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She could tell from Kedzie's very pose that she was as welcome as a submarine. Kedzie said, "Awfully decent of you to come," and gave her a handful of cold, limp fingers. Charity politely pretended that she had called unexpectedly and that she was in dire need of Kedzie's aid.
"Jimsy" Jim admitted, shamefacedly. "Jimsy is right nice," said Mrs. Thropp, and she Jimsied him thenceforward, to his acute distress. He found that he had married not Kedzie only but all the Thropps there were. The father and mother were the mere foreground of a vast backward and abyss of relations, beginning with a number of Kedzie's brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands.
Kedzie's wrath at Charity justified to Kedzie any cruelty, especially as Kedzie was all harrowed up by the fear of losing the Marquess of Strathdene. And Kedzie loved Strathdene as much as she could ever love anybody. For one thing Strathdene was fiercely jealous of her and the poor child had been simply famished for a little jealousy. Her first husband had hardly known what the word meant.
His long arms went out swiftly toward the twain of his assailants. His big hands cupped their heads as if they were melons, and he knocked their skulls together smartly. He might have battered them to death, but he heard Kedzie's little cry of horror, and forbore. He flung the heads from him, and the bodies followed limply. Connery went to the floor, and Gilfoyle sprawled across a chair.
She felt gagged with the silence imposed upon her by the code in the very face of Kedzie's disloyalty, a disloyalty so loathsome that seeing was hardly believing. It seemed inconceivable that a man or woman pledged in holy matrimony could ever be tempted to an alien embrace. And yet she knew dozens of people who made a sport of infidelity.
Young men also know the timidities that are considered maidenly. He did not dream of Kedzie's reason for postponing always the matter of a wedding date. Kedzie had come to depend on Jim for her entertainment. He took care of her evenings, gave them vivacity and opulence. He took her to theaters, to the opera, the music-halls, the midnight roofs, and other resorts for the postponement of sleep.
Her own was merely a defense of her dignity and her rights against the peculiarly impossible people who infested the studio. That was Kedzie's own phrase, for she had not lived with a poet long before she began to experiment with large words. She practised before a mirror any phrases she particularly liked.
Adna was as comfortable as a cow in a hammock, and she would have sent him away, but his hat was in the hall and she dared not go for it. Besides, she wanted to wait long enough to learn the outcome of Kedzie's adventure with Dyckman. As soon as he was alone with Kedzie, Jim had taken her into his arms.
Connery inserted the key stealthily into the lock, turned it, opened the door in silence, and let Gilfoyle slip through. He followed and closed the door without shock. They heard Kedzie's murmurous tones and the rumble of Dyckman's answer. Then Gilfoyle strode forward. He saw Kedzie coiled on the floor with her elbows on Dyckman's knees.
Gilfoyle did not know that the Hyperfilm studio had burned to the ground before he saw Kedzie's picture in Chicago. But he blithely left that city to its fate and sped eastward. Gilfoyle reached New York on the Twentieth Century. It was an hour late, and so the railroad company paid him a dollar. He wished it had been later. In his present plight time was anything but money to him.
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