The ninety days following Charity's encounter with Jim Dyckman and his bride at Sherry's had been busy times for her and epochal in their changes. From being one of the loneliest and most approved women in America she had become one of the loneliest and least approved. Altruism is perhaps the most expensive of the virtues.

No less epochal were those months for the Dyckmans, bride and groom. Their problems began to bourgeon immediately after they left New Jersey and went to Kedzie's old apartment for further debate as to their future lodgings.

Mr. and Mrs. Thropp were amazed by their sudden return. Adna was a trifle sheepish. They found him sitting in the parlor in his shirt-sleeves and stocking feet, and staring out of the window at the neighbors opposite. In Nimrim it was a luxury to be able to spy into the windows of one neighbor at a time. Opposite Adna there were a hundred and fifty neighbors whom it cost nothing to watch. Some of them were very startling; some of them were stupid old ladies who rocked, or children who flattened their noses against the windows, or Pekingese doglets who were born with their noses against a pane, apparently. But some of the neighbors were fascinatingly careless of inspection—and they always promised to be more careless than they were.

Mrs. Thropp came rushing in from the kitchen. She had been trying in vain to make a friend of Kedzie's one servant. But this maid, like a self-respectful employee or a good soldier, resented the familiarity of an official superior as an indecency and an insult. She made up her mind to quit.

After Mrs. Thropp had expressed her wonderment at seeing her children return, she turned the full power of her hospitality on poor Jim Dyckman. He could not give notice and seek another job.

Mrs. Thropp's first problem was the proper style and title of her son-in-law.

“What am I goin' to call you, anyhow?” she said. “Jim sounds kind of familiar on short acquaintance, and James is sort of distant. Son-in-law is hor'ble, and Son is—How would you like it if I was to call you 'Son'? What does your own mother call you?”

“Jimsy” Jim admitted, shamefacedly.

“Jimsy is right nice,” said Mrs. Thropp, and she Jimsied him thenceforward, to his acute distress. He found that he had married not Kedzie only but all the Thropps there were. The father and mother were the mere foreground of a vast backward and abyss of relations, beginning with a number of Kedzie's brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands. Jim was a trifle stunned to learn what lowly jobs some of his brothers-in-law were glad to hold.

Mrs. Thropp felt that it was only right to tell Jim as much as she could about his new family. She told him for hours and hours. She described people he had never seen or heard of and would travel many a mile to avoid. He had never cared for genealogy, and his own long and brilliant ancestry did not interest him in the slightest. He had hundreds of relations of all degrees of fame and fortune, and he felt under no further obligation to them than to let alone and be let alone.

His interest in his new horde of relations-in-law was vastly less than nothing. But Mrs. Thropp gave him their names, their ages, habits, diseases, vices, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies. She recounted doings and sayings of infinite unimportance and uninterest.

With the fatuous, blindfolded enthusiasm of an after-dinner speaker who rambles on and on and on while the victims yawn, groan, or fold their napkins and silently steal away, Mrs. Thropp poured out her lethal anecdotes.

Jim went from weariness to restiveness, to amazement, to wrath, to panic, to catalepsy, before Kedzie realized that he was being suffocated by these reminiscences. Then she intervened.

Mrs. Thropp's final cadence was a ghastly thought:

“Well, now, I've told you s'much about all our folks, you must tell me all about yours.”

“The Lord forbid!” said Jim.

Mrs. Thropp took this to mean that he did not dare confess the scandals of his people. She knew, of course, from reading, that rich people are very wicked, but she did want to know some of the details.

Jim refused to make disclosures. He was wakened from his coma by Mrs. Thropp's casual remark:

“Say, Jimsy, how do folks do, on East here? Will your mother call on me and Kedzie, or will she look for us to call on her first?”

“My God!” thought Jim.

“What say?” said Mrs. Thropp.

Jim floundered and threshed. He had never before realized what his mother's famous pride might mean. She had always been only mother to him, devoted, tender, patient, forgiving, amusing, sympathetic, anxious, flattered by his least attention. 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. Her first glance would turn them to icicles and her first word would snap them to bits.

