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Updated: September 29, 2025
It seemed to him the most loyal thing he could do at the moment. It would have been unpardonably unkind to Charity to let himself be spattered all over his office and the newspapers by a well-known like Zada. Once "home" with Zada, he took the pistol away from her. But she laughed and said: "I can always buy another one, deary." Thus Zada re-established her rights. Cheever was very sorry.
Charity studied him across the table and wondered what he really was, faun or traitor, Mormon or weakling. He was certainly handsome, but the influence of Zada L'Etoile seemed to hang about him like a green slime on a statue. She could not find any small talk to carry the meal along. At length Cheever asked: "What you been up to all day?" "Oh, committee stuff that movie thing, you know."
It was enforced on Charity that it was she and not Zada who had been the inspirer and the victim of Cheever's flitting appetite. It was Zada and not she who had won him to the calm, the dignity, the sincerity, the purity that make marriage marriage. It was a hard lesson for Charity, and she did not know what she ought to do with her costly knowledge. She could only listen.
But he had lost the safety valve of the scream. He smothered. When Zada began to peel off her rings and thrust them out to him he swiftly turned on his heel and fled. He never knew whether Zada woke the block with her howls or not when he left her forever. He forgot to ask when he came back. First he went home to take his temper to Charity.
That vile creature had planned it and that worm of a husband had consented to it! The most unforgivable thing of all, of course, was the clothes of it. Charity, in the course of time, forgave nearly everybody everything, but she never forgave her husband that. On the way home she had nothing to say. Neither had Cheever. He felt homesick for Zada. Charity felt homeless.
Mothers, daughters, wives, mistresses, they have been seldom heard and have been forced to wait remote in anguish till their man has come back or been brought back, victorious or baffled or defeated, maimed, wounded, or dead. It meant everything to Zada that her mate should not suffer either death or publicity. But chiefly her love of him made outcry now.
She did not hear Hudspeth growling to the stenographer as he strolled over and leaned on her chair unnecessarily there were other chairs to lean on, and she was not deaf: "Rotten business! He ought to be ashamed of himself. A nice wife like that!" The stenographer sat forward and snapped, "You got a nice wife yourself." She was a little jealous of Zada, perhaps or of Mrs. Cheever or of both.
Charity, left alone at the three-forked road of divorce, complacency, or separation, sank down and waited in dull misery for help or solution, as do most of the poor wayfarers who come upon such a break in their path of matrimony. She imagined Cheever with Zada and wondered what peculiar incantations Zada used to hold him so long.
Now that she looked at him again, Kedzie thought what an extraordinarily handsome, gloriously wicked-looking, swell-looking man he was. Yet the girl who had danced called him Peterkin which didn't sound very swell to Kedzie. He had very little to say to Zada, who did most of the talking. He smiled at her now and then behind his cigar and gave her a queer look that Kedzie only vaguely understood.
But he was repeating to Zada the very phrases of his honeymoon, repeating them with all the fervor of a good actor playing Romeo for the hundredth time with his new leading lady. Indeed, he seemed to find in Zada a response and a unity that he had never found in Charity's society. Her intelligence was cruelly goaded to the realization that she had never been quite the woman for Cheever.
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