The town was monstrously lonely when Kedzie turned back to her widowhood. Jim's mother and father and sister were touched by her grief and begged her to make their home hers, but she shook her head.

For a while her grief and her pride sustained her. She was the Spartan wife of the brave soldier. She even took up knitting as an appropriate activity. She thought in socks.

But the hateful hours kept coming, the nights would not be brief, and the days would not curtail their length nor quicken their pace. The loathsome inevitable result arrived.

Even her grief began to bore her. Fidelity grew inane, and her young heart shrieked aloud for diversion.

If battles had happened down there, if something stirring had only appeared in the news, she could have taken some refreshment of excitement from the situation. Heroic demands breed heroes and heroines, but all that this crisis demanded was the fidelity of torpor, the loyalty of a mollusk.

Nothing happened except the stupid chronicles of heat and monotony. The rattlesnakes did not bite; the tarantulas scuttered away; the scorpions were no worse than wasps. The Mexicans did not attack or raid or attempt the assassinations which popular hostility accepted as their favorite outdoor sport. Mexico continued her siesta while the United States sentineled the bedroom.

Jim's letters told of scorching heat, of blinding duststorms, and cloudbursts that made lakes of the camps, but nothing else happened except the welter of routine.

The regiments had only police work to do, and the task grew irksome. Men began to think of their neglected businesses. The men who stayed at home were sharing bountifully in the prosperity of the times. The volunteers at the Border were wasting their abilities for fifteen dollars a month.

The officers began to resign by the score, by the hundred. As many enlisted men dropped out as could beg off. Jim could afford to stay; he would not resign, though Kedzie wrote appeals and finally demands that he return to his wretched wife.

Resentment replaced sorrow in her heart. She began to impute ugly motives to his absence. The tradition of the alluring Mexican senorita obsessed her. She imagined him engaged in wild romances with sullen beauties. She was worried about guitar music and stilettoes.

If there were beautiful seÑoritas there in McAllen, Jim did not see them. His dissipations were visits to the movie shows and excursions for dinner to Mr. and Mrs. Riley's hotel at Mission. Liquor was forbidden to officers and men under dire penalties, and Jim's conviviality was restricted to the soda-water fountains. He became as rabid a consumer of ice-cream cones and sundaes as a matinÉe girl. It was a burlesque of war to make the angels hold their sides, if the angels could forget the slaughter-house of Europe.

Jim felt that the Government had buncoed him into this comic-opera chorus. He resented the service as an incarceration. But he would not resign. For months he plodded the doleful round of his duties, ate bad food, poured out unbelievable quantities of sweat and easily believable quantities of profanity.

On the big practice hike through the wilderness who that saw him staggering along, choked with alkali dust, knouted by the sun, stabbed by the cactus, carrying two rifles belonging to worn-out soldiers in addition to his own load, looking forward to the privilege of throwing himself down by the roadside for ten minutes' respite, praying for the arrival in camp with its paradise of a little shelter tent and beans and bacon for dinner or for breakfast or supper—who could have believed that he did not have to do it? That he had indeed at home soft luxuries, a rosy little wife, a yacht, and servants to lift his shoes from the floor for him?

It was easier, however, for him to get along thus there where everybody did the same than it was for Kedzie to get along ascetically in New York where nearly everybody she knew was gay.

She might have gone down to Texas to see Jim, but when he wrote her how meager the accommodations were and how harsh the comforts, she pained him by taking his advice. Like almost all the other wives, she stayed at home and made the best of it.

The best was increasingly bad. Her lot, indeed, was none too cheerful. After her clandestine marriage she had confronted her husband's parents, and the result was not satisfactory. She had had no honeymoon, and her husband's friends were chill toward her. Then he marched away and left her for half a year.

She was young and pretty and restless. She had acquired a greed of praise. She had given up her public glory to be her husband's private prima donna; and then her audience had abandoned her.

Though her soul traveled far in a short time by the calendar, every metamorphosis was slow and painful and imperceptible. She wept her eyes dry; then moped until her gloom grew intolerable. The first diversion she sought was really an effort of her grief to renew itself by a little repose. Her first amusement was for her grief's sake. But before long her diversions were undertaken for diversion's sake.

She had to have friends and she had to take what she could get. The more earnest elements of society did not interest her, nor she them. The fast crowd disgusted her at first, but remained the only one that did not repulse her advances.

Her first glimpses of the revelers filled her with repugnance and confirmed her in what she had heard and read of the wickedness of the rich. The fact that she had seen also the virtuous rich, solemn rich, religious rich, miserly rich, was forgotten. The fact that in every stage of means there are the same classes escaped her memory. She had known of middle classes where libertinism flourished, had known of licentiousness among the poor shopkeepers, shoddy intriguers in the humble boarding-houses.

