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Kedzie showed her some trade photographs of herself as an Athenienne, and Miss Silsby pondered. Although her dances were supposed to purify and sweeten the soul, one of her darlings had so fiendish a temper that she had torn out several Psyche knots. She was the demurest of all in seeming when she danced, but she was uncontrollably jealous. Miss Silsby saw that Kedzie's pout had commercial value.
She was sick, too, and blamed Kedzie for the scene. She spurned the girl with her foot and said: "You get right up off that floor this minute. Do you hear?" Kedzie's soul came back. It had made its decision. It gathered her body together and lifted it up to its knees and then erect, while the lips said, "All right, momma."
He had been one-twelfth of her knightly champions, but she cut him dead as an impertinent stranger when he tried to speak to her. She cut Skip Magruder still deader when he tried to ride home with her. He came to call and showed an inclination to settle down as a member of Kedzie's intimate circle. He had speedily recovered from his first awe at the sight of her splendor.
He called up his house, or, rather, Kedzie's house, in Newport, and after much delay got his yawning valet to the telephone. He never had liked that valet less than now. "That you, Dallam? My car broke down out in the country," he explained, every syllable a sugarless quinine pill in his throat. "That is to say, the gasolene gave out.
Kedzie's lawyer, however, felt it good tactics to assume now the pose of benevolent patience with an erring one. Seeing that Charity was in danger of stirring the hearts of the jurors by her suffering, he forestalled their sympathy and murmured: "I will wait till Mrs. Cheever has regained control of herself." Instantly Charity's pride quickened in her. She wanted none of that beast's pity.
Adna sickened soon of his task, and Kedzie's silence and non-resistance robbed him of excuse. He growled: "I guess that'll learn you who's boss round here." He thrust her from his knees, and she rolled off to the floor and lay still. She had not really swooned, but her soul had felt the need of withdrawing into itself to ponder this awful sacrilege. Her mother knew that she had not fainted.
She thought little of him, though, because the next dance began, and she had a whole riot of costumes to study. There was a constant movement of new-comers past Kedzie's nook. Sometimes people halted to look the crowd over before they went up the steps, and asked two handsome gentlemen in full-dress suits if they could have a table.
She pouted because when she got what she wanted she no longer wanted it. There are hearts like cold storage. They keep what they get fresh and cool; and there are hearts that spoil whatever is intrusted to them. In Kedzie's hot young soul, things spoiled soon. She was hungry, and she could not resist the impulse to enter a cheap restaurant. She did not know how cheap it was.
Kedzie's first thought was of Peter Cheever's new wife, who had been taken up by a certain set of those whom one may call loose-principled or divinely tolerant, as one's own prejudices direct. Kedzie could not yet afford to be so forgiving. She flared up. "Mrs. Cheever! That Zada thing going to call on me? How dare she!" "Of course not." "Oh, the other one, then?" "Yes." "The abandoned one?"
She did not even know the names of the successful, therefore mercenary, writers and illustrators, much less the names of the unsuccessful, therefore artistic and sincere. To Kedzie's delight, Gilfoyle took himself off at the end of a perfect day of misery. He left her alone with her ambitions. She was in very grand company.
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