It is hard enough for any mother to receive the news that her son is in love with any woman and wants to marry her. Mrs. Dyckman must learn that her adored child had transferred his loyalty to a foreigner, a girl she had never seen, could not conceivably have selected, and could never approve. Even the Prodigal Son, when he went home, did not bring a wife with him. Ten to one if he had brought one she would have got no veal—or if she got it she would not have cared for it.

Jim could not be blind even now in his alarm to Kedzie's intense prettiness, but seeing her as through his mother's eyes coldly, he saw for the first time the plebeiance of her grace.

If she had been strong and rugged her commonness would have had a certain vigor; but to be nearly refined without being quite refined is as harrowing as singing just a little off the key. To be far off the key is to be in another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is excruciation. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high C and miss it by a comma.

Yet Jim understood that he could not long prevent the encounter of his wife and her relatives with his mother and her relatives. He could not be so boorishly insolent as to forbid the meeting, and he could not be so blind as to expect success. He got away at length on the pretext of making arrangements with his mother, who was a very busy woman, he said. Mrs. Thropp could not imagine why a rich woman should be busy, but she held her whist.

Jim was glad to escape, even on so gruesome an errand, and now when he kissed Kedzie good-by he had to kiss momma as well. He would almost rather have kissed poppa.

He entered his home in the late afternoon with the reluctance of boyhood days when he had slunk back after some misdemeanor. He loathed his mission and himself and felt that he had earned a trouncing and a disinheritance.

He found his mother and father in the library playing, or rather fighting, a game of double Canfield. In the excitement of the finish they were like frantic children, tied in knots of hurry, squealing with emulation. The cards were coming out right, and the speedier of the two to play the last would score two hundred and fifty to the other's nothing.

Mrs. Dyckman was the more agile in snatching up her cards and placing them. Her eyes darted along the stacks with certainty, and she came in first by a lead of three cards.

Dyckman was puffing with exhaustion and pop-eyed from the effort to look in seven directions at once. It rendered him scarlet to be outrun by his wife, who was no Atalanta to look at. Besides, she always crowed over him insufferably when she won, and that was worse than the winning. When Jim entered the room she was laughing uproariously, pointing the finger of derision at her husband and crying:

“Where did you get a reputation as a man of brains? There must be an awful crowd of simpletons in Wall Street.” Then she caught sight of her son and beckoned to him. “Come in and hold your father's head, Jimsy.”

“Please don't call me Jimsy!” Jim exploded, prematurely.

His mother did not hear him, because his father exploded at the same moment:

“Come in and teach your mother how to be a sport. She won't play fair. She cheats all the time and has no shame when she gets caught. When she loses she won't pay, and when she wins she wants cash on the nail.”

“Of course I do!”

“Why, there isn't a club in the country that wouldn't expel you twice a week.”

“Well, pay me what you owe me, before you die of apoplexy.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Eight dollars and thirty-two cents.”

“I do not! That's robbery. Look here: you omitted my score twice and added your own up wrong.”

“Did I really?”

“Do five and two make nine?”

“Don't they?”

“They do not!”

“Well, must you have hydrophobia about it? What difference does it make?”

“It makes the difference that I only owe you three dollars and twenty-six cents.”

“All right, pay it and simmer down. Isn't he wonderful, Jimsy? He just sent a check for ten thousand dollars to the fund for blind French soldiers and then begrudges his poor wife five dollars.”

“But that's charity and this is cards; and it's humiliating to think that you haven't learned addition yet.”

Mrs. Dyckman winked at Jim and motioned him to sit beside her. He could not help thinking of the humiliating addition he was about to announce to the family. While his father counted out the change with a miserly accuracy he winked his off eye at Jim and growled, with a one-sided smile:

“Where have you been for the past few days, and what mischief have you been up to? You have a guilty face.”

But Mrs. Dyckman threw her great arm about his great shoulders, stared at him as she kissed him, and murmured: “You don't look happy. What's wrong?”

Jim scraped his feet along the floor gawkily and mumbled: “Well, I suppose I'd better tell you. I was going to break it to you gently, but I don't know how.”

Mrs. Dyckman took alarm at once. “Break it gently? Bad news? Oh, Jim, you Haven't gone and got yourself engaged to some fool girl, have you? Not that?”

