THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 J I M
 
 OTHER BOOKS BY 
 
 REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN 
 
 THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE 
 
 THE SENTENCE OF SILENCE 
 
 THE GIRL THAT GOES WRONG 
 
 IN A MOMENT OF TIME 
 
 WHAT IS SOCIALISM? 
 
 THE SPIDER S WEB
 
 JIM 
 
 By 
 
 REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN 
 
 AUTHOR OF "THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
 
 COPYRIGHT. 1915, BY 
 
 MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Published, May 1915 
 Second Printing, June 1915
 
 TO 
 LOUIS HOW 
 
 2136542

 
 NOTE 
 
 ON November 28th last, while this book was in 
 the making, there was printed in the Philadelphia 
 Evening Ledger a paragraph saying that " several 
 well-known radicals appear in Jim. That state 
 ment is absolutely mistaken : not only are my so- 
 called radicals creatures of my imagination, but 
 there is no person, radical or other, in this novel 
 who, so far as I know, has any prototype in real life. 
 
 I do believe that our divorce-courts are hood 
 winked by many of the parties that appeal to them. 
 I do believe that some " radicals " make their creed 
 ridiculous by buffoonery, and that others basely use 
 their radicalism as an excuse for moral laziness, 
 even moral turpitude. But I had no particular di 
 vorced persons in mind when I wrote of Charley 
 Vanaman and the woman he married no particular 
 radicals in mind when I attempted to depict certain 
 faults and foibles in the people with whom Vanaman 
 and his wife came into contact. 
 
 General types and modern tendencies I have of 
 course tried to portray; and I have tried, as every 
 honest writer of fiction must, to make my people 
 seem alive as they move across the printed page. 
 Nevertheless, the people as individuals the wife, 
 her lovers, relatives, friends, acquaintances and 
 enemies are not intended to be, and are not, por 
 traits of any living individuals; their characters are 
 their own only, and for their deeds, both good and 
 ill, no person in real life may truly be held ac 
 countable. R. W. K. 
 
 NEW YORK CITY, 
 2 4th March, 1915.
 
 JIM 
 
 FIRST CHAPTER 
 
 THE faint breeze of an evening in May stirred 
 the curtains of the darkened room. The scent 
 of the season saturated the air ; it climbed from 
 the treetops in nearby Central Park and floated over 
 the window-sill. Spring, the oldest, the sweetest, and 
 the subtlest of liars, was at the ear of the world once 
 more, and in the ear of the world was whispering: 
 
 You are still young, and I have made you 
 younger. You can do it all over again. You can 
 begin afresh. Do it all over; begin afresh now! " 
 
 The woman in the twilight at the apartment-house 
 window listened to that whisper and believed it, as 
 she had been listening to it and believing it ever since, 
 long weeks before, the first vernal hint of approach 
 ing warmth, creeping northward from Carolinian 
 valleys and up the Pennsylvanian waterways, sought 
 a timid foothold in the New York streets. She had 
 listened and planned and acted; and now, it seemed, 
 the moment was arrived to call Spring to his ac 
 counting. 
 
 Leaning far out of the window, a shadow bend 
 ing from the shadows of her own house toward the 
 shadows of the street, Mrs. Trent assured herself 
 that she was indeed still young, that she was really 
 much younger than her thirty-one years would have 
 permitted another woman to be. And, upon this in-
 
 2 JIM 
 
 stance, she did what few young people do, and 
 what Edith Trent had, up to that time, scarcely 
 ever done: she allowed her thoughts to desert the 
 present and the future, and gave them rein to run, 
 albeit with a gentle regard for her own sensibilities, 
 over the arid track of her past. 
 
 She could justify that past, and she did justify it. 
 If, at two-and-twenty, she had known more of the 
 world than the twenty-year-old lad whom she then 
 married, the fault surely lay with Jim, who, at 
 twenty, should have had a working-knowledge of 
 life. If she had tricked him into that marriage, he 
 was at least willing enough to marry her. If the 
 trick, the lie that she had told him, was soon in 
 evitably discovered, so did she soon discover 
 that Jim s hopes of a substantial inheritance from 
 his aunt were equally ill-founded. She doubted 
 the sincerity of those hopes of his; he ought to 
 have verified them. Edith hated failure; she was 
 sure that, in spite of her deceptions, she had loved 
 and trusted the spirited boy; she was precisely 
 as sure that love and trust could not reasonably 
 be expected to survive when the spirited boy changed 
 into a struggling painter; when, without any ap 
 parent hope of success in it, he gave quite half of 
 his affections to an art that his wife did not care to 
 understand. 
 
 Her married life had been, she now assured her 
 self, an exceedingly dull combat against impossible 
 odds, and, though that dullness was occasionally re 
 lieved by quiet essays beyond the sphere of ideal 
 domesticity that she had chosen, Edith felt satisfied 
 because she wanted to feel satisfied that Jim
 
 JIM 3 
 
 had sought and found variety. At this period 
 of her life she possessed the blessed quality of for 
 getting whatever she chose to forget, but she could 
 recall George Mertcheson and Tommy Kirkpatrick 
 and Billy Namyna with admirable equanimity. The 
 only things that might disturb her were a few brief 
 letters: one merely incautious letter that she knew 
 Jim somewhere preserved though she had ran 
 sacked all his belongings and could not find it and 
 two or three others, which she had reason to believe 
 he had secured and somewhere still possessed. 
 But now 
 
 2. There came at the door of her darkened 
 room : the knock for which she had been waiting. 
 
 Edith turned: the movement was stealthy, but 
 more quick than stealthy. Impatient as she had 
 been for this summons, its arrival startled her. 
 
 " Come in," she said. Except the guest, there 
 was none within earshot, yet she kept her voice low. 
 
 The door opened. The shadow that entered the 
 room entered irresolutely. 
 
 " Edith? " Its tone was the echo of hers. 
 
 " Yes. You re late, Charley." There was an 
 noyance at his tardiness. " Where on earth have 
 you been? " 
 
 Nevertheless, the two shadowy figures were em 
 bracing. 
 
 " My father wasn t so well. He kept me. You ve 
 got it awful dark here, Edith." 
 
 She rested her head on his shoulder with a spon 
 taneity that was the drawing of a curtain upon all 
 memory of like surrenders to other shoulders.
 
 4 JIM 
 
 "I know. I ve been thinking," she explained; 
 " and I can t think when the light s on." 
 
 " Where where s Jim?" 
 
 The name splashed into the twilight. Edith 
 drew away; she returned to her place at the window. 
 
 " Sit down here," she said, and indicated a chair 
 beside her own. " He s gone out." 
 
 Charley sat down. He had the manner of a man 
 for whom the prevailing twilight was as much mental 
 as physical. He said: 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 " Because I told him to," said Edith. 
 
 "And he went?" 
 
 " Of course. He always does what I tell him 
 to : that s one of his ways of making me hate him. 
 I told him I wanted a private talk with you." 
 
 She knew that she was young, and she had always 
 been determined. The worst was over: she had 
 faced Jim and forced, as she had so often forced, 
 her will on him. Once, long ago, she had told him 
 that she would have respected him had he ever 
 beaten her; now she was the more bitter because of 
 what she considered the weakness of his compliance 
 in promising to grant her demand for liberty. He 
 had always refused to fight her: he would not fight 
 her now. He would not produce the one letter; 
 his silence regarding the others indicated that he 
 would not produce them. He would not produce 
 anything. As always, he was to give her her way: 
 her acquaintance with those other men, even the cir 
 cumstances of her marriage to Jim, need never come 
 out in court, need never be confessed to Charley 
 Vanaman. She was not grateful to her husband, but
 
 JIM 5 
 
 she paid her thanks to the great god Luck for the 
 opportunity to bury all these things before the door 
 of the high last love that the great god Luck had 
 sent her. 
 
 For Charley, the purely mental portion of the 
 twilight was joyously lessened by her last statement. 
 Revolving it in a mind that was generally steady, but 
 seldom alert, he chuckled. His chuckles were an 
 inherent part of his conversation, and this one was 
 compact of admiration and surprise. 
 
 You certainly don t mind telling Jim what you 
 want," he said. 
 
 " It s the only way to deal with him : tell him 
 what you want, but not what you want it for. You 
 know how easy he is." She so despised her husband 
 that she could not speak pleasantly of him, even to 
 his successful rival. She leaned her chin on her 
 hand and her elbow on the sill of the open window. 
 The faint Spring breeze cooled her burning cheeks. 
 " I ve had it out with him this time," she added. 
 
 3. There it was. For weeks she and Charley 
 had approached this subject, smelled it, quivered, 
 circled, advanced, scampered away, like mice about 
 a bit of cheese that they desire, but fear may bait a 
 hidden trap ; like less heroic Caesars at the Cisalpine 
 river; finally like hunters on whom the quarry turns. 
 
 When they talked to each other, this was always 
 in the air. It was always in their minds. Not at 
 first. At first, on that red night when they had 
 plunged into their emotional Rubicon, they thought 
 of nothing save the delectable country on its other 
 side. Later, they found they could return to the bank
 
 6 JIM 
 
 that they had left, and the fields beyond the river 
 were only a pleasant playground. Yet gradually 
 they cared less and less about returning to that nearer 
 bank; gradually they did not want to return to it; 
 gradually they loathed the thought of returning. 
 For many days both felt the loathing, neither men 
 tioning it to the other, but each knowing what the 
 other felt. Then a look, or a sob, something less 
 than a word, made declaration. They shuddered at 
 the necessity of these returnings: why not make re 
 turn impossible? 
 
 Or the figure of the hunter : The thing, upon that 
 declaration, took shape in speech. It was now a hint, 
 now a hope, now a passionate avowal. Charley was 
 fearful and showed it; Edith fearful, but determined. 
 They temporized, because at heart they were conven 
 tional, but when they stood still in their pursuit, that 
 which they had pursued turned and attacked them. 
 They had to have it: divorce. 
 
 Then the frightful question of means: 
 
 " Jim s behaving himself," Edith had said, " just 
 to keep us from what he must guess we want. He is. 
 It s exactly like him to do that. He s a devil. That s 
 his way. He s always given me all of the little money 
 he can make given it to me as soon as it comes in 
 and simply because he wants to pretend to himself 
 that he s generous when what he s really after is not 
 to have the bother of paying the bills! " 
 
 Charley hop ed, but wondered. Was she sure that 
 Jim had ever 
 
 Of course she was ! The quietness of Jim s char 
 acter was proof sufficient: its silent surface fairly 
 babbled of depths.
 
 JIM 7 
 
 " Unfaithful! " Edith had said, looking past her 
 lover to the imagined figure of Jim. " That s what 
 Jim is: Models! It stands to reason it s so, for 
 ever since you and I got to be friendly (he s never 
 mentioned that we were, of course . . . his way 
 again!) well, ever since then he s not slept in 
 our bedroom: he s been sleeping alone in the 
 next room in the studio. You see, it stands to 
 reason." 
 
 They had no fear that Jim would himself sue for 
 a divorce and make a scandal. Time was when 
 Charley had thought tremblingly of such a mis 
 chance, but Edith, out of her experience of her hus 
 band, was bountifully reassuring. Jim, she said, 
 already knew it and had long known it: he did noth 
 ing, she was sure, because he probably concluded 
 that they, reckless of notoriety, wanted him to 
 do everything. Jim that formed her chiefest 
 complaint against him was not a man to do any 
 thing. 
 
 There then remained, they thus at last demon 
 strated, the one course only. Because they could 
 not find what they were convinced existed, they must 
 manufacture its counterfeit; they must "make a 
 case," and, since they were convinced that the reality 
 did indeed somewhere lie hidden since they argued 
 the punishment deserved this did not at once strike 
 them as unethical. Surely it would be useless to 
 apply to Jim to furnish them with real evidence: 
 " he," said Edith, " would just pretend he was too 
 chivalrous to give a woman away." Surely again, 
 it would be useless to ask him to supply a fictitious 
 case : " he loves to play at being magnanimous, but
 
 8 JIM 
 
 this would only give him a chance to say he was no 
 liar." Edith would go boldly to him, tell him that 
 she meant to free herself and count on his absurd 
 pride to answer: 
 
 " Very well, if you want to be free of me, you 
 must take the sin of perjury on yourself, but I won t 
 interfere to rob you of its reward." 
 
 She had told Charley that she would do this, and 
 he hoped that she would successfully do it, but his 
 was not the sort of mind to previsage. And now, 
 in one of the very rooms in which she lived with 
 Jim, here she was saying through the May twilight 
 that the thing was done : 
 
 " I ve had it out with him this time." 
 
 4. Charley took a deep breath: 
 
 " You don t mean " 
 
 Yes, I do. I told him that I wanted a divorce, 
 that I wanted him to let me get a divorce." 
 
 Her lover half rose: 
 
 "Did you tell him why?" 
 
 " I did. That was one case where I had to give 
 reasons. I said I didn t love him and wanted to 
 marry somebody else." 
 
 " Me? Did you say it was me? " 
 
 " I didn t have to. You know he understood that. 
 You know he guessed it long ago, even if he never 
 spoke of it. He d have guessed it sooner than he 
 did if he wasn t so wrapped up in those pictures 
 that he ll never do more than make a living out of 
 them ! " 
 
 " But if he has guessed Charley s voice 
 
 broke. " Do you think I d better stay here? "
 
 JIM 9 
 
 Edith laughed. "What nonsense! Doesn t this 
 show I can manage him? Oh, no; he thinks he s so 
 intellectual and superior that he s glad actually 
 glad to pose as a philosopher. He wants this 
 thing, because he wants to take it in a way that no 
 body else would. I humored him in that, and so 
 must you." She broke off sharply: "I m ashamed 
 to have been married to such a man! " 
 
 Charley was silent and she found his silence provo 
 cative. 
 
 " Oh, my dear, my dear," she cried, " you can t 
 know what I ve had to put up with. Not even you 
 can know. He can make his meanness look like 
 generosity, so as to make his meanness meaner. He 
 can make his cruelty look like kindness, so s it ll hurt 
 more. He fools everybody. There s Bishop Peel. 
 I don t go to church much, but I ve heard Bishop 
 Peel preach and he s the cleverest preacher I 
 ever did hear, but Jim could come close to fooling 
 him." 
 
 "At my club," began Charley: he belonged to 
 but one club and was very proud of belonging, 
 " they say " 
 
 Edith, however, had her own opinions. 
 
 " Just think of that portrait he painted of me," 
 she said. " He only did it to hurt my feelings. He 
 actually wanted me to pose in the old dressing-gown 
 I wear mornings, and when I wouldn t he painted it 
 in anyhow called it characteristic. And the 
 face If that s art I I know his friends say it makes 
 me look pretty, but they paint the same way he does. 
 It was only an insult, but it was an insult after years 
 of injury! "
 
 io JIM 
 
 Charley had resumed his seat, but his posture was 
 still uncertain. 
 
 " Anyhow," he said, " the man seems to me to be 
 rather decent in this." 
 
 " You don t know him," she retorted. " It s 
 nothing but conceit." 
 
 " Then its lucky for us he s conceited, Edith. 
 How much did you tell him? " 
 
 "All I had to, but no more." 
 
 " Does he know for sure ? " 
 
 " He pretends he thinks it s all on the high spirit 
 ual plane that he puts himself on, and I daresay 
 he half believes it is." 
 
 Charley settled more comfortably in his chair. 
 
 " He s promised not to contest? " 
 
 " Yes, he s promised." 
 
 " Does he know you ll probably bring suit in this 
 state?" 
 
 " I suppose so. It can t make any difference." 
 
 " But in New York there s only one ground." 
 
 " Oh, he s so much in the clouds, he ll never re 
 member that." 
 
 " He ll be told about it, as soon as he talks to his 
 lawyer." 
 
 " He won t talk to his lawyer. He said he would 
 n t; he s too proud to show that he takes any interest. 
 He said all he d do would be to write to a lawyer to 
 represent him formally, not interfere, and not bother 
 him again till it was all over. He s going to do 
 exactly what we want him to do : nothing." 
 
 " So he says." Charley was still doubtful. " But 
 do you think he ll stick to it? " 
 
 " I know I can make him stick to it."
 
 JIM n 
 
 Vanaman sighed, whether from relief or contin 
 ued doubt. Certainly he had a distaste that Edith 
 did not share. 
 
 " Well," he said, " I guess it ll be all right then. 
 We re to do what you what we planned? " 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 " I m to give the evidence you told me to?" he 
 persisted. 
 
 " Yes. And you re to get some detective or other 
 to back you up." 
 
 Charley gulped audibly. 
 
 Her face was still turned toward the scented dark 
 ness of the street, but her hand sought his. 
 
 " I love you," she said, quietly. 
 
 His hand returned her pressure. He leaned for 
 ward to kiss her, but, midway, he wavered as if 
 some force from without, some force to which he 
 was not yet a stranger, restrained him. 
 
 " It does seem like a phony trick," he ventured. 
 
 " What does? " Her words were a challenge, but 
 the movement that preceded them was made as 
 if the force that checked Vanaman pushed her 
 away. 
 
 " Why, all this " he hung over the descriptive 
 word " frame-up." 
 
 Edith rose. 
 
 "It s not a frame-up; it s not anything of the 
 kind," she said. The utterance of the denial helped 
 her first to anger and then to honest conviction as 
 she continued : " I ve told you it was the truth 
 really. I m perfectly certain he s been guilty some 
 time or other. So were you, Charley: you said so 
 yourself. Only we can t prove it. What s the
 
 12 JIM 
 
 difference whether he was guilty last year or last 
 week? I believe you like the man! " 
 
 It is so much easier to lie under oath than to lie 
 in ordinary conversation. Charley contemplated 
 perjury with increasing calm; but here was a seri 
 ous matter. 
 
 " I don t exactly dislike him," said Vanaman. He 
 added, with sincerity: "Except for what he s done 
 to you." 
 
 But his first words had completed the regrowth 
 of Edith s momentarily retarded self-assurance. 
 She could go ahead now. She must. 
 
 " Well, he thinks you re no better than the dirt 
 under his feet. I can tell you some things he s said 
 about you, and I will when we ve more time. He 
 pretends to pity you so as to have an excuse to laugh 
 at you. He s always laughing at that invention of 
 yours. Only yesterday he as much as said you were 
 as stupid as you were hopeful. If such a miracle 
 is possible, is the way he said it." 
 
 Charley wriggled. His invention and his belief 
 that he was clever were tender points with him. 
 
 " There s money in my game," he said, " and 
 there isn t any in Jim s." 
 
 " Then listen." It was too dark for them to see 
 each other s faces, but Edith spread wide her arms. 
 " Whatever I ve done was for you. Whatever I 
 will do will be for you. It s not wrong; but if it was 
 I d do it for your sake. It s our only chance, Char 
 ley. Sb if you don t want me, say so now, for by 
 to-morrow it ll be too late. I m to leave this apart 
 ment in the morning." 
 
 His answer was the answer that, loving him, shf
 
 JIM 13 
 
 could not but want. The jibes of Jim s scorn 
 added to the strength of her appeal. Charley rose 
 and put his arms about her. He said what she 
 had said a few moments before. He said: 
 " I love you."
 
 SECOND CHAPTER 
 
 "TT NOW thyself," adjured the Greek philoso- 
 ^ pher, and left us without a text-book. It 
 is a text-book unlikely ever to be compiled, 
 and yet not until a man knows himself can he know 
 another man. How much is environment and how 
 much heredity? The seed is lost in the root, the 
 cause in the effect. Could they be found, the puzzle 
 would still remain infinite. When the inevitable 
 results of environment had been subtracted, and the 
 inevitable results of heredity, what would be left 
 that was the individual soul, and what for which the 
 individual soul was responsible? Years of intimacy 
 refuse the answer, a lifelong familiarity fails to 
 produce the perfect acquaintance. Hate under 
 stands much, but not all; love understands more, but 
 not all; only omniscience can suffice. Thus you and 
 your neighbor; thus she that once was Edith Moxton 
 and now was Edith Trent. 
 
 Edith Moxton used to sit in the twilight and 
 dream dreams; Edith Trent sat in the twilight and 
 dreamed them. The woman at the apartment-house 
 window had been the girl of the small up-state town. 
 Now she was Edith Trent with nothing of Edith 
 Moxton about her; they had in common only the hu 
 man organism that both had in common with all 
 humanity; they were impassable miles apart. The 
 very trail that led from that earliest Edith to this 
 latest was lost in the desert of her life; choked by 
 
 14
 
 JIM 15 
 
 weeds, obliterated by drifting sands, barred by 
 boulders. Even thought could not trace it. 
 
 Edith Moxton s home had been in a western New 
 York town called Ayton, and her life there was a 
 life among failures. Her mother died in child 
 birth, leaving three sons and Edith, the third child, 
 to the care of a trio of aunts for whom Edith s 
 father provided a more or less precarious livelihood 
 until he succumbed to general inefficiency. He had 
 kept a " grocery-store " held it by the severest ex 
 ertions, since it was always trying to run away from 
 him and the effort was entirely too great. 
 
 " It s his kidneys," his sister Caroline used to 
 say. " He finds the grocery business very trying 
 on the kidneys." 
 
 When the grocery had quite crushed Mr. Moxton, 
 and his estate was settled, the store made a last leap 
 for freedom and got away altogether, Uncle Morty, 
 one of the decedent s two surviving brothers, 
 mounted gayly on its back and spurring it splen 
 didly forward. Uncle Morty had a bald head, a 
 pug-nose, an overhanging red mustache, and little 
 brown eyes, and when he returned to the Moxton 
 house he returned on foot. He always said that his 
 mount had thrown him; Edith, in later years, always 
 said that he traded it for a bicycle-shop of which 
 he presently appeared to be the owner. 
 
 Then began Edith s girlhood. In this the most 
 important factor was her relatives. 
 
 First and least important, there was her other 
 uncle, Uncle Gregory. He was a fat man that 
 breathed hard. His voice was as sharp as a par 
 rot s and, indeed, he looked a good deal like a plump
 
 16 JIM 
 
 cockatoo a cockatoo in shepherd s plaid. He was 
 said to practice painless dentistry in Chicago, but he 
 had no need to pass from practice to proficiency: he 
 selected from among his woman-patients one that 
 combined money with heavy chances of mortality, 
 married her, inherited her estate and kept it to 
 himself. On his rare visits to Ayton, he was wor 
 shiped by his three sisters, Edith s aunts, who occa 
 sionally secured a month s house-rent in return ; but 
 Edith disliked him because he used to call her 
 " Poor Penelope " she never knew why and she 
 would evoke her aunt s awed laughter by thrusting 
 out her chest, puffing her little cheeks, and present 
 ing a passable caricature of him. 
 
 Douglas, the youngest of Edith s brothers, early 
 left home for Rochester, where he managed to get 
 a place in the camera-factory; just as he reached a 
 salary that, as his Aunt Polly put it, " might have 
 helped," he returned to Ayton to marry a girl that 
 the family considered inferior: they saw little of 
 him thereafter. The eldest brother, Fred, married 
 a well-to-do girl in Duncannon, Pennsylvania, and 
 got control of his blind brother-in-law s business. 
 With that business he took over a blond stenog 
 rapher, the daughter of a waiter in a Philadelphia 
 cafe of odd repute. When, at last, the stenographer 
 took over Fred, she got the business along with 
 him or its capital and the pair vanished in the 
 dust-cloud of the collapse. Stephen, the remaining 
 son, having a less sprightly mind than either of his 
 brothers, was sent to Hobart and educated for the 
 Episcopal ministry, which his aunts somehow con 
 sidered was a means of making a gentleman of him.
 
 JIM 17 
 
 He acquired, with laudable celerity, that hall-mark 
 of proficient anglicanism, the art of microscopic 
 penmanship, and was soon able to open his Bible 
 at random and compose a sermon that found a hid 
 den wealth of divine counsel in the very conjunc 
 tions and prepositions of any verse he chanced 
 upon. He had a pretty, bovine face and the stub 
 born sullenness of native stupidity. Nevertheless, 
 he knew enough to talk little, out of his pulpit, so 
 he acquired a parish in Batavia. He also married 
 money, in the person of a former sweetheart of his 
 sprightly brother Fred ; but she held her own purse, 
 and the aunts, who had been outspoken in their 
 expectations, profited not at all. 
 
 Those aunts were self-seeking only because they 
 were unsought. Essentially, they were harmless 
 enough creatures; town-gossip had concerned itself 
 with them in their younger days, but the ebb of their 
 charms left the flat shore of their later life vacu 
 ously even. Of the three, Caroline, the eldest, was 
 considered the lady : her role was to do none of the 
 housework (the Moxtons could no longer afford a 
 servant) and to sit all day in the shaded parlor, made 
 up to resemble Martha Washington, in black silk, 
 with a bit of white lace at her throat, her high- 
 heaped coiffure looking as if it were powdered; she 
 kept her lips pursed and her hands folded; in reality, 
 poverty had made her a coward, and her aim in life 
 was the avoidance of further discomfort. Polly, 
 the youngest, was a fat and frank vulgarian, who 
 came home after the failures of the various ribbon- 
 shops that she would from time to time borrow 
 money to establish; she used to say she had one of
 
 i8 JIM 
 
 those voices, born for interruption, which drown all 
 competitors that she liked to eat apple-sauce with 
 pork "because it cuts the grease"; for ten years 
 she told her friends that there was every likelihood 
 of her marrying a Buffalo lawyer, but, at the end of 
 a decade, the Buffalo lawyer married another woman, 
 and Polly s own lawyer decided that there were not 
 sufficient grounds for Polly s proposed breach-of- 
 promise suit. 
 
 Remained Aunt Hattie stout, kittenish Aunt Hat- 
 tie of the beady black eyes, the perpetually fluttering 
 eyelids, the ineradicable smile. On her uncomplain 
 ing shoulders descended all the work of the house, 
 yet she accomplished it and had time, though not 
 always pupils, for music-lessons. At the piano she 
 possessed facility without feeling, a prevalent di 
 vision, and she liked easy shoes and strict clergymen. 
 Especially the clergymen. " My nephew the clergy 
 man " haunted her conversation like a Wagnerian 
 motif. Her memory was a portrait-gallery entirely 
 filled by the long succession of clergymen that, 
 during her lifetime, had been rectors of her parish- 
 church. That the full-fledged priest, even in 
 Stephen, was an archangel to her eyes logically 
 follows, and of what a Bishop was, reverence for 
 bids mention; but there long endured one lay- 
 reader, a Mr. Tschudy, otherwise engaged in the 
 sardine-line, whom she daily quoted with a gusto that 
 placed him above Epiphanius. For, with her, re 
 ligion was not only a passion; it was all the passions 
 and, what is well-nigh as important, all the joys 
 one might perhaps better say the sole joy of her 
 stifled heart. It was not merely joyous; it was
 
 JIM 19 
 
 hilarious. Those apostles who urged upon the early 
 Christians the joy of religion would have been 
 amazed had they known Aunt Hattie and seen how 
 her rock-founded faith was a temple of glee. What 
 Mr. Gilbert s Mikado found in the perfection of 
 human justice, Aunt Hattie discovered in the per 
 fection of her own creed: "a source of infinite 
 merriment." She loved to front the skeptics; she 
 would rout them with laughter. 
 
 "Ha, ha!" she would laugh. "Ha, ha! But 
 you can t oh, ha, ha, ho, ho ! you can t get away j - 
 ha, ha! You can t get away from Jesus Christ! " 
 
 These were the persons, absent and present, whose 
 influence pervaded the shifting Moxton habitation. 
 Nor were the houses in which the family dwelt 
 they had to move often and always to a smaller 
 house any better suited for the rearing of a girl 
 that was to become an artist s wife. 
 
 Except in size, they were much alike, those houses. 
 The first-floor front was always reserved as Uncle 
 Morty s bedroom, and the rear room on the same 
 floor was always a sitting-room, where the sewing- 
 machine was kept and where were done the darnings, 
 the takings-in, the lettings-out, the almost miraculous 
 regenerations of the family wardrobe. The other 
 upstairs rooms were parceled out among the aunts 
 with a care for Caroline s gentility and Polly s 
 assertiveness: Hattie could go anywhere, and Edith 
 must find such place as was left. Finally, the 
 front room on the ground floor was the parlor. 
 Either because of convention inherited from rustic 
 ancestors, or because its windows looked so directly 
 on the pavement of the street that pedestrians could
 
 20 JIM 
 
 see inside, this chamber was kept in a perpetual 
 gloom. It contained the old square piano; a horse 
 hair sofa that sagged in the middle, but sent dar 
 ing occupants sliding off at the ends; a crayon por 
 trait of Edith s father in a ponderous gilt frame, and, 
 decorated with what Aunt Caroline called a " tidy," 
 the hair-stuffed spring-rocking-chair in which, she 
 was wont to inform the visitor that sat in it, her 
 dear brother had died. Aunt Caroline used to de 
 scribe his last agonies with what was the only spark 
 of literary feeling in the Moxton menage. 
 
 Everybody deferred to the pug-nosed, red- 
 mustached Uncle Morty. To him even Aunt Caroline 
 was second. What money the house secured was 
 largely dependent upon his whim, and his whim was 
 the child of his comfort. The result was a lesson 
 in eugenics. Uncle Morty s bedroom was sacred; 
 the cooking of a beefsteak beyond the shade of 
 Uncle Morty s taste in meat-colors was a genuine 
 calamity; Uncle Morty s jokes must be applauded; 
 if his slippers were not warmed for him every even 
 ing if his bag were not packed on the Summer 
 morning before he, the only member of the family 
 to take a vacation, started for Cape May, grocer s 
 bills were sure to be overdue. 
 
 Edith did not love these people or their surround 
 ings. Her Uncle Gregory she had always ridiculed; 
 her Uncle Morty she feared. She despised Douglas 
 because of his unfortunate marriage; Fred, whom 
 she began by liking, she ended by mistrusting, and 
 Stephen, when the childish reverence for him that 
 she had learned from her aunts wore away, she pro- 
 jiounced a bore. Her Aunt Polly, Edith enjoyed so
 
 JIM 21 
 
 long as none of her friends was about to observe 
 the woman s coarseness, but Caroline and the patient 
 Hattie were types that do not attract the admiration 
 of girlhood. 
 
 For this, her companionships and amusements, of 
 which she had as many as most girls, could not com 
 pensate. Failure, she early realized, was all about 
 her; it surrounded her, smothered her. The town 
 was a failure that was the era when the American 
 cities began most heavily to drain the smaller towns 
 Uncle Morty and her aunts were failures; her 
 brothers with the possible exception of Fred, who 
 had at least the spirit of adventure in him, which she 
 loved were failures in a subtler, but equally dread 
 ful way. And Edith, perhaps at first from the sheer 
 human demand for contrast, hungered and thirsted 
 for success. 
 
 Thus grew the dominant appetite of her life: her 
 hatred of failure and that hatred s corresponding 
 love of success. She wanted to climb out of the one 
 and into the other. She would sacrifice anything for 
 that. She wanted to replace Ayton by New York. 
 She wanted to be quit of pinched pennies. She 
 wanted, at first only a measure, and then a great 
 deal of ease and comfort, of notice and attention 
 and gayety. Her father, out of the wreck wrought 
 by the grocery-store, had left her a little money 
 not much, but a little. When she came into that, 
 she would use it to gain her heart s desire. She 
 wanted to be a woman that was not carebound, with 
 a man of that company which does the things that 
 count. This was poetry to her and romance. She 
 dreamed of it; night by night she prayed for it.
 
 22 JIM 
 
 Then, when she was twenty-one, Uncle Morty, as 
 her father s executor, showed her figures to explain 
 how her inheritance had been consumed by the avun 
 cular outlay for her board, clothes, and education. 
 Until she met Jim, who came from the neighboring 
 town of Bryll, there was no way out. 
 
 She fell in love with Jim. She made him the 
 way out. 
 
 2. In the Episcopal Church there was in those 
 days it still lingers here and there a strong prej 
 udice against divorce. Stephen had put it on as a 
 matter of course as he had put on his surplice and 
 accepted the Thirty-nine Articles, which, to save his 
 life, he could not have repeated. Uncle Gregory 
 had it: death had rid him of his wife. The aunts 
 had it: they had never married. Douglas and 
 Fred did not matter. In this one particular, Edith 
 started by sharing the feelings of the majority of 
 her family. Probably very few people marry with 
 any thought of divorce. Certainly she did not. 
 Yet she was now planning a divorce. 
 
 She had decided that Jim was a failure. She was 
 sure she could have forgiven him for being what 
 she described as " too slow ": she could not forgive 
 anyone for stopping short of success. 
 
 In New York she was living better than any Mox- 
 ton had ever lived in Ayton; but that was not the 
 point. She was particular about her clothes, prefer 
 ring the expensive old to an inexpensive new; but 
 that was not the point. She liked this small suite of 
 studio-apartments in Sixty-seventh Street with its 
 undeniable beauties and conveniences, its proximity
 
 JIM 23 
 
 to the St. Nicholas Rink, and its nearness to the 
 great Park that made the Park seem partly hers; 
 but neither was that the point. The point was that 
 she was here what she had been in Ayton: she was 
 subservient to the restriction of conditions; what dif 
 ference there was was of degree. Pinched pennies 
 had given place to pinched fifty-cent pieces : the pinch 
 was as deep as ever. So far as she could see, Jim 
 would live and die an unknown and struggling artist. 
 She hated failure : Jim personified it. 
 
 His friends wearied her as much as he did: they 
 talked of art as if it were a serious business, and they 
 treated her with a politeness in which she read noth 
 ing but an amused toleration. Her own acquaint 
 ances were better: she disliked, to be sure, the prim 
 Mrs. Entwhistle, who lived in the suite across the 
 hall and called dutifully every tenth day whether 
 Edith returned the call or not ; and she snubbed pretty 
 Effie Mitchell, who also lived in the studio-building 
 and was suspected of not being quite all that she 
 should be ; but Muriel Carson was a good girl whom 
 Edith respected, and Mrs. Dunbar, who had been 
 mere Jean Dent in Ayton, was now married to a 
 young broker with a family that lived on Madison 
 Avenue Edith cultivated Muriel for Muriel s own 
 sake and Mrs. Dunbar for the sake of Madison Ave 
 nue; both had invited Mrs. Trent to their houses, 
 and Mrs. Trent met successful people there. Finally, 
 into her life Diana Wentworth had lately come and 
 gave promise of remaining. 
 
 Diana was a higher assistant in a free library, 
 but aspired to better things. She wore dark gowns 
 and had black hair, both of which served to en-
 
 24 JIM 
 
 hance the merits of a pale face, handsomely mod 
 eled. She talked a pseudo-radicalism, full of capital 
 letters, which rather shocked Edith. When it 
 appeared that Jim did not care for Diana, Edith 
 felt moved to like her. After that the friendship 
 progressed. 
 
 " Freedom," Diana would sigh. " That is what 
 Woman requires: Freedom. She must not be de 
 pendent on Man s favors. She must make Man give 
 her Freedom." 
 
 They got along splendidly now: they shared a 
 basis of conventionality that each thought the other 
 lacked. 
 
 For such a woman as Edith to have a child is 
 sometimes the salvation of the mother, as it is some 
 times the damnation of the child, but Edith, avoid 
 ing what Diana described as " the ultimate servi 
 tude," hungered, as we have seen, for another sort 
 of success. During a long time she reached for 
 it timidly and touched it only in secret. Her first 
 philandering she bitterly regretted; the second re 
 sulted only in fears of detection; after that, until 
 she met Charley, such pleasantries were no more 
 than the price she paid for a few hours taste of 
 freedom from care. " You re the sort of woman 
 that never knows a stone-wall till she s batted her 
 head against it," George Mertcheson had once said 
 to her; she wondered if she had struck her head 
 against the stone-wall now. 
 
 3. It was Jim that presented Charley. They 
 had met a few times at Charley s club, and the hus 
 band brought Vanaman home with him.
 
 JIM 25 
 
 For a week, perhaps a fortnight, she thought 
 Vanaman uncouth. She ridiculed him to her friends. 
 Then, quite suddenly, she was in love. She knew 
 now that she had been so from the moment of their 
 meeting. 
 
 Much has been said against love at first sight, 
 most of it unconvincing. Really, there is no other 
 sort of love. What grows slowly, cautiously, may be 
 more enduring; it may be friendship, it may be last 
 ing affection, but it is not love. Deliberation, self- 
 examination these involve doubt and hesitancy, and 
 where love is there can be neither hesitancy nor 
 doubt. Friendship and affection come from within 
 us and, beginning in the brain, extend to the heart; 
 but love comes, when it comes at all, from without ; 
 it comes as if it were some elemental force that 
 sweeps from the infinite through the universe, that 
 catches up and engulfs such frail humanity as chances 
 in its path, and sweeps its victims forward to its 
 own ends. A pair of lovers are as helpless as two 
 bits of driftwood on a tidal-wave: the wave bears 
 them with it, reckless of their will. 
 
 It was in this fashion Edith loved Vanaman. She 
 had never had the power of seeing things in their 
 beginning, though, when she did see them, she saw 
 them in strong lights. This light was as the full 
 gaze of the sun: it blinded her to everything else; 
 it blotted out all the lesser lights of the past. What 
 she called uncouthness she now called power. 
 
 Charley was an inventor, not a mere painter of pic 
 tures that a few persons might or might not care 
 about, but a force that could leave its impress in every 
 corner of the globe, on trade, on affairs, on the daily
 
 26 JIM 
 
 lives of men and women as yet unborn. He was no 
 mere mechanic; indeed, he had no talent for tools: 
 what he had was a mighty idea. Moreover, he had 
 traveled in strange countries; the launching of his 
 telegraphic sounder was bringing him into contact 
 with financial giants; he was the only son of a well- 
 to-do father. Here at last was success; here at last 
 was a man that had done something and would do 
 more. It did not matter that she was slightly his 
 senior. She thrilled at his touch; she hung on his 
 words; when he came near her, the blood flooded 
 her cheeks and dimmed her sight; the first time that 
 he kissed her, she nearly fainted in his arms. 
 
 And to Vanaman Edith was all that he was to 
 her. His earliest glance saw her as a woman of such 
 radiant health that it seemed as if nothing man could 
 do to her would hurt her; his later talks convinced 
 him that she was a neglected beauty chained to an 
 unappreciative failure. At his own home his father 
 generally discouraged talk of the invention, but 
 Edith urged him to talk of it. He read in her the 
 adventurous soul; himself a shy man, not the least 
 of his inventions were most of his adventures; but 
 from her he felt that he could draw the courage 
 to make his business-venture real. When he talked 
 to her, the dreary repression of his own home faded 
 into the remotest distance. Here was a brave 
 woman, a woman that dared; here was his oppo 
 site, his completion. Before her vanished the 
 bluster with which he habitually hid his shyness; 
 his carefully assumed air of rugged effrontery was 
 replaced by a new tenderness. He could not enter 
 the room in which she sat without experiencing that
 
 JIM 27 
 
 physical exaltation which told him he was another 
 man. Married to Edith, he would be that man until 
 the day he died. He had the conventional sense 
 of honor that few conventional men possess had 
 it so entirely that he never thought of retaining 
 without marriage the gift that he had filched from 
 marriage. He felt that he needed Edith in a rela 
 tion in which he could present her, at last, to his 
 world; he felt that he must have her in the bonds 
 of a companionship that, though he and she com 
 bined to break her companionship with Jim, were 
 still the strongest man had devised; he felt that 
 duty pointed where need pointed and desire: so long 
 as there was no other way to have her, he wanted 
 Edith for his mistress; but, above all else, he wanted, 
 so soon as he could bring the change about, to make 
 her his wife. 
 
 Since they saw each other in this light, it was 
 scarcely to be expected that either of them would see 
 Edith as she was seen in the picture her husband 
 had painted of her. Charley hated that picture 
 almost as much as he hated the fact of Edith s mar 
 riage; Edith hated it almost as much as she hated 
 Jim. Charley thought of her always as she was with 
 him; Edith thought of herself always as she was 
 after six o clock in the evening: the picture was an 
 obvious attempt to represent her at 8 A.M. 
 
 " And I asked him," she had complained to one 
 of Jim s artist friends, " what he was going to call 
 it, and he said he was going to call it A Woman ! " 
 
 The friend looked at her with mild incomprehen 
 sion. 
 
 "Well," he said, "it is a woman, isn t it?"
 
 28 JIM 
 
 4. When Charley had left her on that decisive 
 Spring evening, she reseated herself at the window 
 and tried again to review many of these things. 
 They fixed her determination. They intensified her 
 hunger for the success at hand and lashed her to 
 indignation against the failure that still surrounded 
 her. They sharpened her love for Vanaman. 
 
 Well, it was done now, the thing that would end 
 the past and begin the future. She had told Jim 
 she would take apartments for herself next morn 
 ing, and she had secured his promise to pay the 
 rent for them until the granting of the divorce. 
 More than that she had not hoped for: Charley 
 must help her and alimony she would not seek for 
 the excellent reason that the least alimony and 
 even Edith knew this could easily be proved was 
 beyond Jim s means. 
 
 So she might think now about Charley. His 
 father was a crabbed old man, an old-fashioned 
 old man who disliked her, but there was no use 
 in blinking at facts an old man who was dying. 
 Charley s sister, who, with Charley, would thus 
 soon be the only survivor of the Vanaman family, 
 was an utterly suppressed person, a nonentity. 
 Nothing stood against Edith s plans, and with them 
 stood love, the resolution to succeed, and this Spring 
 evening s wonderful promise of a youth renewed. 
 
 Only last Sunday she had heard the good Bishop 
 Peel preach a sermon on the joy of youth. He read 
 from the Psalms : 
 
 " Bless the Lord, O my soul . . . who redeemeth 
 thy life from destruction . . . so that thy youth is 
 renewed like the eagle s." Her youth was renewed,
 
 JIM 29 
 
 and she thanked God for it. Her youth was re 
 newed, and, thank God, she was going to give it to 
 Charley. 
 
 There was another sound at the door. It was Jim 
 coming home.
 
 THIRD CHAPTER 
 
 A he picked up the telephone-receiver in his bed 
 room on that raw Monday morning in Octo 
 ber, Vanaman noticed that his hand shook, 
 and it occurred to him to wonder if he was afraid 
 of the woman he was about to talk to. He could 
 not understand how it was possible for a man to be 
 afraid of a woman that he loved. 
 
 u Hudson, one-two-nine-three," he ordered. 
 
 In his ear the number was presently repeated: 
 
 " One-two-nine-thr-r-ree, Hudson." 
 
 " That s right," said Vanaman. 
 
 It was only a little while before that he had 
 crawled out of bed. There was a mirror on the wall 
 beside the telephone and, as he waited, he glanced 
 at it. 
 
 " I m fine, I am ! " he muttered to his reflection. 
 " I look almost as bad as I feel." 
 
 He was indeed looking badly. Ordinarily a short, 
 stocky man with pink cheeks and an aggressive face, 
 to-day he seemed shrunken and dull. His eyes, al 
 ways prominent, were now red and bulging like a 
 frog s. His hair, which he had not yet brushed, rose 
 dry and brittle from his round poll, and his mouth 
 hung so heavily that it tugged at his cheeks. He 
 remembered that, after taking Edith back to her 
 rooms last night, he had gone to his club and had 
 some more to drink, but he could not remember 
 leaving the club. He fervently hoped that he had 
 
 30
 
 JIM 31 
 
 not disgraced himself there; in his affections and 
 pride his club held a place next to Edith and his 
 invention. . . . Well, he must stop at a barber s 
 and have his face massaged. He thought of the 
 grateful hot towels. . . . The massage would take 
 away the physical signs of his mistake: he had not 
 been a heavy drinker for a long enough time to 
 bear indelible markings. But he did hope that, at 
 the club, 
 
 "Hello!" 
 
 The word was sharp and irritable. It darted into 
 his head as if it were an arrow. 
 
 Charley started. " I wish she wouldn t spring 
 herself that way," he thought. But he achieved a 
 smile ; he felt that, even in a telephone conversation 
 with Edith, his face must not show disloyalty. After 
 all, he was not disloyal; he was, and for months had 
 been, for the first time in his life, thoroughly in 
 love. 
 
 " Good-morning, dear," he said. 
 
 "Who s talking?" 
 
 He was annoyed. Could there, he reflected, be 
 any mistake? 
 
 " Isn t this Mrs. Trent? " he inquired. 
 
 " If you don t tell me who s talking, I ll ring off." 
 
 No mistaking her voice now: it was Edith s. 
 
 " This is Charley," said Vanaman. " Didn t you 
 recognize me? " 
 
 " No, I didn t." 
 
 " But, dearie, I ve been calling you about this time 
 every morning for weeks, and 
 
 " And I ve always told you to give your name first. 
 You know we can t be too careful."
 
 32 JIM 
 
 " Nonsense. It doesn t matter now. It s all over 
 but the signing of the decree." 
 
 " Perhaps it is, but you can never tell. I m be 
 ginning to believe this thing hasn t any end." 
 
 Vanaman chuckled. He was one of those men 
 who like to feel that the women they love are their 
 inferiors in common sense. 
 
 "Poof!" said he. "That s what I wanted to 
 talk to you about. I ve just been calling up Schultz s 
 office. I slept late this morning, and I thought per 
 haps " 
 
 "What did he say?" 
 
 " Just a moment, please. I slept late, and I 
 thought perhaps " 
 
 " Oh, do tell me what the lawyer said! " 
 
 " All right." It seemed to Vanaman that he was 
 always being interrupted. " He said there was no 
 question the decree would be signed to-day." 
 
 Charley believed that this would be good news 
 and would be received accordingly, but the voice 
 in his ear began its reply with a gasp of dissatis 
 faction. 
 
 " To-day? I should think it would! Don t they 
 know that we want to have it all straightened out 
 by this afternoon? " 
 
 "Why, Edith " 
 
 " Didn t you tell Schultz that? I told you to tell 
 him that." 
 
 " Yes, I told him that; but Schultz isn t the judge, 
 dear." 
 
 " Well, he can tell the judge." 
 
 "How could he, Edith? He s only one of the 
 lawyers in the case, and the "
 
 JIM 33 
 
 " If he s much of a lawyer, I should think he 
 could hurry things a little. Is that all he said? " 
 
 " Yes, that s all, but it s pretty good. You 
 see " 
 
 " Why don t you come up here? " 
 
 Vanaman s haggard cheeks colored with the red 
 of pleasure. 
 
 " I was going to ask if I might," he said. " I 
 thought it would be so nice if we could be together 
 when the news came. I thought " 
 
 " All right. Come on." 
 
 There was a click in his ear. He knew that she 
 had hung up the receiver at her end of the line. 
 
 2. Vanaman turned to dress. He was a man 
 approaching thirty, already tending toward slug 
 gishness. He was inclined to be careless in the 
 matter of his clothes; when, for instance, he wanted 
 to appear fashionable, and thought he was going to 
 a place where he would not have to open his over 
 coat, his custom was to retain a sack suit and put 
 on a silk hat. This morning, however, he made his 
 toilet, though painfully, with uncommon care. 
 
 The past few months had allowed him days and 
 nights of delirious happiness, but not one hour of 
 comfort. The Summer vacation had brought to a 
 standstill all his endeavors toward interesting finan 
 ciers in his invention, and motion had not been re 
 sumed with the arrival of Autumn. That was bad 
 enough. What was worse was the tedious delay of 
 Edith s divorce. 
 
 Once it had devised divorce, the law seemed labo 
 riously to have hedged it about with the most in-
 
 34 JIM 
 
 genious difficulties. Charley had known, of course, 
 that, whereas the consent of the two principals is 
 necesary to the making of a marriage, the opposi 
 tion of one is the sine qua non to its dissolution 
 that the only reason why two persons can be married 
 is that they want to be, and the only reason why they 
 cannot end their marriage in a mutual wish to end 
 it but, with that lightness of heart with which all 
 who do not know the law enter upon litigation, he 
 supposed Jim s merely formal denial, through a law 
 yer, of the charges in the libel would suffice. 
 
 Not at all. The trouble began with the search 
 for a lawyer; it could not truthfully be said to be 
 ended yet. 
 
 " We d better have somebody one of us knows," 
 Edith had suggested. " Why not get your father s 
 lawyer? What s his name? Mr. Zoller." 
 
 " He s too close to the old man," said Charley. 
 
 " Oh, nonsense. Lawyers have to keep their 
 clients secrets. That s professional etiquette." 
 
 They went to Mr. Zoller, a hard, dry little man 
 of fifty, who had a cold eye. He listened to Edith s 
 story with an expression increasingly grim. When 
 Charley followed and began the account of Jim s in 
 fidelity which the lovers had agreed to present, Mr. 
 Zoller interrupted by sending Edith out of his stuffy 
 room. Then he turned to Charley. 
 
 " I can t take this case," he said. 
 
 Charley s eyes bulged. 
 
 "Why not?" he asked. 
 
 " Do you want me to tell you? " 
 
 Charley smelt suspicion, but he had to bluster, so 
 he said:
 
 JIM 35 
 
 " Yes, I do. Didn t we come here to consult 
 you?" 
 
 " Very well. I won t take it because it doesn t 
 sound straight." 
 
 Vanaman s color faded. It was all that he could 
 do to demand: 
 
 " Are you trying to tell me that I m a liar? " 
 
 " I said it didn t sound straight," the lawyer 
 calmly explained. " Perhaps I had better have said 
 it didn t look straight. I ve known you since you 
 were a boy up in Carmel, Charley, and, anyhow, 
 you ve told me to speak out. Well, anybody can see 
 you re in love with the woman, and I m too good a 
 friend of your father s to play him a trick like this. 
 Good-afternoon." 
 
 Charley recovered enough command of himself to 
 storm until he saw it was of no use. After that he 
 devoted his remaining energies toward recalling to 
 Mr. Zoller the lawyer s professional duty to keep 
 his client s affairs to himself. 
 
 " I think," said Mr. Zoller, " that I know quite 
 as much about my duties as you do, Charley. Good- 
 afternoon." 
 
 The expurgated report of this conversation upset 
 Edith, and the reply of the next lawyer upon whom 
 they called angered her still more. He curtly told 
 them that he did not handle divorce-cases. 
 
 " The idea ! " she cried, as they left the second 
 office. " Isn t he a lawyer, and isn t divorce the 
 law?" 
 
 There were tears of vexation in her eyes. She 
 was too discouraged to seek farther that day. 
 
 By the next morning, Charley had bethought him-
 
 36 JIM 
 
 self of a friend lately admitted to the bar. They 
 found him only to be told that their case was not 
 strong enough. 
 
 " But you might try Leishman," he suggested with 
 the tolerant cynicism of the newly-made lawyer: 
 " he ll take anything." 
 
 They did try Leishman. On the way to him they 
 felt forced considerably to strengthen their case. 
 Leishman s weary face showed no signs of approval. 
 
 "Where s your corroboration? " he asked. 
 " You re not enough, you know, Mr. Vanaman." 
 
 Charley remembered that he had meant to per 
 suade a private detective. 
 
 " There s a detective " he began. 
 
 Leishman interrupted. His eyes fixed Charley s 
 with a meaning stare. 
 
 1 You re sure the husband s lawyer will make only 
 a formal defense and cross-examination?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 The stare was turned on Edith. 
 You, too, madam?" 
 
 " Oh, yes," said Edith. 
 
 Leishman returned his significant glance to 
 Charley. 
 
 " It would be a curious coincidence," said Leish 
 man, slowly, " if the detective you mean is one in the 
 employ of the Canarde Agency." 
 
 " I m not sure " began Charley. 
 
 Leishman raised his hand. His eyes glared. 
 
 " Because," he concluded, " the Canarde people 
 are friends of mine, and I know they do satisfac 
 tory work for my clients thoroughly satisfactory." 
 
 It was Edith who first understood him.
 
 JIM 37 
 
 " The detective does come from the Grenarde 
 Agency," she said. 
 
 Her voice was low, but Leishman caught her 
 error. 
 
 " Canarde," he said; "not Grenarde." 
 
 " Canarde, of course," said Edith. They would 
 have to do it now. 
 
 But Leishman was proceeding: 
 
 " And you say, Mr. Vanaman, that this detective 
 from the Canarde C-a-n-a-r-d-e Agency, whose 
 name you have for the moment forgotten, was with 
 you when you entered the house that you had seen 
 Mr. er Mr. Trent enter half an hour before." 
 
 In this manner he performed the task that he 
 called " building up the case." When he had fin 
 ished with Charley, he secured additional details 
 from Edith. There was no resisting him : he would 
 compel an initial lie by remarking that, of course, if 
 such-and-such were not the facts, a decree would 
 be impossible, but that he was sure such-and-such 
 really were the facts, weren t they? The step would 
 be taken and a hundred more, all unimagined at the 
 start, followed upon it inevitably. By the time 
 these clients left Leishman s office, the least of 
 Jim s offenses were drunkenness, lechery, and wife 
 beating. 
 
 And yet, in the end, even Leishman failed them. 
 He was too slow and too expensive. Every few 
 days he would telephone to Edith s apartments for 
 a few dollars for a notary s fee, a subpoena-server s 
 fee, for one fee after another, and when she began to 
 postpone payments the lawyer refused to proceed 
 with the case until payments were made. Every
 
 38 JIM 
 
 move consumed a week, and each week there was re 
 vealed a new move of the necessity of which neither 
 Edith nor Charley had been forewarned. Edith sent 
 Charley on many an angry errand to Leishman, and 
 when Leishman at last ordered his clerks not to ad 
 mit this caller unless he had been especially told to 
 call, Edith herself took to haunting the offices and 
 became a ghost that the attorney had to lay by in 
 forming her that her case was not the only one in 
 which he was retained. 
 
 It has been written that the bitterest anger is 
 that of quarreling brothers, but the anger of a quar 
 reling brother is honey-sweet compared to that of a 
 dissatisfied client at law. Edith told Leishman nearly 
 all that she thought of him. She said she would 
 take her case elsewhere, and, remembering a lawyer 
 by the name of Marcus Schultz, who used to pass 
 his Summers near Ayton and knew her father, she 
 took her case to him. 
 
 She presented it precisely as Leishman had " built 
 it up." She had repeated it so often, made so many 
 affidavits about it and been so thoroughly rehearsed 
 in it that she was letter-perfect now. By this time 
 she really believed a large part of it. Most, she 
 had long since managed to assure herself, repre 
 sented fairly correct guesses at what was, without 
 guesswork, merely undemonstrably true; the rest, 
 she concluded, was but a milder name for still other 
 offenses that had likewise escaped her notice. 
 
 The long and lean Mr. Schultz heard her out. 
 
 " I don t like to take divorce-cases," he said when 
 she had finished, " and I may as well tell you there 
 are some things about this particular case that
 
 JIM 39 
 
 I especially dislike; but your father was a friend of 
 mine and I ll do what I can for you." 
 
 Edith said: " Thank you." 
 
 44 Has there," asked Schultz, " been any other law 
 yer in it? I mean on your side, Mrs. Trent." 
 
 Edith wondered why he suspected that there had 
 been: he plainly did suspect it. She nodded an as 
 sent. 
 
 "H m. Who was he?" 
 
 11 A Mr. Leishman," faltered Edith. " But he 
 wasn t any good," she hurriedly added. 4 He was 
 always postponing things and always asking for 
 money. He d never have done anything. Why " 
 
 "Still," said Schultz, "you paid him?" 
 
 44 I was paying him something every other day," 
 replied Edith, hotly. 
 
 44 1 see. Well, just bring me Mr. Leishman s 
 receipted bill for professional services to date and 
 I ll take the case." 
 
 Edith protested that she had already paid Leish 
 man out of all reason, but Schultz was firm. The 
 production of that receipted bill was necessary for 
 the satisfaction of professional etiquette. Besides, 
 he knew this man Leishman only professionally, 
 Schultz was careful to explain and he was the sort 
 of person from whom Well, in short, that receipt 
 must be secured and shown. 
 
 Leishman was exorbitant; he charged for several 
 things that Edith was sure he had never done and 
 more that she was sure she ought not to be asked to 
 pay for; but there was no escape. Somehow Char 
 ley got her the money. 
 
 Then it seemed as if the whole tedious process
 
 40 JIM 
 
 was again to be gone through. Annoyance followed 
 upon delay and fresh delay upon annoyance. 
 Schultz, said Edith, made Charley and her and the 
 detective the latter procured during the Leishman 
 reign do all the work; the lawyer showed a strong 
 dislike to originating anything; he would not listen 
 to the suggestions from legal short-cuts that Vana- 
 man picked up from club-gossip and brought to him, 
 and Edith complained that she had never heard of an 
 attorney so anxious to force his employers to do the 
 unclean work for him. Once he openly expressed 
 mistrust of their evidence and asked for fresh. He 
 recommended another detective agency which was, 
 he said, more trustworthy than the Canarde; advised 
 that this agency report direct to him after watching 
 Jim, and, when the report showed Edith s husband 
 to be behaving with an innocence that Edith de 
 clared was assumed only to give them trouble, 
 Schultz flew into a rage and threatened to wash his 
 hands of the whole affair. Edith s tears were all 
 that softened him. 
 
 So the hot Summer crawled along. Edith refused 
 to leave town: she wanted, she explained, " to be on 
 the spot," and she expected Charley to be there, too. 
 Not that it helped. They passed breathless after 
 noons in the apartments where she was living, talking 
 it over and over, swinging about a weary circle, and 
 sticky evenings at roof-gardens, trying to devise 
 means to hurry the tardy engine of the law. Jim, it 
 appeared, would keep his word. Only once, when 
 he happened to hear he was to be charged with in 
 famies that would be supererogatory, he threatened, 
 so his lawyer wrote, to enter a cross-suit, but this
 
 JIM 41 
 
 was no more than entered before the tearful repent 
 ances of his wife engaged its withdrawal. The 
 newspapers, too, had been successfully eluded. But 
 practical progress limped. 
 
 At last, however, the ear of a court was gained, 
 a referee appointed and the testimony that Leish- 
 man had " built up " was taken. Edith gave her 
 evidence. Charley gave his. The detective fol 
 lowed. The unessential details were hazarded; the 
 opposition was merely formal. The decree nisi was 
 granted, and now it was expected that the decree 
 would be made absolute some time during this 
 October day. 
 
 3. Once in his clothes, Charley descended the 
 stairs softly. He wanted to pass unobserved the 
 door of his father s room; but the floor of the land 
 ing creaked under his sluggish tread and the door 
 was opened. His sister had detected him. 
 
 " Charley," said she. 
 
 She spoke in the commanding whisper of ama 
 teur nurses. The dim light of the stairway 
 showed her to be a dumpy woman with an empty 
 spectacled face and too many years for the likelihood 
 of marriage. Her myopic eyes were round with a 
 serious vacancy. Her mouth was patient. She be 
 longed to the unhappy type that is dismissed with the 
 postscript: "But she is good." Mame had never 
 been anything but a useful drudge in the Vanaman 
 household. Charley loved her, but he considered 
 her a cipher. 
 
 " Charley," she repeated. She put out a plump 
 hand.
 
 42 JIM 
 
 Her brother brushed the hand away. 
 
 " Let me go, Mame," he said: " I m in a hurry." 
 
 " But Charley," she pleaded, " you re never going 
 without saying Good-morning to poppa. He had 
 a very bad night. Dr. Morley s just left." 
 
 Charley gave one of his short chuckles. 
 
 "Had a bad night, did he? Well, so did I." 
 He really did not feel like chuckling, still less like 
 visiting the sick: he wanted a bracer and a massage 
 and Edith was waiting. 
 
 "Oh, Charley!" 
 
 In the grip of that argument, Vanaman twisted his 
 body as a wayward lad wriggles when the school 
 mistress substitutes gentle persuasion for the right 
 eous rod. 
 
 " Oh, well," he said, " I m sorry. I don t want 
 him to be sick, but I am in a hurry, and " 
 
 " He wants to see you," said Mame Vanaman. 
 "He s been asking for you these two hours, but I 
 didn t want to wake you up." 
 
 " All right," said Charley, resignedly. He really 
 was sorry for his father, but he really was in a 
 hurry, too. " I ll come in; only, mind you, it s just 
 a moment." He started to pass her and then no 
 ticed that she made a movement in the opposite 
 direction. " Where are you going? " he asked. 
 
 " I was going downstairs," said Mame, timidly. 
 " I couldn t leave poppa alone, but now you were 
 going in I thought I might telephone Mrs. Hamil 
 ton. I wanted to tell her that I couldn t go to the 
 missionary meeting to-night, poppa being so sick." 
 
 " Oh," said Charley. Mame s sole dissipation 
 was her church s missionary-society: the family tol-
 
 JIM 43 
 
 erated so much. " All right; but don t be long. Is 
 that the newspaper you ve got there?" 
 
 Mame was holding something in her left hand. 
 She seemed to be trying to conceal it behind her back. 
 
 " Yes," she said. 
 
 "Any news? " 
 
 " N-no. Nothing much. There s " 
 
 Charley had been fearing the papers. Mame s 
 manner renewed his fears. 
 
 " There s something in it you don t want me to 
 see. What is it? " 
 
 Mame had a certain gentle craft, but she never 
 rebelled against established authority. 
 
 " Oh, Charley," she said, " it s just a few lines 
 away in the back. Nobody ll notice it." 
 
 Her brother seized the paper. 
 
 " What do you mean ? " he urged. " What is it? " 
 
 " It just says that Mrs. Trent has been trying to 
 get a divorce. It s only a couple of lines, but, oh, 
 Charley, isn t it awful? " 
 
 The veins stood out on Charley s forehead. In 
 the dim light of the landing his eyes ran over the 
 fluttering pages of the paper. 
 
 "Where is it? Where is it? Is that all it said? " 
 
 " Yes, that s all. Just that." 
 
 "No names? It don t print the names of any 
 of the witnesses? " 
 
 " No; it says the evidence won t be made public. 
 Really, Charley, do you think we ought to leave 
 poppa alone so long? " 
 
 "Where is the thing? Confound it, Mame, can t 
 you show me? " 
 
 She anxiously showed it him. It was, as she said,
 
 44 JIM 
 
 a mere statement to the effect that the suit, the testi 
 mony in which had been impounded, would prob 
 ably result to-day in the entry of the final decree. 
 Nevertheless, Charley did not like it. 
 
 " Did poppa see this? " he inquired. 
 
 " I He read the paper. Dr. Morley said he was 
 well enough for that." 
 
 " But," her brother s index-finger struck the of 
 fending piece of news "did he see this? That s 
 what I want to know." 
 
 11 Yes, I think so." 
 
 " You think so ! Don t you know ? Did he say 
 anything about it? " 
 
 " No, Charley, really he didn t." 
 
 Charley had not been on a witness-stand for 
 nothing. He pressed his point. 
 
 "What did he say?" 
 
 " He didn t say anything." 
 
 "You re sure?" 
 
 "Well" Mame wavered; she genuinely wanted 
 to save her brother from pain and she knew he 
 was at least a friend of Mrs. Trent " he did say 
 something about divorce in general. I forget just 
 what it was; but you know he don t approve of di 
 vorce, Charley." 
 
 Charley groaned at these weak evasions. 
 
 " Go and telephone your Mrs. Hamilton," he said. 
 
 He saw her start downstairs toward the tele 
 phone in the hall. Then he opened the door of the 
 first-floor front bedroom and went in. 
 
 4. When the family, at Charley s proposal, 
 had moved to New York after Mrs. Vanaman s
 
 JIM 45 
 
 death, and bought the house in Lexington Avenue, 
 its head furnished the entire place, and especially 
 this bedroom, as much as was possible with the furni 
 ture, and after the manner, of the house in Carmel 
 in which old Vanaman had lived while making his 
 fortune and from which he never ceased to regret his 
 departure. Now, as with a new vision, Charley saw 
 the room, and he hated it. He saw the mahogany 
 washstand with a marble top, the mahogany bureau 
 with a marble top, the marble mantel-piece, and he 
 saw the high mahogany bed in which his father 
 lay. 
 
 The old man was covered to the chin, his long, 
 gray beard resting outside the blanket that Mame 
 had tucked about him with mathematical precision. 
 His large head was quite bald, and the skin, drawn 
 tight over his high cheek-bones and beak nose, was 
 yellow. He lay still, but the eyes that, under the 
 bushy brows of iron gray, sought Charley s were 
 black and keen. 
 
 " Good-morning," said Charley, with a sturdily 
 evoked cheerfulness. He came to the foot of the 
 bed and stood there irresolutely. " Mame said you 
 didn t have a good night, but you re looking fine." 
 
 The elder Vanaman s mouth tightened. 
 
 "Don t lie to me," he answered; his voice was 
 firm, calm. " I m not looking fine an no more, 
 are you." 
 
 " Oh, I m all right." Charley shifted his weight 
 from one foot to the other. " A little indigestion, 
 that s all. Had grouse for dinner, and I ate 
 
 " Ate! " The word was accusation. " How s 
 your invention comin on?"
 
 46 JIM 
 
 Charley brightened. 
 
 " If you ll only put up the money I asked you 
 about " he began. 
 
 "Seen Mrs. Trent lately?" 
 
 " I no " The son s cheeks became brick 
 
 red. " I wish you d let me explain about her." 
 
 " I don t need explanations," the old man an 
 swered. " What I want is actions. I told you not 
 to have anything to do with her. I know what 
 she is." 
 
 " She s a lady! " Charley s protest was dutifully 
 loyal to Edith. 
 
 " She s a married woman," said his father, quietly. 
 " I won t have you runnin around with married 
 women." 
 
 To forestall parental reference to the newspaper 
 paragraph, u She s getting a divorce," said Charley. 
 
 The old man s mouth worked. 
 
 " I know that, too," said he, " an I guess you 
 knew it long ago. I guess you wouldn t a told me 
 if you didn t know it was in the papers. Well, 
 there s only one thing worse than a married woman, 
 and that s a woman who s divorced." 
 
 " What else could she do? " Charley pleaded. A 
 summer at law had made him as bitter as the law 
 makes most people. " Her husband was a brute." 
 
 " So she says," muttered the father. 
 
 " He didn t deny it. He didn t give evidence." 
 
 " Maybe he was too much of a man, Charley." 
 
 " He s too much something else. He did begin 
 a cross-suit, and he had to drop it." 
 
 Under the covers the old man s feet fidgeted. 
 
 " He named you in it. Oh, I don t get all my
 
 JIM 47 
 
 news out o the newspapers. I hear a little o what s 
 goin on, even if I am bed-ridden." 
 
 This must be Zoller s work. Inwardly, Charley 
 cursed Zoller. He wondered how much the lawyer 
 had told, but knew that to ask either Zoller or the 
 elder Vanaman would be to invite further trouble. 
 
 " But I tell you he dropped it. He hadn t any 
 evidence. Besides " 
 
 " Charley," said the father, " you can t talk this 
 way to me. I ve lived too long. I know what lies 
 a woman can threaten to tell, and if she s good- 
 lookin they re worse ones. When she does threaten 
 to tell em, it isn t only a matter o no evidence that ll 
 make a man drop his cross-suit. Now, don t let me 
 hear any more about it; you keep away from that 
 woman or you don t get another cent out o me." 
 
 He had said it often before; now he said it with 
 an air of fearsome finality. When Charley was 
 afraid he grew angry. Moreover, he was in love; 
 he knew both the need of money and the fact that 
 Edith would be properly displeased if he were late 
 for his appointment with her. 
 
 "Why?" he demanded. 
 
 " Because she s a bad lot," said the father. 
 
 The son s eyes glared. " She s the best woman in 
 the world! " he affirmed. 
 
 His tone betrayed him. His father s sharp gaze 
 read the younger man s mind. 
 
 " Don t tell me you want to marry her! " 
 
 Charley s lungs seemed to collapse. He had to 
 wait a perceptible moment before, still forgetting 
 discretion, he could cry: 
 
 " You don t understand ! You re too old-fash-
 
 48 JIM 
 
 ioned. You can t see that the world s grown any 
 since you were young. If you d only take the trou 
 ble to listen to the evidence in the Trent case; 
 if- 
 
 His father drew a slow arm from beneath 
 the bedclothes. He shook a skinny forefinger at 
 his son. 
 
 " Charley," he said, " Dr. Morley says I ve got 
 to have quiet. You d better go. But if you marry 
 that woman, I won t leave you a cent, so help me 
 God I"
 
 FOURTH CHAPTER 
 
 SOMEWHERE, in starlit space, are there 
 stars that are both brown and bright? Char 
 ley, who was in most matters no poet, always 
 asked himself that question when he thought of 
 Edith Trent s eyes. To say merely that they were 
 brown was to say so little of them as to say almost 
 nothing at all; they were like stars, and yet they 
 were like no stars he had ever seen. 
 
 He often wondered how he could describe her. 
 He had been called upon a hundred times to de 
 scribe the complicated improvement for the tele 
 graphic sounder that he had invented, and in this 
 he could always make himself clear. But Edith 
 there his powers of description failed. She was tall 
 and dark; the lines of her lips were generous; the 
 curve of her breast awakened his memories of boy- 
 read mythology and the stories of goddesses that 
 walked the earth and condescended to the loves of 
 men. At such times he thought of her as a woman 
 with the body of Aphrodite and the face of Artemis. 
 He thought of her forehead as broad and low, of 
 her lips as passionate and firm; much as Homer 
 thought of the dawn, Charley thought of the pink 
 wave that would climb from Edith s shoulder to 
 her cheek. But of her eyes he always thought as of 
 stars. 
 
 With his father s threat hammering at his heart, 
 how was he to face them now? To succeed with 
 
 49
 
 50 JIM 
 
 Edith and to succeed with his invention that was 
 all the success he asked: why should it be denied 
 him? He could not believe that all life was against 
 him. Some way out there must be. 
 
 The drink and the massage gave him courage; 
 they propped his shaken power of decision. His 
 father? Well, there was no help for it: he must 
 keep his father in ignorance of his marriage to 
 Edith ; so long as old Vanaman knew nothing of that, 
 he would take no step to divert his property from his 
 son. And Edith? Charley dared not tell her out 
 right what had happened at least not just yet. He 
 did not want to lie to her, but she had had so much 
 to vex her lately: he must not give her more. Be 
 sides, he knew something of her abhorrence of fail 
 ure: of course, she would not throw him over, but 
 she might want him to wait until the sounder had so 
 thoroughly redeemed its promises that they would 
 not need his father s money and the law had al 
 ready strained Charley s endurance to its breaking- 
 point. No, he would now only prepare Edith, tell 
 her only in part; he would break the rest of the news 
 to her after their marriage. Edith was a practical 
 woman: she would understand the need of secrecy. 
 She loved him: knowing that love alone had 
 prompted it, she would forgive his deception. 
 
 Again he fell to thinking of her as Artemis and 
 Aphrodite. 
 
 2. When he entered the living-room of her 
 apartment-Olympus she had moved all the way 
 across town from Jim s address he found await 
 ing him a wrathful goddess.
 
 JIM 51 
 
 "You re late," said Edith. "Where on earth 
 have you been all this time?" 
 
 Charley had one of his rare moments of inspira 
 tion. 
 
 "That s just it," he said: "I ve been on earth, 
 and it s a long way from earth to heaven." 
 
