Kedzie never feared that it might have a scarlet-letter significance.

She forgot that she was anything but a newborn, full-fledged angel without a past--only a future with the sky for its limit. Alas! we always have our pasts. Even the unborn babe has already centuries of a past.

It was Ferriday who brought Kedzie home to hers.

"What about dinner to-night, my dear? I feel like having a wonderful dinner to-night! Are partridge in season now? What is your favorite sherry? Let me call for you at, say, seven. Where shall I call?"

Kedzie flopped back from the empyrean to her flat. Gilfoyle again blockaded her.

She nearly swooned then. Her soul rummaged frantically through a brain like her own work-basket. She finally dug up an excuse.

"I'd rather meet you at the restaurant."

Ferriday smiled. He understood. The poor thing was ashamed of her boarding-house.

"Well, Cinderella, let me send my pumpkin for you, at least. I won't come. Where shall my chauffeur find you?"

Kedzie whimpered the shabby number of the shabby street.

"Shall he ask for Miss Adair, or--"

Kedzie was inspired: "I live in Mrs. Gilfoyle's flat-partment."

"I see," said Ferriday. "Miss Anita Adair--ring Mrs. Gilfoyle's bell.

All right, my angel, at seven. Run along."

He kissed her, and she was ice-cold. But then women were often like that before Ferriday's genius.

CHAPTER VIII

The things we are ashamed of are an acid test of our souls. Kedzie Thropp was constantly improving the quality of her disgusts.

A few months ago she was hardly ashamed of sleeping under a park bench.

And already here she was sliding through the street in a limousine. It was a shabby limousine, but she was not yet ready to be ashamed of any limousine. She was proud to have it lent to her, proud to know anybody who owned such a thing.

What she was ashamed of now was the home it must take her to and the jobless husband waiting for her there. She was ashamed of herself for tying up with a husband so soon. She had married in haste and repented in haste. And there was a lot of leisure for more repentance.

Already her husband was such a handicap that she had refrained from mentioning his existence to the great moving-picture director who had opened a new world of glory to her--thrown on a screen, as it were, a cinemation of her future, where triumphs followed one another with moving-picture rapidity. He had made a scenario of her and invited her to dinner.

She smiled a little at the inspiration that had saved her from confessing that she was Mrs. Gilfoyle. It was neat of her to tell Mr.

Ferriday that she could be addressed "in care of Mrs. Gilfoyle." In care of herself! That was just what she was. Who else was so interested in Kedzie's advancement as Kedzie?

She was a bitterly disappointed Kedzie just now. Ferriday had told her to go to Lady Powell-Carewe and get herself a bevy of specially designed gowns at the expense of the firm. There was hardly a woman alive who would not have rejoiced at such a mission. To Kedzie, who had never had a gown made by anything higher than a sewing-woman, the privilege was heavenly. Also, she had never met a Lady with a capital L.

The dual strain might have been the death of her, but she was saved by the absence of Lady Powell-Carewe. Kedzie went back to the street, sick with deferred hope. Ferriday's chauffeur was waiting to take her home.

She felt grateful for the thoughtfulness of Ferriday and crept in.

The nearer Kedzie came to her lowly highly flat the less she wanted even the chauffeur of Mr. Ferriday's limousine to see her enter it. He would come for her again at night, but the building did not look so bad at night.

So she tapped on the gla.s.s and told him to let her out, please, at the drug-store, as she had some marketing to do.

"Sure, Miss," said the chauffeur.

Kedzie liked that "Miss." It was ever so much prettier than "Mizzuz."

She bought some postage-stamps at the drug-store and some pork chops at the butcher's and went down the street and up the stairs to her life-partner, dog on him!

Gilfoyle was just finishing a poem, and he was the least attractive thing in the world to her, next to his poem. He was in his sock feet; his suspenders were down--he would wear the hateful things! his collar was off, his sleeves up; his detachable cuffs were detached and stuck on the mantelpiece; his hair was crazy, and he had ink smears on his nose.

