Sometimes Jim Dyckman was foolish enough to wish that he had been his wife's first lover. But a man has to get up pretty early to be that to any woman. The minxes begin to flirt with the milk-bottle, then with the doctor, and then to cherish a precocious passion for the first rag sailor-doll.

Jim had come as near as any man may to being a woman's first love in the case of Charity, and what good had it done him? He was the first boy Charity had ever played with. Her nurse had bragged about her to his nurse when Charity was just beginning to take notice of other than alimentary things. By that time Jim was a blasÉ rouÉ of five and his main interest in Charity was a desire to poke his finger into the soft spot in her head.

The nurses restrained him in time, and his proud, young, little mother of then, when she heard of it, decided that he was destined to be a great explorer. His young father sniffed that he was more likely to be a gynecologist. They had a grand quarrel over their son's future. He became none of the things they feared or hoped that he would and he carried out none of his own early ambitions.

His first impressions of Charity had ranged from contempt, through curiosity, to protectiveness and affection. She got his heart first by being helpless. He began by picking up the things she let fall from her carriage or threw overboard and immediately cried for again. She had been human enough to do a good deal of that. When things cumbered her crib or her perambulator she brushed them into space and then repented after them.

Following her marriage to Peter Cheever she did just that with Jim Dyckman. His love cluttered up her domestic serenity and she chucked it overboard. And then she wanted it again. Then her husband chucked her overboard and she felt that it would not be so lonesome out there since Jim would be out there, too. But she found that he had picked himself up and toddled away with Kedzie. And now he could not pick Charity up any more. His wife wouldn't let him.

Jim did not know that he wanted to pick Charity up again till he called on her to ask her to call on his wife and pick Kedzie up out of her loneliness. It was a terrific thought to the simple-minded Jim when it came over him that the Charity Coe he had adored and given up as beyond his reach on her high pedestal was now lying at the foot of it with no worshiper at all.

Jim was the very reverse of a snob. Kedzie had won his devotion by seeming to need it. She had lost it by showing that she cared less for him than for the things she thought he could get for her. And now Charity needed his love.

There were two potent principles in Jim's nature, as in many another man's and woman's; one was an instant eagerness to help anybody in trouble; another was an instant resentment of any coercion. Jim could endure neither bossing nor being bossed; restraint of any sort irked him. There may have been Irish blood in him, but at any rate the saying was as true of him as of the typical Irishman—“You can lead him to hell easier than you can drive him an inch.”

When Jim left Charity's house his heart ached to think of her distressful with loneliness. When he realized that somehow Kedzie was automatically preventing him from helping Charity his marital bonds began to chafe. He began to understand that matrimony was hampering his freedom. He had something to resent on his own behalf.

He had been so troubled with the thought of his shortcomings in devotion to Kedzie that he had not pondered how much he had surrendered. He had repented his inability to give Kedzie his entire and fanatic love. He saw that he had at least given his precious liberty of soul into her little hands.

Galled as he was at this comprehension, he began to think over the lessons of his honeymoon and to see that Kedzie had not given him entirety of devotion any more than he her. Little selfishnesses, exactions, tyrannies, petulances, began to recur to him.

He was in the dangerous frame of mind of a bridegroom thinking things over. At that time it behooves the bride to exert her fascinations and prove her devotion as never before.

Kedzie, knowing nothing of Jim's call on Charity or of his new mood, chanced to be in a most unfortunate humor. She criticized Jim; she declined to be amused or entertained; rebuffed his advances, ridiculed his pretensions of love. She even chose to denounce his mother for her heartlessness, his sister for her neglect, his father for his snobbery. That is always bad business. It puts a husband at bay with his back against the foundation walls of loyalty. They quarreled wonderfully and slept dos-À-dos. They did not speak the next morning.

The next afternoon Jim saw to his dismay that Kedzie was putting on her hat and gloves to go out on a shopping-cruise. If she went she would miss Charity's call.