 His eyes sought her hungrily. She had not risen 
 from the pillow-heaped couch on which she was lying 
 when he let himself into the apartments with the key 
 that, when she rented them, she had given him. 
 The long folds of a canary-colored negligee 
 Edith continued to be particular about her clothes 
 clung eagerly to her body. It showed the lines he 
 loved, for petticoats had ceased to be the fashion; it 
 gave view, as she lay there, of her lithe ankles cased 
 in silk stockings of the same shade, and of her 
 crossed little feet in high-heeled slippers to match. 
 The negligee fell far away from the base of her 
 throat; and, framing the oval of her dark face, hung 
 the black strands of her alluringly disordered hair. 
 
 With movements too rapid for a man of his bulk, 
 Charley put his hat and overcoat on the nearest 
 chair and crossed to her. He sat on the edge of the 
 couch. He had none of the graces of the perfect 
 lover, but he had energy and earnestness. Almost 
 roughly he forced an arm about her waist and drew 
 her head to his shoulder. He seized her hand. 
 
 "Edith!" he whispered. 
 
 He tried to raise her head toward his, but she 
 held back, so he lowered it until it rested on his 
 elbow. Thus he sat for a moment, looking into 
 the stars that were her eyes. 
 
 " Edith! " he whispered again.
 
 52 JIM 
 
 And their lips met in a rapturous kiss. 
 
 But the kiss ended abruptly. 
 
 " What s the matter? " he asked. He sat upright 
 now. 
 
 She shook the wonderful masses of her hair. 
 
 " Nothing." 
 
 " Something s wrong, I know." 
 
 " Well," she pouted, " I told you you were late." 
 
 " I overslept." 
 
 You drank too much last night," said Edith, 
 composedly. " And you ve had more this morning." 
 
 " How could I help it? " He did not like criti 
 cism, even from a quiet goddess, and his tone seemed 
 now to imply that the fault of his intemperance lay 
 at her door. " This thing s got so on my nerves that 
 I ve got to do something." 
 
 "Your nerves?" She raised her level brows. 
 "What do you think it must do to mine?" 
 
 " I know; but you drank your share." 
 
 " My share didn t go to my head." 
 
 Charley repeated that petulant wriggling of the 
 shoulders with which he had met his sister s appeal. 
 
 " It was Jim taught me to drink," he said. " He s 
 the cold-blooded kind that never take too much. He 
 pretends he thinks everybody else is as slow as he is. 
 Sometimes I half believe he taught me so as to get 
 square with me. People say he isn t drinking a bit 
 now." 
 
 The mention of the absent man seemed to drop a 
 veil between the lovers, who were yet as much bound 
 together by their common hatred of that man as they 
 were by their passion for each other. They drew 
 unconsciously apart.
 
 JIM 53 
 
 " If people do say it," declared Edith, " they re 
 not telling the truth." 
 
 Charley had begun by postponing speech of what 
 was uppermost in his mind. Jim, however, was no 
 sooner mentioned than other topics vanished before 
 him. 
 
 " I don t know about that." Vanaman shook his 
 round head. " It would be just like his devilish- 
 ness to quit for good." He reflected on this. 
 " Jim ll want to show that we lied." 
 
 " Nobody will believe him, no matter what he 
 does," Edith quietly interrupted. " There is the 
 testimony that he hardly denied, and, anyhow, peo 
 ple always believe a woman. All we have to do is 
 be careful." 
 
 Charley heaved the heavy sigh of one that makes 
 a supreme sacrifice. 
 
 u All right," he said, smacking his knee with 
 his fat hand. " I ll just promise you one thing: 
 from the minute you get your decree, I ll never take 
 another drink." 
 
 " Nothing? " she inquired. 
 
 " Well, not whisky, anyhow; only a glass of beer 
 now and then, and perhaps a little white wine with 
 my dinner." He thought he saw a cloud of doubt 
 dim the brightness of her eyes. " I mean it," he 
 affirmed. " You just wait and see." 
 
 Edith had drawn a pillow away from him when 
 they began to speak of her husband. Now she put 
 it behind her and sat in the center of the couch. She 
 did not comment on his declaration. 
 
 "You believe me, don t you?" asked Vanaman. 
 
 " Oh, I suppose so," said Edith. Her fingers
 
 54 JIM 
 
 were busy with an invisible spot on her canary 
 negligee, and her eyes followed her lingers. 
 
 Charley tried to take her hand. 
 
 "You ll promise the same?" he urged. 
 
 "I? Why should I? " Her gaze met him fairly, 
 but her hand retreated and escaped. " I never take 
 too much." 
 
 u I know, dear, but you might sometime." 
 
 " I m too careful even if I m not cold-blooded." 
 
 " You can t tell. I used to think I was careful. 
 And when we re married well, you never know 
 what it ll lead you to." 
 
 Edith smiled a world-old smile. 
 
 " I know what it led you to," she said. " That 
 first evening, when Jim was out of town, if you 
 hadn t had one drink more than you needed, you 
 wouldn t have had the courage to say what you 
 did." 
 
 " No," chuckled Charley; " and every time you 
 went on the witness-stand " 
 
 "Are you sorry for that?" she challenged. 
 
 " Are you sorry I said what I did on that first 
 evening?" he countered. 
 
 He bent toward her, but her eyes caught the desk- 
 telephone that stood on a table beside the wall oppo 
 site them. 
 
 " Why doesn t Schultz send us word? " she asked. 
 
 3. The morning for it was indeed late when 
 Charley arrived had been trying to Edith for 
 more reasons than one. Now that the long strain 
 of the suit was nearing its end, she felt supersti- 
 tiously afraid of telephoning Schultz for news. She
 
 JIM 55 
 
 had arranged with Charley, on the night previous, 
 to call the lawyer before noon, and Schultz was 
 now to call her apartments the moment the decree 
 was signed. The shorter the wait grew, the severer 
 it became. She had risen early, bought all the 
 morning papers she had an especial reason for 
 looking at them to-day- and then, disappointed at 
 what she found there, she went for a nervous walk to 
 pass the time until that fixed for a word from 
 Charley. 
 
 Perhaps because she was missing her old walks in 
 the Park, she went in that direction. She had a hor 
 ror of encountering Jim, but she knew that he would 
 be at his easel at this hour, making the most of the 
 morning light. The person she did encounter was 
 Mrs. Dunbar, the former Jean Dent of Ayton 
 and the present wife of the broker with a family in 
 Madison Avenue. It was their first meeting since 
 Edith had left Jim. 
 
 Edith s sensations were new to her and disquiet 
 ing. She saw Mrs. Dunbar before that lady raised 
 her eyes, and the petitioner in divorce found herself 
 strangely unstable of purpose. Did Mrs. Dunbar 
 read the papers? And if she did, would she care? 
 Madison Avenue, as represented in the woman that 
 was once Jean Dent, stood for a factor that Edith, 
 although she knew it now to be tremendous, had not 
 counted on. To be sure, the Madison Avenues of 
 this world have divorces of their own and to spare; 
 but it is one thing to have a skeleton in your own cup 
 board, or even to be aware that your friends have 
 one in theirs, and quite another to open your draw 
 ing-room to someone that does not as yet quite
 
 56 JIM 
 
 belong there and presents herself at your door with 
 her family-skeleton freshly strapped to her back for 
 all folk to see. Edith would rather have liked to 
 get into that parlor; not, of course, to stay there, 
 but to be able occasionally to come and go. Here 
 and now the issue might be determined. Without 
 any conscious doubt of the righteousness of her posi 
 tion, Edith wanted to run away. 
 
 " Why, Edith Trent! " Mrs. Dunbar spoke at the 
 moment when Jim s wife turned to cross the street. 
 " I am glad to see you! " 
 
 The tone was a little patronizing, but Mrs. Dun- 
 bar s tone had been that from the day when she 
 ceased to be Jean Dent. Her round, red face was 
 pleasant. Edith could have fallen in her arms and 
 wept. 
 
 " Mrs. Jean! You re back in town? " 
 
 " Yes. We got here only yesterday. We stayed 
 at Seal Harbor till there wasn t another soul but 
 ourselves left in the place. How are you and where 
 have you been for the Summer? " 
 
 (" Does she know? " Edith was thinking. " Does 
 she know and not care, or hasn t she heard yet? ") 
 
 Aloud she said: 
 
 " I didn t go much of anywhere, except for a day 
 
 or two now and then. There was business that 
 
 And it s been so dreadfully hot in town." 
 
 " So they tell me. They say it was better than 
 Turkish baths. I think I ll have to stay in New 
 York some Summer to reduce my weight. What a 
 brute your husband is, to be sure, keeping you here 
 just because of his business. I thought artists could 
 paint anywhere."
 
 JIM 57 
 
 Edith opened her lips to tell the truth, but what 
 came from them was a flow of nothings about 
 August weather in the city. She was trying to divert 
 Mrs. Dunbar s attention from Jim. 
 
 She did divert it. They talked safely for quite 
 five minutes and parted as they had met. Edith felt 
 herself clinging to this woman more than that: try 
 ing to commit her to a friendship that could survive 
 the news of the divorce; and when Mrs. Dunbar at 
 last withdrew, Edith half believed that she had suc 
 ceeded. She was grateful and jubilant. She was 
 so jubilant that, presently finding in her path the 
 apartment-house that she had lived in with Jim and 
 that Jim still lived in, she walked by it as if she were 
 the Children of Israel circling doomed Jericho. 
 
 Effie Mitchell, who was once suspected of being 
 not quite all that she should be, was coming out of 
 the door. The Summer had worked changes in 
 Effie that raised suspicions to certainties. Her 
 cheeks, which had always been bright, were now far 
 too bright for a morning; and her hair, which had 
 once been yellow, was now the red of the prevailing 
 fashion. 
 
 Edith, as she saw the girl s face brighten with 
 glad recognition and forgetfulness of past snubs, 
 felt a twinge of pity. There was in that look a 
 pathos all the more poignant because it was uncon 
 scious. But Edith had just triumphed; she had noth 
 ing in common with this thing that Effie Mitchell 
 had so patently become. There had never been a 
 time when she did not scorn it, and to-day she scorned 
 it more than ever. Besides, she was at present in 
 a position in which she must be especially careful.
 
 58 JIM 
 
 People that did not know the facts were anxious to 
 misinterpret anything they chanced to see, and peo 
 ple like the Dunbars would not care to know people 
 that knew people like Effie. 
 
 "Mrs. Trent?" said Effie. 
 
 But Edith pretended not to hear. 
 
 She went back to her apartments and changed 
 to her negligee, but she could not change her frame 
 of mind and she was not wholly satisfied with her 
 self. After all, she had seen Effie only from the 
 corner of her eye: perhaps Effie thought that she 
 had not been seen at all. Edith hoped so. How 
 could anybody expect to be recognized under such a 
 ridiculous alteration of hair? And yet 
 
 Edith lay down on the couch in the living-room 
 and vainly tried to find something of interest in 
 the newspapers that were heaped there. What she 
 found, and what she fascinatedly read, was the re 
 port of a sermon by the only preacher she admired: 
 a sermon by Bishop Peel denouncing divorce. It 
 was impossible for an unworldly clergy to under 
 stand such matters! Edith choked on a wrathful 
 sob. She threw down the paper. 
 
 She watched the clock on the mantel-piece. It 
 ticked so fast and so loud, and yet its hands moved 
 so slowly. Its regular sounds were like steady ham 
 mer-taps upon her brain. When the door-bell rang, 
 she thought at first that it was the telephone. Diana 
 Wentworth was calling an epidemic of whooping- 
 cough in the neighborhood, she cheerfully said, had 
 temporarily closed the branch of the library in which 
 she was employed and Edith absent-mindedly ad 
 mitted her without realizing that a visit would prob-
 
 JIM 59 
 
 ably be a fresh annoyance, and that Diana must be 
 got rid of before Charley let himself in with his tell 
 tale latch-key. All the gods of irritation appeared 
 to be conspiring against her: it was an unendurable 
 morning. 
 
 Diana sat down with a gentle sigh and the full 
 tokens of remaining. Her gown was voluminous 
 and velvet. Her violet eyes animated her pale, 
 handsome face. She had met Edith in a department- 
 store a week or two ago and was given this address. 
 
 You ve been reading the capitalistic news 
 papers," she said, shaking her head in sad improba- 
 tion. 
 
 " There s nothing in them," returned Edith, 
 viciously. 
 
 " There never is," said Diana. " Didn t you 
 know that all their news is personally censored by 
 Wall Street?" 
 
 Edith had a vision of Mr. J. P. Morgan prun 
 ing galley-proofs in the secrecy of his own home at 
 one o clock in the morning. It was a brief vision; 
 it could not be more, because she was too busy won 
 dering how to get rid of Diana before Charley ar 
 rived. 
 
 " They print the most absurd things," she said, 
 " and leave out all the real news that anybody does 
 give them." 
 
 She was thinking of that column-long report of 
 the sermon by Bishop Peel and of something that, 
 in her opinion, should have taken the sermon s place. 
 For an instant she was stopped short of the men 
 tion of these matters stopped by the same fear 
 of her acquaintances opinion of her suit that had
 
 6o JIM 
 
 made her want to run away from Mrs. Dunbar. She 
 thanked Heaven that Diana did not read the papers, 
 and then she realized that, sooner or later, Diana 
 must know at least the bare truth. 
 
 "How s Jim?" Diana was asking. 
 
 Quite calmly Edith s mood changed: she would 
 tell it now. Here was a way of getting rid of her 
 visitor a desperate way, perhaps, but she was over 
 come by a temporary disgust of deception. Let 
 Diana hear and flee. 
 
 " I don t know how he is," said Edith, tragically. 
 " He doesn t live here. I I m going to divorce 
 him." 
 
 The result was not what she had looked for. 
 Diana leaned forward, her hands clasped, her violet 
 eyes alight. 
 
 " How splendid of you ! " she gasped. 
 
 Edith gasped in echo. 
 
 "What? You don t " Then she thought she 
 
 saw a light. " Of course," she said, " a wife s al 
 ways the last to hear anything about her husband. 
 I suppose you ve known things about him for ever 
 so long." 
 She was once more mistaken. 
 
 " N-no," said Diana. " I never heard anything 
 of that sort, but I could see that he was the Conven 
 tional Type of husband, and the Conventional Type 
 of husband is a tyrant. He has no Feeling for Free 
 dom." 
 
 So it became clear. Diana was for Freedom; 
 hence Diana was for Divorce. The merits of no 
 particular case concerned her, nor the means. She 
 placed everybody that she knew in what she called
 
 JIM 6 1 
 
 a Type, and Jim belonged to a Type that Diana dis 
 approved of; but that mattered little where so great 
 a principle as Divorce was concerned: had he been 
 all that she admired, she would still have applauded 
 Edith s action one must demonstrate one s Prin 
 ciples; even at some slight personal inconvenience, it 
 is each individual s duty to make some sort of Pro 
 test against the unendurable might of Convention. 
 Divorce was a Popular Right, and Diana believed 
 in helping along the progress of the Greatest-good- 
 for-the-greatest number. Doubtless she had often 
 said such things before in Edith s hearing, but be 
 fore Edith never heeded them because they seemed 
 unlikely ever to apply to her. The present applica 
 tion gave them an intimate interest. 
 
 "That s what he was," said Edith: " a What 
 do you call it? He had no no " 
 
 " Feeling for Freedom," breathed Diana. " I 
 know the type." 
 
 " No Feeling for Freedom," Edith repeated. 
 " That s it. He used to pretend to let me do what 
 I wanted, and then, when it got me in any trouble, 
 he d pretend to be sweetly magnanimous. The way 
 he wouldn t say it was my own fault simple shrieked, 
 * I told you so ! " 
 
 " Of course. I know them so well. He was en 
 tirely wrapped up in his own work, wasn t he ? They 
 all are." 
 
 " Jim never thought of anything else. He said he 
 couldn t afford to. And such a thing to think about! 
 If he d only been in business ! Why, he worked him 
 self half to death, and could only make just enough 
 for us to get along on."
 
 62 JIM 
 
 Without any interest in your work," Diana 
 nodded. 
 
 Edith was in full swing now. Five minutes ago, 
 she had been punctuating her sentences by glances at 
 the clock, but now the injuries done her by Jim 
 blotted out the memory of Charley. 
 
 " No interest at all in what I cared for," she said. 
 " Of course, I hadn t any work but the housework. 
 My father was a business-man, and we weren t the 
 sort of people that have to teach their daughters a 
 trade. Sometimes I wish I had one." 
 
 " Housework is drudgery," Diana declared. She 
 had settled back in her chair to enjoy in greater 
 comfort the story of Edith s wrongs. She added: 
 " Even in an apartment and with a maid." 
 
 " And he wouldn t play cards," pursued Edith, 
 " or dance. He wouldn t do anything at all for 
 me. He d hardly ever go anywhere with me in the 
 evenings not even to the theater because he said 
 he had to be up early to use the morning light for 
 his painting." 
 
 She ran on at length. She went through the cata 
 logue of her woes. " And all this Summer," she con 
 cluded, " he s been leading a perfectly immaculate 
 life do you know why? Simply to make it harder 
 for me to get evidence." 
 
 That s so like them," smiled Diana. " And of 
 course with these silly man-made laws that we have, 
 you do have to get evidence, don t you? Well, the 
 time will come when we ll change all that. A woman 
 will have the Right to her own soul. When a wife 
 wants to leave her Slavery, she will do it by what
 
 JIM 63 
 
 Archibald Hodge calls the Divine Prerogative of 
 Womanhood." 
 
 Edith did not follow this, but the name of its au 
 thor caught her ear. 
 
 "Who is Archibald Hodge?" she asked. 
 
 She could not have asked anything, it immedi 
 ately appeared, that Diana more delighted to an 
 swer. Her face was transfigured as she told of 
 Hodge. 
 
 He was the Splendid Type. With a glorious 
 body he combined an intellect that was as Mt. 
 Everest among foothills. " He is so thoroughly 
 emancipated," said Diana, " that his mind is posi 
 tively positively naked." Hodge had simplified 
 Simplified Spelling. He had passed upward through 
 Socialism to Anarchism and thence to a political 
 economy of his own making: the Hyper-individual 
 ism. He had made a synthesis of Bergson and 
 Eucken, added to it the Vital Principle that these 
 two philosophers so conspicuously lacked, and called 
 it Hodgeism. Those were his lesser achievements. 
 As you cared to look at it, he threw them off by the 
 way or hewed them as foundation-stones for his 
 Great Work. His Great Work was the confutation 
 of mere Feminism and the creation of his own 
 system to which he had given the simple name of 
 Womanism. 
 
 " Womanism," Diana explained, " is well, it is 
 the Absolute Freedom of Woman. It recognizes 
 that Woman, as the Life-Giver, should be the Life- 
 Ruler." 
 
 " Yes," said Edith, a trifle vaguely. " But what 
 does he do? "
 
 64 JIM 
 
 " He preaches his Gospel," said Diana. 
 
 "Oh! He has money of his own?" 
 
 Hodge had not. He was one of the lilies of the 
 radical field. How did he live? His friends were 
 only too glad to support him. They were support 
 ing him while he wrote his Great Work in twenty 
 volumes. When he had written it, they themselves 
 would publish it. Sylvia Tytus had started the sub 
 scription : she was the secretary of the Radical Club. 
 Edith ought to come around to the Radical Club; 
 it was a wonderful place for the exchange of ideas. 
 
 " And Sylvia," said Diana, " is just one of the 
 finest types of woman that ever lived. She has the 
 clearest soul I ever knew. There s nothing that she 
 hasn t done or wouldn t do. She is simply a pure 
 diamond that reflects the light of every known emo 
 tion and yet remains its untainted self. She s a 
 splendid speaker, and she s radiantly beautiful." 
 
 Edith s attention began to wander and her 
 thoughts to return to the tardy Charley; but Diana 
 ran on, telling how the Womanist League, under 
 the direction of Hodge and Sylvia Tytus, was launch 
 ing the propaganda that was to convert the world 
 and set up Woman as the earth s ruler. Her prac 
 tical hostess came back to herself, only to ask how 
 long would be required for the conversion. 
 
 Diana looked about her as if suspecting Philistine 
 eavesdroppers. She lowered her voice to a dis 
 couraged whisper. 
 
 There are times," she confessed, " when I feel 
 afraid it will take years/ She shook her head. 
 Years," she repeated, sadly. " But, of course, 
 we never mention that to Him."
 
 JIM 65 
 
 She did not want to talk about this. Intentions 
 were far more interesting to her, and to them she 
 glibly reverted. 
 
 Edith was glad, now, that Charley was late: the 
 later he was, the less chance there would be of 
 Diana meeting him and guessing their intimacy. She 
 was roused by another word of her visitor. 
 
 " . . . the barbarism of the married-state," 
 Diana was saying. " There will be no marriage in 
 Our World." 
 
 " You don t mean that you won t marry? " 
 
 " Only free unions," said Diana, " terminable at 
 the desire of either party." 
 
 " But," said Edith, " that s why, that s what they 
 call Free Love ! " 
 
 " Exactly." 
 
 Edith was shocked. 
 
 " I think," she said, sharply, " that that s simply 
 disgusting." 
 
 Diana tried to be tolerant; she tried to explain. 
 Freedom, she said, was the essence of Love, and 
 Love was the essence of Freedom. 
 
 " Do you mean to tell me," Edith asked, " that 
 if you were married to a man 
 
 " Oh, my dear, I wouldn t marry! " 
 
 " Well, then, living with a man." Edith loathed 
 the phrase. " Do you mean to tell me that if you 
 were living with a man, you would let him be in 
 love with other women?" 
 
 " I should scorn to shackle him," said Diana. 
 " And, as for what it meant to myself, it would be 
 a test of my Type, a proof of my Emancipation." 
 
 It was what the actors call " a good exit-line," and
 
 66 JIM 
 
 Diana, to Edith s relief, used it as her departing 
 word. 
 
 When her guest had gone, the hostess gathered 
 up the newspapers and looked at the clock. Charley 
 was very late. She was no longer glad that he was 
 late: she was angry. She was angry at Diana, too, 
 for thinking that love was a minor passion and less 
 than holy; yet she was also angry because a man of 
 whom she had thought so highly as she had thought 
 of Bishop Peel could utter a sweeping condemnation 
 of all divorce. 
 
 4. And now, to Charley beside her, she was re 
 peating: 
 
 "Why doesn t Schultz send us word?" 
 
 Charley, bending to kiss her, checked himself. 
 
 " I suppose," he said, " the judge hasn t handed 
 down the decree yet." 
 
 The white knuckles of Edith s right hand tapped 
 the back of the couch impatiently. She made an 
 obvious effort at self-control. 
 
 " How is your father this morning? " 
 
 "Not so well: he had a bad night." 
 
 " I m sorry." 
 
 " Yes." Charley spoke in his dual role of the 
 sympathetic son and the man of the world. " But 
 of course he ll never be any better." 
 
 Edith caught her breath. 
 
 "How can you talk that way? Your own fa 
 ther!" 
 
 Above everything else, she feared death. She 
 regarded it as the greatest evil. It was so terrible 
 that she could not wish it even for Jim.
 
 JIM 67 
 
 " Well," said Charley, " that s the fact, anyhow. 
 Dr. Morley hasn t told Mame yet, but he admitted 
 it to me yesterday. I don t want him to die; I d do 
 anything I could to save him, only there isn t any 
 thing to be done." It was the moment to say so 
 much as must be said: " He don t like you, Edith." 
 
 Edith s beautiful eyes showed her pain. 
 
 " I know," she said. " I did my best, but he never 
 cared much about me. I must try again, that s all. 
 I hope," she quickly added, " it hasn t turned him 
 against you? " 
 
 " Would it " Charley gulped at the lump in 
 
 his throat. He looked at her in high appeal. He 
 would venture the hypothetical question. " Would 
 it matter to you, dear, if he did turn against me? " 
 
 It was Edith who now made the advance. She 
 put out a hand and lightly touched his cheek. 
 
 "You silly boy! Of course it wouldn t. But he 
 won t turn and we do have to have some money to 
 live on, don t we? " 
 
 Charley understood her. Before his memory 
 there flashed the picture of that first-floor bedroom 
 of the house in Lexington Avenue: the mahogany 
 washstand and bureau, the marble mantel-piece, the 
 big bed and the bald, yellow man with the beak nose 
 and the keen gray eyes, that lay there. Charley was 
 in love and so he lied freely. 
 
 " Well," he said, " it hasn t set him against me, 
 anyhow. Three-fourths of the estate, you know, 
 go to me under the present will, and there s no chance 
 of a change." The chance, he reflected, really was 
 small: he had only to keep his secret from his fa 
 ther. A little more preparation of Edith s mind
 
 68 JIM 
 
 for what he meant to tell her after their marriage 
 was, however, necessary, and so he went on : " The 
 way he happened to speak about you was Did you 
 see the papers this morning?" 
 
 " Yes," said Edith. 
 
 Then you saw Didn t you see what was in them 
 about the suit? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 Charley s mind dodged from its consideration of 
 effects to a complaint against their cause. 
 
 " It was rotten luck. I don t see why that had 
 to happen. I don t see how they ever got hold of 
 it. We d all been so careful." 
 
 " I gave it to the papers," said Edith, coolly. 
 
 His arm fell away from her. 
 
 "You Edith, what are you talking about?" 
 
 " I did," she said. She looked at him belligerently. 
 " I was sick and tired of everybody thinking Jim 
 such a saint and me the other thing." 
 
 Charley was overcome. He could only stutter: 
 
 " W-why, how could they think anything about 
 the case when they hadn t heard of it? " 
 
 "They ll have to know sometime, won t they?" 
 
 " Yes, but not now." 
 
 " I don t care. I wanted to be the first to talk. 
 I wanted people to know what Jim really is. I 
 couldn t stand it any longer. So I called up the 
 papers on the telephone. It was last night after 
 you brought me home." Her wrath weakened. 
 " Why didn t you stay the way you used to? I asked 
 you to stay. If you d stayed, I wouldn t have done 
 
 it. But I was lonely and I got to thinking " 
 
 She surrendered to a sob. " And the horrid things
 
 JIM 69 
 
 wouldn t print a line except just to say that there 
 was a suit for divorce ! Not one fact against Jim 
 not one. He must have fixed them all long ago. He 
 thinks of everything; he has friends on all the papers. 
 He d say he did it to save me from publicity! " 
 
 Tears had her now. She was crying on Charley s 
 shoulder, and Charley thought of nothing but some 
 means to comfort her. 
 
 He patted her hands; he stroked her hair. 
 
 " It s all right," he murmured. " It don t matter. 
 We ll let them all know some day. It s all right. 
 It didn t do any harm; really, it didn t." 
 
 Edith did not raise her head, but her sense of the 
 practical was reasserting itself. 
 
 " He didn t think I was awful your father, I 
 mean?" she asked. 
 
 " Oh, he s just old-fashioned. It ll be all right." 
 
 " But there s Mame. She might see this was her 
 chance." 
 
 Charley s chuckle was honest: 
 
 " Mame? You don t know Mame. She s all for 
 me. Mame don t count." 
 
 Edith clutched his hands. 
 
 " Are you sure? Are you sure your father won t 
 turn against you, Charley?" 
 
 What else could he seem to be? "Of course I 
 am," he said. " I ve got a scheme. It ll be all 
 right." He was trembling; he wished that he dared 
 to ask for a drink. " Just you wait. You ll see. 
 And, anyhow, there s always the sounder." 
 
 " But you said yesterday it had been so hard to 
 get the right people about that; and you said we 
 needed money in the meantime."
 
 yo JIM 
 
 We ll get the money. I tell you I have a scheme 
 to fix poppa. We ll interest capital in no time now. 
 Then we ll be more than well-to-do: we ll be rich. 
 I remember once when I was working in the gov 
 ernment telegraph office in Peking " 
 
 He believed in his sounder. He believed that, 
 even should his father live long enough to discover 
 the necessity of carrying out the threat of a new 
 will, that sounder would save the day. But he would 
 not now have dared to make matters clear to Edith; 
 he wanted to be sure of her, and his love for her was 
 of such a sort that the more he loved the less certain 
 of her he could be. So he fell to diverting her at 
 tention by the kind of narration that she most en 
 joyed: the stories of adventures in the strange lands 
 in which, as a wandering inventor under passing 
 parental displeasure, he had spent five years of his 
 life. 
 
 She listened to him, her head raised again, but 
 her eyes were for the telephone. Her inner ear 
 sat alert for the first tinkle of the bell that would 
 announce their freedom. 
 
 Charley broke off in the middle of a description 
 of a midnight ride through the Boxer lines. 
 
 " But I can t talk about that now," he said. 
 " This is too much like waiting for the jury to 
 come in." 
 
 "The jury?" Edith found the simile ominous. 
 " When there s a jury there s some doubt, isn t there? 
 
 But in our case You don t mean that anything 
 
 might upset our plans? " 
 
 Charley was too nervous wholly to conceal his 
 fears. If he could only have a drink!
 
 JIM 71 
 
 " N-no," he said. " But it s always just possible 
 that, somehow or other, word might get to the 
 judge 
 
 "How can it?" 
 
 " It s not likely. But, you know, Edith, some of 
 these judges are just old women; and if this fellow 
 happened to learn that you and I that we " 
 
 " He can t learn that. Nobody suspects. I m 
 called Mrs. Trent here, but not Mrs. James Trent. 
 Nobody in this house knows who I am." 
 
 " Well, then, he might find some flaw in the testi 
 mony." 
 
 " There isn t any flaw to find." 
 
 " Yes, I know; but maybe it s too flawless. Some 
 times I wonder if it isn t so flawless that it sounds 
 faked." 
 
 Edith s brows contracted. 
 
 " We had to do that," she protested. " Schultz 
 himself said so. Over half of it he suggested to 
 us by his questions he and Leishman. It was their 
 fault. They both were always saying we couldn t 
 win unless we did swear to what we did swear to. 
 You know, Charley, how they led us on. We just 
 couldn t prove what was true, so we had to prove 
 what wasn t. You don t suppose Her under- 
 lip trembled. "Charley!" she sobbed. 
 
 Again he took her into his arms and comforted 
 her. He denied all the fears that he had so lately 
 expressed. He kissed her, at first tenderly and then, 
 as her red lips responded, with more and more 
 fervor. 
 
 Of that contact was born something that banished 
 fear. Fear was banished and within them rose, beat-
 
 72 JIM 
 
 ing in their temples and tugging at their throats, the 
 passion that had drawn them together, the desire, 
 so often temporarily satisfied but never perma 
 nently satiated, which, beginning in the days when 
 Edith Trent considered herself the neglected wife 
 of an artist too much engrossed in his art, had 
 dragged the one of them through the divorce court, 
 had turned the other to bear false witness, and had 
 brought them both to this apartment and this waiting 
 for a judgment in favor of all that they had done. 
 
 Vanaman s right arm was wound about her waist 
 with a grip of steel; his left was round her firm neck, 
 her head was thrown against the heaped cushions of 
 the couch; her black hair half veiled her glowing 
 cheeks, her panting bosom, her parted lips, her 
 burning eyes. There was, for them, no reason for 
 denial; for a year and more denial had been un 
 known between them. Charley bent his face; his 
 mouth closed on hers. He held her tighter. He 
 drew back only to gasp her name: 
 
 "Edith!" 
 
 A bell rang. It was crisp, clear. It was from 
 the world that they were forgetting. It was as if 
 the walls of their room had fallen and left these 
 lovers visible to all that world. 
 
 They leaped apart. 
 
 Charley, in a trembling voice, swore an habitual 
 oath. The woman was more collected. 
 
 "The phone!" she said with quick realization. 
 14 That s Schultz." 
 
 She sprang up; but Charley was before her. 
 
 " Not you! " she cried. " It mustn t be a man s 
 voice from my rooms."
 
 JIM 73 
 
 She was too late: Charley was at the telephone. 
 If his hand had shaken when, a few hours earlier, he 
 began to telephone to Edith, it shook more violently 
 now; but he lost no time. 
 
 " Hello ! Hello ! Hello ! " he said. 
 
 In the little black receiver at his ear the answer 
 danced and rattled. 
 
 "Hello!" said the answer. "Hudson one-two- 
 nine-three? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Mrs. Trent there?" 
 
 " Yes, yes." 
 
 (Edith pleaded: " Make him say who he is," but 
 Charley did not hear her.) 
 
 " Ask her to the phone, please." 
 
 " This is Mr. Vanaman," said Charley with what 
 dignity he could get into his tone. 
 
 " Oh ! " begged Edith, but she could say no more. 
 She could not wrench the receiver from his hand. 
 She could scarcely breathe in this atmosphere that 
 she herself had charged with surveillance and decep 
 tion. 
 
 The black receiver, however, was firm. 
 
 " I want to talk to Mrs. Trent," it persisted. 
 
 "Who is this? " asked Charley. 
 
 " Mr. Schultz, her lawyer," said the receiver. 
 
 "Well, won t I do?" 
 
 " You will not. I talked to you once before this 
 morning, and that s enough for the day. You ve had 
 too much to do with this case already, Mr. Vana 
 man. I want to talk to my client, and I won t talk 
 to anybody else."
 
 74 JIM 
 
 Charley put his fat, pink palm over the trans 
 mitter and held the receiver toward Edith. 
 
 " It s Schultz," he said, his lips pale and his voice 
 shaking. " He wants to talk to you." 
 
 Edith tottered forward. She, too, was pale. 
 
 " Charley," she whispered, " it s not oh, you 
 don t think it s bad news? " 
 
 He tried to say, " I don t know," but, though his 
 lips moved, he said nothing. 
 
 Now she was afraid to go to the telephone. What 
 did that sullen black tube hold for her? 
 
 " Won t he talk to you, please? " 
 
 Charley shook his head. 
 
 She had to take the receiver that he held out to 
 her. 
 
 This is Mrs. Trent, Mr. Schultz," said she, and 
 a moment later she was glad that it was she alone 
 who heard the form of the lawyer s answer. 
 
 " Mrs. Trent," said the distant attorney, in a 
 slow, even tone, " I want to say, first of all, that I 
 took this case because of my friendship for your 
 dead father, and once in it I held on. This is not my 
 sort of practice, and you know it. If I had not been 
 too deeply committed before I knew where I was, I d 
 have got out of it long ago. I d have got out, any 
 how, if your husband had fought the suit. Never 
 mind about my fee: I couldn t touch a penny of it. 
 Now that this thing is over, I merely want to tell 
 you that I thoroughly understand what you and that 
 fellow Vanaman have done to an innocent man 
 thoroughly. The court has just signed your decree. 
 I m sending up a certified copy by messenger. You 
 are a free woman. Good-by."
 
 JIM 75 
 
 5. For a few seconds after the lawyer had rung 
 off, Edith, paler still, stood with the receiver pressed 
 to her ear. It was only slowly that indignation came 
 to her rescue. Why, even if the first lies had begun 
 with them and been amplified and improved by Leish- 
 man, this Schultz had hinted that they must continue : 
 it was an open secret between them. 
 
 She hung up the receiver and turned to her lover. 
 
 He was looking at her. His wide mouth was 
 half open, and his eyes gaped. She had never be 
 fore thought that he might appear grotesque. 
 
 " What what is it? " he mumbled. " What did 
 he say? " 
 
 " Nothing," she answered, speaking calmly now. 
 " Nothing except that the decree has been signed 
 and he feels so under obligations to my father that 
 he can t take any money. We can do what we ve 
 been planning to do : we can be married quietly over 
 in Jersey City this afternoon." 
 
 With a strident shout, he tottered toward her. 
 He opened his arms. She leaned to him, but, as they 
 met, something seemed to have gone out of them. 
 The kisses that the telephone-bell had interrupted 
 had no repetition. His arms, instead of encircling 
 her, drooped, and only his hands met hers. He 
 raised her hands between his own. They stood look 
 ing at each other. Slowly he lifted her fingers and 
 kissed them. His lips were cold. 
 
 " Where s the whisky? " he asked. " I think we 
 deserve just one more drink. Let s celebrate this 
 once. We ve earned it."
 
 FIFTH CHAPTER 
 
 WE Americans believe in divorce and mistrust 
 the divorced. We mistrust them so much 
 that it behooves a petitioner to place all 
 the blame on the shoulders of the respondent if the 
 petitioner hopes at all to retain a place in respect 
 able, middle-class society. 
 
 Edith Trent and Charley Vanaman had inherited 
 neither enough wealth nor enough social position to 
 brave conventions and achieve the leisured walks 
 of American life. They were conventional people 
 wanting to do conventionally a more or less uncon 
 ventional thing. To do it they had, therefore, tacitly 
 recognized the necessity of a conspiracy that would 
 leave Jim in the position of a brutal and libertine 
 husband and show Edith to the world as a long- 
 suffering wife protected by a wholly chivalrous 
 friend. 
 
 They had succeeded. They had accomplished the 
 perfect perjury. Jim had kept his word; and now, 
 with the signing of the divorce decree in Edith s 
 favor, Jim, as a real presence, should have vanished 
 from the existence of his wife and the lover of his 
 wife. A vindicated woman, Edith was free to go 
 where her heart listed; Charley s reputation was, 
 at least legally, sustained. They were sincerely, even 
 tremendously, in love with each other; with no faith 
 in the theory with no knowledge of it that a suc 
 cessful fraud cannot be a bond between its per- 
 
 76
 
 JIM 77 
 
 petrators, but must always be a barrier because it is 
 a fraud, they felt that they had but to marry in order 
 to accomplish conventional happiness. 
 
 And they were married. They were married on 
 the afternoon of the day that brought the news 
 of Edith s freedom. Somewhat amazedly, Charley 
 found himself borne off, by his own desires as much 
 as by Edith s, to Jersey City, where they had all 
 along planned to go for the legalization of their 
 union. This could escape the New York newspa 
 pers; Edith wanted to escape the New York news 
 papers now. 
 
 They stood in a shabby little office before a shabby 
 man at a high desk. There were some ragged books 
 on the desk; at one side of it was a railed space 
 and at the other the witness-chair; behind a couple 
 of tables was a row of benches discolored by a 
 generation of audiences. The wall decorations were 
 handbills picturing wretched faces and offering re 
 wards for their originals: the law promised to pay 
 well for the chance of sending these furtive men to 
 jail. It was a room used for the trials of petty of 
 fenders, and every morning it was filled by drunken 
 derelicts, pickpockets, and prostitutes. The man at 
 the desk had a blue nose and the room reeked with 
 the magisterial odor. 
 
 Here Edith and Charley were married. The blue- 
 nosed man asked them, in a matter-of-fact voice, the 
 intimate and impertinent questions prescribed by 
 statute. Edith answered with burning cheeks and 
 Charley with a nervous chuckle. The formalities 
 concerning residence had been attended to a week 
 since; the certified copy of the divorce-decree was
 
 78 JIM 
 
 asked for, produced, and barely glanced at. One 
 or two more questions were put and answered. 
 
 " That s all," said the man with the blue nose. 
 
 "Eh?" said Charley. 
 
 You re married," said the blue-nosed man. He 
 grinned. 
 
 2. They left the magistrate s office in silence. 
 To each of them this legal ceremony had seemed 
 lacking in the dignity that their ceremonial souls 
 and their warm affection counted requisite. Their 
 nerves had, for a long time, been on an ugly strain, 
 for the details of the divorce had been more trying, 
 the need of falsehood more frequent, than they had 
 anticipated, and now their exit was not, they felt, 
 of the sort that is generally supposed to be 
 hymeneal. 
 
 " Well," said Edith, " that s settled, anyhow." 
 
 Charley nodded, and for a moment neither spoke. 
 Then the man looked at the woman, and, feeding on 
 her, his enthusiasm revived. 
 
 " I think," he chuckled, as she took his arm, 
 which bent to compress her clasping fingers, " we 
 ought to celebrate this somehow. What do you say 
 to a bottle of champagne just one between us? " 
 
 Edith s reply was more matter-of-fact than senti 
 mental: 
 
 " I think it would do me good," she said. 
 
 They had it as soon as they reached New York. 
 They went to a quiet cafe on Sixth Avenue and there 
 sat side by side at a little corner table. The ground- 
 floor room in which they sat was full of mirrors, 
 but, save for Edith and Charley, the mirrors re-
 
 JIM 79 
 
 fleeted only the figures of three tired and inattentive 
 waiters. 
 
 Charley raised his glass and clinked it against 
 hers. Then he turned the glass so that their fingers 
 touched. 
 
 "Here," he said "here s to us!" 
 
 Her eyes met his, and glowed. 
 
 " To us," she softly echoed. 
 
 "Long life and happiness!" said Charley. 
 
 " And success! " she added, smiling. " Don t for 
 get the success of the invention, dear." 
 
 He drained his glass; she sipped from hers. For 
 sometime they talked of the indifferent things that 
 are so important to lovers. They talked until the 
 bottle was empty. 
 
 " Let s have another," suggested Charley. 
 
 " No, thank you." 
 
 " Aw, come on. Most fellows aren t married but 
 once in a lifetime." 
 
 Edith winced. She knew that his words had con 
 tained no intended reference to her, but her voice 
 was hard as she replied: 
 
 " I thought you were going to quit drinking? " 
 
 " I am. But to-day- 
 It was only her smile that interrupted him. 
 
 "All right," he said, "you ll see. Only I am 
 nervous. This is a new thing to me." 
 
 How could he stumble on such phrases? 
 
 " I don t want you to have anything more to 
 drink," she said. 
 
 She reverted to the last subject of their talk, 
 and Charley did his best to listen, but he was indeed 
 nervous. He fidgeted in his chair.
 
 8o JIM 
 
 " I ve been thinking," said Edith at last, " about 
 where we re going to live. We ve got to find a place 
 in a day or two. There s been no time to look, with 
 this suit going on, and not much time to talk, but 
 I ve been thinking." 
 
 "Eh?" said Charley. He rose. "Excuse me a 
 moment," he said. 
 
 He left the room and went into the bar, where 
 he took a large drink of Scotch whiskey, neat. He 
 was preparing to tell her what, sooner or later, he 
 would have had to tell her, but, since he had all 
 along taken it for granted that they would live for 
 a time at Edith s present apartments, he had still 
 hoped to postpone the date of his disclosure. 
 
 " Of course," on his return Edith placidly con 
 tinued, " as I said last week, I understand how it is 
 that, just now, you can t leave town because of the 
 invention, and that s why I told you I don t a bit 
 mind making our wedding journey a stay at some 
 good hotel; but while we re there I ll have to look 
 around for some nice apartments." 
 
 It was characteristic of him not to have reintro- 
 duced this subject; it was characteristic of her silently 
 to have reflected a great deal about it and, assum 
 ing it her own province, to have reintroduced it now. 
 
 " What s the matter with the apartments that 
 you have? " asked Charley. " They re swell enough, 
 aren t they? " 
 
 " Oh, we can t live there. I thought you under 
 stood that." 
 
 "What s wrong with the place? " 
 
 "Nothing, dear; but everybody there has seen 
 you coming and going since I first moved in."
 
 JIM 8 1 
 
 The reason was sufficient, as Edith s reasons al 
 ways were; but it left Charley embarrassed. 
 
 " We can t go to poppa s," he said, a little awk 
 wardly. 
 
 The brown stars that were her eyes searched him 
 quickly. 
 
 " I wouldn t think of doing that. I always said no 
 one man s house was big enough to hold two families. 
 But that s not your reason. What is your reason? " 
 
 Charley wriggled. He felt it was too bad that a 
 difference should arise at such a time, and Edith 
 agreed with him. Nevertheless, the first fervor of 
 passion had preceded even the divorce; they were 
 not, in the ordinary sense, newly-married people, and 
 this difficulty, but dimly apprehended on the one side 
 and quietly concealed on the other, had at once 
 somehow to be resolved. 
 
 " You know well enough how things are at my 
 place," said Charley. 
 
 "You mean your father doesn t like me?" 
 
 " I mean he s old-fashioned and prejudiced. You 
 always understood how it was." 
 
 " That was before there was the before I was 
 divorced, dear and it was before we were married." 
 
 Charley laughed softly: 
 
 " A couple of hours ago." 
 
 " Yes; but whatever your father used to think of 
 me, I m his son s wife now." 
 
 He pressed her hand. " Of course you are 
 forever and forever. But you ve got to remember 
 that, according to the old man s notions, we re sort 
 of sudden." 
 
 Edith s manner did not change. Her gaze was
 
 82 JIM 
 
 steady, and, as she turned the empty glass between 
 her fingers, her hand was steady, too; but her sensi 
 tive nostrils dilated and her voice was dry as, look 
 ing into his eyes, she said quietly: 
 
 You haven t told him that you meant to marry 
 me?" 
 
 Here was something she had not expected, had 
 not understood. Thoroughly aware of the elder 
 Vanaman s disapprobation of her, she was wholly 
 convinced that he would not immediately like this 
 hurried match. She quite agreed that he had better 
 be kept in ignorance of his son s project until that 
 project was accomplished; but she counted on over 
 coming the old man s prejudice against her by a per 
 sonal appeal after the wedding, and she took it for 
 granted that the opportunity for a personal appeal 
 would be given her. 
 
 Charley was saying: 
 
 " You know I didn t mean him to know before 
 hand." 
 
 "Yes," said Edith, "but it s not beforehand 
 now. You don t mean you were going to try 
 to keep our marriage a secret from your own 
 family?" 
 
 She could not bear the infliction of the insult 
 implied. She was tired of evasions. It was well 
 enough, perhaps, to avoid the newspapers, since Jim 
 seemed to have so many friends on the newspaper- 
 staffs; in order to avoid the newspapers she had, 
 in the quiet of her own mind, decided against 
 sending out formal announcements. But she was 
 tired of purely unnecessary evasions. The divorce 
 had been given to her, not to Jim; she was a law-
 
 JIM 83 
 
 fully married woman, and she would hide from no 
 more Mrs. Dunbars the Mrs. Dunbars would ac 
 cept her only if she were straightforward with them. 
 Still less would she hide from Charley s own family. 
 Oh, she could bring the old man round and keep 
 his will intact: she could do that better as Charley s 
 acknowledged wife than Charley could do it as a 
 supposed bachelor. Edith could scarcely believe that 
 her husband would want to conceal his marriage. 
 
 Charley continued to wriggle in his chair. Had 
 the moment indeed come? 
 
 " Oh, Edith, you don t understand or rather, 
 you won t. You know perfectly well that we " 
 
 " How did you think you could hide it from 
 him?" 
 
 He was trying hard to do what he had meant to 
 do, trying hard to state his terms and state them 
 clearly; but he could not do it. Her glance was 
 strange : he could not do it. 
 
 " I wasn t going to hide it from him. I wanted 
 it to be over and done with before I told him, that s 
 all. Don t you see? " 
 
 " But you were going to put off telling him for a 
 few days? You weren t going to tell him right 
 away? " 
 
 " Oh, well, Edith, you must see for yourself that 
 if we only waited till " 
 
 Edith rose from the table. Her eyes looked like 
 the brown agate marbles that he used to play with 
 when he was a small boy. 
 
 " We ll go up and tell your father now," she said.
 
 SIXTH CHAPTER 
 
 A i they came up the steps of the Vanaman house, 
 Mame opened the door for them. 
 
 " I was listening for you," she said to 
 Charley. " I wanted 
 
 Then her near-sighted eyes took in her brother s 
 companion and her vapid face twitched. 
 
 " You won t you both come into the parlor? " she 
 asked. 
 
 She led the way to the dim room, furnished in 
 the style of the Seventies. Charley, who had had a 
 terrible ride uptown a silent ride during which he 
 had failed in every endeavor to conjure the courage 
 requisite for facing Edith s anger with the facts in 
 his case was rather glad of the respite, but he 
 asked: 
 
 "How s father?" 
 
 Mame blinked. 
 
 ;t That s what I was looking for you to tell you 
 
 about," she said. " He s Again she realized 
 
 the catastrophe of Edith s presence. She had an 
 illuminating flash. " You didn t you didn t want 
 to see him?" she faltered. 
 
 " Of course I did." 
 
 " But he s he s very low, Charley. He had a 
 sort of sinking-spell after you left this morning." 
 The words came with a rush now. " Besides, when 
 he got a little better he made me I don t know why 
 telephone for Mr. Zoller." 
 
 8 4
 
 JIM 85 
 
 " What! " said Charley. His jaw dropped. 
 
 Brother and sister were standing, but Edith had 
 sat down on the horsehair sofa that reminded her so 
 much of the sofa in her Uncle Morty s wandering 
 parlor at Ayton. 
 
 "Who s Mr. Zoller?" she repeated. 
 
 " You know him: the lawyer," explained Charley. 
 He tossed the words over his shoulder at her. " Is 
 he up there now, Mame?" 
 
 Mame nodded. 
 
 Edith started to rise. The situation was reveal 
 ing to her what Charlie had been afraid to reveal. 
 
 " Charley " she began. 
 
 But Charley raised his hand. 
 
 " Just a moment, please," he said. " Is it " 
 
 He wet his dry lips. " Is it a new will, Mame? " 
 
 " No. At least I don t think it is, Charley." She 
 looked helplessly from her brother to Edith. " But 
 he s in no condition to be interrupted, whatever it is, 
 
 at least not by That is, if you don t mind 
 
 if Mrs. Trent will excuse us " 
 
 Edith got up. She came a step forward and put 
 out her hand. Her face was kindly. 
 
 " If I can be of any help," she said, " you must 
 give me a chance. I am not Mrs. Trent any more. 
 I have been granted a divorce from that terrible 
 man, and I am your brother s wife, my dear." 
 
 Strong emotion is incapable of complete conceal 
 ment. What poor Mame s face showed was some 
 thing uncommonly close to horror. Her features 
 seemed flattened, as if from a blow. Behind her 
 thick spectacles, her pale eyes blinked piteously. 
 
 " His you re married? " She did not see
 
 86 JIM 
 
 Edith s proffered hand. Her frightened gaze 
 sought her brother. "Oh, Charley!" she whis 
 pered. 
 
 Charley had fallen back at Edith s announcement, 
 a not very dignified figure. Now, however, action 
 was forced on him. He feared his father s disap 
 proval, but that silent ride uptown had taught him 
 to fear his wife s anger more. He had to interfere. 
 Besides, he really did not want to see the woman he 
 loved treated in any but the most cordial manner. 
 
 " Of course we re married," said he. His tone 
 was not the ideally triumphant one in which a 
 new-made bridegroom is supposed to announce his 
 changed estate, but neither was it accompanied by the 
 sheepish smile that, in practice, usually accompanies 
 such declarations. His voice carried a challenge. 
 
 Mame fairly swayed. 
 
 " But, Charley " she protested. 
 
 u Just a moment, please! Why are you surprised? 
 You must have known all along that I intended to 
 do this." He remembered that it always paid to 
 keep the upper hand with Mame. " I made it as 
 clear to you as I could without without saying 
 it in so many words before Edith was legally free 
 of the brute that had been her husband. Mame " 
 he looked at her threateningly " aren t you glad? " 
 
 Mame was ready for tears; but she fought 
 bravely with her impulse and overcame it. Mur 
 muring some platitude about her pleasure, and seek 
 ing to excuse her embarrassment by a word about 
 the suddenness of the news, she took Edith s hand 
 at last; she even touched with her lips the cheek of 
 her new sister-in-law.
 
 JIM 87 
 
 Edith was radiant. She returned the caress 
 warmly. 
 
 " I love him," she whispered, and she blushed 
 prettily as she whispered it. 
 
 The entrance of a maid saved Mame from imme 
 diate reply. 
 
 " Mr. Vanaman s asking for you, Miss Vana- 
 man," said the servant. " He wants you right 
 away." 
 
 Charley caught Edith s eye. 
 
 "Shall I go along?" he asked. 
 
 At that Mame s face grew utterly white. She 
 gasped in unconcealed terror. 
 
 " It wouldn t do," she said as soon as she was 
 sure that the maid was out of hearing. " It d be 
 the worst thing for both of you. You know you re 
 counting on his help to finance the invention, and 
 
 if you told him Forgive me, Edith, but he s 
 
 an old man, and if Charley " 
 
 Charley had that easy bravery which comes with 
 the belief that we have burned the last of our bridges 
 behind us. 
 
 " I ll do what I like," he snorted. 
 
 " No, no," Mame implored him. " You know 
 how upset he was by your talk this morning. If he 
 saw you again, he might have another sinking- 
 spell." 
 
 " He s my father," said Charley, doggedly. 
 
 It was the amazing Edith who came to Mame s 
 rescue. She saw the practical danger and changed 
 her plans instantly. 
 
 " I think your sister is right," she declared. She 
 nodded calmly to Mame, who, her victory shorn of
 
 88 JIM 
 
 some of its pleasure because it was bought by an 
 other woman s influence over Charley, hurried up 
 stairs and left husband and wife together. 
 
 2. Charley s amazement kept him, for quite a 
 minute, speechless. Essentially a timid man, he 
 had known, and them but slightly, only a few women, 
 and knowing a few women slightly, he of course re 
 duced his scanty knowledge to a set of simple rules 
 and concluded that he knew Woman well. Here, 
 however, were all his rules broken and by the 
 woman that he had supposed he knew best of all her 
 kind. Edith, with whom he had carried on a long 
 liaison, with whom he had planned, and brought to 
 a triumphant issue under heavy difficulties, a con 
 spiracy that the civil law at best but winked at and 
 that moral law in which they had been reared con 
 demned Edith, whom he had married, was a mys 
 tery. Here he had reluctantly come at her bidding. 
 Their entire future lay in the balance; his father 
 might be dying. She had ordered him; he had 
 
 obeyed, and now He flung his hands above his 
 
 head with a gesture of fatuous despair. When he 
 spoke it was without thought: it was not so much a 
 question that he put as it was a picture of his own 
 bewilderment and of that action of hers which had 
 amazed him: 
 
 "Why did you do that?" 
 
 "Can t you see, dear?" she parried. 
 
 He was uncertain as to the advisability of press 
 ing her: he had lately mastered the proverb about 
 sleeping dogs. He was worried by Zoller s presence 
 in the house and, to do him justice, by his father s
 
 JIM 89 
 
 relapse. Nevertheless, this seemed a time to have 
 things out, so he answered: 
 
 " No, I can t see. One minute you want me to 
 come up here and face them, and the next you hold 
 me off. I can t see it at all." 
 
 If Edith needed anything to justify to herself her 
 change of front and she was not a woman to feel 
 the need of extraneous justification Charley s words 
 were that thing. This was not the Charley she had 
 known, and only severe stress could so have changed 
 him. 
 
 " It s because you ve converted me to your view," 
 she said. She stilled his annoyance by the touch of 
 her slim hand upon his arm. u You and your sister 
 and the whole situation in this house. I didn t 
 realize it till I got here. Somebody used to say that 
 I never could understand a stone-wall until I had 
 struck my head against it. I ve struck this stone-wall 
 now." 
 
 The quotation, or the confession that it was a quo 
 tation, proved unfortunate. Charley s annoyance 
 revived. It broke the fences of his new discretion. 
 
 " Who used to say that? " he inquired. 
 
 " Never mind who, dear. The point is that it s 
 the truth." 
 
 " I suppose it was Jim." 
 
 She had not quoted Jim; she had quoted another 
 man a man that Charley had not known. It was 
 over the first cocktail she ever drank at Sherry s 
 that George Mertcheson said it. She could still have 
 recalled the glitter of the room it and the glitter 
 of his eyes then both so novel to her; but she could 
 also forget them, and she had chosen to forget.
 
 90 JIM 
 
 No, it was not Jim; but she understood that to say 
 so would entail explanations. 
 
 " What if it was Jim? " she asked. " You don t 
 have to be told what I think of him." 
 
 " I know I don t; but I m sick and tired of hear 
 ing of him. I don t want ever to have to think of 
 him again." 
 
 Edith kissed her husband. 
 
 " You won t have to think of him ever again," 
 she promised. " And now do try to see why I kept 
 you down here in the parlor. I guessed well enough 
 from what your sister said that you had some little 
 quarrel with your father about me this morning, and 
 I know how much our whole future depends on 
 keeping his good will. Oh, I know you only de 
 ceived me to save my feelings and I forgive you for 
 that. But I ve found it out now, and so I tell you 
 you ve converted me, dear, to your opinion of what 
 we ought to do." 
 
 She spoke truly enough there. Brought face to 
 face with the actual conditions of the Vanaman house 
 hold a household with which she had never been 
 intimate, and to which she had been almost a stranger 
 since its head began to suspect his son s liking for 
 her she realized the folly of the anger and defiance 
 that had forced her to demand her husband s imme 
 diate acknowledgment of her new status to old Vana 
 man. Charley lived on the paternal allowance; he 
 built his future on the expected success of the tele 
 graphic invention, and his only present hope of 
 floating that invention lay in a winning over of his 
 father to a faith in him and the sounder equal to 
 his own faith. Something of these facts, obscured
 
 JIM 91 
 
 by the sanguine views of his ingenuity that are the 
 aura of every inventor, Charley had long ago put 
 before her, but the full extent of the father s power 
 and the inability of her charms to overcome his 
 prejudices were not brought home to Edith until she 
 heard in Mame s tones the terror inspired by Char 
 ley s implied determination to tell the elder Vanaman 
 of the marriage. 
 
 Her new point of view was what, had he dared to 
 want it, Charley would most have wanted; but it 
 had come too suddenly for him to feel grateful for 
 it; he was still numbed by the blows that had pre 
 ceded it. Charley s sort of man, when chance gives 
 him a victory, knows in his heart that chance and not 
 his own valor has won him the day, and so Charley s 
 sort of man is not magnanimous. 
 
 " I wish you could have been converted sooner," 
 grumbled Charley. 
 
 "How could I, dear? You didn t say that he d 
 cut you out of his will if I if we married." 
 
 " Oh, he won t cut me out of his will if I m only 
 given a little time to break this to him gently," said 
 Charley. Since chance had been so far kind, he felt 
 justified in counting on it further. 
 
 " Then you shall have the time," Edith answered: 
 she never did things by halves. She put her arms 
 about his neck. " I ll be good. I ll leave you to go 
 up to him when he s stronger, and I ll run along 
 and meet you at Bustanoby s for dinner. My bag s 
 packed and can be sent for from there. At eight 
 o clock, dear. Don t be late, but do remember how 
 much depends on your being nice to your father. 
 We ll keep it all quiet until you can bring him
 
 92 JIM 
 
 round." She guessed what that might mean, but 
 she knew that rebellion would mean a new Vanaman 
 will. She would hurry now; she too would burn her 
 bridges. She added: "And find out, if you can, 
 what he wanted to see his lawyer about." 
 
 She kissed him again and left him. Charley saw 
 her to the door which they opened quietly for fear 
 that the sick man would hear them and ask questions 
 of Mame and then, returning alone to the gloomy 
 parlor, began to pace up and down the length of the 
 room. 
 
 Taking Edith s change at its face value, as he 
 now saw that he would have perforce to take it, 
 the world, or the world as Charley s tired brain 
 projected it, was still a chaos. Could he indeed keep 
 his marriage secret? He could not wish his father s 
 death, yet even if Edith did not tire of waiting, there 
 were the newspapers and the tongues of gossip, to be 
 dreaded: there were all the dangers that Edith had 
 immediately seen and that he had for so long a time 
 been blind to. He was beginning to learn what most 
 of us are as slow to learn: that marriage, in the ac 
 cepted sense of that word, means the foundation of 
 one family at the cost of the disruption of another 
 and more often two other families. Do what he 
 would, it must be his father against Edith. Mame, 
 
 of course, did not count, but the others If Jim 
 
 had never come into Edith s life, everything would 
 have been so easy. This, however, indirectly, was 
 Jim s work. 
 
 He had to have a drink. Since the start of his 
 father s illness, Charley had been keeping a bottle 
 in the dining-room sideboard. The dining-room
 
 JIM 93 
 
 opened upon the parlor through sliding doors. He 
 tiptoed out and poured himself some whisky a 
 good deal of whisky. The first drink did not at 
 once affect him, so he took a second. 
 
 He still had the empty glass in his hand when he 
 heard somebody come rapidly down the front stairs 
 to go out to the street. Was it Zoller? Charley 
 ran to the parlor window; but Mame had brought 
 from Carmel the habit of keeping the inner shutters 
 closed: the wood was warped; the shutters stuck; 
 by the time that Charley had them open the person 
 that had gone out was nowhere to be seen. 
 
 He crept to the first-floor landing and put his ear 
 to the keyhole of the door of his father s room. 
 There was a buzz of three voices inside a woman s 
 and two men s. He could distinguish nothing more 
 than that. He dared not go in. He had to return 
 to the parlor and walk and wait. 
 
 3. Mame returned at last. She was crying. 
 
 "Well?" demanded Charley. 
 
 " He s only a little better," said Mame. " Dr. 
 Morley was there, that s why they wanted me." 
 
 "Was Zoller still with him?" 
 
 " He was about just going when I came up. Dr. 
 Morley says I asked him right out, Charley, for I 
 thought anything was better than this suspense and 
 he says he may live several months father may, I 
 mean but that " her sobs shook her " but that 
 it can t have any end except except 
 
 Charley Vanaman bent and kissed his sister. Her 
 news was no news to him, but he had not thought 
 that the doctor would break it to her so soon.
 
 94 JIM 
 
 " I m sorry, Mame," he said; " but, after all, it s 
 only what we ve really expected. We must just do 
 the best we can to make him comfortable in the 
 meantime." 
 
 Mame looked up, mopping her reddened eyes. 
 
 " If you only hadn t m-married at just this time ! " 
 
 You don t understand," said Charley. 
 
 " Perhaps I don t, but you can hardly expect me 
 to approve of her, Charley." 
 
 His nerves would not endure much more. 
 
 " You ve got to remember," he said, " that Edith 
 is my wife now." 
 
 " I do. I m going to try to. I know she has her 
 good points. She s well, she s very well dressed, any 
 how. But Charley, with poppa feeling about her 
 the way he does, and your invention not making 
 money, how can you think 
 
 "Stop it!" snapped Charley. 
 
 She stopped, and he forced himself to recall the 
 matters that were immediately pressing. Presently 
 he asked: 
 
 " Didn t you find out what he wanted with 
 Zoller?" 
 
 Mame shook her head. 
 
 " They wouldn t let me know, and afterward, just 
 now, I was afraid if I asked it would excite him. Dr. 
 Morley says particularly he mustn t have any ex 
 citement. He says " 
 
 " You haven t any idea what it was about what 
 Zoller was here for, I mean? " 
 
 " That s what I m saying, Charley. You know he 
 has all poppa s business to attend to. It might be
 
 JIM 95 
 
 most anything. Dr. Morley says if poppa is both 
 ered any more about business 
 
 " Zoller s an old fox. I don t trust him." 
 
 Mame came, at this, as near to indignation as her 
 brother had ever known her to come: 
 
 You mustn t say that, Charley. I m sure I 
 don t know what poppa would do without him." 
 
 " He d do with me to attend to his business for 
 him, that s what he d do. Zoller came to him with 
 some story from some of Jim Trent s friends, I 
 guess, and got the old man down on me. He began 
 to change just about the time I began to go to Jim s 
 place." 
 
 "Oh, Charley, how can you think of all these 
 things when poppa 
 
 That softened him. 
 
 "I know, Mame," he said, more gently; "we ve 
 got to do all we can for poppa now." 
 
 She looked up at him beseechingly. 
 
 " That s just it; and if he heard of your about 
 you and Mrs. Trent 
 
 u You mean about Edith. For Heaven s sake, do 
 stop connecting her with Jim Trent! " 
 
 " About you and Edith, I mean, Charley if 
 father heard about that, it would be a shock, and the 
 doctor said that any shock might kill him imme 
 diately." 
 
 " H m," said Charley. He took a short turn of 
 the room. When he spoke again, his back was 
 toward her. " Do you think you can keep to 
 morrow s papers away from him? I guess the news 
 of this wedding s not important enough to be in 
 more than one issue and they may miss it altogether
 
 96 JIM 
 
 that s what we hope for, anyway. I was going 
 to ask you to do this before, only Edith thought 
 otherwise until she understood how really sick he 
 was, of course." 
 
 " Yes, I can keep them from him. Oh ! " Mame 
 brightened "will you do it, Charley? Your part, 
 I mean. Will you? " 
 
 " Yes," he said, turning at last. " I will." Cir 
 cumstances were working together for him again. 
 " I suppose I can put in a good deal of my time here 
 enough to keep poppa from suspecting anything: 
 the way you put it, it s my plain duty." 
 
 She came to him, her myopic eyes still red from 
 tears, but her lips smiling gratitude. 
 
 " Oh, thank you, Charley, thank you ! You are 
 good, and and, Charley, I will love Edith, and I 
 do hope you ll be very happy! " 
 
 " Oh, that s all right. Don t thank me. But I 
 want you to do something for me. Find out if that 
 paper that old Zoller was here about was a new 
 will." 
 
 11 I ll try." 
 
 " And if it is a will, try and find out what s in it, 
 will you? " 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 " Oh, and just a moment, Mame, can you lend me 
 twenty dollars? I ll be a little short till to-morrow, 
 when my allowance is due."
 
 SEVENTH CHAPTER 
 
 THE days that slowly lengthened themselves 
 into months began not unhappily for Edith 
 Vanaman and her new husband. They had 
 long ago discounted the delicious surprises of a life 
 together led by two persons desperately in love; 
 but, though they had made the mistake of choosing 
 each other for no reason save that of their passion 
 for each other, and Edith s passion for success, their 
 circumstances developed three interests that they 
 could and did share in common; they wanted to be 
 quit of the memory of Jim, they wanted the inven 
 tion to prosper, and they wanted the elder Vana- 
 man s money. 
 
 Edith s surrender to the necessity of concealing 
 their marriage from Charley s father involved, she 
 recognized, a postponement of those plans for a 
 more expensive manner of life upon which she had 
 confidently counted. The disappointment was bit 
 ter, but she met it resolutely. Her only experience 
 in house-hunting and housekeeping had been with an 
 artist husband, and almost her only knowledge of 
 New York apartments was concerned with studio- 
 buildings. Such a building as that in which she 
 had lived with Jim was far too costly for her pres 
 ent condition; but she had heard some of his friends 
 speak of the Washington Square district as cheaper, 
 and there she decided to engage rooms for herself 
 
 97
 
 98 JIM 
 
 and Charley where they might live economically un 
 til riches came with the exploitation of the sounder, 
 the opportunity for her to meet and soften the elder 
 Vanaman or the elder Vanaman s death. 
 
 Yet even the Washington Square district proved 
 unexpectedly expensive. The rents brazenly de 
 manded were out of all honest proportion to the 
 comfort of the dark rooms shown her. She could not 
 pay them if she had wished, and she began by scorn 
 ing the rooms at any price. She had several dis 
 couraging days of interviews with landladies less 
 and less well-dressed, showing rooms more and more 
 beneath her most modest requirements. In the end, 
 she was compelled to engage only temporarily, she 
 wa^ sure what the slovenly proprietor called a 
 " third-floor front and back " in a house of grimy 
 red brick across Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village. 
 Trucks, surface-cars, and school-children made the 
 streets noisy from dawn until evening, and at night 
 the trains on the elevated railroad, indistinguishable 
 from the choral cacophony of day, screeched and 
 thundered close to the bedroom windows, with a 
 horrid regularity that first deafened the quivering 
 ear and then left a more painful silence : the waiting 
 for the next assault. The bedroom was narrow and 
 crowded, and it presented all those inducements for 
 quarreling which are offered by any small space when 
 two people try to dress in it; but Edith s clothes, 
 as a woman s, needed cupboards, whereas Charley s, 
 as a man s, fared as well in one remaining bureau- 
 drawer as elsewhere, even if the bureau-drawer was 
 that nearest the carpet, stuck when it was closed, 
 and had to be kicked shut every time that it was
 
 JIM 99 
 
 opened. The living-room was in ungracious keep 
 ing with the bedroom; but they went out to their 
 meals at supportable restaurants. 
 
 During the better part of November, husband 
 and wife were prey to a fear that, unpleasant as it 
 was, saved them from boredom; they were afraid 
 that some word of their marriage might get into the 
 newspapers and reach the eye of the elder Vanaman, 
 or that gossip, gathering it downtown, would bear 
 it up. This fear, however, gradually passed. They 
 bought more papers than economy would approve, 
 but the papers were silent. They were so silent that 
 Edith sometimes felt hurt at the apparent journalis 
 tic assumption of her unimportance. It was Jim s 
 work, of course : he would still be hugging thaUpre- 
 tense of saving her from publicity. 
 
 Then, little by little, the tedium of their situation 
 made itself felt. It settled on their love as Autumn 
 weather settles on the land. It was a mist, a fog, a 
 drizzle; at last it turned to a monotonous, discour 
 aging rain. Charley had carried out his plan of 
 saying to his father that he must sleep downtown 
 so as to be at his office early in the morning: he 
 passed half of his working-hours dictating, in that 
 office, letters that praised his invention and peti 
 tioned financiers for engagements; the other half 
 waiting in anterooms, interviewing powerless and 
 pompous subordinates, accepting with a mask of 
 belief the palpable lies of delay. Edith substituted 
 walks in Washington Square for her old rambles in 
 Central Park, dreamed her dreams of success at a 
 window overlooking that Greenwich Village street, 
 waited and grew sick with hope deferred. In the
 
 ioo JIM 
 
 evenings, she and Charley would go now to one 
 restaurant and now to another, putting off as long 
 as they could the inevitable return to that cramped 
 bedroom; or they would scurry up to the gallery of 
 a theater, dodging recognition by possible acquaint 
 ances of other days in the better seats; or they would 
 sit together in their living-room, with the blue gas 
 burning at its highest, while Charley talked of his 
 adventures in China or of the good times soon to be. 
 And all this while old Vanaman seemed to grow no 
 better and no worse. 
 
 Gradually, therefore, two of their interests be 
 came one. As time dragged on, they realized in 
 creasingly that the money required to launch the 
 sounder was not to be had from without, and so in 
 creasingly that their hope lay in Charley s dying, 
 but slowly dying, father. Thus the invention, which 
 had formed the chief topic of their intimate conver 
 sations, yielded to long guesses regarding old man 
 Vanaman s inclinations and his will. 
 
 You re sure he hasn t guessed that we re mar 
 ried?" Edith would daily inquire. 
 
 And Charley would daily answer: 
 
 " I m sure of it. Haven t I told him I had to live 
 away from home because I had to be near my 
 work?" He would pause before sincerely adding: 
 " And you know that I think it s even a duty to him, 
 because, as Mame says, a shock might kill him any 
 time." 
 
 Did Edith want her father-in-law to die? She 
 did not tell her husband that this question so much 
 as suggested itself to her, and she was not then sure 
 of its true answer. She, who feared death above
 
 JIM 101 
 
 every other terror, she who would not have wished 
 death even for Jim: certainly she did not want Mr. 
 Vanaman to die if his will had been changed to 
 Charley s hurt. 
 
 From Mame, now shut in the house by her fa 
 ther s illness, Charley could discover nothing. 
 
 " You don t half try to find out," he upbraided 
 her. 
 
 "I do so try," she protested; "but I can t ask 
 poppa in so many words, can I? You know he 
 mustn t be excited." 
 
 "Then why don t you try Zoller? He comes 
 around here every once in a while, you say." 
 
 "He does; and he s very nice; but he wouldn t 
 talk to me about such a thing he d think he had no 
 right to talk to me about a client s business with 
 him." 
 
