. He had never before realized what his mother's famous pride might mean. She had always been only mother to him, devoted, tender, patient, forgiving, amusing, sympathetic, anxious, flattered by his least attention. Yet he had heard her spoken of as a human glacier for freezing social climbers and pushers of every sort. She was huge and slow; she could be frightfully cold and crushing.

Now he understood what congelation the trembling approachers to her majesty must have suffered. He was afraid to think what she would do to the Thropps. Her first glance would turn them to icicles and her first word would snap them to bits.

It is hard enough for any mother to receive the news that her son is in love with any woman and wants to marry her. Mrs. Dyckman must learn that her adored child had transferred his loyalty to a foreigner, a girl she had never seen, could not conceivably have selected, and could never approve. Even the Prodigal Son, when he went home, did not bring a wife with him. Ten to one if he had brought one she would have got no veal—or if she got it she would not have cared for it.

Jim could not be blind even now in his alarm to Kedzie's intense prettiness, but seeing her as through his mother's eyes coldly, he saw for the first time the plebeiance of her grace.

If she had been strong and rugged her commonness would have had a certain vigor; but to be nearly refined without being quite refined is as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off the key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C and miss it by a comma.

Yet Jim understood that he could not long prevent the encounter of his wife and her relatives with his mother and her relatives. He could not be so boorishly insolent as to forbid the meeting, and he could not be so blind as to expect success. He got away at length on the pretext of making arrangements with his mother, who was a very busy woman, he said. Mrs. Thropp could not imagine why a rich woman should be busy, but she held her whist.

Jim was glad to escape, even on so gruesome an errand, and now when he kissed Kedzie good-by he had to kiss momma as well. He would almost rather have kissed poppa.

He entered his home in the late afternoon with the reluctance of boyhood days when he had slunk back after some misdemeanor. He loathed his mission and himself and felt that he had earned a trouncing and a disinheritance.

He found his mother and father in the library playing, or rather fighting, a game of double Canfield. In the excitement of the finish they were like frantic children, tied in knots of hurry, squealing with emulation. The cards were coming out right, and the speedier of the two to play the last would score two hundred and fifty to the other's nothing.

Mrs. Dyckman was the more agile in snatching up her cards and placing them. Her eyes darted along the stacks with certainty, and she came in first by a lead of three cards.

Dyckman was puffing with exhaustion and pop-eyed from the effort to look in seven directions at once. It rendered him scarlet to be outrun by his wife, who was no Atalanta to look at. Besides, she always crowed over him insufferably when she won, and that was worse than the winning. When Jim entered the room she was laughing uproariously, pointing the finger of derision at her husband and crying:

"Where did you get a reputation as a man of brains? There must be an awful crowd of simpletons in Wall Street." Then she caught sight of her son and beckoned to him. "Come in and hold your father's head, Jimsy."

"Please don't call me Jimsy!" Jim exploded, prematurely.

His mother did not hear him, because his father exploded at the same moment:

"Come in and teach your mother how to be a sport. She won't play fair. She cheats all the time and has no shame when she gets caught. When she loses she won't pay, and when she wins she wants cash on the nail."

"Of course I do!"

"Why, there isn't a club in the country that wouldn't expel you twice a week."

"Well, pay me what you owe me, before you die of apoplexy."

"How much do I owe you?"

"Eight dollars and thirty-two cents."

"I do not! That's robbery. Look here: you omitted my score twice and added your own up wrong."

"Did I really?"

"Do five and two make nine?"

"Don't they?"

"They do not!"

"Well, must you have hydrophobia about it? What difference does it make?"

"It makes the difference that I only owe you three dollars and twenty-six cents."

"All right, pay it and simmer down. Isn't he wonderful, Jimsy? He just sent a check for ten thousand dollars to the fund for blind French soldiers and then begrudges his poor wife five dollars."

"But that's charity and this is cards; and it's humiliating to think that you haven't learned addition yet."

Mrs. Dyckman winked at Jim and motioned him to sit beside her. He could not help thinking of the humiliating addition he was about to announce to the family. While his father counted out the change with a miserly accuracy he winked his off eye at Jim and growled, with a one-sided smile:

"Where have you been for the past few days, and what mischief have you been up to? You have a guilty face."

But Mrs. Dyckman threw her great arm about his great shoulders, stared at him as she kissed him, and murmured: "You don't look happy. What's wrong?"

Jim scraped his feet along the floor gawkily and mumbled: "Well, I suppose I'd better tell you. I was going to break it to you gently, but I don't know how."