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Updated: August 29, 2024
She threw him a shrug of contempt. Peter went away laughing. Kedzie waited a few minutes and saw that Mr. Devoe had come to sit with Zada. After a moment the music was resumed, and Zada rose to dance again with Mr. Devoe a curious sort of dance, in which she lifted her feet high and placed them carefully, as if she were walking on a floor covered with eggs and didn't want to break any.
So Peter Cheever and Zada L'Etoile went over into the convenient realm of New Jersey the next morning, secured a license, and on the following day were there made man and wife before all the world. This entitled them to a triumphant return to New York. And now Peter Cheever had also done the honorable thing.
There were cooing tones which the dictagraph repeated with hideous fidelity. Zada asked, "Did he have hard daydie old office-ums?" And he answered, with infatuated imbecility, "Yes, he diddums, but worst was lonelying for his Zadalums." "Did Peterkin miss his Zadalums truly truly?"
He dressed for dinner with unusual care. He was trying to make a hit with his wife. In going through his pocket-book he came across two theater tickets. He had promised to take Zada. He felt like a low hound, both for planning to take her and for not taking her. She would have a dismal evening. And she was capable of such ferocious lonelinesses. He had driven away all her old friends.
When she came to, she was lying on a couch with a cushion under her heels, and Cheever was chafing her wrists and kissing her hand. She drew it away feebly and said: "Thank you. I'll be all right. Just leave me alone." He remembered that Zada had said much the same thing. He was glad to leave the room.
The mute, inglorious Boswell took him up at the front steps, heeled him to his office, out to lunch, back to the office, thence to wherever he went. The name of Zada did not appear in the first report at all, but on the second day she met Cheever at luncheon, and he went shopping with her.
Neff had defended Charity from the slanderous assumptions of Prissy Atterbury and had refused to listen to Pet Bettany's echoes. She had, indeed, a bad reputation for rebuking well-meaning disseminators of spice. This attitude discouraged several persons who would otherwise have told her all sorts of interesting things about Charity's husband's entente cordiale with Zada.
The gossip did not die in his absence. It oozed along like a dark stream of fly-gathering molasses. Eventually it came to the notice of a woman who was Zada's dearest friend and hated her devotedly. She told it to Zada as a taunt, to show her that Zada's Mr. Cheever was as much deceived as deceiving. Zada, of course, was horribly delighted.
Peter Cheever was as handsome as a man dares to be, awake or asleep; he had vast quantities of money, and he was generous with it. But Zada L'Etoile was not happy. She dwelt in an apartment that would have overwhelmed Kedzie by the depth of its velvets and the height of its colors. Yet Zada was crying this very morning crying like mad because while she had Cheever she had no marriage license.
"Is it because of his wife?" "Leave her out of it." There was the old phrase again. Cheever kept hurling it at her whenever she referred to the third corner of the triangle. Zada remembered when Cheever had threatened to kill Dyckman if he found him. Now he would be unarmed. He was not so big a man as Dyckman.
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