 " I wish he d always been as high and mighty 
 about such things. Look here, Mame: here I am 
 keeping my part of your bargain, and you re not 
 keeping yours. You wanted me not to tell poppa 
 about my getting married, and I haven t told him. 
 Why don t you keep your word as well as I keep 
 mine?" 
 
 All that Mame could do was to wipe the tears 
 from her myopic eyes and promise to try again. 
 She tried often, but vainly. 
 
 There were moments when Charley thought of 
 softening his father s heart toward Edith, but all 
 his approaches from this direction were as futile as 
 his sister s from the other. In the room with the 
 ugly mahogany furniture the terrible old man lay, 
 all day and all night long, on the bed, his body im-
 
 102 JIM 
 
 perceptibly weakening, but his eyes keen, his brain 
 clear, his prejudices unshaken. 
 
 There came a time when Edith was annoyed by 
 her husband s inability to discover whether a new 
 will had been drawn. On one or two occasions she 
 quarreled with him because of this failure. 
 
 " Why don t you ask him? " she demanded. 
 
 " That d only put the idea in his head," Charley 
 gloomily assured her. 
 
 " Then can t you get Mame to find out? " 
 
 " I ve tried that. I ve told you I ve tried. He 
 just won t say." 
 
 " And you can t get him to advance anything?" 
 
 " Not beyond my regular allowance. He says he 
 doesn t know enough about telegraphy. He says if 
 I can interest some company or some expert, he ll 
 cough up." 
 
 " I don t see why you can t interest an expert," 
 Edith would reply. 
 
 But despite business rebuffs Charley continued 
 sanguine of the merits of his invention and proud of 
 his abilities to convince anybody of anything. He 
 would try to explain the intricacies of the telegraphic 
 situation that, for the moment only, delayed suc 
 cess. Edith listened but little and based her argu 
 ment upon the question of sheer merit; she either 
 could not or would not understand. It was a period 
 of suspense, and they agreed at least upon one thing 
 concerning it: they silently agreed that it furnished 
 excuse for seeking relief in a postponement of the 
 time when Charley should give up liquor. 
 
 "If only I could see your father, I know I could 
 bring him round," said Edith.
 
 JIM 103 
 
 " I ve done my best," Charley declared, " and 
 he simply won t have it. If I tried any harder, he d 
 begin to suspect, and that would be the end of us 
 forever." 
 
 The suspense was pulled to a straining tension. 
 Edith dreaded the arrival of a child, which, in their 
 present circumstances, would never do; she came to 
 dislike the sight of babies in their coaches in Wash 
 ington Square, but she managed to escape maternity 
 and to evade Charley s patriarchal tendencies. For 
 the rest, Edith bit her lip and waited; Charley, in 
 his little downtown office, went on dictating verbose 
 letters to capitalists and notes to experts, inviting 
 them to call and test his instrument. The tasks of 
 both were hard; the latter s appeared so fruitless 
 that it began to wear on even the husband s nerves, 
 and its failures more than once sharpened Edith s 
 tongue to bitter criticism. 
 
 We might save a little money," she said, " if 
 you weren t spending so much on making your office 
 look as if you were carrying on a big business." 
 
 " We might save some," he answered, " but we d 
 never make any. The only way to begin to make 
 money is to pretend to have it." 
 
 She disagreed. Why couldn t he at least dispense 
 with his stenographer? 
 
 "What? Fire Miss Girodet? She s my best as 
 set. These big financiers won t read a hand-written 
 letter, or a badly typed one, for that matter." 
 
 " But couldn t you rent desk-room in some other 
 man s office and share his stenographer s time with 
 him?" 
 
 " No, I couldn t. You don t understand these
 
 io 4 JIM 
 
 things, Edith. I tell you a fellow has to put up the 
 bluff of success if he wants to succeed." 
 
 He urged her to come to see his office, but she 
 refused to go. She had never been there. While 
 she was Jim s wife to go would have been indiscreet; 
 now she had so many worries at home that she was 
 afraid to make an expedition which, discovering 
 tokens of failure, might add to her burden a new 
 care. 
 
 Since Charley could not economize at his office, 
 Edith attempted further domestic retrenchments. As 
 she had nothing to do all day long, she bought a gas- 
 stove, had it installed, after an argument with the 
 landlady, and prepared her own meals and Charley s. 
 She repaired their clothes and secured a slight, though 
 inadequate, reduction in their rent by undertaking 
 all the work of their two rooms. But these tasks 
 were distateful to her, and she hurried through them 
 to gain a time that, gained, hung heavily. Instinct 
 ively, she was avoiding such of her former acquaint 
 ances as she chanced to encounter in the shops or 
 on the streets, for she was ashamed of her poverty 
 and she felt that the mere mention of Charley s 
 name in Jim s dropped cross-suit had by this time 
 become known to them and was held against her. 
 One afternoon she went a block out of her way 
 to avoid approaching that prim Mrs. Entwhistle 
 who used to live across the hall from the apartments 
 in which Edith and Jim lived. She scorned herself 
 for these qualms; she used all her logic to banish 
 them: but they remained. On a single occasion she 
 mentioned them to Charley. 
 
 Well," he said he had had a particularly dis-
 
 JIM 105 
 
 couraging day and was very tired " it s not my 
 fault, is it? At the start of the whole thing, I told 
 you Jim might make trouble, but you were sure he 
 never would." 
 
 After that she abandoned the practice of bearing 
 these tales to him and resolved to wait until the 
 triumph of the invention placed her, where she now 
 was not, in a position to make new friends as de 
 sirable as the old had been. She even did not tell 
 him when she heard one of her neighbors in the house 
 refer to her as " that divorced woman," and she 
 began to pass her spare time in wandering upon 
 shopping excursions during which she did not shop 
 because she had not money and from which she 
 returned miserable with the pangs of unsatisfied 
 envy. 
 
 Charley s lot continued to be little better. He felt, 
 as keenly as did his wife, his unrewarded business 
 endeavors and he kept to his own heart several af 
 fronts that decreased the frequency of his visits to 
 his club. He was sustained solely by his confidence 
 in the ultimate triumph of his invention. 
 
 " Let em wait," he would say to himself. 
 " They ll come crawling to me on their knees when 
 I m rich, and then it ll be me that throws them down. 
 Money is what talks in this burg: money and noth 
 ing else." 
 
 Edith noticed that the club of which he had been 
 so inordinately vain was playing less and less part in 
 his conversation and life. She had thought it unfair 
 that he should have this social outlet while she had 
 none, and her only reason for tolerating it was Char 
 ley s proud announcement, at the start of the di-
 
 io6 JIM 
 
 vorce-proceedings, that Jim had resigned his mem 
 bership. This was a social triumph over Jim; be 
 sides, although Jim would say that he resigned 
 because he did not want to embarrass Charley, it 
 would look as if the first husband s withdrawal were 
 prompted by a guilty conscience that could not front 
 Edith s champion. Now the full effect of appear 
 ances had been gained. 
 
 "Why don t you give up the club?" she asked. 
 " It would save a good deal, wouldn t it? " 
 
 " What? "Charley could not credit her. 
 
 " Well, you hardly ever go there any more." 
 
 " I wouldn t give it up if I never went to it 
 Everybody d say I was down and out. You ve got 
 to have a club, even if you don t use it for anything 
 but to take your business-friends there." 
 
 " Jim resigned." 
 
 Charley flamed into a rage. 
 
 "Jim, Jim, Jim! Can t you ever get him out of 
 your mind? Not for a minute? I tell you, I won t 
 have you talk about him. Of course he resigned. 
 He s on the toboggan. I won t have the fellows say 
 the same thing about me. No, I m not going to re 
 sign, and that s all there is to it." 
 
 Generally, she ruled Charley; but when he broke 
 into these rages, he ruled her. Edith dropped the 
 subject of the club, and it was not mentioned be 
 tween them until some weeks later, when Charley 
 told her that Jim had been elected to one that she 
 knew was better. 
 
 They continued to wait. They saved money by 
 giving up the theater. They were thrown entirely 
 upon each other s company. Their love-makjng con-
 
 JIM 107 
 
 tinued, but no man and woman that ever lived can 
 pass every evening in love-making, and so Edith s 
 talk and Charley s steadily strengthened its emphasis 
 upon the financial possibilities of their future. Their 
 relief was alcoholic; the whisky became increasingly 
 necessary. 
 
 At last two things happened together: Charley s 
 father, growing steadily weaker, became peevish 
 because Charley did not pass more time under the 
 paternal roof; and Charley, nervously alert to trou 
 ble through the worry that breeds worry, noted 
 more and more, and more and more resented in his 
 wife s talk, certain words and twists of phrase that 
 were undoubtedly unconscious reminiscences of Jim. 
 Weariness and policy combined to move the hus 
 band: he passed two or three nights of each week 
 in his father s house, and for these nights at least 
 left Edith alone. 
 
 That was all. Everything else went on as it had 
 gone on previously. The invention did not prosper; 
 the elder Vanaman remained stingy and prejudiced 
 and alive. Edith wanted Charley to turn his allow 
 ance over to her uncensored administration, as Jim 
 had been in the habit of turning over his earnings; 
 but the mention of that desire brought on one of 
 Charley s rages, in the course of which he told her 
 that she was evidently trying to play upon him the 
 tricks that she had played upon his predecessor. 
 They could not save a cent; the day came when they 
 were in debt. 
 
 She kept it from him as long as she dared, but 
 she told him at last, and his reply was that he could 
 not concern himself with her affairs. The manage-
 
 io8 JIM 
 
 ment of their domestic matters was her business; if 
 she failed in that, how had she the hardihood to 
 ask for the administration of his whole allowance? 
 He had worries enough of his own. 
 
 There was something in his tone that gave her a 
 new fear. 
 
 " Charley," she asked, " are you in trouble, too? " 
 
 They were sitting in the front room of their suite. 
 It was evening. The gas, burning full head, showed 
 cruelly all the cheapness of their surroundings. Out 
 side, the light from the street-lamps cast a haze over 
 a wet December street. Every little while a scream 
 ing train on the elevated-road made it necessary for 
 husband and wife to shriek at each other. 
 
 Trouble?" said Charley. "What else have I 
 had for months? " 
 
 " But I mean I mean debt." 
 
 He had been avoiding her eyes. Now he looked 
 at her. 
 
 "Well, aren t you?" 
 
 It was true then. For the thousandth time they 
 returned to their weary struggle in the financial net. 
 In the midst of it, Charley poured himself a drink. 
 
 " I thought," said Edith, " that you were going to 
 quit that? " 
 
 " It s taken you a long time to remember," he 
 chuckled, grimly; " and I don t see you stopping." 
 
 " It doesn t hurt me." 
 
 " And I couldn t get through the strain without 
 it. When everything s all right again, I ll quit; but 
 nobody could expect a man to quit when he s going 
 through what I ve got to go through with." 
 
 It came out at last his trouble. He had fallen
 
 JIM 109 
 
 behind in his office-rent, and his bar-checks at the 
 club were overdue. Both debts could be juggled for 
 a time, but not for long. 
 
 Edith had not the heart again to urge him to 
 lessen his business expenses and resign from the 
 club. She could only look at him with knitted fin 
 gers and wide eyes: 
 
 " What are we to do? What are we to do?" 
 
 " I don t know," he answered. 
 
 His haggard eyes met hers again. Then, sud 
 denly, both looked away. They looked out of the 
 window at the hazy lights and the wet street, at 
 the shining tops of umbrellas and the hunched backs 
 of shambling men that walked unprotected in the 
 rain. 
 
 Edith s voice was low. It was toneless. 
 
 " Were you up home to-day? " 
 
 He did not turn his head. 
 
 " Yes," he said. 
 
 " How were things? " 
 
 " He seems just about the same." 
 
 They both went on looking out of the window. 
 
 2. One thing seemed possible: if there were no 
 combating exterior forces, Edith could at least con 
 quer the morbid fears that, she believed, sprang 
 from within. The next afternoon she went to call 
 on Mrs. Dunbar. 
 
 She was close to the Dunbar house when she saw a 
 motor draw up at the steps. She saw the former 
 Jean Dent get out and go into the house. 
 
 Edith s hesitation was momentary and concerned
 
 no JIM 
 
 itself not with her past fears, but her present policy. 
 Her cards read: 
 
 MRS. CHARLES VANAMAN. 
 
 But Jean had never met Charley, and Edith remem 
 bered that the news of the second marriage had 
 not been in the papers. Once she had been glad of 
 this; at another time she feared that the news would 
 get to Mrs. Dunbar through gossip, even though 
 they had no real friends in common, and get there 
 in a fashion unfavorable to the match. If it had not 
 got there at all, how was Jean Dunbar to recognize 
 this new name? Edith took a pencil from her purse 
 and, under " Mrs. Charles Vanaman," scribbled the 
 words " Edith Trent." 
 
 She rang the bell and sent up her card by the neat 
 servant who, as a symbol of peace and prosperity, 
 spurred the visitor s longings. To think that she had 
 to use Jim s name in order to enter here ! Edith 
 flushed: she would have been just as intelligible to 
 Jean if she had written " Edith Moxton." 
 
 The reception-room into which she had been 
 shown was rich, but quiet. It should have been 
 soothing. Edith, tapping a restless foot in a thick 
 rug, heard the servant descending the stairs: 
 
 " Mrs. Dunbar is not at home," said the serv 
 ant. . . . 
 
 3. Well, let them cut her, let them send down 
 their lying " not at homes." Edith would not sur 
 render, she would wait. She would wait for her 
 revenge. That would come when the sounder made
 
 JIM 1 1 1 
 
 her rich; and when the sounder made her rich, Edith 
 would be the one that held the knife. 
 
 Meanwhile, there was Diana. Edith had neg 
 lected Diana. She would look her up now. She 
 would look up Diana Wentworth and she would 
 make new friends, too. If these had to be in a lower 
 scale than Mrs. Dunbar, than all the hopes that 
 Edith had fed for her life with Charley, they would 
 at least serve to lessen the present tedium, and Jean 
 had taught her the way to get rid of undesirable 
 acquaintances when prosperity should change her 
 visiting-list. 
 
 She put her resolution into harness. Library-hours 
 were over: she called at Diana s picturesque flat in a 
 " model tenement," and Diana, who was no woman 
 to bear grudges, received her enthusiastically. 
 
 " You re looking thin and Oh, how brave 
 
 you are ! " said Diana. " It s splendid to see a 
 woman enduring so much for Principle." 
 
 Edith shrank from that unfinished sentence, but 
 she was glad to find a welcome and said so. Diana 
 talked to her of Archibald Hodge and Sylvia Tytus 
 and Womanism. 
 
 u You must come around to the Radical Club," 
 she said, " I ll take you some evening. It is such a 
 Melting-Pot for ideas. You get an idea and develop 
 it and get Everything out of it that it holds for your 
 own type. Then you go to the Radical Club, you 
 know, and pass it on to some other type who can get 
 Everything out of it that there is in it for him, and 
 he gives you an idea that he s got Everything out of 
 that there was in it for him, and you get Everything 
 out of that that there is in it for you. And so you go
 
 112 JIM 
 
 on, and on, and on," Diana nodded her handsome 
 head. " That s Growth," she concluded. 
 
 Edith thought she would like to grow until the 
 invention was making money. She did not at once 
 accept Diana s invitation to the Radical Club, be 
 cause she was not yet ready to meet crowds; but she 
 did let Diana introduce her to several people, and 
 among these she took especially to a few whose rad 
 icalism limited itself to art. They had done noth 
 ing as yet, but they were surely going to do every 
 thing; they were not at all in Jim s set, so they pre 
 sented no dangers or embarrassments, and Edith s 
 life with Jim had made her a little less ignorant of 
 art than of sociology. 
 
 Charley had been cultivating the silence of des 
 peration. In his bearing toward Edith, he was as 
 affectionate as he had ever been; except when he 
 dominated her by one of his sudden rages, he feared 
 her, but he found her no longer a mystery. The 
 memory of Jim was grown to an obsession; he hated 
 Jim as we can hate only those we have wronged, and 
 when even Charley had to admit that a resignation 
 from his club was imperative, he wrote his note of 
 withdrawal from this pride of his life with the cer 
 tainty that Jim was somehow to blame for it. Busi 
 ness stood still; creditors threatened. Charley had 
 got into the way of leaving his office several times 
 daily to go to the nearest saloon for a drink. " I m 
 going out for a moment," he would say to Miss 
 Girodet, his stenographer; "if anybody calls, tell 
 em I ll be right back "and he would return smell 
 ing heavily of liquor and annoyed because nobody 
 had called. He was putting on fat. His abdomen
 
 JIM 113 
 
 bulged, and his neck overlapped his collar; his 
 cheeks, on which tiny purple veins became visible, 
 were pendulous. 
 
 At Christmas time Edith hoped that the elder 
 Vanaman might give his son a liberal present, but 
 Charley s father gave his son what he had given him 
 at every Christmas for fifteen years: an umbrella. 
 She herself, somewhat in advance of the season, 
 sought to renew touch with her own relatives, whom 
 she had theretofore avoided as much as possible; 
 but she was not much more successful than Charley: 
 Uncle Morty maintained a diplomatic silence. Uncle 
 Gregory, the rich widower, sent her a five-dollar bill 
 and said that he did not approve of divorce ; Doug 
 las wrote that his wife spent all the money he could 
 make; Fred was lost somewhere with the waiter s 
 daughter; Aunt Polly expressed a box containing 
 a dozen rolls of ribbon from her latest shop and a 
 lace handkerchief from Aunt Caroline; Aunt Hat- 
 tie s gift was a year s subscription to " The Church 
 man," and the Rev. Stephen, to whom Edith had tim 
 idly hinted that she might visit him for a little rest, 
 sent her ten dollars and told her that, much as he re 
 gretted it, the presence of a divorced sister at the 
 rectory might make talk among his parishioners. 
 
 It was about this time that, on a Sunday, she and 
 Charley happened to pass a little hall in an obscure 
 street where her radical artists were holding an 
 exhibition. She had tried to induce her husband to 
 meet some of these friends, for she knew that it 
 would help to take his mind from business worries; 
 but Charley refused because they were what Jim had 
 been.
 
 H4 JIM 
 
 " Let s go in here," she suggested. 
 
 " I don t want to go in," said Charley. 
 
 " It s free," she urged. 
 
 " I don t care. I haven t got any use for artists. 
 One artist is all I need for a lifetime, thank you." 
 
 " But these artists aren t like Jim. They laugh 
 at his kind of work. Their idea is to get back to 
 the old way: they re real revolutionists, you see. 
 They want to paint things in the way that things are 
 and not in the way the artist tries to think he sees 
 them." 
 
 Charley was not interested in any theory of art, 
 but the fact that these revolutionaries were opposed 
 to Jim appealed to him. He consented to go into 
 the narrow room, and he went ready to espouse the 
 cause of the exhibitors for the best of reasons : it 
 was a cause opposed to Jim s. 
 
 Nevertheless, he was glad to find that the paint 
 ings had a direct appeal to his personal taste. They 
 were an endeavor, so the brief catalogue said, " to 
 carry back into the Holy Land of Art the Ark of the 
 Covenant of Beauty which has been banished from 
 those sacred fields by the Philistine brushes of men 
 who had no eye for it." The result was a gallery 
 full of Egyptian queens in royal galleys rowed by un- 
 sweating slaves; nymphs posed, on a sunlit after 
 noon, in the shade of trees of which no leaf cast 
 any shadow on the models creamy skin; nude Roman 
 ladies going to the bath; Guinever, looking from a 
 white marble battlement for Launcelot; Napoleon 
 (on a curveting horse and in stainless clothes) at 
 Waterloo; a lover, in satin knickerbockers, about to 
 elope with a lady in dancing-shoes. Most of the pic-
 
 JIM 115 
 
 tures illustrated something or told a story, and all 
 had pretty names. Those which did not hark back 
 to the Diisseldorf school or the England of the early 
 eighties allied themselves with Bouguereau, or 
 Alma Tadema, or Frederic Leighton. 
 
 " There," said Charley " now there s something 
 like : there s something I can understand" 
 
 He was facing a picture of a little girl who had 
 evidently just entered a doctor s office. The little 
 girl, with tears in her eyes, was holding up for the 
 physician s inspection a doll of which the arm had 
 been broken. 
 
 "Number a hundred-and-one. What s itsname?" 
 he asked Edith. 
 
 Edith consulted the catalogue. 
 Won t you mend my dollie? " she read. 
 
 " Fine," said Charley. " These fellows are doing 
 real art. They paint uncommon things and you 
 know what they are; Jim and his crowd paint com 
 mon things and nobody can tell what they are. Take 
 any one of these pictures: I can tell right off what 
 it s all about." 
 
 That was the beginning of Charley s introduction 
 to the work of the revolutionary artists. After it, 
 Edith had no difficulty in taking him about to meet 
 the painters. For some time, she and her husband 
 were a part of the cheaper studio-life. 
 
 4. For a Saturday afternoon early in Janu 
 ary, they received invitations to a tea that was to be 
 given by one of these artists: a Gladys Smyser. It 
 was written in white ink on turkey-red paper and 
 concluded with the words:
 
 n6 JIM 
 
 " From the poems of Beryl Henessy, recitations 
 by Mr. Ming." 
 
 "Shall we go?" asked Edith. 
 
 And Charley surprised her by answering: 
 
 " Of course we ll go. This is the sort of artists 
 I m for." 
 
 Miss Smyser s studio was at the rear of the 
 top floor in " The Beatrice," an apartment-house for 
 unmarried literary and artistic women on the east 
 side of Washington Square. One gained access by 
 a slow elevator that climbed only two-thirds of the 
 way and then probably because it grew too tired 
 stopped short; by a long walk down a dark passage, 
 and by a final ascent up two flights of noisy iron 
 stairs. Neither Edith nor Charley had been here 
 before, and they were a little startled by what they 
 found. 
 
 The hall-door of Miss Smyser s apartment struck 
 a chime of bells as it was opened. The hall itself 
 was in pitch darkness. Charley stumbled on the 
 discarded overcoat of one guest and put his foot 
 through the derby hat of another, as Edith and he 
 were led forward to the scarcely brighter studio be 
 yond. 
 
 Here heavy curtains of crimson plush had been 
 drawn across the windows, and about the picture- 
 covered walls tiny candles, hanging in swinging 
 sconces before ikons or sacred images, supplied but 
 the faintest illumination. The atmosphere was thick 
 with the brown spirals of smoke from Japanese in 
 cense and the blue spirals from many cigarettes, and 
 through this Charley could discern dim persons mov 
 ing gently among Oriental tables, inlaid with ivory,
 
 JIM 117 
 
 or seated in artistically cramped positions on low 
 divans. In one corner, under an Italian ivory crucifix 
 of the early sixteenth century, a tall, dark young man 
 served tea, and a short, blond young woman mixed 
 sweet cocktails in each of which a white violet 
 floated. Everybody was smoking, the women try 
 ing to pretend that they liked it as well as the men 
 did, and though everybody talked at once, all con 
 versation was in whispers: a generally fond air 
 pervaded the room. 
 
 Miss Smyser Charley could make out only that 
 she had a skinny arm and was dressed in what looked 
 like a crimson kimono figured with yellow lotus- 
 leaves pressed their hands and peered at them 
 through the pervading smoke of the incense. 
 
 " How d y do? " she said in a hissing tone. " I 
 can t see who you are, but I m awfully glad to see 
 you. Isn t this splendid? And we ve got Oswald 
 Pusey here. Will you have tea and brandy or only 
 a cocktail? " 
 
 They took cocktails Charley took two cocktails 
 and choked on the violet in the first one, much to 
 the delight of the dwarfed blonde and then Miss 
 Smyser, who did not know their names until she was 
 half way around the room with her introductions, 
 presented them to the other guests. 
 
 Of these there were a great many: far more than 
 it would have seemed possible the room could hold. 
 There was a beefy woman with a corsage in immi 
 nent danger of explosion, who was already tipsy 
 and whose mission in life, Miss Smyser said, was 
 to bring the truths of occultism within reach of 
 the masses: she was the reincarnation of Jeanne
 
 n8 JIM 
 
 d Arc, who, in her turn, had been, it appeared, the 
 reincarnation of Sappho. There was a man so fat 
 that, having seated himself at this lady s feet, he 
 was unable to rise, and he was a composer of music 
 chiefly love-songs and serenades. There was a doc 
 tor that wrote novels, and a novelist that practiced 
 drugless medicine. There was a handsome, sharp- 
 eyed man who announced himself as the sole- 
 surviving Calvinist and made epigrams that were 
 well worth while, but that nobody listened to, and a 
 sculptor that repeated as his own dead men s epi 
 grams that everybody applauded. There was one 
 woman of wealth, position, and intellect, who was 
 politely bored, and several rich women without those 
 other two attributes, who were fascinated. They 
 were patently lenders, and about them hung a num 
 ber of greedy-eyed youths and other borrowers. 
 Through the crowd moved a chain of six girl- 
 painters following a pimpled poetess, and a little 
 chorus of old maiden-ladies in youthful costumes 
 stood surrounding a lad with neutral-colored hair 
 who sat cross-legged on a divan and appeared to talk 
 in his sleep. 
 
 "Who s that?" asked Charley. 
 
 Miss Smyser had stopped and was standing uncer 
 tainly outside the circle of the maiden-ladies chorus. 
 She gave Charley a look that said: " Are you joking 
 with this sacred matter, or is it possible that you 
 really don t know? " What her lips whispered was: 
 
 " Oswald Pusey." 
 
 Edith saw that Charley was about to commit the 
 solecism of putting the fatal question : " Who s Os-
 
 JIM 119 
 
 wald Pusey?" Indeed, her husband s lips were 
 opening to utter it, when she interposed: 
 
 " We so admired his picture of Godiva at the ex 
 hibition, Miss Smyser didn t we, Charley? " 
 
 She had checked Charley, who changed his ques 
 tion to an " Ugh-hugh " of assent, but she had not 
 much improved affairs with her hostess. Her hostess 
 said: 
 
 " Naturally." 
 
 It was plain that everybody must admire Mr. 
 Pusey s work. 
 
 " I d like to present you," Miss Smyser pursued, 
 " but you can see that he s talking Art you can al 
 ways tell that by the way he closes his eyes and 
 Oswald Pusey won t tolerate the breaking of his 
 thread of thought when he s talking Art. Oh, there 
 are some more people coming in! I wonder who 
 they are. Excuse me." 
 
 She went to the newcomers, leaving E<Jith and 
 Charley in the rear of Mr. Pusey s chorus. 
 
 "I remember that picture," said Charley: "the 
 naked girl with the long hair, wasn t it?" 
 
 Edith feared he was speaking too loudly. Hop 
 ing that he might imitate her discretion, she made 
 a nod serve for reply. 
 
 " Well," said Charley, " that girl was a peach." 
 
 " Hush ! " whispered Edith. " Somebody he 
 might hear you." 
 
 "What if he does?" inquired her husband, but 
 he did lower his voice. " He don t look as if he d 
 mind a little praising." 
 
 Mr. Pusey certainly did not seem to hate himself. 
 He sat with his pearl-gray trousers drawn up to
 
 120 JIM 
 
 show pearl-gray socks embroidered with purple pan- 
 sies. He still appeared to be asleep, but he was smil 
 ing in his sleep, and his smile was divinely com 
 placent 
 
 What else do you know about him?" asked 
 Charley, when Edith remained silent to his preceding 
 query. 
 
 " Nothing," said Edith at his ear. " I just hap 
 pened to remember that one picture." 
 
 In fact, it was the only picture that Mr. Pusey 
 had ever done or ever would do, for, shortly after 
 this tea at " The Beatrice," he married the richest 
 of his maiden-lady chorus, who was also the oldest 
 and most angular, and she was so jealous that she 
 would not let him paint from a model unless she her 
 self brought her embroidery into the studio. Pusey 
 said it robbed him of his inspiration. Edith never 
 saw him on a second occasion, nor did Charley, but 
 on this occasion Charley remained for some time 
 fascinated. 
 
 They stood there watching. Every little while 
 Mr. Pusey opened his eyes ever so little and said 
 something about Art in a loud voice, apparently ad 
 dressing empty space; but Edith noted that the 
 slightest inattention on the part of anybody else in 
 the room the chorus was never anything but rap 
 turously attentive brought faint shadows of annoy 
 ance to the artist s face. 
 
 " He looks kind of greenish," said Charley. 
 "Isn t he well?" 
 
 "Hush!" Edith again commanded. "He ll be 
 sure to hear you." 
 
 "But isn t he well?" Charley persisted. "I
 
 JIM 121 
 
 thought maybe he was consumptive or something." 
 
 " Of course he s well," said Edith: " only he s a 
 genius; that s all. Come on away." 
 
 She plucked at her husband s sleeve. Charley, 
 who felt the effects of the close air and the two 
 cocktails, was rooted to his point of vantage. 
 
 "I don t believe that s all," said Charley: "just 
 look at the man s eyes." 
 
 The man s eyes were at that moment open. The 
 irises were so pale as to be indistinguishable from 
 the yellow surfaces in which they were set. Mr. 
 Pusey looked still asleep, though dreaming. He was 
 speaking, with a bony gesture of his left hand, 
 about Art. 
 
 The maiden-ladies applauded by a great intake 
 of the choral breath. 
 
 Charley chuckled. Edith was relieved when one 
 of the chain of six artist-girls accosted him: 
 
 " I saw you at our Exhibition the other Sunday, 
 Mr. Vanaman," she said. She looked exactly like 
 Miss Smyser. So did all her companions. The 
 marks of identification consisted of different colored 
 kimonos. 
 
 " Yes," said Charley, " I was there. Great 
 show." 
 
 " Did you see my little trifle? " asked the artist- 
 girl. 
 
 Charley was on the verge of displaying the truth 
 when Edith once more saved him. 
 
 " It was charming," said she. 
 
 " Oh, not that," the girl deprecated. " Still, I do 
 think the values were well handled." 
 
 This time Charley was too quick for his wife.
 
 122 JIM 
 
 " I m glad you made a good bargain," he said. 
 " The only artist I ever knew was a fool in money- 
 matters." 
 
 Edith had nudged him, but she was tardy. Leav 
 ing the girl between a smile and a frown, the wife 
 dragged her husband toward the pimpled poetess. 
 
 "Why n t you let me talk to her?" grumbled 
 Charley. 
 
 Edith was saved for the time from answering 
 by Miss Smyser clapping her hands for silence. Mr. 
 Pusey appeared mildly hurt; his chorus was horri 
 fied, for he was gasping .his way toward another 
 aphorism; but the rest of the company submitted. 
 
 " I am sorry to say," announced Miss Smyser, 
 " that Miss Beryl Henessy can t be here to-day to 
 hear her own poems recited, because she has a cold in 
 her head." 
 
 There was a murmur of condolence followed by a 
 loud sniff from the pimpled poetess. 
 
 " Nevertheless," continued Miss Smyser, " we are 
 to have the best of Miss Henessy here, for she says 
 that she puts what is best of her into her poems, and 
 Mr. Laurence Ming is going to recite some of Miss 
 Henessy s as yet unpublished Love Songs frorn a 
 Cannibal Jungle. " 
 
 The audience fluttered its approbation. Charley 
 clapped his hands once loudly, and then, finding that 
 he was alone in this demonstration, scowled at every 
 body else. 
 
 Mr. Laurence Ming came to the center of the 
 room. He was a diminutive man built like a jack- 
 in-the-box, hinged like that delight of innocent child 
 hood, and full, like it, of startlingly sudden gestures.
 
 JIM 123 
 
 He had long black hair and the eyes of a sparrow. 
 His face and hands were the color of mixed mus 
 tard German mustard and on his right wrist he 
 wore a silver bracelet. 
 
 ".I ought to explain," he said in a high, perky 
 voice, " that these jungle poems of Miss Henessy s 
 are authentic. Perfectly authentic. The jungle 
 poems are literal translations. From the Central 
 African dialects." 
 
 Again the flutter of approbation again frowned 
 into silence by Charley. The audience drew itself 
 back into attitudes of artistic attention. The air be 
 came hushed. In the same high voice, and with the 
 same jerky intonation in which he had first spoken, 
 Mr. Ming, punctuating his recital by gestures that 
 made Charley fear the little man s arms would fly 
 away, began: 
 
 " My woman, 
 
 My lioness, 
 
 My she-elephant! 
 
 Your face is like the moon, 
 
 It is like the full moon, like the moon at the full; 
 
 Daily you drink five cups of melted fat. 
 
 Where you walk, there your tracks are like the 
 tracks of the hippopotamus when he passes 
 through the mud of the river-shore. 
 
 Fear you that I shall bewitch you? 
 
 I will bewitch you ! 
 
 I will crush you in my arms; 
 
 I will strangle you; 
 
 I will tear your wide cheeks with my strong teeth, 
 
 Large daughter of great chieftains, 
 
 My woman, 
 
 My lioness, 
 
 My she-elephant! That s all!"
 
 i2 4 JIM 
 
 The concluding phrase was Mr. Ming s intimation 
 that the poem had indeed come to an end, but he 
 uttered it as if it were part of the last line of the 
 poem. He snapped his flying arms back to his side 
 and snapped his head as if it were the lash of a 
 whip. 
 
 The audience breathed deeply by way of applause. 
 The doctor that wrote novels said something, in a 
 stage-whisper, about the beauty of the primitive pas 
 sions. 
 
 " Art," said Mr. Oswald Pusey, " is eternal." 
 
 His attending maiden-ladies chorused: " Yes." 
 
 Mr. Ming was encored half a dozen times, and 
 Charley took a cocktail after each. Then the 
 pimpled poetess whispered indignantly to Miss Smy- 
 ser, and Miss Smyser called for volunteers to recite 
 some of the pimpled poetess s poems. The response 
 was uncertain, so the author herself took the floor. 
 
 " I want to take the universe in my arms- 
 she began. 
 
 " She weighs about sixty pounds," commented 
 Charley. 
 
 But the poetess went on: 
 
 " I want to take the universe in my arms 
 Without alarms, 
 And face to face, 
 In cosmic love-embrace, 
 Love it for one long siderial day; 
 It satiate, 
 My mighty mate, 
 Then slay 
 And fling away! "
 
 JIM 125 
 
 "Yes, sir," said Charley: "she don t weigh a 
 pound above sixty-two and a half, and she d run 
 from a rabbit." 
 
 He irritated Edith. 
 
 "Stop!" she whispered; "after the break you 
 made about that girl s picture, I should think you d 
 have done enough." 
 
 "What break?" asked Charley, belligerently. 
 " The girl said she d got a good value for her pic 
 ture, and I said I was glad she made a good bar 
 gain." 
 
 " Yes," said Edith, " that s exactly what you did 
 say. I suppose you didn t know that values is an 
 art-term and hasn t anything to do with sales." 
 
 Charley reddened. 
 
 " I forgot you d been an artist s wife," he said, 
 savagely. 
 
 ,The smoke of the cigarettes had banished the 
 odor of the incense. Through the blue cloud, as 
 Edith and Charley relapsed into a sullen quiet, they 
 heard one of the chain of artist-girls talking to an 
 other. 
 
 " Of course James Trent can t paint: I don t have 
 to know him to know that," she was saying; "but 
 now the whole of Society ll be running after him. 
 That portrait of Bishop Peel has set him up for 
 life." 
 
 Edith and Charley had forgotten their quarrel. 
 They were listening. 
 
 "I know," the other girl answered; "that s the 
 way it goes. Success always comes with a rush. 
 They say he has more orders than he can fill in a 
 year."
 
 126 JIM 
 
 " And that s not all," said the first gossip: " he s 
 selling all his old stuff as fast as he can send it to the 
 dealers. ..." 
 
 5. Edith and Charley passed from the heavy 
 twilight of " The Beatrice " to the cold twilight in 
 Washington Square. For some time neither spoke. 
 
 " Well," said Edith at last, " what do you think 
 of that?" 
 
 Charley grunted. 
 
 " A divorced man," said Edith, " and he paints 
 a portrait of a Bishop that s down on divorce. 
 Don t they know about him? Don t they know ? I 
 suppose, next, he ll be wanting to sell that picture he 
 painted of me. He ll never sell that, anyway: it s 
 no good. Such luck as he has! He d say it was the 
 result of hard work. If it is, it s the result of hard 
 work I had to put up with in him when he had no 
 time for his own wife." 
 
 They were across the Square now. Edith paused 
 from her monologue through sheer want of breath; 
 but Charley said nothing: his anger was beyond 
 words. 
 
 " Well," said Edith, " Jim d better make hay while 
 the sun shines. He can t fool people long. This is 
 his one chance. It won t go on but a month or two. 
 You ll see " 
 
 " Go on up; I ll be back in a minute," said Char 
 ley, when he had brought her across Sixth Avenue to 
 the door of their lodging-house. " Just excuse me." 
 
 On the other side of the street, a yellow light was 
 shining through the ground-glass doors of a saloon.
 
 EIGHTH CHAPTER 
 
 EDITH soon found that it is easier to recover 
 from one s own reverses than from the suc 
 cesses of those whom one dislikes. A read 
 justment there finally was, of course: the presence 
 in the house of an unpaid landlady cannot forever 
 be denied by the most preoccupied consciousness; and 
 no matter what one learns of an absent foe, his con 
 tinued absence does gradually lessen the poignancy 
 of good news about him until more good news 
 is reported; but, for a brief period, the word of an 
 enemy s well-being is often so shocking that it numbs 
 one against the pangs of the illness from which one 
 suffers. Within a few days Edith was giving 
 little thought to her burden of debt and poverty, 
 whereas weeks were to pass before the pain of what 
 she had overheard at Miss Smyser s tea appreciably 
 lessened. 
 
 January closed with one stroke of good luck: 
 Charley managed to borrow from Mame, who had 
 lately been putting three-quarters of her allowance 
 into bank, enough to pay the rent for his office and 
 the two rooms in Greenwich Village; but his relief 
 was transitory, and reliable hope of permanent 
 safety remained as distant as it had been in mid 
 winter. He had relatively heavy expenditures, and 
 his sole income was the weekly check that his father 
 signed for him. Capital went on nibbling at the bait 
 of his invention and swimming away. Sometimes 
 
 127
 
 128 JIM 
 
 the fisherman sat on the sun-baked bank for days to 
 gether with no encouragement; sometimes he fell 
 asleep and woke to wonder if he had missed a catch; 
 sometimes there was a tug at his line which pulled its 
 cork beneath the muddy surface of the water and 
 roused palpitant enthusiasms that the more skillful 
 manipulations of his rod failed to justify; twice at 
 least, during February and March, he had on his 
 hook a fish that fought itself free before he could 
 draw it ashore : he caught nothing. He missed the 
 outlet that his club had given him; neither he nor 
 Edith wished again to mix with artists, because they 
 wanted to hear no more of Jim; he grew deeper and 
 deeper into the habit of secret drinking to supple 
 ment the drinking that Edith, in grudging silence, 
 still permitted him, more and more into the custom 
 of excusing himself from the pressure of someone 
 whose talk made him nervous and of slipping out 
 for a drink before renewing the task of such a con 
 versation; he brooded dumbly, as did Edith too, 
 more and more upon the snail s pace of the elder 
 Vanaman s disease. 
 
 Their love did not lessen, but their quarrels in 
 creased in both frequency and violence. More than 
 once Edith yawned when Charley was telling her one 
 of his Asiatic adventures, and more than once she 
 interrupted him by saying: "Yes, I know: you ve 
 told me that before." At the height of a dispute that 
 began in nothing and was not ended for hours, the 
 thought came to him, and he nearly uttered it: 
 " What I ve got is something that Jim cast off." 
 Charley was not looking well. He was steadily 
 fattening, the veins in his pendulous cheeks assumed
 
 JIM 129 
 
 an intenser color, the whites of his eyes were 
 grayish. 
 
 2. When the serenity of April came into the 
 air, it modified, for a time, the mood of both. For 
 a while, it said to Edith that she was still young 
 and still had her chance, and, for a while, she be 
 lieved it. It said, for a while, to Charley that he was 
 still alert and resourceful, and Charley, for a while, 
 listened. It sent them out to dinner one night to a 
 cheap " Italian table d hote restaurant " on Tenth 
 Street, where they ate food so highly seasoned as to 
 defy detection, among a crowd of diners whom des 
 peration had driven from surrounding boarding- 
 houses and through a blaze of music that every 
 patron preferred to his own thoughts and the talk 
 of his companion. 
 
 There was one tune especially lively. The cus 
 tomers stopped eating to whistle it; people with their 
 mouths full hummed. When the orchestra it con 
 sisted of a piano and two violins stopped, there 
 was a sound of applause and a demand that the tune 
 be repeated. At a table near Edith and Charley sat 
 a man of about sixty, who had a serviette tucked 
 under his chin; he was dining with a girl of scarcely 
 sixteen, and his applause was among the loudest. 
 
 Charley liked the tune. He whistled, too. 
 
 That s a good one," he said, when the encore 
 was ended. " What s its name? " 
 
 " I think it s called Too Much Mustard, or 
 something like that," said Edith. " It s the music 
 for one of those dances the newspapers are beginning 
 to make such fun of."
 
 i 3 o JIM 
 
 Both she and Charley had been leading a cloistered 
 life; they had left the cafe world shortly before the 
 cabaret invaded it with hired dancers, but Edith con 
 tinued to read the papers in detail while her hus 
 band s newspaper-reading was confined to the finan 
 cial columns. 
 
 " The tango and that sort of thing? " Char 
 ley chuckled: tango was a name to him and little 
 more. " I d like to see how it s done." 
 
 " Everybody s tangoing," said Edith. A pang of 
 envy caught her. " It s the latest thing." 
 
 " If it s up to that tune this orchestra just played, 
 I ll bet it sure has some class," said Charley. Then 
 he said again: " I d like to see how these new dances 
 are done." 
 
 He was to have his wish. While he spoke, a pair 
 of waiters had been clearing a space at the far end 
 of the room, and now the orchestra started a tune 
 that was even more titillating than the last. 
 
 It was a tune that laughed at everything, a tune 
 that set the pulses jumping to its rhythm, and its 
 effect upon the company was mesmeric, thaumatur- 
 gical. As at the waving of a wizard s wand, diners 
 jumped from their chairs, some surging to the 
 cleared space, and some dexterously utilizing such 
 space as there was between the tables. Many were 
 dancing while their mouths still worked on the food 
 that the music had surprised there. Charley saw the 
 elderly man of the serviette already whirling with 
 his young companion: either he had forgotten to 
 remove it or the waving wand had not given him 
 enough time to do so: it flapped in his partner s 
 pretty eyes, and she did not notice it. What had, an
 
 JIM i 3 t 
 
 instant before, been a roomful of more or less 
 staid diners was now a roomful of bouncing marion 
 ettes. 
 
 Edith and Charley watched particularly a slim, 
 handsome young man and a graceful girl. He had 
 seemed to lift his partner from her chair and to be 
 dancing with her before her feet touched the floor. 
 They dipped with their knees together, they pivoted, 
 trotted, ducked, and twirled. Now he flung her 
 from him as if in a rage with her, and now he 
 snatched her back and crushed the breath from her 
 against his panting breast. 
 
 Charley looked at Edith and saw that she was 
 watching with eyes bright and parted lips. He had 
 long ago drunk all of the small bottle of acrid red 
 wine that the table d hote provided him. He leaned 
 across the table, poured and drank what was left of 
 hers. She did not see him do it; she saw nothing but 
 the dancers. Charley frowned. 
 
 " Why, I know that dance," he declared. His 
 tone was all amazed disapproval. " I saw it years 
 ago when I came back from China. And do you 
 know where I saw it? In Frisco. On the Barbary 
 Coast in Frisco, the toughest place on earth." 
 
 She did not turn her eyes. 
 
 " I m talking to you, Edith ! " he said. 
 
 " Oh ! " She started. " Yes," she said ; " I heard 
 you." 
 
 "And these aren t professionals?" he asked. 
 
 Her gaze was wandering back to the dancers. 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " You don t mean to say respectable people do 
 it?"
 
 I 3 2 JIM 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 He raised his voice: 
 
 "Swell people, too?" 
 
 " All night and every night." 
 
 "When did they go crazy?" 
 
 He commanded her attention, and she had to 
 give it. She told him that the mania had been sud 
 den, acute, severe. It was still new, but young and 
 old in all classes were afflicted. 
 
 " And it looks worse here than it did out in those 
 Frisco dives," said Charley, emphatically. 
 
 The few persons that had remained seated were 
 beating an accompaniment to the music with their 
 knives on their wine-glasses. Their feet were 
 stamping in unison. Here and there somebody 
 would shout a few of the words that belonged to the 
 music words that aptly expressed its spirit. 
 
 Edith was looking again at the slim young man 
 and the graceful girl. They pivoted, dipped, and 
 then met in a swift embrace. Her cheeks were 
 flushed, and his were pale; her eyes were filmy, and 
 his like blazing lamps. 
 
 u It s not decent," said Charley, as his scowl 
 followed Edith s gaze. " It s positively rotten. I 
 should think the cops would pinch this place." 
 
 The newspapers say," replied Edith, " that all 
 the nice places are having it." She did not turn to 
 him as she spoke. 
 
 " Then the cops ought to pinch them, too," said 
 Charley. " It s a disgrace." 
 
 " People used to say the same thing about the 
 two-step. It depends on who dances it and how." 
 She gave him the corner of her eye. " Haven t you
 
 JIM 133 
 
 really seen about it in the papers the last few 
 weeks? " 
 
 " I ve seen it there, but I haven t read it. I 
 haven t any time for such stuff : I got to work." 
 
 " Well, the papers are full of advertisements of 
 people that teach it, and they say some teachers get 
 more than fifteen dollars a lesson." 
 
 " Then they ve got fools for pupils." Seeing her 
 again relapsing into the fascination of the spectacle, 
 Charley continued: "It s a nigger dance, that s 
 what it is. A fellow out in Frisco told me all about 
 it and he d been to the Congo and knew. The can 
 nibals dance it in Africa, and here we are " 
 
 " You didn t seem to mind the cannibal s love- 
 poems at Miss Smyser s," said Edith, quietly. 
 
 "I wasn t singing them myself, was I? And I 
 wouldn t dance this." He paused and eyed her; then 
 concluded: "I wouldn t dance this, and I wouldn t 
 have you dance it for anything in the world. Re 
 member that." 
 
 Edith did not answer. Under the secrecy of the 
 table, her tingling toes moved restlessly. Then one 
 hand, resting in her lap, began to beat time. She 
 knew how Charley would object, but it was all that 
 she could do to keep her head from beating time 
 also. . . . 
 
 She wanted to dance she wanted to dance ! 
 
 3. They continued, after their own fashion, to 
 love each other: they had sacrificed too much to gain 
 each other, risked too much, broken too many of 
 the conventions that both inherited, not to go on 
 loving: as the Spring warmed them, it brought mo-
 
 i 34 JIM 
 
 ments when their love was stronger, was even some 
 thing finer, than it had ever been before; it rose and 
 fell, as all love does; but it did not fall so deep that 
 it could not reclimb. And yet, notwithstanding this 
 almost, it seemed dependent upon it their quar 
 rels continued, too; the heat of these precisely 
 equaled the heat of the love that preceded and fol 
 lowed them; it was as if aversion had become the 
 natural reaction from attraction. 
 
 There were occasions when this need to quarrel 
 was not a need to quarrel with each other, when the 
 joint streams could, if taken early, be diverted into 
 a common channel, and on those occasions they di 
 rected them toward Jim. Now and again the waters 
 of their wrath would beat in vain against the rock 
 of his memory, find it so firm that it drove them back 
 and set the two streams to struggling with each other 
 after all; but there were other times when the device 
 served, and when they spent themselves in an alli 
 ance of anger. They passed hours in confessing, 
 each to each, their opinions of him, in jeering at him, 
 denouncing him, to the walls of their poor living- 
 room, dissecting his past motives, sneering at his 
 present success, prophesying his future downfall. 
 Sometimes their domestic talk would run for days 
 upon nothing but Jim. 
 
 The first effect in Edith of reflection on her former 
 husband s good fortune was a strengthening of her 
 resolve to have Charley succeed. He must succeed. 
 If he could not do it alone, she must somehow find 
 means to help him : he must be more successful than 
 Jim. 
 
 Although she had had her black moments since
 
 JIM 135 
 
 their marriage, she had never seriously doubted 
 the final triumph of Charley and his invention. She 
 had feared that circumstances might be for a long 
 while against him, but she believed in the sounder, 
 in the ability of merit to achieve commercial suc 
 cess; and she had never thought that failure might 
 be inherent in Charley. Now, however, she saw 
 that her resolve was taken with a sort of despera 
 tion, and she knew that a desperate hope can spring 
 from nothing but an immedicable doubt. She remem 
 bered her father, and her girlhood passed in an at 
 mosphere of defeat. Was Charley a failure, too? 
 She remembered fatuous Uncle Gregory, blundering 
 into dentistry and saved only by his marriage; her 
 Uncle Morty, keeping his nose above water solely by 
 seizing the life-belt that had been flung to his niece; 
 her stupid, discomfited aunts, living Christian lives 
 on the moody charity of a swindler; her brothers, 
 one in hiding, a second working his life out for an 
 exacting wife, the third a spiritual coward in a small 
 town parish. Was it possible that these had infected 
 her with the bacillus of frustration? Was the 
 disease in the Moxton blood? She had heard that 
 persons predisposed to tuberculosis seemed born 
 with an especial terror of that ill. Perhaps her 
 innate horror of failure was some such expression 
 of her doom, some such instinctive protest against 
 the inevitable. 
 
 No, it could not be that; it was Jim. If she had 
 never met him, she would certainly not be where she 
 was to-day, and if she had not been Jim s divorced 
 wife, the elder Vanaman would have received her 
 into his family, and all would now have been well.
 
 i 3 6 JIM 
 
 As it was, why had she so readily assumed that 
 Charley would be a success? She knew little 
 about him, in the old days, save what he himself told 
 her; she knew nothing about telegraphy now. Sup 
 pose the invention proved useless : they could not 
 be completely certain that Charley s father had not 
 heard of the marriage and held his tongue. He 
 might already have drawn a will leaving his money 
 to Mame. 
 
 4. Then Diana Wentworth, whose loyalty had 
 not been dampened and whose admiration continued 
 firm, insisted on taking them to a meeting of the 
 Radical Club. 
 
 This was an organization that had had a troubled 
 career. It was started by a number of uptown young 
 men who read the magazines of exposure and thereby 
 learned that Tammany Hall was corrupt. The 
 young men were at first shocked by this knowledge, 
 but they soon became accustomed to it and regarded 
 it as their own peculiar discovery and possession. 
 They found that a communication of small portions 
 of it to their middle-class friends shocked those 
 friends, and the young men thus experienced that 
 delicious thrill which is entailed in shocking other 
 people without discommoding oneself. They ac 
 quired the habit. It struck them that to expose 
 political corruption without having to meet bad com 
 pany was to be Liberal, and that to champion the 
 cause of the poor without risking poverty was to be 
 Radical. The shock of their first discovery left 
 them with an appetite for more shocks, so they 
 shocked themselves by calling themselves Radicals
 
 JIM 137 
 
 and forming a club to which women were admitted. 
 In order to keep up their supply of ammunition, they 
 invited the writers of the literature of exposure to 
 address them, and in order to show to the world their 
 own limitless democracy, they set up their clubhouse 
 not on Fifth Avenue, but on Union Square. Union 
 Square, they said, was positively proletarian. 
 
 Radicalism, however, is like most things that are 
 easily started: it is hard to stop. These young men 
 from uptown felt they must demonstrate their sin 
 cerity by accepting to membership in their club at 
 least a few persons from downtown: of course not 
 many, at first, and only the fellows that could at 
 once be interesting specimens for study and wear 
 clean collars; the sort of people than can give you 
 a feeling of your superiority in recognizing the 
 brotherhood of man, without offending you by ex 
 pecting to be introduced to your sister, or saving the 
 fish-fork for the ice-cream. So North and South, 
 East Side and West, began to mingle in the halls 
 of the Radical Club in proletarian Union Square, and 
 gradually the interesting specimens that knew how to 
 behave smuggled into membership interesting speci 
 mens that behaved very badly, and the original radi 
 cals, one by one, received their final shock, lost in 
 terest, and retired. 
 
 The " new lot," as the founders of the club some 
 times spitefully described them, were immensely 
 democratic. They could not help being, for they 
 were school-teachers dissatisfied with their pay; 
 dramatists from Akron, Ohio, against whom the 
 lords of the theatrical trust entered into elaborate 
 conspiracies; authors whom publishers and magazine
 
 i 3 8 JIM 
 
 editors and successful writers had combined to keep 
 out of print; inventors of fresh philosophies, fresh 
 religions, fresh spelling-books; male spinsters; 
 women desperately unmarried; all the hopeless chaff 
 of respectable boarding-houses anxious to espouse 
 any cause that they could be deceived into believing 
 new. They were excellently fitted to maintain a 
 Radical Club on Union Square, but they did not 
 have the money, so they moved into part of a house 
 on Eighth Avenue. 
 
 This migration left behind it some of the " new 
 lot," because a few of the new lot considered Eighth 
 Avenue undignified, and others did not like to 
 walk through that part of town by night. Never 
 theless, their places were filled by persons that lived 
 in the neighborhood and other places were made for 
 more, so that there was now a newer lot which was 
 uncomfortably shouldering the new. And, as the new 
 lot had short memories in the small matter of dues 
 being engrossed in schemes for world-regeneration, 
 how could they remember details, or, when reminded, 
 attend to them? the membership was again being 
 extended and the thin edge of the newest lot already 
 inserted. 
 
 It is a curious thing about clubs that they defy 
 the Spencerian laws; their evolution is never upward, 
 and bad blood grows worse and perpetuates itself 
 at the expense of good. In this organization, the 
 new lot called themselves Socialists, believed in mu 
 nicipal reform and shuddered at the political ideals 
 of the newer lot; the newer lot scoffed at the ultra 
 montane tendencies of the new, called themselves 
 Socialists, were party men Socialist Party men of
 
 JIM 139 
 
 the my-party-right-or-wrong school and were horri 
 fied by the iconoclastic doctrines of the newest lot; 
 the newest lot ridiculed both the new and the newer, 
 foreswore all politics, preached Direct Action, and 
 at least said that they trembled at nothing. In brief, 
 the Radical Club was still conservative, but was in 
 grave danger of becoming radical. 
 
 The next thing we know," said Diana Went- 
 worth, who belonged to the new lot, " we ll be letting 
 in a lot of Anarchists." 
 
 She was to be the chief speaker on this evening and 
 she undisguisedly considered Edith s company and 
 Charley s a personal tribute. 
 
 " I m going to speak on Fatherhood," Miss Went- 
 worth added. " The Inutility of Fatherhood. I 
 am to open the discussion and of course I ll advocate 
 Archibald van Houyz s point of view." 
 
 " Van Houyz? " repeated Edith. " Do you mean 
 the man you said was going in for simplified spell- 
 ing?" 
 
 " He is not going in for it, " Diana corrected 
 her: "he has invented a system of his own. It s a 
 new system. It is based on " 
 
 " I thought you told me his name was Hodge." 
 
 " It was, but he s changed it. Sylvia Tytus 
 thought van Houyz was more euphonious, and I 
 agreed with her. So he s changed it. He ll be there 
 to-night, and Sylvia, too. You ll meet them. 
 They re wonderful types." 
 
 5. By removing the folding-doors that once 
 separated them, two rooms had been thrown into 
 one, and a couple of opened doors, connecting the
 
 140 JIM 
 
 rear room with an anteroom behind, gave space far 
 the overflow of the audience. The walls were se 
 verely bare of decoration, as the walls of so serious 
 an institution ought to be, but betrayal spoke from a 
 mute mechanical piano, at present shoved into one 
 corner, for, on certain evenings of the week, these 
 Radicals turned from righting the wrongs of Labor 
 in the next generation to making gayer their own 
 condition: the disease of the tango had spread even 
 to the newest lot and most revolutionary. Rows 
 of wooden chairs had been placed in both rooms, 
 and seated on these chairs, or filling the aisles and 
 lounging at the windows, were the devotees of 
 freedom. 
 
 If they did not belong to the mass, they formed 
 one. It was only after some time that the observer 
 could separate them, individualize them, and then 
 they had first to be divided into their groups of new 
 est, newer, and new. Here were the pale, dissatis 
 fied faces of the new lot; strained, nervous faces they 
 were; dissatisfied with life because it had made them 
 respectable and withheld the rewards of respectabil 
 ity, souls sick and groping for an unknown remedy. 
 Here, in almost equal numbers, were the newer lot, 
 equally dissastisfied, but with the tense face of the 
 zealot, whose faith no fact or argument can move, 
 whom defeat can only stimulate, and who is certain 
 he can effect a cure if only he can force the world 
 to try his panacea. And here, finally, were the few 
 newest, the long-haired, unshaven, careless apostles 
 of denial, the only happy faces in that audience. 
 Seated, the men and women looked extraordinarily 
 alike and like neither men nor women.
 
 JIM 141 
 
 At first there was no one that sufficiently stood out 
 to excite Edith s curiosity. Then Diana plucked at 
 her sleeve. 
 
 " There s Archibald van Houyz and Sylvia," she 
 said. 
 
 Van Houyz was standing in the center of the 
 front room : he almost always stood and he always 
 chose the center of a room. Looking at him, the first 
 thing that Edith noticed was that here was a man 
 wearing knickerbockers in New York; the next was 
 that, in place of shirt and waistcoat, he wore a 
 yellow jersey or sweater of pale yellow silk. This 
 garment might have been affected to convey the idea 
 that he was what he would have called " a rough 
 diamond," or " one of Nature s noblemen," but it 
 failed because it was quite immaculate, because his 
 Norfolk jacket was clearly fresh from the pressing- 
 iron and because van Houyz s face completed the 
 denial. He had astutely hidden as much of it as 
 he could by combing far over his forehead his curl 
 ing black hair and by cultivating there is no other 
 word for it a curling brown black; yet his piscatory 
 eyes shot through this mask, his nose was long and 
 thin, and when he smiled as he was continuously 
 doing one saw that his upper lip was curiously thin 
 and his lower curiously thick. He had his arm too 
 tightly, Edith thought around the shoulder of a 
 woman that patently felt proud of this attention, a 
 woman whose most notable feature was her teeth: 
 there were too many of them and they had been care 
 lessly arranged. 
 
 To avoid expressing an opinion, Edith directed 
 Diana s attention elsewhere.
 
 I 4 2 JIM 
 
 " Who s that man sitting in this hot room with an 
 ulster on and its collar turned up above his ears? " 
 
 "That s George Andre," said Diana. "He s 
 French : he s from Alsace. He used to have an s 
 in the end of his first name and an accent on the e 
 of his last; but Archibald simplified them for him. 
 He s a Syndicalist." 
 
 "What s a Syndicalist?" Charley asked. 
 
 Diana hesitated for but the fraction of a second. 
 
 " A Syndicalist," she explained, " is a person that 
 believes in Syndicalism." 
 
 " And what s Syndicalism? " urged Charley. 
 
 Diana s answer was to indicate another Radical. 
 
 "There s Dorsey Dutton," she said. "He s a 
 poet." 
 
 Probably nobody ever had the courage to " do " 
 George IV of England in stained glass, but, if any 
 body had, that George IV would have resembled this 
 tympanismic revolutionist. He was proudly exhibit 
 ing his courageous radicalism by sitting in the door 
 way to the anteroom with a diminutive girl, a 
 brunette, perched on his knee. Their relative sizes 
 suggested that her relation to him was that of the 
 tiny cherub which one sometimes sees carved at the 
 feet of the recumbent figure on a royal tomb. Be 
 hind this pair stood a young man in a stock; he had 
 an intellectual forehead and was palpably bored. 
 
 " And that one s the editor of a revolutionary 
 paper," said Diana, " and he thinks himself above 
 all of us. But don t bother about him. Come over 
 here: I want you to meet Archibald and Sylvia." 
 
 Van Houyz had belonged to the Radical Club 
 since the latter half of its Union Square days; he was
 
 JIM 143 
 
 a part of the institution, and paying members had a 
 right to as much of himself as he could give them: 
 he, therefore, stood with a much bestockinged leg 
 planted on a chair-bottom for their delectation. 
 Sylvia, the girl with the assertive teeth, was looking 
 up into his piscatory eyes. With Charley he shook 
 hands limply: he did not like men, nor did men like 
 him. Edith s extended hand he took in both his 
 own. 
 
 " It is so sweet to meet you," he said. " We ve 
 all been hearing of how much you ve done for Prin 
 ciple. Do you mind my saying that you oughtn t 
 to wear quills in your hat? In the first place, they 
 entail cruelty to birds, and in the second, you have 
 such an interesting face that you ought to wear only 
 the most unostentatious clothes in order not to de 
 tract attention from it." He twirled his beard. 
 " Let it stand out," he said " out, you know." 
 
 He had scarcely nodded to Diana; now he seemed 
 to have forgotten Sylvia. They all sat in the front 
 row of chairs, and van Houyz pressed his body close 
 to Edith s. It occurred to her that here was one of 
 those who think that a divorcee of one husband is a 
 willing prey to all men. She hated van Houyz. 
 
 Charley was talking in a loud voice to Sylvia, who 
 needed consolation. 
 
 " I was in Peking during the Boxer troubles," he 
 was saying; " and one night " 
 
 Edith knew the story. She noticed that one of 
 a pair of men behind her was more interested in 
 it than was Sylvia. The story was not complete when 
 Diana was introduced by an informal chairman and 
 began speaking.
 
 144 JIM 
 
 " Fatherhood," she said, and impressively paused. 
 " We all know the so-called duties with which men 
 bolster up this man-imposed Right. We also are 
 well aware of the inutility of it, under present con 
 ditions, as a profession. Where is the typical fa 
 ther, during the waking hours of his offspring? Is 
 he at home? Does he give the benefit of his con 
 stant care and superior knowledge? Is it from him 
 that the little one imbibes the rudiments of eating 
 and walking, and is it to him that it lisps its first 
 prattling sentences? Who teaches it to call him 
 Daddy? You must all agree with me that Father 
 hood in sta ] tu quo is shorn of the glory of responsi 
 bility and is one of the most futile and undignified 
 of trades." 
 
 She spoke in a conversational tone, pausing now 
 and again to choose her words, but it was a question 
 if her cultivation of the impromptu method, her pose 
 of negligence, were not arranged to make more 
 startling for she obviously thought them startling 
 the things that she had to say. She was follow 
 ing van Houyz s advice about Edith s clothes and 
 forbidding the grace of her phrases to divert atten 
 tion from the meat of her ideas. She was serious 
 and, had she not nervously held her head in a man 
 ner reminiscent of the late Cardinal Newman, would 
 have remained handsome. 
 
 There ought to be nothing startling in doing 
 away with inefficient fathers I mean, in fatherhood 
 under its present enthralled conditions," she went 
 on. Her voice was really beautiful, and well modu 
 lated. " When the Plan was adumbrated to me by 
 Archibald van Houyz, / wasn t startled. Individual
 
 JIM 145 
 
 fathers will, in the end, become Group Fathers, giv 
 ing up their children to the mothers or to the state, 
 since they do not seem fitted to the entire care of 
 them the wisdom of mother or state has not yet 
 been definitely settled and, by Co-operation, by 
 working together for the common good of the on 
 coming generation, improve with concerted intelli 
 gence economic and educational conditions and make 
 of Fatherhood a thing even to be proud of. I am 
 quite hopeful that our Legislature in Albany will 
 soon be brought to consider this vital subject seri 
 ously, for the laxity with which it has lately been 
 regarded has already caused a baby-strike." 
 
 Charley scowled at Edith. One of the men be 
 hind him laughed: the laugh asked whether Char 
 ley suspected his wife of connubial sabotage. Edith 
 blushed and drew back, but felt herself thus ap 
 proaching closer to van Houyz and bent forward 
 again. 
 
 Diana was going on : 
 
 ". . . . for that matter. The decreasing birth 
 rate screams prophetically. One Type says : It s 
 nothing but a small circle of selfish women among 
 the very rich who refuse to become mothers be 
 cause it keeps them from playing Bridge. The 
 Capitalistic Press puts the blame on poverty and 
 the poor. Preachers call it Minds arid of Religion. 
 What are we to believe? How about the wives 
 and possible mothers who are Professional Women? 
 These women cannot be called idle; they do not 
 come under the Capitalistic Press s category; nor 
 are their minds always arid of Religion. 
 
 " For my part, I call the Professional Woman just
 
 146 JIM 
 
 responsive to the Spirit of the Times. She doesn t 
 want to sacrifice her utility to the Whole to her 
 utility to the Few. Fatherhood inflicts penalties on 
 Motherhood in the case of the Professional Type. 
 I speak particularly of the Professional Type, which 
 modern fathers would make into house-drudges, 
 nursery-governesses, and dish-washers. You know 
 what the simple result is, and, for my part, I blame 
 the fathers: the typical Professional Woman does 
 not have children." 
 
 When Charley saw that the speaker s revelations 
 were to deal with professional women, he dismissed 
 his suspicions of Edith and lost interest in this part 
 of the speech. He thought such subjects as Diana 
 had chosen ought never to be discussed in mixed 
 company; but even the pleasant sense of listening to 
 something improper did not long sustain him. He 
 folded his arms and, chin on breast, fell asleep. 
 Presently he snored. Edith nudged him sharply. 
 The man behind laughed again, and Charley 
 started. 
 
 ". . . nor stop there," Diana was continuing. 
 " Now, what is the duty of the state? Mothers are 
 being yearly discouraged by the heedless attitude of 
 the state and of fathers. It is the plain duty of the 
 state, in order to protect the future of the race, 
 to pay a salary to mothers and make of Fatherhood 
 a useful profession. 
 
 " Mormonism has worked out its problem of 
 plural marriages. So long as the country was 
 rugged and labor extravagant, wives in group-form 
 and children in the mass were an economic asset in 
 stead of a liability. Now manufactures have re-
 
 JIM 147 
 
 placed agriculture : it is an expense to keep wives 
 and rear children. There need have been no legis 
 lation to prove to the Mormons that plural mar 
 riages do not now pay. What Mormonism has 
 done, we can do. The time has come. The modern 
 father cannot much longer remain the pater familias 
 of the Mormon Church, as it were. He must yield 
 to the Call of the Century: he must become a use 
 ful Member of Society." 
 
 Charley wriggled in his chair. 
 
 " Is it fair," asked Diana, with flushed cheeks, 
 " for the mother to bear all the burden of this 
 training? When shall the father do his share? 
 When shall Fatherhood bend its concentrated at 
 tention to the Finished Product of the Future 
 Generation? " 
 
 Only an angry glance from Edith stopped Char 
 ley in the midst of a broad yawn. He was fidgeting 
 painfully. At last he could sit still no longer. " Ex 
 cuse me a minute," he said to Sylvia Tytus and hur 
 ried out to get a drink. 
 
 " What is the remedy? " Diana proceeded. " The 
 remedy is that discovered by Archibald van Houyz 
 and Bernard Shaw: it is Subsidized Fatherhood. 
 According to van Houyz s Plan, we should have a 
 law to force the father to bear precisely half the 
 burden of the rearing of the child. That is, the 
 working-hours of the day would be evenly divided, 
 and Fatherhood would assume its share of the re 
 sponsibilities of the Home. Finally, van Houyz s 
 Plan would provide for some type of salaried Fa 
 therhood, under which prospective fathers would be 
 examined and certified and, on proving the per-
 
 148 JIM 
 
 formance of their duties, be paid therefor by the 
 State which they have thus benefited. The same 
 course would be followed with regard to mothers, 
 and each parent would be compelled to contribute 
 a tithe of the joint weekly income for the future 
 use not the present needs of the offspring: a sort 
 of savings-bank account would be opened. In this 
 way, when the boy became a father, he would have 
 something on which to start a household, and when 
 the girl became a mother she would be automatically 
 compensated " Diana repeated that phrase " Au 
 tomatically Compensated for her Quondam Eco 
 nomic Dependence." 
 
 It was evident that Miss Wentworth was 
 approaching the climax of her address. Coming 
 suddenly in the calm flow of an informal talk, 
 " Automatically Compensated for her Quondam 
 Economic Dependence " was like the thunder that 
 presages storm. The Radical Club cocked its ears, 
 and cocked them not in vain, for Diana, with her chin 
 thrust even farther forward now than the Cardi 
 nal s, concluded: 
 
 " Van Houyz doesn t propose that the State 
 should take over complete charge of the children. 
 It is his theory that its parents can do for a child 
 what no one else can, and that even Fatherhood can 
 become useful from an altruistic and economic stand 
 point. What he proposes is that trained experts 
 appointed by the state should help the father, at 
 least at first, to the realization and comprehension 
 of his true responsibilities. And all this he pro 
 poses all this vast Plan in the knowledge that the 
 free union of a man and a woman can become effi-
 
 JIM 149 
 
 cient only when Motherhood and Fatherhood be 
 come twin glories and when the woman is not Eco 
 nomically Dependent on the man." 
 
 The man behind Charley s empty seat was inquir 
 ing of his friend: 
 
 " How about when the man s economically what- 
 d -you-call-it on the woman? " 
 
 Scarcely anybody heeded this: all the new lot of 
 members were applauding their protagonist, even 
 the newer lot were in startled agreement with her, 
 and the newest were still too polite to interfere. 
 Edith, however, listened. The only effect the speech 
 had had on her was to weary her without lessening 
 her personal regard for the speaker. She condemned 
 Diana s ideas, she condemned all ideas that were 
 new to her, as absurd; but she condemned Charley, 
 in absentia, more severely for having manifested a 
 weariness which she had been at pains to conceal. 
 Without a word, a woman can convey to any man, 
 even to such a man as van Houyz, her aversion for 
 him: Edith had finally impressed hers on the phi 
 losopher, and he was again caressing Sylvia Tytus. 
 There was nobody to talk to, and so she listened to 
 the men behind her, much as she had listened to 
 chance talk at Miss Smyser s tea: what she heard 
 was as disconcerting as what she had heard from 
 the two artist-women at " The Beatrice." 
 
 " Let s beat it," said one man. " That s the whole 
 show. There s no story in it."- -They were evidently 
 newspaper-reporters. 
 
 " You never can tell," said the other. " It s a 
 queer gang: something s liable to break loose any 
 time. They all talked free love last week."
 
 150 JIM 
 
 "What? These male old-maids? Do they be 
 lieve in free love? " 
 
 " Of course they do. It s so cheap, you see. Oh, 
 they re a thrifty lot, even if they are only the foam 
 on the beer." 
 
 " All right, then, let s blow off the foam and get 
 some real beer, like our friend that went out. Did 
 you ever see Secret Drunkard written over a man 
 as large as it was written over him? " 
 
 The second man snorted. 
 
 " Said he was in Peking during the Boxer trou 
 bles," he sneered. " He s seeing things. I was there 
 through the whole rumpus went out for our sheet, 
 got shut up and couldn t get away. By the time it 
 was over, I knew every white man in the city well 
 enough to call him by his first name and borrow his 
 spare pyjamas and this fellow wasn t any more 
 there than the office-cat." 
 
 6. Charley was beckoning to her from a distant 
 doorway. She joined him there: his breath was 
 heavy with whisky, and his face was purple. 
 