But now she felt that money made vice and forgot that vice is one of the amusements accessible to the very poorest, to all who inherit flesh and its appetites.

Gradually she forgot her horror of dissipation. The outswirling eddy of the gayer crowd began to gather and compel her feet. She lacked the wisdom to attract the intellectuals, the culture to run with the artistic and musical sets, the lineage to satisfy that curious few who find a congeniality in the fact that their ancestors were respectable and recorded persons.

In the fast gang she did not need to have or use her brains. She did not need a genealogy. Her beauty was her admission-fee. Her restlessness was her qualification.

Those who were careless of their own behavior were careless of their accomplices. They accepted Kedzie without scruple. They accepted especially the invitations she could well afford. She ceased to be afraid of a compliment. She grew addicted to flattery. She learned to take a joke off-color and match it in shade.

She met women of malodorous reputation and found that they were not so black as they had been painted. She learned how warm-hearted and charitable a woman could be for whom the world had a cold shoulder and no charity.

She extended her tolerance from men whose escapades had been national topics to women who had been involved in distinguished scandals and were busily involving themselves anew. Being tolerant of them, he had to be tolerant of their ways. Forgiving the sinner helps to forgive the sin. There are few things more endearing than forgiveness. One of the most appealing figures in literature and art is the forgiven woman taken in adultery.

And thus by easy stages and generous concessions Kedzie, who had begun her second marriage with the strictest ideals of behavior, found herself surrounded by people of a loose-reined life. Things once abhorred became familiar, amusing, charming.

It was increasingly difficult to resent advances toward her own citadel which she had smiled at in others. She grew more and more gracious toward a narrowing group of men till the safety-in-numbers approached the peril-in-fewness. She grew more and more gracious to a widening group of women, and they brought along their men.

Kedzie even forgave Pet Bettany and struck up a friendship with her. Pet apologized to her other friends for taking up with Kedzie, by the sufficient plea, “She gives such good food and drink at her boarding-house.”

Kedzie found Pet intensely comforting since Pet was full of gossip and satirized with contempt the people who had been treating Kedzie with contempt. It is mighty pleasant to hear of the foibles of our superiors. The illusion of rising is acquired by bringing things down to us as well as by rising to them. When Pet told Kedzie something belittling about somebody big Kedzie felt herself enlarged.

Pet had another influence on Kedzie. Pet was no more contemptuous of aristocrats than she was of people who were good or tried to be, or, failing that, kept up a decent pretense.

Pet made a snobbery of vice and had many an anecdote of the lapses of the respectable and the circumspectable. Her railing way brought virtue itself into disrepute and Kedzie was frightened out of her last few senses. She fell under the tyranny of the risquÉ, which is as fell as the tyranny of the prudish.

Prissy Atterbury had told Pet without delay of meeting Jim Dyckman at Charity's home. Now that Pet was a crony of Kedzie's she recalled the story. Finding Kedzie one day suffering from an attack of scruples, and declining to accept an invitation because “Jim might not like it,” Pet laughed:

“Oh, Jim! What right has he got to kick? He didn't lose much time getting back to his Charity Coe after he married you.”

“His Charity Coe!” Kedzie gasped. “What do you mean by his Charity Coe?”

“Why, his old reliable sweetheart. He's been silly about her since babyhood. When she married Pete Cheever he moped like a sick hound. And didn't he beat up Pete in a club only a few days before he married you?”

This was all news to Kedzie and it sickened her. She demanded more poison, and Pet ladled it out joyously.

She told Kedzie how Prissy Atterbury found Jim at Charity's home. But Kedzie remembered vividly that Jim had said he met Charity on the street. And now she had caught him in a lie, a woman-lie! He was not there to explain that he visited Charity in Kedzie's behalf, and if he had explained it would only have embittered her the more.

Being quite convinced now of Jim's perfidy, she denied the possibility of it.

“Jim's square, I'm sure. There couldn't be anything wrong with him. And Mrs. Cheever is an awful prig, everybody says.”

Pet whooped with laughter: “They're the worst sort. Why, only a couple of years ago Jim and Charity were up in the Adirondacks alone together. Prissy Atterbury caught them sneaking back.”

So one lie was used to bolster another. The firmest structures can be thus established by locking together things that will not stand alone—as soldiers stack arms. Pet went on stacking lies and Kedzie grew more and more distressed, then infuriated. Her bitterness against Charity grew the more acid. Charity's good repute became now the whitewash on a sepulcher of corruption. Her resentment of the woman's imagined hypocrisy and of her husband's apparent duplicity blazed into an eagerness for vengeance—the classic vengeance of punishing a crime by committing another of the sort. Like revenges like; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a loyalty for a loyalty.