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Updated: August 29, 2024
When he saw her lord and master, Peter Cheever, with Zada, Dyckman was enraged. Cheever owned Charity Coe; he could flatter her with a smile, beckon her with a gesture, caress her at will, or leave her in safe deposit, while he spent his precious hours with a public servant! Dyckman could usually afford to do what he wanted to.
If Charity, sitting like a recording angel, invisible but hearing everything, had found in the communion of Zada and Cheever only the fervor of an amour, she could have felt that Cheever was merely a libertine who loved his wife and his home but loved to rove as well.
They had made up and fought and made up again dozens of times and settled down at length to that normal alternation of peace and conflict known as domestic life. With Charity out of the way there was so little interruption to their communion that when she came back Zada forbade Cheever to meet her at the station, and he obeyed.
She waited a long time, haughtily indifferent to the admiration she and her gown were achieving. At last she was punished and rewarded, revenged, and destroyed by the sight of Cheever coming down the aisle with Charity. They had to pause to let a fat couple rise, and they paused, facing Zada.
The inveterate idioms of wooers took on in Charity's ear a grotesque obscenity, a sacrilegious burlesque of words as holy to her as prayer or the sacred dialect of priests. When Zada murmured, "Kissings! kissings!" Charity screamed: "Stop it, you beasts! You beasts!" Then she clapped her hand over her lips, expecting to hear their panic at her outcry.
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?"
Then Zada said: "Peterkin, it's time you came home." His laugh was hard and sharp. She took out a little weapon. She had managed to evade the Sullivan law against the purchase or possession of weapons. Peter was nauseated. Zada was calm. "Peterkin," she said, "did you read yesterday about that woman who shot a man and then herself?"
But the long arm of the telephone brought him within the reach of Zada L'Etoile. Zada had plans of her own for his evening-dinner, theater, supper, dance till dawn. Peter had answered, gently: "Sorry, but I'm booked." Zada had seemed to come right through the wire at him. "With that wife of yours, of course!"
Peter left his office to escape telephoning Charity, but he could imagine how the message crushed her. He felt as if he had stepped on a hurt bird. When he met Zada he kept trying to be patient and forgiving with her, in spite of her blameworthiness. Zada saw through his sullenness, and for a little moment was proud of her victory. Then she began to suffer, too.
She was tortured by fantastic imaginings of what she might hear. She wondered how a man would talk to such a person as Zada, and how she would answer. She imagined the most dreadful things she could. She stepped out, paid her fare, and turned, to find Mr. Hodshon at her elbow. He had been waiting for her. He recognized her by her melodramatic veil.
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