 " Don t let s wait D ana," he said, thickly. " M 
 ashamed of her." He wagged his head. " I know," 
 he said. " Been standin here doorway. Don t you 
 ever come here again. * Baby-strikes ! An * free 
 unions. I n t marriage good nough for her? I 
 know what she means all right, all right. D ana s 
 not a fit person f my wife sociate with. Come on 
 home."
 
 NINTH CHAPTER 
 
 THEY were nothing new to her, the things that 
 the reporter had said. Having heard them, 
 she realized that they had for some time been 
 darkening the background of her consciousness. 
 But the reporter had brought them forward. Though 
 they would have troubled her grievously had she 
 thought them hers alone, their hurt could have been 
 nothing to what it was now that she knew them 
 to be visible to the passing stranger. It was not 
 enough that she have a secret shame: her shame 
 must become a public betrayal; her pride must suf 
 fer with her heart. 
 
 She could not bring herself to speak at once to 
 Charley; at least for the present, her loathing of 
 his condition was too strong: she did not dare to 
 open her lips for fear of what might pass them. She 
 had seen him before made merry by drink, made 
 sanguine, made affectionate, and these manifesta 
 tions had been, on the whole, welcome. To-night 
 he had reached a later stage of the alcoholic, and 
 for the first time she had an appreciation of what 
 those earlier stages meant, of how they led to this 
 one, of how the earlier could less and less frequently 
 be regained. All the way back to their sordid home, 
 she let him uninterruptedly maunder to her; when 
 he thickly demanded a reply, she made none; when 
 he accepted her silence as a confession of some sort 
 of guilt that he felt more deeply than he could de- 
 
 151
 
 JIM 
 
 fine, she held her tongue. She let him run on while 
 he clumsily undressed and when he tumbled into 
 bed beside her. She got up, put out the light that 
 he had forgotten to extinguish, lay down again and 
 remained dumb while his monotonous voice babbled 
 into sleep, came back, stumbled, ended in a final 
 snore. 
 
 He lay there sodden and stertorous. His breath 
 was foul. It was a cold night, and with his first 
 drowsiness he had dragged the blankets about him 
 self, leaving her shivering. 
 
 She was awake for the better part of the night, 
 wondering what she should do in the morning, and 
 on all the mornings that were to follow. What 
 should she say to him? Of what use could any 
 words be? If he was a drunkard, her upbraidings, 
 even her appeals, would only drive him forward to 
 more drink: she confirmed that by recalling a dozen 
 past experiences with him, imperfectly apprehended 
 then, now nakedly revealed. If he was a liar and 
 a lying braggart there is no other kind of brag 
 gart that was a thing done, not to be changed: 
 he had committed himself to his lies with his every 
 acquaintance. Her untrained mind followed no 
 course of logical reasoning: it darted back and forth 
 among the strands of the web that had caught it. 
 Everybody that they knew he had made familiar 
 with his lies; but did everybody did anybody, ex 
 cept that reporter suspect them to be lies? She 
 found her pride basely forced to share in his decep 
 tions; to bolster them; to hide them; if need should 
 be, to brazen them out beside him. Perhaps only 
 a few people guessed; perhaps people were abom-
 
 JIM 153 
 
 inably, sneakingly polite, but perhaps not many knew 
 of his drunkenness. If, on the other hand, they did 
 guess. . . . 
 
 She wheeled back to hatred of him. The fault 
 that a wife has detected in her husband needs but 
 its recognition by a stranger to become unendurable 
 to her. She looked at the loudly heaving mass of 
 covers that lay so close beside her. A passing train 
 on the elevated-railway drowned his snores, but lit 
 up his puffed and swollen face as by a lightning- 
 flash. It was stupefied, horrible. 
 
 It was pitiful, too. Quite unreasoningly she re 
 alized that, and immediately realized nothing else. 
 She had staked so much on him; he was the hand 
 she had dealt herself in the game of life; she could 
 not afford to put it down and retire; she had to bet 
 on it all that remained to her. After all, the force 
 that had wrought these things in Charley was a 
 force created by his love for her. If he had lied, 
 he had lied to win her; if he drank, it was for 
 strength to bear the hardships imposed by the re 
 sults of his love for her. This was Jim s work: if 
 Charley and she had met when she was free, none 
 of these troubles would have come upon them; if 
 Jim had not married her, Charley s father would 
 have received her in his house, poverty would not 
 have so much as touched them, no living soul would 
 have dreamed that their intimacy was once illicit. 
 The darkness was hiding his face again, and she 
 could remember that she loved him. 
 
 Had he lied? What proof was there that he had 
 lied? The sneering word of an unknown news 
 paper-reporter, a man whose face she had not even
 
 I 54 JIM 
 
 seen. Why was it not the reporter that was brag 
 gart and liar? She felt ashamed that she had 
 doubted Charley. ... As soon as his father died, 
 this hideous strain would be over, and with the 
 need of liquor the use of it would end. . . . She 
 
 would say nothing, do nothing until 
 
 She fell asleep. She did not waken until ten 
 o clock, and then she found that Charley had got 
 up and gone breakfastless to his office. 
 
 2. He came back late, having postponed his return 
 to the last possible minute. He had taken, on the 
 way home, enough whisky to steady his shaken 
 nerves, but he looked ill, and, though firm in his 
 denunciation of the Radical Club, he was abjectly 
 penitent for his drunkenness. 
 
 " It was Jim that got me started drinking," he 
 said. " Think of that: Jim! I never drank a drop 
 till he taught me. He was always saying a whole 
 man could be temperate. A whole man! He meant 
 a man like himself, a man without any red blood 
 in his veins ! " 
 
 Edith felt a savage joy in Jim as a scapegoat. 
 
 "Of course he did," she agreed: "a man like 
 that can always stop when he s had enough. He 
 was always as cold as an icicle." 
 
 They talked of Jim for some time. It eased 
 them. 
 
 " Still," said Charley at last, " I d cut out Diana 
 if I were you, dear. A woman with her ideas isn t 
 fit company for you, you know." 
 
 Edith did not like Diana s loose opinions of mar-
 
 JIM 155 
 
 riage, but she liked Diana : Diana was her one re 
 maining friend. 
 
 " I haven t anybody else left," she pointed out. 
 
 " Oh, well " Charley wriggled his shoulders 
 "you ll find others, and, once the luck turns for us, 
 you can take your pick. Drop her. I would. We 
 have each other, after all." 
 
 3. It was a beautiful April. The days were full 
 of an invigorating sunshine, and the nights full of 
 stars. With every sunrise, the Spring-longing 
 tugged harder and harder at Edith s heart. Some 
 times it strained in her throat, sobbed in it. The 
 passion that had seized her in the Italian restaurant 
 would not abate. She wanted to be free; she wanted 
 to dance. 
 
 Charley borrowed more money from Mame, and 
 they dined nightly at some third-rate cafe; but never 
 for he made his choice carefully at one where 
 there was dancing. They came to know these res 
 taurants which flourish in the New York side- 
 streets for the relief from fatal tedium of all third- 
 rate New Yorkers as thoroughly as the inventor 
 knew the parts of his invention. The cafes are 
 really as tedious as are the lives of those that seek 
 variety in them, but theirs is a different kind of 
 tedium, and Edith and Charley enjoyed it. They 
 were authorities. They were speedily connoisseurs 
 of the strange food that was served with sharp 
 sauces and of the thin wines that puckered their 
 mouths with an astringency that they called dryness. 
 They kept it up until Charley s digestion began to 
 suffer.
 
 i 5 6 JIM 
 
 At one of these places they had, one evening, to 
 wait for a table, and Edith, in the shoddy reception- 
 room, picked up the current number of a popular 
 magazine. It contained several full-page reproduc 
 tions of paintings in an exhibition lately opened, 
 and one of these caught her eye. 
 
 It was the picture of a man and woman dancing 
 the tango. They were in modern dress, and the 
 treatment was far from commonplace or conven 
 tional, but Edith liked it because the artist had 
 caught and conveyed, so that even she could feel 
 it, the movement and spirit of the subject. Al 
 though the figures were indicated rather than de 
 lineated, she realized the presence of the man s arm 
 about the girl, the touch of hand to hand, of thigh 
 to thigh; she felt the music and knew the rhythm. 
 It s perfect response to her mood made her forget 
 her husband s objections to the form of dance that 
 it celebrated, and she was about to hand the maga 
 zine to Charley for his approbation of the picture 
 when she saw the legend printed beneath it: 
 
 " TANGO " 
 
 " This painting, which is attracting more atten 
 tion from both critics and public than any other in 
 the exhibition, is a mighty argument for those who 
 maintain that the New Dancing is a graceful and 
 beautiful art. The fortunate painter is James 
 Trent." 
 
 So Jim s work had attained that summit of suc 
 cess, reproduction in the ten-cent magazines ! She 
 closed the book hurriedly and held it, lest Charley 
 should see it. If Charley saw it, he would be too
 
 JIM 157 
 
 angry to enjoy his dinner. She knew what he would 
 say (" Tango just the rotten right thing for a man 
 like that to paint! "), and she did not want to hear 
 him say it. She felt that the picture had tricked 
 her into her admiration of it, and that Jim had no 
 right to paint a dance that she wanted to practice 
 and was forbidden. " The fortunate painter ! " He 
 was trying hard to make himself famous, and no 
 doubt his chief incentive was a knowledge that his 
 fame would annoy her. Probably he had a similar 
 incentive for escaping fame while she remained his 
 wife. It would be just like him. He had remained 
 unsuccessful in order to hurt her; in order to hurt 
 her, he became successful. Well, there was one con 
 solation: he could not keep up his success. What 
 was Charley saying? 
 
 He was saying: 
 
 " The postman was at the door when I came home 
 this evening. He had this letter for you. I forgot 
 it. I m sorry." 
 
 The thought of Jim had set her nerves on edge: 
 she snatched the letter. It was a printed letter, and 
 it was headed: 
 
 THE LEEG FOR WIMMINISM 
 
 (No Conexshun With Enny Femminist 
 Asosiashuns) 
 
 Wimminism is a filosofie witch rekognizes 
 Wumun as the Life-Giffer and demands that 
 therefor she be the Life-Rooler! Ower 
 Leeg insists on this Ateenth Amendment to 
 the Kontzteetooshun of the United States: 
 " No rite, sivil or polytik, shal be denied 
 to enny person on akownt of sex."
 
 i$8 JIM 
 
 "What is it?" asked Charley. 
 
 Edith, her anger gone, was puckering her brows 
 over it and trying to guess the words by framing 
 them with her lips. 
 
 " I can t exactly make it out," she said. " I think 
 it s simplified spelling." 
 
 She handed the letter to Charley. 
 
 The letter announced van Houyz, Sylvia Tytus, 
 and Diana Wentworth as the Leeg s officers with 
 out simplifying their names and announced the ex 
 istence of kommitties on the filosofie of Wimmin- 
 ism, art-dress, publisity, mekanick baysis of Wim- 
 minism, Sivik Staytus of Mutherhud, and a dozen 
 other subjects, concluding with one on Wumun s 
 Rite to Retane her one Name wen Married. 
 
 "One name?" read Charley. "What one s 
 that?" 
 
 Edith had crossed to him and was looking over 
 his shoulder. 
 
 " Perhaps that s their way of spelling own, 
 she suggested. 
 
 " And what do they want with you?" 
 
 They wanted her, it was with difficulty deciphered, 
 to join the Leeg. 
 
 " Well, I won t have it," said Charley. " I won t 
 have my wife mixing herself up with a lot of scan 
 dalous lunatics. Their spelling s worse than their 
 opinions. W-u-m-u-n ! That sort of craziness 
 might be catching." 
 
 Edith had not the least desire to join. She 
 glanced again at the text of the letter. 
 
 " They spell one sound one way in one word and 
 another way in another," she noted. " And they
 
 JIM 159 
 
 mispronounce so many words. If people must spell 
 phonetically, why don t they phoneticize the correct 
 pronunciation rather than the incorrect?" 
 
 That phrase slipped from her without thought. 
 At the end of it she caught her breath: it was some 
 thing that Jim had once said. 
 
 She never did tell Charley about the picture. 
 
 4. She could no longer keep her eyes closed to 
 the change in Charley. His fat was unhealthy, his 
 expression fixed. His habitual chuckle had lost its 
 old assertiveness, and he was becoming dirty in his 
 personal habits. Nobody would invest in the 
 sounder, and the elder Vanaman would not die. 
 
 " I wouldn t be surprised if he saw the last of 
 all of us," she would sometimes say. 
 
 In her Charley noticed the occasionally recurring 
 carelessness of her clothes. 
 
 You ought to spruce up a bit," he told her. 
 You used to look swell." 
 
 She turned on him quickly. 
 
 Yes," she said " when I was Jim s wife. I 
 had some money then. You know, as well as I do, 
 he used to give me all the money he made." 
 
 " I know he was a fool." 
 
 " He had that good point, anyhow," said Edith. 
 
 But she went on hating Jim. 
 
 On a particularly bright afternoon, when the 
 sunshine wooed her and the light airs lied to her, 
 she had been wondering whether there was not some 
 just ground for Charley s criticism of her dress, 
 whether she was really doing so well in the matter
 
 160 JIM 
 
 of clothes as she could do on the money that was 
 spared her. She went to the shops, determined to 
 do better. 
 
 Her disappointment was keen. Everything that 
 she wanted was far beyond her means. She walked 
 along many miles of counters and corridors that dis 
 played but two sorts of things: the sort she would 
 not wear and the sort she could not buy. 
 
 It was when she came out of the last shop that 
 she remembered the picture called " Tango," the 
 picture by Jim, of which she had seen a reproduc 
 tion in the magazine at the restaurant. She did not 
 know what made her remember it; it seemed to her 
 that nothing made her remember it, that the impres 
 sion of this picture was an entity with a life of its 
 own inherited from the artist, which had passed 
 into her brain, lain for a few days dormant there, 
 and was now malignantly asserting itself, was actu 
 ally assuming at least temporary possession. 
 
 For she felt, quite suddenly, that she must see 
 the original. She tried to tell herself that she wanted 
 to see it in order to satisfy herself that it was really 
 a meretricious piece of work, which had caught the 
 popular fancy merely because it had cleverly ap 
 pealed to the spirit of a passing fashion; but she 
 knew that this was not the reason for her desire. 
 She wondered if the reason was the influence of Jim; 
 but she denied that Jim possessed any influence over 
 her. Then she thought that the picture s fascination 
 for her might lie in its presentation of a dance in 
 which she was interested and in all the freedom, the 
 successful joy, that this dance, since it was denied 
 her, had come to symbolize; but she denied that, too,
 
 JIM 161 
 
 though she could find no convincing argument for 
 this denial. 
 
 All the while she was walking toward the hall 
 in which the magazine had said that the picture was 
 exhibited. At the shops, she had been tired; she 
 was tired now; but she walked on. 
 
 She came to the hall and went in. She had no 
 trouble in finding the picture : it was hung in the 
 best light of the largest room, and there was a group 
 of people about it. 
 
 The reproduction had been a good one, but the 
 colors gave to the original a life and brightness that 
 the reproduction lacked. ... 
 
 Edith heard little broken sentences of approval 
 from the group about the picture. Some of the per 
 sons speaking were persons that seemed to know 
 good pictures; others seemed to know good danc 
 ing. One man among the admirers crooked his bald 
 head, bent the fingers of his left hand and applied 
 them to his right eye as if they were a miniature 
 telescope. He spoke in crisp, academic sentences, 
 which he meant all about him to hear. 
 
 "Alive," he said: "alive with grace, movement, 
 music. The artist that painted it must have under 
 stood, not alone the rhythm of dancing, but also 
 the rhythm of life. He understood them and 
 painted them here." 
 
 To -her young lover, a girl in the group a girl 
 in clothes somewhat ahead of the prevailing fash 
 ion said the same thing. She said: 
 
 " That s some tango, that is." 
 
 Edith had never hated Jim as she hated him 
 now. . .
 
 162 JIM 
 
 On her way to her Greenwich Village home, 
 beside which the drays and surface-cars rattled all 
 day long and the trains on the elevated-railway 
 screamed at regular intervals all night, she bought 
 an evening newspaper and studied the advertise 
 ments that followed those classified as " Amuse 
 ments." She counted the money with which she had 
 been unable to buy clothes. Charley had not given 
 her all of it; some she had saved, by painful denials 
 and awkward subterfuges, from the living-expenses 
 that he allowed her. He did not know how much 
 it was. It was not much; it would not go far. Nev 
 ertheless, she decided that, without telling Charley, 
 she would spend it for as many tango-lessons as it 
 would buy. 

 
 TENTH CHAPTER 
 
 FOR months past Edith had been eavesdrop 
 ping upon everybody about her: she was lis 
 tening for the things she did not want to hear. 
 Nobody puts his ear at a keyhole to catch pleasant 
 words, nor does anybody so placed remember such 
 pleasant words as chance to reach him: Edith ap 
 plied her ear to all that portion of the conversation 
 of her acquaintances and neighbors which was not 
 intended for her, and what remained in her memory 
 was precisely so much as displeased her. From the 
 day when she had a secret, she began to fear that 
 other people would suspect it; and from the day 
 when she feared other people would suspect it, she 
 began to seek confirmation of her fears. She sought 
 what she dreaded to discover. 
 
 It was, however, in the nature of Jim s success 
 that some of the news of it should reach her through 
 the designed highways of publicity. So the knowl 
 edge of the tango-picture reached her; so reached 
 her, on the morning after her visit to the exhibition, 
 another piece of knowledge. 
 
 She and Charley had their hurried breakfasts 
 for their breakfasts were always hurried in the 
 living-room that looked out on the noisy Greenwich 
 Village street. Charley would waken her with diffi 
 culty, urging her that he must not be late at the 
 office; and she would at last crawl out of bed, thrust 
 her stockingless feet into slippers, and fling about 
 
 163
 
 1 64 JIM 
 
 her her trailing yellow negligee, now stained by the 
 preparation of many breakfasts previous to this one. 
 Her hair unbraided, her eyes half closed by sleep, 
 she would light the gas-stove and boil the coffee 
 and eggs, which she took from the supply kept in 
 the cupboard where her dresses were hung. While 
 she was at this task, her husband would grunt his 
 way into his clothes and go out to buy a newspaper 
 at the corner, generally returning with the traces of 
 a morning cocktail on his breath. He would glance 
 at the chief headlines of the paper on his way up 
 stairs and then, when he sat down on the sofa to 
 eat the food that she handed him, would give Edith 
 the paper to read while he ate for they economized 
 on newspapers now, the understanding being that 
 the journal was to be surrendered to Charley for 
 his further study on his way to work. 
 
 This is what happened on the morning following 
 Edith s sight of the picture. The living-room, as 
 usual, was still in the disorder of the preceding even 
 ing and heavy from the odors of the night. Clothes 
 that Edith had taken off at twelve o clock and not 
 yet put away were lying across chair-backs with 
 a brazen intimacy. Charley, fully dressed, was 
 perched on the edge of the sofa, ready to spring for 
 the door and hurry toward his office as soon as he 
 should have gulped the last mouthful of the coffee 
 that he perpetually complained of because it was 
 too hot: his cheeks had now lost their color; they 
 had become leathery, and there were heavy bags of 
 darkened skin under his prominent eyes. Edith 
 looked her age : she lolled in a chair, her dressing- 
 gown falling open over her nightgown; her legs
 
 JIM 165 
 
 crossed, showing a bare shin, the slipper half off 
 the raised foot and moving up and down as she 
 closed and opened her toes in it: she pushed her hair 
 away from her face and held the newspaper within 
 an inch of her nose. 
 
 She turned to an inside page, glanced at it, gasped. 
 The paper fell into her lap. 
 
 "Well," she said, "I never!" 
 
 Charley looked up, his cup at his lips. 
 
 "What s wrong now?" he asked. 
 
 It was not to be concealed as the picture in the 
 magazine had been. He had to have his newspaper 
 to read in the subway; could she have kept it from 
 him without arousing his suspicions, she would not 
 have done so, for this was news of an importance 
 that demanded communication. Indeed, she did not 
 consider suppression: before she had time to think 
 at all, the paragraph she had seen wrenched from 
 her that exclamation in the forgotten patois of her 
 up-state kindred. She handed him the newspaper, 
 indicating with her forefinger a few lines in the de 
 partment called, "What Society Is Doing": 
 
 Lu.a2 J.2_ 
 JAMES TRENT MARRIED 
 
 Rising Young Artist Weds Miss Elizabeth 
 Bowen 
 
 Mr. James Trent, the rising young artist 
 whose portrait of Bishop Peel won such 
 praise from the critics last winter, was yes 
 terday quietly married in Trinity Church, 
 Philadelphia, to Miss Elizabeth Ord- 
 way Bowen, only daughter of Theodore 
 Howard Bowen, the well-known yachts 
 man. Only a few persons, all immediate
 
 i66 JIM 
 
 relatives, were present. Miss Bowen her 
 self is an enthusiastic sailor and has a rare 
 talent for miniature painting. Mr. and 
 Mrs. Trent are sailing this morning on the 
 Schleswig-Holstein for a long stay abroad. 
 
 Edith expected an outbreak; it would have re 
 lieved her had there been one; but Charley, though 
 the muscles of his face worked spasmodically, folded 
 the newspaper and put it into his pocket without a 
 word of comment. She could not bear this; she 
 could not bear the pain that the action showed him 
 incapable of appreciating. 
 
 "What do you think of that?" she shrilly de 
 manded. Her face was yellow. " Married! " She 
 laughed. " And in a church, if you please. He s 
 actually had the nerve to marry some nice girl 
 and some nice girl with money, too! I ll bet he 
 didn t tell the minister he was a divorced man. I d 
 like to tell his wife a few things his wife!" She 
 stood up. She raised her voice as if she intended 
 to shriek her message to the bride across the house 
 tops of New York. " Mrs. James Trent, Number 
 Two!" She reverted to her second husband: "I 
 asked you what you thought of it. Can t you talk? 
 What do you think of it? " 
 
 Charley too had risen, but he had risen to go 
 out. 
 
 " Don t yell so," he cautioned. " Do you want 
 everybody in the house to know about it? " 
 
 Her answer was to go to him and try to take the 
 newspaper from his pocket. 
 
 " Let me look at it," she said. " I want to read 
 that again."
 
 JIM 167 
 
 He seized her wrists. There was a sharp 
 struggle. 
 
 " Stop it! " he commanded. " Why do you want 
 to read it again? " His eyes flashed a jealousy that 
 he had more than once felt of late. He twisted her 
 wrists with unnecessary force and brought from her 
 a cry of pain. " What do I think about it? I don t 
 think anything. I haven t got time to waste on such 
 people. It won t come to any good, that s a sure 
 thing." 
 
 The pain in her wrists gave her some of the re 
 lief she required; she gathered some of the remainder 
 from his prophecy of evil. She stopped trying to 
 regain the newspaper, but her hysteria, though di 
 minished, was not yet ended. 
 
 " I m sorry for that girl, whoever she is: the poor 
 thing don t know what she s got," said Edith. 
 "Married again actually! And she must have 
 money. And the papers don t say I divorced him: 
 they don t even say he ever had anything to do with 
 a divorce." 
 
 What now moved Charley to quicken his depart 
 ure was the fear that he would betray his jealousy. 
 He was held merely by the greater fear that, if he 
 did not partially quiet his wife, she might still rouse 
 the house and make a scene. 
 
 " Of course it was some newspaper friend of 
 Jim s that printed that account," he said. 
 
 Rising young artist! Edith scornfully 
 quoted. " Well, it s the end of him; he s jumped too 
 high this time; he s sure to come down now. He 
 can t keep on fooling people forever, and he can t
 
 i68 JIM 
 
 fool his wife for more than a month or two. He ll 
 starve in a garret once she s got rid of him." 
 
 " Sure he will," agreed Charley. " People ll find 
 out what he is. No fear of that." He wanted to 
 get away and get another drink. For the first time 
 he was fully realizing what an important part in 
 their mental lives this man had been playing ever 
 since they combined to swear him out of their ex 
 istence. " I guess his picture of that Bishop didn t 
 amount to much," he concluded. "I never heard 
 of it." 
 
 " You? " She spoke quickly and from mere nerv 
 ous excitement, but with superior tone. " Of course 
 not. You don t know anything about pictures." 
 
 Instantly the fire that Charley had tried to master 
 shot up beyond his control. 
 
 " Of course I don t," he snapped. " I m a man, 
 and do a man s work. Pictures ! Where did you 
 learn anything about them? All you ever knew you 
 got from him. Perhaps you d like to go back to 
 him and learn more ! " 
 
 It took another half hour to heal the wound thus 
 made, and it sharpened Charley s craving for a drink 
 to a pitch that was almost unendurable. At the 
 first sign of returning quiet, he left her with the 
 briefest of perfunctory kisses. 
 
 On his dash to the saloon, and during most of 
 his day at the office, he was thinking: 
 
 " Here s this fellow making a good thing out 
 of his work and marrying a swell, and what I get 
 is what he s used up and thrown away." 
 
 As Edith, at the window, watched her husband s 
 swollen figure cross the street immediately after he
 
 JIM 169 
 
 had left her, something was reminding her of what 
 the reporter at the Radical Club had said of him, 
 and was setting against this a mental picture of Jim 
 and a young girl standing before a clergyman at 
 the altar-rail. . . . 
 
 She waited for fifteen minutes. Then she went 
 to the corner news-stand and bought a copy of each 
 of New York s morning newspapers. As she paid 
 the boy, who knew both her and Charley, she asked : 
 
 " Did my husband get some other papers to-day? 
 I mean when he went by a little while ago." 
 
 The boy pocketed her money before replying: 
 Yes m: he got em all, same as you did." 
 
 She went back to her rooms and ran feverishly 
 through the papers, but, although all printed the 
 news of the wedding, none mentioned Jim s previous 
 marriage. Indeed, the wording was in each case 
 so similar to every other that it was plain that a 
 common source had supplied them. Once, in her 
 anger, Edith thought of telephoning her story to 
 the newspaper-offices as she had once before tele 
 phoned it, but the failure of the former attempt was 
 against its repetition, and the friendly tone of the 
 wedding-notices convinced her that the endeavor 
 would be futile. Throughout that long morning 
 she had lain on her disordered bed, leaving the room 
 as she had wakened to find it. Dumbly she nursed 
 a wound the justice of which she could not under 
 stand. 
 
 2. At three o clock in the afternoon the land 
 lady s maid-of-all-work opened the door without 
 knocking and thrust in her frowsy head.
 
 170 JIM 
 
 " Summin t see yuh," she said: she spoke simpli 
 fied spelling. 
 
 Edith had come to the living-room, but was lying 
 on the sofa; the newspapers, which she had brought 
 with her and re-read, were scattered on the floor. 
 
 "Who is it? " she asked. 
 
 " Dunno," said the maid; who had not liked 
 Edith since she began to take care of her own rooms 
 and, consequently, to cease tipping. 
 
 "Didn t you ask?" 
 
 The maid was a product of the East Side, but she 
 was also the daughter of natives of the Central Rus 
 sian Plateau, and had a face that was as stolid as a 
 Chinaman s. 
 
 " No," she said. 
 
 "Is it a lady?" 
 
 " Yessim." 
 
 " Wait," said Edith. 
 
 She went into the hall and cautiously leaned over 
 the balustrade of the stair-well. In the dim light 
 below, she could see Diana standing. 
 
 Edith had not seen Diana since the night of the 
 former s unceremonious desertion at the Radical 
 Club. She knew that Charley had never abated his 
 disapproval of the acquaintanceship, and that, if 
 he heard of this visit, he would dislike it; but she 
 determined not to give up her last friend for a situ 
 ation that had already demanded and received so 
 many sacrifices. A few hours ago, it was true, she 
 would have denied herself to any caller; but the bit 
 terness that cries for isolation had given place to 
 the loneliness that aches for companionship.
 
 JIM 171 
 
 " Bring her up," said Edith, " in about five 
 minutes." 
 
 " I ll tell her t come up," the maid compromised. 
 
 Edith hurried back to the living-room. She gath 
 ered together the clothes of the night before, which 
 were still lying on the chairs where she had flung 
 them, made them into a great ball, and tossed them 
 into the bedroom. She was about to follow them 
 and make some sort of toilet when there was a 
 knock at the door: evidently the maid, heedless of 
 instructions, or willfully disregarding them, had told 
 the visitor to come up at once. Edith was annoyed, 
 but postponement would now be incivility. 
 
 " Come in," she said. 
 
 It thus happened that Diana found her hostess 
 much as she had been on the morning when she an 
 nounced her intention to divorce Jim. She was in 
 her living-room; she was surrounded by open news 
 papers; she was dressed in the same yellow negligee. 
 Edith thought of this and flushed, for she knew 
 how different was this living-room from that other, 
 and how that canary-colored gown told the story of 
 all that had occurred in the interim. A moment 
 later she was still more embarrassed, for behind 
 Diana s stood another figure: a man s. 
 
 " Oh," cried Edith, " I thought you were alone ! " 
 
 Diana smiled graciously. 
 
 " Do be natural," she said. " We are all so much 
 better when we are true to our type. It s Archi 
 bald." 
 
 It was Archibald, but Edith should have been 
 pardoned for her failure to recognize him. Except 
 that he wore a flowing bow-tie of salmon-pink, he
 
 172 JIM 
 
 was dressed like his male fellow-citizens. His 
 clothes, to be sure, had been too recently pressed, 
 but they were almost inoffensive. He was wearing 
 long trousers: the advocate of the Supremacy of 
 Woman did not brave the New York daylight in 
 knickerbockers. 
 
 " Oh! " said Edith again: she had to be natural, 
 because it was too late to be anything else. " Do 
 sit down," she said to van Houyz, and then, rapidly 
 to Diana, she gave an excuse that she had just pre 
 pared for her defection on the evening of Diana s 
 address. " It was mean of us to run away," she 
 explained, " but the room got terribly close, and I 
 thought I was going to faint. There wasn t any 
 time to apologize. I hope everything s going on 
 well at the club." 
 
 Everything, it seemed, was not going on well at 
 the Radical Club. The newest lot were becoming 
 uncomfortably numerous. 
 
 You see," said Diana, seated on the sofa beside 
 the bland worshiper of womanhood, whose eyes, for 
 getful of a former rebuke, were fixed on Edith as 
 she took a chair opposite her callers " you see, 
 they re getting in more and more of their own type, 
 and they don t care how they do it, either. At the 
 last meeting, some of them proposed an out-and-out 
 Anarchist for membership, and when we found that 
 one of the seconders of the nomination was a man 
 that hadn t been elected a member yet himself, but 
 had only just been proposed, they all got angry and 
 said we were taking our stand on a mere quibble. 
 They said we were using Capitalistic Methods. 
 We re going to resign."
 
 JIM 173 
 
 "You?" asked Edith, vaguely. She had been 
 hoping for a sympathetic interview with Diana 
 alone; all this talk about an organization for making 
 the world happy a generation hence seemed far 
 away from her own unhappiness and decidedly less 
 important. 
 
 "Yes," said Diana, unriddling the pronoun: 
 " Archibald and Sylvia Tytus and me." 
 
 " They don t understand Woman," said van 
 Houyz. u They don t give her her proper place. 
 Would you believe it: they have an average of 
 three men to two women on every committee, 
 except the entertainment-committee and the kitchen- 
 committee." 
 
 " We feel," said Diana, her violet eyes shining 
 with earnestness, " that we should devote all our 
 efforts to the really Great Work, so we are going 
 to give up everything to the Wimminist Leeg. We re 
 moving to a new Headquarters, and I ve been help 
 ing in the moving. I got a substitute to take my 
 place at the library while we did it. That," she 
 somewhat mistily wound up, " is how I could get 
 around here this afternoon." 
 
 They wanted Edith to join the League, and she 
 had not replied to the circular-letter they had sent 
 her. Why hadn t she replied and, please, wouldn t 
 she join? 
 
 Edith tried to bring her throbbing brain to bear 
 upon these schemes for the betterment of the world. 
 She was sure they must have something to commend 
 them, in spite of van Houyz, since they so completely 
 absorbed the interest of a woman like Diana. 
 Moreover, Edith did not want to seem to be put-
 
 i 7 4 JIM 
 
 ting Charley in a bad light. But she could accom 
 plish nothing. 
 
 " I hardly know," she said. " I don t believe I 
 can. I have so much to take up my time." 
 
 " I work in a library," said Diana. 
 
 The philosopher was clearing his throat. 
 
 " What we propose to do," he began, " is to re 
 store Woman to her rightful position, the position 
 she lost with the overthrow of the matriarchy." 
 
 He sketched life under the matriarchy in a half- 
 dozen polished sentences. In scarcely a dozen more, 
 he outlined the descent of woman to the present 
 time, and then, with Diana s admiring eyes always 
 upon him and his eyes upon Edith, he talked for ten 
 minutes on what the world would be when Woman 
 once more ruled it. He dismissed Woman s Suffrage 
 with a gesture and showed Feminism the door with 
 a smile: these were beneath his powers of dispute; 
 he would none of them. 
 
 " Woman," he concluded, " has the instinct for 
 Truth, which man has not, and nothing but the truth 
 can make us free. Her reign will see the end of all 
 tyrannies and all lies. It will all go all: from the 
 curse of capital to the deception of clothes. We 
 shall be free and nude. And " 
 
 Edith caught herself drawing the folds of her 
 negligee around her. 
 
 " true Chivalry will come again," said van 
 
 Houyz. " Not that of the so-called Age of Chiv 
 alry, when Woman was a prisoner and called a 
 queen; not the Chivalry of to-day, when Man pre 
 tends to worship her, while in reality using her for 
 his pampered toy; but genuine Chivalry, when she
 
 JIM 175 
 
 shall be at liberty to do her own work and govern 
 her own world." 
 
 Diana tore her glance away from him to deliver 
 a question to Edith. 
 
 " Now will you join? " she asked. 
 
 " I ll have to think about it," said Edith, who had 
 now made up her mind that, even should Charley 
 permit her, she would not join anything to which 
 van Houyz belonged. 
 
 " Good," said Diana. She rose, but she had a 
 moment left for trivialities. " I see that miserable 
 first husband of yours has remarried," she added. 
 
 Edith s assent was a nod. 
 
 " What a creature ! " said Diana. " You didn t 
 know him?" she asked of van Houyz, and, when 
 the philosopher shook his head: "No? A perfect 
 type. You know: the kindly sort that thinks he 
 has done everything for his wife when he has given 
 her all the creature-comforts he can afford, and then 
 refuses to go out with her to a meeting because he 
 says he needs the sleep in order to make more money 
 next day. How s Charley, dear? " 
 
 Edith said that Charley was quite well. She was 
 thinking how ill he had looked that morning: how 
 ill and unsuccessful. 
 
 " There s the fine type," Diana told van Houyz. 
 " He shares his wife s work and pleasures. I m 
 sure he ll join the Leeg, too. You must bring him 
 with you, Edith." 
 
 3. That was one of those nights when Charley 
 was expected to dine and sleep at his father s house. 
 On such occasions, his custom was to go direct from
 
 i 7 6 JIM 
 
 his office to the Vanaman place in Lexington Avenue 
 and not reappear in Greenwich Village until the 
 following morning; but to-day he telegraphed Edith 
 that he would do no more than take dinner with 
 his sister and would be home by ten o clock. 
 
 The things that occur day in and day out, even when 
 they are discouraging things, tend, with their every 
 occurrence, toward quiet; they draw us back from 
 high emotions; the crab that loses a leg returns to 
 his necessary burrowing in the sand, and, burrowing, 
 grows another leg: Charley closed his desk with a 
 feeling that the leg which had been torn from him 
 had been replaced by a perfect duplicate, that his 
 jealousy was shameful and unintelligible. It would 
 all be sometime again to be gone through with, but 
 it would all be gone through with: that was the 
 routine of life. Meantime, he would pass so much 
 of the evening with Edith as he could wrest from 
 parental displeasure; it would be a difficult evening 
 and would require adventitious assistance, but, if 
 properly and tactfully met, what it ended in would 
 be the purchase of another period of domestic 
 peace. 
 
 He came into the lighted living-room with a par 
 cel in his arms and a bulky something under his coat. 
 He put the parcel on the table and kissed his wife 
 with a renewal of the old-time passion. 
 
 "What s that?" she asked, indicating the parcel 
 on the table. 
 
 He had already turned his back to her, hurriedly 
 to go into the bedroom. He answered over his 
 shoulder, one hand pressed beneath the bulge at 
 the breast of his coat.
 
 JIM 177 
 
 " A bottle," he chuckled. " I know it s been a 
 bad day for you, and I thought you might want a 
 little bucking up." 
 
 She did want it. She had sipped a single cock 
 tail before her solitary dinner, but she did not like 
 to drink alone, even when, as now, she needed a 
 stimulant, and her oppression had been more than 
 the single cocktail could ease. She did not want 
 Charley to continue his abuse of liquor; within a 
 few minutes, she might object to his drinking; but 
 now she was in no mood to set good examples; she 
 was in the mood to let the repair of her husband s 
 habits wait upon better times. 
 
 " Thank you," she said. 
 
 He was in the bedroom and had shut the inter 
 vening door. She heard him in there at the bureau. 
 He was at his bureau-drawer: the bottom one. 
 When he tried to close it, the wood, as she could 
 hear, stuck as it always did. There was the sound 
 of his kicking at it, and he swore about this a little 
 more than was usual. 
 
 Edith s day had affected her much as Charley s 
 had affected him. She went to the closed door; but 
 he heard her hand on the knob and told her to go 
 away. 
 
 " Can t I help?" she called. 
 
 " No, no ! " he answered. " Go away. It s all 
 right." 
 
 At that the drawer crashed shut, and he returned 
 to the living-room, flushed from his efforts and 
 furtive. 
 
 " I just wanted to get something out of that 
 drawer," he explained, " and it stuck the way it al-
 
 178 JIM 
 
 ways does." He put his arm around her and kissed 
 her a second time. "Have a good dinner?" he 
 inquired. 
 
 " Yes," she said. 
 
 "Where?" 
 
 " Just over at Bagnoli s. It was lonely, of 
 course." 
 
 He patted her cheek in his protective fashion. 
 
 " What you been doing all day? " 
 
 It was his usual evening question; it had long since 
 become a purely formal one as, indeed, the mo 
 notony of their lives made inevitable but to-night 
 she was startled by it. She remembered Diana s 
 visit and wondered if the inimical maid-of-all-work 
 could have spoken of it to Charley as he came in. 
 The maid-of-all-work could not know of his disap 
 proval, did not know Diana s name, rarely addressed 
 him when she chanced to meet him; but Edith s 
 recent life had made her wary, the routine of de 
 ceiving her acquaintances had forced her into an 
 attitude of suspicion toward her husband. Finally, 
 Diana s mistaken praise of Charley had been most 
 upsetting: Edith was wondering whether that praise 
 was really mistaken, whether it was not ironic. . . . 
 
 " I ve been doing nothing," she said. 
 
 "Alone all day?" 
 
 She met his eyes. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 The monosyllable softened him. He squeezed her 
 shoulder. 
 
 " Poor little woman ! Well, it s bound to come 
 right one of these days." He hurriedly unwrapped 
 the parcel on the table, drew the cork of the bottle,
 
 JIM 179 
 
 and, when she had fetched a couple of glasses, 
 poured out two drinks. " Here we are," he said. 
 
 The liquor burned her throat; she had always 
 hated the taste of it; but she drank eagerly. 
 
 "How s your father?" she asked. 
 
 That, too, was a usual question, but, although it 
 usually brought the same dull answer, it was daily 
 more significant. To-night they dealt with it fac 
 ing each other across that table, the glasses between 
 them. 
 
 " About the same. I don t know. A little weaker, 
 perhaps. It seems as if he d never it seems as 
 if there d never be any change." 
 
 They sat down. Charley lit a bad cigar. A sec 
 ond drink of whisky gave them courage. 
 
 " Did you hear anything more? " she asked. 
 
 " About the wedding? No. Did you? " 
 
 "No." She broke out: "I don t see why he 
 should have all the luck." She poured forth her old 
 abuse of him. " That kind of a man ! " As she had 
 so often done in these domestic conferences, she re 
 cited those charges against him which she had sworn 
 to until they had become her unquestioned articles 
 of faith of about the only faith that was left her. 
 " He d even say that he kept out everything about 
 the divorce from the papers as much to protect me 
 as her! " 
 
 Charley, pouring himself a trembling drink of 
 whisky, chuckled a grim assent. 
 
 She felt that by this marriage Jim had again 
 somehow tricked her. She had been so sure that, 
 by her accusations in the divorce-suit, she had made 
 a second marriage impossible for him. Had he man-
 
 i8o JIM 
 
 aged to conceal his divorce from the girl? Of 
 course, she was a mere girl, younger than he was, 
 much younger Edith winced at the reflection than 
 Edith. Had Jim imposed upon the poor thing s 
 innocence? Edith was convinced he had secured that 
 publication of the news of the wedding as a message 
 to her, as at once a proof that he was happy and 
 that scandal could not touch him: "Although he d 
 say to everybody that he was doing nothing of the 
 kind; that he wanted us happy and supposed we d 
 be glad to know he was." 
 
 "Do you think so?" mused Charley. "I won 
 der if he thinks as much about us as we think about 
 him." 
 
 " Certainly he does! " 
 
 " Well, you know, from all we ve heard, he s a 
 pretty busy man just now, and " 
 
 " He thinks about us all the time! " 
 
 " Just a moment, please. I was going to say a 
 man couldn t be as busy as those girls at that tea 
 said Jim was and yet be thinking about anything 
 that s as much over and done with as that divorce." 
 
 "How do you know those girls told the truth? 
 I don t believe they did. Besides, you can think about 
 anything when you re only painting. You re doing 
 more than painting, but you think about him." 
 
 That statement was one to which Charley did not 
 care to answer. 
 
 Edith went on again to speculate about the new 
 wife of her former husband. Her speculations were 
 unflattering. 
 
 " I wonder if he ll paint that woman," she con 
 cluded, " the way he painted me."
 
 JIM 181 
 
 Charley chuckled. 
 
 " Not much. She won t let him. She s got the 
 money. She s " 
 
 " Yes, she s got the money, and I guess he ll do 
 anything to stick to that." 
 
 " Just a moment, please." Charley s eyes were 
 bright with alcoholic indiscretion; his cheeks had 
 momentarily lost their leathery hue and recovered 
 a touch of pink; the pouches under his eyes were 
 unnoticeable. " She s got the money, and when it s 
 the wife that has the money she don t stay blind 
 long. He can t keep it up. She ll get on to him 
 soon and chuck him." 
 
 Edith saw the change in her husband. It im 
 proved him, but she knew its cause, and that fright 
 ened her. Those thoughts which had been imme 
 diately roused in her by the comment of the reporter 
 at the Radical Club sprang into a fresh activity. 
 She saw Charley as a man talking automatically 
 from a befuddled brain. The day-wrought sub 
 mission to the ordinary course of events vanished 
 before a red rage. Her brown eyes were like 
 flames. 
 
 " A lot you know about it! " she said. 
 
 Charley looked at her. His mouth lolled with 
 astonishment: 
 
 " But that s just what you said yourself this 
 morning! " 
 
 Edith s laugh was strident. What did it matter? 
 What did anything matter? She was still ti-red. 
 The liquor seemed ineffective. She wondered if an 
 other drink would help. She was very tired. Life 
 was too much for her.
 
 182 JIM 
 
 " Let s finish the bottle and go to bed," she sug 
 gested. 
 
 4. In the night she woke to hear him fumbling at 
 the bureau and began to recall that she had heard 
 him doing this an hour ago, and perhaps once or 
 twice before. The room was dark. She asked him 
 what he was about. 
 
 " Just looking for something," he said, thickly. 
 " Go to sleep." 
 
 The noise of the fumbling stopped for some sec 
 onds. She lay still. Charley seemed to be waiting 
 until convinced that she had obeyed him. Presently 
 his bureau-drawer creaked open. Edith heard him 
 draw a cork. \ 
 
 She continued to pretend to be asleep. That was 
 so much easier.
 
 ELEVENTH CHAPTER 
 
 THAT night left Edith in one of her fits of 
 desperation about Charley. She blamed Jim 
 for her husband s condition, because Charley 
 had taken his first drink in Jim s company; but the 
 growth of the habit she traced to the financial anxiety 
 under which Charley so wearily labored. Something 
 must be done; he must be rescued, or he would de 
 scend to the gutter, and she would go mad; yet 
 there was only one means of rescuing him : money 
 must be procured money, which they had both been 
 vainly trying to procure for months past and where 
 was money to be had? 
 
 For several weeks there had been whispering in 
 her brain a voice to which she would not listen; 
 but to-day she was too tired to turn away from it. 
 Those men whom she had, before she knew Char 
 ley, amused in order that they might amuse her: 
 why should she not appeal to them? 
 
 She opened at their pages the book of her memory 
 as easily as she had once closed it. Billy Namyna 
 had always been a good fellow; the rich Tommy 
 Kirkpatrick, although less generous, had always 
 said that he would give her whatever she might 
 want; George Mertcheson earned a large salary, had 
 sworn that he loved her above everything else in 
 the world and that he would do anything she asked. 
 She had dropped them, the one for the other and 
 the last for what really mattered for Charley. She 
 
 183
 
 1 84 JIM 
 
 had taken care never to see them or communicate 
 with them again; she had wanted to forget them, 
 and had forgotten them; no sight or word of them 
 had come to disturb her; but their wide promises 
 had been unconditioned, and she had canceled the 
 friendship of none of them in anger. There was no 
 reason that she could think of to prevent her ap 
 proaching any one of them. Whatever she might 
 know, they thought that she had given more than 
 she received that they were in her debt. She had 
 not loved them; she had loved only the gayety to 
 which they held the keys; but of this she had kept 
 them in ignorance; she did love Charley and must 
 help him. He did not know of their existence and 
 need not know now. She would give nothing now: 
 she would only levy on their mistaken but undoubt- 
 ing sense of past obligations, and then tell Charley 
 that the money thus secured had been borrowed from 
 distant Uncle Gregory: the money need be a mere 
 loan; it could be repaid as soon as it had launched 
 the Vanaman Sounder. 
 
 She hurried through her household work, de 
 spising every task. She was still nervous to the 
 verge of hysteria and, remembering Charley s pre 
 scription for such trouble, she did what she had never 
 yet done : went out, bought a half-pint flask of 
 whisky, took one drink before her solitary luncheon 
 to give her an appetite, and another at the lunch 
 eon s end to assist digestion. 
 
 The prospect brightened. In its glow, she could 
 tolerate the comparison between her present hus 
 band and his predecessor: Charley s reputation 
 might have become one for laziness, lying, and hard-
 
 JIM 185 
 
 drinking, but his faults were faults that she could 
 now remedy. She was sure his long talks about his 
 invention had given her a thorough knowledge of 
 it. She gathered up some of the descriptive 
 pamphlets that he always left lying about, and, after 
 a careful toilet, started on her relief expedition. 
 Her first advance was made toward Kirkpatrick, as 
 the richest of the trio, and was made by telephone. 
 From a nearby public telephone-station, she called 
 up the apartment-house in which he had, when she 
 met him, been living for years. 
 
 " Mr. Kirkpatrick s not living here now," the 
 clerk told her. 
 
 Edith felt that surprise which we all feel in simi 
 lar circumstances : we expect the people from whom 
 we go away to remain precisely where we leave them. 
 She felt that Kirkpatrick had no right to move. 
 
 "Gone away?" she repeated. 
 Yes, m am. He s been gone two months now." 
 
 She obtained his new address, looked up its num 
 ber in the telephone-directory, and called that. 
 
 A servant answered: 
 
 " Is Mr. Kirkpatrick there? " asked Edith. 
 
 " Yes, m am; but I think he s at luncheon." 
 
 " Will you ask him to come to the phone, please? 
 I won t keep him a minute. I just want to know if 
 it would be convenient for him to see me this after 
 noon on a matter of business." 
 
 " Yes, m am. What name, please? " 
 
 Edith pondered. If she said " Mrs. Vanaman," 
 Kirkpatrick might not know who she was; if she 
 said " Mrs. Trent," she would probably be saying 
 it to a man that was aware of Jim s remarriage.
 
 186 JIM 
 
 "What name?" the servant asked for the sec 
 ond time. 
 
 " Edith Trent," said Edith. 
 
 " All right, Miss Trent. Hold the wire, please." 
 
 She waited for a longer time than she considered 
 necessary. When the telephone spoke to her again 
 she was becoming annoyed at Kirkpatrick and losing 
 the caution with which she generally conducted con 
 versations by wire. 
 
 " Hello?" 
 
 " Oh, is that you, Tommy? " she said. " What 
 on earth 
 
 " No, this is not Mr. Kirkpatrick," said the tele 
 phone. She had forgotten Kirkpatrick s voice along 
 with the rest of him, and only now, when it was too 
 late, she recognized this as the voice of the servant 
 who had previously been speaking to her a voice 
 different from what it had been because it was less 
 polite. " Mr. Kirkpatrick says he is very sorry, but 
 you must excuse him from seeing you : he says to 
 tell you he is lunching with Mrs. Kirkpatrick and 
 will be indefinitely engaged." 
 
 The servant rang off, and left Edith to her morti 
 fication. 
 
 Tommy was married, then! His mother was 
 dead; he had no brother, no male relatives of his 
 own name: he had often told her so. " Mrs. Kirk 
 patrick " could mean only one thing and this was 
 his gratitude; this was his way of informing her of 
 his marriage and of saying that he would have noth 
 ing more to do with her. 
 
 She would not be beaten yet; she would swallow 
 her anger and try elsewhere. She would not risk
 
 JIM 187 
 
 being put off by telephone; she would see George 
 Mertcheson in person. 
 
 Mertcheson was the head of the publicity depart 
 ment in one of the public-service corporations. Edith 
 went to his office on a high floor in a lower Broad 
 way skyscraper and, refusing to send in her name, 
 said that she wanted to see him on business. In 
 most offices her name would have been insisted upon, 
 but she knew George to be a man of easy habits, 
 and she was not disappointed: she was shown into 
 the inner office, where he sat alone. 
 
 For an instant he did not recognize her, and this 
 was a shock. Then, as she drew nearer, his sallow 
 face changed its expression from one of polite curi 
 osity to one of pity not unmixed with embarrass 
 ment. Nevertheless, he got up from his desk and 
 came forward, his hand outstretched: a loose- 
 jointed figure of a man. 
 
 " Hello ! " he said. " Glad to see you. Where 
 did you drop from? " 
 
 He had pretty eyes of blue, but his black hair 
 was too straight, and there was a wart on his nose ; 
 his head, which started well, ended abruptly in a 
 pointed, insignificant chin, as if the modeler had 
 grown tired of the work; the too prominent ears 
 the modeler had left quite unfinished. Mertcheson s 
 eyelids rose and fell with a nervous rapidity remi 
 niscent of Aunt Hattie s, and his tone belied his as 
 sertion of pleasure at seeing her. 
 
 Edith came directly to the point. 
 
 " I ve been divorced and I m remarried," she said, 
 " and my husband s in business, and I want to tell 
 you about it."
 
 i88 JIM 
 
 His face gave her no indication of how much of 
 what she said was news to him. He told her to 
 sit down, and he sat down again at his desk and lis 
 tened to her: the man that had sworn he would love 
 her forever. 
 
 Edith did know a good deal about the sounder. 
 She talked for half an hour. Sometimes she thought 
 he was paying more attention to what she was than 
 what she said, but this did not disconcert her, be 
 cause she knew that an interest in her person would 
 help her project, if that interest were not pressed 
 too far, and because, having noted on her entrance 
 his recognition of the alteration in her, she humanly 
 wanted his attitude to be an admission that, if she 
 had changed, she had not changed entirely for the 
 worse. What she did not count on was what hap 
 pened: the personal interest was pressed forward 
 to the exclusion of all other interests. When she 
 opened one of the pamphlets to illustrate from its 
 diagrams a point that she was making, Mertcheson 
 took her hand and squeezed it. 
 
 You mustn t do that! " she said, sharply. 
 
 His blue eyes met her brown eyes. She did 
 not want to lose her chance, but he meant her to 
 understand one thing, and she could not misunder 
 stand it. This Mertcheson, who had once declared 
 he would do for her anything she might ask, 
 would help her, now she was cornered, on only one 
 condition. 
 
 "Why not?" he asked. He kept her hand and 
 smiled at her knowingly. 
 
 " I told you I was married."
 
 JIM 189 
 
 " Well, weren t you married when I knew you 
 before?" 
 
 She snatched her hand away and left him. She 
 did not once look back at him. 
 
 By half-past four o clock, she had learned that her 
 other chance was gone, too. Edith, who feared and 
 hated death, was told that Billy Namyna was dead 
 and buried, that the hand in which her living hand 
 had rested 
 
 2. She found herself within walking-distance of 
 Charley s office. She remembered how he had urged 
 her to visit it and how she had declined to go there, 
 saying that she had too much to do at home, yet in 
 wardly fearing to find some overt signs of failure. 
 Now, on the sudden impulse to seek from the man 
 she loved refuge in the hour of defeat, she decided 
 to call at the place. She would get Charley and 
 take him home with her. 
 
 She went in the elevator to the highest floor, and 
 searched until she found an inconspicuous door con 
 spicuously labeled: 
 
 THE VANAMAN TELEGRAPHIC SOUNDER 
 
 Edith turned the brass door-knob and entered. 
 
 It was a very small room, the walls of which were 
 hung with blueprints and diagrams. Hard by the 
 single window stood Charley s roll-top desk, closed. 
 In the center of the room was a long table, upon 
 which, amid a pile of disordered papers, stood a 
 telegraphic instrument enhanced by a Vanaman 
 Sounder. Close to the door, under the electric light,
 
 190 JIM 
 
 a man, a caller strange to Edith, was lounging be 
 side a typewriter-table at which, her fingers idly 
 toying with the keys of the writing-machine, sat the 
 girl that must, the wife surmised, be Miss Girodet, 
 Charley s stenographer. 
 
 She was a girl of a sort so rare in New York 
 as to be worth any man s second glance. In the 
 Bordeaux country, and especially in Bordeaux itself, 
 her kind is the rule, but it is a kind that seldom 
 emigrates. She was short and robust, trimly cor 
 seted, yet generously developed. Her dark dress 
 was cut low at the base of the neck and displayed 
 a throat that seemed made of warm ivory. Her 
 mouth was full, a vivid red, and her round cheeks 
 were pink; but the rest of her face was marvelously 
 white : a white soft and firm and like the white of 
 her throat, all splendid in its contrast to her thick, 
 low-combed, jet-black hair. 
 
 Edith felt an uncomfortable emotion. 
 
 "Mr. Vanaman?" she inquired, for the stenog 
 rapher had not troubled to look up at her entrance. 
 
 " Out," said the girl, and went on talking to the 
 caller, who, it seemed to Edith, must have come 
 to meet not Charley but the girl. 
 
 " When will he be back? " persisted Edith. 
 
 The girl glanced apologetically at her caller and 
 turned a bored face, for the merest moment, toward 
 her questioner. 
 
 " I don t know. He s never certain." 
 
 "Soon?" 
 
 " Perhaps in fifteen minutes; perhaps not for half 
 an hour." 
 
 "Very well," said Edith; " I think I ll wait."
 
 JIM 191 
 
 She sat down beside the table and tried to look 
 at the model. Soon, however, she found her glance 
 wandering back again and again toward the softly 
 chattering and laughing stenographer, of whose 
 conversation she was unable to catch any save the 
 most casual words. 
 
 The man at last turned away. Stunned by the 
 results of her afternoon s endeavors, Edith, who 
 generally had an appraising eye for men, had noted 
 nothing of this one except that he was tall and slim 
 rather of Jim s build, she scornfully thought and 
 that he had a dark face. But now, as he left the 
 room, the wife got her best look at the girl. The 
 stenographer was gazing intently at the man, and 
 her eyes, under somber brows and long, curling 
 lashes, were big and soft and black; they were the 
 melting eyes that melt hearts, and they looked at 
 the departing caller with a meaning that Edith, out 
 of her own experience and her fresh memory of 
 Mertcheson s advances, found it impossible to mis 
 construe. 
 
 When the caller had gone, the stenographer, with 
 out a word to Edith, began to clatter at the type 
 writer. Charley s wife sat in silence until, ten min 
 utes later, Charley himself appeared: he looked 
 tired and harassed, but his eyes were shining as 
 Edith knew they always shone immediately after he 
 had taken a drink. 
 
 " Hello! " he said to the typist as he entered; and 
 then, seeing Edith, " Hello ! " he said in another but 
 no less easy tone. " This is good! How long have 
 you been here? " 
 
 " A half hour," said Edith. Her tone was cool.
 
 192 JIM 
 
 She had seen something that she distinctly disliked: 
 when Charley came in, his stenographer looked at 
 him precisely as she had looked at the man that 
 had left a short time before. It did not count with 
 Edith that Charley did not return the glance: no 
 doubt he saw his wife in time to prevent that. " Are 
 you leaving soon?" she added. 
 
 " Right away," said Charley. " But don t you 
 want me to show you the office first?" 
 
 " No, thanks. I ve had plenty of time to see 
 it while I was waiting for you." 
 
 The stenographer had risen and was pinning on 
 her hat, her hands raised above her head. Hers was 
 a large black hat and becoming. 
 
 " Mr. Tyrrell was here, Mr. Vanaman," she said. 
 " Mr. Tyrrell, of Boston." 
 
 " Eh? Oh, that s too bad! " Charley was obvi 
 ously disappointed. " Missed him and his first visit 
 to the office, too. Did he say he d come again? " 
 
 " He said he might call again to-morrow." 
 
 Edith s voice interrupted this exchange of business- 
 details. 
 
 " I think he will be sure to come back," said she, 
 dryly. 
 
 Vanaman looked puzzled. "You met him?" 
 
 " No. I only gathered it from his manner." 
 
 The stenographer smartly closed her desk: 
 
 "Anything more, Mr. Vanaman? " 
 
 " No, thank you, Miss Girodet," the employer 
 answered. He went to the door and held it open 
 for her as she went out. " A nice girl, that," he 
 added as he closed the door upon her exit. 
 
 Edith was regarding him with stern eyes. Her
 
 JIM 193 
 
 lips were set, and she tapped the floor with the toe 
 of her right boot. 
 
 " So your business-friend that was here seemed 
 to think," said she. 
 
 "What Tyrrell?" Charley chuckled. His 
 chuckle was hoarse : it grated on her nerves. " Well, 
 any bait that catches the fish Is good bait." He no 
 ticed the cloud on his wife s face. " She s a good 
 worker, too," he said. 
 
 " She appeared to be working Mr. Tyrrell," 
 replied Edith, " and she is quite ready to, work 
 you." 
 
 Charley blushed. It was a blush of honest denial 
 of all guilt, a blush, moreover, of fear of his ac 
 cuser s anger; but it was also the blush of a man 
 that is flattered. Edith recognized only this last 
 significance. 
 
 " Nonsense," said Charley. 
 
 " Who is she? " demanded Edith. 
 
 "You heard: Miss Girodet, my stenographer. 
 You know well enough. I ve told you about her lots 
 of times." 
 
 You never told me she was like this." 
 
 "Like what?" 
 
 " Well, you never told me what she looked like. 
 You " 
 
 " Now, just a moment, please. Don t go so fast, 
 Edith." Charley was maneuvering for delay. 
 " What does it matter what she looks like, as long 
 as she s cheap and does her work well? " 
 
 Edith was not concerned with the economic as 
 pects of Miss Girodet s case: 
 
 "She s French, I suppose?"
 
 i 9 4 JIM 
 
 " Her parents were. Good Heavens, Edith, 
 you ve heard me speak of her often enough! " 
 
 " Yes, very often indeed, now I come to think 
 of it. Too often." Edith s breast rose and fell 
 heavily. " But you never happened to mention that 
 you thought her a beauty. I know now why you 
 wouldn t discharge her." 
 
 Charley saw trouble rolling nearer and tried to 
 avoid it by a lie. " I don t think she s a beauty." 
 
 " You do ! " Edith s voice lifted to an exas 
 perating sharpness, and her lips parted in a smile 
 that showed her teeth. " Why can t you tell the 
 truth for once? " 
 
 " My dear," said Charley, trying to put a heavy, 
 quieting hand on the shoulder that was quickly 
 drawn away, " when have I ever lied to you? " 
 
 "Lied!" Edith s anger burst. "Do you think 
 I believe all your Chinese stories and haven t I 
 known you to lie under oath? Her cheeks are 
 painted, and so are her lips. Anybody who wasn t 
 a fool could see that. I know you. I see you now. 
 I might have known it from the way we started 
 the way you started with me." She considered her 
 own case. She was not pretty when she was angry, 
 and, now that she broke into sobs of self-pity, she 
 was almost ugly; but her utter disregard of the con 
 sequences of the noise she made, her carelessness 
 to what her husband s business-neighbors passing in 
 the hall outside might think, had a terrifying sub 
 limity. " I m at home washing dishes and mending 
 clothes all day, and you re down here flirting with 
 a painted French girl ! " 
 
 So she suspected his tales of Asiatic adventure!
 
 JIM 195 
 
 He was long to remember that, though it hurt him 
 too much for him to recall it to her. And she was 
 thinking of their testimony in the divorce-suit, not 
 as she had thought of it for months past, but as 
 so many lies. This too he dared not dwell upon. 
 It was bad enough to have her accuse him of infi 
 delity as she had accused her former husband. 
 Charley was wounded, but he was even more afraid 
 of what might follow. He scarcely knew what he 
 said, but what he said was: 
 
 " Dearie, dearie, please don t talk so loud. She s 
 not painted." 
 
 " How did you find that out? " 
 
 " Oh, I didn t mean Edith, please! Some 
 body will be sure to hear you." 
 
 " I don t care who hears me ! " Torn by the long 
 strain of the past months, the recent news of Jim s 
 latest success and the failure of her afternoon, 
 she completely abandoned herself. Her voice 
 rose to a shriek. "A painted French girl!" she 
 cried. 
 
 "Edith!" 
 
 " I won t stop. You needn t try to stop me. And 
 don t think she cares anything about you! She d 
 make eyes at any man. She does make them at 
 every man. You re her boss, that s all. But you re 
 such a soft thing that any girl can fool you if she s 
 made up enough and smiles at you. You re just like 
 Jim!" 
 
 At the mention of that name which was in the 
 minds of both, a purple anger surged into Charley s 
 face. He leaped forward and put his hand over her 
 shouting mouth.
 
 196 JIM 
 
 "Shut up!" he commanded. "Shut up, or I ll 
 do something that Jim never had the nerve to do ! " 
 
 She struggled in his arms. She fought him, but 
 he held her cruelly tight. Then, suddenly, she lay 
 still. She had fainted. 
 
 This presented a new and mightier terror. Char 
 ley found himself standing rigid, helpless, wonder 
 ing if she were dead, and, if so, what, at the inquest, 
 witnesses could say of the noise of that quarrel. 
 He shook himself together, loosened her dress, and 
 fanned her face and kissed her. He begged her to 
 open her eyes, and, as he kissed her, all his love for 
 her returned. 
 
 " Come back! " he whispered in her ear. " Come 
 back to me, dearie! Edith, can t you hear? Won t 
 you hear me? What you thought wasn t true; but 
 if you ll only believe me, I ll do anything anything 
 you ask." (It was what George Mertcheson had 
 once said to her.) "I love you, Edith!" cried 
 Charley. "I love you! I love you! " 
 
 Slowly she opened the brown stars that were her 
 eyes. 
 
 " Will you will you send away that horrid 
 girl? " she asked. 
 
 Her husband nodded. 
 
 " Yes," he said. 
 
 She clutched his hand.
 
 TWELFTH CHAPTER 
 
 HUSBAND and wife patched up their quar 
 rel, and for some time this patch wore as 
 well as most. They began their stitching 
 without fully knowing what they were doing; they 
 continued it because that was the easiest thing to do. 
 Nevertheless, the very presence of a patch is a per 
 petual reminder of the rent it covers, and the robe 
 of Charley s and Edith s domestic relations had al 
 ready many patches. 
 
 Charley felt that he had been grievously injured 
 by unjust suspicion, and he was sorely offended by 
 Edith s likening him to Jim; even his pet past was 
 doubted. Edith, who had once said that she might 
 have respected her first husband had he ever struck 
 her, found it difficult to tolerate Charley s threat of 
 physical violence. The man, if he could not wholly 
 forget, at least tried to forgive; the woman, though 
 she did not acknowledge her suspicions unfounded 
 it was not her custom to utter such awkward admis 
 sions made an honest effort to put the stenographer 
 out of her thoughts as Charley put her out of his 
 office : Edith blamed Jim for placing her in the frame 
 of mind that made her distrust all men. Thus it 
 at first appeared that nobody suffered except Jim, 
 ever present in the background of their conscious 
 ness; but the patch looked fresh, remained fresh. 
 
 Edith figured the situation in martial rather than 
 sartorial terms. She called it a truce, and the truce, 
 
 197
 
 i 9 8 JIM 
 
 at least on her side, could not long continue. A time 
 arrived when she violated its implicit terms. The 
 violation began timidly, through the roundabout 
 ways of excuse, of self-justification and righteous 
 anger elaborately prepared, but it inevitably 
 occurred. 
 
 The relation between man and wife is no more 
 static than any other emotional relation, and our 
 belief to the contrary is only one of those faiths that 
 we cling to all the more tightly because we feel in 
 our hearts that their basis is a thing of our own 
 making, whereas the quicksand nature of the soil on 
 which the foundation was perforce laid is a condi 
 tion imposed by exterior forces. Man s social his 
 tory is a history of contention against those forces, 
 and his method of building is the erection of a dwell 
 ing that he is not yet fitted to inhabit: he develops 
 for the race an ideal standard in advance of the real 
 individual s qualifications. When the ideal totters, 
 he says: " In spite of this, I must be right"; then: 
 " I will make it so; " and finally: " I will prop it and 
 buttress it and pretend that it is so and perhaps, 
 somehow, time will solidify the quicksand." He 
 loves his arbitrary conventions because they are his 
 own, endeared to him, however they may crowd him, 
 by the traditions of his long endeavors. His faith 
 in them, his stubborn denial that the collective con 
 science is still beyond the individual attainment, is 
 the stronger because it is hourly compelled to front 
 the denial of facts. It commands for the universal 
 law a desperate loyalty that is all the while silently 
 making personal compromises and recognizing per-
 
 JIM 199 
 
 sonal exceptions. With Edith Vanaman those ex 
 ceptions slowly had their will. 
 
 What she thought was : " Since Charley has been 
 false to his friendship with Jim, why should he not 
 be false to his love for me? " The poverty of the 
 Winter months, the attitude of deceit toward the 
 world, the quarrels, the loss of friends, the elder 
 Vanaman s tenacious grip upon his slender thread 
 of life, Charley s certain drunkenness, his possible 
 lying about his adventurous past, the halt of the 
 invention, the failure of her attempts to secure money 
 for it, the unrelieved hopelessness of the entire situa 
 tion these things pushed her forward. 
 
 She told herself that she had been a thorough 
 going Puritan and without reward. The hunger 
 for friendship and a modicum of gayety, a hunger 
 that had increased through those starved days, she 
 could no longer refuse. She had done her best to 
 help, but she was impotent; and in every corner cafe 
 New York danced. The memory of that picture of 
 the tango-dancers remained with her as a symbol of 
 everything she was missing, as something that con 
 tinually inquired of her whether she was not to 
 snatch a little joy before the final crash of Char 
 ley s fortunes which could not much longer be post 
 poned. It did not seem to her a trivial thing, this 
 dancing: it seemed to her the only means of relief, 
 of meeting new people and new thoughts that would 
 not associate themselves in her mind with those con 
 ditions which she must now from time to time for 
 get if she would escape madness: the only means to 
 a few and rare moments of forgetfulness. Once 
 she remembered that Jim had allowed her to take
 
 200 JIM 
 
 riding-lessons, of no use to her now, and reflected 
 that he would have been equally free in his permis 
 sion for tango-lessons; but such permissions of course 
 came from his lack of interest in her pursuits; they 
 furnished no ground for comparison with Charley. 
 He, in any case, would never consent to the instruc 
 tion; about that he had gone on record. There was 
 but one way to win him: she must take the lessons 
 secretly, learn them everybody said that they were 
 easy surprise him with her accomplishment, and, 
 teaching it to him, trust to the accomplished fact. 
 Charley was awkward, but she could teach him. He 
 was timid, and his objection probably rose from 
 envy: it was necessary only to give him what he 
 thought he could not acquire. She would no more 
 deny herself. 
 
 The speed and completeness with which the New 
 Dancing had conquered New York was characteris 
 tic of that city at that time. Labor was restless, 
 capitalistic reform had been given a fair test and 
 proved incompetent, the cost of living had mounted 
 to a dizzy height, the whole world was ready for 
 war, and all classes were seeking a nepenthe. For- 
 getfulness is always more expensive than endurance : 
 the drugs offered and eagerly bought were the 
 cabaret-performances and the tango. Nearly every 
 restaurant in town had "put on" that was their 
 word for it a cabaret-performance, in which hired 
 singers and dancers sang and danced on a stage or 
 among the tables while the patrons dined and drank. 
 It was a godsend to superannuated chorus-girls and 
 talentless amateurs, the proprietors equalizing ex 
 penses by raising the prices of food and lowering
 
 JIM 201 
 
 its quality. Then the tango, having become popular 
 in the theaters, was introduced in the cabarets. Paid 
 entertainers were seated at tables; they were so 
 clothed as to appear as if they were customers of the 
 place, but, at given intervals, they would pretend that 
 they were unable to resist the lure of the orchestra 
 and would dance the tango among the diners. Once 
 a drunken guest seized a girl-professional and 
 learned the new steps under the eyes of his approv 
 ing neighbors. Other men followed his example. A 
 little later, the more easy-moraled, and, conse 
 quently, careless, among the woman-diners joined 
 and learned the dance in order to prevent the 
 winning-away of their hosts allegiance and to meet 
 the competition. In a respectable world, the re 
 spectable woman can win and hold a man in mar 
 riage only by approaching turpitude as closely as 
 respectability will permit: the respectable woman 
 learned the dances and liked them. And so, at home 
 and in cafes of every sort, the good and the bad 
 rubbing shoulders, all New York was tangoing. 
 
 Among these, driven as we have seen her driven, 
 soon was Edith. She would, of course, have pre 
 ferred to take private lessons, but these the money 
 at her disposal would not permit, so she searched 
 the advertising-columns of the newspapers, in which 
 new schools of dancing grew faster than nastur 
 tiums, and selected a list of what she thought were 
 the newest, smallest, and cheapest. None, it ap 
 peared upon investigation, were old, few had small 
 classes, and all were, from her present point of view, 
 expensive. 
 
 " Of course we re not an old institution," the dap-
 
 202 JIM 
 
 per proprietor of one establishment enlightened her, 
 "because we specialize in only the new dances; but 
 the very fact that we re new and up to date brings 
 the crowd. Everybody s crazy to learn, and so our 
 smallest class is rather large. Our price is way 
 below the average, but the people that want to keep 
 up with the times are always willing to pay for it." 
 
