"Oh, Jim! What right has he got to kick? He didn't lose much time getting back to his Charity Coe after he married you."

"His Charity Coe!" Kedzie gasped. "What do you mean by his Charity Coe?"

"Why, his old reliable sweetheart. He's been silly about her since babyhood. When she married Pete Cheever he moped like a sick hound. And didn't he beat up Pete in a club only a few days before he married you?"

This was all news to Kedzie and it sickened her. She demanded more poison, and Pet ladled it out joyously.

She told Kedzie how Prissy Atterbury found Jim at Charity's home.

But Kedzie remembered vividly that Jim had said he met Charity on the street. And now she had caught him in a lie, a woman-lie! He was not there to explain that he visited Charity in Kedzie's behalf, and if he had explained it would only have embittered her the more.

Being quite convinced now of Jim's perfidy, she denied the possibility of it.

"Jim's square, I'm sure. There couldn't be anything wrong with him. And Mrs. Cheever is an awful prig, everybody says."

Pet whooped with laughter: "They're the worst sort. Why, only a couple of years ago Jim and Charity were up in the Adirondacks alone together.

Prissy Atterbury caught them sneaking back."

So one lie was used to bolster another. The firmest structures can be thus established by locking together things that will not stand alone--as soldiers stack arms. Pet went on stacking lies and Kedzie grew more and more distressed, then infuriated. Her bitterness against Charity grew the more acid. Charity's good repute became now the whitewash on a sepulcher of corruption. Her resentment of the woman's imagined hypocrisy and of her husband's apparent duplicity blazed into an eagerness for vengeance--the cla.s.sic vengeance of punishing a crime by committing another of the sort. Like revenges like; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a loyalty for a loyalty.

CHAPTER XVIII

But now, as often happens in evil as in virtue, Kedzie had the willingness, but not the resolution. She threw her scruples into the waste-basket, accepted Pet's invitation, went with her and her crowd to one of the most reckless dances in Greenwich Village, where men and women strove to outdo the saturnalia of Montmartre, vied with one another in exposure, and costumed themselves as closely according to the fig-leaf era as the grinning policemen dared to permit.

Kedzie screamed with laughter at some of the ribaldry and danced in a jostle of fauns, satyrs, nymphs, and maenads. Yet when her partner clenched her too straitly she could not forget that she was the wife of an absent soldier. And when on the way home he tried to flirt she could not quell the nausea in her soul.

But practice makes perfect and Kedzie was learning to be downright bad, though yet awhile she gave but stingy reward to her a.s.siduous cavaliers.

She was what Pet called a _demi-veuve_ and unprofitable to the men she used as weapons of her revenge against her innocent and unwitting husband.

There was another factor working toward her debas.e.m.e.nt and that was the emanc.i.p.ation of her pocket-book. It was a fairy's purse now and she could not scatter her money faster than she found it renewed.

Her entertainments grew more lavish and more reckless. She had an inspiration at last. She would put Jim's yacht into commission and take a party of friends on a cruise, well chaperoned, of course.

She sent instructions to the master of the vessel to get steam up.

Knudsen sent back word that he would have to have an order from the boss. She promised to have him discharged and in her anger fired a telegram off to Jim, demanding that he rebuke the surly skipper and order the boat out.

The telegram found Jim in a state of doldrums. The food had turned against him, homesickness was like a fever in him, and the monotony of his routine had begun to get his nerves. He was startled and enraged at Kedzie's request for permission to go yachting and he fired back a telegram:

Knudsen was right I am astonished at your suggestion do not approve in the slightest.

He regretted his anger when it was too late. Kedzie, who had already made up her list of guests and received their hilarious acceptances, was compelled to withdraw the invitations. She would have bought a yacht of her own, but she could not afford it! She was not allowed so large a fund. She, Mrs. Dyckman, wanted something and could not afford it! What was the use of anything, anyhow?

Times had changed for Kedzie indeed when the little beggar from the candy-store who had cried once when Skip Magruder, the bakery waiter, refused to take her to the movies twice in one Sunday, was crying now because her miser of a husband forbade her a turbine yacht as a plaything.

She was crushed with chagrin and she felt completely absolved of the last obligation. What kind of a brute had she married who would go away on a military picnic among his nice, warm cacti and deny his poor deserted wife a little boat-ride and a breath of fresh air?

If she had had any lingering inclination to visit Jim in Texas she gave it up now. She went to Newport instead and took Pet Bettany along for a companion--at Kedzie's expense, of course.

Charity Coe Cheever was visiting Mrs. Noxon again and Kedzie snubbed her haughtily when she met her at the Casino or on Bailey's Beach. Kedzie was admitted to that sacred surf of the Spouting Rock a.s.sociation now and she was as pretty a naiad as there was.

But now she encountered occasional rebuffs from certain people, not only because she was common, but because she was reputed to be fast. When the gossip-peddlers brought her this fierce verdict she was hardened enough to scorn the respectables as frumps. She grew a little more impudent than ever and her pout began to take the form of a sneer.

