When they reached her magnificent home it had a deserted look.

"Wait here a minute," said Charity when Jim got out to help her out. She ran up the steps and rang the bell. There was a delay before the second man in an improvised toilet opened the door to her and expressed as much surprise as delight at seeing her. "Didn't Mr. Cheever tell you I was coming home?" she gasped.

"We haven't seen him, ma'am. There's a telegram here for him, but of course--"

Charity was still in a frantic mood. She wanted to escape brooding, at all costs. She ran back to where Jim waited at the motor door.

"Got any date to-night, Jim?" she demanded. He shook his head dolefully, and she said: "Go home, jump into your dancing-shoes, and come back for me. I'll throw on something light and you can take me somewhere to dance. I'll go crazy mad, insane, if you don't. I can't endure this empty house. You don't mind my making a convenience of you, do you, Jim?"

"I love it, Charity Coe," he groaned. He reached for her hand, but she was fleeting up the steps. He crept into the car and went to his home, flung off his traveling-togs, pa.s.sed through a hot tub and a cold shower into evening clothes, and hastened away.

Charity kept him waiting hardly a moment. She floated down the stairs in a something fleetily volatile, and he said:

"You look like a dandelion puff."

"That's right, tell me some nice things," she said. She did not tell the servant where she was going. She did not know. She hardly cared.

CHAPTER VI

To Kedzie Thropp the waiting-room of the Grand Central Terminal was the terminus of human splendor. It was the waiting-room to heaven. And indeed it is a majestic chamber.

The girl walked with her face high, staring at the loftily columned recesses with the bay-trees set between the huge square pillars, and above all the feigned blue sky and the monsters of the zodiac in powdered gold.

Kedzie could hardly breathe--it was so beautiful, so much superior to the plain every-night sky she was used to, with stars of tin instead of gold like these.

Even her mother said "Well!" and Adna paid the architects the tribute of an exclamation: "Humph! So this is the new station we was readin' about.

Some bigger'n ours at home, eh, Kedzie?"

But Kedzie was not there. They had lost her and had to turn back. She was in a trance. When they s.n.a.t.c.hed her down to earth again and pulled her through the crowds she began to adore the people. They were dressed in unbelievable splendor--millions, she guessed, in far better than the best Sunday best she had ever seen. She wondered if she would ever have nice clothes. She vowed that she would if she had to murder somebody to get them.

The porter led the way from the vast.i.tude of a corridor under the street and through vast empty rooms and up a stairway and down a few steps and through the first squirrel-cage door Kedzie had ever seen (she had to run round it thrice before they could get her out) into a sumptuousness beyond her dream.

At the foot of more stairs the porter let down his burdens, and a boy in a general's uniform seized them. The porter said, mopping his brow to emphasize his achievement:

"This is fur's I go."

"Oh, all right! Much obliged," said Adna. He just pretended to walk away as a joke on the porter. When he saw the man's white stare aggravated sufficiently, Adna smiled and handed him a dime.

The porter stared and turned away in bitter grief. Then his chuckle returned as he went his way, telling himself: "And the bes' of it was, I fit for him! I just had to git that man."

He told the little porter about it, and when the little porter, who had been scared away from the Thropps and left to carry Charity Coe's dainty hand-bags, showed the big porter what he had received, still the big porter laughed. He knew how to live, that big porter.

Kedzie followed the little general up the steps and around to the desk.

Her father realized that his fellow-pa.s.senger had been teasing him when he referred to this place as a boarding-house, but he was not at all crushed by the magnificence he was encountering. He felt that he was in for it--so he c.o.c.ked his toothpick pluckily and wrote on the loose-leaf register the room clerk handed him:

A. Thropp, wife and daughter, Nimrim, Mo.

The room clerk read the name as if it were that of a potentate whose incognito he would respect, and murmured:

"About what accommodation would you want, Mr. Thropp?"

"Two rooms--one for the wife and m'self, one for the daughter."

"Yes, sir. And about how much would you want to pay?"

"How do they run?"

"We can give you two nice adjoining rooms for twelve dollars--up."

Mr. Thropp made a hasty calculation. Twelve dollars a week for board and lodging was not so bad. He nodded.

The room clerk marked down a number and slid a key to the page, who gathered the family treasures together. Kedzie had more or less helplessly recognized the page's admiration of her when he first took the things from the porter. The sense of her beauty had choked the boy's amus.e.m.e.nt at her parents.

Later Kedzie caught the glance of the room clerk and saw that she startled him and cheated him of his smile at Adna. Still later the elevator-boy gave her one respectful look of approval. Kedzie's New York stir was already beginning.

The page ushered the Thropps into the elevator, and said, "Nineteen."

It was the number of the floor, not the room. Adna warned his women folk that "she" was about to go up, but they were not prepared for that swift vertical leap toward the clouds. Another floor, and Mrs. Thropp would have screamed. The alt.i.tude affected her.

Then the thing stopped, and the boy led them down a corridor so long that Adna said, "Looks like we'd be stranded a hundred miles from nowheres."

The boy turned in at a door at last. He flashed on the lights, set the bags on a bag-rack, hung up the coats, opened a window, adjusted the shade, lighted the lights in Kedzie's room, opened her window, adjusted the shade, and asked if there were anything else.

Adna knew what the little villain meant, but he knew what was expected, and he said, sternly, "Ice-water."

"Right here, sir," said the boy, and indicated in the bathroom a special faucet marked "Drinking Water."

This startled even Adna so much that it shook a dime out of him. The boy sighed and went away. Kedzie surprised his eye as he left. It plainly found no fault with her.

Here in seclusion Mrs. Thropp dared to exclaim at the wonders of modern invention. Kedzie was enfranchised and began to jump and squeal at the almost suffocating majesty. Adna took to himself the credit for everything.

"Well, momma, here we are in New York at last. Here we are, daughter.

You got your wish."

Kedzie nearly broke his neck with her hug, and called him the best father that ever was. And she meant it at the moment, for the moment.

Mrs. Thropp was already making herself at home, loosening her waistband and her corset-laces.

Adna made himself at home, too--that is, he took off his coat and collar and shoes. But Kedzie could not waste her time on comfort while there was so much ecstasy to be had.

She went to the window, shoved the sash high, and--discovered New York.

She greeted it with an outcry of wonder. She called to her mother and father to "Come here and looky!"

Her mother moaned, "I wouldn't come that far to look at New Jerusalem."