“Worse than that, mother!”

“Oh dear! what could be worse? Only one thing, Jim! You haven't—you haven't married a circus-rider or a settlement-worker or anything like that, have you?”

“No.”

“Lord! what a relief! I breathe again.”

Jim fired off his secret without further delay. “I've been married, though.”

“Married? Already? Married to what? Anybody I ever heard of?”

His mother was gasping in a dangerous approach to heart failure. Jim protested.

“You never saw her, but she's a very nice girl. You'll love her when you meet her.”

Jim's father sputtered as he pulled himself out of his chair: “Wha-what's this? You—you damned young cub! You—why—what—who—oh, you jackass! You big, lumbering, brainless, heartless bonehead! Oh—whew! Look at your poor mother!”

Jim was frightened. She was pounding at her huge breast with one hand and clutching her big throat with another. Her husband whirled to a siphon, filled a glass with vichy, and gave it to Jim to hold to her lips while he ran to throw open a window.

Jim knelt by his mother and felt like Cain bringing home the news of the first crime. Her son's remorse was the first thing that Eve felt, no doubt; at least, it was the first that Mrs. Dyckman understood when the paroxysm left her. She felt so sorry for her lad that she could not blame him. She blamed the woman, of course. She cried awhile before she spoke; then she caressed Jim's cheeks and blubbered:

“But we mustn't make too much of a fuss about a little thing like a wedding. It's his first offense of the kind. I suppose he fell into the trap of some little devil with a pretty face. Poor innocent child, with no mother to protect him!”

“Poor innocent scoundrel!” old Dyckman snarled. “He probably got her into trouble, and she played on his sympathy.”

This was what Jim sorely needed, some unjust accusation to spur him out of his shame. He sprang to his feet and confronted his father.

“Don't you dare say a word against my wife.”

“Oh, look at him!” his father smiled. “He's grown so big he can lick his old dad. Well, let me tell you, my young jackanapes, that if anybody has said anything against your wife it was you.”

“What have I said?”

“You've said that you married her secretly. You've not dared to let us see her first. You've not dared to announce your engagement and take her to the church like a gentleman. Why? Why? Answer me that, before you grow so tall. And who is she, anyway? I hear that you had a prize-fight with Peter Cheever and got expelled from the club.”

“When did you hear that?”

“It's all over town. What was the fight about? Was he interested in this lady, too?”

One set of Jim's muscles leaped to the attack; another set held them in restraint.

“Be careful, dad!” he groaned. “Peter Cheever never met my wife.”

“Well, then, what were you fighting him about?”

“That's my business.”

“Well, it's my business, too, when I find the name of my son posted for expulsion on the board of my pet club. You used to be sweet on Cheever's wife. You weren't fighting about her, were you?”

This chance hit jolted the bridegroom so perceptibly that his father regretted having made it. He gasped:

“Great Lord, but you're the busy young man! Solomon in all his glory—”

“Let him alone now,” Mrs. Dyckman broke in, “or you'll have me on your hands.” She needed only her husband's hostility to inflame her in defense of her son. “If he's married, he's married, and words won't divorce him. We might as well make the best of it. I've no doubt the girl is a darling, or Jim wouldn't have cared for her. Would you, Jimsy?”

“Naturally not,” Jim agreed, with a rather sickly enthusiasm.

“Is she nice-looking?”

“She is famous for her beauty.”

“Famous! Oh, Heavens! That sounds ominous. You mean she's well known?”

“Very—in certain circles.”

“In certain circles!” Mrs. Dyckman was like a terrified echo. She had known of such appalling misalliances that there was no telling how far her son might have descended.

Old Dyckman snarled, “Do you mean that you've gone slumming for a wife?”

Jim dared not answer this. His mother ignored it, too. But her thoughts were in a panic.

“What circles is she famous in, your wife, for her beauty?”

Jim could not achieve the awful word “movies” at the moment. He prowled round it.

“In professional circles.”

“Oh, an actress, then?”

“Well, sort of.”

“They call everything an actress nowadays. She isn't a—a chorus-girl or a show-girl?”

