Charity Coe Cheever was making less progress with her amateur movie-show than Kedzie with her professional cinematic career.

Charity telephoned to ask Jim Dyckman to act, but he proved to be camera-shy and intractable.

She had difficulties with all her cast. It was impossible to satisfy the people who were willing to act with the rÔles they were willing to assume.

Charity was lunching at the Ritz-Carlton with Mrs. Noxon when she saw Jim Dyckman come in with his mother. Mrs. Noxon left Charity and went over to speak to Mrs. Dyckman. So Charity beckoned Jim over and urged him to accept the job of impresario.

He protested, but she pleaded for his help at least on an errand or two.

“Jim, I want you to go up to the studio of these people and find this great man Ferriday and get him to promise to direct for us. And by the way, that little girl you pulled out of the pool, you know—well, they promised to get her a job at the studio. You look her up and find out how she's doing—there's a darling.”

He shook his head, resisting her for once, and answered:

“Go to the devil, Charity darling. You won't let me love you, so I'll be cussed if I'll let you get me to working for you. I've had you bad and I'm trying to get well of you. So let me alone.”

That was how Peter Cheever, talking to the headwaiter at the head of the stairs, saw his wife and Jim Dyckman with their heads together at a table. He wanted to go over and crack a water-bottle over Dyckman's head. He did not do it, for the excellent reason that Zada L'Etoile was at his side. She had insisted on his taking her there “to lunch with the bunch,” as she expressed it.

She also saw Charity and Jim and Cheever's sudden flush of rage. She felt that the way was opening for her dreams to come true. She was so happy over the situation that she helped Cheever out of the appalling problem before him.

He did not know how to go forward or how to retreat. He could think of nothing to say to the headwaiter who offered him his choice of tables.

Zada caught his elbow and murmured in her very best voice just loud enough for the headwaiter's benefit:

“Mr. Cheever, I'm so sorry—but I'm feeling dizzy. I'm afraid I shall faint if I don't get out in the air. It's very close in here.”

“It is very close, madam,” said the headwaiter, and he helped to support her down the steps quietly and deferentially, just as if he believed it.

Zada and Cheever thought they were escaping from a crisis, but they were drifting deeper and deeper into the converging currents. When they were safe in the motor outside Zada was proud.

“Some get-away, that?” she laughed.

“Wonderful!” said Cheever. “I didn't know you had so much social skill.”

“You don't know me,” she said. “I'm learning! You'll be proud of me yet.”

“I am now,” he said. “You're the most beautiful thing in the world.”

“Oh, that's old stuff,” she said. “Any cow can be glossy. But I'm going in for the real thing, Peterkin. I've cut out the cocktails and I don't dance with anybody but you lately. Have you noticed that? It's the quiet life and the nice ways for me. Do you mind?”

“It's very becoming” he said. “Anything for a novelty.”

Yet he liked her surprisingly well in this phase. She had been cutting down his liquor, too. She had been cutting down his extravagances. She had even achieved the height of denying herself luxuries—one of the surest and least-trodden short-cuts to a man's heart—a little secret path he hardly knows himself.

The affair of Zada and Cheever was going the normal course. It had lost the charm of the wild and wicked—through familiarity; and it was tending to domestication, as all such moods do if nothing interrupts them. There are all sorts of endings to such illicit relations: most of them end with the mutual treachery of two fickle creatures; some of them end with bitter grief for one or the other or both; some of them end in crime, or at least disgrace; and some of them finish, with disconcerting immorality, in an inexcusable respectability.

The improvement in Zada's mind and heart was, curiously, the most dangerous thing in the world for Cheever. If she had stayed noisy and promiscuous and bad, he would have tired of her. But she was growing soft and homey, gentle as ivy, and as hard to tear away or to want to tear away. After all, marriage is only the formalizing of an instinct that existed long before—exists in some animals and birds who mate without formality and stay mated without compulsion.

When Zada and Cheever had escaped from the Ritz-Carlton they took lunch at another restaurant. Zada was childishly proud of her tact and of Cheever's appreciation. But afterward, on the way “home”—as she called what other people called her “lair”—she grew suddenly and deeply solemn.

“So your wife is with Dyckman again,” she said. “It looks to me like a sketch.”

Cheever flushed. He hated her slang and he did not accept her conclusion, but this time he did not forbid her to mention his wife. He could hardly do that when her tact had saved him and Charity from the results of their double indiscretion and the shame of amusing that roomful of gossips.

Zada misunderstood his silence for approval; so she spoke her thoughts aloud:

“If that He and She business goes on I suppose you'll have to divorce the lady.”

“Divorce Charity!” Cheever gasped. “Are you dotty?”

That hit Zada pretty hard, but she bore it. She came back by another door.

“I guess I am—nearly as dotty as she is about Dyckman. First thing you know she'll be trying to get free herself. What if she asks you for a divorce?”

“I'd like to see her!”

“You mean you wouldn't give her her freedom?”

“Not in a thousand years.”

He was astounded at the sepulchral woe of Zada's groan. “O Lord, and I thought—oh—you don't love me at all then! You never really loved me—really! God help me.”

Cheever wondered what Zada would smash first. He hoped it would not be the window of the car. He hoped he could get her safely indoors before the smashing began.

He did. She was a grim and murky storm-cloud full of tornado when they crossed the pavement and the vestibule of the apartment-house and went up in the elevator.

But once inside the door, her breast began to heave, her nostrils to quiver, her fingers to work. Her maid came to take her hat, and paled to see her torment. Zada gave her her things and motioned her away. She motioned her four or five times. The maid had needed only one motion.

Cheever watched Zada out of the corner of his eye and wondered why he had ever been fated to fall in love with such a creature. He was convinced that he had been fate-forced into the intrigue. He had no sense whatever of volition or wicked intent. He could only feel that he had tried to be decent and play fair and be generous.

The thought of what the neighbors were about to hear made him sick with chagrin. The fact that the neighbors were under suspicion themselves only aggravated the burden of shame.

The hardest part of Zada's agony was her pitiful effort to take her medicine like a lady. It was terrific how hard it was for one of a wildcat heritage and habit to keep the caterwaul back and the claws muffled. The self-duel nearly wrecked Zada, but she won it. She was not thoroughbred, but she had tried to be thoroughgoing. She was evidently not a success as a self-made lady. She kept whispering to herself:

“What's the use? Oh, why did I try? Oh, oh, oh, what a fool I've been! To think!—to think!—to think!”

Cheever was distraught. He had waited for the outbreak, and when it did not come he suffered from the recoil of his own tension.

“For the Lord's sake, yell!” he implored.

She turned on him eyes of extraordinary abjection. She saw at last where her lawlessness had brought her, and she despised herself. But she did not love him any the more for understanding him. She saw at last that one cannot be an honest woman without actually being—an honest woman. She was going to get honesty if it broke a bone.

She told her accomplice: “I want you to go away and stay away. Whatever you do, leave me be. There's nothing else you can do for me except to take back all the stuff you've bought me. Give it to that wife you love so much and wouldn't suspect no matter what she did. You love her so much that you wouldn't let her go even if she wanted to leave you. So go back to her and take these things to her with my comp'ments.”

Now it was Cheever who wanted to scream as he had not screamed since he was the purple-faced boy who used to kick the floor and his adoring nurse. 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.