Miss Kedzie Thropp had never seen Fifth Avenue or a yacht or a butler or a glass of champagne or an ocean or a person of social prominence. She wanted to see them. To Jim Dyckman these things were commonplace. What he wanted was simple, complex, cheap, priceless things—love, home, repose, contentment.

He was on the top of the world, and he wanted to get down or have somebody else come up to him. Peaks are by definition and necessity limited to small foothold. Climbing up is hardly more dangerous than climbing down. Even to bend and lift some one else up alongside involves a risk of falling or of being pushed overboard.

But at present Jim Dyckman was thinking of the other girl, Charity Coe Cheever, perched on a peak as cold and high as his own, but far removed from his reach.

Even the double seat in the sleeping-car was too small for Jim. He sprawled from back to back, slumped and hunched in curves and angles that should have looked peasant and yet somehow had the opposite effect.

His shoes were thick-soled but unquestionably expensive, his clothes of loose, rough stuff manifestly fashionable. Like them, he had a kind of burly grace. He had been used to a well-upholstered life.

He was one of those giants that often grow in rich men's homes. His father was such another, and his mother suggested the Statue of Liberty in corsets and on high heels.

Dyckman was reading a weekly journal devoted to horses and dogs, and reading with such interest that he hardly knew when the train stopped.

He did not see the woman who got out of a motor and got into the train, and whose small baggage the porter put in the empty place opposite his. He did not see that she leaned into the aisle and regarded him with a pathetic amusement in her caressing eyes. She took her time about making herself known; then she uttered only a discreet:

“Ahem!”

She put into the cough many subtle implications. Hardly more could be crowded into a shrug.

Dyckman came out of his kennels and paddocks, blinked, stared, gaped. Then he began to stand up by first stepping down. He bestrode the narrow aisle like a Colossus.

He caught her two hands, brought them together, placed them in one of his, and covered them with the other as in a big muff, and bent close to pour into her eyes such ardor that for a moment she closed hers against the flame.

Then, as if in that silent greeting their souls had made a too loud and startling noise of welcome, both of them looked about with an effect of surreptition and alarm.

There were not many people in the car, and they were absorbed in their own books, gossips, or naps. Only a few head-tops showing above the high-backed seats, and no eyes or ears.

“Do you know anybody on the train?” the woman asked.

The man shook his head and sank into the seat opposite her, still clinging to her hands. She extricated them:

“But everybody knows you.”

He dismissed this with a sniff of reproof. Then they settled down in the small trench and seemed to take a childish delight in the peril of their rencounter.

“Lord, but it's good to see you!” he sighed, luxuriously. “And you're stunninger than ever!”

“I'm a sight!” she said.

She was clad even more plainly than he, and had the same spirit of neglectful elegance. She was big, too, for a woman; somewhat lank but well muscled, and decisive in her motions as if she normally abounded in strength. What grace she had was an athlete's, but she looked overtrained or undernourished. Seeing that she did not look well, Dyckman said:

“How well you're looking, Charity.”

She did not look like Charity, either; but her name had been given to her before she was born. There had nearly always been a girl called Charity in the Coe family. They had brought the name with them from New England when they settled in Westchester County some two hundred years before. They had kept little of their Puritanism except a few of the names.

This sportswoman called Charity had been trying to live up to her name, of late. That was why she was haggard. She smiled at her friend's unmerited praise.

“Thanks, Jim. I need a compliment like the devil.”

“Where've you been since you got back?”

“Up in the camp, trying to get a little rest and exercise. But it's too lonesome nights. I rest better when I keep on the jump.”

“You're in black; that doesn't mean—?”

She shook her head. A light of eagerness in his eyes was quenched, and he growled:

“Too bad!” He could afford to say it, since the object of his obloquy was alive. If the person mentioned had not been alive, the phrase he used would have been the same more gently intoned.

Charity protested: “Shame on you! I know you mean it for flattery, but you mustn't, you really mustn't. I'm in black for—for Europe.” She laughed pitifully at the conceit.

He answered, with admiring awe: “I've heard about you. You're a wonder; that's what you are, Charity Coe, a wonder. Here's a big hulk like me loafing around trying to kill time, and a little tike like you over there in France spending a fortune of money and more strength than even you've got in a slaughter-house of a war hospital. How did you stand it?”

“It wasn't much fun,” she sighed, “but the nurses can't feel sorry for themselves when they see—what they see.”

“I can imagine,” he said.

But he could not have imagined her as she daily had been. She and the other princesses of blood royal or bourgeois had been moiling among the red human dÉbris of war, the living garbage of battle, as the wagons and trains emptied it into the receiving stations.

She and they had stood till they slept standing. They had done harder, filthier jobs than the women who worked in machine-shops and in furrows, while the male-kind fought. She had gone about bedabbled in blood, her hair drenched with it. Her delicate hands had performed tasks that would have been obscene if they had not been sublime in a realm of suffering where nothing was obscene except the cause of it all.

She sickened at it more in retrospect than in action, and tried to shake it from her mind by a change of subject.

“And what have you been up to, Jim?”

“Ah, nothing but the same old useless loafing. Been up in the North Woods for some hunting and fishing,” he snarled. His voice always grew contemptuous when he spoke of himself, but idolatrous when he spoke of her—as now when he asked: “I heard you had gone back abroad. But you're not going, are you?”

“Yes, as soon as I get my nerves a little steadier.”

“I won't let you go back!” He checked himself. He had no right to dictate to her. He amended to: “You mustn't. It's dangerous crossing, with all those submarines and floating mines. You've done your bit and more.”

“But there's so horribly much to do.”

“You've done enough. How many children have you got now?”

“About a hundred.”

“Holy mother!” he whispered, with a profane piety. “Can even you afford as big a family as that?”

“Well, I've had to call for some help.”

“Let me chip in? Will you?”

“Sure I will. Go as far as you like.”

“All right; it's a bet. Name the sum, and I'll mail it to you.”

“You'd better not mail me anything, Jim” she said.

He blenched and mumbled: “Oh, all right! I'll write you a check now.”

“Later,” she said. “I don't like to talk much about such things, please.”

“Promise me you won't go back.”

She simply waived the theme: “Let's talk of something pleasant, if you don't mind.”

“Something pleasant, eh? Then I can't ask about—him, I suppose.”

“Of course. Why not?”

“How is the hound?—begging the pardon of all honest hounds.”

She was too sure of her own feelings toward her husband to feel it necessary to rush to his defense—against a former rival. Her answer was, “He's well enough to raise a handsome row if he saw you and me together.”

He grumbled a full double-barreled oath and did not apologize for it. She spoke coldly:

“You'd better go back to your seat.”

She was as severe as a woman can well be with a man who adores her and writhes with jealousy of a man she adores.

“I'll be good, Teacher,” he said. “Was he over there with you?”

She evidently liked to talk about her husband. She brightened as she spoke. “Yes, for a while. He drove a motor-ambulance, you know, but it bored him after a month or two. They wouldn't let him up to the firing-lines, so he quit. Have you seen him?”

“Once or twice.”

“He's looking well, isn't he?”

“Yes, confound him! His handsome features have been my ruin.”

She could smile at that inverted compliment. But Dyckman began to think very hard. He was suddenly confronted with one of the conundrums in duty which life incessantly propounds—life that squats at all the crossroads with a sphinxic riddle for every wayfarer.