“Lord, no!” His indignation was reassuring to a degree.

His father broke in again, “It might save a few hours of dodging and cross-examination if you'd tell us who and what she is.”

“She is known professionally as Anita Adair.”

So parochial a thing is fame that the title which millions of people had learned to know and love meant absolutely nothing to the Dyckmans. They were so ignorant of the new arts that even Mary Pickford meant hardly more to them than Picasso or Matisse.

Jim brought out a photograph of Kedzie, a small one that he carried in his pocket-book for company. The problem of what she looked like distracted attention for the moment from the problem of what she did and was.

Mrs. Dyckman took the picture and perused it anxiously. Her husband leaned over her shoulder and studied it, too. He was mollified and won by the big, gentle eyes and that bee-stung upper lip. He grumbled:

“Well, you're a good chooser for looks, anyway. Sweet little thing.”

Mrs. Dyckman examined the face more knowingly. She saw in those big, innocent eyes a serene selfishness and a kind of sweet ruthlessness. In the pouting lips she saw discontent and a gift for wheedling. But all she said was, “She's a darling.”

Jim caught the knell-tone in her praise and feared that Kedzie was dead to her already. He saw more elegy in her sigh of resignation to fate and her resolution to take up her cross—the mother's cross of a pretty, selfish daughter-in-law.

“You haven't told us yet how she won her—fame, you said.”

And now Jim had to tell it.

“She has had great success in the—the—er—pictures.”

“She's a painter—an illustrator?”

“No, she—well—you know, the moving pictures have become very important; they're the fifth largest industry in the world, I believe, and—”

The silence of the parents was deafening. Their eyes rolled together and clashed, as it were, like cannon-balls meeting. Dyckman senior dropped back into his chair and whistled “Whew!” Then he laughed a little:

“Well, I'm sure we should be proud of our alliance with the fifth largest industry. The Dyckmans are coming up in the world.”

“Hush!” said Mrs. Dyckman. She was thinking of the laugh that rival mothers would have on her. She was thinking of the bitterness of her other children, of her daughter who was a duchess in England, and of the squirming of her relatives-in-law. But she was too fond of her boy to mention her dreads. She passed on to the next topic.

“Where are you living?”

“Nowhere yet,” Jim confessed. “We just got in from our—er—honeymoon this morning. We haven't decided what to do.”

Then Mrs. Dyckman took one of those heroic steps she was capable of.

“You'd better bring her here.”

“Oh no; she'd be in your way. She'd put you out.”

“I hope not, not so soon,” Mrs. Dyckman laughed, dismally. “She'll probably not like us at all, but we can start her off right.”

“That's mighty white of you, mother.”

“Did you expect me to be—yellow?”

“No, but I thought you might be a little—blue.”

“If she'll make you happy I'll thank Heaven for her every day and night of my life. So let's give her every chance we can, and I hope she'll give us a chance.”

Jim's arms were long enough to encircle her and hug her tight. He whispered to her, “I never needed you more, you God-blessed—mother!”

Her tears streamed down her cheeks upon his lips, and he had a little taste of the bitterness of maternal love. She felt better after she had cried a little, and she said, with courage:

“Now we mustn't keep you away from her. If you want me to, I'll go along with you and call on her and extend a formal invitation.”

Jim could not permit his revered mother to make so complete a submission as that. He shook his head:

“That won't be necessary. I'll go get Kedzie.”

“Kedzie? I thought her name was Anita.”

“That was her stage name—her film name.”

“Oh! And her name wasn't Adair, either, perhaps?”

“No, it was—er—Thropp!”

“Oh!” She wanted to say “What a pretty name!” to make it easier for him, but she could not arrange the words on her tongue. She asked, instead, “Is she American?”

“American? I should say so! Born in Missouri.”

Another “Oh!” from the mother.

Jim swallowed a bit more of quinine and made his escape, saying:

“You're as fine as they make 'em, mother. I won't be gone long.”

The father was so disgusted with the whole affair that he could only save himself from breaking the furniture by a sardonic taunt:

“Tell our daughter-in-law that if she wants to bring along her camera she can have the ballroom for a studio. We never use it, anyway.”

