"Yes, my lord."

"Oh, G.o.d, 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 grat.i.tude. 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, n.o.blest 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 n.o.body 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 appet.i.te 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 b.l.o.o.d.y superst.i.tions that mankind has clung to with a fanaticism impervious to experience. They would change the prisons from h.e.l.ls to schools and hospitals.

Even the doctrine of a h.e.l.l 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 grat.i.tude 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 rect.i.tude 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 circ.u.mstances 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 doc.u.ment 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?"