 The Spring was warm in Edith s blood again. 
 At the fourth place of inquiry she committed herself 
 to a series of afternoon lessons. 
 
 2. The " school " was high in a West Forty- 
 fifth Street building full of theatrical agents offices, 
 the visitors to which filled the elevator with the 
 scent of essences and chewing-gum. The hall was 
 not large, and its ceiling was low. Along the walls 
 were ranged rows of folding-chairs. At one end 
 an expressionless woman sat at a piano. On the 
 polished floor were two or three groups of serious 
 people of both sexes and every age, each group in 
 charge of a deputy-instructor. The chief instructor, 
 the thinnest man Edith had ever seen, darted from 
 one of these groups to another, clapping his hands 
 to mark time or arrest attention, his coat-tails flying, 
 his eyes intense. Now he would illustrate a " step " 
 alone; now with his chief lieutenant, a blond girl 
 as thin as himself ; again he would swoop on a couple 
 of dancing pupils, pull them apart and correct some 
 of their errors by assuming the masculine or femi 
 nine role, as the case required, and whirling through 
 it with the lesser offender. The expressionless 
 woman at the piano followed him with stony eyes, 
 began playing at his command, without expres-
 
 JIM 203 
 
 sion, but with abnormal accentuation of time, and 
 stopped, again at his command, in the middle of a 
 bar. 
 
 " Glad to see you," said the thin man, when Edith 
 had made known her errand to him. " And you 
 want to start right away?" 
 
 Edith looked at the other pupils. She wanted to 
 begin among beginners. 
 
 The thin man interpreted her gaze. 
 
 " Oh, don t mind them," he said. " They won t 
 mind you a little bit. Come on, now." He stood 
 before her, his hands on his narrow hips, and spoke 
 in the most businesslike tone. " The first thing 
 to remember is you don t dance the new dances with 
 your head. And the next thing is just to get into 
 the rhythm and let yourself go. Give me your hand. 
 That s it. Miss Gilroy." 
 
 Miss Gilroy was evidently the pianist, and the 
 mention of her name was audibly a command for the 
 music to continue. The music did continue, and 
 Edith s first lesson began. 
 
 Compared with Edith, the other pupils were ex 
 perts. She had learned the old-fashioned dances at 
 Ayton in a class of which the members were all 
 young, as she had been, all raw novices and all her 
 friends. This was another affair altogether, and 
 at first she was awkward from sheer embarrass 
 ment; but she had not taken a dozen steps before 
 a glance at her present companions assured her that 
 the thin man was right: these other pupils were too. 
 seriously bent upon mastering their art to have any 
 eyes for her. In the words of one of the songs that 
 had led the vanguard of the new dances, everybody
 
 204 JIM 
 
 was " doin it " and doin it doggedly for himself 
 and his momentary partner alone. 
 
 The teacher had put out his arms, and Edith 
 stepped into them. 
 
 " Now," said the teacher. " Just let yourself go 
 with me. Um-tum-te-um-tum, um-tum, um-tum. 
 Legs apart. Keep your knees close to mine." 
 
 She went red, but she obeyed. 
 
 "That s it; that s it. So. There you are. Um- 
 
 tum-te No, no! From your hips; from your 
 
 hips only. Miss Gilroy. Most teachers prefer the 
 machine-music, but I " 
 
 The sufficiently mechanical music stopped. So did 
 the other dancers. The thin man repeated his in 
 structions in a voice for all the room to hear; but 
 Edith, though ashamed for the mistake she had 
 made, saw that the pupils attention was for him 
 and not for her. He performed the step alone. 
 
 " This way. What you must put your mind on 
 is simply to keep your feet close to your partner s 
 and far from each other, and don t move your shoul 
 ders. Now, try again. Hold tight. Miss Gilroy." 
 
 Edith stepped on the instructor s feet, but he 
 smiled and kept on. " Don t get rattled," he said. 
 " Um-tum-te-um-tum, um-tum, um-tum." 
 
 Then, all at once, she was doing it; she had 
 learned; at least of these elementary movements she 
 was mistress. How this had happened she could 
 not have explained; she knew only that she gave her 
 self to the rhythm of that foolish tune. The thing 
 was so easy as to seem not worth payment: all save 
 details, all save what she thought of as embroidery, 
 was accomplished.
 
 JIM 205 
 
 Those elaborations came later as the lessons, rein 
 forced by solitary home-practice on her aching legs, 
 progressed. The one-step, the Castle, and the 
 turkey-trot, the grape-vine, and the dip, were fol 
 lowed by evolutions more and more intricate. Edith 
 learned the Texas, the Boston, and the Hesitation, 
 and then half a dozen other variations. At the end 
 of a fortnight, just as her savings were gone, she 
 could carry herself through the dance that her 
 teacher called the " max-^c/z-ie." 
 
 " You ll never make a professional," he told her; 
 " but, with a good partner, you ll be a first-rate 
 parlor-performer." 
 
 Edith left the hall that afternoon with a new glow 
 in her heart. During the past fourteen days she 
 had been recapturing joy, and joy recaptured bright 
 ened her eyes, colored her cheeks, did for a time 
 what the Spring promised and failed to do: made 
 her young again. Even Charley saw it and, in his 
 clumsy way, said so. But she decided that it was 
 not yet time to tell him the secret. 
 
 3. As she came away from her last lesson, she 
 tried to set her mind to a consideration of things 
 as they were with her. The moment presented itself 
 as decisive. 
 
 She had again made friends with gladness. What 
 her lessons did for her was not merely negative. 
 They not only shut her mind, while they were in 
 progress, against the memory of her disappoint 
 ments and the hopelessness of her husband s affairs; 
 they opened another door, the door beyond which 
 she had always wanted to pass, the door to light
 
 206 JIM 
 
 and music and freedom from care, to the fairy- 
 elements that composed what she considered Suc 
 cess. They sharpened her longing, gave her a 
 glimpse, pointed a way. 
 
 Nevertheless, they were expensive. They were 
 expensive emotionally, though that she but dimly 
 apprehended; and they were expensive in material 
 dollars and cents, and of this she was now desper 
 ately aware. " The people that want to keep up 
 with the times," the dapper proprietor had told her, 
 " are willing to pay for it " : Edith had spent the 
 last penny of her savings. The tuition-fees took 
 much. Then it was evident that a special kind of 
 skirt was needed for the execution of the new dances 
 and, next, a special kind of corsets and shoes. The 
 makers of these luxuries were trading on the tango- 
 craze as sharply as the dancing-masters, were ask 
 ing those prices which people that wanted to keep 
 up with the times were willing to pay : Edith, rashly 
 defying experience with the hope of some good luck 
 coming to the Vanaman Sounder, had appropriated 
 for skirt and corsets and shoes money that Charley 
 gave her for the room-rent, and the landlady was 
 again ominous. 
 
 Charley s business-position was rapidly becoming 
 untenable. She knew, because of his very silence 
 concerning it, that he had again sunk into debt, 
 that the office-rent was in much the condition in 
 which the room-rent was, that printers and other 
 creditors were pressing him, and that Mame had 
 no more money to lend. These things reacted on 
 his habits, his physique, his temper: he was drinking 
 harder than ever; his face was fat and gray and
 
 JIM 207 
 
 haggard; he seemed to burrow into her words, even 
 into her gestures, for grievances, and he would brew 
 red rages that shot from his mouth in flames of burn 
 ing accusation and reproach. 
 
 Her position was almost worse because of that 
 touch of contrast which the dancing-lessons supplied. 
 From dully hopeless it had become acutely intoler 
 able. On the one hand, the door to gladness was 
 opened enough to tantalize her by the sight and 
 sound of what lay beyond it, yet too little to per 
 mit her passage through; from the other advanced 
 implacable danger and yes, she at last thus con 
 fessed its nature irretrievable failure. 
 
 Unwilling to return at once to the scene of what 
 must so soon be this disaster, she had walked east 
 along Forty-fifth Street. She turned south on Fifth 
 Avenue. 
 
 The shop-windows were full of those beautiful 
 things which she loved, which she had once been 
 certain of possessing, which she now realized she 
 could never obtain: they were ornaments that she 
 would have ornamented, clothes that she would have 
 worn so much better than the women who could 
 afford them. Thousands of women could afford 
 them, but Edith never could. They beckoned to her 
 and smiled at her, these beautiful things. Pretend 
 ing to scorn the mention of mere money, and de 
 signed for customers to whom money mattered 
 everything in bulk and nothing in detail, they were 
 displayed gowns and rings, brooches and opera- 
 cloaks, hats and tiaras, embroidered stockings and 
 delicate anklets, weblike lingerie, jeweled slippers, 
 massive bracelets, necklaces of diamonds, ropes of
 
 208 JIM 
 
 pearls without the vulgarity of a price-mark that, 
 if it told the truth, would tell a price which the 
 merchants were ashamed to advertise. Persons 
 some quite commonplace-looking persons saw them 
 and, innocent of a second s hesitation, went into the 
 shops to buy. Close at hand these treasures lay, 
 but far beyond Edith s reach ; they hung from metal 
 rods, shone on mockingly superior wax figures, spar 
 kled out of cushions of pale yellow and royal purple 
 behind a scant quarter-inch of plate-glass window; 
 yet from Charley Vanaman s wife they were as far 
 away as the glittering planets are from the astrono 
 mer when he studies them through the lens of his 
 telescope. 
 
 It was half-past four o clock in the afternoon, and 
 the Avenue was filled with those fortunate of New 
 York s women who want everything and have every 
 thing, who cannot count the cost of what they desire 
 and do not have to count it. They passed in freshly 
 varnished motor-cars, directed by liveried chauffeurs ; 
 in broughams behind sleek thoroughbred horses 
 driven by cockaded coachmen; they brushed Edith 
 on the sidewalk; they wore pumps and silk-stockings, 
 yet were dressed in furs too heavy for the Spring 
 weather and too expensive for the daughters of 
 feudal overlords. All of them were chattering, all 
 of them were laughing, all of them were ignorant 
 of what it was to be stalked by debt or balked by 
 prices. Here and there, easy, gallantly attentive to 
 the happy girl beside him, gracefully mannered with 
 the instinctive social rectitude of the person born to 
 the world of leisure, appeared a man, slim, correct, 
 his clothes made for him and not he for his clothes,
 
 JIM 209 
 
 the male complement to the woman of Fifth Avenue 
 at four-thirty, a creature of a species that Charley 
 might occasionally say one word of business to in a 
 month, but never approach any nearer. There was 
 among them all, women and men, the freemasonry 
 of extravagant wealth: friend waved muff or raised 
 hat to friend, called across the curb from limousine 
 to pavement some polite question about last night s 
 dance or some invitation to to-morrow s opera. Even 
 those who were not personally known to one an 
 other had signs of mutual understanding, tacit rec 
 ognitions and acceptances. 
 
 In the throng of them the few less fortunate were 
 swallowed up; the envious mimicked; the total im 
 pression was an impression of complete well-being. 
 Edith read her newspapers and her scandalmonger- 
 ing weekly magazines, those blackmailing social- 
 scavengers which exact tribute from the weaker rich 
 who fear publicity, depending for their circulation 
 upon the Edith Vanamans of New York: she knew 
 many of the passersby the society women, the 
 actresses, the millionaires from printed pictures 
 and descriptions, and she knew, from her reading, 
 the daily life of all. 
 
 They had wakened late and slowly in quiet bed 
 rooms. Capped and aproned servants had brought 
 coffee and rolls or toast and tea to their bedsides. 
 They had stepped into baths of a prescribed tem 
 perature. They had ridden good horses in Central 
 Park. They had come home to be dressed by maids 
 or valets in clothes selected from rooms resembling 
 these shop-windows. They had motored here to 
 luncheon, there to tea. Now they took exercise along
 
 210 JIM 
 
 Fifth Avenue as familiarly as they would soon be 
 playing tennis on the lawns of their own summer- 
 places at Newport or Bar Harbor. 
 
 Fifth Avenue belonged to them, because they could 
 afford it. Soon the shining asphalt of it would be 
 entirely hidden by the long line of their cars: rich 
 women going home to dinner from unhampered 
 shopping, rich men going home to dinner from the 
 club or from huge financial manipulations that they 
 performed as men play cards to whom the stakes 
 are insignificant. Then the motors would reappear 
 to join the theater-procession along Broadway, and 
 Broadway, when the theater-curtains rose, would be 
 come as quiet as the main street in Ayton on a 
 mid-week evening, only to change, as the curtains 
 fell, into a blazing canyon s river-bed too narrow 
 for the noisy flood poured into it. The suppers, the 
 cabarets, the tango-dancing would begin. . . . 
 
 And Edith Vanaman would be sitting in a sordid 
 room in Greenwich Village, with the elevated- 
 railway trains screaming close to her window, watch 
 ing her shabby husband drink and listening to him 
 brag about what he would do when his luck changed 
 and what he had done in a country that she won 
 dered if he had ever visited. 
 
 4. At Forty-second Street she turned westward, 
 meaning to take a Seventh Avenue car home; but 
 she walked slowly: the feet that had been dancing 
 were loath to drag her toward her dingy lodgings, 
 and her mind, busy with the pictures of what she 
 had left and what she was going to, directed her 
 steps languidly. More than one passerby turned
 
 JIM 211 
 
 to look after her, for the sparks of her recaptured 
 joy still shone out of the brown eyes and bright 
 ened the round cheeks behind which the old despair 
 was rising; yet she was so preoccupied that, within 
 two hundred yards of Broadway, she avoided a 
 man coming toward her only to bump sharply into 
 another man going in her own direction. 
 
 u I beg your pardon," said Edith. 
 
 She scarcely looked at her victim, but received 
 the impression that he belonged in the crowd that 
 she had seen on Fifth Avenue. Because her envy 
 of that crowd was so sharp, she was not disposed 
 to look at him a second time. 
 
 Her victim, however, for a half-minute seemed 
 to consider himself the aggressor. He stopped, 
 pulled at his little black mustache, raised his hat, and 
 rapidly began a full apology. 
 
 " Oh," he interrupted himself in the midst of it 
 " and it s Mrs. Vanaman. I am so sorry." 
 
 She knew him now: he was the man she had seen 
 in Charley s office in subdued talk with Miss Girodet. 
 Edith despised him for that intimacy with a stenog 
 rapher, perhaps the more because it was carried on 
 when a better sort of woman was within speaking- 
 distance; but it struck her that she must be careful 
 not to show him her feelings, because Charley had 
 told her that this Mr. Tyrrell was a rich young Bos- 
 tonian who evinced an interest in the sounder and 
 might be persuaded to invest in it. 
 
 " Yes," she said. " But you didn t hurt me." 
 
 " Are you sure? " he pressed her. His voice was 
 the voice of cultivation, and his tone genuinely so 
 licitous. " I was very awkward. And I hope you ll
 
 212 JIM 
 
 forgive me for knowing your name. I saw you in 
 your husband s office one day and, the next time I 
 went there, I dared to make inquiries." 
 
 She had thought him like Jim, but now she saw 
 that, physically, there was no real resemblance. 
 What points of likeness there might be were negligi 
 ble, and only an ease of manner and readiness of 
 phrase were so sufficiently dissimilar from Vanaman 
 and so sufficiently similar to his predecessor as to 
 insist at all upon a comparison. Tyrrell was younger 
 than either Jim or Charley, but his dark hair was 
 touched with a premature gray and his face was the 
 self-possessed face of a man of means that is also a 
 man of the world. It was a stern, strong, dignified 
 face with piercing eyes and a firm mouth, and yet 
 it gave her the feeling that the man s strength, since 
 he had inherited more money than he could use, 
 was devoted to procuring enjoyment. He was pale 
 and lean and dressed with a quietness that Edith 
 recognized as expensive. He had a pleasant smile 
 that showed his lips, when relaxed, to be full, and 
 his gray gaze was provocative as well as piercing. 
 Edith knew at a glance that he belonged on the 
 bright side of the door forbidden to her. She had 
 to admit that he was handsome ; she felt at once the 
 lure that the light has for all those who are in the 
 shadow, felt it quick and keen; but she resolutely 
 set her mind to wondering what such a man could 
 have discovered to attract him in the stenographer 
 that her husband had since summarily dismissed. 
 She had a sense that she must keep a firm grasp on 
 the sword of her displeasure because, against the
 
 JIM 213 
 
 attacks of an adversary of this sort, the shield of 
 her resistance was frail. 
 
 " I m quite sure I wasn t hurt," she said. 
 
 " Then you won t hold it against me? " he smiled. 
 
 " I won t bump against you, if that s what you 
 mean," she put it. 
 
 The blow went home. His smile broadened to a 
 frank laugh. 
 
 "Well," he said, "I ll confess if there s any 
 virtue in a thief s confession when he is caught with 
 the stolen property in his .waistcoat-pocket. I saw 
 you and recognized you. I ve been wanting for some 
 days to apologize to you for for something that 
 seemed to me to require an apology; and so, when 
 I saw you strike that chap and carom in my direc 
 tion, I well, I rather put myself in your way." 
 
 Edith felt the weight of her buckler: "Is that 
 your way of getting a chance to apologize? " 
 
 " Oh, for a good deed," he expostulated, " any 
 way is a good way." 
 
 " Then," she struck again, " suppose you tell me 
 what you want to apologize for, and then suppose 
 you apologize." She remembered that this ingra 
 tiating young man, whom she still wanted to mis 
 trust, might save the sounder s fortunes; she re 
 membered it just in time to refrain from concluding: 
 " And then suppose you let me go on my way home." 
 
 If the young man guessed the suppression and 
 there was a twinkle in his eyes that made her sus 
 pect that he guessed it he did not permit it to dis 
 turb him. He took quite the opposite course. He 
 said: 
 
 " It s a long story."
 
 2i 4 JIM 
 
 " If that s so," said Edith, " perhaps Forty- 
 second Street isn t the place to tell it, after all." She 
 made as if to move on. 
 
 Tyrrell patently chose to misunderstand her: 
 
 " You take the words out of my mouth. You 
 quite charmingly relieve me of the embarrassment 
 of asking it. Honestly, I m grateful." 
 
 He puzzled her. Curiosity overcame caution, as 
 only curiosity so splendidly can. 
 
 " You mean I relieve you of the embarrassment 
 of asking my pardon of making your apology for 
 I don t know what? " 
 
 "No; on the contrary: of asking you to let me 
 make it in a fitter place. You give me hope of ulti 
 mate mercy. I was beating my poor brains to think 
 of a way to induce you to let me select a quieter 
 scene. I need courage to ask mercy; I m dying for 
 a harmless stimulant, and I m a bad enough Ameri 
 can to like the English beverage at five o clock. 
 What do you say to the first-at-hand and eminently 
 respectable tea-room of the Knickerbocker? " 
 
 What she would have said to it was, " No "; but 
 Tyrrell saw that too, and added: 
 
 " Everybody goes there, you know. They say 
 they go to drink tea, but when they get there they 
 all tango." 
 
 He was opening a little wider the door that she 
 had thought she could not pass, the door through 
 which she could escape the failure that approached 
 outside of it. He was asking her to go to a the- 
 dansant. Moreover, he was asking it as if it were 
 quite a matter of course among the men and women 
 of his own class. After all, it was not as if he were
 
 JIM 215 
 
 not of her husband s acquaintance; somehow or 
 other Charley had managed to meet this man. In 
 Ayton, when a stranger scraped acquaintance with 
 you on the street, you named it being " picked up," 
 and pretended to your friends that there had been 
 a formal presentation; but Tyrrell knew quite well 
 who she was, even had what he might well feel was 
 an excellent reason for talking to her. If he thought 
 he had been rude, that day at the office, it was no 
 more than she had thought he was : she owed him 
 the chance for an apology and, as she had truthfully 
 committed herself, Forty-second Street was no place 
 for the granting of such opportunities. The place 
 he moderately called respectable was more than re 
 spectable; Ayton would have called it "select." 
 This was no disloyalty to Charley: it might be the 
 means toward helping Charley that, a few days 
 ago, she had so eagerly sought and so wildly re 
 gretted losing. If she was pleasant to the man of 
 wealth, the man of wealth would be the more dis 
 posed to look kindly on Charley s invention. The 
 the-dansant 
 
 Edith s buckler clattered to the pavement. Forty- 
 second Street, on which so many similar shields have 
 fallen, was too full of other noises to heed its 
 clatter. 
 
 " Yes," she said, breathlessly she could not say, 
 " Thank you " " I will go in." 
 
 They had to push their way through the great 
 lobby. There was a woman on every chair, and 
 men and women stood shoulder to shoulder from 
 wall to wall. 
 
 " Is there anything going on? " asked Edith.
 
 216 JIM 
 
 ; There s the tango-tea going on," he laughed 
 over his shoulder at her, as he plowed the road; 
 " and it goes on two afternoons in every week." 
 
 They reached a high-vaulted room decorated in 
 gilt and crimson. About it were many and small 
 gilded tables; to each table there were drawn more 
 gilded chairs than could comfortably be placed there, 
 and not one of them was unoccupied. In the 
 crowded space between the rows of tables, a hun 
 dred or more couples were dancing to the music 
 of an orchestra that the demands of the dancers had 
 propelled from view. The women were bright 
 with those daring colors, more daringly combined, 
 which the fashion of the day exacted, but the men 
 tangoed in the rumpled sack suits in which they 
 had hurried here from their offices as soon as they 
 could decently leave their work. They balanced and 
 seesawed, slid and ambled, without the farthest 
 suspicion of being ridiculous, without a care of what 
 the spectators said or thought. 
 
 " We shall have to wait our chance," said Tyrrell, 
 looking over the tables. " Do you mind? " 
 
 They were standing in the doorway, and already 
 other anxious guests were thick behind them. That 
 Tyrrell did not mind was enough evident. Edith, 
 her eyes wide upon the scene, confessed that she 
 did not. 
 
 " What a good time they re having," she said. 
 
 " They re doing the only thing that anybody now 
 really cares about," Tyrrell assured her. " Life s 
 become nothing but learning to tango, tangoing, and 
 resting from tangoing so as to be able to tango 
 again. They say the saloons are losing money: at
 
 JIM 217 
 
 five o clock your tired business-man used to be six- 
 deep at the bars all along Broadway and now look 
 at him." 
 
 Immediately in front of her, passed a couple of 
 dancers that might well have been the models for 
 Jim s picture. Edith said to herself that perhaps 
 Jim had come to this very place for his inspiration 
 Jim, courted, lucky, successful. Well, she could 
 come here, too. . . . 
 
 " But I needn t tell you anything about tangoing," 
 Tyrrell was saying. " You tango, too." 
 
 She gave him her grateful eyes: 
 
 " How do you know that? " 
 
 He knew it because he had assumed that every 
 body danced the new dances, but he saw that what 
 he had said pleased her. 
 
 " I ve only to look at you," he replied. " Will 
 you let me see if I m at all your match? " 
 
 " Oh, no, thank you," she said, quickly, she could 
 not have told why; " I don t think I came to dance. 
 Weren t you going to apologize to me?" 
 
 The crowd behind them pressed them together. 
 The blare of the music made them bend their heads 
 close to each other. 
 
 "What?" said Tyrrell. "Before I ve had the 
 tea to raise my courage?" 
 
 You needn t do it till you ve had your tea, but 
 meantime you might tell me what it s all about." 
 
 " It s all about you," he beautifully explained. 
 
 She thoroughly knew what he wanted to apologize 
 for, but it suited her to make the way arduous: 
 
 " I haven t the least notion what you re talking 
 about."
 
 2i8 JIM 
 
 Then do suppose we dance it." 
 
 " No, really." 
 
 "You re not afraid?" 
 
 You mean afraid to dance? But you re afraid 
 to talk." 
 
 " A dance might do in place of the tea." 
 
 She shook her head. " It must be something quite 
 terrible." 
 
 " Just one dance? " he pleaded. 
 
 " Not three steps," she resolved. It was really 
 very pleasant to have a man of this sort asking fa 
 vors of her, and the music was insistent. Before 
 she knew what she was adding, she had added: u Un 
 til you ve told me." 
 
 " Oh, then!" he smiled. He seemed to be mak 
 ing a momentous decision. " It was for being rude 
 to you that day at your husband s office." 
 
 She had hoped he would say this. She had seen 
 an advantage in that form of statement. She 
 reached for the advantage: 
 
 "What day?" 
 
 With a frank laugh, he dashed it from her: 
 
 Why, that s saying you didn t see me there, and 
 if you didn t see me there, Mrs. Vanaman, you 
 would have been letting me speak to you just now 
 without the least idea of who I was." She flushed, 
 and he read the meaning of her flush. " Come," 
 he said: "I m the sinner and I mustn t forget it. 
 Don t let me forget my place, Mrs. Vanaman: your 
 husband never lets me. But he manages that by 
 being so appallingly honest. Of course you saw me, 
 but of course you didn t want to own to seeing any 
 such atrocious person."
 
 JIM 219 
 
 " Perhaps that was it," said Edith, who knew 
 that he was trying to help her. 
 
 " You saw me," he went on, " and you naturally 
 wanted to know how it was that your husband had 
 such outrageous acquaintances, and so, when I d 
 gone, you asked the stenographer " 
 
 "Not at all!" 
 
 " Well, then, it was your husband that you asked 
 who I was." 
 
 " I didn t ask anybody. When Charley came in, 
 the stenographer told him you d called." 
 
 Tyrrell became more serious. " At any rate, I 
 didn t want you to think that I had any idea at that 
 time that you were yourself, you know. And I don t 
 want you to think now that my attentions to the 
 charming young person were of any but a business 
 nature." 
 
 Edith had it on her tongue to inquire what sort 
 of business they were; but she substituted another 
 question: 
 
 " If you hadn t any idea who I was, when did 
 you find out? " 
 
 " Later," said Tyrrell. 
 
 "And where?" 
 
 " I did what I accused you of doing: I asked Miss 
 Girodet" 
 
 Edith shrugged her shoulders: 
 
 " You see Miss Girodet often? " 
 
 " I have seen her once since, and by chance." 
 
 " And you asked " she had an advantage at last 
 and would not release it " you asked my husband s 
 stenographer who I was?" 
 
 " Yes. You see, I wanted to find out in order
 
 220 JIM 
 
 to apologize, or at least to explain. Explain is 
 the better word, isn t it, please? " As she was about 
 to answer, he continued: "And, besides, she tells 
 me she s not your husband s stenographer any longer. 
 I do hope that what you observed didn t make you 
 have Mr. Vanaman get rid of her." 
 
 Again he had the better. Edith s denial was a 
 shade too ready. 
 
 " I m glad of that," said Tyrrell; " because she s 
 really quite all right, you know." 
 
 " Did she," Edith could not refrain from asking, 
 " tell you that, too, when you met her once and by 
 chance? " 
 
 " It wasn t necessary, Mrs. Vanaman. My eyes 
 told me and my ears. And the chance that I met 
 her by was a collision that I had with her yester 
 day on this highly respectable dancing-floor." 
 
 How much of what he said did he say from a 
 sort of friendly malice? She was sure, now, that 
 it must be friendly, but equally that it must be malice. 
 The question was one of quantity alone. Talking to 
 Tyrrell was like playing a game. It was happy 
 children she recklessly granted the adjective 
 romping about an empty house. He would invite 
 her to pursue him into a room from which there 
 was no exit save the door of entrance. Sure that 
 she could here at last trap him, she would follow 
 and fling herself far into that room, only to find 
 that he had flattened himself against the wall in 
 which the door was cut: before she could turn on 
 him, he would have turned, darted out, shut the 
 door on her, and be galloping down a distant pas 
 sage. Yes, it was a game a game that she had
 
 JIM 221 
 
 played and liked once or twice before, a long time 
 since, when she had briefly met a few of the friends 
 of Jean Dunbar. 
 
 "So that s the story," he concluded; "and now 
 you ve got to keep your promise and give me my 
 dance." 
 
 He so much offered what she wanted: she could 
 reflect for but the briefest moment She had justi 
 fied her coming here. If there was no reason against 
 her coming here, there could be none against her 
 doing what was done by all the others that came. 
 Behind, the crowd pressed; in front, the music in 
 vited; Tyrrell, standing ready, invited: Edith slipped 
 into his waiting arms. 
 
 In the second bar, she faltered and lost step; 
 but he righted her before her instant shame could 
 enforce the error. Then the magic had its way with 
 her: the magic of the music and a perfect partner. 
 Without thought, without the wish or need to think, 
 she was swept across the room on a rhythmic wind. 
 They marched, reversed, marched again; Tyrrell 
 was feeling his way with her, determining what she 
 could do before she had done it, passing subtly from 
 the simplest steps to the more complicated. And 
 she could do it, she could do it all. That knowl 
 edge came to her in an engulfing triumph. They 
 swung, they dipped, they pirouetted. Her brain 
 could form no guess as to what the next evolution 
 might be, and did not have to form one, for when 
 the next evolution came her feet, whatever it was, 
 proved that they had known it and expected it; 
 they welcomed it and were a part in it. The flush 
 deepened on her cheeks; her eyes mirrored the glory
 
 222 JIM 
 
 of her success. For now, for at least this brief 
 minute, nothing else in all the world mattered. 
 
 The thing was in the air. The women with their 
 hats on, the men in their business-garb, were danc 
 ing as freely as if they were dressed for a ballet, 
 and as wildly. Girls on their way home from school 
 had stopped here to steal this half hour of clandes 
 tine joy; wives balanced before their lovers while 
 their unremembered husbands, oblivious of them, 
 embraced the wives of other men not a yard away; 
 mothers clung laughingly to partners that, in other 
 surroundings, they pretended to disdain, and spared 
 not a glance for their daughters on the same floor 
 with young men against whom the mothers houses 
 were barred. Strands loosened from the coiffures 
 of next year s debutantes brushed the shining pates 
 of elderly partners. Couples of the age of grand 
 parents were as nimble as their last descendants. 
 And through the maze, in and out, never interfer 
 ing with another pair and always moving in abso 
 lute harmony with each other, more alone in that 
 crowd than they could have felt on an aeroplane, 
 Edith and Tyrrell passed, breast to breast. 
 
 The music stopped with what seemed to Edith 
 a sudden clash. People that had left their tables 
 for the dancing-floor ran back to the tilted chairs 
 that reserved their places. Everybody was talking 
 at once and laughing breathlessly. 
 
 "It was splendid!" The phrase came from 
 Edith without foreknowledge. 
 
 But Tyrrell did not take the compliment to him 
 self: he applied it to their union: 
 
 " It was a good dance. We re what they call a
 
 JIM 223 
 
 first-rate team, aren t we? " He looked about. " I 
 wish one could get a table. Shall we go into the 
 other room and look for one there?" 
 
 " Oh, no ! " said Edith. She saw, at the tables 
 about her, women by station " good " women or 
 dering drinks with the easy familiarity of boulevar- 
 diers. Them she would not imitate, had she wished 
 it, and, as a matter of fact, the excitement of the 
 dance was all the intoxicant she wanted. " I m 
 afraid I ve got to be going." 
 
 "Not yet!" He poured on her his full gaze. 
 " Please ! " 
 
 She so wanted to talk as he did, but she could 
 only repeat: 
 
 " I m afraid I ve got to go." 
 
 "So soon? It can t be half-past five." He met 
 her squarely: "Why do you have to go? And 
 where? " 
 
 " Charley," she began" he wouldn t " Her 
 
 brown eyes met Tyrrell s, and she stopped. 
 
 " Oh, bother Charley! " he laughed. 
 
 Somehow she found herself laughing, too. 
 
 " But he wouldn t -" she insisted. 
 
 "Very well, then," said Tyrrell; "in that case 
 we ll have one more dance on the understanding 
 that we won t bother him." 
 
 If he had not said it with a smile, she would have 
 said that he proposed a treasonable conspiracy; 
 she would have refused to join it; but Tyrrell s smile 
 made all the difference: it belittled Charley s ob 
 jections without scorning Charley; it pointed out 
 that half of the best people in this room were doing 
 much what Tyrrell proposed; it banished all diffi-
 
 224 JIM 
 
 culties and made lightly merry of every scruple. As 
 plainly as if he had spoken it, and far more per 
 suasively than any speech, Tyrrell had told her: 
 
 "It s quite all right; it s, in fact, the custom; 
 we ll simply never mention this to Charley: where s 
 the harm?" 
 
 She had a vision of the Greenwich Village living- 
 room, of the husband harassed, bragging, sodden. 
 The fires of Spring burned in her heart. . . . 
 
 " Please," said Tyrrell: " just one more dance." 
 
 " Well just one more," she conceded. 
 
 So, when the music started again, these two started 
 with it, and in movements more intricate than they 
 had attempted before. Across the web of dancers 
 they shot with an incredible swiftness. He took his 
 arm from her back, tightened his hold of her hand, 
 sent her whirling from him and pulled her to him. 
 It was attack and surrender. Again he held her 
 close and spun her round. Once she felt his hand 
 quiver and looked quickly at him: he blushed like 
 a girl. She was ashamed to know that this ability 
 to make him quiver did not shame her; she was 
 ashamed, and yet it was a shame that she liked. 
 Nor could it last; the dance permitted nothing to 
 last. Change of step followed upon change. He 
 was like no partner that she had ever known; for 
 her he was a better partner than the thin instructor 
 at the school in Forty-fifth Street: Tyrrell was not 
 a force pulling her; he was a consciousness usurp 
 ing her own and directing her body in the stead of 
 her own consciousness. 
 
 It was an appreciable time, when this dance had 
 ended, before her consciousness returned to its do-
 
 JIM 225 
 
 minion. Then she was leaning against the wall with 
 Tyrrell pleading: 
 
 "One more, please?" 
 
 But this was a moment for firmness. Charley 
 would be waiting at home for her; he would ask 
 questions. 
 
 " I must go right away," she said. 
 
 Perhaps Tyrrell knew her reasons. He changed 
 his plea. 
 
 "To-morrow, then? It s such fun, and we do 
 work so well together. We can try it at " 
 
 She shook her head. Somehow it seemed im 
 portant not to make an appointment for so early 
 a date. 
 
 " Then how about the next day? " 
 
 " I ll meet you here," she said, " on Saturday " 
 Charley did not observe the Saturday half holiday 
 " at half-past four." 
 
 5. It was nonsense to think evil of this tango- 
 craze; Charley was as old-fashioned as his father. 
 The dance helped people out; it made life easier, and 
 Charley must be made so to see it. All dances, 
 Edith reasoned, as the crowded car hurried her 
 homeward, were mere convention. The convention 
 provided that a woman might permit a man to 
 hold her tight in his arms before a roomful of peo 
 ple and move in bodily unison with him to the music 
 of an orchestra. Very well; but was that any reason 
 for supposing that the woman would proceed to do 
 anything of the same sort in secret? The frank 
 ness of it really provided an excellent reason for 
 supposing the contrary. The tango was only a
 
 226 JIM 
 
 dance, and, besides, everybody was, indeed, doing 
 it: good people, really "good" people, too. 
 
 When she reached her lodging-house, she looked 
 at it with distaste; but she comforted herself with 
 the thought of the coming Saturday. She went up 
 the stairs humming "Too Much Mustard." 
 
 6. Charley was seated at the table. There was 
 a bottle and a glass beside him. His mouth was 
 drawn down at the corners; the veins on his nose 
 were purple. He did not get up to greet her. He 
 said : 
 
 14 Where you been, anyhow? " 
 
 She couldn t tell him now she couldn t do it. 
 Tyrrell had been right. 
 
 " Out," she said. 
 
 Charley snorted. " I guess I ought t know that. 
 I been waiting long enough for you. I asked you 
 where you been? " 
 
 She could not take her gaze from him. His frog- 
 like eyes stared back in sullen dullness. His clothes 
 were worn and rumpled. His face was set. He 
 was a picture of failure. 
 
 " I went for a walk," she said. 
 
 He poured himself a drink. 
 
 "Have one?" he asked, nodding at the bottle, 
 but not offering to pour for her. 
 
 All the intoxication of the dance had gone from 
 her; she felt the need of whisky. 
 
 Thanks," she said, and took some, 
 
 The fresh dose of alcohol changed, for a mo 
 ment, his mood. His glance played slowly over 
 her and unendurably softened.
 
 JIM 227 
 
 " Don le s go out for dinner," he said. He set 
 tled himself in his chair. " Le s have a good talk. 
 I m not hungry." He beckoned her toward him. 
 " Come over here an sit down on m knee. I re 
 member once when I was good an hungry, though. 
 It was out in China, an we d been under fire all day. 
 We used to " 
 
 " I won t come over there! " she flashed at him. 
 " And I m sick and tired of hearing what you used 
 to do!" 
 
 For a moment he looked at her in round-eyed 
 incomprehension. Then the force of her defiance 
 beat into his dulled brain. He sprang up, his eyes 
 blazing. 
 
 " You shut your mouth ! " he commanded. " I m 
 goin to be master in m own house." 
 
 But Edith laughed at him: 
 
 " You call this your house ! " 
 
 He walked unsteadily around the table to her; 
 but she stood her ground, her chin up. His hand 
 was raised. He stopped before her, swaying ever 
 so slightly. He clenched his hand, met her eyes, 
 and then only shook a finger in her face. 
 
 " Jus a moment, please. I want you understand 
 I won t have you talk this way to me. You stan 
 
 up here an say an say Well, you know what 
 
 you say, an so do I, all right, all right. I won 
 stand for it; that s all: I won stand for it. I m 
 not the soft kind that ll stand what Jim stood." 
 
 She saw by his opened hand he was afraid of 
 her, and she would use that fear. 
 
 "You re drunk!" she cried. "Drunk! Aren t 
 you ashamed of yourself? It s all you re fit for,
 
 228 JIM 
 
 being drunk is, and you re working hard at it all 
 the time, while I stay home and wash your dishes 
 and mend your clothes. You ll be sick in a min 
 ute, the way you were last week, and the place will 
 be in a mess. If you are, you ll clean it up yourself. 
 I m done with such chores. I m not your hired- 
 girl." Her Ayton vocabulary returned to her, and 
 after it the memory of her life after leaving Ayton. 
 " You needn t talk about Jim. He was a bad lot, 
 but you haven t got anything on him not a thing. 
 Go to bed. Do you hear me? Go to bed! " 
 
 She took him by the collar. He went pale with 
 fright, and then burst into the tears of maudlin re 
 pentance. He tried to embrace her, and when she 
 drew away he caught her free hand and covered 
 it with damp kisses. 
 
 " I m sorry, Edith," he whined. " I m sorry, 
 truly I am. I love you. You know I love you. My 
 God, but I love you! But I m so worried; I m so 
 worried. . . ." 
 
 She pushed him into the next room and let him 
 fall upon the bed. She locked the door on him, 
 came back, and sat down at the window, her chin 
 in her hands, her eyes toward the sordid street. 
 
 What had happened was nothing fresh. It was 
 a straw; but it was the last straw. To the letter of 
 her contract with him she would be loyal; she had 
 to be loyal: there was nowhere for her to go but 
 these miserable quarters. When the ultimate dis 
 aster overtook him, she would have to be here to 
 suffer it; but in the meantime she would take what 
 harmless joy life had left for her, and she would 
 never tell Charley.
 
 THIRTEENTH CHAPTER 
 
 YET she let Saturday go by without keeping her 
 appointment to meet Tyrrell. 
 
 Had she been told that this was because 
 of any feeling that to keep the appointment would 
 be doing a wrong, she would have denied the state 
 ment indignantly. Had she been accused of cow 
 ardice, she would have denied that. She would have 
 denied the suggestion that her action sprang from 
 a desire to make herself less facile or more rare 
 in the eyes of the Bostonian. She would have de 
 nied any motive that might have been suggested, and 
 she was conscious of none; but she did not keep the 
 appointment. 
 
 She sat at home all that afternoon. She was thor 
 oughly resolved not to go out; but she was annoyed 
 when the entrance of Diana made going out im 
 possible. 
 
 " You wouldn t come to see me; I waited, but you 
 wouldn t come," said Diana, " and when I couldn t 
 wait any longer, I had to come to you. It s be 
 cause I ve such news for you." 
 
 Diana was irresistibly radiant. Edith s eyes, 
 filled with memories of the Fifth Avenue standards, 
 would not have approved the clothes that her guest 
 used to wear and thoroughly disapproved of the 
 drab and shapeless gown which was now presented 
 to her, but the face above it was too wonderfully 
 alight. That was more than happy; it was flut- 
 
 229
 
 230 JIM 
 
 teringly happy, to be sure, but it was also proud 
 and lucidly satisfied. 
 
 Women understand these things, and Edith un 
 derstood this one. It was marvelous; it gave the 
 lie to all Diana s Principles, but there it shone, 
 as flagrant as an electric-sign on Broadway. 
 
 You ve married! " cried Edith, and kissed her. 
 
 It was a kiss of spontaneous well-wishing, even 
 if it rose from a heart that, at the words, felt the 
 twinge of pain. 
 
 "How did you know?" asked Diana. "There 
 wasn t a line in the papers. We couldn t have al 
 lowed anything so conventional as that." 
 
 " I guessed it from your face, you goose," said 
 Edith, and then: "Who s the man?" 
 
 The man?" Diana s echo knew of but one 
 possible man among all men the superman, the sole 
 example of his " type "; in brief : " Archibald." She 
 sat back, serenely waiting for Edith to recover from 
 the stupefaction of that glory. 
 
 Edith did her best to evince stupefaction, and 
 indeed she experienced a proper amount: it was 
 only the kind that she failed in. She was fond of 
 Diana; without agreeing with her theories, even 
 sometimes being shocked at them, scornful of them, 
 or more fatally bored by them, she had a high re 
 spect for the mind that could understand them and 
 accept them as vital things, and she had a still 
 higher respect for what she took to be the courage 
 necessary for their public utterance. Of even greater 
 importance to her was her personal liking and grati 
 tude : she liked Diana, as she would have said, " for 
 herself " which is incontinently the surest sort of
 
 JIM 231 
 
 liking and she was grateful to her for an attitude, 
 prompted by whatever " Principles," which had been 
 maintained in the face of circumstances altogether 
 too terrible for Mrs. Dunbar. Yet here was Diana, 
 the believer in " free unions," sacrificing herself in 
 marriage to an implausible parasite and giving her 
 goodness to a man that wore a yellow silk sweater 
 and posed in knickerbockers ! Comment came irre 
 sistibly: 
 
 " Not really married not regularly? " 
 
 "Certainly!" That, too, came irresistibly: be 
 fore her brain could check it, Diana s tone resented 
 the implication of the question. 
 
 "Oh!" Edith was confused; she wanted to 
 repair her error. " I asked only because I 
 
 thought Well, you know you said you didn t 
 
 believe in that sort of thing." 
 
 " And I don t." It was Diana s brain that was 
 talking now. " And of course neither does Archi 
 bald. We re not that type. We hold that love ought 
 to be strong and free. But, you see, there s my posi 
 tion. After all, I m only a wage-slave, and the 
 Library-Board is so narrow and reactionary: first it 
 wouldn t have assistants that were married, and now 
 it won t have them that aren t. You know what I 
 mean: for a long time they wouldn t employ us if 
 we were married women, and now that they re 
 letting some of us marry, they d discharge us 
 if we took the end without the means. That s 
 their unreasonable way: they can t understand 
 Principles." 
 
 Then you re going to keep on working? " 
 
 " I would not," said Diana, " be economically
 
 232 JIM 
 
 dependent on any man. You ought to know me bet 
 ter than even to hint it: I am a Freewoman." 
 
 Edith apologized. She wondered whether, in this 
 case, the economic independence of the wife did not 
 consist in her economic exploitation by her husband; 
 so she was not surprised at what Diana said next. 
 
 It developed that even radical women took less 
 interest in an attached than in an unattached phi 
 losopher: women formed the majority of the ad 
 mirers that had been subscribing to van Houyz s 
 support while he wrote at his Great Work; the Great 
 Work was by no means finished; it had, of course, to 
 go on, and the subscribers would not subscribe after 
 the apostle of Woman s Freedom had been pre 
 empted by any union, be it never so free. 
 
 " I might have defied the Library-Board," Diana 
 pursued, " but Mother s still living and she belongs 
 to her own Generation; she worships all its Con 
 ventions, and I didn t like to hurt her. I might have 
 deceived everybody, but I felt This was something 
 too sacred to lie about, and, besides, it would be 
 sure to be discovered. So you see, if I lost my job, 
 we d be hard up. The subscriptions had all stopped 
 all but splendid Sylvia s. As Archibald says, the 
 shadow of woman s slavery still darkens the mind 
 of the emancipated." 
 
 " I see," said Edith. 
 
 "And so Archibald pointed out to me how we 
 believed that love ought to be strong and free : it 
 ought to be so strong that it could bear even the 
 weight of marriage, and so free that a mere form 
 of words before a magistrate couldn t really chain 
 it. We simply had a magistrate marry us just
 
 JIM 233 
 
 formally, you understand and made our mutual 
 mental reservations. In that way we could please 
 Mother and the Board and still be true to our 
 Principles. Isn t Archibald ingenious?" 
 
 What Edith said was: 
 
 " So you consider yourself quite free? " 
 
 "Absolutely," Diana nodded: she accented the 
 third syllable. 
 
 " And you let your husband be free, too? " 
 
 " Of course. I wouldn t compromise. I wouldn t 
 compromise with sacred things. Ours is a free 
 union. I know Archibald will never use his free 
 dom but he s free." 
 
 Edith comprehended a great deal now. She com 
 prehended the increased ugliness of Diana s clothes: 
 did not Diana s husband hold that a fair face should 
 suffer from no dressmaker s competition? It was 
 an excellent way of concealing one s wife s beauty 
 from predatory eyes and saving it all for oneself. 
 Assuredly Archibald was ingenious ! 
 
 Diana was running on and over with her happi 
 ness. She had a few damning words of scorn for 
 the weak-kneed subscribers to the Great Work and 
 no end of praise for Sylvia Tytus: u The only real 
 Radical of them all, my dear, and I adore her." 
 Finally she came to the point at which Edith had 
 throughout this interview feared she would arrive: 
 to the Wimminist Leeg and Edith s reasons for 
 never joining and bringing Charley. 
 
 There was no longer a hope of evasion. Indeed, 
 there was small desire for one. 
 
 " He wouldn t hear pf it," saip] Edith.
 
 234 JIM 
 
 " Wouldn t Diana refused to credit it : 
 
 "What do you mean?" 
 
 " I mean he hates those things; I mean I suppose 
 
 he s what you call a reactionary, and She 
 
 could have almost let her annoyance at Diana s 
 marriage add, " I m one, too," but she said: " And 
 he wouldn t permit me to go alone. He just wouldn t 
 have it, if I asked him; that s all." 
 
 It served, at all events, to end the call before 
 Charley could return home and find there a caller 
 he disliked. Diana stiffly rose. 
 
 " I never thought it," she said. " I never thought 
 it of him, and I certainly never thought it of you. 
 My dear, I couldn t guess that you belonged to the 
 Servile Type. Why, he s he s no better than your 
 First One! And after all you ve done for Prin 
 ciple!" 
 
 2. Edith might say to herself that Diana was 
 now the last one to talk of Principle. She did say 
 it. She said it, for days after her caller had gone, 
 vehemently. But the Parthian shot rankled. She 
 saw her husband with a vision ever clearer. She 
 would be no man s slave. . . . 
 
 She drank a little more than she had been drink 
 ing: she was so hopeless and so worn out. She 
 let the memory of Diana s happiness insist upon 
 comparison with her own lot. She thought that the 
 renascence of her beauty was losing its force, and 
 she bought and used some rouge. On the next 
 Wednesday it was one of the days when Charley 
 was to sleep at his father s house she went to the 
 Knickerbocker.
 
 JIM 235 
 
 It was the same scene that she had been a part 
 of a week ago. The same people were riotously 
 performing the same riotous dances to the same 
 riotous music. It seemed to Edith as if they had 
 never stopped. There were the schoolgirls, the 
 mothers, the grandparents; there was that couple 
 which might have served for the models of Jim s 
 picture. Edith had said to herself that she was there 
 only to look on, but when she heard somebody point 
 out one pair of dancers as professionals, she eyed 
 them enviously and began to eye the other dancers 
 hungrily. 
 
 In the room were many women as openly unat 
 tended as she was, and Edith noticed that some of 
 these freely accepted, sometimes almost as freely 
 sought, dancing-invitations from men that had come 
 alone. When a sleek lad approached her, she in 
 dignantly refused him: she felt soiled by his 
 address. 
 
 She saw George Mertcheson and tried to hide 
 from him, but this time he recognized .her easily 
 enough. He recognized her with the whole crowd be 
 tween them and advanced in his loose-jointed stride. 
 The exercise of dancing had heated him: his straight 
 hair stood out from his head, and his sallow cheeks 
 were faintly flushed. A smile crowned his insignifi 
 cant chin. 
 
 " Hello ! " he said as he had said when she went 
 to his office. " Where did you drop from? " 
 
 Edith saw that he meant superbly to ignore the 
 indignation in which she had parted from him. 
 That was George s way: he was the sort that smile
 
 236 JIM 
 
 and wait. His unfinished ears seemed to be trying 
 harder than ever to escape from his head. 
 
 " I often come here," said Edith. She looked 
 straight across the room, but she thought that the 
 wart on his nose was growing. 
 
 " Well, that s good. Now we can have a dance 
 once in a while." 
 
 " I m not dancing." 
 
 His eyelids had their nervous flicker: 
 
 "Oh, come on!" 
 
 " I am not dancing." 
 
 3. Tyrrell rescued her. It was a long time since 
 she had been so glad to see anyone. She was grate 
 ful for his coming; grateful, too, because, as he led 
 her away, he made no comment on the man that had 
 been talking to her and asked no question as to why 
 she had failed to keep her appointment for Sat 
 urday. He seemed tolerantly to understand. 
 
 "You ll dance?" 
 
 It was as if she were pushed into his arms 
 pushed there by all the horror of her home, by the 
 pursuit of Mertcheson, by the weight of unendur 
 able days, and the pressure of advancing penury. 
 She went a timid step forward; the music crashed 
 into a wild revel. 
 
 Tyrrell seized her, and the world retreated. He 
 held her tight; he let her go. He flung her from 
 him and drew her back. Again they were one; again 
 his consciousness struck hers into abeyance and ruled 
 her body. 
 
 Once, in a flying instant, she saw his eyes and 
 read a hot passion there. He realized that she
 
 JIM 237 
 
 read it; but he pretended nothing, not even that he 
 did not know her reading. Without lessening their 
 pace, he said: 
 
 " I m sorry." 
 
 11 That s all right," she heard herself saying as 
 he seized her once more. " It doesn t matter." 
 
 Why did she think it did not matter? A few 
 months ago, one month ago, she would have thought 
 it mattered a great deal. Why did she think it did 
 not matter now? She could find no answer and no 
 time for debate. 
 
 He spun her body about his own. The dance be 
 came a frenzy. She was off her feet: he was whirl 
 ing her in his arms. She felt herself falling, only 
 to be caught up, in perfect time and unison with the 
 music and with him, and whirled again and thrown 
 again, and again clutched close. She ended breath 
 less, almost fainting, yet tingling with the joy of it 
 and not deaf to the whispered commendations of the 
 onlookers that had been watching her and Tyrrell, 
 to the exclusion of all the other dancers on the 
 floor. 
 
 " Are you doing anything this evening? " her 
 partner was asking. 
 
 Still too short of breath to answer, she only shook 
 her head. 
 
 " Then I ll tell you what we ll do : we ll have a 
 quiet dinner somewhere where there is a good 
 cabaret and then we ll charter a taxi and make the 
 Grand Tour of the tango-palaces." 
 
 Edith, not given to self-analysis, did have mo 
 ments, long afterward, when she sought the reasons 
 for her consent, or, rather, tried to select, from
 
 238 JIM 
 
 the many forces that in those days conquered her 
 control, the one force to which the blame for this 
 action could most justly be attributed. She never 
 succeeded. There was the old desire for ascend 
 ency over circumstance, the perjury in the divorce- 
 suit with its progeny of deception : Charley s nec 
 essary deception and hers of his father, of their 
 dwindling social world, eventually and inevitably of 
 each other. Everything so perfectly resulted from 
 everything else: there were the other forces the 
 poverty depending upon the deception of the elder 
 Vanaman, itself with the other lies dependent upon 
 the initial perjury, and the need, the keenly actual 
 need, of some relief, which the pressure of poverty 
 created. It intensified to an abnormal degree the 
 purely human appetite for joy; it made for more 
 failure, as only failure can, and sharpened her indi 
 vidual fear and hatred of failure; it created the 
 debts and the steadily approaching financial collapse, 
 and cultivated her horror of them; it effected the 
 slow uncovering of the real Charley with that un- 
 covering s suspicions of unfounded bombast, its cer 
 tainties of drunkenness, weakness, futility. The chil 
 dren of what she had done at law, or what the law, 
 as she put it, had made her do, numbered among 
 them the scorn and loss of such friends as Mrs. 
 Dunbar, the loss of the very things that she had done 
 it all to gain even, at last, the ill-concealed scorn 
 of Diana. They made her feel Diana s happiness, 
 reasonless though such a happiness might be, as a 
 goad in her own side; they sharpened tiny arrows 
 of truth in the arsenal of Diana s now recalled, if 
 once derided, talk of woman s freedom. They had
 
 JIM 239 
 
 brought Edith to this floor, to the example of the 
 gay " best people," as well as the gay worst, about 
 her; to the maddening music; the seductive frenzy 
 of the dance; the thrill of the recent contact, still 
 tingling in every least muscle of her body; to Tyr 
 rell himself, appreciative, considerate, confident, a 
 gentleman, apparently determined to go not too far, 
 and demonstrably the symbol of everything from 
 which she had been thwarted. They led forward 
 to Tyrrell, and they led back, they converged at 
 their source, in Jim. . . . 
 
 Edith, just now, experienced nothing save the total 
 result. She made no effort to disentangle, differ 
 entiate. It was enough, it was too much, that the 
 finer loyalty had been shorn of its justification, and 
 that the mere instinct toward traditional loyalty, the 
 product of early conventional environment weak 
 ened by the action which drove her to her first 
 divorce and by all the first divorce had entailed 
 stopped, as yet, only short of overt, physical dis 
 loyalty. 
 
 " Thanks," she said, " that would be fun." 
 
 4. They went to the Martinique for dinner, 
 where they sat in an oak-wainscoted cellar among 
 clattering knives and forks, and, presently, the din 
 of a score of short-skirted cabaret-performers, who 
 sang and danced on a stage and paraded about the 
 room, jangling sleigh-bells in the diners ears. Its 
 only simple note was the costly simplicity of the 
 meal that Tyrrell ordered : that was like what Jim 
 used to order when he had a windfall, and wholly 
 unlike the plunges that Charley used to make when,
 
 240 JIM 
 
 in the days of his surreptitious courtship, he unex 
 pectedly got hold of some money. 
 
 Then they began their tour. They went to one 
 garish place after another, Tyrrell s bearing always 
 lending her the air of polished detachment at the 
 very moments of their taking glad part in the revel 
 ries. It was light and hurry. Guests of every sort 
 and there were all sorts at each place ate rapidly 
 with the air that they were doing it simply to fortify 
 themselves for the next dance. These gulped drinks 
 and dashed back upon the floor so soon as the sweat 
 ing musicians could catch breath to resume their 
 playing. 
 
 And Edith danced with Tyrrell. At first she 
 feared to; then she wanted to; but through all that 
 earlier portion of the evening she encountered in 
 him no repetition of the indiscretion at the Knicker 
 bocker. 
 
 They went to a place called Reisenweber s and 
 to that called Bustanoby s; they visited a half-dozen 
 cafes-dansants. At some the dancers were brilliant 
 in evening-clothes and jewels and ball-gowns; at 
 others only the women had attempted decoration 
 and that in a manner which would permit their going 
 home if they ever went home, or had homes to go 
 to in the street-car or afoot; but at most the several 
 classes inextricably mingled. Here were rich and 
 poor, good and bad, shopgirls and women of wealthy 
 leisure, debutantes, and street-walkers; and here 
 were wealthy men and procurers; bank-clerks, shop- 
 clerks, released for the night from gray routine and 
 running to these restaurants as children run from 
 school to play, trying to forget to-morrow. Where
 
 JIM 241 
 
 did the poorer get the money? Whence did the 
 older snatch the energy? How would the workers 
 ever get to work on time? And how would they 
 ever do their work when they got to it? 
 
 " They won t," laughed Tyrrell, when she asked 
 him. " And they ll be scolded and docked for it by 
 employers who are unable to go through with their 
 own work and all the crosser for that because 
 they ll have been tangoing, too." 
 
 At some places the women smoked; at all they 
 drank. At several Tyrrell bowed to acquaintances, 
 and once he introduced her to a quite colorless friend 
 who asked a dance, hung on her, hopped about out 
 of time, and bumped her into other dancers things 
 that could not happen when she and Tyrrell danced 
 together. 
 
 As the night deepened, the dancing was intensi 
 fied. A few of the revelers remained graceful, but 
 some were childish or maudlin in their contortions, 
 and more were vicious. Mere abandon became odi 
 ous posturing; the tango of the Knickerbocker de 
 scended to the grotesquely named and acted " Bunny 
 Hug"; a pair of dancers became a quadruped. At 
 one of the last places that Tyrrell and Edith visited 
 the gyrations were freely vile. The men sweated, 
 the women crooned the music. Eyes were either 
 bright or filmy, faces and figures yielding or pro 
 vocative; the fact that these dancers were clothed 
 became the final touch of lewdness. For anybody 
 not sharing the madness, it was an incredible spec 
 tacle, a nightmare. 
 
 Tyrrell did not share it to the prevailing degree.
 
 242 JIM 
 
 He took her away, but masked his shame, as the 
 American will, with a word of derision. 
 
 " The poor things call that tangoing," he said. 
 " We ll go to one real place for one more real dance, 
 just to obliterate the impression, Mrs. Vanaman." 
 
 To Edith the scene had evoked memories. Once, 
 as a small girl, she had furtively gone to look on 
 at a dance given by one of the Ayton volunteer fire- 
 companies: it was decorum to this. And she re 
 membered how, not long afterward, a girl of an 
 other faith than her own had taken her to a pro 
 tracted revival at the end of which the congregation 
 had behaved as if animated by a spirit correlative 
 to that which animated these dancers. Even as a 
 child it had disgusted her without explaining itself 
 to her. When Tyrrell spoke she was trying hard 
 to apologize to herself for the dancers at whom she 
 now was looking; she was saying that, at the best 
 Ayton dances, a girl was certain to be kissed in a 
 corner, whereas the present convention was at all 
 events more honest; but she had not convinced her 
 self and she was glad to have the Bostonian feel 
 as he plainly did feel. 
 
 The place that he last of all took her to obliter 
 ated the ugly impression made by its predecessor 
 and restored, almost instantly, the magic she had 
 nearly lost. It was smaller, quieter, and the people 
 in it were of a better sort. They danced as wildly, 
 but they danced with grace. They revived the poetry 
 and the charm. 
 
 He moved with her on the crowded floor among 
 soft lights and dancers quietly dressed. The air was 
 perfumed and the music gentle. With the first steps
 
 JIM 243 
 
 she forgot the scene they had left behind, forgot 
 everything but the joy of rhythmic music and escape. 
 The vulgar faded; for these few minutes she would 
 be happy, and nobody that mattered would ever 
 know. Tyrrell would not tell Charley; this was 
 their secret. Here was at least respite from despair. 
 Her brown eyes kindled; a genuine flush returned 
 to her cheeks; youth returned: she was beautiful. 
 
 Well as they had danced together before, they 
 had never danced so well as now. They composed 
 dances as they went along, in absolute and gracious 
 harmony; they made those delicate impromptu varia 
 tions which are like the discoveries of innocent lovers 
 and the opportunity for which is the secret of the 
 New Dancing s attraction. Slowly, as before, her 
 will became the creature of his and his directed her. 
 His body was the master his soul, she said, and 
 then was deliciously frightened at the thought. 
 Their movements had the dignity of a minuet, then 
 quickened into something all their own all his. Her 
 every muscle was in rhythm with him. She felt the 
 warmth of his body against hers, the play of the 
 muscles in his legs, the beating of his heart, the 
 hot breath that now struck her flaming cheeks. . Their 
 thighs crossed, she held him with her eyes, as he 
 held her with his will, and she was glad to hold 
 him and to have his wise, vibrant being holding her. 
 He drew her closer. She found that he was look 
 ing at her oddly: his glance was half veiled. Tighter 
 he held her and tighter; his lips parted. She remem 
 bered life again; she was so tired of it. ... 
 
 She drew hastily away. She stopped dancing. 
 
 " Let s sit down," she panted, but not from the
 
 244 JIM 
 
 exercise of the dance. " I m tired. I think I d bet 
 ter be going home." 
 
 His agreement was instant, unquestioning. His 
 face had changed, at her word, to the face she had 
 known when they talked on Forty-second Street. 
 
 " I do hope I haven t overdanced you," he said. 
 
 She denied that, and until the taxi came she talked 
 heedlessly, lightly, saying anything to cover the evi 
 dences of what she felt. She would not let him see 
 her home, protest as he did, and he asked no em 
 barrassing questions. 
 
 5. She was not clear precisely what it was she 
 had felt; but she knew that she had passed through 
 the door of light and could pass through it again. 
 She would have to come back; but she could return 
 through it as often as she chose. 
 
 She chose frequently, and she found Tyrrell al 
 ways politely eager and unquestioning. No dance 
 ever again moved him as that last dance of their 
 first evening together had moved him, or, if one 
 did, he was sufficiently lord of himself to hide the 
 effect of it. Their talk was of indifferent things, and 
 once she quickened his interest in the Vanaman 
 Sounder. Under Tyrrell s care, she came to know 
 intimately the thes-dansants at the Ritz-Carlton, the 
 Knickerbocker, and Delmonico s. In the women s- 
 rooms at these places she met and made some genu 
 ine acquaintances with women not unlike herself, 
 unhappy women restlessly in quest of a restless hap 
 piness. The easy air of the tango-teas made such 
 friendships facile, and, even in her worst moments 
 at home, Edith s pulses beat to tango-time. She
 
 JIM 245 
 
 rarely contrasted this secret life with her existence 
 in the Greenwich Village lodgings, and when she did 
 it was to tell herself that she had not fallen in love 
 with anybody else : she had merely fallen out of love 
 with Charley. Once, when she first knew her pres 
 ent husband, she had conceived of love as an ele 
 mental force that sweeps from the infinite, through 
 the universe, catching up and engulfing such frail 
 human estrays as chance in its path and sweeping 
 them forward to its own ends. Then she saw that, 
 in its power, a pair of lovers were as helpless as 
 two bits of driftwood on a tidal wave; now she saw 
 the necessary consequence: that the wave, having 
 borne them with it, reckless of their will, finally, 
 when it is through with them, tosses them away.
 
 FOURTEENTH CHAPTER 
 
 ONCE, on an afternoon at the Ritz-Carlton, 
 when Tyrrell had left her for a few minutes 
 to telephone, Edith saw van Houyz and 
 Sylvia Tytus at a nearby table. There was a 
 champagne-pail beside them, and the Philosopher 
 was counting out, with commendable slowness, and 
 an unproductive glance toward his companion, the 
 money for the bill. It was four o clock : which meant 
 that Diana was still safely at work. Van Houyz, 
 his glance failing to wheedle Sylvia, paid: which 
 meant that Diana paid. Champagne and a tango- 
 tea: Edith loathed the woman for her treachery to 
 friendship and the man for his treason to marriage. 
 
 " Of course Diana would say he might," Edith 
 reflected; "but of course she d never think he 
 would." 
 
 Even their clothes were voluble. Sylvia, smiling 
 with every one of her prominent teeth, could never 
 look the beauty Diana held her to be, but she was 
 dressed in a gown so fashionable that she would 
 not have risked it at the Radical Club ; and the curl 
 ing hair and beard of Woman s evangel surmounted 
 a suit of strict conventionality. 
 
 " I ll bet Diana doesn t know a thing about this 
 picnic," thought Edith. " Of course they ve come 
 up here to get as far away as they can. They think 
 this is the last place they d meet any of their Radical 
 friends in. I ve a notion to let them see me." 
 
 246
 
 JIM 247 
 
 At once she had the chance. Van Houyz rose 
 and left a tip that the waiter choked over. Sylvia 
 rose, too. The pair came toward the door near 
 which Edith was standing. 
 
 "How do you do?" said Edith. She advanced 
 bravely and offered her hand. 
 
 The effect disappointed her. Sylvia s immediate 
 frigidity was unmistakably not fear of scandal: it 
 was jealousy for her prize. Van Houyz s fishy grin 
 Edith comprehended this with a disconcerting 
 pang accepted her as being at this place on the same 
 sort of errand that brought him. 
 
 " How sweet to see you here ! " He squeezed her 
 hand. 
 
 She understood his meaning. He meant: " We re 
 in the same glass-house : of course we won t stone our 
 common shelter." She would not let him have it 
 so. She said: 
 
 " I m coming round to see you and Diana as soon 
 as I have a moment to spare. I haven t congratu 
 lated you yet. She s the finest woman I know." 
 Edith, with prodigious innocence, looked beyond 
 him. " But where is she? " 
 
 Van Houyz was imperturbable : 
 
 "She has her duties to the public; she s at the 
 library. How s Mr. Vanaman?" 
 
 " Quite well. He ll be back in a minute. Won t 
 you wait? He d be so glad to meet Miss Tytus and 
 you again." 
 
 " I m afraid we can t." It was Sylvia who in 
 terposed: her projecting teeth looked dangerous. 
 " We have to hurry to the library to meet Diana." 
 
 (" What a lie! " thought Edith. " I hope Mr.
 
 248 JIM 
 
 Tyrrell doesn t come just yet. I must nail that lie, 
 even if they nail mine.") 
 
 "Yes," said the Philosopher: "we shall have to 
 hurry." 
 
 Edith held his hand. 
 
 " Do you know, I scarcely recognized you? " she 
 said. " You weren t wearing knickers when Diana 
 and you called on me, and you re not wearing them 
 now. Don t tell me you ve given them up." 
 
 " If I d known you would be here, Mrs. Vanaman, 
 I should have worn them. But, then, how could I 
 guess it? " 
 
 Sylvia snarled. 
 
 " You see," Edith explained, " knickers are only 
 the half of long trousers, and I thought you believed 
 in them, Mr. van Houyz, on the principle of the 
 less the better." 
 
 " We don t believe in clothes at all," Sylvia an 
 swered for him. " Clothes only hide the body; the 
 body is part of the self; to hide the self is to deceive. 
 Therefore, clothes make us liars." She tugged at 
 the Philosopher s disengaged arm. 
 
 " Still," said Edith, as she looked at Sylvia s split- 
 skirt, " they do keep us warm, don t they? " 
 
 " We have to hurry," said Sylvia. 
 
 2. At home the end seemed very near. 
 
 Charley drank steadily. His face, though still 
 fat, was drawn and haggard, the bags under his 
 eyes were purple. His creditors threatened; the 
 invention was motionless. For one-half the time 
 spasms of passion for Edith alternated with fits of 
 jealousy, prompted by the idea that she regretted
 
 JIM 249 
 
 Jim; for the other half he was breast-deep in leth 
 argy. He had made, to gain his wife, the largest 
 sacrifice that he knew how to make, and it proved, 
 in the face of disproportionate rewards, a larger 
 sacrifice than his large love could sustain. If there 
 were not an immediate financial relief, there would 
 be a speedy emotional collapse. 
 
 Edith maintained her relations with Tyrrell, who 
 kept them where she wished: on the plane of what 
 he considered good-fellowship. She suffered with 
 him no descent to the pit of overt disloyalty; she 
 understood that he had begun by being only casually 
 interested in her, as he would have been in any 
 pretty woman, and that he had ended in a fondness 
 for her company because she was an excellent 
 dancing-partner. But there were troubles elsewhere : 
 the landlady threatened and might at any moment 
 expose her embezzlement to Charley, and the com 
 ing of Charley s business-disaster, she knew, could 
 now be a question of but a very short time. She 
 tried to shut her mind to it and keep up the out 
 ward signs of peace. In order to bear, with at least 
 passivity, the assaults of her husband s intermittent 
 passion, she drank with him freely, and to cover the 
 evidences of this she resorted to frequent cosmetics. 
 
 There came a flash of hope. It came with Char 
 ley when, one noonday, he arrived home unexpectedly 
 for luncheon. 
 
 His cheeks were tinged with the excitement of it. 
 He seemed almost a lad again. So far as liquor 
 was concerned, he was sober, yet he kissed Edith 
 almost boisterously. 
 
 " I ve put it over! " he cried. " I ve put it over
 
 250 JIM 
 
 at last ! If we only manage this new deal right, the 
 hard times are ended." 
 
 Edith was all questions. 
 
 " You remember that fellow Bob Tyrrell you 
 saw that time well, that time you were at the of 
 fice," Charley explained. " He s our meat." 
 
 Edith remembered. 
 
 " What d you think of him? " 
 
 " I didn t think much about him. He was too 
 busy with the stenographer, and, besides, he looked 
 a little like like Jim." 
 
 Charley s face clouded. 
 
 " Oh, don t talk about Jim now," he said; but he 
 brightened immediately. " We ve got a success 
 that ll make Jim green with envy. And, anyway, 
 Tyrrell s not really like him same height and man 
 ners, maybe that ll all. A little stuck-up, like Jim, 
 but that s just how I could work him: I d learned 
 the sort. This man s eyes are gray and his nose is 
 like one of those statues of an old Roman politician." 
 
 " Who is he, and what s he going to do for us? " 
 
 It seemed that Tyrrell was going to do the thing 
 they wanted of anybody that would do it: he was 
 going to provide the money needed to float the in 
 vention. Personally, Charley knew nothing of this 
 patron beyond that he had once been brought to 
 Vanaman s club before Charley was forced to resign 
 from it, had met the inventor there, and, being 
 told of the sounder, as every chance acquaintance 
 was, became more and more interested until he was 
 now tacitly promising his support. 
 
 Edith had gone to the window and was looking 
 out.
 
 JIM 251 
 
 "Are you sure he really has the money?" she 
 asked. 
 
 " Trust me for that. I had Bradstreets look him 
 up. I told you he was a rich young Boston fellow. 
 He inherited no end of cash, and he s thinking of 
 settling here in New York. That was enough for 
 me. I ve talked him round, and all you ve got to 
 do is to be nice to him." 
 
 " / have ? " Edith did not turn. " What do you 
 mean? " she asked. 
 
 " I mean we re going to have him to dinner to 
 night" 
 
 She turned now, and her face showed sudden dis 
 may. 
 
 " We can t have him here," she declared. 
 
 " Just a moment, please. Certainly, we won t 
 have him here. Oh, just trust me to do the right 
 thing, my dear. We re going to dine at the 
 Martinique." Charley chuckled. " Where s the 
 liquor?" he asked. " I m so worked up over this 
 good luck I can hardly think." 
 
 "The Martinique? " Edith s voice was sharp as 
 she repeated the name of the hotel at which she 
 had dined with Tyrrell. She added, quickly: "You 
 know we can t afford that." 
 
 " Can t we, though? " Her husband drew from 
 a trousers-pocket two bills, one for a hundred dol 
 lars and the other for fifty. " I guess those will a 
 little more than pay the order." 
 