"Don't speak to me!" he said, frantically, as he thumped the table with finger after finger to verify the meter.

"No danger!" said Kedzie, and went into the bedroom to look over her scant wardrobe and choose the least of its evils to wear.

She shook her head at her poverty and went to the kitchen to cook lunch for her man. He followed her and read her his poem while she slammed the oven door of the gas-stove at the exquisitely wrong moments. She broke his heart by her indifference and he tore up the poem, carefully saving the pieces.

"A whole day's work and five dollars gone!" he groaned. He was so sulky that he forgot to ask her why she had come home so early. He a.s.sumed that she had been turned off. She taxed her ingenuity to devise some way of getting to the dinner with Ferriday without letting Gilfoyle know of it. At last she made so bold as to tell her husband that she thought she would drop in at her old boarding-house and stay for dinner if she got asked.

"I'm sick of my cooking," she said.

"So am I, darling. Go by all means!" said Gilfoyle, who owed her one for the poem.

Kedzie was suspicious of his willingness to let her go, but already she had outgrown jealousy of him. As a matter of fact, he had been invited to join a few cronies at dinner in a grimy Italian boarding-house. They gave it a little interest by calling it a "speak-easy," because the proprietor sold liquor without a license. Gilfoyle's cronies did not know of his marriage and he was sure that Kedzie would not fit. She did not even know the names of the successful, therefore mercenary, writers and ill.u.s.trators, much less the names of the unsuccessful, therefore artistic and sincere.

To Kedzie's delight, Gilfoyle took himself off at the end of a perfect day of misery. He left her alone with her ambitions. She was in very grand company. She hated the duds she had to wear, but she solaced herself with planning what she should buy when money was rolling in.

When Ferriday's car came for her she was standing in the doorway. She hopped in like the Cinderella that Ferriday had called her. When the car rolled up to the Knickerbocker Hotel she pretended that it was her own motor.

Ferriday was standing at the curb, humbly bareheaded. He wore a dinner-jacket and a soft hat which he tucked under his arm so that he might clasp her hands in both of his with a costume-play fervor. He had been an actor once--and he boasted that he had been a very bad one.

Kedzie felt as if he were helping her from a sedan chair. She imagined her knee skirts lengthened to a brocaded train, and his trousers gathered up into knee breeches with silver buckles.

Bitterness came back to her as she entered the hotel and her slimpsy little cloth gown must brush the Parisian skirts of the richly clad other women.

She pouted in right earnest and it was infinitely becoming to her.

Ferriday was not thinking of the price or cut of her frock. He was perceiving the flexile figure that informed it, the virginal shoulders that curved up out of it, the slender, limber throat that aspired from them and the flower-poise of her head on its white stalk.

"You are perfect" he groaned into her ear, with a flattering agony of appreciation.

That made everything all right and she did not tremble much even before the _maitre d'hotel_. She was a trifle alarmed at the covey of waiters who hastened to their table to pull out the chairs and push them in and fetch the water and bread and b.u.t.ter and silver and plates. She was glad to have long gloves to take off slowly while she recovered herself and took in the gorgeous room full of gorgeous people. Gloves are most useful coming off and going on.

Kedzie was afraid of the bill of fare with its complex French terms, but Ferriday took command of the menu.

When he was working Ferriday could wolf a sandwich with the greed of a busy artist and give orders with a shred of meat in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. But when he luxuriated he luxuriated.

Tonight he was tired of life and dejected from a battle with the stingy backers, who had warned him for the last time once more that he had to economize. He needed to forget such people and the loathsome enemy of fancy, economy.

"I want to order something as exquisite as you are," he said. "Of course, there could be nothing as exquisite as you are, Miss Adair--you were curled up on a silver dish with a little apple in your mouth like a young roast pig. Ever read Lamb on pig?"