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Gilfoyle was poet enough to enjoy a little extra doldrums at what might have made a longshoreman peevish. He mopped sweat and fanned himself with a newspaper till he grew frantic. He flung down the paper and rose with a yawn. "Well, this is one helluva honeymoon. I'm going to crawl into the oven and fry." Kedzie sat alone in the dark parlor a long while. She was cold now.
Jim saw that Gilfoyle's departure had been accepted as a Heaven-sent solution of Kedzie's problems. Abruptly it came to Dyckman that the solution of their problem was the beginning of a whole volume of new problems for him. He recalled that while he had become Kedzie's fiance in ignorance of his predecessor, he had rashly promised to buy off Gilfoyle as soon as he learned of him.
Kedzie giggled a good deal, and she leaned softly against the hard shoulder of Gilfoyle while the clerk quizzed him as to his full name, color, residence, age, occupation, birthplace, the name of his father and mother and the country of their birth, and the number of his previous marriages.
He felt as guilty as if she had actually caught him at a rendezvous. Yet he felt pride, too. This luminous being was his wife. He remembered all that she had been to him. Miss Clampett noted his perturbations and made a brilliant guess at their cause. She asked him if he wanted to leave her and go around to the stage door to meet this wonderful Miss Adair. Gilfoyle laughed poorly at her quip.
But now a greedy and impertinent civil government had stepped in and sacrilegiously insisted on having a license bought and paid for before the Church could officiate. And the license bureau was not open all night, as it should have been. Kedzie knew nothing of this, but Gilfoyle was informed. Theoretically he believed that marriage should be rendered impossible and divorce easy.
I must go home. It's later than I thought, and " "And Mrs. Gilfoyle will wonder," Ferriday laughed. "That's right, my dear. You've got to keep good hours if you are going to succeethe on the screen. Early to bed, for you must early-to-rise. Garcon, garcon, l'addition, s'il vous please." While he was paying the bill Kedzie was thinking fleetly of her next problem.
There was no visible horizon to her wealth. Her name was one of the oldest, richest, noblest 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 nobody who knew was going to tell.
Gilfoyle had some difficulty in finding Kedzie's address, but at last he learned it, and he made haste to her apartment. He was impressed by its gaudy vestibule. He told the hall-boy that he wanted to see Miss Adair. "Name, please?" "Just say a gentleman to see her." "Gotta git the name, or I can't 'phome up. Miss Adair naturally won't see no gempman ain't got a name." "Does she see many men?"
Gilfoyle had a touch of writer's cramp, and Kedzie had no desire to see the result of a conflict between two such victims of unpreparedness. She forgot both rivals in the excitement of a sudden incursion of Miss Silsby, who came crying: "Oh, girls, girls, what Do you sup-Pose has Happened? I have been en-Gaged to give my dances at Noxon's old Mrs. Noxon's, in Newport."
A pessimist might have seen a portent in the cynical amusement of her smile, and another in the aweless speed with which Gilfoyle and Kedzie hustled toward the awful mystery of such a union as marriage attempts. The wedlock-factory was busy. In spite of the earliness of the hour the waiting-room was crowded, its benches full.
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