Zada asked, "Did he have hard daydie old office-ums?"

And he answered, with infatuated imbecility, "Yes, he diddums, but worst was lonelying for his Zadalums."

"Did Peterkin miss his Zadalums truly--truly?"

The inveterate idioms of wooers took on in Charity's ear a grotesque obscenity, a sacrilegious burlesque of words as holy to her as prayer or the sacred dialect of priests. When Zada murmured, "Kissings! kissings!"

Charity screamed: "Stop it, you beasts! You beasts!"

Then she clapped her hand over her lips, expecting to hear their panic at her outcry. But they were as oblivious of her pain or her rage as if an interplanetary s.p.a.ce divided them. They went on with the murmur and susurrus of their communion, while Charity looked askance at the three men. They could not hear, but could imagine, and they stared at her doltishly.

"Leave the room! Go away!" she groaned.

They slipped out through the door and left her to her shame.

In the porches of her ear the hateful courtship purled on with its tender third-personal terms and its amorous diminutives, suffixed ridiculously.

"Zada was afaid her booful Peterkin had forgotten her and gone to the big old house."

"Without coming home first?"

"Home! that's the wordie I want. This is his homie, isn't it, Peterkin?"

"Yessy."

"He doesn't love old villain who keeps us apart?"

"Nonie, nonie."

"Never did, did he?"

"Never."

"Only married her, didn't he?"

"That's allie."

"Zada is only really wifie?"

"Only onlykins."

Charity listened with a greed of self-torment like a fanatic penitent.

The chatter of the two had none of the indecency she had expected, and that made it the more intolerably indecent.

She saw that Cheever's affair with Zada had settled down to a state of comfort, of halcyon delight.

It had taken on domestication. He was at home with her and an alien in Charity's home. He told the woman his business affairs and little office jokes. He laughed with a purity of cheer that he had long lost in his legal establishment. He used many of the love-words that he had once used to Charity, and her heart was wrung with the mockery of it.

Charity listened helplessly. She was as one manacled or paralyzed and submitted to such a torture as she had never endured. She harkened in vain for some hopeful note of uncongeniality, some rea.s.surance for her love or at least her vanity, some certainty that her husband, her first possessor, had given her some emotion that he could never give another.

But he was repeating to Zada the very phrases of his honeymoon, repeating them with all the fervor of a good actor playing Romeo for the hundredth time with his new leading lady. Indeed, he seemed to find in Zada a response and a unity that he had never found in Charity's society. Her intelligence was cruelly goaded to the realization that she had never been quite the woman for Cheever.

She had known that he had not been the full complement of her own soul.

They had disagreed fiercely on hundreds of topics. He had been chilled by many of her ardors, as many of his interests had bored her. She had supposed it to be an inevitable inability of a man and a woman to regard the world through the same eyes. She had let him go his way and had gone her own. And now it seemed that he had in his wanderings found some one who mated him exactly. The b.u.t.terfly had liked the rose, but had fluttered away; when it found the orchid it closed its wings and rested content.

It was a frightful revelation to Charity, for it meant that Cheever had been merely flirting with her. She had caught his eye as a girl in a strange port captivates a sailor. He had haunted her window with serenades. Finding her to be what we call "a good girl," he had called upon her father and mother that he might talk to her longer. And then he had gone to church with her and married her that he might get rid of her father and mother and her own scruples. And so he had made her his utterly, and after a few days and nights had sailed away. He had come back to her now and then as a sailor does.

Meanwhile in another port he had found what we call "a bad woman." There had been no need to serenade her out into the streets. They were her shop. No parents had guarded her hours; no priest was intermediary to her possession. But once within her lair he had found himself where he had always wanted to be, and she had found herself with the man she had been hunting. She closed her window, drove her frequenters, old and new, from the door; and he regretted that he had given pledges to that other woman.

It was a pitiful state of affairs, no less pitiful for being old and ugly and innumerously commonplace. It meant that Cheever under the white cloak of matrimony had despoiled Charity of her innocence, and under the red domino of intrigue had restored to Zada hers.

If Charity, sitting like a recording angel, invisible but hearing everything, had found in the communion of Zada and Cheever only the fervor of an amour, she could have felt that Cheever was merely a libertine who loved his wife and his home but loved to rove as well.

She had, however, ghastly evidence that Cheever was only now the rake reformed; his marriage had been merely one of his escapades; he had settled down now to monogamy with Zada, and she was his wife in all but style and t.i.tle.

There was more of Darby and Joan than of Elvira and Don Juan in their conversation. He told Zada with pride that he had not had a drink all day, though he had needed alco-help and the other men had ridiculed him. She told him that she had not had a drink for a week and only one cigarette since her lonely dinner. They were in a state of mutual reformation!

Where, then, was the sacrament of marriage? Which of the women held the chalice now?

It was enforced on Charity that it was she and not Zada who had been the inspirer and the victim of Cheever's flitting appet.i.te. It was Zada and not she who had won him to the calm, the dignity, the sincerity, the purity that make marriage marriage. It was a hard lesson for Charity, and she did not know what she ought to do with her costly knowledge. She could only listen.

When Zada complained that she had had a dreadful day of blues Cheever made jokes for her as for a child, and she laughed like the child she was. For her amus.e.m.e.nt he even went to a piano and played, with blundering three-chord accompaniment, a song or two. He played jokes on the keyboard. He revealed none of the self-consciousness that he manifested before Charity when he exploited his little bag of parlor tricks.

Charity's mood had changed from horror to eager curiosity, and thence to cold despair, to cold resentment. It went on to cold intelligence and a belief that her life with Cheever was over. Their marriage was a proved failure, and any further experiments with its intimacies would be unspeakably vile. Or so she thought.

She had consented to this dictagraphic inspection of her husband's intrigue merely to confirm or refute gossip. She had had more than evidence enough to satisfy her. Her first reaction to it was a primitive l.u.s.t for revenge.

Once or twice she blazed with such anger that she rose to tear the wire loose from the wall and end the torment. But her curiosity restrained her. She set the earpiece to her ear again.

At length she formed her resolution to act. She called out, "Mr.

Hodshon, come here!"

He came in and found her a pillar of rage.

"I've heard enough. I'll do what I refused before. I'll go with you and break in."

Hodshon was dazed. He was not ready to act. She had refused his plan to break in according to the cla.s.sic standards. He had let the plan lapse and accepted Mrs. Cheever as a poor rich wretch whom he had contracted to provide with a certain form of morbid entertainment. He could do nothing now but stammer:

"Well--well--is that so? Do you really? You know you didn't--O'

course--Well, let's see now. You know we ain't prepared. I told you we had to have a c'rob'rating witness. It wouldn't be legal if we were to--Still, they probably would accept you as witness and us as corroboration, but you wouldn't want to go on the stand and tell what you found--not a nice refined lady like you are. The witness-stand is no place for a lady, anyway.

"The thing is if you could get some gentleman friend to go with you and you two break in. Then you'd both be amateurs, kind of. You see? Do you know any gentleman who might be willing to do that for you? The best of friends get very shy when you suggest such a job. But if you know anybody who would be interested and wanted to help you--Do you?"

Only two names came to Charity's searching mind--Jim Dyckman's impossible name and one that was so sublimely unfit that she laughed as she uttered it.

"There's the Reverend Doctor Mosely."

Hodshon tried to laugh.

"I was reading head-lines of a sermon of his. He's down on divorce."

"That's why he'd be the ideal witness," said Charity.