He knew that he ought not to tell her of Charity's visit in advance. In fact, Charity had pledged him to a benevolent conspiracy in the matter. He put up a flag of truce and resumed diplomatic relations.

With the diplomatic cunning of a hippopotamus he tried to decoy Kedzie into staying at home awhile. His ponderous subtlety aroused Kedzie's suspicions, and at length he confirmed them by desperately confessing:

“Mrs. Cheever is going to call.”

Kedzie's first thought was of Peter Cheever's new wife, who had been taken up by a certain set of those whom one may call loose-principled or divinely tolerant, as one's own prejudices direct. Kedzie could not yet afford to be so forgiving. She flared up.

“Mrs. Cheever! That Zada thing going to call on me? How dare she!”

“Of course not.”

“Oh, the other one, then?”

“Yes.”

“The abandoned one?”

“That's pretty rough. She's been very kind to you and she wants to be again.”

“Where did you learn so much?”

“We were talking about you.”

“Oh, you were, were you? That's nice! And where was all this?”

He indulged in a concessive lie for the sake or the peace. “I met her in the street and walked along with her.”

“Fine! And how did my name come to come up?”

“It naturally would. I was saying that I wished she'd—er—I wished that you and she might be friends.”

“So that you and she could see each other still oftener, I suppose.”

“It's rotten of you to say that.”

“And it's rottener of you to go talking to another woman about your wife.”

“But it was in the friendliest spirit, and she took it so.”

“I see! Her first name is Charity and I'm to be one of her patients. Well, you can receive her yourself. I don't want any of her old alms! I won't be here!”

“Oh yes, you will!”

“Oh no, I won't!”

“You can't be as ill-mannered as that!”

“You talk to me of manners! Why, I've seen manners in your gang that would disgrace a brakeman and a lunch-counter girl on one of dad's railroads.” Her father already had railroads! So many people had them in the crowd she met that Kedzie was not strong enough to deny her father one or two.

Kedzie had taken the most violent dislike to Charity for a dozen reasons, all of them perfectly human and natural, and nasty and unjustifiable, and therefore ineradicable. The first one was that odious matter of obligation. Gratitude has been wisely diagnosticated as a lively sense of benefits to come. The deadly sense of benefits gone by is known as ingratitude.

No one knows just what the divinely unpardonable sin is, but the humanly or at least womanly unpardonable sin is to have known one's husband well before the wife met him, and then to try to be nice to the wife. To have known the wife in her humble days and to have done her a favor makes the sin unmentionable as well as unpardonable.

Jim Dyckman had involved himself in Charity's crime by trying to get Charity to help his wife again. It was bad enough that Charity had got Kedzie a job in the past and had sent Jim Dyckman to make sure that she got it. But for Jim, after Kedzie and he had been married and all, to ask Charity to rescue Kedzie from her social failure was monstrous.

The fact that Jim had felt sorry for his lonely Kedzie marooned on an iceberg in mid-society was humiliating enough; but for Charity to dare to feel sorry for Kedzie, too, and to come sailing after her—Kedzie shuddered when she thought of it.

She fought with her husband until it was too late for her to get away. Charity's card came in while they were still wrangling. Kedzie announced that she was not at home. Jim told the servant, “Wait!” and gave Kedzie a look that she rather enjoyed. It was what they call a caveman look. She felt that he already had his hands in her hair and was dragging her across the floor bumpitty-bump. It made her scalp creep deliciously. She was rather tempted to goad him on to action. It would have a movie thrill.

But the look faded from Jim's eye and the blaze of wrath dulled to a gray contempt. She was afraid that he might call her what she had once overheard Pet Bettany call her—“A common little mucker.” That sort of contempt seared like a splash of vitriol.

Kedzie, like Zada, was a self-made lady and she wanted to conceal the authorship from the great-grandmother-built ladies she encountered.

She pouted a moment, then she said to the servant, “We'll see her.” She turned to Jim. “Come along. I'll go and pet your old cat and get her off my chest.”