of suitors. Just now she had seen too much of the fruits of male
combat. She was sick of hatred and its devastation.

So Charity begged Dyckman to get off at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth
Street, but he would not show himself so poltroon. He answered, "I'd
like to see myself!" meaning that he would not.

She retorted, "Then I'll get off there myself."

"Then I'll get off there with you," he grumbled.

Charity flounced back into her seat with a gasp of mitigated disgust.
The mitigation was the irresistible thrill of his devotion. She had
a husband who would desert her and a cavalier who would not. It was
difficult not to forgive the cavalier a little.

Yet it would have been better if he had obeyed her command or she
her impulse. Or would it have been? The worst might always have been
worse.




CHAPTER V

When Kedzie was angry she called her father an "old country Jake."
Even she did not know how rural he was or how he had oppressed
the sophisticated travelers in the smoking-room of the sleeping-car
with his cocksure criticisms of cities that he had never seen. He
had condemned New York with all the mercilessness of a small-town