 " Charley! " She put out her hands for the 
 money. " How did you get it? " 
 
 He did not surrender the bills; but he answered: 
 
 " By being a good little boy. I ran up to see
 
 252 JIM 
 
 father as soon as I d hooked Tyrrell. Poppa s not so 
 well; Mame s rather worried about him needlessly, 
 I think, for he s been this way so often but I told 
 her where she could get me by phone any time to 
 day or to-night, and of course to-morrow first thing 
 I ll run up there." 
 
 " But the money?" 
 
 " Oh, yes ! Well, I told poppa I d interested an 
 expert Tyrrell is an expert in a way: an expert 
 investor, anyhow, and perfectly clear-headed and 
 the old man coughed up this much toward cinching 
 him. Then, if I do cinch him, poppa ll come along 
 in on the deal. We won t really need his money, 
 then, but I guess we can use all we get." 
 
 Edith was suspicious. " You got all this by only 
 saying that? " 
 
 " Not exactly." He put his arm around her waist. 
 " He asked about you, and I had to had to say 
 we hadn t been seeing much of each other lately. 
 Honestly, he can t stand any shock, you know, and 
 you told me long ago to jolly him." 
 
 Edith s mind reverted to the dinner. 
 
 " Don t let s go to the Martinique," she said. 
 " Let s go somewhere else. Why do you want to 
 go there?" 
 
 "Why don t you want to?" 
 
 " I don t know. It s I just don t want to." 
 
 " Well, it s too late to change now. I ve reserved 
 a table and ordered the dinner. They say there s 
 a good cabaret there." 
 
 " I haven t any clothes fit for the Martinique," 
 said Edith. 
 
 " That don t matter," Charley assured her.
 
 JIM 253 
 
 " Wherever we went, it would have to be some place 
 as good as the Martinique. I thought you d some 
 pretty swell things left. Here, take twenty out of 
 this fifty and buy a dress." 
 
 "Get a dinner-gown in an afternoon? And for 
 only twenty dollars? Charley, you must be crazy! " 
 
 It was a dash of cold water on the warm surface 
 of his triumph. He rather steamed at her, but he 
 agreed at last to give her fifty dollars, and Edith 
 bought a ready-made gown for thirty. 
 
 3. Her dress was of a soft ninon, simply made, 
 white. Only the slightest immediate alteration had 
 been needed. It was modestly cut, but showed her 
 dazzling neck and shoulders and gave every advan 
 tage to her tall figure and the brunette beauty of her 
 face. Her cheeks wanted but little rouge to-night 
 and her brows and lashes only the lightest touch 
 of crayon. Her brown eyes shone with the radiance 
 of stars in a clear sky after storm; her only orna 
 ment was her wedding-ring. 
 
 Most clothes a man may wear and give no hint 
 of whether he has been brought up to wear their like; 
 but not evening-clothes : for good or ill, they betray 
 him. Charley, in his, looked puffed and conscious; 
 slim Tyrrell wore his as only he wears them who 
 has worn them every evening since his boyhood. 
 That was one of his few points of resemblance to 
 Jim. Again, as she looked at him, Edith fell to 
 wondering why, at their first meeting, he had re 
 called her former husband. 
 
 Of Tyrrell she was wholly confident: he would 
 not show that they two had a secret. Upon Char-
 
 254 JIM 
 
 ley she scarcely dared count: she had warned him 
 that a heavy drinker would not impress a prospective 
 inventor. 
 
 " I tell you he s as good as hooked," said Charley. 
 
 " He s not on the kitchen-stove yet," she answered. 
 
 Now here was her husband trying to satisfy his 
 own thirst under a pretense of hospitality. While 
 Tyrrell drank his cocktail slowly, Charley had bolted 
 his; he tapped anxiously on the table with his fin 
 gers until his guest had finished and then instantly 
 commanded it could not truthfully be called an 
 invitation : 
 
 "Have another!" 
 
 Edith was afraid that Tyrrell might accede. He 
 did not look at her; he looked about the wainscoted 
 room in which he had dined with her. 
 
 " No, thank you," he said. 
 
 " One s no good," urged Charley. 
 
 " Two are worse for me," said Tyrrell. He 
 smiled. " I never take more than one." 
 
 She knew this was not correct, and she silently 
 thanked him for the lie. 
 
 The lack of that second cocktail made Charley 
 nervous. He had ordered a dinner that she knew 
 to be too elaborate, one garishly unlike the dinner 
 Tyrrell had ordered for her here, and he was over 
 bearing with the waiters. He tried to make up with 
 the wine for the loss of the liquor; he knew that 
 Edith felt she must watch him, and this intensified 
 his nervousness. 
 
 Just as the clams were gone and the soup was 
 served, there came a fanfare from the orchestra, and 
 the cabaret-performance began. It began with one
 
 JIM 255 
 
 of the singers that Edith and Tyrrell had heard to 
 gether. Much of the following programme was the 
 same; but to the woman s eyes and ears it seemed 
 somehow coarsened. Charley was eating heavily; 
 his guest ate little, drank less, and made polite small- 
 talk. When the crowd of diners applauded, Char 
 ley joined loudly in the applause, but when two of 
 the performers danced the tango he scowled into 
 his plate. 
 
 " I think these new dances are rank," he said. 
 
 Nobody replied. 
 
 " They re rank," repeated Charley. 
 
 The Bostonian s eyes did not seek Edith s, but 
 a reply of sorts had been demanded. 
 
 " Wouldn t you rather say," he asked, " that it 
 depends on the people that dance them?" 
 
 " That s what / think," Edith ventured. 
 
 They ought to be stopped," said Charley. 
 
 " The best people " his wife began. 
 
 " So much the worse for them. I ve been hearing 
 a lot about these tango-teas lately places where 
 divorces are made." 
 
 It was the unfortunate word. Edith colored. 
 Charley colored, and his annoyed nervousness in 
 creased. It grew painful not only to himself, but 
 to his wife and his guest. When, presently, it drove 
 him to rise and say, " Excuse me a minute," Edith, 
 although she knew he was going to the bar for 
 whisky, was almost glad to have him go: at least, 
 momentarily, it would quiet him. All the while 
 that he was gone Tyrrell continued to make small- 
 talk as before, in the manner of a man that had met 
 her for the first time that evening.
 
 256 JIM 
 
 The dinner ran through course after course. On 
 the whole, they did not dine badly, and there was 
 plenty of champagne. Edith drank sparingly, be 
 cause she saw that Tyrrell did not show the effects 
 of what little he drank and because Charley was so 
 plainly drinking at random. By conversational di 
 versions that she was sure Tyrrell observed, but that 
 he pretended not to observe, she kept her husband 
 from too heavy insistence upon his invention, and 
 not until the coffee and brandy were served did she 
 permit him to raise his glass to it. 
 
 " Well," said Charley at last, " here s to the 
 sounder! " 
 
 Tyrrell bowed approval. 
 
 " To your good fortune ! " said he. 
 
 It was a waiter who interfered. He said Charley 
 was wanted at the telephone, and when Charley 
 returned it was with news that postponed the toast 
 indefinitely. His face was tense and his voice shook. 
 Edith had feared that he would come back drunk: 
 he had come back shockingly sobered. 
 
 " It s from Mame," he began. He did not sit 
 down. " My sister, I mean," he explained to Tyr 
 rell. " There s been another sinking-spell. Morley s 
 been sent for, and he says the end may be mayn t 
 be here yet, but that I d better come at once." 
 
 Edith s fear of death sent her pale. " I m so 
 sorry," she whispered. Then she realized that all 
 this was unintelligible to their guest. " My hus 
 band s father has been ill for a long while," she 
 said. 
 
 Tyrrell rose at once, regret on his lips and in his 
 eyes:
 
 JIM 257 
 
 " You must go, of course." 
 
 Charley nodded solemnly and, the bill paid, they 
 hurried to the line of waiting motors before the 
 door. Vanaman started to give the Lexington 
 Avenue address to the chauffeur. 
 
 "But I m not going with you, am I?" asked 
 Edith. She did not want to seem heartless, but she 
 dreaded a house into which death was soon to enter, 
 and she knew that at the Vanamans she would be 
 both useless and unacknowledged. 
 
 Her husband understood. 
 
 "That s true," he said. "My wife," he ex 
 plained to Tyrrell, " won t go with me. There are 
 circumstances " 
 
 He hesitated painfully, and Edith found time to 
 blush for his awkwardness, but Tyrrell saved the 
 situation. 
 
 " If I may see Mrs. Vanaman to your home," 
 he suggested, " I shall be glad. I want to be of 
 any help possible." 
 
 Charley s protruding eyes amazingly gleamed 
 with a jealous refusal. Tyrrell must have noticed it. 
 Edith spoke quickly. 
 
 " That s very kind of you, Mr. Tyrrell," she said. 
 Death was here, the presence that she most dreaded. 
 It had sent its cold breath into that hot room of 
 revelers, among the gorged and the drunken, be 
 tween the comic songs and the voluptuous dances 
 such dances as she had danced with Tyrrell. There 
 had been a time, not long since, when she could 
 not have wished death even for Jim; and there had 
 followed a time, there had followed many times, 
 when she wished it for old Vanaman. Well, he was
 
 258 JIM 
 
 going to die now, old Vanaman, the man that had 
 so long stood between her and security, the man that 
 refused her, the man whose death could alone, un 
 less the invention succeeded, ease the curse that had 
 begun its sway with her divorce. That wish of hers 
 was to be granted, and, in the horror of having this 
 thing which she had wanted, she could have screamed 
 aloud. At that moment she would have given any 
 thing short of her own life to return the gift of 
 his. . . . "Thank you," she was saying; " I am a 
 little nervous. Get in. Charley, I ll wait up for 
 you, of course and you can telephone." 
 
 4. She had simply wanted not to be alone with 
 it: the realization that old Vanaman was dying. But, 
 as the taxi whirled her and Tyrrell up the street, 
 she was the prey of a mob of emotions. She was 
 overtried by her long, silent hatred of the husband 
 she had divorced and by his constant presence in her 
 mind; she was nervously ill from the poverty of her 
 present life, the strain of Charley s business-diffi 
 culties, and the fallacy of her position toward Char 
 ley s father. The growth of concealment and lies, 
 her little gleam of joy hidden under a cloak of de 
 ception; the increase of failure, the advance of dis 
 aster; the loss of reputation, the loss of friends, 
 the loss of love: they had broken her at last. The 
 stimulants that had perforce become her habitual aid 
 were slowly growing to be her daily enemies; envy 
 gnawed at her soul and sickened her heart. It was 
 all bad enough, it was increasingly bad, that Char 
 ley should risk Tyrrell s financial support by play 
 ing the boor at dinner; it was worse that next, with
 
 JIM 259 
 
 the horror of death upon them, he must first clumsily 
 hint to his guest of the dying man s dislike for her 
 and then further endanger his cause with the Bos- 
 tonian by a flash of utterly unexpected jealousy; but 
 worst of all were these certainties and salvations 
 that had come like twin lightning-strokes to end the 
 months of doubts and despairing. She had been 
 in no mood fit to meet adequately the last moments 
 of crisis: the hope offered that noon, the dreadful 
 tidings of that night. The first relief had been too 
 sudden and unexpected, the second was too terrible 
 to be borne. Abruptly, she burst into uncontrollable 
 tears. 
 
 Tyrrell tried to respect her feelings by Ignoring 
 them; but Edith s sobs were never of a sort to brook 
 ignoring. 
 
 " I m very, very sorry," he said at last. " It s 
 dreadful news." 
 
 Because she was lonely and afraid, she put her 
 hand on his. The action was as simple and spon 
 taneous as that of a child appealing to its nearest 
 protector. Instantly, the contact burst the last bar 
 rier of her so-tried reserve. 
 
 " Oh," she said, " it isn t only that. It s every 
 thingeverything! We re dreadfully poor, and his 
 people don t like me, and I m lonely; and now, with 
 this this thing about his father I m afraid I m 
 just dreadfully afraid!" 
 
 Never before had she told him anything of her 
 real self or her real life. Now, before they had 
 reached Greenwich Village, she told him enough 
 of her story for him to guess almost all the 
 rest. Her "divorce she did not mention, but there
 
 260 JIM 
 
 remained in her narrative enough to interest and 
 move him. 
 
 He was a man of the world and therefore a sen 
 timentalist He felt for her; he pitied her. In all 
 friendliness he offered to stay awhile in her rooms 
 with her, and there he tried to quiet her by diverting 
 their talk to other matters. 
 
 " But things will be all right now," he said. 
 
 " Now? That s just the dreadful worst of it 
 that it must all come out of out of his father s 
 death." 
 
 Tyrrell had sat on the couch in the poor room, 
 apparently noting only such of her poverty as she 
 chose to point out to him. His gray eyes were grave, 
 his lips tender. 
 
 " But it won t," he explained: " it will come out 
 of the success of his invention." 
 
 She turned her tear-stained face to him : 
 
 " You ll think I m ungrateful not to have thanked 
 you before for that; but I do thank you: I do. If 
 it wasn t for you " 
 
 " Please ! " He raised his hand. " Don t talk of 
 that." 
 
 There were whisky and water on the table, and 
 he poured her some to steady her and, since she 
 would take none without him, took a little him 
 self. 
 
 " It will soon be all right," he told her. 
 
 She shook her head: 
 
 " Oh, you must see how it can t be ! " 
 
 Tyrrell chose to see nothing. 
 
 " Your husband s father may pull through," he 
 said. " These long illnesses often have scares of
 
 JIM 261 
 
 this sort without any quick fatality. He may even 
 get well. It s almost sure that he won t die to 
 night." 
 
 " He will," she persisted. " He will. I know it." 
 
 But Tyrrell kept it up, and, slowly, he made her 
 see things much as he saw them. By the time that 
 he thought it safe to leave her, she was recovering 
 something of her accustomed appearance of serenity, 
 and looked again the beautiful woman that she gen 
 erally was. To her he seemed a courteous man, 
 wise, a strong and handsome comforter sent from 
 the social sphere to which she could now again hope 
 one day to attain. 
 
 " Good-night," he smiled as she gave him her 
 hand. " I hope you will be all right now." 
 
 " Good-night," she answered. " You ve been 
 awfully good to me." 
 
 The hands were held for that mere moment longer 
 than is common, which makes it so hard to release 
 them and impossible to retain them. Her brown 
 eyes were bright with fresh tears, tears of gratitude 
 now and tears unshed. Tyrrell s face was gravely 
 tender. 
 
 " I ve done nothing, Mrs. Vanaman," he was say 
 ing; and then again, " Good-night." 
 
 She heard him go down the stairs, and she heard 
 the street-door close behind him. She looked from 
 the window at his lithe figure. 
 
 If only Charley s father got well, it would be all 
 right to hope again. Even if Charley did not change 
 with success, there would still remain much that she 
 might have of what was worth while. She would 
 be done with failure. . . .
 
 262 JIM 
 
 5. And a quarter of an hour later it was her 
 heavy husband with a puffed and brutalized face who 
 was standing where Tyrrell had said good-night 
 to her. Charley had no sooner entered than he saw 
 the two empty whisky glasses, and wrung from her 
 the admission that Tyrrell had been in the room. 
 
 " So that s what you do as soon as I m called 
 away to my sick father! " he blustered. 
 
 She was innocent, and she was angry at his injus 
 tice. Her cheeks flamed and her delicate hands 
 were clenched at her sides. 
 
 " You forget that you told me to be nice to him." 
 
 "Nice! That s one thing; but this " From 
 
 a hand that shook with anger, his thick forefinger 
 indicated the empty glasses on the table. 
 
 "How dare you suspect me?" she demanded. 
 
 Charley chuckled bitterly. " How did you dare 
 to suspect me?" he asked. 
 
 They faced each other, their eyes like drawn 
 poniards. Each one knew the answer to those ques 
 tions: they suspected each other because they had 
 once deserved the suspicion of Jim. 
 
 " Don t say it! " cried Edith. " Don t you dare 
 to say it ! " 
 
 Charley s lip curled upward, but his glance fell. 
 Into Tyrrell s glass, he poured himself some liquor 
 and drank it eagerly. He was almost glad to be 
 the bearer of bad news. 
 
 " Well," he said, " while you were flirting with 
 that man, poppa died. I phoned Zoller and got him 
 out of bed and asked him about the will. The will 
 leaves everything to Mame if I m ever married to 
 you."
 
 FIFTEENTH CHAPTER 
 
 "T^VEAD? He s dead?" 
 
 J Oh, she had known that this news would 
 be brought her. Tyrrell had lulled her 
 into temporary hope, but Charley s entrance ended 
 that. She saw the thing in his first glance. She felt 
 it lurking behind his cross-examination about her 
 recent visitor, stealing nearer and nearer through 
 her husband s denunciation of the visit. That cross- 
 examination, those denunciations, had been hard to 
 bear, but this was worse. It was all the worse be 
 cause of its slow approach: all the worse because 
 she had expected it. 
 
 " Yes, dead," said Charley. 
 
 He dashed into the next room. He slammed the 
 door behind him, but she heard him crying there. 
 
 Edith could not cry. She saw perfectly how her 
 husband could combine sincere grief for his father s 
 death with sharp chagrin at his father s will; but 
 she, for a half hour, sat with bowed head, clenched 
 hands, dry eyes. 
 
 Then she got up. Hideous as was to her the sense 
 that she had wished this death, she felt at last that 
 she must meet practically its practical results to 
 her. 
 
 She went into the next room. Charley, lying on 
 the bed, raised a tearful face. She, standing in the 
 doorway, said: 
 
 " You ve got to break the will." 
 263
 
 264 JIM 
 
 " I ve thought of that." Swayed by her resolu 
 tion, he would not evade the issue. " And it can t 
 be done." 
 
 " It must be." 
 
 " It can t be. I should think you d had enough 
 of law." 
 
 " It doesn t matter what I ve had. I ve been 
 dragged into it so often that once or twice more 
 can t count." 
 
 " But, Edith, I tell you it s no use. Zoller drew 
 it, and he s the safest thing alive." 
 
 " You can prove that Mame got your father un 
 der her thumb. You can prove he wasn t in his 
 right mind. Look how long he d been sick." 
 
 "That s just what I can t prove. Zoller knows; 
 so does Mame. The servants know. So do poppa s 
 friends: he was seeing them every few days at the 
 time he made that will. We wouldn t have a leg 
 to stand on." 
 
 He proceeded to explain; he showed her that her 
 plan was unquestionably foredoomed. 
 
 She had sinned, then, and suffered for it, and was 
 not to gather the fruits of her sin. Hysteria seized 
 her. She said things that, a few minutes since, she 
 would not have dared even to think. 
 
 "It s too much; it s too much. His own son! 
 The old fool ! The old sneak ! He was under 
 Mame s thumb Mame s and that foxy lawyer s! 
 They were in this together; they worked him what 
 ever way they pleased: Mame with her sniveling 
 religion I never did trust her and Zoller, the 
 shyster. They did him brown. And they made a 
 dunce of you, all right. His own son! It was all
 
 JIM 265 
 
 because he hated me; it was all because Jim started 
 that cross-suit. Well, if your father hated me, I 
 know what he was: he was " 
 
 Charley leaped from the bed. 
 
 "Stop that! " he cried. 
 
 " I won t. I ll say what I like for once. You 
 know what he was as well as I do, but you re afraid 
 of the truth : you always were. You ! Why, it was 
 all your fault. You ve been a perfect dub about it 
 right along. Anybody with any sense could have 
 stopped him; but you couldn t. Look what Jim s 
 done for himself] at his worst, he was a better 
 business-man than you are. You can t make any 
 money and you can t hold on to what you were born 
 to." She flung herself on the bed from which he 
 had risen. " Oh, I don t mean it; I don t mean it! 
 I don t know what I m saying. It s too much; it s 
 too much ! " 
 
 The tears he could never resist won him now. 
 He went to her and began to stroke her hair. 
 
 " I know," he said. " I understand, dear. Don t 
 you worry. It s all right. We can hold out a little 
 longer. We can move up there till Tyrrell comes 
 in with me. He s got some stock he wants to get 
 rid of in a good market and then put that money 
 in the sounder. It ll be all right: you ll see." 
 
 2. She had to do it: now that old Vanaman 
 was dead, she had to live in the house from which 
 he had barred her. In spite of her once expressed 
 determination not to live with any relative of her 
 husband, there was nothing else to be done but to 
 take shelter with myopic Mame in the house on Lex-
 
 266 JIM 
 
 ington Avenue. Edith reminded Charley that Jim, 
 with all his faults, had taken better care of her, but 
 she bowed, however ungraciously, to the inevitable. 
 
 The seriousness of their position temporarily so 
 bered both husband and wife. The next day Char 
 ley spoke to Mame about it. 
 
 " Do you think you can put us up here for a 
 while?" he asked. "You ought to do that much 
 for me, Mame. Besides, you ll be lonely, now, and 
 Edith ll be company for you." 
 
 They were sitting in the darkened parlor, Edith 
 with them. At the last moment she had summoned 
 all her resolution and come along with Charley. 
 Old Vanaman s body had not yet been brought 
 downstairs; it remained in the big mahogany bed 
 above. Their voices were monotonous and low. 
 Mame sprawled limply in a chair; her spectacles 
 were in her lap; she dabbed her eyes with a hand 
 kerchief. Edith leaned back on the sofa; Charley 
 sat erect, his hands outspread on his knees. 
 
 " I want you to understand, Charley, that it 
 wasn t my doing, that will wasn t," said Mame. " I 
 hadn t the least idea." 
 
 " I know." 
 
 " But I got to follow it; I got to do what poor 
 poppa wanted I should, and in it he says I got to 
 keep what he leaves me. Mr. Zoller particularly 
 explained that to me this very morning most par 
 ticularly, he did." 
 
 Charley wriggled. He had hoped for a substan 
 tial gift. He looked at Edith, but Edith looked 
 away. 
 
 " Still," Charley suggested, " you ve got to invest
 
 JIM 267 
 
 it." He saw another light. " You do have to do 
 that, don t you?" 
 
 " It s all invested," said Mame. " You know how 
 poppa was." 
 
 Again Charley tried to catch his wife s glance, but 
 her face was like the statue of a classic goddess. 
 
 You d change your investments if you could get 
 better ones, wouldn t you?" 
 
 Mame met him with stolid gentleness: 
 
 " Poppa last week made me promise I wouldn t 
 invest one cent of whatever he d leave me in the 
 sounder." 
 
 Her brother had not meant that she should see, 
 before he brought her to it, what he was leading 
 her to. He frowned. 
 
 " Even so " he began. 
 
 " Not," Mame concluded, " till a regular tele 
 graph company endorsed it." 
 
 " Oh ! "This was better." But I ve got a man 
 to endorse it who s as much an expert as any tele 
 graph company. His name s Tyrrell. I told poppa 
 about him yesterday and poppa told me 
 
 " He told me" said Mame in the same sad mono 
 tone, " I mustn t invest one cent of what he d leave 
 me in the sounder till a regular telegraph company 
 endorsed it." 
 
 Charley looked helplessly at Edith and received no 
 help. 
 
 " Well, then," he said, " about our living here? " 
 
 There Mame was acquiescent. She would be glad 
 to have them. 
 
 " I ll do the housework," she added " what the 
 servants don t do of it. I ll need something to keep
 
 268 JIM 
 
 me busy, now I can t be busy with with what I have 
 been busy with so long." The handkerchief, twisted 
 into a ball, went to her eyes. " I want to do my duty 
 by everybody. I m sure I ll only be too glad to do 
 whatever I can for my own brother." 
 
 The omission of any wish to do what could be 
 done for Edith was innocent. If Edith noticed it, 
 she gave no sign of noticing. She spoke now for 
 almost the first time during this interview. 
 
 " You re awfully kind," she said. Her tone was 
 cool and even, her face expressionless. " Of course 
 you re going to have a trustee and of course you ll 
 have Charley doing for him what you can, you 
 know. It will be so convenient to have your trustee 
 right in the same house with you." 
 
 Charley turned sharply to her. Mame listened 
 with open mouth. 
 
 " Well," she slowly began, " Mr. Zoller said " 
 
 " Of course he did; but you wouldn t agree with 
 him, would you? After all, Charley is your brother, 
 
 and, as you say, you ll be only too glad I can 
 
 telephone my own lawyer (that s Mr. Leishman, and 
 he s one of the best in New York) to send up the 
 necessary application blanks and a power-of-attorney, 
 too." 
 
 Mame was engulfed before she realized what all 
 this was about. It was after Edith had telephoned, 
 and while they were waiting for the arrival of the 
 papers, that Mame said to her sister-in-law: 
 
 "Wouldn t you like to come and see poppa? " 
 
 Edith drew back. Her self-possession vanished. 
 
 " No oh, no, thank you ! " 
 
 " You wouldn t believe how calm and peaceful
 
 JIM 269 
 
 he seems," said Mame. " It s lovely. He looks so 
 natural." 
 
 " I wouldn t," stammered Edith. " I mean I 
 couldn t. I ve never 
 
 They resumed their waiting for the emissary of 
 the re-engaged Leishman. Mr. Leishman carried 
 this little matter through for Edith to its finish. 
 
 3. Husband and wife moved into the old- 
 fashioned house on the day after the funeral. It 
 was a vast improvement on their lodgings in Green 
 wich Village, but Edith, on entering it to live there, 
 felt as if there was closing on her something worse 
 than the door of a prison. 
 
 She wore black, and her clothes were no conven 
 tional deception. Hourly, for many weeks, the 
 thought of how she had wished old Vanaman s 
 death was made more poignant by the house that 
 had been his and all that it contained. Sleepless 
 nights and memory-filled days wore her down. And 
 there could be no immediate escape, no afternoons 
 or evenings of relief: the latter Charley passed at 
 home, the former offered no tango-teas to a woman 
 in mourning. 
 
 She was a trial to Mame, and the servants, know 
 ing the tenor of the will, openly disliked her. 
 Though Charley s sister did not complain, Edith 
 knew the nature of Mame s feelings and did not 
 care. She wanted to rest: she took every chance 
 of escape from the sort of labor that she had per 
 formed in her former lodgings. She gave no help 
 to her sister-in-law; breakfasted in bed; required 
 much waiting on. She liked dainty food and asked
 
 270 JIM 
 
 for it: she increased the household expenses. To 
 Mame s gossip of the church, of Mrs. Hamilton, 
 and the missionary society, Edith had to listen, but 
 she would not go to services, and this, she was aware, 
 incurred Mame s further disapproval. 
 
 In the intervals of settling, without giving bond, 
 his father s estate, Charley was perpetually remind 
 ing his wife that they were, at all events, bulwarked 
 against starvation; but then, as Edith soon observed, 
 they were not much more than that. Tyrrell, whom 
 hard necessity compelled her husband to forgive, 
 came to the house often, talked politely, and left 
 early. At his office, too, Charley seemed to see the 
 Bostonian, not so often, yet frequently. But the 
 market was in the hands of the bears, and Tyrrell 
 still refused to invest in the sounder before he could 
 first profitably dispose of certain stocks that he 
 wanted to sell. 
 
 In the middle of one of her sleepless nights, 
 Edith turned from her thoughts about the elder 
 Vanaman s death to notice that Charley was lying 
 awake beside her. 
 
 " Except that we don t have to pay rent," she said, 
 abruptly, "we re not a bit better off than we used 
 to be." 
 
 Directness belongs to darkness: Charley took the 
 speech as matter of course. 
 
 " We ll be all right," he said. 
 That s what you were always telling me." 
 
 " Well, it s come true, partly, hasn t it? " 
 
 Edith lay still for some minutes. Then she said: 
 
 " I wish we could break the will." 
 
 " You know we can t," said Charley.
 
 JIM 271 
 
 Then, why don t you get Mame to put some 
 thing into the sounder?" 
 
 "Why don t I? You heard me try once, didn t 
 you? I don t know what s got over Mame lately. 
 She didn t use to be like this. She s not a bit like 
 herself nowadays." 
 
 There was another pause, a longer one. They 
 were thinking of the same thing. This time it was 
 Charley who spoke first. He spoke of something 
 that, in spite of his surprise when it occurred, he 
 had never yet referred to: 
 
 " Why did you get Mame to give me that power- 
 of-attorney? " 
 
 Edith buried her head in the pillow. 
 
 "How do I know?" she said. "Let s go to 
 sleep." 
 
 4. Charley did try again to persuade his sister 
 to a practical interest in his invention. He tried 
 next day. When he came downstairs in the morn 
 ing, he found Mame, in an apron and with her head 
 tied up in a towel, sweeping the parlor. Servants 
 were permitted to sweep the rest of the house, but 
 the parlor and the room in which the elder Vana- 
 man had died were sacred. 
 
 " No," said Mame in reply to Charley s persua 
 sions. " It s no use. Poppa said 
 
 " But you don t believe in your own brother? " 
 
 "Yes, I believe in you. Of course I do; but 
 poppa made me promise " 
 
 " Just a moment, Mame. I ve been going over 
 poppa s papers, as you know. It s my duty now 
 since he made you his only executor and you made
 
 272 JIM 
 
 me your agent. Well, I find that the highest inter 
 est you re drawing is six per cent. If my sounder 
 could get a start, it s bound to pay seven from the 
 jump, and there s nothing that it won t pay before 
 it s five years older." 
 
 Mame s eyes were vague. 
 
 "About my being executor," she said: "I met 
 Mr. Zoller in the street the other day and he told 
 me poppa d told him of course I d let him act for 
 me." 
 
 Charley reddened. 
 
 "Why do you tell him everything you know? 
 He s not your lawyer." 
 
 " He was poppa s." 
 
 " Did you tell him I had your power-of- 
 attorney? " 
 
 " He didn t ask, Charley." 
 
 " Then don t tell him. I don t trust that man." 
 
 " Oh, Charley!" Mame nearly dropped her 
 broom. " He was such a friend of poppa s." 
 
 " I don t care. I don t trust him. Now, about 
 those investments 
 
 "No," said Mame; "it s no use, Charley. I 
 never asked you to pay back that money I lent you 
 while you were living downtown, and I never will; 
 but I got to keep 
 
 " This isn t a loan ! " her brother protested : " I m 
 not trying to get money away from you ; I m trying 
 to give you some." 
 
 But Mame only shook her toweled head and en 
 folded him in her dull stare. 
 
 " Poppa made me promise not to invest a cent
 
 JIM 273 
 
 in the sounder till some big telegraph company ap 
 proved it, and I got to keep my promise, Charley." 
 
 5. Charley came away from this in a hopeless 
 mood. Midsummer was here: again Capital was 
 taking its vacation; the great men and heads of 
 corporations, from whom a mere line of writing 
 would have made the sounder s fortune, were gone 
 to seashore and mountain; Charley had become a 
 nuisance in their offices, a joke for their office-boys. 
 The prospectuses and elaborate booklets that he 
 had worked so hard to write and exhausted his credit 
 to publish now brought replies from none save 
 cranks and paupers; one by one his chances of in 
 teresting even private individuals of merely second 
 ary means had receded out of sight, until only the 
 figure of Tyrrell remained and Tyrrell waited for 
 the rise of a market that, in the July sun, slept peace 
 fully. Charley knew that he could not hold out 
 a month longer. 
 
 As he walked to the subway station, he passed a 
 stationer s shop and saw that one of its windows 
 was full of the reproductions of one picture. . It 
 was a picture of a young man and woman dancing 
 the tango, and it was shown in every shape and 
 size. There were copies and prints in color, framed 
 photographs, and a score of picture postcards. 
 
 " It just shows what people are coming to," he 
 thought. " It ought to be stopped, that sort of thing 
 ought." 
 
 Then his eye was caught by a placard in the win 
 dow. It read:
 
 274 JIM 
 
 "GET THE HABIT!" 
 
 Take along a copy of the most 
 popular picture in America: James 
 Trent s " Tango." 
 
 " Everybody s Doin It " 
 
 Charley s eyes bulged. 
 
 "Well, I ll be damned! "he said. 
 
 Jim was still making money, Jim was still suc 
 cessful! He was catering to the depraved appetite 
 of the effete, and the effete were buying what he had 
 to offer. 
 
 Charley went to the nearest saloon and had a 
 drink. In the subway train he saw a girl going 
 to work with one of the tango postcards in her 
 hand. Downtown he passed other shop-windows full 
 of the things. No doubt Jim was paid a royalty on 
 every copy printed. And here was he, Charley Vana- 
 man, the inventor of something really useful, going 
 bankrupt. 
 
 He wouldn t put up with it. He stopped twice 
 more for whisky. He would end this situation. He 
 would make a fortune that would dwarf the pen 
 nies piled up by this painter. He would take a big 
 chance. He would take it now. 
 
 Then came the inspiration. The large telegraph 
 companies had continued to show themselves ob 
 durate; they could not be cajoled, and so Charley 
 planned to force them : he would stake his last shred 
 of credit on the hope that the market would rise 
 within three weeks; he would form a company to 
 be initially financed by Tyrrell s support; he would 
 publish broadcast his story of the telegraph corpo-
 
 JIM 275 
 
 rations ignorant and incompetent disregard of him, 
 place it before the great American public, invest 
 his final chances in that public s hatred of combina 
 tions of capital and devotion to fair-play. He would 
 begin at once, though the tide of indebtedness rose 
 above his head and though the only thing that could 
 save him from drowning would be the life-raft to be 
 launched by Tyrrell. 
 
 By four o clock that afternoon he had performed 
 miracles in the way of stretching credit. He stood 
 committed to his scheme. Twenty-odd days would 
 decide, once and for all, in favor of final success 
 or ruin. 
 
 6. One can become accustomed even to horror. 
 Edith first became accustomed to the thought of her 
 father-in-law s death as an answer to her own de 
 sires, and then ceased to believe in it. The horror 
 gone left her to boredom, but the boredom was 
 scarcely less irksome. She began to feel that Mame 
 disliked her, was jealous of her, did not want her 
 in the house: Mame never spoke sharply and never 
 ceased to work for her; but Edith became none the 
 less possessed by this idea. She had drunk a little 
 to quiet what she took to be her conscience; now, 
 however occasionally, she drank a little to ease her 
 weariness. The strain had told on her; her cheeks 
 more often needed rouge, and she became used to 
 her crayon. There came an afternoon when she 
 stole out of the house and stood in a hotel door 
 way, looking at the tango-dancers. 
 
 Some relief she had to have. It was as she said 
 to Charley: except that they were free of rent, they
 
 276 JIM 
 
 were no better off than they had been in Greenwich 
 Village ; and the very exemption from rent bore with 
 it the stigma of charity. In the long effect, it could 
 count but little. Edith knew enough of her husband s 
 business to know that his indebtedness must soon 
 overwhelm him unless Tyrrell came to the rescue, 
 and Tyrrell, encouraging in tone, remained slow 
 in action. She foresaw that the old strain would 
 begin again, had indeed begun, was daily tighten 
 ing, and she was too tired to endure it. 
 
 She could read it in Charley. His words were 
 stubbornly hopeful, but his bearing was that of a 
 breaking man. His step was slow and his mouth 
 lolling; he had long minutes of complete absent- 
 mindedness when, in the midst of a conversation, he 
 fell silent and sat staring at vacancy, from which he 
 would return in a violent temper. His customary 
 chuckle had lost its old mirth and its old conceit, 
 was become a purely muscular habit. He was more 
 than ever jealous of her past with Jim. When he 
 walked in the street with her, he would, on one 
 flimsy pretext or another, excuse himself and slip 
 into the nearest bar; at home he made continual 
 visits to the dining-room sideboard, in which he kept 
 a bottle; and Edith had lost the heart to protest. 
 
 She thought about seeking consolation of Diana 
 she was no longer too proud to acknowledge the 
 need of sympathy and to seek it but she remem 
 bered that Diana had withdrawn herself from their 
 last meeting in a mood anything but sympathetic. 
 Edith was therefore not surprised to have Diana 
 try to hurry by her when, one afternoon, they met 
 on Broadway near Twenty-third Street.
 
 JIM 277 
 
 " Aren t you going to talk to me? " The words 
 came impulsively from Edith. 
 
 Diana stopped. A sad little smile played over 
 her fine lips. 
 
 " I didn t know you d want me to bore you," she 
 said. 
 
 Edith took her friend s reluctant hand. Already 
 she had made the first advance; for the moment re 
 pression ceased to matter. 
 
 " Oh, of course you think I m a poor sort be 
 cause I don t see things the way you do," she said. 
 "But can t we be friends anyhow?" 
 
 The day was hot. Yellow sunshine poured into 
 Madison Square. Through it the high edge of the 
 Flatiron Building seemed to quiver northward as if 
 it were the prow of a great ocean-liner seen from a 
 dory. The seven hundred feet of the Metropolitan 
 Life Insurance Company s tower glittered like an 
 Alpine summit. 
 
 " Oh, yes ! " said Diana. " We can be friends." 
 She stood facing Edith uncertainly. 
 
 " Then let s let s sit down somewhere and 
 talk." Edith s brown eyes wandered to the cool 
 ness of the crowded Square. " I wonder if there s 
 an empty bench over there, and if it d be very ter 
 rible if we sat on it." 
 
 She led the way across the street. They passed 
 the bronze, beneficent Farragut of Saint-Gaudens 
 and followed a curving path toward the Madison 
 Avenue side of the Square, past benches on which 
 sprawled derelicts who, Edith flashingly thought, 
 could not be more dispirited than was she. They
 
 278 JIM 
 
 found an empty seat facing the Manhattan Club 
 and took it. 
 
 " I certainly have been having bad luck," said 
 Edith. " I don t know what s going to happen 
 next." 
 
 She had found that for once she must tell an 
 other woman of her troubles. Not all of her trou 
 bles: even now Edith could not tell the truth about 
 her husband; but she had to find consolation in the 
 statement of at least a few of her difficulties to a 
 member of her own sex. It is an impulse that we 
 attribute to all women at all times, whereas it is 
 common to both men and women, occurring only 
 at the height of long fatigue, but then occurring 
 irresistibly. Edith explained her equivocal position 
 as an unpaying inmate of Mame s house; she poured 
 out the history of the invention; for a quarter of 
 an hour she speculated upon the oncoming disaster 
 and through it all Diana listened with that sad 
 little smile. 
 
 "We ve been dreadfully poor," said Edith; 
 " we ve been so poor that I used to think there 
 couldn t be worse poverty; and now we re going 
 to have worse. We re almost sure to. Our only 
 chance is the Mr. Tyrrell I ve been telling you 
 about, and he can t or won t invest in the sounder 
 till he can sell some other stocks at a profit. He 
 has to wait for what s called a rising market, 
 Charley says; and I know if the market doesn t rise 
 soon we ll be ruined absolutely ruined. I don t 
 know what on earth we re going to do." 
 
 Diana was sitting with her slim hands clasped 
 on her knees, her eyes fixed on the figure of her
 
 JIM 279 
 
 titular goddess that tops the tower of Madison 
 Square Garden. The city is under the goddess s 
 feet; she is flying, she is free: Diana Wentworth 
 turned to Edith a face strongly altered from the 
 face of the pseudo-revolutionist that her companion 
 used to know. She was still smiling, but that face 
 was the face of a woman whom life has conquered. 
 
 " You have your husband left," she said very 
 quietly. " Nothing really matters so long as you 
 have your husband, and so long as he s glad to 
 have you." 
 
 Then Edith understood the meaning of that sad 
 little smile. Her own troubles had blinded her to 
 every sign of troubles in others, but, upon these 
 words, she remembered van Houyz as she had seen 
 him at the Ritz-Carlton with Sylvia Tytus. 
 
 " Diana," she said, " you don t mean- 
 Diana nodded. " But there s no use talking about 
 it," she explained. 
 
 " It s that Tytus woman? " 
 
 "Yes," said Diana, softly, "it s that Tytus 
 woman. Nothing really wrong has happened " 
 
 " The brainless, ugly cat! " cried Edith. 
 
 " Oh, yes" Diana wearily conceded it "I see 
 now that she is brainless, and I wonder why I ever 
 thought she was good-looking; but that doesn t 
 help much, does it? I don t blame her: I know if 
 it hadn t been Sylvia it would have been somebody 
 else." She stood up. 
 
 Edith knew that Diana was running away; that 
 she would rather run away than talk of this. One 
 word more seemed, however, imperative. 
 
 " But you ll divorce him."
 
 280 JIM 
 
 " No, I won t divorce him, dear." 
 
 "I see. Perhaps you re right; I don t blame 
 you for not wanting to give him up to her." 
 
 " Ah " Diana looked away " he s already 
 taken. Besides, you see, he s poor: he doesn t want 
 a divorce." 
 
 Edith had risen, too. She remembered Diana s 
 declarations of her own " Freedom " and van 
 Houyz s; her praise of Edith s course in the pro 
 ceedings against Jim; her former scorn of holding 
 a husband to vows that he might want to break. 
 This was not that same Diana who had held such 
 views; but now, somehow, there was nothing hu 
 morous in the alteration. 
 
 " Anyhow," said Edith, " you ought to use your 
 own freedom: you ought to get square with him 
 that way." 
 
 The violet deepened in Diana s eyes. 
 
 " Of course," she said, " I could do that, espe 
 cially as it s me that makes the money. Only- 
 well, I don t happen to want to." She smiled 
 again. " I suppose I m not that type," she added. 
 
 Edith walked slowly to the Twenty-third Street 
 subway station. Her thoughts were quoting some 
 thing that Diana had said: 
 
 " Nothing really matters so long as you have 
 your husband, and so long as he s glad to have 
 you." 
 
 " I wonder if everybody s not pretending just the 
 way I am," thought Edith. " I wonder if it isn t 
 all a lie,* 5
 
 SIXTEENTH CHAPTER 
 
 WHEN he came home that evening, Char 
 ley wore a more hopeful air than he had 
 worn for many days. 
 
 The market s rising," he said: " it s rising stead 
 ily; and I think, from what Tyrrell phoned me 
 a little while ago, he s going to come across at last. 
 He phoned me from the Waldorf to meet him in 
 the lobby there at eight o clock this evening." Char 
 ley looked at his watch. " It s nearly seven now. 
 I got to hustle." 
 
 He went out immediately after bolting his dinner, 
 and Mame, bound for her Mrs. Hamilton s and 
 then for a meeting of her missionary-society, went 
 out with him. Edith had gone upstairs to the lonely 
 sitting-room when the maid appeared there and 
 announced Tyrrell. 
 
 2. He was standing in the antiquated parlor, 
 where Edith was always ashamed to receive him 
 because it seemed so old-fashioned and he and she 
 so out of place in it. He was leaning, as she en 
 tered, against the marble mantel-piece, lithe and 
 easy in his evening-clothes, fingering his small 
 mustache. 
 
 "But," said Edith, "didn t the maid tell you? 
 Charley s just gone out." 
 
 He repeated: u Gone out? " 
 
 " Yes : to meet you." 
 
 281
 
 282 JIM 
 
 Tyrrell s handsome face was puzzled: 
 
 " I thought we were to meet here. Where s he 
 gone?" 
 
 " To the Waldorf. He said you phoned him 
 that you d be there." 
 
 " No, no. I told him I was telephoning from 
 the Waldorf. I meant to give him to understand 
 that I was coming up here." He laughed a lit 
 tle, and Edith caught herself speculating whether 
 that laugh rang wholly true. " Well," he went on, 
 " if I went after your husband, I should only miss 
 him: by the time I got to the Waldorf he d be sure 
 to be gone. Of course he ll look next at my club 
 for me, but I might miss him there, too. Since I ve 
 been so stupid, I suppose the best thing for me to 
 do is to wait here till he comes back. Will you 
 try to put up with me, Mrs. Vanaman? " 
 
 He was right, and she was not loath to admit 
 it; in spite of the importance of Charley s pro 
 spective interview, she was flattered by the guess 
 that this misunderstanding might have been willful. 
 The business matters were safe enough: they would 
 be attended to on her husband s return. Meantime, 
 it was pleasant to find Tyrrell so obviously contented 
 to sit on a sofa beside her in the old-fashioned par 
 lor and to have him talk to her in a tone that rapidly 
 became more serious than any they had previously 
 adopted in their latterly not infrequent tete-a-tetes. 
 
 Somehow, with her warm brown eyes on his firm 
 face, she fell again to telling him, if not all that 
 there was to tell about herself, at least more than 
 she was in the habit of telling other people: as 
 much, almost, as she had told Diana that afternoon.
 
 JIM 283 
 
 Had he been right, on the evening of the elder 
 Vanaman s death, to say that all would turn out 
 well? No, he had not been right. The mood for 
 confidences was still strongly upon her: she pointed 
 out to him, as delicately as she could, the ambiguous 
 position in which the will left her and her husband, 
 and she did not hesitate to hint that she could not 
 bring herself to be really friendly with Charley s 
 sister. 
 
 " Miss Vanaman struck me," said Tyrrell, " as 
 being entirely amiable." 
 
 " She is," said Edith; "but you ve seen her." 
 
 ; Well, after all," he submitted, " you have your 
 husband." 
 
 There it was again, nearly in Diana s words. 
 Edith thought of Diana s plight. She thought of 
 how that plight and her own had made her wonder 
 whether the entire attitude of the world s married 
 women was not a conspiracy of faith betrayed to 
 delude the world s unmarried. Oddly in contrast, 
 the memory of that picture by Jim, the picture of 
 the tango-dancers, came back to her: the joy of 
 life as he saw it against the drab monotony of life 
 as she must live it in this house. Once more, from 
 this, followed the realization of all that she had 
 suffered. If this man was to help Charley with 
 money, why should he not help her, as he had once 
 helped her, with a taste of gladness? 
 
 She shrugged her graceful shoulders. 
 
 " Yes, I have my husband for the evenings. 
 And even on some of those his business keeps him 
 away." 
 
 " Ah, yes, of course." It was a too ready agree-
 
 284 JIM 
 
 ment: to-night Tyrrell seemed less suave than she 
 had ever known him. " And so you re a little 
 lonely?" 
 
 " Sometimes; and I don t like it." 
 
 "No doubt; only, don t we all have to be more 
 or less lonely? Isn t that the law of life? " 
 
 She hesitated scarcely a moment. "For you?" 
 she asked. 
 
 " Sometimes I think most of all for me." 
 
 * I shouldn t have supposed so," said Edith. She 
 was looking at the floor, which was disfigured by a 
 hideous Brussels carpet, but she shot a brown glance 
 at him. 
 
 You mean," he quickly took her up, " that I con 
 sole myself? " 
 
 Edith resumed her inspection of the carpet. 
 
 " I mean," said she, " that I haven t forgotten the 
 first time I saw you, and that then you were con 
 soling yourself so well that you didn t see me." 
 
 While she said it, she was wondering what made 
 her say it, telling herself that this man s affairs 
 could be nothing to her. Yet she wanted to know 
 more about them about him. She wanted to know 
 that she had been mistaken; she wanted to have out 
 with him the discussion that their first meeting at 
 the Knickerbocker had, after all, left magnificently 
 in the air. 
 
 " Oh, but I explained all that to you long ago." 
 
 "Did you?" 
 
 " Of course I did. You can t have forgotten the 
 day we met on Forty-second Street." 
 
 He went back to that day and to that conversa 
 tion. He repeated his part in it. Of the incident
 
 JIM 285 
 
 at Charley s office he did not say much that was 
 new, but he ended by saying: 
 
 " I m sorry." 
 
 " For the stenographer?" she could not forbear 
 inquiring. 
 
 " I m sorry," he repeated. " You understand." 
 
 " Oh, I m sure there was nothing to be sorry 
 for! " She blushed a little and then added: "Was 
 there?" 
 
 4 There was a great deal, for there was this : that 
 I didn t observe you." 
 
 * She was a very pretty girl, Mr. Tyrrell." 
 
 He caught her gaze and held it. 
 
 " Do you think," he asked, slowly, " that such 
 things count? " 
 
 " I don t know," said Edith, her color deepening, 
 " exactly what you mean. I should think that 
 whether they count or not depends on whether you 
 let them count." 
 
 He seemed truly distressed. 
 
 " Really, really, Mrs. Vanaman," he said, in a 
 voice that was low and unsteady, " you mustn t 
 
 think A stenographer! I m not a snob, but 
 
 neither am I a cad! " 
 
 " Then why " she met him with a look that 
 went deep " why do you feel you must explain to 
 me?" 
 
 She was feeling now what she had felt before with 
 him : the strange fascination of fascinating him. She 
 had felt it in their dancing when, as his conscious 
 ness ruled her body, her body fired his emotions. It 
 was much that he was handsome and beside her; it 
 was more that he was of a grain finer than Char-
 
 286 JIM 
 
 ley. She felt the thrill of power over Tyrrell and, 
 feeling the thrill of power over him, she let him 
 take her hand. 
 
 He answered slowly, his eyes .on hers : 
 
 " I explain it because I m lonely, too, here in New 
 York, and don t want to lose the friendship of the 
 only really fine woman that has been my friend. Be 
 cause " 
 
 "Hello!" said Charley. 
 
 They both started to see Vanaman entering the 
 room. Tyrrell dropped Edith s hand; he was wholly 
 self-possessed, but Edith, clearly perceiving that 
 Charley was making a doubtful effort at self-control, 
 felt a quick anger against her husband s intrusion. 
 
 You ve come just at the end of my experiment 
 in fortune-telling," said Tyrrell, rising. " I find 
 that your wife is to be a rich woman. Where have 
 you been? I thought we were to meet each other 
 here." 
 
 Charley s eyes were hot. 
 
 You said the lobby of the Waldorf," he cor 
 rected. 
 
 " Did it sound that way to you? " Tyrrell saun 
 tered back to the mantel-piece. " That s what Mrs. 
 Vanaman s been saying. I m sorry if I gave you a 
 run down there for nothing. I never could make 
 myself understood over a telephone." 
 
 Vanaman grunted an indistinguishable reply. 
 
 " Edith," he added, " you d better leave us alone 
 for a little while. We ve got to talk business."
 
 SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER 
 
 SHE left them without a glance at either. She 
 went upstairs, trembling a little from fear of 
 what her husband might do or say to ruin his 
 chances of financial help from Tyrrell, but trem 
 bling more from fear of how he might compromise 
 her with the guest. 
 
 Then anger came and crowded out her fear. En 
 tering the house noiselessly, dropping into the room 
 as a policeman drops upon a burglar, Charley had 
 no right to put on the uniform of an injured hus 
 band. It did occur to her what was the fact 
 that Charley s entrance had not been quieter than 
 was its wont, but that her absorption and Tyrrell s 
 was deeper: she dismissed the idea. What was there 
 for him to see? Her guest had been holding her 
 hand. In that there was nothing so dreadful. Men 
 and women held each other s hands, Edith argued, 
 when they danced together. Besides, Tyrrell had 
 given the explanation of fortune-telling, and that 
 should have been sufficient. Whatever the circum 
 stances of his entrance, and whatever he deduced 
 from whatever he saw, Charley should have con 
 cealed his suspicions, if suspicions there must be, 
 until he was alone with his wife. Tyrrell certainly 
 would have done that; Jim would not have sus 
 pected. 
 
 What could Charley be saying now? What, in 
 deed, was he not capable of saying? It might con- 
 
 287
 
 288 JIM 
 
 cern her dignity; it was certain to concern her well- 
 being. Edith resolved to try to hear it. 
 
 She reached the upper floor and this decision at 
 the same time. She leaned over the stair-railing 
 in her endeavor to hear the talk that was going 
 on in the parlor below. It was useless: her ears 
 could detect nothing save an unintelligible mur 
 mur of their voices, now antiphonal, now merged; 
 no separate word reached her; even their tones were 
 dulled and made meaningless by a closed door. 
 Nevertheless, she held her strained position until 
 she heard Mame returning from the missionary- 
 meeting. 
 
 Edith retreated to the sitting-room. Mame had 
 come up the stairs quickly, and, as she stood blink 
 ing behind her thick spectacles in the light of the 
 sitting-room lamp, Edith felt the breeze of a dim 
 disapproval emanate from that uncertain figure. 
 
 " Is someone in the parlor? " asked Mame. 
 
 Edith nodded. 
 
 "Who is it?" 
 
 " Mr. Tyrrell." 
 
 " Oh! " Mame took off her hat and sat down. 
 " He s not alone there, is he? " 
 
 " Charley s with him." 
 
 " I thought it was him Charley went down to the 
 Waldorf to meet." 
 
 " He did." Edith was annoyed by this mild but 
 persistent examination. " There was some sort of 
 mistake about the engagement, and Mr. Tyrrell 
 came up here." 
 
 " And Charley came afterward?"
 
 JIM 289 
 
 Edith did not reply. She sat down and opened a 
 book. 
 
 "And Charley came afterward?" Mame kept 
 it up. 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 Mame reached for her work-basket from the 
 center-table on which the lamp stood. She took out 
 some sewing. 
 
 " Did he have to wait long? " she asked. 
 
 Edith was not reading, but she would not raise 
 her glance from her book. 
 
 " Did who have to wait long? " 
 
 " Well, either of them, dear. If one did, the 
 other did, didn t he? I was thinking of Mr. 
 Tyrrell." 
 
 " Not very long," said Edith. 
 
 Mame sewed for a while in silence, her head bent 
 close to her work. 
 
 " Do you know," she said, presently, " I thought 
 when I came in I saw you leaning over the banister." 
 
 Edith said nothing, but she felt the blood in her 
 cheeks. 
 
 " We had a fine meeting," Mame pursued: " real 
 splendid, it was. Sallie Hamilton made the open 
 ing prayer, and I never heard her pray better. The 
 treasurer s report showed we d made forty-two dol 
 lars and thirty-four cents at the bazaar last week." 
 She paused and looked at the ceiling for inspira 
 tion. " Or was it forty-two dollars and forty-three 
 cents?" 
 
 Edith left decision to the ceiling, and, that refus 
 ing information, Mame went on: 
 
 " Mrs. Colly made a good speech, too. She really
 
 290 JIM 
 
 near convinced me the home missionary field was 
 almost as important as the foreign one; but she 
 did have to admit a land where everybody s Chris 
 tians, like ours, can t be quite so important as where 
 everybody s a heathen. And as I said to Mrs. Ham 
 ilton on the way home, at least we ve taught them 
 to wear clothes and that s a great deal." 
 
 It was evident that Edith must say something. 
 She had thought of the van Houyz doctrine con 
 cerning clothes. 
 
 " A great deal," she assented, her eyes on her 
 book. Charley seemed to be keeping Tyrrell a long 
 time. What was it that was happening down 
 there? 
 
 " You d have been interested at the meeting," 
 said Mame. 
 
 "Yes," said Edith. (If only Mame had not 
 come back so soon, and if only the eavesdropping 
 had been attempted from the hall instead of from 
 the stairs!) 
 
 Mame s vacuous face was turned upon Edith. 
 
 " I wish you d go with me sometimes. It d been 
 more profitable to-night, for instance, than staying 
 here alone." 
 
 Edith shut her book with a bang. She stood up. 
 
 " I don t care about such things," she said, 
 sharply. 
 
 " I know you don t," sighed Mame. " I wish you 
 did." 
 
 " And I won t have you hinting about what I ve 
 been doing while you were gone." 
 
 " Why, Edith " Mame s mouth opened in 
 
 amazement.
 
 JIM 291 
 
 " I won t ! I won t have it ! " She turned to the 
 door. " I m going to bed." 
 
 But as she stood there she heard the men come 
 from the parlor into the hall. Then the front door 
 closed on Tyrrell s departure, and Charley came up 
 stairs. 
 
 He entered the sitting-room as Edith was leav 
 ing it. His broAvs were contracted, his mouth 
 squared; in his throat a jealous anger was strain 
 ing almost absurdly. 
 
 " Mame," said he, " go to bed. I want to say 
 something to Edith." 
 
 Mame s eyes blinked, but she left the room with 
 out a word. 
 
 2. Husband and wife waited until they heard the 
 sister s footsteps reach the higher regions of the 
 house; they waited until the last sound of her prog 
 ress had quite died away. Then Edith hurried to 
 speak. To say the first word and capture the role of 
 the wronged party is to win the opening skirmish of 
 most domestic battles, and Edith lost no time now. 
 
 "You disgrace me!" she declared. Her voice 
 shook, but only with rage; eyes and cheeks were 
 ablaze; her nostrils quivered. 
 
 She was momentarily successful. They stood there 
 facing each other, she with her head high, Charley 
 glowering, but baffled. 
 
 " Disgrace you? " He could not follow her. " / 
 disgrace you? " 
 
 " Oh, you know well enough what I mean think 
 ing these things of me and letting Mr. Tyrrell see 
 that you think them."
 
 292 JIM 
 
 " Did I say a single word? " 
 You didn t have to. You looked as solemn as 
 a funeral and as angry as a mad bull. I saw it 
 and he saw it. You needn t think he ll put money 
 in your invention if you keep this up. The idea 
 of you suspecting me like that! " 
 
 But there she gave him an opening. He turned 
 on her. His bloodshot eyes were like hot coals, 
 the bags under them were black. 
 
 " It was perfectly evident that you were trying 
 to flirt with him. Why shouldn t I suspect you?" 
 His breath came short. " I know what you re think 
 ing," he burst out. " You re making more of your 
 comparisons. I see you making them in your own 
 mind and hiding them there every day comparing 
 me with Jim ! " 
 
 Edith s rages were seldom ineffective. Charley 
 had probed her secret. It was a secret of which 
 she herself was scarcely conscious; it was a sore 
 secret because, however often she might think of 
 some good point in Jim, she hated Jim the more 
 that she thought of any virtue in him; but her pres 
 ent husband had found a half truth and had drawn 
 it from that inner self which resents the bringing 
 of its concepts to light. She glared at Charley 
 as a puma glares before it springs. Her bosom 
 rose and fell; her brown eyes launched green 
 rays. 
 
 "You invite comparison!" she cried. "You in 
 vite it. Jim would never have suspected me like 
 this." 
 
 Charley did not quail: his jealousy was too hot. 
 He bent toward her.
 
 JIM 293 
 
 ; The more fool Jim," he said: " and you and I 
 know that better than anybody." 
 
 What they had done to the hurt of each other 
 when they joined together to hurt Jim! The words 
 struck her face first white and then crimson. Whether 
 from the force of the attack, or because she could 
 think of no more potent way of repelling it, 
 Edith started back and collapsed, sobbing, on a 
 sofa. 
 
 If she had a mind to faint, Charley would not 
 regard it. He had, and he meant to keep, the upper 
 hand. He merely strode closer and stood threat 
 eningly above her. 
 
 "If he ever strikes me!" she thought. "Jim 
 never struck me. If this man ever strikes me, I ll 
 leave him: I ll- 
 
 You forget," he was saying, " that you suspected 
 me, and for the same reason. You made me fire my 
 stenographer. You made me fire Miss Girodet, and 
 now you ve got just a moment, please; don t in 
 terrupt now you ve got to drop Bob Tyrrell." 
 
 He had beaten. She tried one more attack with 
 that one of her weapons which came readiest to 
 hand: she tried hysterics, but her physical contor 
 tions were as ugly to him as her mental had been, 
 and, quite suddenly, she felt the last ounce of her 
 resistance leave her. It would come back again; 
 it would be renewed; but not to-night. To-night all 
 that she wanted was the end of this quarrel. A mad 
 ness for rest possessed her. The thought of quiet 
 shimmered in her brain as the false vision of a pool 
 shimmers in the brain of a man lost in the desert 
 and perishing for thirst. She would have promised
 
 294 JIM 
 
 anything for it. She did promise what Charley 
 asked. 
 
 " I don t care if I never see or speak to Mr. Tyr 
 rell again," she vowed; " and I never will." 
 
 " All right," said Charley. 
 
 Still sobbing, she got up to go. She hoped that 
 he would not come to bed just yet; but, even at 
 that moment, her sense for the practical painfully 
 asserted itself. 
 
 " And then," she continued, with averted face, " if 
 we drop him, where will you get the money that 
 you ve got to get? What did you say to him to 
 night?" 
 
 Charley turned away. 
 
 " Never you mind about that," he said in a dust- 
 dry echo of his old chuckle. " I ll get the money, all 
 right." 
 
 He would pay no further attention to her. He 
 left her on the landing as she went to their bed 
 room, and, though she sobbed so hard that she was 
 sure he must hear through the door which she 
 immediately closed, he strolled calmly down the 
 stairs. 
 
 She knew he was going to the dining-room to com 
 pose himself by drinking. She was glad that he did 
 not follow her. 
 
 3. Beneath all his arrogant anger, Charley, as 
 he settled himself beside a bottle in the dining-room, 
 felt something like a reasonable satisfaction with his 
 night s work. He reflected on his recent talk with 
 Tyrrell, and, reflecting on this, he smiled commen 
 dation at his ability to manage women. For he now
 
 JIM 295 
 
 assured himself that Edith s tears had proved she 
 really loved him, and so he concluded that he had 
 merely properly checked her at the start of a little 
 flirtation. He had succeeded in keeping from her 
 what he had said to their guest; he had left her in 
 a healthy state of uncertainty and fear; and yet his 
 talk with Tyrrell had been wholly friendly and re 
 sulted in no more than the fixing of a final business 
 appointment for the next day. 
 
 It was to this end that Tyrrell had wanted to see 
 him. The Bostonian explained, what he did not 
 wish to say through a telephone, that the stock he 
 wanted to rid himself of would be disposed of at 
 private sale on the morrow to certain officers of a 
 company competing with that which issued the stock. 
 The proceeds would, of course, go into the Vanaman 
 Sounder Company. 
 
 Charley poured himself a fresh drink and smiled 
 at his good fortune. The luck had changed at last. 
 He would beat Jim at the money game beat him 
 hopelessly and there was a pleasant irony in the 
 fact that it was Jim s own work, Jim s " Tango," 
 which had given the last spur to Charley s endeav 
 ors. They would make him, in the end, one of the 
 richest men in America. 
 
 There was no need to worry any more about mate 
 rial matters; nor was there now any need to worry 
 about Edith. Charley had decided that she should 
 be protected from temptation and that, for this rea 
 son, Tyrrell should never again enter the Vanaman 
 house; but the inventor intended that these matters 
 should be arranged diplomatically: if the Bostonian
 
 296 JIM 
 
 ever realized it, he would realize it only after his 
 money had passed into Charley s hands. 
 
 For the sounder had now reached the last stage 
 of its trial existence. The next fortnight would, its 
 inventor did not conceal from himself, prove either 
 its success or its inventor s ruin. By the use of the 
 last lies and the last appeals, duns could be kept 
 waiting that much longer, and by the end of that 
 time a corporation must be afloat. Charley had 
 taken the perilous steps. A vast deal of advertising 
 had been done. There were bills, new and old, from 
 the newspapers, and heavier bills from the job- 
 printers, the old long overdue, all clamoring for pay 
 ment. A single suit for debt, and his entire scheme 
 would come crashing about his head; Tyrrell s help, 
 and he would triumph. Well, Tyrrell was going to 
 help. . . . 
 
 That night, after he had drunk more than was 
 good for him, the successful manager of women and 
 investors went to bed serenely certain; but the next 
 morning there happened something on which he had 
 not counted. He failed to count on it because he 
 did not know his wife. 
 
 4. His wife waited nervously for ten o clock. 
 At ten o clock she was going to telephone for Tyr 
 rell. It would be perilous to call him before that 
 hour: she knew that men do not like to be brought 
 direct from bed to business, and Tyrrell, who 
 stopped at his club when in New York, never came 
 down to breakfast before ten. 
 
 She had been thinking things over. The exhaus 
 tion of her quarrel had lessened; she was still tired,
 
 JIM 297 
 
 but her very physical weariness stirred her to ab 
 normal nervous activity. Money, she knew, she 
 and Charley must have and have immediately: dur 
 ing the past few days she had learned enough of the 
 new company to know that. Charley s ruin would 
 no longer have meant much to her had it not in 
 volved her own, but it did involve her own: she 
 was tied to this man to sink or swim. If he sank, 
 she must go down with him; if he swam to affluence 
 if he swam at all, it would be to affluence she 
 would probably be no more unhappy than most mar 
 ried women. Tied to him, she had her just claims 
 upon him; without her concurrence, Charley had no 
 right to throw away their common chances of sal 
 vation. Jim would not have done such a thing, fool 
 as Jim was and he was rich and successful now, 
 while she was poor and wretched: if only to show 
 Jim she did not need him, she would save herself 
 and Charley with her. She remembered how she 
 had once resolved that Charley must be more suc 
 cessful than Jim, and that she would make him so: 
 to-day her one desire was to save Charley in order 
 to save herself. 
 
 Her husband had gone to his work without a 
 further hint of what he had said to Tyrrell, and 
 Edith was too proud to ask him again. She was 
 satisfied that, if Charley had brought about an open 
 rupture, he could not get the money elsewhere: she 
 had learned the emptiness of his boasting. If, on 
 the other hand, he thought he had smoothed Tyrrell 
 by diplomacy well, she fancied she knew Tyrrell 
 better than Charley knew him, and she had no faith 
 in Charley s shirt-sleeve diplomacy. A vow wrung
 
 298 JIM 
 
 from her as her husband had wrung from her that 
 vow never to see or communicate with Tyrrell had 
 no binding power. Besides, and apart from all the 
 demands of material necessity, her former feeling 
 for Tyrrell had now returned in its full force. . . . 
 
 It was hard to wait. She watched the clock as 
 eagerly as she had once looked at it when awaiting 
 Charley. The minutes dragged, and Mame was an 
 noying. On most mornings, Edith s sister-in-law was 
 busy directing household matters, but to-day she 
 buzzed about Edith like a persistent fly: she hovered 
 about the sitting-room door. When at last the hall- 
 clock struck ten, she came in and sat down. Edith 
 waited for ten minutes more. Then she got up. 
 
 " Where are you going? " asked Mame. 
 
 Her mild tone angered Edith, who now decided 
 to go to the nearest pay-station and telephone from 
 there ; she ought to have thought of that in the first 
 place. 
 
 " Out," she said. 
 
 "What on earth for?" 
 
 " I want to get something." If the woman held 
 her much longer, Tyrrell would have left his club, 
 and there was no telling where to look for him 
 then. 
 
 " What do you want to get? " Mame inquired. 
 
 " I some tooth-paste," said Edith. 
 
 " I only asked," Mame explained, " because I 
 have to go out in a minute. Why can t I get it 
 for you? " 
 
 There was nothing to do but let her go. 
 
 She took an interminable time going, but she 
 went at last, and, so soon as the front-door closed
 
 JIM 299 
 
 on her, Edith darted downstairs to the telephone 
 in the hall. 
 
 The exchange was slow in making the connection, 
 and, when the club had answered, what seemed an 
 inexcusable time was needed to bring Tyrrell to his 
 end of the wire. There was every reason for hurry: 
 Edith did not waste preliminaries; she directly 
 apologized for her husband s rudeness. 
 
 " I hope you didn t much mind. He s all worked 
 up over his invention," she explained, " and he s 
 really not himself." Why blink facts? She went 
 on : " If he d only been himself, of course he wouldn t 
 have been so foolish as to think what you couldn t 
 help seeing he did think." 
 
 " Oh ! " Tyrrell s voice sounded dryly in her 
 ears. " So that s it, is it? " 
 
 She had made a terrible blunder: she saw it then. 
 Charley had used diplomacy, and his diplomacy had, 
 after all, succeeded. She should have proceeded 
 more slowly and, before committing herself, found 
 out from Tyrrell exactly what had happened. But 
 it was too late now: she must make the best of 
 matters. 
 
 " I was afraid that was it," she answered. " Of 
 course, he didn t say 
 
 Tyrrell interrupted she could not remember that 
 he had ever interrupted her before: 
 
 "I see; I see. How absurd of him." 
 
 "Yes," said Edith, "isn t it?" 
 
 " So I suppose you want me, after this, to give 
 you the room that will be better than my company, 
 Mrs. Vanaman? " 
 
 If only she had been face to face with him, her
 
 300 JIM 
 
 task would have been easy: his mobile, sympathetic 
 face always invited her confidence and gave her 
 sympathy : 
 
 "Oh, not that! I only I only wanted you to 
 understand." 
 
 " I understand perfectly," said Tyrrell. 
 
 His voice told her that he did not at all under 
 stand. She felt still more strongly the need of his 
 sympathy. After that difficult night and morning, 
 she yearned for it. But a telephone is a far from 
 sympathetic instrument. . . . 
 
 " Is that all? " came Tyrrell s voice. 
 
 " I don t know," she said, the tears coming to her 
 eyes. " Oh, I m so unhappy about it. Our our 
 friendship " 
 
 "I m sorry, too," said Tyrrell; "but I under 
 stand." 
 
 " But listen," Edith began: "if you ll only- 
 Something made her look over her shoulder. With 
 a quick gasp, she hung up the receiver. 
 
 Mame Vanaman was standing in the doorway. 
 
 5. That is how it happened that, at his office, 
 Charley, at the moment when Tyrrell should have 
 called there to complete their deal, received, instead 
 of a visit, a messenger-borne letter in which the 
 prospective investor curtly regretted that certain re 
 verses on the market made it impossible for him to 
 offer the money that the Vanaman Sounder required 
 for a new lease of life. It was only a few minutes 
 later that, one after the other, the lawyers of three 
 of the sounder s creditors called Charley on the tele 
 phone and threatened to enter suit immediately un-
 
 JIM 301 
 
 less at least partial payments were made on their 
 creditors bills. 
 
 Charley crumpled down into the swivel-chair be 
 fore his desk. The blueprints were dancing on the 
 wall, the sounder mocked him from the table. He 
 was alone with ruin. 
 
 Automatically, he opened the bottom drawer of 
 his desk, in which he had lately been keeping a bot 
 tle of whisky. He brought out the bottle and a glass 
 and started to pour himself a drink. . . . 
 
 It was the end. There was nothing more. This 
 was what marrying Jim Trent s wife had brought 
 him to. He had emptied every coffer of resource; 
 pledged his credit thrice over; borrowed the last ob 
 tainable cent from the last acquaintance. Mame 
 would do nothing; he knew that; she would stick 
 to his father s advice : she was a fool to do it, but, 
 in the very face of his disaster, she would do it 
 
 He had more than filled the glass, and the whisky 
 was running over on his hand. 
 
 He was disgraced and ruined irretrievably. If 
 only Mame were not a fool, if she could only see 
 her own advantage. . . . 
 
 His heedless eye fell on a pigeon-hole in his desk 
 from which a folded gray paper protruded. Spill 
 ing the whisky, he drank with a shaking hand. 
 
 Then it was that he remembered the power-of- 
 attorney that his sister had given him. . . .
 
 EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER 
 
 WHEN Charley came home that evening, he 
 was a frightened and bewildered man: 
 frightened because of what he had done; 
 bewildered because he could not see the course of 
 events that had made his action imperative. There 
 should be no difficulty about keeping Mame in the 
 dark until the thoroughly launched sounder had 
 earned enough money to replace what the brother 
 had misappropriated if that sum in excess of the 
 misappropriation, still required for the launching, 
 could be secured but the fact that the misappro 
 priation had been made was hard to bear. There 
 might even be no trouble, after a little further tam 
 pering with Mame s fortune, in getting along with 
 out Tyrrell s aid, but the fact that Tyrrell had with 
 drawn was sinister. In the circumstances, the last 
 person Vanaman wanted to talk about was Tyrrell, 
 and yet about Tyrrell, as it chanced, he had almost 
 immediately to talk. The last person he wanted to 
 see was Mame, and yet Mame was the first person 
 he asked for. 
 
