Kedzie went home early. It was depressing there, too. Now that she had a house of her own, she found an extraordinary isolation in it. Almost nobody called.

When she lived under the Dyckman roof she was included in the cards left by all the callers; she was invited into the drawing-room to meet them; she was present at all the big and little dinners, and breakfasts and teas and suppers.

People who wanted to be asked to more of the Dyckman meals and parties swapped meals and parties with them and included Kedzie in their invitations, since she was one of the family. She went about much in stately homes, and her name was celebrated in what the newspapers insist upon calling the “exclusive” circles.

Kedzie laughed at the extraordinary inclusiveness of their High Exclusivenesses until she got her own home. And then she learned its bitter meaning. It was not that Mrs. Dyckman meant to freeze her out. She urged her to “come in any time.” But, as Kedzie told Jim, “an invitation to come any time is an invitation to stay away all the time.” Kedzie's pride kept her aloof. She made it so hard to get her to come that Mrs. Dyckman sincerely said to Cicely:

“We are too old and stupid for the child. She is glad to be rid of us.”

Mrs. Dyckman planned to call often, but she was an extremely busy woman, doing many good works and many foolish works that were just as hard. She said, “I ought to call,” and failed to call, just as one says, “I ought to visit the sick,” and leaves them to their supine loneliness.

Thus Kedzie floated out of the swirling eddies where the social driftwood jostled in eternal circles. She sulked and considered the formalities of who should call on whom and who owed whom a call. New York life had grown too busy for anybody to pay much attention to the older reciprocities of etiquette.

Almost nobody called on Kedzie. She took a pride in smothering her complaints from Jim, who was not very much alive to her hours. He was busy, too. He had joined the Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard, and it absorbed a vast amount of his time. He had gone to the Plattsburg encampment the summer before and had kept up with the correspondence-school work in map problems, and finally he had obtained a second lieutenancy in the Seventh Regiment. It was his little protest against the unpreparedness of the nation as it toppled on the brink of the crater where the European war boiled and smoked.

One midnight after a drill he found Kedzie crying bitterly. He took her in his arms, and his tenderness softened her pride so that she wept like a disconsolate baby and told him how lonely she was. Nobody called; nobody invited her out; nobody took her places. She had no friends, and her husband had abandoned her for his old regiment.

He was deeply touched by her woe and promised that he would take better care of her. But his military engagements were not elastic. He dared not neglect them. They took more and more of his evenings and invaded his days. Besides, he was poor company for Kedzie's mood. He had little of the humming-bird restlessness, and he could not keep up with her flights. She had darted her beak into a flower, and its nectar was finished for her before she had realized that it was a flower.

He felt that what she needed was friends of her own sex. There were women enough who would accept Kedzie's company and gad with her, vie with her quivering speed. But they were not the sort he wanted her to fly with. He wanted her to make friends with the Charity Coe type.

The next day Jim grew desperate enough to call on Charity. She was out, but expected in at any moment. He sat down to wait for her. The room, the books, the piano—all spoke of her lovingly and lovably. He went to the piano and found there the song she had played for him once in Newport—“Go, Lovely Rose!”

He thought it a marvelous coincidence that it should be there on the rack. Like most coincidences, this was not hard to explain. It chanced to be there because Charity played it often. She was lonelier than Kedzie and almost as helpless to amuse herself. She read vastly, but the stories of other people's unhappy loves were a poor anodyne for her own. She thought incessantly of Jim Dyckman. Remembering the song she had played for him, and his bitter comment on the verse, “Tell her that wastes her time and me,” she hunted it out, and the plaintive chimes of Carpenter's music made a knell for her own hopes.

She had played it this very afternoon and wrought herself to such sardonic regret that she forced herself into the open air. She walked a mile or two, but slunk back home again to be rid of the crowds.

She was thinking of Dyckman when she entered her house. She let herself in with her own key, and, walking into the drawing-room, surprised him at the piano, reading the tender elegy of the rose.

“Jim!” she gasped.

“Charity!” he groaned.

Their souls seemed to rush from their bodies and embrace. But their bodies stood fast before the abyss that gaped between them.

She whipped off her glove before she gave him her hand. That meeting of the flesh was so bitter-sweet that their hands unclasped guiltily by a kind of honest instinct of danger.

“What on earth brought you here?” Charity faltered.

“Why—I—Well, you see—it's like this.” He groped for words, but, having no genius in invention, he blurted the truth helplessly: “I came to ask you if you wouldn't—You see, my poor wife isn't making out very well with people—she's lonesome—and blue—and—why can't you lend a hand and make friends with her?”

Charity laughed aloud. “Oh, Jim, Jim, what a darling old numskull you are!”

“In general, yes; but why just now?”

“Your wife will never make friends with me.”

“Of course she will. She's lonely enough to take up with anybody.”

“Thanks!”

“Well, will you call?”

“Have you told her you were going to ask me to?”

“Not yet.”

“Then I'll call, on one condition.”

“What's that, Charity Coe?”

“That you don't tell her. You'd better not, or she'll have my eyes and your scalp.”

“But you'll call, won't you?”

“Of course. Anything you say—always.”

“You're the damnedest decentest woman in the world, Charity Coe; and if—”

He paused. It is just as well not to go iffing about such matters.

Charity stopped short in her laughter. She and Jim stared at each other again across that abyss. It was terribly deep, but only a step over.

They heard the door-bell faintly, and a sense of guilt confused them again. Jim rose and wished himself out of it.

“It's only Prissy Atterbury,” said Charity.

Prissy came in tugging at the ferocious mustaches that only emphasized his lady-like carriage. He paused on the door-sill to stare and gasp, “My Gawd, at it again!”

They did not know what he meant, and he would not explain that he had seen them together ages ago and spread the gossip that they were in intrigue. The coincidence of his recurrence on their scene was not strange, for Charity had been using him as a kind of messenger-boy.

Prissy was that sort. He looked the gentleman and was, a somewhat too gentle gentleman, but very useful to ladies who needed an uncompromising escort and were no longer young enough to permit of chaperonage. He was considered perfectly harmless, but he was a fiend of gossip, and he rejoiced in the recrudescence of the Jim and Charity affair.

Jim confirmed Prissy's eager suspicions by taking himself off with a maximum of embarrassment. Charity went to the door with him—to kiss him good-by, as Prissy gloatingly supposed, but actually to say:

“I'll call on your wife to-morrow.”

“You're an angel,” said Jim, and meant it.

He thought all the way home what an angel she was, and Charity was thinking at the same time what a fool she had been to let Peter Cheever dazzle her to the fact that Jim Dyckman was the one man in the world that she belonged to. She needed just him and he just her.