“Shame on you!” his wife cried. “Don't mind him, Jimsy.”

“Jimsy” reminded Jim of Mrs. Thropp and his promise to ask his mother to call on her. But he had confessed all that he could endure. He was glad to get away without letting slip the fact that “Thropp” had changed to “Dyckman” via “Gilfoyle.”

His mother called him back for another embrace and then let him go. She had nowhere to turn for support but to her raging husband, and she found herself crying her eyes out in his arms. He had his own heartbreak and pridebreak, but he was only a man and no sympathy need be wasted on him. He wasted none on himself. He laughed ruefully.

“You were saying, mother, only awhile ago that you wished he'd marry some nice girl. Well, he's married, and we'll have to take what he brings us. But, oh, these children, these damned children!”

A little later he was trying to brace himself and his wife against the future.

“After all, marriage is only an infernal gamble. We might have scoured the world and picked out an angel for him, and she might have run off with the chauffeur the second week. I guess I got the only real angel that's been captured in the last fifty years. The boy may have stumbled on a prize unbeknownst. We'll give the kid the benefit of the doubt, anyway. Won't we?”

“Of course, dear, if she'll give us the same.”

“Well, Jim said she came from Missouri. We've got to show her.”

“Ring for Wotton, will you?”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“The truth.”

“Good Lord! Do you dare do that?”

“I don't dare not to. They'll find it out down-stairs quickly enough in their own way.”

“I see. You want to beat 'em to it.”

“Exactly.”

For years the American world had been discussing the duty of parents to teach their children the things they must inevitably learn in uglier and more perilous ways. There were editorials on it, stories, poems, novels, numberless volumes. It even reached the stage. Mrs. Dyckman had left her own children to find things out for themselves. It occurred to her that she should not make the same mistake with the eager servants who gave the walls ears and the keyholes eyes.

It was a ferocious test of her courage, but she knew that she would have all possible help from Wotton. He had not only been the head steward of the family ship in countless storms, but he had an inherited knowledge of the sufferings of homes. He had learned his profession as page to his father, who had been a butler and the son of a butler.

Wotton came in like a sweet old earl and waited while Mrs. Dyckman gathered strength to say as offhandedly as if she were merely announcing that Jim was arrested for murder:

“Oh, Wotton, I wanted to tell you that Mr. James Dyckman has just brought us the news of his marriage.”

Wotton's eyebrows went up and his hands sought each other and whispered together as he faltered:

“Indeed, ma'am! That is a surprise, isn't it?”

“He has married a very brilliant young lady who has had great success in—ah—in the—ah—moving pictures.”

The old man gulped a moment, but finally got it down. “The moving pictures! Indeed, ma'am! My wife and I are very fond of the—the movies, as the saying is.”

“Everybody is, isn't they—aren't they? Perhaps you have seen Miss Anita Adair in the—er—pictures.”

“Miss Anita Adair? Oh, I should say we 'ave! And is she the young lady?”

“Yes. They are coming to live with us for a time.”

“Oh, that will be very pleasant! Quite an honor, you might say—That will make two extra at dinner, then?”

“Yes. No—that is, we were expecting Mr. and Mrs. Schuyler, but I wish you would telephone them that I am quite ill—not very, you understand—a bad cold, I think, would be best. Something to keep me to my room for the day.”

“Very good, ma'am. Was there anything else?”

“No—oh yes—ask Mrs. Abby to have the Louis Seize room made ready, will you?”

“Very good—and some flowers, per'aps, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

He shuffled out, bowed under the weight of the calamity, as if he had an invisible trunk on his back. He gathered the servants in solemn conclave in their sitting-room and delivered a funeral oration over young Mr. Jim. There were tears in the eyes of the women-servants and curses in the throats of the men. They all adored Mr. Jim, and their recent pride in his triumph over Peter Cheever was turned to ashes. He had married into the movies! They supposed that he must have been drinkin' very 'ard. Jim's valet said:

“This is as good as handin' me my notice.”

But, then, Dallam was a ratty soul and was for deserting a sinking ship. Wotton and the others felt that their loyalty was only now to be put to the test. They must help the old folks through it. There was one ray of hope: such marriages did not last long in America.