 "Where s Mame?" he inquired of Edith, who 
 stood as if waiting for him in the upstairs sitting- 
 room. 
 
 She saw him as a loose, slouching figure, a man 
 with a dull gaze that became furtive when he spoke 
 to her. He saw her a little worn and dowdy 
 enough dowdy to make him recall, even at such a 
 
 302
 
 JIM 303 
 
 time, how neat she had always seemed when she was 
 the wife of Jim but still with much of her old pret- 
 tiness, in her face a strange mixture of triumph, 
 defiance, and timidity. 
 
 " She s gone," said Edith. 
 
 "Gone?" gasped Charley. It seemed as if his 
 sister might have achieved the impossible: might 
 have learned of what he had done. " What do you 
 mean gone ? " 
 
 " She s left," said Edith, slowly. " And because 
 she went, the maid and cook went, too. They never 
 did like me any better than Mame did." Her voice 
 sharpened. " And I won t do the housework," she 
 added. " I may as well tell you that right now. I 
 never had to do any housework until you un 
 til Jim never made me do any, and I won t do 
 
 it now." 
 
 Charley heard only the first words and the men 
 tion of the man that somehow still remained his 
 rival. 
 
 "Jim!" he nearly shouted. "What do I care 
 about Jim? Where s Mame? That s what I want 
 to know." 
 
 " And it s what I m telling you. She s gone." 
 
 " Do you mean to say to me that you ve suc 
 ceeded at last in driving my sister out of her own 
 house? " 
 
 Edith was now resolutely calm. 
 
 " If you had your rights," she said, " it would be 
 no more her house than yours and mine." 
 
 He waved this aside: 
 
 " She s gone for good? " 
 
 " So she told me."
 
 304 JIM 
 
 Charley felt his heart freeze in his breast. If 
 Edith and Mame had quarreled, then Mame would 
 regard him as on Edith s side, would assume that 
 he was his own sister s enemy. If the quarrel had 
 indeed resulted in Mame s being driven from the 
 house, then Mame would almost certainly search for 
 new allies: she was a woman unable to exist with 
 out friends and, in the lightest change of her daily 
 life, must seek a counselor. The counselor that, 
 out of her own home, she would be sure to seek 
 was Zoller Zoller, who had been her father s law 
 yer; Zoller, who was a member of her church; 
 Zoller, who had always suspected Charley and might 
 even now be asking questions about that power-of- 
 attorney. All the rage went out of Charley; this 
 was no time for rage; this was a time only to save 
 himself from a situation that might end in his ap 
 prehension as a thief. 
 
 " Good God! " he gasped. " We mustn t let her 
 go! Where d she go, Edith? I ve got to go right- 
 after her and bring her back." 
 
 Edith supposed that he was merely whining over 
 the departure of a sister whom he now preferred 
 to his wife : " She said she was going to stop for 
 a time at Mrs. Hamilton s. I daresay you know the 
 address, for Mrs. Hamilton is an officer in one of 
 Mame s church-societies." She had spoken coldly. 
 Now her cheeks and her voice warmed together: 
 " But I want you to understand one thing, Charley: 
 you can t bring her back here if I am to stay. I 
 won t live with her any more." 
 
 "You won t? You ve got to!" Vanaman s
 
 JIM 305 
 
 mystification overcame him. " In Heaven s name, 
 what s happened?" he asked. 
 
 Edith had known all along that she would have 
 to tell. It was something to be able to tell it be 
 fore her sister-in-law had the chance. Her lips 
 parted in a smile that was partly fearful, partly 
 defiant. 
 
 " I was worried," she said, " about what happened 
 between you and Mr. Tyrrell last night. I was 
 afraid you might antagonize him, so s he wouldn t 
 put his money into the sounder. He wouldn t put 
 it in if nobody smoothed down that embarrassment 
 of last night. You d made me promise not to see 
 him, so I phoned. Well, perhaps you d made me 
 promise not even to speak to him; but I phoned, 
 anyhow. I simply said you were worried by busi 
 ness-troubles, by not being able to get the money 
 that would make the sounder make a fortune 
 
 Charley swore softly, but Edith was proceeding: 
 
 " Mame heard me. She d been hanging around 
 all morning, and she was queer last night when she 
 came in from that missionary-meeting, too. She d 
 gone out on some errand this morning; but she got 
 back a good deal quicker than was natural. I think 
 she did it on purpose; I think she hurried back and 
 sneaked in. I believe she listened. She never liked 
 me; she never once came to see me when we were 
 downtown. I was always sure she was spiteful and 
 jealous of my place in this house. Anyhow, she 
 heard just enough to know I was talking to Mr. 
 Tyrrell, and then it turned out that, last night 5 , 
 she d been listening, too, the way I guessed she had; 
 and she d heard you tell me not to see him. She said
 
 306 JIM 
 
 awful things horrid. She said she wouldn t stay 
 where people did what I d done goings on, she 
 called it and so I simply told her I was your wife 
 and I d stay here as long as you did, whether she 
 liked it or not. Then she packed some of her clothes 
 and left." 
 
 Charley sank upon the lounge on which his wife 
 had sunk the night before. He put his face in his 
 hands. 
 
 " Good God! " he groaned again. 
 
 "What s the matter?" asked Edith. "If you 
 think more of your sister " 
 
 Charley s voice, which came through his fingers, 
 interrupted her. 
 
 " Now I know what was wrong with Tyrrell to 
 day." 
 
 "Wrong with him? Was there something 
 wrong? " All of Edith s strength rose to her self- 
 justification. " Then it wasn t what I said to him 
 to-day; it was because I was too obedient to you to 
 say more. Whatever was wrong was wrong be 
 cause you behaved the way you did last night. None 
 of it would have happened if you hadn t suspected 
 me the way not even Jim the way nobody ever sus 
 pected me before. What was wrong?" 
 
 Charley raised a face that was haggard with fear. 
 It had shrunken lately, and now the skin hung loosely 
 on his cheeks. 
 
 "He s pulled out; he s refused to put up " 
 
 Edith s eyes dilated. She caught her breath. 
 
 " He won t give you the money? It was your 
 fault ! " 
 
 " Not a single cent."
 
 JIM 307 
 
 " But why? Don t he say why? Didn t you ask 
 him?" 
 
 " I didn t see him: he wrote. He didn t give any 
 
 real reason. He just said Charley fumbled in 
 
 a breast-pocket. He produced Tyrrell s note, soiled 
 and crumpled now. " You can read it for your 
 self," he concluded. 
 
 She snatched it from him and read it at a glance. 
 She tossed it to the table: 
 
 " And you didn t try to see him? " 
 
 " Anybody can tell from that it d be no use. So 
 then- 
 
 " It was your fault." 
 
 " Just a moment, please." He would go through 
 with it now: it would be a relief to him to have 
 somebody share this crime and its attendant fear; 
 it would even be a grim satisfaction to see her suf 
 fer a little of what he suffered, and it would be 
 only common justice to open her brown eyes to the 
 results of her quarrel with Mame. He rushed on: 
 " So then the lawyers began phoning. There was 
 
 the Stanfield account for two thousand, and the 
 
 Oh, I forget the names and the figures!" He 
 brushed his hand across his aching forehead. " It s 
 about five times more than I ever had at once, any 
 how. And they d have entered suit to-morrow, and 
 that would have ended the sounder forever. We d 
 have been down and out, you and me. Well, there 
 was that power-of-attorney of Mame s." He took 
 a great breath. " I used it." 
 
 Edith s own face whitened. She drew away from 
 him. 
 
 "Will will they find it out?" she whispered.
 
 308 JIM 
 
 " I don t know. Here s Mame turned en 
 
 emy " 
 
 That wasn t my fault." She passionately justi 
 fied herself. u You know it wasn t my fault. You 
 oughtn t ever to have brought me here." 
 
 " What else could I do? Anyhow, it doesn t mat 
 ter whose fault it was in the beginning. The point 
 is, I ve used her money " 
 
 " Well, if she didn t mean you to use it, why did 
 she give you the power-of-attorney? " 
 
 Charley shook his head wearily. " I don t know. 
 I asked her." 
 
 " I believe," began Edith, " that even then you 
 thought " 
 
 " I don t know. Perhaps I did. But now " 
 
 He stopped. Back in his brain, in the depths of 
 his memory, cluttered over by the business-worries, 
 the jealousies, and the debauches of the past weeks, 
 something rang like a bell, sharp and clear. He 
 rose. He looked up, his eyes staring into hers. 
 Wasn t it you suggested me getting that power-of- 
 attorney from her?" he demanded. "It mas you! 
 Why did you suggest it?" . . . 
 
 For a long moment their glances met, and they 
 probed each other s souls. There was no word said, 
 but there passed between them one of those incan 
 descent flashes of understanding which are so rare 
 between even the happily married. In that flash, as 
 an honest man and wife scarcely ever comprehend 
 each other, Edith comprehended Charley and Char 
 ley comprehended her. By doing together this thing 
 which they had done, by acknowledging it to each 
 other and instinctively expressing their willingness
 
 JIM 309 
 
 to go on with it together, something came back, 
 something was renewed, however temporarily: they 
 were in the same relative positions that they had 
 been in on that night when they definitely began their 
 plot against Jim. 
 
 Slowly she advanced to him; slowly she put her 
 arms around his neck, slowly raised her lips to his. 
 
 What if you did take some of her money?" 
 whispered Vanaman s wife. " Your father wasn t 
 himself when he made that last will; he was half 
 out of his mind. You can pay her back; you can 
 pay her back with interest some day. The inven 
 tion s sure to make money for her we both know 
 that. If you hadn t the right to use a little of it 
 that way, what will she care when she finds it s been 
 a good investment for her? What does it matter 
 so long as she doesn t know ? She needn t ever know. 
 She doesn t suspect. She s not angry with you. 
 Don t worry: we ll fix her. You see her, and then 
 I will, too. Go and see her to-morrow give me 
 to-night, but go and see her to-morrow morning, 
 early. Don t bring her back, but smooth her down. 
 You can do anything you want with her. You know 
 how easy she is." Edith was propelled by the re 
 vival of that forgotten bond of attraction. Her 
 arms tightened; she held him close; as she spoke, 
 her red lips brushed his lips. " The money was half 
 yours by right, Charley more than half. What 
 made your father make a new will? Who made 
 him make it? " 
 
 2. He did not answer, but it was, for this hour, 
 as it had been with them both on that morning
 
 310 JIM 
 
 before the news of the granting of the divorce came 
 to them; as their league against Jim had then brought 
 them together, so their league against Mame the 
 result, as it seemed to them, of the will to plot 
 together that was born when they conspired against 
 Jim brought them together now. Fear fell from 
 them, and within them rose, beating at their tem 
 ples and straining at their throats, the passion which 
 was, after all, the purest emotion that they had in 
 common. They were one again : guilt had once more 
 done for them what marriage could not do.
 
 NINETEENTH CHAPTER 
 
 DOUBT came at the time when it usually ar 
 rives: in the morning. Edith and Charley 
 woke with headaches, for they had drunk 
 a good deal during the night, and showed it. 
 
 Edith, through half-opened eyes, saw that her 
 husband, as he stood before the shaving mirror, 
 looked worn and vulgar. His skin was dull; his 
 prominent eyes were bloodshot as, indeed, they 
 now usually were, and his hair, daily growing 
 thinner and more brittle, showed touches of gray. 
 The rough stubble on his loose cheeks looked like 
 grime, and, as he now sought to remove it, he more 
 than once cut himself with his trembling razor. 
 
 Nor was Charley s vision of his wife more edify 
 ing. To the end, Edith was always able to simulate 
 her earlier beauty when she had time to prepare the 
 simulation; but, under the cruel light of the morn 
 ing, she showed plainly her seniority. It flashed 
 through Vanaman s mind that the best of her was 
 what had been Jim s, and he hated Jim the more be 
 cause of this. 
 
 " Suppose she don t let me jolly her," said Char 
 ley " Mame, I mean." 
 
 " She will," yawned Edith. She did not want to 
 think of unpleasant things; she wanted to go to sleep 
 again. " Bring her back if you must." 
 
 " But suppose I can t fix it," Charley persisted. 
 
 " Then it will be your fault," said his wife. She 
 311
 
 312 JIM 
 
 yawned again; but she would have to think of the 
 unpleasant things: she realized that now. 
 
 " Aren t you going to get up? " asked Vanaman. 
 
 " No," said Edith. 
 
 " But what am I going to do about breakfast? " 
 
 "What am / going to do, Charley? I suppose 
 you can get a cup of coffee on your way over to Mrs. 
 Hamilton s. But don t tell Mame you didn t have 
 one here : that d only please her." 
 
 Charley cut himself again and cried out. Never 
 theless, he did not then upbraid his wife for sloth- 
 fulness; she was an important ally, and allies were 
 few. There was a silence, during which each was 
 thinking of how much hung upon the outcome of 
 the projected visit: Charley that perhaps his very 
 liberty depended upon his bringing Mame back and 
 restoring his own influence over her before Zoller s 
 could reassert itself; Edith that between her and 
 absolute ruin there stood only this figure of the vapid 
 sister-in-law whom she had always despised. Pres 
 ently Edith, who had shut her eyes again, resumed: 
 
 " If she doesn t let herself be smoothed down, 
 that s no reason why she should suspect you ; but 
 if she does suspect you, perhaps we can still bring 
 Mr. Tyrrell around." 
 
 It was what had been in Charley s mind. He did 
 not like to hear his wife suggest it, but he had been 
 about to suggest it himself. Neither believed the 
 excuse that Tyrrell had offered; both knew that they 
 were not expected to believe it. 
 
 Yes," said Charley, " perhaps we d better try. 
 If things don t go right with Mame, we ll talk it 
 over when I come home this evening.
 
 JIM 313 
 
 As he bent over the bed to kiss her good-by, he 
 thought that he had never seen her look so old and 
 unattractive. He was about to put their fortunes 
 to the test; this should have been a farewell into 
 which she poured encouragement, into which she 
 poured something of the ardor that had brought 
 them together on the previous night: she looked at 
 him through half-opened eyes and saw in him only 
 the broken and empty shell of a man. It had all 
 left her: that ardor of the night; she could not give 
 him her mouth; she turned her cheek. It had left 
 him, too : he was relieved that she did not give him 
 her mouth. 
 
 2. Mame s friend, Mrs. Hamilton, lived in an 
 apartment-house on a cross-street, less than half a 
 mile from the Vanamans . It was one of those 
 apartment-houses which the New Yorker loves: the 
 sort that put their best front to the world and im 
 press the street at whatever cost to the inmates. The 
 front was ornate and costly; the carefully gloomed 
 lobby less expensively mimicked a sober wealth and 
 the apartments frankly paid the bills. 
 
 When Charley had passed through a fragile 
 elevator-cage on the third-story and rung at a thin 
 pine-door, he was shown down a dark hallway so 
 narrow that he could not spread his arms in it. At 
 the end of this, he was left to wait for his sister in a 
 little, five-sided room. This was the parlor of the 
 flat, and it appeared to provide the lessee with a 
 game like " Pigs-in-Clover," of which the object was 
 to maneuver the installment-plan furniture of an 
 ordinary parlor into the room without spilling any
 
 3 i 4 JIM 
 
 pieces out of the window. The present lessee had 
 won the game. 
 
 Charley sat down in a chair of imitation 
 mahogany, Chippendale from Grand Rapids. It 
 audibly protested, but it could bear him now, for, 
 from all over his body, the fat had lately been dis 
 appearing, leaving the skin hanging like the silk of 
 a half-inflated balloon. He was close to panic. As 
 he sat there, the fear came to him that perhaps she 
 had already run to Zoller and that Zoller had ques 
 tioned her and learned enough to suspect the truth. 
 The visitor cursed his delay. What a fool he had 
 been to listen to Edith and let the night pass with 
 out intervention ! When Mame came in, he got up 
 and kissed her quickly. 
 
 "Oh, Charley!" she said. 
 
 She wore a cotton dressing-gown, and her hair 
 was in curl-papers. Her vague eyes were red from 
 weeping, and she spoke in the tone she used to 
 employ at her father s bedside. 
 
 Her brother attempted another sort of tone. He 
 tried to be jocular and superior and to make light 
 of her presence here. " Now, then," he said, " what 
 have you children been quarreling about? Wouldn t 
 Edith give you any of her gumdrops? " 
 
 Mame looked at him in a sort of ruminant protest. 
 
 " Oh, Charley," she said, " how can you? " And 
 then she added: "Isn t it awful? My own sister- 
 in-law!" 
 
 He was quaking with fear, but he fought to hold 
 his pose. It was something that Mame, as her man 
 ner indicated, as yet guessed nothing of his own 
 course; but this did not prove that she had not been
 
 JIM 315 
 
 to Zoller: Zoller might well, after questioning her, 
 leave her in the dark until he had verified whatever 
 suspicions he had gathered from the full answers 
 she would have given him. But Charley chuckled. 
 
 " Tut-tut ! " he said. " The thing I think s awful 
 is your not coming right to me instead of running 
 off here to people outside your own family like Mrs. 
 Hamilton and Mr. Zoller." 
 
 Mame s face showed a new light. 
 
 " Why, I never thought of Mr. Zoller," she said. 
 u If there s got to be any legal arrangement about 
 the house, perhaps it would have been better 
 
 Just a moment, please!" Charley could have 
 torn his tongue out: he had actually put the idea 
 into her silly head. " There s no reason for your 
 going to anybody but me : there s every reason why 
 you shouldn t. You know I don t trust Zoller." 
 
 " Poppa did." 
 
 "Well, no matter if he did: you don t want to 
 make a scandal, do you? You don t want to get 
 any lawyers in this." 
 
 " No," said Mame, " I don t want to make things 
 worse than they have to be; but I wouldn t go to 
 Mr. Zoller because he was a lawyer: I d go to him 
 because he was a friend and a man and knew the 
 law." 
 
 The distinction was too fine for Charley. 
 
 " I tell you, you don t need anybody that knows 
 the law. What s the law got to do with it? " 
 
 " I only thought there might be some sort of legal 
 arrangement " 
 
 Did she mean to give him money enough to live 
 away from her? Twenty-four hours ago he would
 
 316 JIM 
 
 have kissed her for the offer; to-day, he knew that 
 he must keep her under his influence and that he 
 must prevent any arrangement of her affairs and 
 his which would involve a careful scrutiny of their 
 entire field. 
 
 "I don t want any arrangement," he said: "I 
 want you." 
 
 Grateful tears came to her eyes. She timidly took 
 his hand. 
 
 That s good of you, Charley. Somehow, I d 
 begun to think you didn t care any more." 
 
 " Of course I care." He patted her shoulder pro- 
 tectingly. "You say you need a friend: well, I m 
 better than a friend I m your brother." 
 
 " I know," she answered, " but you re Edith s 
 husband, too; and you remember what the Bible 
 says : For this cause shall a man leave father and 
 mother, and shall cleave to his wife. I was read 
 ing that last night." 
 
 " But you see I m going to cleave to Edith and 
 you, too," said Charley. " It s all right. You just 
 misunderstood each other, that s all. Now, you get 
 your things together and come right back with me, 
 and we ll explain everything, and everything ll be 
 the way it was before." 
 
 Again the tears filled Mame s eyes, but she shook 
 her head. 
 
 " No, Charley," she said. " I can t go back while 
 Edith s there: I m sorry, but I can t." 
 
 What was the matter with Mame? What had 
 changed her of late from the sister upon whom he 
 could always work his will? 
 
 " Mame," he said, " I m ashamed of you."
 
 JIM 317 
 
 Then," said Mame, " you don t know what hap 
 pened, and I don t know if I ve any right to tell 
 you." 
 
 Had Edith lied to him? Had she concealed some 
 thing? Had she been saying more to Tyrrell than 
 she pretended to have said? Then why had she 
 urged him to come here? Didn t she know Mame 
 would repeat it? Or did she safely count on his 
 sister s sense of duty, which forbade her to make 
 trouble between husband and wife? This whole 
 difficulty was of Edith s making: she had disobeyed 
 him; she broke her promise, she telephoned sur 
 reptitiously to Tyrrell just as, when Jim s wife, she 
 used telephone to Charley. For the minute, he 
 forgot his danger. 
 
 " What was it? " he asked. 
 " I don t know if I ought to tell." 
 " You oughtn t to do anything but tell." 
 He got it out of her: it was nothing more than 
 Edith had owned to. Then he had the difficulty 
 of explaining that Edith had admitted this; that 
 it was of no importance; that he forgave his wife 
 for conduct toward Tyrrell which was essentially 
 incorrect, and that, Edith being sorry for what she 
 had said to Mame, Mame must forgive her, too. 
 
 " If things don t go right with Mame " he had 
 said to his wife : things did not go tremendously right 
 with Mame. She was amazingly fixed. Charley s 
 future was balked, his liberty endangered, by her 
 new-born stubbornness, her twisted sense of duty 
 to herself, and the hundred petty details of a long 
 standing animosity between a sister and her sister- 
 in-law.
 
 318 JIM 
 
 Mame wept a good deal, but her tears were no 
 longer soft. Edith, according to her, had been quite 
 as ready with criticism as Mame had been in Edith s 
 version of their earlier differences and final quarrel. 
 His sister, if only for the sake of peace, could not 
 live again with Edith. 
 
 " I thought you were a religious woman," Char 
 ley sadly upbraided her. 
 
 That was, Mame protested, precisely her point. 
 The religious soul has two duties: one to its neigh 
 bor and the other to itself; it must have charity and 
 it must have self-respect. Mame, though as a Chris 
 tian she forgave, could not, as a self-respecting 
 woman, forget. In the former character, she told 
 her brother that she could share belief in Edith s re 
 pentance, though she thought the repentance only 
 temporary; in the latter, she declared that she could 
 subject herself to no further insult and that, since 
 he demanded the truth, her brother s wife was, in 
 her opinion, a spouse that he had better separate 
 from at once if he did not want soon to have to di 
 vorce her. 
 
 Charley s patience left him. He had been ready 
 enough to suspect Edith and to accuse her in the 
 privacy of their own life, but his frayed nerves re 
 acted against these accusations by a third person. 
 Moreover, he did not forget that the present accuser, 
 if his sister, was also the actual inheritor of money 
 he believed by right to be his. 
 
 He accordingly lost his temper, and there were 
 more tears and a scene, in the course of which Mame 
 declared that, since her only living relative hated 
 her, she would cut the last strand that bound them
 
 JIM 319 
 
 and turn the management of her estate over to her 
 father s lawyer. It took a good deal of tact, of 
 which Charley in his best moments had no large 
 supply, to turn the conversation away from such un- 
 sisterly threats, and he left Mame only partially 
 pacified. The best that he could get from her, even 
 by appeals to religion and family affection, was a 
 promise to " think things over." 
 
 3. He went hopelessly to his hopeless office and 
 passed there a worried day. He telephoned to 
 Edith the result of his interview with Mame. 
 You ve certainly got me into it," he concluded. 
 
 " I told you last night it was your own fault," 
 she answered: " you oughtn t ever to have made me 
 live with her." 
 
 " And I told you there wasn t anything else I 
 could do." 
 
 " Well, what are you going to do now? That s 
 the important thing." 
 
 He said he thought he would have to await 
 Mame s decision and might meanwhile try to obtain 
 an interview with Tyrrell. 
 
 From the latter course Edith dissuaded him. She 
 said it would look as if he were too anxious. 
 
 " Give him another day to think it over in," she 
 advised. " To-night, if you think it s any use, I ll 
 go around with you to see Mame." 
 
 " But she might go to Zoller in the meantime," 
 said Charley. 
 
 " No, she won t. You know she never hurries. 
 She told you she d think it over, and Mame thinks 
 slow."
 
 320 JIM 
 
 " I wonder," Charley added, " why Zoller never 
 mixed in before. He drew the will, and she had to 
 tell him a few things when she turned the estate 
 over to me. I ve always wondered about that, but 
 I was afraid I d only start her to hunting trouble 
 if I asked her." 
 
 Over the wire, Edith s voice came more lightly: 
 That s where I did you a good turn, anyhow. 
 Mame and I were friends then. I said if she told 
 Zoller that, he d try to take the thing out of your 
 hands because he didn t like you; and I said you 
 needed the fees." 
 
 " If she remembers that, it might send her to 
 him now! " 
 
 " Oh, she ll never go to law, no matter what she 
 finds out." 
 
 " Zoller d make her," said Charley; "she always 
 does what the person nearest to her tells her to." 
 
 He rang off. He took the power-of-attorney from 
 the desk and, drinking as he read, perused it even 
 more carefully than on the previous afternoon. 
 There was no misunderstanding its phraseology: it 
 gave him the right to check-out Mame s money only 
 for the running expenses of the Vanaman estate; 
 Leishman had drawn it as directed, but Edith had 
 apparently feared to ask Mame for any wider 
 powers. 
 
 Charley drank steadily throughout the morning. 
 Nearly all of this money might have been legally 
 his. It was even possible Mame had indeed in 
 fluenced his father against him: Mame was a little 
 too good to be true. Besides, the sounder was bound 
 to repay, and Tyrrell might still be brought round.
 
 JIM 321 
 
 Charley would give the sounder a full chance. On 
 the old theory that it is as well to hang if de 
 tected for a sheep as a lamb, he boldly drew an 
 other and larger check against Mame s fortune and, 
 in the face of all danger, proceeded to put forth his 
 invention on what, forgetting that the money was 
 his sister s involuntary contribution, he described as 
 his own hook. 
 
 4. Almost at that instant, Edith was using her 
 own hook, too. She had been left alone in the hide 
 ous house of which every room reminded her of her 
 failures. She saw Charley ruined and herself re 
 duced to imploring the charity of Uncle Gregory 
 or returning, if it was permitted her, to the monot 
 ony of Ayton. This was what Jim had brought her 
 to. She remembered the dreams of her girlhood 
 and she cried over them. She had not wanted more 
 than other women she was sure of that and she 
 had once loved Charley truly and wholly. Now she 
 must pay. 
 
 There must be some way out. She remembered 
 Tyrrell : it all would have been well if Mame had 
 not interrupted that explanation to Tyrrell; Edith s 
 misfortune had not been in telephoning him, but in 
 not being permitted to finish telephoning. If she 
 could have made an appointment with him and seen 
 him face to face, she would have saved the situation. 
 
 Well, Charley had agreed that it might still be 
 both necessary and possible to bring Bob Tyrrell 
 around. That was what he agreed before he left 
 to persuade Mame. Edith would try it now; she 
 would complete it was not too late what marplot
 
 322 JIM 
 
 Mame had interrupted yesterday. When Charley 
 telephoned, Edith persuaded him against appealing 
 to Tyrrell. Once before he had failed with Tyrrell : 
 now she would succeed. 
 
 Her telephone caught the Bostonian at his club. 
 
 " I want to see you," she said. " I want you 
 please to take me to lunch somewhere." 
 
 Tyrrell agreed, and it was good to hear his voice. 
 She had not realized how good it would be. 
 
 Edith made a careful toilette. She wore her best 
 gown, and she took pains about the crayon and 
 rouge. She did not want their work to be evident 
 as theirs, but she wanted to look her best. . . . 
 
 5. He had named a quiet restaurant, but an ex 
 pensive one. As Edith entered it, she felt the wisdom 
 of his choice; but, when she was seated opposite 
 her pleasant host, she was startled to see, at tables 
 near her, two faces with which she had once been 
 familiar. She did not know what hurt her more: 
 the cold stare with which her bow of recognition was 
 met by that Muriel Carson whom she had liked and 
 respected during her life with Jim and had not seen 
 since the divorce ; or the waved hand of Effie Mitch 
 ell, who, with her cheeks painted red and her nose 
 powdered violet, greeted Edith across the room as 
 comrade hails comrade. Edith could scarcely eat 
 until Muriel, with a man who must have been her 
 father, and Effie with a youth who might have been 
 her son, left the restaurant. 
 
 It was wonderful to look from them to Tyrrell, 
 sitting opposite, polite, decorous, easy, wrapped in
 
 JIM 323 
 
 the golden light from the happy doorway that was 
 forbidden her. She looked at him from a glass that 
 had been oftener refilled than had her glass at any 
 of their other meetings. It was long before, look 
 ing at him, she could bring herself to think of the 
 sordid motives that, she still told herself, had 
 prompted her to ask him to bring her here. 
 
 " I don t know what you must think of us," she 
 said, when she finally decided that the moment to 
 speak of such things could no longer be postponed. 
 ;< Why us ? " he asked, his glance full upon hers. 
 Her eyes lighted with the old feeling of conquest 
 to be gained, but she had the grace to let them 
 drop. 
 
 " Why not? " was all she had to say. 
 They had finished a luncheon chosen with the care 
 and delicacy that such a luncheon deserved, and, over 
 their cordial glasses, were delaying departure. 
 About them, the chatter at the other tables, the noise 
 of dishes and the brass of an orchestra in a balcony 
 almost over their heads, made Edith forget the in 
 sult of Muriel Carson s snub and Effie Mitchell s 
 greeting. She felt that now she and this handsome 
 host were as unnoticed as two children at a circus. 
 If one can hide by night in a large city, he can 
 generally hide by noon in a great restaurant, and 
 Tyrrell and Edith, though they did not consider the 
 necessity of being hidden save from the possible 
 jealous gaze of Vanaman, were at last temporarily 
 secure from the interruptions of their own world. 
 Sitting at their ease, they put aside their smiles and 
 lighter talk and drifted, as they used to when alone, 
 to something personal if not intimate.
 
 324 JIM 
 
 " I wonder," said Tyrrell, slowly, " if you know 
 what a beautiful woman you are? " 
 
 There was perfect sincerity in his voice, and Edith, 
 after her elaborate preparations, was, indeed, look 
 ing her best; but she knew the ground to be dan 
 gerous. Besides, they had somehow not yet talked 
 of what she had told herself she came here to talk 
 about. 
 
 " Don t," she said and without coquetry. " I m 
 glad you think so; but is that all?" 
 
 She was searching her soul. Somehow she won 
 dered how much beauty counted; how much it 
 brought her, and how much it might yet bring. She 
 thought of Charley with no feeling of disloyalty; 
 indeed, with little feeling at all of Mame, of her 
 dreary life in the old-fashioned Vanaman home, 
 where her presence had been so obviously tolerated 
 only because of Charley s relations to her. She 
 thought of what now threatened that house and her 
 self as one of its inmates. She hated her whole 
 drab past and feared her whole dark future; she 
 made a movement as if her shackles were material 
 things and she could shake them from her wrists. 
 
 What Tyrrell saw was a pretty gesture of in 
 quiry from a beautiful woman. 
 
 " All? " he repeated. " No. You are a very brave 
 and fine woman, too." 
 
 " I don t know," she said, honestly. " I try to be 
 brave but it s hard sometimes, isn t it?" 
 
 " It is hard," he answered. " I think we all 
 try. It must be wretched for you in that dismal 
 house." 
 
 " You do think it dismal, don t you ? " How could
 
 JIM 325 
 
 he think it anything else, this easy-mannered man 
 of the world whose grave eyes so earnestly studied 
 her? 
 
 " Good Heavens ! " said Tyrrell. " Surely no one 
 ever called it gay! " 
 
 They both laughed. Then Edith continued: 
 
 " I think Mame does or used to." 
 
 You mean the dumpy I beg your pardon 
 
 the- 
 
 But Edith did not object. 
 
 " That s just it," she agreed. " And her mind s 
 somehow dumpy, too." She did not think it nec 
 essary to say that Mame was no longer an inmate 
 of the prison. 
 
 You don t belong there," he said at length. 
 
 "Where do I belong?" 
 
 " Well, you belong here everywhere where it 
 is bright and happy and merry 
 
 Edith had been listening with flushed face. Her 
 dreams called her; the door of light called her; the 
 thought that Jim had gained what she so wanted 
 urged her on. 
 
 "Yes," she said. "Not that I want it always; 
 but once in a while I do belong where there s music 
 and dancing where people dress well and live well 
 and enjoy life. I ve always wanted those things, 
 and somehow I ve always just missed them." 
 
 There were unshed tears in her brown eyes. 
 
 " I think I understand," said Tyrrell, quietly; 
 " and I think you ll understand me if I say it s 
 hard luck." 
 
 Edith fought back her tears. She smiled. 
 
 " Oh, it will come! " she said. " I know it will "
 
 326 JIM 
 
 she recalled her errand here " if Charley ever 
 gets his sounder through, and can give a little time 
 to me instead of to his invention!" She lowered 
 her eyes. " It s that I wanted to talk to you about," 
 she went on. " Charley " 
 
 She stopped: Tyrrell was regarding her with a 
 puzzled smile. 
 
 " I think," he said, " that, if we are going to dis 
 cuss jealousy, / might be jealous of him." 
 
 Edith s glance intensified. She remembered how 
 she and this man had danced together, been one be 
 ing and moved with one rhythm to music and joy. 
 Her starved heart suddenly cried out in protest 
 against life and in longing for a little joy. If only 
 she had met Tyrrell sooner. If only 
 
 But Charley s invention was what she must now 
 think of, and she brought herself to it. 
 
 " I m sorry he acted the way he did Charley, 
 I mean," she said. " I shouldn t have telephoned 
 to you yesterday. I only wanted to tell you to 
 explain to say he was so excited, and we all know 
 how important it is to get his invention on the mar 
 ket quickly. Everything upsets him now, while he s 
 only waiting, more than it should." 
 
 Tyrrell ignored, as completely as Edith, the ex 
 cuse that he had sent Charley for the withdrawal 
 of support. 
 
 " I think the sounder is a good thing, Mrs. Vana- 
 man," he said. " I ve looked it over pretty thor 
 oughly. I suppose it is hard to find people to put 
 up capital on chance 
 
 " It is a good investment," said Edith. 
 
 " Yes, it s a good investment. I tell you honestly,
 
 JIM 327 
 
 I would have gone into it if your husband hadn t 
 been " 
 
 " I know," said Edith, softly. " But I believe he s 
 over that: really I do. Of course it must have 
 looked a little queer to him, to come into the room 
 and find you holding my hand, even if " she smiled 
 at memory of their innocent lie " even if you were 
 only telling my fortune." 
 
 Her cheeks were warm with color. Tyrrell 
 caught her glance and held it, but the waiter, grow 
 ing impatient, was demanding: 
 
 " Anything more, sir? " 
 
 " No," said Tyrrell, sharply. " Bring me my 
 bill." 
 
 Edith sighed. Did he mean this as a final 
 refusal? 
 
 " Don t you think," asked her host, " that we d 
 better finish our talk at another luncheon soon?" 
 
 "Isn t it finished?" 
 
 " Do you think it is? " 
 
 "I don t know; I " He had given her no 
 
 answer; he had left everything in the air she must 
 know she must know! 
 
 " Well, then, we might continue it, at any rate," 
 said Tyrrell, " some day next week. Say Tuesday." 
 
 " You might telephone, of course," suggested 
 Edith. 
 
 Yes, but " 
 
 " Oh, it s perfectly safe at eleven in the morning." 
 She would not pretend to misunderstand him now. 
 " I m always alone then. Besides, you needn t say 
 who you are." 
 
 41 Well Tuesday."
 
 328 JIM 
 
 " Perhaps." She made a final effort. " But about 
 about the invention? " 
 
 Tyrrell s face was undecided. 
 
 " You know how I feel," he said. 
 
 " Yes," agreed Edith, with an upward glance, 
 " but if it s a good thing " 
 
 " I ll see," he concluded. He looked at her 
 squarely. " I ll see," he repeated. 
 
 There were some things that he did not like to 
 put plainly, even to himself.
 
 TWENTIETH CHAPTER 
 
 A} soon, that evening, as Charley s latch-key 
 sounded in the door of the Vanaman house, 
 Edith hurried into the vestibule to meet him. 
 He had left his office somewhat earlier than usual 
 because, after the strain of the second robbery of 
 Mame s estate, he had felt the need of a further 
 stimulant, and the supply in his desk he had ex 
 hausted by mid-afternoon. He had remained down 
 town drinking until the hour at which he cus 
 tomarily returned home; but he was not drunk: in 
 the present state of his nerves, a good deal of liquor 
 was required to conquer him. He was, rather, more 
 than commonly susceptible to impressions, and he 
 now at once saw by his wife s face that something had 
 gone wrong. 
 
 "What s the matter?" he demanded. 
 
 Edith closed the door of the vestibule behind her. 
 
 "Where on earth have you been?" she whis 
 pered. 
 
 " At my office. Where d you suppose? " 
 
 " Well, you weren t there about half an hour ago. 
 Somebody went to see you, and you weren t there. 
 The people in the next office said they thought you d 
 gone home. So he came up here. He s here now. 
 He just came in. He s in the parlor." 
 
 Her voice shook. It frightened Vanaman. 
 
 "What are you talking about?" he asked. 
 "Who s here?" 
 
 329
 
 330 JIM 
 
 " Mr. Zoller." 
 
 " Zoller? " Charley stupidly repeated. " Mame s 
 lawyer? What does he want?" 
 
 " I don t know. I told you he s only just got here. 
 I can t guess. He won t say anything to me, and 
 I don t dare ask. I thought you told me Mame 
 wouldn t do anything till she d mulled it all over 
 in her own mind." 
 
 " That s what she promised," said Charley. He 
 leaned against the wall of the vestibule, panting. 
 " Oh, Lord ! " he said. 
 
 Edith dragged at his hand. 
 
 " You can t stay here," she urged. " You ve got 
 to go in. The longer we wait, the queerer it will 
 look to him." 
 
 Charley passed a trembling hand across his eyes. 
 
 " I can t go in," he muttered. 
 
 But Edith dragged at him. 
 You must. You ve got to. Come on. Do you 
 want to ruin us? Come on into the dining-room 
 first and have a drink to steady your nerves." 
 
 He struggled. "You ll go along? You ll back 
 me up? " He was pitiful. 
 
 This, she bitterly reflected, was the man she had 
 to count on: this was what Jim had left her. Well, 
 somehow she must pull him through. 
 
 "Yes, yes," she said; "I ll come along; I ll back 
 you up. Only, hurry, hurry! " 
 
 She led him softly into the dining-room. She 
 poured him a large drink, and herself one, the bottle 
 clanging nervously against the glass as she poured. 
 
 " Come on now," she said. " And just remember 
 not to admit anything anything! "
 
 JIM 331 
 
 He stood with the empty glass in his hand, look 
 ing at her. Suddenly he collapsed into a seat and 
 bent his head to the dining-table. 
 
 She ran to him and tried to lift his head; but he 
 held it down. 
 
 " Come on! " she whispered. 
 
 11 1 can t," he groaned. ..." I m afraid." 
 
 Edith pulled at his shoulders. She ground her 
 teeth. He would not budge. 
 
 " You coward! " she said. 
 
 " Oh, it s easy enough for you to talk," said her 
 husband: " you get the money if I win, and if I lose 
 you re just where you were. It s not you that goes 
 to goes to " 
 
 " Jail ! " she concluded for him. " Why don t you 
 say it?" She shook him and his head bobbed until 
 it beat the table so noisily that she feared Zoller, 
 in the next room, might hear. 
 
 Charley turned on her. 
 
 " It was you got me into this," he said. You 
 put me up to it. You got Mame to give me that 
 damned power-of-attorney." 
 
 " If you ll only brace up and listen to me," Edith 
 whispered, " I ll get you out. What are you afraid 
 of? What can he know yet? But the longer you 
 keep him waiting, the more he ll suspect." 
 
 She was afraid to give Charley another drink, 
 and yet she was more afraid not to. She refilled his 
 glass, and he gulped its contents. 
 
 Slowly a little color came into his cheeks. He 
 stood up. 
 
 " You re right, Edith," he said. " The fellow s
 
 332 JIM 
 
 a bluff. He can t know anything yet. I like his 
 
 nerve, coming here " 
 
 Yes, yes," she urged, plucking at his sleeve. She 
 knew that his new courage was a false one, but she 
 must use it before it vanished. " Come on." 
 
 She half pushed, half dragged him into the old- 
 fashioned parlor. 
 
 2. Mr. Zoller was seated on the extreme edge 
 of the stiffest of all the room s stiff chairs. His dry 
 little body was erect, his mouth closed like a sprung 
 trap. He rose slowly as Charley and Edith entered. 
 
 Edith was trembling for the results of her strata 
 gem; her eyes were on her husband. Charley was 
 trying to hide his terror under a boisterous front. 
 
 "How d you do, Zoller?" Charley began, with 
 all the appearance of heartiness he could muster. 
 " Sorry I missed you downtown. One of the big 
 telegraph companies called me unexpectedly into con 
 ference about my sounder. They re going to 
 take " 
 
 The words died away on his lips. Mr. Zoller had 
 not seemed to see the unsteady hand that Charley 
 extended. Vanaman was glad that the parlor was 
 darkened and that Edith was now beside him. 
 
 " Just so," said Mr. Zoller. " Glad to hear it, 
 I m sure. Glad to hear your father s apprehensions 
 about that invention were unfounded." His cold 
 eye looked quickly at Edith and back to Charley. 
 " I wanted a word with you in private, Mr. Vana 
 man," he said: he used to call Charley by his first 
 name. 
 
 There was no need for Charley to bluster, but
 
 JIM 333 
 
 bluster he did, and Edith felt that he was danger 
 ously overplaying his part. His unnecessary hearti 
 ness had been patently exaggerated. Edith knew 
 that Zoller must see this and guess what it hid. 
 She was sure her husband was working his false cour 
 age too hard, and at this rate it must soon give 
 way. 
 
 " I haven t any secrets from my wife," Charley 
 declared. 
 
 Mr. Zoller s smile was sour. 
 
 " Then Mrs. Vanaman is a fortunate wife," said 
 he. " I rather thought that you had no secrets from 
 her; but, as this is a matter of business 
 
 " That makes no difference," said Charley. 
 
 " Very well, Mr. Vanaman. If that is your feel 
 ing, very well." Without being asked to do so, 
 Zoller resumed his stiff seat, whereat Charley and 
 Edith, unconsciously gripping hands, took places on 
 the sofa opposite him. " I come from your sis 
 ter," continued the lawyer. 
 
 Charley was about to say that he had supposed 
 as much, but Edith intervened: 
 
 " From Mamie? " Her tone was one of innocent 
 surprise. 
 
 " Exactly, Mrs. Vanaman : from Miss Vanaman, 
 whose trustee you, Mr. Vanaman, I believe are." 
 
 " Why " began Edith. 
 
 But Charley cut her short. The liquor burned in 
 his veins and surged to his head. He had been 
 dragged to this interview, and he was now deter 
 mined to go through it in his own way. 
 
 " Just a moment, dear," he said. He glared at 
 Zoller. " Of course I m Mame s trustee. You know
 
 334 JIM 
 
 that as well as I do. If Just a moment, I 
 
 say, dear. If my sister wanted to ask anything 
 about the estate, why couldn t she come herself?" 
 
 Zoller looked him steadily in the eye. 
 
 " I thought that was a question I had better not 
 put to her," said the lawyer. " I wanted to ask 
 it, but she expressed a desire to place the matter 
 in my hands." 
 
 " Why," murmured Edith, " I m rather surprised 
 at Mamie. I know she and I had a little quarrel 
 
 just the merest quarrel but I didn t think " 
 
 Just so, just so," Zoller interrupted. " I could 
 have written, Mr. Vanaman, but having been your 
 father s attorney, I thought I had better call. Your 
 sister wants an accounting of the management of her 
 estate." 
 
 Charley s face went very white, Edith s tightened. 
 Except that their clasped hands gripped each other 
 closer, neither moved. The expected bomb had ex 
 ploded, but, expected though it had been, Charley 
 knew of no way to meet it save by a counter ex 
 plosion. Edith saw this coming, knew in a flash that 
 there was now no danger of his collapse that the 
 danger was the antithesis of collapse tried to inter 
 fere, and was howled down. Disregarding more 
 violently than before his wife s efforts to re 
 strain him to quieter methods, Charley sprang to 
 his feet. 
 
 "What!" he bellowed. "An accounting? My 
 sister asks her own brother for an accounting? " 
 
 Zoller was painfully unimpressed. 
 You have caught my meaning exactly," said he. 
 
 " Charley " Edith tried to interpose.
 
 JIM 335 
 
 Charley did not heed. He was resolved to try 
 again. He had worked himself into a genuinely 
 righteous indignation. 
 
 " Just a moment, Edith," he once more said. 
 "My sister!" he cried, turning upon the unre 
 sponsive lawyer. " My own sister! And she sends 
 her attorney to do.it for her! How dare she treat 
 her only brother this way? And how dare you, Zol- 
 ler my father s friend : a fine friend you are ! how 
 dare you permit her to do so? " 
 
 Zoller sat bolt upright and unflinching. 
 
 " I take my client s instructions," he placidly 
 answered. 
 
 " Her instructions ! Her insults to your old 
 friend s son, you mean ! " 
 
 " As you please, Mr. Vanaman. It is not uncom 
 mon for the beneficiary of an estate to want to know 
 what has become of that estate not at all uncom 
 mon, I assure you." 
 
 " Don t try to be funny, Zoller. This is a serious 
 business. I tell you 
 
 " Mr. Vanaman," said the lawyer, simply, " if all 
 is as it should be, there is no reason why you should 
 think it serious." 
 
 " Do you mean to charge me " Charley s 
 
 cheeks were now purple. He leveled a shaking fin 
 ger at his tormentor. 
 
 " Charley! " his wife admonished. 
 
 " I do not charge anything," said the quiet Zoller. 
 " Before you spoke, I could not have suspected any 
 thing. It was you who said this was a serious busi 
 ness. If all is not as it should be, you can t exag 
 gerate its seriousness, Mr. Vanaman."
 
 336 JIM 
 
 Zoller " 
 
 Edith got up and put her hand on her husband s 
 arm. Her hand was shaking, but, when she spoke, 
 her voice was low and calm. 
 
 " I m sure, Mr. Zoller," she said, " that Charley 
 wouldn t hurt his sister s feelings for the world. 
 Except for me, there s nobody he loves as much as 
 he loves Mamie. No wonder he s hurt, Mr. Zol 
 ler. I can t understand business, and so I don t 
 know just what all this means; but I can see some 
 body has been putting terrible thoughts against her 
 brother into poor Mamie s head, and " 
 
 " I ll see her myself! " broke in Vanaman. 
 
 " I think not," said Zoller, quietly. His cold eyes 
 did not so much as wink. " I had hoped you would 
 take this in the proper spirit; but from the way you 
 have taken it, I am sure I shall be justified in going 
 to her at once and, as a duty to a client, inform 
 ing her of my suspicions and instructing her not to 
 see you." 
 
 "Mr. Zoller!" pleaded Edith. 
 
 " Leave this house! " blustered Charley. His de 
 sire to be impressive raised him to the vocabulary 
 of his prospectuses: " This interview must terminate. 
 Leave my house this instant! " 
 
 The lawyer bowed. He got up slowly and stood 
 erect. 
 
 " The terms of your trusteeship provide," he said 
 with a slow clarity, " that an accounting may be de 
 manded and must be provided at any time and with 
 out notice; but my client is disposed to be generous. 
 She will give you ten days. In ten days from date, 
 therefore, we shall expect your figures. In the mean-
 
 JIM 337 
 
 time, I have no objection to leaving your sister s 
 house." 
 
 He went out without listening to Edith s endeav 
 ors to undo something of what had been done. 
 
 3. Husband and wife stood confronting each 
 other in a fear that began by expressing itself in 
 mutual recriminations. As soon as the front door 
 closed, Edith turned on Charley. As if it had been 
 a paper mask, all the gentle innocence that Zoller 
 had seen was torn from her face. Her face was 
 that of a vindictive savage. 
 
 "Now you ve done it!" she cried. "You must 
 brag ! You must try and bully him ! You made him 
 suspect and now you ve probably bragged and bul 
 lied yourself into jail! " 
 
 Charley s look mirrored hers: 
 
 " He suspected all along. He suspected because 
 Mame did and you know what got Mame down on 
 us; you set her against us: you did! She s the easi 
 est woman in the world to get along with; but you 
 set her against us by never being decent to her, 
 fighting with her, and telephoning to Tyrrell when 
 I d told you to keep away from him! " 
 
 " You forget one thing," said the wife: " you for 
 get that you gave the cause for suspicion. If you 
 hadn t cheated your own sister, there d have been 
 nothing to suspect you of." 
 
 " Who suggested me getting the power-of- 
 attorney? " 
 
 " Oh, I did, but I didn t think I d got it for a 
 fool. Yes, that s what I said: a fool! You not
 
 33 8 JIM 
 
 only stole you did it in such a way that you were 
 sure to be found out sooner or later, anyhow." 
 
 " Stop that! " Charley raised his clenched fist as 
 if it grasped a weapon. 
 
 " I won t," said Edith. " I tell you, if you ever 
 lay your hand on me I ll leave you forever leave 
 you to brag yourself into jail. I said you were a 
 fool and you are a fool. Even now you re a fool. 
 You re wasting time accusing your wife when you 
 ought to be telephoning to Mame to come out and 
 meet you, so as to get her away from Mrs. Hamil 
 ton s before this Zoller gets there." 
 
 She was right about that. Charley darted to the 
 telephone in the hall. She heard him tear the leaves 
 of the telephone-directory, rattle at the hook, and 
 swear at the exchange for what he took to be its 
 tardiness. She heard him saying: 
 
 " I want to talk to Miss Vanaman. . . * ,, 
 
 " Yes, Miss Mame Vanaman. . . . 
 
 " Never mind who it is. I want to talk to her. . . . 
 
 "What? . . . 
 
 " Why not ... 
 
 "Well, then, it s her brother; it s Mr. Charles 
 Vanaman. . . . 
 
 "What? . . . 
 
 " But I tell you I m her brother. I Here, 
 
 Central s cut in. Hello, hello, hello, Central ! What 
 the hell do you mean cutting in on me when . . . 
 
 "What s that? They rang of?" 
 
 He staggered back to Edith. His anger was gone ; 
 there was only a helpless terror in his staring eyes. 
 
 " She won t talk to me," he gasped. " That 
 woman it must have been Mrs. Hamilton; I don t
 
 JIM 339 
 
 know who it was says Mame s got instructions from 
 Zoller. He must have phoned from the corner drug 
 store as soon as he left here." A last flicker of 
 enmity flamed in his voice. " Whoever was talking 
 to me said you made things the way they are; so, 
 you see, it was you excited her suspicions. It seems 
 to be your nature to excite em." 
 
 " Suspicions ! " Edith echoed. " Nothing wrong 
 had happened when I quarreled with her. Suspi 
 cions! I m sick of that word. I never once heard 
 it from Jim, and since I ve been with you I ve hardly 
 ever heard any other. Suspicion seems to run in 
 your lovely family. If you hadn t had suspicions 
 you d never have lost Tyrrell you d have all the 
 money you needed now." 
 
 Charley s face changed. Tyrrell meant escape. 
 Tyrrell meant the only possible means of escape. 
 Mame was under Zoller s thumb, and Zoller in 
 tended oh, Charley knew he intended to send 
 Charles Vanaman to jail. The hunted man forgot 
 all else that his wife had said; he caught her hands; 
 he was shaken by a paroxysm of tears. 
 
 " Oh, Edith," he sobbed, " we ve got to have this 
 money; it s jail for me if I don t get it, and I do 
 love you, and there s nobody to get it from but Tyr 
 rell. I do love you ; before God, I do love you ! 
 We ve got only ten days, and in that little time we 
 can t find money anywhere but from Tyrrell. We 
 must bring him back! Can t we bring him back? 
 Can t can t you, dear? " 
 
 He hung upon her answer. Edith listened with 
 impassive face; she was thinking of Tyrrell s last 
 words to her in the restaurant.
 
 340 JIM 
 
 " Perhaps I can," she said. Oddly enough, " The 
 Tango Dancers," Jim s picture, swam into her 
 memory. 
 
 "Try! " Charley implored. " Please, please try, 
 for my sake. If you have to, you may flirt with 
 him just a little, you know. I won t be jealous any 
 more, dear. I m sorry I was. Forgive me! Do 
 try do, do try. For God s sake, Edith for mine ! 
 You can do it, if you ll only try." 
 
 She heard him, and she thought that she under 
 stood. She was sorry for him; she was disgusted; 
 she was elated. 
 
 "You re sure you won t be jealous?" 
 
 " No, no, no ! " vowed Vanaman. 
 
 " Well, then, I ll try," said Vanaman s wife.
 
 TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER 
 
 HE had ten days ten days in which to do the 
 thing he had been trying to do for months 
 in vain. 
 
 This time, moreover, the thing was final: there 
 was to be no higgling; the issue would be decisive. 
 He had come to his last resource and that was 
 Edith. 
 
 The discovery had come to him quite simply; it 
 had appeared to him on the crest of that crisis 
 after Zoller had left husband and wife together. 
 The lawyer opened the flood-gates of disaster upon 
 his client s brother. To Charley, sputtering and 
 struggling in the onrush of those waters, this means 
 of safety had presented itself, bobbing on the waves, 
 and he clutched at it with no more surprise and 
 no more debate than a drowning man has for a 
 life-belt: Vanaman thought as much of questioning 
 its ethics or its effects upon his pride as the drown 
 ing man thinks of questioning the patent rights of 
 the manufacturers of the life-preserver. It was the 
 next day when he began to think of these things: 
 the next day, when he had his arms through the 
 belt and fancied he could already feel the tug at 
 the rope that was to drag him ashore. 
 
 Then he had his first moment for reflection, and 
 his first reflection was this: that he, a man, had 
 cried out for help from a woman. The voice of 
 tradition led all other voices; his early conventions 
 
 341
 
 342 JIM 
 
 were the first forces to awaken in his stunned con 
 sciousness. 
 
 He brought a fresh bottle of whisky into his of 
 fice, over which to consider this. He locked the door 
 against callers. He reflected bitterly that nobody 
 of importance would be likely to call, but he added 
 that duns were plenty, and he did not want to be 
 disturbed; so he put a card on the door, saying that 
 he would be absent until two o clock in the after 
 noon. Then he sat down, among the blueprints and 
 the prospectuses, and took a long drink. 
 
 He was seeking rescue from a woman. Well, 
 why not? That woman was his wife; he had housed 
 and clothed and fed her: he had a right to expect 
 some return. If he hadn t married her, where would 
 she be now? There was something that ought to 
 gall him more than the mere fact of her womanhood : 
 it was that his one help was a woman that Jim had 
 cast oft. He fought with this reflection until his 
 shame conquered it. What matter whence the aid 
 came, so long as it was efficacious? It was not for 
 him to criticize its origins. Suppose she had, that 
 night of the dinner at the Martinique, flirted a bit 
 with Tyrrell, and again the other evening: it was 
 a lucky thing for him, for her husband, that she 
 had. 
 
 He drank and grew repentant. It was low of 
 him to think of her as he had been thinking. Pie 
 was being saved by the woman he had suspected and 
 upbraided. Edith forgave him; she was a fine 
 woman; she was forgetting all the evil he had done 
 her and was coming nobly to his help. 
 
 But the means he had asked her to use? He had
 
 343 
 
 asked her, in almost so many words He 
 
 wouldn t think about it. His position was one in 
 which choice was impossible. He had to take what 
 he could get and be thankful. Women did this sort 
 of thing all the time; New York was full of it; 
 and their husbands let them amuse themselves. It 
 was not so bad as the flagrant tangoing that the town 
 was full of. It wasn t as if she were going too far, 
 as if she were doing it without his knowledge. It 
 wasn t as if she were doing it for its own sake 
 
 He caught himself up on that. Was she doing 
 it only for him? If she were doing it only to save 
 the situation, she was doing it to save herself as 
 well as him. He had told her that her position 
 would be unchanged, though he might go to jail; but 
 he knew it was not true, and Edith also must know 
 it. He was soothing his wounded conventions by 
 saying that it was proper for a man to call for 
 rescue from his wife; but it was precisely because 
 Edith was his wife that Charley could doubt the un 
 selfishness of her motives: his financial ruin would 
 be hers. Of course she was willing. . . . 
 
 The more he drank and reflected, the more will 
 ing she seemed. She seemed almost too willing. 
 That question " You re sure you won t be jeal 
 ous? " was disconcerting. How did he know what 
 desires had prompted it? Desires? They might 
 be intentions. Now that he came to think of it, 
 why had he assumed that, where he had lost, she 
 could win? What was it made him so sure for 
 he was sure of her influence with Tyrrell? As a 
 child fingers a sore tooth that he knows it will hurt 
 him to finger, Charley played with this idea. He
 
 344 JIM 
 
 began to remember a hundred careless words of 
 Edith s, hints and gestures that were really inno 
 cent; to torment into malignant meanings unguarded 
 expressions that he had seen pass over her face. 
 Saving him? Yes, she might be saving him, but at 
 what price? She had tricked one husband already. 
 
 Yet he must be saved. He thought of Zoller s 
 dry, hard features and piercing eyes, and wriggled in 
 his chair. Zoller was the kind of man from whom 
 no mercy, Charley was sure, could be expected. Al 
 ready, Zoller more than suspected. Zoller had 
 Mame under his thumb. Charley saw the court 
 room, the jury he saw the jail. He must be saved, 
 and there was only one way. . . . 
 
 He would watch Edith. He would be diplomatic. 
 She would not know; but he would watch her. He 
 must be saved; but there was just one thing he 
 wouldn t stand at least, not if he could help it, 
 and not one second after the danger was past. 
 
 2. Charley watched and waited, torn by the 
 pangs of that jealousy which he had promised to 
 avoid, and racked by fears lest the plan which 
 caused his jealousy should fail. Of his scant ten 
 days of grace, one day passed. Then two and 
 three. At first, he asked her no questions, because 
 he could not trust his tongue, and Edith told him 
 nothing. Was she playing with him? Was she in 
 earnest with Tyrrell? Was she going too far and 
 too fast? Was she going far and fast enough? 
 When he at last ventured to seek reports from her, 
 he got them, but there were scores of clamoring 
 inquiries that he dared not make.
 
 JIM 345 
 
 He contemplated going to Mamc, confessing 
 everything, and throwing himself upon her sisterly 
 mercy. He tried again and again to get to her, 
 with one plea or another, but he could not reach her. 
 She refused to answer the telephone, though he rang 
 it at all hours. He went to Mrs. Hamilton s, but the 
 maid brought back word that his sister would see 
 nobody. 
 
 3. As for Edith, she questioned not at all. She 
 would not hurry Tyrrell, who seemed loath to hurry, 
 but she would be in time; she would save Charley, 
 
 and then Well, it was enough for her now 
 
 that the door was again opened; that although she 
 had still to return to the shadows after each visit 
 in the light, those visits were free and frequent; 
 it was enough to give herself once more to the lure 
 of the music, the magic of the dancing, the thrill 
 of Tyrrell s arm about her waist, of his body moving 
 closely and harmoniously with hers, of his will rul 
 ing her will. 
 
 She would remember his conversation in the res 
 taurant when she had been cut by Muriel Carson and 
 hailed by Effie Mitchell, the conversation in which 
 he had so nearly, and yet so differently, taken the 
 position that Mertcheson had taken, and she would 
 try to gauge the value of his feelings toward her. 
 Tyrrell had always been much more than her match 
 at talk that was one of his strongest charms for her 
 and now she wondered, more seriously than ever 
 before, how much of sincerity, of abiding sincerity, 
 underlay his words. If there was all sincerity, she 
 must use it; if there was little, she must create more;
 
 346 JIM 
 
 if there was none, she must lose. Weighing Tyr- 
 rell s heart, she came to know the full measure of 
 her own; she was aware of a purpose against which 
 her remnant of conscience rebelled, but she tried to 
 quiet her conscience by saying that she was acting 
 at Charley s orders, that she would save her husband 
 before seeking through another man what she had 
 sought and failed to find through Charley. She 
 would persuade Tyrrell to help Charley, for nothing 
 if possible, for everything if necessary, and then, 
 once Charley was safe 
 
 She did not contemplate leaving him; something 
 in her, something imperious, demanded of her a 
 warped loyalty and confidently now assumed in him 
 a loyalty unwarped. She had left Jim, but she must 
 not leave Charley. Much as she disliked him, she 
 must not leave him. She could not. When she had 
 tied herself to Charley in order to get rid of Jim, 
 she had used a knot stronger, she realized, than mar 
 riage. There seemed now only one thing that could 
 break it: a blow. Once she had thought that she 
 might almost have respected Jim had he ever struck 
 her: she knew that if Charley ever struck her, she 
 would leave him. 
 
 During the brief hours that she had with him, 
 she would sit regarding her husband in a quiet specu 
 lation. She no longer concealed from herself the 
 truth that she was in love with Tyrrell. 
 
 4. The game that she played approached its 
 decisive moment on the fourth day of Charley s 
 respite. She had pointed out to him the need of 
 investing something in the endeavor, of making the
 
 JIM 347 
 
 last play. They must have a quiet that could not 
 be had in the public dining-room of a restaurant, 
 they ought to have the appeal of an intimate family 
 atmosphere that could not be had in any such 
 restaurant s private rooms: Mame s bank-account 
 was again drawn upon; servants were engaged, and 
 Tyrrell was asked to luncheon at their own home. 
 
 Charley returned excitedly from his office on the 
 night before this luncheon. He was smiling with 
 a new hope. 
 
 " It never rains but it pours," he said. " I ve got 
 another chance and it makes Tyrrell look like a 
 piker." 
 
 Edith s face showed disappointment, but her dis 
 appointment was groundless: Charley had learned 
 something of caution; he would not throw over a 
 certainty for an uncertainty; the luncheon was to 
 begin as they had planned it, the husband arriving 
 late, in order that she might have a free oppor 
 tunity to make her appeal to their guest. The only 
 change would be in the time of Charley s departure: 
 he must leave early. It was not to be told Tyrrell 
 until after he had either given his support or defi 
 nitely declined to give it, but the fact was that a 
 stroke of unaccountable good luck had granted 
 Charley permission to interview, on the following 
 afternoon, one of the most important officers of one 
 of the two great telegraph companies : somehow the 
 yards of red tape that enveloped it had been un 
 wound from a letter Charley had written weeks ago, 
 and a second vice-president, having other business 
 that brought him from seashore to town for a few
 
 348 JIM 
 
 hours, consented to talk to Vanaman for fifteen 
 minutes. . . . 
 
 5. Tyrrell was on time. He had his accus 
 tomed self-possession; he looked even more at ease, 
 more removed from Edith s own world, than usual, 
 and he showed no surprise when told that business 
 would detain his host. She was inclined to believe 
 it was only her own sense of the impending crisis 
 that made her feel beneath his lighter talk for a 
 sense of finality corresponding to her own. 
 
 She thought that, this time, she managed the con 
 versation. Sitting close to Tyrrell, she directed their 
 words to Charley; she sketched, rather deftly, Vana 
 man in the character of a husband, not loved per 
 haps, but pitied, whose wife must suffer through his 
 continued poverty. Then she said, boldly: 
 
 " If you d really understood how things were with 
 us, you wouldn t have had that hard luck on the 
 stock exchange." 
 
 She said it so boldly that even Tyrrell did not at 
 once follow her: 
 
 "That hard luck?" 
 
 " Yes: the hard luck you told him made it impos 
 sible to back the sounder the way you d hoped to do 
 the way you d promised. You wouldn t have had 
 it." 
 
 He followed her now; he passed her: 
 
 " Luck goes by favor like some other things." 
 
 Your luck goes by your own favor. You told 
 me you might reconsider yours. You told me that 
 the other day at luncheon. Do you remember? 
 Have you reconsidered? There s no use my pre-
 
 JIM 349 
 
 tending it won t mean a lot to Charley if you have 
 and to me." 
 
 Tyrrell bent toward her. 
 
 " If I do this," he said, quietly, " I won t be doing 
 it for him." 
 
 She blushed as vividly as ever she had blushed 
 in Ayton. She was proud because of the evidence 
 of her coming success in securing the money, and 
 proud because that success was to be won entirely 
 by her own charms. 
 
 "No," she said; "I suppose it will be because 
 you believe in the sounder." 
 
 Tyrrell shook his head. " Not even that. In 
 fact, I ve been looking into the telegraphic situation, 
 and I m not sure But, no, the only reason that 
 I d do it would be for you." 
 
 She looked up at him. Her lips were parted; 
 her breast visibly rose and fell. 
 
 " You mean " she began. 
 
 " I mean I don t want to see you unhappy," he 
 answered; "I mean I don t want to see your hus 
 band ruined financially; but I mean that, apart from 
 the ruin, I don t care two straws what happens to 
 him. I ll do this thing, but I shall want you." 
 
 He took her hand as he had taken it on the night 
 when Charley had interrupted them. He put it 
 to his lips. She saw him tremble as he leaned 
 farther toward her. His ease left him; his voice 
 was broken, his tone low: 
 
 " I can t help telling you, Edith, I ve got to tell 
 you. I see what your life s been here : it s too glar 
 ing not to be seen. And I see tremendously what it 
 ought to be and what what it must be. I ll do
 
 350 JIM 
 
 this thing. I ll do it for you. I won t say I ll want 
 my reward, but I will say I want you. I want you; 
 but I want you because He stopped. He took 
 
 her other hand. He looked away. " Because I love 
 you," he said. 
 
 Her heart hammered in her throat. He did love 
 her: this man, who stood for all she desired in life, 
 who possessed what a man of Charley s sort never 
 could possess. Without hurting Charley, even by 
 helping Charley, who must care more for his inven 
 tion than for her 
 
 With a premonitory clattering at the lock, Char 
 ley came in by the front-door. He came in noisily 
 and slowly and found them seated far apart. He 
 kissed his wife s offered cheek and shook hands with 
 his guest. 
 
 " Hello, Tyrrell! " he said. " Sorry I was late. 
 Business, you know. And business is going to take 
 me away as soon as the feed s over. I only wish it 
 was paying business." . . . 
 
 When they went into the dining-room Charley 
 went first, and Edith caught Tyrrell s hand and 
 pressed it. That pressure seemed a promise, and 
 before the luncheon had ended, one of Tyrrell s 
 checks was in Charley s wallet next to Charley s 
 heart.
 
 TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER 
 
 NOTHING that Charley Vanaman had in all 
 his life been called upon to do was harder 
 than the thing he had to do this afternoon. 
 The money Tyrrell had given was referred to by its 
 donor as "just enough for a preliminary canter"; 
 more, it was to be supposed, would follow if the 
 preliminary canter gave satisfactory results; but 
 this initial sum would not much more than cover the 
 peculations from Mame. 
 
 Her accounts could now easily enough be straight 
 ened out, and Charley was saved from Zoller; but 
 the position of the invention was really little better 
 than it had been before. There were other debtors 
 still pressing; there was not the money required for 
 an independent start. Should Tyrrell later make 
 inquiries, it would be possible to pretend such a start 
 and to say that the result had been a failure so 
 that Tyrrell would not press as Zoller had done 
 but the sounder and its maker would be penniless. 
 
 Charley must take up again, at the appointed 
 interview with that portentous second vice-president, 
 the dreary task of wooing the established telegraph 
 companies. This interview was the most sanguine 
 chance that had come to him for a long time; only 
 yesterday it had seemed most hopeful; but to-day 
 he wondered whether it would come to anything, 
 after all. If it did, he could show Tyrrell a clean 
 account, and they would both earn a fortune; if it 
 
 351
 
 35 2 JIM 
 
 did not, then, though Tyrrell could be convinced 
 that his loss was unavoidable, Charley would be a 
 pauper. 
 
 The moment Tyrrell s money was in Charley s 
 pocket, the distressed inventor vanished and the 
 jealous husband reappeared. He must leave the 
 luncheon early, must leave Tyrrell and Edith to 
 gether and he had, on entering the parlor, seen his 
 wife looking into Tyrrell s eyes with eyes that Char 
 ley understood to be playing well the game he had 
 set her to play. Entirely too well: he must go away 
 when it was impossible for him to explain Edith s 
 attitude on the mere hypothesis that she was flirting 
 with Tyrrell for her husband s sake. 
 
 " Once he d signed this check, he acted as if he d 
 bought her with it," brooded Charley; "and she 
 acted as if she liked being bought." 
 
 As he was rushed downtown in the stifling sub 
 way, that idea loomed larger and larger in his mind. 
 He had told her that she might flirt " a little " 
 if she found flirtation the only means of capture, 
 but he had meant the verb " to flirt " to be inter 
 preted in its narrowest sense. He had never meant 
 anything more; he swore that he never had, 
 and Edith must know it. Yet Tyrrell s face was the 
 face of a man that has been given at least a promise, 
 and although it might be well that the Bostonian 
 thought he was making a purchase, that Edith should 
 fall in with this view and probably as a ready chat 
 tel was intolerable. 
 
 He added to his mistrust of his wife a hatred for 
 Tyrrell. In spite of what there had indeed been for 
 him to observe, it was a blind hatred, and in spite
 
 JIM 353 
 
 of all the reasons that there might be for a rea 
 sonable hatred, it was reasonless. It transcended 
 right and reason, as the most effective love and 
 hatred always do. It was the instinctive rage of the 
 rude for the suave, of the ignorant for the knowing, 
 of the man that, having set out to trick another, be 
 gins to suspect the other of turning the trick. 
 
 His jealousy rushed back upon him. He was at 
 least safe from Zoller; there was no fear of jail 
 to dam the onrush, no demand of expediency to 
 block the way. Love, in its first sense, had long 
 ago left him; it had retreated and returned, never 
 once coming back with quite the force of the previous 
 time, disappearing at last completely and leaving be 
 hind it only the passionate counterfeit, which itself 
 ebbed and flowed, and always retreated farther than 
 it advanced, until it retreated forever. 
 
 That is love s one way of going. Charley s love 
 had been swept back by the lies bred from his first 
 clandestine relationship and by the poverty, the dis 
 appointment, and the alcoholism consequent on that. 
 What remained was his conventional pride as a hus 
 band the shapeless something that men of his train 
 ing call " honor "which is tenderer than love, more 
 easily hurt, alert to press into its own bosom every 
 sword. 
 
 He writhed in his seat in the subway-train. It 
 might be bad policy to drink before keeping his 
 appointment with the telegraph official, but he had 
 to drink. He drank at the saloon nearest the station 
 from which he issued to the street, and the liquor 
 that he took to strengthen his resistance reinforced 
 his jealousy.
 
 354 JIM 
 
 To think that, a few brief days ago, he had suf 
 fered at the thought of seeking aid from a woman ! 
 That error was merely one of tactics. He had imag 
 ined himself using Edith, and all the while she was 
 using him. His vanity quivered. He should have 
 seen from the first he, who thought he could man 
 age men and women that, at best, she was trying 
 only to save herself. " You re sure you won t be 
 jealous? " He invested those words with a tone to 
 fit his mood. Saving him with herself? A lot she 
 cared about saving him ! She loved this other man : 
 he sneered at his use of the word " love " in such 
 a connection. She was using Charley s misfortune 
 the misfortune into which she had led him to hook 
 Tyrrell, and, once Tyrrell was hooked, she would 
 toss her husband away. 
 
 " What a mess I ve got into! " Charley groaned. 
 