She lingered in and about Newport till the autumn came. Occasional excursions on other people's yachts or in her own cars or to house-parties broke the season, but she loved Newport. Jim's name had given her entry to places and sets whence n.o.body quite had the courage or the authority to dismiss her.

At Newport there was a very handsome fool named Jake Vanderveer, distantly related to the charming Van-der Veers as well as the Van der Veers. He was even more distantly related to his own wife at the time Kedzie met him.

Pet Bettany had told Kedzie what a rotter Mrs. Jake was, and Kedzie felt awfully sorry for Jakie. So did Jakie. He was soph.o.m.oric enough to talk about his broken heart and she was soph.o.m.oric enough to suffer for him most enjoyably.

A little sympathy is a dangerous thing. Married people run a great risk unless they keep theirs strictly mutual and for home consumption.

Jakie said he believed in running away from his grief. Kedzie ran with him for company. People's tongues ran just as fast. Jakie was making a lot of money in Wall Street and trying to drown his sorrows there.

Kedzie was thrilled by his jargon of the market and he taught her how to read the confetti streamers that pour out of the ticker. Jakie confided to her a great scheme.

"The only way I can keep that wife of mine from spending all my money is to spend it first."

"You're a genius!" Kedzie said. A woman usually approves almost any scheme for keeping money away from another woman.

"I'm going to make a killing next week," said Jakie, "and I'm going just quietly to put a couple of thou. up for my little pal Kedzie. You can't lose. If you win you can buy yourself five thousand dollars' worth of popcorn."

Kedzie was enraptured. She would have some money at last that she didn't have to drag out of her husband. She prayed the Lord for a rising market.

Then Mrs. Dyckman sent for her. When Kedzie called the servants were extremely solemn. Kedzie had to wait till the doctor left. He was very solemn, too.

Kedzie found her mother-in-law in bed. She looked like a small mountain after a snow-storm. It was strange to Kedzie to find one so mighty brought low and speaking in so tiny a voice. Her husband was there and he was haggard with sympathy and alarm, a very elephant in terror. He was less courteous than usual to Kedzie and he left the room at his wife's signal. Mrs. Dyckman was more gentle than ever.

"Draw your chair up close, my child," she whispered. "I want to have a little talk with you and my voice is weak."

Kedzie was alarmed enough to revert to a simple phrase; "I'm awfully sorry you're sick. Are you very sick?"

"Very. There's such a lot of me, you know. It's disgusting. I've scared my poor husband to death. I'm glad Jim isn't here to be worried. I hope I'll not have to send for him. But I'd like to."

Kedzie felt a little quiver of alarm. She did not quite want Jim to come back just yet. She had grown used to his absence. His return would deprive poor Jakie of solace.

Mrs. Dyckman took Kedzie's hand and stared at her sadly.

"You're looking a little tired, my dear, if you'll forgive me for being frank. I'm very old and I very much want you and Jim to win out. Lying here I take things too anxiously, I suppose, but--I'm frightened. I don't want my boy and you to go the way so many other couples do. He's left you because his country needed him, or thought it did. It wouldn't look well to have him come back and find that in his absence you had forgotten him. Now, would it?"

"Why, Mrs. Dyckman!" Kedzie gasped, getting her hand away.

Mrs. Dyckman groped for it and took it back. "Don't be vexed. Or if you must be, pout as you used to. You mustn't grow hard, my child. Your type of beauty doesn't improve with cynicism. You must think sweet thoughts or simply be petulant when you're angry. Don't grow hard! If nothing else will move you let me appeal to your pride. You are traveling with a hard crowd, a cruel pack, Miss Bettany's pack, and a silly lot of men like Jake Vanderveer. And you mustn't, my child. You just mustn't get hard and brazen. Couldn't you give up Miss Bettany? She's an absolutely unprincipled creature. She's bad, and you must know it. Don't you?"

Kedzie could not answer, or would not. Mrs. Dyckman's voice grew poignant.

"I've lived so long and seen so much unhappiness. There is so much tragedy across the water. My poor daughter has had a cable that her husband's brother has been killed in France. Her husband has been wounded; she is sailing back. So many men, so many, many men are dying.

The machine-guns go like scythes all day long, and the poor fellows lie out there in the shrapnel rain--Oh, it is unbelievable. And Europe's women are undergoing such endless sorrow; every day over there the lists contain so many names. So many of Cicely's friends have perished. Life never was so full of sorrow, my dear, but it is such a n.o.ble sorrow that it seems as if n.o.body, had any right to any other kind of sorrow.

"You are young, dear child. You are lonely and restless; but you don't realize how loathsome it is to other people to see such recklessness going on over here while such lofty souls are going to death in droves over there. The sorrow you will bring on yourself and all of us, and on poor Jim, will be such a hateful sorrow, my dear, such an unworthy grief!"