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What is poetry, anyway, but the skilful advertisement of emotions? She might at least have made of Gilfoyle that all-important element of the Republic, a respectable, amiable, ordinary man, perhaps the father of children who would be of value, even of glory, to the world. There was romance enough in their wedding.
She perched herself on his lap and asked him what was worrying him. "Nothing much, honey," he groaned, "except that I've lost my job." Kedzie was thunderstruck. She breathed the expletive she learned from her latest companions. "My Gawd!" Gilfoyle nodded dreadfully: "Business has been bad, anyway. Kalteyer, with his chewing-gum, was about our only big customer, and now he's gone bust. Yep.
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 assumed 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.
He was denied her presence and was as miserable as any waif in a poor farm attic. Money seemed to make no visible difference in his despair. If he thought of Kedzie at all, he dismissed her as a trifling memory. He wanted Charity, who did not want him. Charity had Cheever, who did not want her. Kedzie had Gilfoyle, and did not want him.
"And you a socialist and telling me you didn't believe in marriages!" "I don't," said Gilfoyle, with lovely sublimity above petty consistencies, "except with you, Anita. I don't believe in anything exclusive for anybody except you for me and me for you. We've just got to be each other's own, haven't we?"
Miss Havender accepted the inevitable, gave her the address of the studio far up-town in the Bronx and told her to report at eight the next morning. Kedzie went back to her home in a new mood. She was the breadwinner now, if not a cake-earner. Gilfoyle was depressed by her good news, and she was indignant because he was not happy.
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.
He caught her arms and held them apart where she could scratch nothing more than his wrists, which she did venomously. The cat tribe is a bad tribe to fight at close quarters. One must kill or break loose. When Kedzie tried to bite him, Gilfoyle realized that she was in no mood for argument. He dragged her to the living-room door and then flung her as far as he could from him.
With Kedzie's fame he was having a very sudden and phenomenal triumph if anything could be called phenomenal in a field which itself was phenomenal always. Ferriday did not know, of course, that Kedzie was married. She hardly knew it herself now. Gilfoyle had been three weeks late in sending her the thirty dollars' fare to Chicago.
Thomas Gilfoyle. Her soul cried out: "This is my honeymoon! I am married, married forever to that tousle-headed, bristle-jawed, brainless, heartless dub. I won't stand for it. I won't! I won't!" She wanted to outscream the parrot. Its inarticulate, horrible cachinnations voiced her humor uncannily.
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