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She might have withstood as much as twenty thousand a year for the sake of home and religion. But to resist a million dollars and all that went with it was impossible. To resist a score of millions was twenty times impossibler. She made up her mind that Dyckman should not escape from this temporary alliance with the Thropps without paying at least a handsome initiation-fee.
Adna dared neither to go nor to stay. Suddenly a chauffeur of an empty limousine, fearing to lose a chance to swear at a taxi-driver, kept his head turned to the left and steered straight for the spot where the Thropps awaited their doom. Adna had his wife pendent from one arm and a valise or two from the other. Kedzie carried a third valise.
Dyckman had a chilling intuition that Cheever was lying in ambush for him. Again he was wrung with the impulse to tell Charity Coe the truth about her husband. Again some dubious decency withheld him. The word "breakfast" was magic stimulant to the Thropps. Kedzie put on her clothes, and the family went down to the elevator together.
Then his chuckle returned as he went his way, telling himself: "And the bes' of it was, I fit for him! I just had to git that man." He told the little porter about it, and when the little porter, who had been scared away from the Thropps and left to carry Charity Coe's dainty hand-bags, showed the big porter what he had received, still the big porter laughed. He knew how to live, that big porter.
Yet he had heard her spoken of as a human glacier for freezing social climbers and pushers of every sort. She was huge and slow; she could be frightfully cold and crushing. Now he understood what congelation the trembling approachers to her majesty must have suffered. He was afraid to think what she would do to the Thropps.
She shrieked and jumped; and she kissed and hugged every member of the household, including the dogs and the cats. She must go down-town and torment her girl friends with her superiority and she could hardly live through the hours that intervened before the train started. The Thropps rode all day in the day-coach to Chicago, and Kedzie loved every cinder that flew into her gorgeous eyes.
Thropp's proper waiter hoped that he would be as extravagant with his tip as he was with his order. He feared not. His waiterly intuition told him the old man put in with more enthusiasm than he paid out. At last the meal was over. The Thropps were groaning. They had not quite absorbed the feast, but they had wrecked it utterly. Mr. Thropp found only one omission in the perfect service.
Charity might have been capable even of such a derring-do if she had known that Jim Dyckman's bachelorhood was threatened with immediate extinction by the Thropps. But she could not know. For, however Jim's soul may have been mumbling, "Help, help!" he made no audible sound. Unwilling brides may shriek for rescue, but unwilling bridegrooms must not complain.
Turn a parable upside down, and nearly everything falls out of it. Even the beautiful legend of the prodigal son returning home to his parents could not retain its value when it was topsy-turvied by the Thropps. Their son was a daughter, but she had run away from them to batten on the husks of city life, and had prospered exceedingly.
If she had have, she wouldn't have brought the girl along, to say nothing of her photograph. The amiable walrus in the cap and brass buttons recommended the Thropps to a boarding-house whose prices were commensurate with Adna's ideas and means, and he and his wife went thither, where they told a shabby and sentimental landlady all their troubles.
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