 How had he got into it how except through his 
 wife? If he had never joined Edith in that con 
 spiracy to cheat Jim at law, old man Vanaman s 
 money would have gone mostly to old man Vana 
 man s son. There would have been no need to steal 
 from Mame, no need to truckle to Tyrrell. With 
 a burst of fresh hatred for his wife, Charley de 
 clared in his own heart that, by teaching him to help 
 in the cheating of Jim, she had taught him dishon 
 esty, that through the conspiracy against her first 
 husband, she had wrought the moral ruin of her 
 second. 
 
 " And now," he concluded, " she s going to do 
 what I ought to have known from the first she d 
 do. I ought to have known it when I was fool 
 enough to marry her. If a woman s crooked once,
 
 JIM 355 
 
 she ll always be crooked: she s going to play me 
 the same trick she played Jim ! " 
 
 2. It was in this frame of mind that he entered 
 the building which contained the executive offices of 
 the telegraph company. He passed the revolving 
 doors, took the elevator, and went into the waiting- 
 room, where, behind a brass-rail, a single office-boy 
 was seated. 
 
 Charley knew the place well: time was when he 
 had haunted it. Then he came to seek an inter 
 view; now he had at least been asked to come, 
 though in reply to a written appeal. He was laughed 
 at then by underlings, but he was hopeful of his 
 invention and secure in his domestic pride; now, 
 though still full of faith in the sounder, he felt him 
 self disgraced at home, and the office-boy s grin hurt 
 him as grievously as if it were directed at him for 
 Edith s treachery. He took his stand on the fact 
 of his appointment. 
 
 " Here," he said, sharply. " Take in my card 
 to Mr. Linton. I have an engagement with him." 
 
 The boy was still grinning. 
 
 " Mr. Linton s gone," he said. 
 
 "No, he s not," said Charley. " Come on now; 
 hurry up. I tell you," he went on, as if the phrase 
 was a charm, " I have an engagement with him 
 and I m busy." 
 
 " He went out five minutes ago." 
 
 Charley stared: 
 
 " But I have an engagement with him! " 
 
 " I m sorry, but he went out." 
 
 Charley looked at his watch:
 
 356 JIM 
 
 " I m on time and I have an engagement with 
 him." 
 
 The boy s grin became pitying. He shrugged, 
 took the card, and left the waiting-room by an inner 
 door. When he returned it was with the word that 
 the second vice-president had been unexpectedly 
 called back to his country-place, but would return 
 for an hour on the following day. 
 
 Charley left the office under fire of the office- 
 boy s grin. 
 
 " Called back unexpectedly ! " sneered the inventor. 
 " Someone wanted to play golf with him, I guess, 
 and so business don t matter." 
 
 He went down in the elevator, cursing his luck. 
 Surely this was the last straw. He banged through 
 the revolving doors to the street. Here he had been 
 on a fool s errand while his wife was making a 
 greater fool of him by amusing herself with an 
 other man uptown. 
 
 3. " Oh, it s Mr. Vanaman! " 
 
 Charley looked up. Leaving the hall by the same 
 door by which he was leaving it was Claire Girodet, 
 his former stenographer. 
 
 Sometimes, in the old days, he had enjoyed sit 
 ting at his desk and watching her, with a quickened 
 pulse-beat, as, her back turned to him, she bent over 
 her typewriter, her shoulders broad and firm, her 
 warm, white neck caressed by one little loosened 
 strand of her jet-black hair. When she would sit 
 beside his desk to take his dictation, her nearness 
 made him breathe heavily, and once, bending his 
 flushed face close to her round, pink cheeks, as they
 
 JIM 357 
 
 scrutinized a letter, his knee touched hers beneath 
 the arm of the desk: he remembered in what a panic 
 he had drawn away from her. Yet he had never 
 once translated sensation in the terms of thought, 
 never once dreamed of a fuller interpretation. 
 Edith had forced him a step in that direction by 
 giving the form and life of words to the suspicions 
 bred in her by their betrayal of Jim and by allow 
 ing those suspicions to order the girl s dismissal; 
 but the step had not brought him within sight of 
 the goal: his mind remained innocent of intention. 
 Ashamed to tell Claire of his wife s attitude, and 
 more ashamed to plead his poverty, or the stenog 
 rapher s inefficiency, as causes for her dismissal, he 
 had sent her away with the feeble pretext that he 
 had come into money and was retiring from busi 
 ness. When she had gone, he missed her. To-day 
 she was smartly dressed. . . . 
 
 She was so secure. There were no " nerves " 
 about her, and, Edith to the contrary notwithstand 
 ing, there was no artifice. She bore herself with the 
 serenity of the well-nurtured animal. The white-and- 
 pink of her skin was as sleek, the low-combed hair, 
 which draped her forehead and hid her ears, was as 
 glossy as the coat of a prize King Charles spaniel. 
 
 Charley s face softened. 
 
 " Hello ! " he said. " I m glad to see you." 
 
 He was glad to see her. Their parting had been 
 friendly. He had always liked her ready sympathy 
 and quick understanding in their daily work to 
 gether; now he realized that he had also always 
 liked to look at her firm beauty, her vivacious face, 
 her sloelike eyes.
 
 358 JIM 
 
 She put out a firm, ungloved hand and pressed the 
 hand that met it. 
 
 "How do you like being retired?" she asked. 
 She had the phraseology of the New York stenog 
 rapher, but her voice was a velvet contralto, and she 
 accompanied her every speech with a direct gaze. 
 
 " Well enough," he answered. The lie discon 
 certed him. " Are you working here? " 
 
 They were walking down the warm street. 
 
 " Oh, no ! " She tossed her black head. " I only 
 ran in to see one of the girls who s a friend of mine. 
 I m not working any more." 
 
 He looked at her again and saw that her clothes 
 were better than Edith s. 
 
 "Married?" he asked. 
 
 Her long-lashed eyes sought his face with a glance 
 that was a caress and a tentative invitation. 
 
 " No-o," she slowly answered. 
 
 He understood. He thought of Edith, uptown 
 there with Tyrrell: Edith alone with Tyrrell in 
 her husband s home. Here was something that, for 
 a steady acquaintance, was beyond the reach of a 
 man as poor as Charley Vanaman, and yet some 
 thing for an evening now and then, for a brief con 
 solation, for a forgetting of the perils that were 
 near and the treacheries that were being sworn 
 against him. Why not? He had money left in his 
 pocket. It was Edith who had opened his eyes to 
 this girl s beauty and then sent the girl away. Edith, 
 the traitor, of all women ! To treat his wife with 
 her own medicine, to choose this very girl. . . . 
 
 They had reached a corner and stopped uncer 
 tainly:
 
 JIM 359 
 
 " Which is your way? " 
 
 She nodded northward. 
 You re going home? " 
 
 " I d meant to. I m living with a friend." 
 
 Charley saw again that her throat resembled 
 warm ivory, that her skin was very white, her lips 
 very red, and her hair like a storm-cloud. He 
 thought again of Edith, the woman that had be 
 guiled him into treachery to Jim : Edith with Tyr 
 rell, tricking her second husband as she had tricked 
 her first. 
 
 " Excuse me just a minute^" said Charley. 
 
 He darted into the nearest bar and bought a drink. 
 
 When he came back, she was waiting where he 
 had left her. She held her rich body in a position 
 of careless serenity. 
 
 " Are you expected back soon to day? " he asked, 
 hoarsely. 
 
 11 No," she said, " not to-day." 
 
 " Then let s have an early dinner together," he 
 suggested, " and first we ll take a taxi through the 
 Park." 
 
 Their glances met again met and confided. 
 
 " All right," she said. . . . 
 
 Charley sent a messenger-boy to the house. The 
 note thus conveyed curtly announced that he would 
 not be home to dinner, because business connected 
 with the invention would detain him downtown.
 
 TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER 
 
 CHARLEY S departure from his house for 
 the offices of the telegraph company had not 
 been postponed until his wife and his guest had 
 returned to the parlor. He left while they were still 
 at table, and for some time after they heard the 
 front door close upon him, Tyrrell and Edith sat 
 with the table between them. 
 
 Their coffee was unfinished; a bit of cake lay 
 beside Edith s cup; there was a silver-plated plat 
 ter of untouched fruit at the center of the table, 
 and at the place opposite that of the hostess was 
 Charley s serviette, as he had dropped it, and Char 
 ley s chair pushed back as he had pushed it when 
 he went away. The room was full of his memory; 
 it was full of the memory of Mame and dead old 
 man Vanaman. Along quite half of one side of 
 the room stood the cumbersome sideboard: Vana 
 man had bought it when he set up housekeeping 
 with his wife in Carmel, nearly forty years ago, 
 and in the compartment nearest to the hall-door 
 Charley kept his liquor. The chairs had been bought 
 with the sideboard. Charley and Mame and their 
 father had been using them thrice daily from the 
 date of their removal to New York until the day that 
 the father was taken ill. Over Tyrrell s head hung 
 a print of one of Landseer s most sentimental stags, 
 which, Mame had said, Charley had given to his 
 father as a birthday present. The thrifty knives and 
 
 360
 
 JIM 361 
 
 forks, their coating of silver worn away and showing 
 the yellow surface of the baser metal beneath, were 
 heavy and old-fashioned and Vanaman. 
 
 Halfway through the luncheon, a constrained 
 silence had fallen between hostess and guest. The 
 burden of talk had been placed upon Charley, and, 
 now that he was gone, the Vanamans seemed still 
 to demand exclusive attention. They were palpable, 
 determined: the pause was hard to break. 
 
 Tyrrell rose and walked to a window looking 
 upon a narrow plot of grass that ran beside the 
 house, a bright green in a bath of yellow afternoon 
 sunshine. With his back partially turned to the 
 room, he lighted and began slowly to smoke a cigar. 
 He had often smoked when he was with Edith, and 
 must have known that she would not object to it 
 now; but this was the first time he had done 
 so without going through the form of asking her 
 permission. 
 
 Her hands clasped on the table before her, her 
 coffee forgotten, Edith sat considering his tall, lean 
 figure silhouetted against the bright window-pane. 
 He did, she reflected, look rather like Jim, after 
 all. She wanted to talk; she must talk, and yet she 
 could think of only the most banal things to say. 
 
 She asked: 
 
 " Is it going to rain? " 
 
 He seemed no better-minded: 
 
 " No, it s quite clear." He did not turn. 
 
 "Is it? I thought this morning we might have 
 some showers." 
 
 " It s quite clear," he said again. 
 
 He looked out of the window. There was noth-
 
 362 JIM 
 
 ing there to repay a second glance, but he kept it 
 up. She felt that he did not want to keep it up, 
 but had to. 
 
 " I m afraid," she ventured, " this has all been 
 stupid for you." 
 
 " Stupid? Oh, no; how could it be? " 
 
 "How couldn t it?" 
 
 He raised the window and flung away the cigar: 
 she saw that scarcely half an inch of it had been 
 burned. 
 
 He closed the window loudly. The noise seemed 
 to silence the clamoring of the absent Vanamans. 
 
 " We can t go on like this," he said. 
 
 He had turned. His grave but pleasure-loving 
 face was alight. 
 
 " We can t," he repeated. " We- 
 
 She saw the light in his face. Called by it, she 
 rose and slowly walked toward him. 
 
 "Edith!" 
 
 He tried to seize her, but she drew aside. 
 The other house the house next door," she 
 said : " the windows " 
 
 He followed her away from the possibility of 
 observation and caught her in his arms. 
 
 " You do love me, dear? " he asked. 
 
 She felt his hold tighten, not as it usually tight 
 ened in the dance : more intimately, to the strains 
 of a music that only they two could hear. His 
 breath came brokenly; his heart was pounding 
 against her breast; his lips were on her mouth. She 
 could not breathe. The door of light was opened 
 wide, and, crushed to him, she was being led through 
 it through it as she had never been led before,
 
 JIM 363 
 
 What did the dead or absent Vanamans matter now? 
 She gave a little inarticulate sob and hid her head 
 against his coat. 
 
 " Don t you know? Don t you know?" she mur 
 mured. 
 
 2. Theirs was an impossible position: about 
 that, and that only, Edith was clear. Though Char 
 ley, on several recent occasions, had sullenly submit 
 ted to what he must have seen to be love-making, 
 he was not likely now that the immediate reason 
 for love-making was, from his point of view, satis 
 fied to continue to submit. The cause of his acqui 
 escence, if his rival so much as guessed that there 
 was acquiescence, stood between her and Tyrrell. 
 She knew what her companion did not know and 
 what she could never tell him: that Charley had 
 begged her to flirt a little with this man in order 
 to save her husband from disgrace, even perhaps 
 from jail. Tyrrell, who had never lacked the wealth 
 to secure his every desire, would never understand 
 the weak man that had been pampered from child 
 hood and now found himself deprived of the money 
 to prolong the pampering. 
 
 Could she understand him? Ever since, a few 
 days before, Charley had admitted his dishonesty 
 and, what was far worse, demonstrated his want of 
 acumen to cover up his dishonesty, she had looked 
 at him with horrified eyes. His weakness in ap 
 pealing to her had made matters infinitely worse. 
 Of all the failures she had known and loathed, her 
 husband s was the most complete. 
 
 She did not blame herself. She salved her con-
 
 3^4 JIM 
 
 science with the thought that she had saved Char 
 ley financially and that she felt a genuine pity for 
 him. No, she was not at fault: her " artistic life " 
 the phrase that she now employed in recalling 
 those days of uncertainty and over-certainty which 
 characterized her previous marriage excused much 
 that, had she married somebody who was not an 
 artist, she would not have excused in herself; that 
 life had thrust her into the arms of the first sympa 
 thetic man who offered, and Charley s arms had 
 promised to be strong, his sympathy enduring. All 
 that she had wanted was success. With both hus 
 bands she had been wise enough to know that finan 
 cial independence was essential to happiness; but 
 Jim s aunt had failed to leave him the money Edith 
 expected, and Charley, an only son and a much- 
 loved son, had been cut out of his rich father s will 
 without a penny. Jim had failed her by postponing 
 his success, if success it were she could not believe 
 it would last until it was too late to benefit her; 
 Charley had failed by throwing his chance of suc 
 cess away. Tyrrell 
 
 She was still young ! The earlier desires and the 
 earlier ambitions were still in her blood. She knew 
 little enough of Tyrrell, but she knew that he loved 
 her. Tyrrell had money of which no one could de 
 prive him; he had position, he was a gentleman, 
 he belonged to the world that she envied. Here 
 was no chance of a third mistake. Here was pas 
 sion, to be sure, but here also was tenderness and 
 devotion; here were her dreams come true. She had 
 thought that she was somehow tied to Charley, that 
 she must maintain at least the appearance of loy-
 
 JIM 365 
 
 alty to him: under Tyrrell s kisses she thought so 
 no more. She even saw herself married to Tyrrell. 
 She loved him. 
 
 3. It was already four o clock. For all the 
 world as if they had been child-lovers in one of 
 Uncle Morty s shifting homes at Ayton, they were 
 sitting side by side, in the Vanaman parlor, on the 
 ugly, uncongenial sofa on which, not so many days 
 before, Edith and Charley had sat during the or 
 deal of the Zoller interview and held each other s 
 hands. 
 
 The door-bell rang, and the maid brought Edith 
 a note. 
 
 " Is there an answer? The messenger-boy didn t 
 wait." 
 
 Edith opened and read the note. 
 
 " No, there s no answer," she said. 
 
 The maid left the room. 
 
 "From him?" inquired Tyrrell. 
 
 Edith nodded: 
 
 " He s detained by business. It s something about 
 the sounder. He can t be home till late to-night." 
 
 Their eyes searched one another. 
 
 " Why not drive in town," suggested Tyrrell, 
 " get a cocktail somewhere, and have a little din 
 ner together? There s no reason for you to stay 
 here in this stuffy house." 
 
 There seemed indeed no reason to stay, and cer 
 tainly no chance of detection if she went. 
 
 Yet Edith hesitated. Tyrrell had said he loved 
 her: that changed everything. She did not know 
 him well enough to know how much she could give
 
 366 JIM 
 
 him without losing all hope of return. When love 
 
 has been confessed, a little dinner is a dangerous 
 
 thing. 
 
 You don t know how angry he would be if 
 " But how can he? You ll be back before ten 
 
 o clock; we can dine early. At least, we shall be 
 
 together." 
 
 She remembered a song Jim used to sing Jim, 
 
 who never followed its advice: 
 
 Take what you can and can what you can t 
 But take what you can when you can, dear. 
 
 Why not snatch at happiness now? Charley had 
 been really none the wiser for the luncheon; why 
 should he learn of the dinner? 
 
 " I must dress " 
 
 " No," he said. " We can go to some quiet place. 
 It s better not, I think." 
 
 She agreed with him, and Edith was amazed to 
 find herself trusting to a man s judgment. 
 
 " All right," she said, and went from the room 
 to search for her hat and gloves. She was singing 
 softly as she went. She had not sung to herself 
 more than once or twice since since she left Jim. 
 
 4. There was plenty of time indeed, too much. 
 So, when they saw a hansom with its sad cab-horse 
 waiting for fares, Tyrrell hailed it, and they started 
 down Fifth Avenue, hand in hand behind the shelter 
 of its little doors. 
 
 " It s so much more fun," Tyrrell had explained 
 with a boyishness that charmed her and that she 
 had not dreamed of finding in him. " There s no
 
 JIM 367 
 
 romance in a taxi. Any sort of passion can ride in 
 a taxi; but in a hansom only Love can ride." 
 
 Again the Avenue, its shop-windows glittering and 
 luring, was filled by that happy crowd which had 
 filled it on the afternoon when, hopeless and envi 
 ous, she passed along it on her unguessing way to 
 meet the man that now sat beside her and made 
 her belong to it. She could not now look for faces 
 familiar to her from the society pages in the news 
 papers Sunday supplements, and had she looked she 
 would soon have remembered that the people of the 
 society pages were away for the Summer would 
 have realized that the replacing throng was a throng 
 of counterfeits and imitations. Her sense of hap 
 piness was too great. She saw the crowds only as 
 a brilliant mist. For her they were all what they 
 had been on that other afternoon, and she, thanks 
 to Tyrrell, was one of them. She breathed the at 
 mosphere of carelessness, of luxurious freedom from 
 debt and from counting the cost, and it was as the 
 air of Lautaret to a citizen of Amsterdam. She be 
 longed to this life, and this life belonged to her. 
 
 At Thirty-fourth Street the traffic was retarded 
 by a policeman for three or four minutes. Edith saw 
 an inquiring head thrust out of a taxicab win 
 dow. There was no mistaking: it was Charley s. 
 
 She clutched Tyrrell s hand convulsively: Tyrrell 
 was looking in the opposite direction. If he had 
 seen, he gave no sign; but Charley had seen: Edith 
 convinced herself of that. When their hansom 
 passed the taxi, Edith, her eyes fascinated, looked 
 within. Charley was not alone; beside him, on the 
 farther side, sat a robust girl, of warm ivory and
 
 3 68 JIM 
 
 healthy pink, with jet-black hair draped low over 
 her broad forehead and coiled tight over her ears 
 the stenographer whom Edith had forced him to 
 discharge. Charley was not now looking out of 
 the window; he was not looking at Edith. Indeed, 
 his broad back was turned, as if to protect his com 
 panion from her possible gaze. 
 
 Edith turned to Tyrrell. 
 
 " Bob," she said, " don t you think the driver 
 could get a little more speed out of this animal of 
 ours?"
 
 TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER 
 
 SHE reached home before Charley: few scant 
 minutes before. She made Tyrrell drop her 
 at the door. 
 
 " No," she said, composedly enough; " don t come 
 in. I want to be alone for a little while. I want 
 to think things over." 
 
 Had he seen what she had seen? She did not 
 know. She wished Tyrrell were a little less the 
 gentleman enough less to have commented on that 
 glimpse of Charley if, indeed, the glimpse had come 
 to him but she knew him to be the sort that, see 
 ing such a thing, would seem not to see it, would 
 scorn to justify his course by any course which the 
 husband of the woman he loved might elect to fol 
 low. So she said good-night and went indoors, 
 where, a prey to emotions that she resolutely re 
 fused to analyze, she waited for Charley. 
 
 She went into the parlor and lighted every gas-jet 
 this woman that once wanted the darkness for 
 thought. She paced up and down the room like a 
 caged animal like Charley, on the day when he 
 waited for Mame to bring him word of his father s 
 business with Zoller from his father s sickroom. 
 
 How was she to act? She did not want to know 
 how she was to reason: she asked how she was to 
 act. This moment was, somehow, her chance but 
 how? Rightly seized, the opportunity meant free 
 dom from Charley, from debt and poverty, and 
 
 369
 
 370 JIM 
 
 drunkenness and lies: freedom to go to Tyrrell and 
 success; to pass through the lighted door. 
 
 What hampered her was a genuine anger, that 
 reasonless anger which is the fiercest, against the 
 man who was still her husband. He had tricked her 
 and betrayed her. He had done it meanly and clum 
 sily as he did everything else, and his discovery had 
 left him with no rag of his boasting to cover the 
 unwholesome truth of his real personality; she saw 
 him as undeserving even the false loyalty of pre 
 tended affection and forced adherence: weak, sod 
 den, a liar, and a failure. She had been a fool 
 to try to save him: he would let the fruits of this 
 rescue slip through his fingers as he had let slip 
 through them everything else worth while that his 
 undeserved good luck had ever placed in his greedy, 
 incompetent hands. 
 
 They were safe from immediate financial ruin. 
 No sooner had Tyrrell signed that check which 
 saved Charley, than, her duty performed, she be 
 gan to feel what now she felt: the sight of her hus 
 band in the cab with that French girl had completed 
 the change. She should have been prepared for 
 this. Charley had cheated Jim: of course he would 
 cheat his wife. She ought to have trusted her earlier 
 instincts. She had been right, all along, in her sus 
 picions: Charley had deceived her into bearing pov 
 erty, forced her into submission to his insults, put 
 upon her the snubs of her acquaintances, wheedled 
 her into lying for him, set her to washing his dishes, 
 darning his socks, while he had been spending on 
 other women the money that her economies saved. 
 How long and with how many had it not been go-
 
 JIM 37 i 
 
 ing on? And he had implored her to save him 
 for this stenographer: implored his wife to save him 
 for his mistress. He had sold her for his paltry 
 safety: worse than that, for his low pleasures. He 
 sat through these past days, through this last lunch 
 eon, looking on while the purchase was completed; 
 he left her to consummate the sale while he ran 
 off to pay his foreign woman. To think that she 
 could ever have contemplated continuing to live 
 with him! 
 
 So far as her relations with Charley were con 
 cerned, Love for him, in the finest sense of that word, 
 had left her as long ago as it left him. With her, 
 too, there had been the partial returns, each lesser 
 than the preceding; with her, too, the final cessa 
 tion, the substituting of a passionate counterfeit, it 
 self retreating and advancing until it should retreat 
 forever. The lies bred of their first clandestine 
 communion had done for her what they did for him. 
 What was left of her was what he now struck: 
 her perverted conventional pride as a wife, the 
 shapeless nothing that women of her early training 
 consider as faith in their husband s fidelity and cling 
 to as if it were their own honor, however unfaith 
 ful they themselves may be : tenderer than love, more 
 easily hurt, eager to press into its own bosom every 
 possible sword. 
 
 If she loved Tyrrell, it was Charley who had 
 forced her to it, begged it with tears and almost 
 on his knees. He had taught her dishonor by teach 
 ing her to help him in cheating her first husband. 
 Jim had been right in scorning this creature. She 
 remembered a score of light words that Jim had
 
 372 JIM 
 
 occasionally let fall concerning Charley; she applied 
 them herself; she found them lashing her forward 
 as no words of her own that she could find. And 
 now Charley was playing on her the same trick 
 he had once inveighd her into playing on Jim. 
 
 But how to act? That was what she must de 
 cide: how to act. Her resolution reeled. She had 
 reached no conclusion when Charley came in. 
 
 2. He came in almost at once : all that she had 
 felt, she felt in the course of a few hurrying min 
 utes. Frightened by the encounter at Thirty-fourth 
 Street and angry because of it, Charley had left 
 Claire after the dinner that he had promised her 
 and had then fortified himself with an unusual quan 
 tity of liquor. 
 
 He stood glaring at Edith, his froglike eyes bulg 
 ing over black bags of unhealthy skin; the loose gray 
 skin of his cheeks trembled at the twitching of the 
 facial muscles deep beneath it: she saw him a traitor, 
 a failure, a weakling. She faced him, arrested in 
 her pacing of the brightly lighted room, her brown 
 eyes angry beacons, her face hardened, the paint 
 on her cheeks like daubs of vermilion on a white 
 washed wall: he saw her a traitor, a common scold, 
 a loose woman. 
 
 Her first words came from her without an instant 
 of reflection: 
 
 " Well," she sneered, " I hope you were success 
 ful in the business that kept you downtown." 
 
 Her tone allowed him no chance to hope that she 
 had not seen. He walked up to her. 
 
 " Yes," he said, " I was successful. I went in for
 
 JIM 373 
 
 that business because I saw you were going in for 
 the same sort of thing." 
 
 The same sort of thing! He could compare his 
 excursion in the company of a stenographer with 
 the idyl of which she had been a part ! She thought 
 of the grace and charm and love of Tyrrell; of the 
 awkward vulgarity and lust of Charley and his mis 
 tress. Her cheeks now burned with a natural red. 
 
 You never saw anything of the sort," she said. 
 
 " I saw you in that hansom with Tyrrell." 
 
 " What if you did? What if you did? You sent 
 home word you weren t to be here you sent home 
 that lie about business; couldn t I go out to dinner 
 with your friend and have nothing said about it? " 
 
 "My friend?" 
 
 " He s the best friend you ve got." She stood 
 with her fists clenched at her sides. " He s kept 
 you out of jail to-day." 
 
 " Well, don t pretend it was only a dinner en 
 gagement. I saw the way you two were looking 
 at each other when I came in for lunch. I saw the 
 
 way you looked when I had to leave you " He 
 
 choked. 
 
 She wanted to tell this man that she hated him 
 and all the dreadful reasons for her hatred, and yet, 
 because she remained only a conventional woman 
 who did unconventional things, she still more wanted 
 to preserve her conventional honor. 
 
 " You told me I was to flirt with him," she said. 
 
 " I did not." 
 
 " You did. You told me to, and you know it." 
 
 " I said you might do it if there wasn t any other 
 way."
 
 374 J IM 
 
 "Why don t you finish it? You mean if there 
 wasn t any other way for me to get money out of 
 him for you." 
 
 " All right, Edith. Put it however you like. I 
 don t care." 
 
 " Well, there wasn t any other way." 
 
 "Did you look for one?" 
 
 " Yes, I did." 
 
 " Very well. But what I said was flirt a lit 
 tle. I didn t say you were to " 
 
 " Go out to dinner with him? Where is the 
 harm in that? " 
 
 " You know what I mean." 
 
 " I know what you did. I know what you ve been 
 doing. You ve been running around town with com 
 mon women. You ve been carrying on with that 
 painted French girl 
 
 " Just a moment, please. I " 
 
 " Don t use that phrase, Just a moment : it sets 
 me wild. I tell you you ve been carrying on with 
 that painted French " 
 
 11 Edith ! " 
 
 " Oh, yes, you have ! Don t try to lie any more 
 to me. That low stenographer that you promised to 
 discharge " 
 
 " I did discharge her." 
 
 " From that place, yes," said Edith. Her nos 
 trils dilated. " And then you gave her another sort 
 of job. You promoted her! " 
 
 The difference between them was this : that Edith 
 was, at least for the time, in love with Tyrrell, 
 whereas Charley, though he admired Claire, had 
 recognized at the outset that she was too expensive
 
 JIM 375 
 
 a luxury for his permanent possession, felt her some 
 thing that was only passing, and frankly admitted 
 as much both to himself and to the girl. He could 
 therefore bear any insult aimed at Claire, but must 
 resent, if he was to maintain the conventional hus 
 band s upper hand, any suspicion of his own conduct. 
 
 " I never did anything of the sort," he said. 
 You must think you leave me money to spare. 
 Till to-night I haven t seen her since I fired her." 
 
 Edith sniffed. 
 
 "That s a likely story!" 
 
 " It s the true one." 
 
 " Then, why did you send home that lie about 
 business? You haven t business enough to keep you 
 busy during the day. You never did like to work, 
 and you never have worked. You ve always lived 
 on somebody else, and of course you ve been see 
 ing this French girl while you pretended to be at 
 your office." 
 
 "Nonsense; how d I get the money?" 
 
 " The way you got the other money, I suppose. 
 it, or " 
 
 " I tell you, it s not true. I was kept downtown 
 on business as I said I d be, and on the way up I 
 happened to meet Miss Girodet 
 
 " And I suppose she stopped her motor-car and 
 told her chauffeur to get down and call you over 
 and offer to drive you home?" 
 
 " No. Just a moment, please. As I was say- 
 
 mg- 
 
 " Oh," Edith broke out, " I told you not to use 
 that phrase, and I don t care what you were say 
 ing! I m going to bed." She started toward the
 
 376 JIM 
 
 door, deciding to shut herself in a spare bedroom 
 and determine her course of action; but she flung one 
 more word at him: "I know what you ve been 
 doing, and that s enough for me ! " 
 
 Rage boiled up in him. His accidental innocence 
 righteously protested; but he could not prove his 
 innocence. He felt she had tricked him to the end, 
 even to this mere detail of somehow capturing and 
 maintaining the role of the injured party, when, as 
 a matter of fact, she had betrayed him to Tyrrell. 
 That he, the husband, had contemplated betraying 
 her no longer counted with him. He felt only that 
 he must gain the mastery. 
 
 " Stop! " he cried: it was his old command. He 
 caught her arm and flung her around until, panting 
 from pain, she once more faced him. " I won t have 
 this. We ve got to be honest with each other once 
 and for all. I know how far you ve gone with Tyr 
 rell I know it as well as if I d seen it; and you 
 can t say anything that ll make me believe anything 
 else." The sound of his words whipped his anger. 
 " I know what your game is. You re in love with 
 him. You ve ruined me. You made me a per 
 jurer in that case against Jim, and now you re cook 
 ing up the same sort of a scheme with Tyrrell 
 against me! " 
 
 His grasp hurt her, and the hurt tore away the 
 last vestige of her caution. 
 
 " Made a perjurer of you ! " she yelled. Her 
 voice rasped. Her lips were twisted with suffering, 
 mental and physical. " You jumped at the chance. 
 You were born a crook. Don t you put on moral 
 airs to me ! I know you ! You ve cheated your sis-
 
 JIM 377 
 
 ter. You re nothing but a thief! Do you hear 
 a common thief! Why don t you answer? Jim? 
 He was fifty times more of a man than you!" 
 
 She was tugging at the hand that held her. At 
 the mention of Jim, Charley suddenly released his 
 hold, and she tottered back. 
 
 There surged to the surface of his consciousness 
 all the venom that had been brewing in his brain 
 since the day when he first conspired with her against 
 Jim, the venom from all the consequent poverty, 
 debauchery, deceit, and he spewed it out. 
 
 " You re in love with Jim! " he shouted. " That s 
 what s the matter with you, you old cat older than 
 I am and older than he is. And what I got when 
 I got you was what he d used up and wanted to throw 
 away! " 
 
 His jealousy sickened her; it spoiled everything 
 that it touched. She had but one thought : to stop the 
 dirty tide of his speech; but one desire: to dam the 
 foul flood of his accusation and yet it ran on and 
 on, giving her no chance to answer. He barred her 
 way to the door and allowed her no opportunity 
 for retreat. 
 
 " Jim, Jim, Jim ! You ve got to quit thinking 
 about him. By God, you ve got to quit thinking about 
 him! I know what you are, and I m going to tell 
 you." 
 
 He burst into an insane fit of denunciation, ridi 
 cule, reproach. It flung garbage, offal, crawling car 
 rion. It was like the opening of a sewer-tap. The 
 brutalities of business, the vulgarities of the street, 
 the sweepings of low barrooms, the scourings of 
 slums and stews roared from his lips and deluged
 
 378 JIM 
 
 her. They seemed to spatter the very walls of the 
 Vanaman parlor. They beat on her, submerged her. 
 To have to listen was to be defiled. There was no 
 vileness with which he did not charge her, no vi 
 cious bond with which he did not lash her to Jim, 
 to Tyrrell, to persons suspected and persons un 
 known but most of all to Jim. 
 
 Then he stopped in the midst of a sentence, struck 
 her full across the face, and, as she fell, rushed out 
 of the room. 
 
 3. Under the blaze of the lights, Edith lay on 
 the floor. She was partially stunned by her fall, 
 and nearly fainting from the exhaustion following 
 her war of emotions; but she heard her husband go 
 into the dining-room. She heard him open the com 
 partment in the sideboard where his whisky was kept. 
 She heard the clinking of a glass against a bottle. 
 Then she heard him repass down the hall by the 
 parlor, without pausing to look in, and climb the 
 stairs to their bedroom. 
 
 She heard what would happen now. He was tak 
 ing a bottle and glass to bed with him: he would 
 nurse his anger upon liquor until he had drunk him 
 self into a stupor. Yet now it came to her in a flash 
 that this was no longer anything to dread. That 
 bottle which, in the deepest sense, Jim had placed 
 in Charley s hand, took Charley out of her way at 
 the moment when her decision waited only on his 
 absence. It became only something to use for the 
 present occasion to use in order that she might 
 be done with it forever. 
 
 She lay quiet on the floor. She waited until she
 
 JIM 379 
 
 was certain he would be too drunk to hear her mov 
 ing about, or, hearing, interfere. Once convinced 
 of this, she went softly upstairs and, a little later, 
 softly left the house. 
 
 From the next house there came a light and the 
 sound of hoarse music. A music-machine was play 
 ing " Too Much Mustard." Edith stopped an in 
 voluntary moment to listen, and then went on her 
 way. 
 
 She was going toward the door of light, toward 
 the Fifth Avenue of half-past four o clock in the 
 afternoon, toward Romance and Love and Success. 
 She had turned her back on Failure. She was going 
 to the man that was so unlike Charley; she was 
 going to the man that had once or twice reminded 
 her of Jim.
 
 TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER 
 
 CHARLEY was wakened by the hot light of a 
 late summer mid-morning pouring in at the 
 window of the bedroom, which he had for 
 gotten to open, and beating on his face. The room 
 stank; there was a buzzing of flies. He raised his 
 head, but quickly lowered it: his head was full of 
 sledge-hammers that beat outward on his skull. The 
 bed seemed to pitch and sway. He turned his aching 
 eyes to right and left: there was no sign of Edith. 
 Then he longed for water and knew that it would 
 sicken him again, and quailed at the thought of a 
 drink of whisky, knowing that, if he could force 
 it down his throat, it would strengthen him. He 
 must have one drink of it just one drink to steady 
 his nerves and still that banging agony in his head. 
 Painfully, slowly, he groped for the bottle on the 
 floor beside the bed: the bottle was empty. 
 
 That effort and its failure were almost too much 
 for him. He sank back with a groan upon his heated 
 pillow. The pillow was rank with the sweat of the 
 drunkard. He had seen, in raising his head, enough 
 of the room to know that it was in a frightful con 
 dition. He closed his eyes. For half an hour he 
 lay still, trying to summon the resolution to move 
 again. Slowly, the events of yesterday, the wrangle 
 of last night, the memory of the blow, came back 
 to him. 
 
 380
 
 JIM 3 8i 
 
 He swore heavily. At last he got up and stood 
 clutching the bedpost. 
 
 "Edith! "he called. 
 
 There was no answer. 
 
 He went to the door and opened it, meaning to 
 call to her from the hall and have her fetch him some 
 whisky, but on the threshold was a bit of paper that 
 held his attention. He saw it was a letter addressed 
 to him in Edith s hand. He stooped dizzily for it, 
 shut his eyes, groped, lurched, and got it as he 
 sprawled forward on the floor. He opened the 
 envelope with palsied fingers. It contained a half 
 sheet of note-paper covered with hurried lines. 
 Kneeling, he read: 
 
 " After what you have done to me, of course you 
 can t ever expect to see me again. A beating isn t 
 ground for divorce in this state, but I know enough 
 now to know there s plenty of other evidence of the 
 right sort, and if you re one-half as brave as Jim 
 was, you won t stand in the way. As soon as I ve 
 seen my lawyer I ll have him telephone you." 
 
 He made no audible comment: he merely strug 
 gled into his clothes. There was still a little whisky 
 downstairs; he drank it and, with that heavy on 
 his breath, set forth for the offices of the telegraph 
 company in which lay the last hope of the Vana- 
 man Sounder. 
 
 A half hour later, he was a ruined man. The 
 second vice-president had spared enough time from 
 his few hours of work to end an office-nuisance: he 
 demonstrated to Charley beyond the last shadow 
 of doubt that the Vanaman Sounder infringed upon
 
 382 JIM 
 
 a patent secured long before the date of his inven 
 tion, but only recently put into use, by a rival tele 
 graph corporation. . . . 
 
 He could not get drunk. He drank steadily, 
 seated alone in his miserable office with the sounder 
 grinning at him from the table; but the more he 
 drank, the clearer his brain became, the sharper 
 the outlines of the things he wanted to forget. 
 
 Edith was gone. She was gone to Tyrrell. 
 There was the hideous shame of that: little of the 
 pain of it, but a shame the greater because it had 
 to itself the field which it might have had to share 
 with the pain. His wife had inflicted on him what 
 he considered the last marital dishonor and, in do 
 ing this, had linked him, in the world s eyes, with 
 Jim whom, for this same dishonor, Charley had so 
 long despised. Edith had written " Cuckold " all 
 across the page of his domestic life. 
 
 The sounder was a leering ruin. The years of 
 thought that he had given it, the hopes that he had 
 built on it, the sleepless nights and the days of toil, 
 the money spent, the debts incurred, the crimes com 
 mitted for it, profited him nothing. The rival in 
 vention predated him so obviously that he would 
 have no chance to fight it through a long patent liti 
 gation, even if he had the money. How the patent 
 office had failed to discover his infringement long 
 ago and notified him at the beginning he could not 
 guess; he knew that such mistakes did sometimes 
 occur and he had to acknowledge that this was one 
 of them. He seized the model instrument from the 
 office-table and ripped it to pieces with his bare 
 hands.
 
 JIM 383 
 
 He was a thief in imminent danger of detection 
 and arrest. He had stolen from Tyrrell through 
 misrepresentation and from his sister outright. The 
 Tyrrell theft might be explained even now, and, in 
 any event, its victim would not dare to prosecute 
 that was the one gray ray of light but Zoller 
 would. Except for the check that Tyrrell had given 
 him the price, he bitterly reflected, of his honor 
 he was penniless. 
 
 Again he telephoned to Mame, but again a voice 
 that must have been Mrs. Hamilton s informed him 
 that she was not to be seen; it directed him to 
 Zoller. He went to Mrs. Hamilton s apartments, 
 but the maid left him at the door and presently re 
 turned to him with this note from his sister: 
 
 " DEAR BROTHER, 
 
 " I extremely regret that, under advice of counsel, 
 it will be impossible for me to see you or again 
 communicate with you in any form, pending your 
 rendering to me, through my attorney, a satisfactory 
 accounting in the matter of our father s estate. 
 " Your affectionate sister, 
 
 " MARY L. VANAMAN." 
 
 Charley crumpled the letter in his fist. One or 
 two faint touches showed the softening influence of 
 his sister s character as he had known it in years 
 gone by, but all of the tenor, and much of the phrase 
 ology, were unmistakably Zoller s. 
 
 He thought of checking out more of Mame s 
 money and running away with it; but he was too 
 much afraid of her lawyer and too much afraid 
 to be alone. No, there was only one thing to be
 
 3 8 4 JIM 
 
 done : Charley must make his accounting. The dan 
 ger of jail was far keener than the shame of Edith s 
 conduct, sharp as that shame was; the threat of im 
 prisonment although it did not emanate from 
 Mame, and might yet, by Mame, be diverted was 
 worse than the threat of penury. 
 
 He went back to his office and fell to work. His 
 peculations from his father s estate would be cov 
 ered, but not much more than covered, by the pro 
 ceeds of Tyrrell s check. He used it for that pur 
 pose and, just as the grim little Zoller was about 
 to leave for home, Charley reached that attorney s 
 stuffy workshop. 
 
 2. " Very well," said Zoller, after one of the 
 most uncomfortable hours that Charley had ever 
 passed. The bank-books of course have to be bal 
 anced, but so far as I can tab them up by these stubs, 
 they agree with your accounting. I don t pretend to 
 understand these entries " a thin forefinger pointed 
 to the record of the checks drawn by Charley for 
 his own uses and clumsily explained " but the de 
 posit made to-day covers those amounts." 
 
 The words were an acquittal, but the way 
 that Zoller s mouth snapped shut when he had 
 ended them was more like an announcement of 
 conviction. 
 
 Charley wiped the sweat from his forehead. 
 
 "Will you let me see Mame now?" he asked. 
 
 " I have here," said Zoller, with splendid preci 
 sion drawing the one paper that he wanted from the 
 bundle on his desk, " a formal rescinding of your 
 appointment and power-of-attorney, signed by your
 
 JIM 385 
 
 sister. She has decided to nominate me as your 
 
 successor." 
 
 ; Will you let me see Mame now?" Charley 
 repeated. 
 
 " After I have given her some advice over the 
 telephone," said Zoller. 
 
 3. Charley sat on the Chippendale chair from 
 Grand Rapids in the quinquilateral parlor of Mrs. 
 Hamilton s flat. He was here to beg Mame to go 
 back home and to take him with her. He had one 
 faint hope : the hope that he might induce her to set 
 him up in some small business; but he was, above 
 all, seeking an asylum and yet he was afraid to 
 face her. Through all the years when her refusal 
 meant nothing to him, she had never refused him. 
 This evening, and he knew it, he must confront a 
 new Mame. Nothing was his, everything hers. If 
 she denied him now, who had not once denied him 
 while their father lived, she would be denying him 
 food and shelter: his very bread and butter depended 
 on the will of the sister he had always scorned. 
 
 " Good-evening, Charley." 
 
 She stood in the doorway, dressed in a formless 
 black gown of some cheap material, her myopic eyes 
 peering through her thick spectacles, but with what 
 his timid imagination interpreted as a strange firm 
 ness about her once vacuous face. 
 
 He staggered to his feet. " Mame," he said: 
 " Dear Mame," and, his whole figure expressing 
 penitence and despair, he began to sob out his story 
 to her, like a naughty child entangled beyond hope 
 of evasion and seeing safety only in confession at
 
 3 86 JIM 
 
 the parental knee. He told her everything every 
 thing, that is, but his own dishonesty. 
 
 She heard him through without comment. When 
 he had finished she said: 
 
 " It s just about what I expected of her, but I 
 must say I didn t expect it of you, Charley." 
 
 " Me? " He didn t in the least comprehend. 
 
 11 Yes, you, Charley." 
 
 " But it was Edith. Haven t I just been telling 
 you? Edith s gone and run away to this Tyrrell 
 fellow." He began to guess that she suspected. 
 " What have / done? " he asked. 
 
 Mame s face became as grave as such a face can 
 become. 
 
 4 You know," she said. 
 
 What do you mean? What do you mean? 
 Mame, do you mean to say you think I took your 
 money? " 
 
 He had let it out before she became specific, 
 but that mattered little : there is no betraying a dem 
 onstrated fact. 
 
 " I know it," said Mame. 
 
 " Mame, how dare you?" He tried to bluster 
 and then caught the fixity of her pale eyes. " Your 
 own brother ! " he sobbed. 
 
 " It s no use, Charley." She shook her head. It 
 was a head slow to grasp, but stubbornly retentive. 
 " Mr. Zoller telephoned while you were on your way 
 here." 
 
 Charley argued; he declared that Zoller, even if 
 prompted by the best of motives toward his client, 
 could not be sure. He explained his expenditures
 
 JIM 387 
 
 in half a dozen conflicting ways. He wept. But 
 Mame had only one sadly monotonous reply: 
 
 " Mr. Zoller knows." 
 
 The accounts are square!" cried Charley. 
 " Even if I did use some of the money, it s paid back. 
 It s all there. Zoller himself admits that." 
 
 Yes, Zoller admitted it, but the repayment did not 
 suffice. " It s knowing you could ever have done such 
 a thing," said Mame. 
 
 If she had only wept, he would have been able 
 to deal with her; she used to weep so easily; but she 
 did not weep now: she stood there in a sort of sad 
 placidity. He couldn t understand this sister. He 
 was terribly afraid of her. Charley s tears ceased 
 to flow for the sake of effect: they flowed because 
 he was hopeless. 
 
 " Come back, Mame," he sobbed. " Come back 
 to the old house and let me be there with you. 
 Don t turn me out your own brother! " 
 
 Neither Mame s voice nor her expression 
 changed. " Listen here, Charley," she said. You 
 are my own brother and I hope I m a Christian 
 woman He made a pitifully grateful move 
 ment toward her, but she stopped him by a mere 
 shake of her head. " I hope I m a Christian woman, 
 and I m going to try to do my duty," she continued, 
 " but I m not going to be a blamed fool. I m go 
 ing to remember poppa and do what he d want. All 
 my life s been kind of arid, and you d like it to 
 keep on being. Now it s going to change. It s just 
 been like the Bible says: I was like a pelican of 
 the wilderness and an owl of the desert; but here s 
 where you get off."
 
 388 JIM 
 
 " Get off? " And it was Mame speaking! Where 
 had she learned such a phrase? To be sure, she 
 must often have heard him use it, but for her to 
 
 repeat it He mistrusted his ears. He did not 
 
 know this woman. For a moment he was utterly 
 dumfounded by her entire attitude. Then: 
 
 " But, Mame " he began. 
 
 "Just a moment, please," said Mame. She looked 
 like a bovine oracle, uttering the will of implacable 
 gods. " Of course I m going to do what s right 
 by you, but you see I know you now better than even 
 poppa did, and so it wouldn t be right it wouldn t 
 be what poppa d want if I did as much as he used 
 to. I won t do anything that I and Mr. Zoller think 
 poppa d disapprove of if he was here to have his 
 say. Now, I ll come back to the house, for that 
 was mine, and not yours : poppa always wanted that 
 I should have it, anyhow. And you can live there 
 with me by yourself: you don t seem to know how 
 to manage a wife. You ve shown you re not fitted 
 for business, and you re safer if you don t have a 
 job. I ll give you a regular allowance or Mr. 
 Zoller will. It won t be as much as you used to 
 get, for if poppa was alive he d know that wasn t 
 good for you. Still, it ll be as regular as it ever 
 was, and you won t be having any expenses to speak 
 of. You can have the room you used to have before 
 you were married, and I ll run the house and make 
 everything as pleasant as possible; but 7 will run it. 
 And you ve got to quit drinking, Charley. I ll do 
 my duty as a Christian and as your sister, but my 
 duty don t include living under the same roof with 
 a wicked woman, if you could get Edith back, and
 
 JIM 389 
 
 me being your sister only makes it more important 
 I should follow poppa s will; and now I ve got back 
 the money where I see he all along meant it should 
 be, I m going to keep it all of it in my own 
 hands." 
 
 He listened to her, scarcely understanding. He 
 realized only that she was using compulsion against 
 him and that she could use it successfully. This was 
 the woman of whom he had always thought that she 
 " didn t count." 
 
 " Mame," he sobbed, " is this sisterly of you? " 
 " It s what poppa would have wanted," said 
 Mame. " Mr. Zoller will attend to everything. 
 It s what poppa would have wanted, and I ve got 
 to think of myself and poppa."
 
 LAST CHAPTER 
 
 MAME had her way. She had her way com 
 pletely. For the first time in her life, this 
 weak woman found in her hands the un 
 challenged whip and reins of power, and she 
 employed them with the cool determination that is 
 to be found nowhere among mankind save in the 
 weak made strong. 
 
 For a while, for almost as much as a month, Char 
 ley tried to rebel against it, in secret. The little 
 money he had left he spent, as a sort of protest 
 against Mame s tyranny and Edith s desertion, on 
 Claire Girodet; but when that money was gone and 
 there remained only Mame s allowance, which 
 scarcely kept him in poor tobacco and furtive whisky, 
 Claire plainly expressed her expected opinion that 
 he was impudent to suppose she could care anything 
 about him except what his money had brought. She 
 called him a fool; she said he looked like a frog. 
 At the climax of an ugly scene, when he had cringed 
 while she scolded, she dismissed him forever, as a 
 Bordeaux housewife would dismiss a thieving 
 concierge. 
 
 He thought about regaining his independence by 
 getting work. Without Mame s knowledge for she 
 was resolute in her belief that he was safest unem 
 ployed he sullenly sought a position, but he sought 
 without finding. He had no genuine business ex 
 perience and no clerical education. He was not even 
 
 390
 
 JIM 39 i 
 
 a competent manual worker or handyman. He had 
 never been a practical inventor; he possessed no skill 
 with tools : amid the clutter of his uninstructed brain, 
 he had merely stumbled on the idea of the sounder 
 and exploited it. Lacking training and recommen 
 dations, looking twice his age and all his habits, 
 he was everywhere informed that he was too old 
 and too incompetent. He had to abandon his search 
 and remain what Mame wanted him to be. As time 
 passed, he succumbed to her firmer will; he settled 
 down to the part of a barely-tolerated family 
 skeleton rigorously confined to a cupboard to which 
 only his sister and Zoller possessed the keys. 
 
 From the first, the attorney, who exercised so 
 subtle an influence over Mame, reduced Charley to 
 abject terror. Lawyer and client made certain of 
 the brother s peculations, and his sin, like the Psalm 
 ist s, was ever before him. He was frightened into 
 his first submission, and, once having submitted, he 
 lost all chance of future liberty. 
 
 Long ago he had been told he must do nothing 
 so sentimental and so compromising as to permit 
 Edith to divorce him: he was to divorce her. He 
 would leave everything to Zoller. He was not to 
 bother over the thought of Edith s contesting the 
 suit; Zoller, with the evidence that was in his ca 
 pable hands, would see she did nothing of the sort, 
 and would see there was no publicity. So Charley 
 appeared before a referee; he answered, in words 
 previously supplied him, questions he had been 
 warned would be asked; and one evening Mame 
 quite casually let fall the news that the decree of 
 divorce had been made final a week before.
 
 392 JIM 
 
 That news was a fair example of his entire situa 
 tion in his father s house. The even course of the 
 Vanaman establishment, its traditional respectability 
 and quiet, were thus preserved. Late Summer gave 
 place to Autumn and Autumn to Winter, and Edith 
 was apparently forgotten, and Mame reigned in her 
 stead. 
 
 Charley s descent became rapid, and led to a posi 
 tion wholly servile. His sister treated him as if 
 he were a child, a child in disgrace; an idiot aunt 
 bequeathed to Mame s care by the preceding gen 
 eration; a piece of furniture too decrepit for use 
 and too unfashionable for exhibition, but, because 
 a deceased and respected parent had sometimes used 
 it, now tolerated in the limbo of " upstairs." He 
 was given all the odd jobs about the house to do, 
 and Mame found many. Zoller, the stony-hearted, 
 directed and shared Mame s power, called often to 
 consult with his client, and regularly, on the fifteenth 
 day of every month, summoned Charley into the 
 gloomy parlor and handed over the meager allow 
 ance, for which he exacted a punctilious receipt. 
 Out of these sums the pensioner purchased the bad 
 tobacco and contraband whisky, and soon ceased 
 much to care. 
 
 He scuttled about the back ways and corners of 
 the house, unshaven and collarless. He clung to 
 a waistcoat, but was more comfortable without a 
 coat. He had visibly shrunken; his clothes hung 
 more loosely than ever, and his eyes, above the hol 
 lows in his cheeks, were more prominent. He walked 
 with a shuffle in a pair of his dead father s carpet- 
 slippers that were too big for him. When he was
 
 JIM 393 
 
 allowed to talk at all, he never mentioned his Chinese 
 adventures. Occasionally he felt the stirrings of 
 ideas for money-making, reflex movements, mere 
 brain-throbs to the tune of former habit; but he 
 had neither the means nor the energy to encourage 
 them, and they gradually became less and less fre 
 quent. His greatest solace was to lock himself in 
 his narrow room at night and drink himself to sleep. 
 Sometimes he wondered why he had been such a 
 fool as to marry Edith, marriage being unneces 
 sary, and reflected again on the male commonplace 
 that a woman untrue to one man will be untrue to 
 another. He read the newspapers, when his sister 
 was through with them, and in one of these he once 
 read some mention of Tyrrell as being in the Orient, 
 which led him to suppose Edith adrift. From words 
 that he overheard pass between Zoller and his sis 
 ter he eavesdropped on them continually and found 
 a sort of adventurous pleasure in it he caught a 
 report that his wife had been living with George 
 Mertcheson, and that Mertcheson was dead. Most 
 of the pensioner s passions degenerated into inclina 
 tions; only one retained its former force, grew in 
 deed with the decline of its fellows: his hatred of 
 the man from his conspiracy against whom all his 
 disasters derived. He hated Jim. 
 
 2. When Edith had left the Vanaman house, 
 she went direct to Tyrrell s club. She would have 
 telephoned ahead, but the telephone had once be 
 fore betrayed her, and when she reached the street 
 she did not want to lose time. At the corner she 
 looked for an unengaged taxi: all that flew by her
 
 394 JIM 
 
 had their tin flags lowered, bearing happy freight 
 home from the theaters or away to tango-suppers. 
 Then she remembered what Tyrrell had said: u Any 
 sort of passion can ride in a taxi; but in a hansom 
 only Love can ride." An empty hansom was stand 
 ing beside the curb ; slow as such a conveyance must 
 be, she decided to take it. 
 
 Tyrrell was not at his club: the cabman returned 
 with the hall-porter, who told her so. Mr. Tyrrell 
 had come in a short time before, but had gone out 
 again, the porter had not the least idea where. 
 
 "Where to now?" asked the driver. 
 
 Back? Should she say "Back"? Edith would 
 never say that. She said the first name that entered 
 her head: 
 
 " Bustanoby s." 
 
 She wondered if Tyrrell could be at any such 
 place. She had not thought of him as frequenting 
 restaurants and public dances without her; it was 
 certainly unlikely that he would seek one after what 
 had passed between them; yet she did not know 
 where else to look for him. She must hunt until 
 she found. 
 
 At Bustanoby s, where Tyrrell was known, she 
 was told that he had left a few minutes since, say 
 ing something about running up to the Beaux-Arts. 
 It was good, in the quiet of West Fortieth Street, to 
 see him, in response to her message, strolling, 
 leisurely and hatless, from the cafe to her cab. 
 
 "You?" He was unmistakably startled. "I 
 hadn t any idea " 
 
 " No; I didn t send in my name." 
 
 He leaned over the flap of the cab: " Of course
 
 JIM 395 
 
 I m no end glad to see you. But what is it? What s 
 wrong? I thought- 
 Edith put her face close to his : " Everything. He 
 beat me with his fist. So I left him. I walked right 
 out." 
 
 She saw Tyrrell s lips tighten. In their move 
 ment, she welcomed her champion. 
 
 " I sha n t be two minutes," he said. 
 
 He was better than his word. He came back with 
 his hat and stick and leaped into the hansom. 
 
 " Anywhere you like," he answered the driver s 
 question. " I knew I couldn t sleep if I went to bed, 
 dear," he explained to Edith, " and so I ve been 
 knocking about here, looking on. I hope you hadn t 
 to trail me far? " 
 
 She shook her head. He had taken her hand; his 
 voice was tender and considerate; but she wished 
 that he would kiss her wished that she could see 
 his face. 
 
 " Now," he said, " tell me all about it." 
 
 She gave him the broad outlines. Jim she did not 
 mention, for she had never mentioned Jim to Tyr 
 rell; but the quarrel with Charley needed no further 
 explanation than that she gave: 
 
 " So he beat me because he s jealous of you, and 
 now I m going to divorce him." 
 
 "You re going to sue?" Tyrrell s voice was 
 sharp. He called to the cabby to take them to the 
 Waldorf. " We ll go up to the roof," he said to 
 Edith, " and talk this thing over quietly." 
 
 Up there she saw his face, and it frightened her. 
 It frightened her because it showed that she had 
 frightened him. There was music; people were
 
 396 JIM 
 
 dancing; but Tyrrell did not ask her to dance. He 
 sat opposite her, over a bottle of champagne, and 
 made her tell him the story a second time. He 
 seemed loath to comment on it, but at last he said: 
 
 " Of course you can t be beaten by this brute. 
 That s got to be stopped. I daresay it wouldn t 
 become chronic, but your husband had better be 
 brought to reason right away." 
 
 She did not like his tone. She did not like his 
 reference to Charley as her husband. 
 
 " My lawyer ll bring him to reason," she said. 
 She felt her lips twitching. 
 
 Yes, that s an excellent idea. I tell you what 
 we ll do " his face brightened : " you ll put up at 
 the Astor for a few days at my expense, if you don t 
 mind accepting a l>it of money we can make it a 
 loan if you insist till your lawyer has given your 
 husband a good talking-to." 
 
 " But," said Edith" but- 
 
 " But of course," Tyrrell pursued, " there mustn t 
 be any divorce, or anything of that sort." He looked 
 at her evenly. " You see that now as well as I do, 
 don t you? People of the sort you and I are don t 
 go in for that kind of mud, do they? Why " he 
 smiled at her " when I think of my mother, or 
 of all my s*todgy old dead and gone Massachusetts 
 ancestors, when you think of your quiet family in 
 Ayton After all, you and I have escaped be 
 ing Manhattanites, haven t we?" 
 
 She saw it all now. He would not have a scandal ; 
 he had never meant anything but a clandestine love- 
 affair, and he did not care enough about that to run 
 any great risk. It was to be something little and
 
 JIM 397 
 
 low, like Charley s assignations with a stenographer. 
 
 She scarcely knew what she was desperately saying: 
 
 " But there needn t be any publicity. I got a 
 
 divorce from Jim, and almost nobody " 
 
 "Jim? From Jim? Then you ve " 
 
 Yes, from Jim Trent. He s an artist." 
 Tyrrell beckoned to the waiter. While the bill 
 was being fetched, her host said: 
 
 " I know Mr. Trent s work. I know a little about 
 him; but I didn t know you did." He looked at 
 her and smiled again a smile that now made Edith 
 shiver. Well, well," he said, " you put up at the 
 Astor, and we ll think it over. I ll come around 
 to-morrow afternoon at four." 
 
 3. She had no choice; she had to obey him; but 
 he did not call on her at four o clock the next after 
 noon: he never called on her again. Instead, he 
 sent her a note that was tender and affectionate in 
 its wording, and in its tone a sheer surrender of 
 every desire for her, a panic flight before the guns 
 of scandal. He had been called to Boston by his 
 mother s illness; he did not know when he could re 
 turn. The possibility of further physical violence 
 must, of course, be ended, but his advice was fervent 
 for a reconciliation between wife and husband. 
 
 " What," he wrote, " was innocent in our minds " 
 he could call it that, this now cautious man, who 
 would not commit himself in writing! " your hus 
 band has evidently misconstrued, and although I 
 shall always stand ready to do anything I can to help 
 the finest woman I ever knew, it is better, for the 
 sake of everybody concerned, that I efface myself,
 
 39 8 JIM 
 
 even beyond the point of receiving a reply to this 
 note, from a situation which it was never our in 
 tention should wound anyone." He inclosed, with 
 out comment, five one-hundred-dollar bills. 
 
 That was the fall of the structure she had founded 
 on Tyrrell s affections. She had, she saw, torn it 
 down by her proposal of a divorce and the mention 
 of her divorce from Jim. She saw Tyrrell genu 
 flecting before a New England family that had never 
 known a divorce, a Boston set in which the inde 
 cencies held fast to the mask of respectability. She 
 realized that this was the end. She hated him for 
 having rejected her, hated him for the very quali 
 ties that had attracted her to him: for his polite 
 ness and thin polish, and for the sort of people from 
 whom he originated. She hated him almost as much 
 as she hated Jim, whose relation to her she held 
 responsible for this catastrophe. She wrote to Tyr 
 rell, but he did not reply. 
 
 Through a sleepless night, she came to her deci 
 sion. She would not return to Charley. The money 
 she kept without question. Against the background 
 of her long poverty, five hundred dollars bulked like 
 wealth. Besides, for a time, she hoped, against con 
 viction, that Tyrrell would write again. 
 
 She went to Schultz and asked him to get her a 
 divorce from Charley, but Schultz, remembering her 
 conduct in the former case, refused her; he might 
 almost be said to have turned her out of his office. 
 Leishman listened, but, after he had heard from 
 Zoller, demonstrated to her amazed indignation 
 that, if she did not want to be exhibited to the pub 
 lic in the worst of light, she must submit to appear-
 
 JIM 399 
 
 ing as a respondent. Her case, though for other 
 reasons, was what Jim s had been: guiltless, she must 
 submit to appearing guilty. 
 
 Among her shattered hopes, she passed some ter 
 rible days. She came from them into a period of 
 extravagance, in which she spent the better part 
 of the money Tyrrell had left her. She bought a 
 few of the clothes that she had long wanted. Reck 
 lessly, she returned alone to the restaurants, the 
 cabarets, the tango-teas. She renewed, but failed to 
 keep up, her acquaintance with the stray women she 
 had met there; with whatever man asked her to 
 dance, she danced. She left the Astor, and when 
 her money was gone, she tried to get a place as a 
 professional dancer. 
 
 You ve no chance," the cafe-proprietors told 
 her. " A few months ago, you might have got on, 
 but we re filled up with real vaudeville stars nowa 
 days." 
 
 The frail-limbed master that had taught her the 
 new dances would not give her lessons to fit her for 
 professional dancing except at prices beyond the 
 reach of her dwindling capital. " I told you, any 
 how," he said, " you wouldn t do for the cabarets." 
 She could nowhere find a partner that could make 
 her dance as Tyrrell had made her. 
 
 Once she thought of appealing to Jim, but she 
 was too bitter and too proud for that. Tyrrell was 
 now out of reach; he was traveling in the Orient, she 
 was told, and had left no address behind. She did 
 write to her relatives. Uncle Gregory sent her a 
 check for fifty dollars and another letter that was a 
 sermon against divorce; the Reverend Stephen sent
 
 400 JIM 
 
 her a ten-dollar bill and asked her not to ac 
 knowledge its receipt: letters from her upset his 
 wife. 
 
 After a sharp illness, she returned to Ayton, 
 where Aunt Caroline sat in the parlor with folded 
 hands and pursed lips and said nothing, while Aunt 
 Polly chewed gum and asked her why she had been 
 such a fool as to lose Jim, and Aunt Hattie blinked 
 and grinned and giggled her religion. Pug-nosed 
 Uncle Morty complained to these aunts of the addi 
 tional expense, in tones intended to reach Edith s 
 ears, and she went back to New York as soon as 
 she could borrow, from Aunt Hattie s music-lesson 
 fund, the money to get there. For a time, after that, 
 she took up with Effie Mitchell, but they quarreled. 
 All of her other old acquaintances, and especially 
 Diana, she avoided. 
 
 She had been collecting misfortunes as some peo 
 ple collect money. There comes the point when 
 money continues to grow without effort by the pos 
 sessor : Edith s mishaps grew by interest, simple and 
 compound. She met Mertcheson, and he offered to 
 befriend her. On the night of their meeting, they 
 danced hard together and rode to his rooms in an 
 open taxi-cab. Five minutes after the ride was over, 
 Mertcheson had a chill; he was desperately ill all 
 night, and she dared not leave him. The next day 
 the doctor that she called in diagnosed his patient s 
 case as one of pneumonia and, although Edith, in her 
 old fear of death, nursed him with a desperate ten 
 derness, Mertcheson died. It was only then that 
 Edith thought of sending for his relatives and 
 brought his mother, a quiet, sad-eyed woman in
 
 JIM 401 
 
 black, to the bed on which the body of the man 
 with the unfinished ears and trivial chin lay dead. 
 Are you the nurse? " asked Mrs. Mertcheson. 
 
 " No," said Edith. Her discretion had fled the 
 presence of mortality. " I m just a friend." 
 
 The mother took her son s body away, and some 
 how the thing, escaping the papers, was whispered 
 in the clubs. The fact that its real victim had once 
 been James Trent s wife made it worth whispering. 
 
 She had the full name without the real game. She 
 took an ugly room in Sixteenth Street, west of Sixth 
 Avenue. She had twenty dollars that she had found 
 in Mertcheson s pockets, and, in early May, she 
 faced a speedy choice between playing the real game 
 or death. She passed three days deciding. 
 
 When she thought of Charley, it was first with 
 scorn and later with a certain tolerance. The worst 
 thing about the failure of their life together had 
 been its monotony: even their quarrels had been of 
 one monotonous piece; they had said the same 
 phrases over and over, made the same accusations 
 . week by week. It all went back to Jim, who had 
 calculatingly let her divorce him, whom even Schultz 
 perversely thought she had wronged: the poverty, 
 the lies, the drunkenness, even the disloyalty to Char 
 ley, the wreck of that very disloyalty, all went back 
 to Jim. She saw that, had Charley prospered, or 
 old Vanaman been kind, her union would still have 
 been much what it was because of Jim. The breath 
 of its original deceit had become an entire atmos 
 phere of deception surcharged with the lightnings 
 of suspicion because of Jim. Even now, Jim, who 
 had brought them togeth-- and made them repel each
 
 402 JIM 
 
 other, somehow, across the city, united them Jim, 
 who, she finally thought, had probably allowed her 
 to divorce him because he wanted to get rid of her. 
 
 She had become careless in her habits and in her 
 dress. Her face had hardened, her voice was 
 harsher, her brown eyes dull. She had abandoned 
 her last thought of success; her highest ambition was 
 for some endurable compromise. She was always 
 lonely, so lonely that, from sheer habit, she would 
 sometimes wish Charley were with her, if only to 
 have him to quarrel with and to talk to about the 
 wrong that Jim had done them. But on this May 
 evening she must think about the ways of escaping 
 from life : she was thinking about death when some 
 body knocked at her door. 
 
 4. At first she did not know who he was. 
 
 He was a tall man, clean-shaven, silver-haired. 
 His eyes were sharp but pleasant; his man 
 ner easy, but out of place in Sixteenth Street. 
 
 Edith jumped to her feet. Instinctively, her nerv 
 ous hands darted upward to arrange her hair. 
 
 " Please don t disturb yourself," said her caller. 
 " I sha n t keep you ten minutes." He gave her his 
 card. 
 
 Edith read that he was Mr. Douglas Aspinall, of 
 Lord s Court Building, 27 William Street. In the 
 lower left-hand corner of the card were the words: 
 " Aspinall & Derry, Counselors-at-Law." She 
 looked up : 
 
 " I don t understand " 
 
 It was quite simple, he assured her. He came in 
 person because he had experienced some trouble in
 
 JIM 403 
 
 finding her address and establishing her identity, 
 but that was the only intricate portion of his task, 
 and it was over. He came to tell her that an 
 annuity small, but absolutely unconditioned and the 
 best his client could afford had been settled upon 
 her: "To be paid quarterly in sums aggregating 
 three hundred and sixty-four dollars a year." He 
 was not to tell her the name of her benefactor un 
 less she insisted, but since she did insist, he was at 
 liberty to say that it was James Trent. 
 
 For a full minute Edith said nothing. When she 
 did speak, her face was averted. 
 
 " So it s Jim," she said. 
 
 Yes, it was Jim. Though he had married a rich 
 wife, he earned, it appeared, a comfortable com 
 petence from his art and he had just sold three pic 
 tures for the sum with which he invested in this 
 annuity. What pictures? Mr. Aspinall did not see 
 why she should care, but there was no secret about 
 it; it would doubtless soon be published: they were 
 a portrait of Bishop Peel, a picture of some tango- 
 dancers that was popular about a year ago prob 
 ably she remembered the reproductions, which were 
 everywhere and a still earlier painting, the picture 
 of a woman in a dressing-gown, called, the lawyer 
 believed 
 
 "I know it," said Edith, shortly; it was that 
 portrait of her, the portrait about which she had 
 been so angry with Jim. Well, she was angry now, 
 but she was glad to have the money that was sal 
 vation from whatever source and her only curi 
 osity was as to the price paid for that picture: 
 "What did he get for it?"
 
 404 JIM 
 
 Aspinall shook his head at her: 
 
 " Don t you think I ve already told you more than 
 I ought to? " 
 
 She couldn t move him and, after all, what did 
 she care? " He s still he s still married? There s 
 no harm in asking that, I guess." 
 
 "None whatever. Oh, yes, he s still married! 
 Very happily, I believe. And he has a little son." 
 
 She got up and walked across the room, her back 
 toward the lawyer. She stood thus until he was 
 through stating the arrangements for payment and 
 its methods. Then she turned. 
 
 " How did you know I was living here? How 
 did he know I needed needed it?" 
 
 But she guessed the reply: there had been that 
 gossip about Mertcheson s death, of course; Jim 
 could not help hearing it; she herself had heard its 
 echoes. And that picture was helping to pay- 
 She broke out in angry denunciations of Jim. If 
 Aspinall only knew what she knew; if he guessed 
 what sort of man his client was! This Trent had 
 wrecked her life; he had ruined her; he followed 
 a secret career of debauchery. She spread her old 
 accusations before her visitor before he could raise 
 his voice in protest. She was so skillful in her at 
 tack that she even woke temper in the legal mind. 
 
 " And he sends you to me now as if I was a beg 
 gar! " she ended. " Oh, I ll take your money: you 
 bet I ll take the money. I ve earned it. But don t 
 say he sent you because he thought it d be painful 
 for me to see him. Of course he did say that: it s 
 so like him. But I know he did it because he wanted 
 to be high-and-mighty. If he didn t want to be
 
 JIM 405 
 
 high-and mighty, he wouldn t have missed the pleas 
 ure of seeing for himself how hard up I am." 
 
 Aspinall s eyes were less pleasant now. 
 
 " If you want to know what Mr. Trent felt," he 
 replied, " I ll tell you. Although I pointed out to 
 him that you have no claim, either legal or moral, 
 upon him, he said: I only wish I could do more 
 for her; I can t bear to think the poor thing might 
 starve. " 
 
 It was wanton repetition of a phrase uttered in 
 confidence; but Aspinall had been too severely tried. 
 Edith recoiled from it. She seemed to see Jim s 
 face again, alight now with a large and patient pity. 
 " I can t bear to think the poor thing might 
 starve! " 
 
 He had never meant her to hear that; but he had 
 said it, and she hated him for his compassion. Still, 
 money was money, however little and however de 
 rived; once this money was hers, it was nobody s 
 else. . . . 
 
 When the lawyer left her, she shook hands with 
 him, for she was grateful for the money. But she 
 hated Jim for this humiliation how she hated Jim! 
 
 5. So, once again, the gypsy lad, Spring, had 
 come running up the streets of New York, behind 
 his harbinger, the hurdy-gurdy, and singing as he 
 ran. The children heard him first and laughed at 
 their play under the budding trees in the public 
 squares. Then even the older people began to give 
 ear to his bragging lies and pay heed to his swag 
 gering promises: often ere now he had tricked them, 
 but they forgot, as he so loftily forgot, how sadly
 
 4 o6 JIM 
 
 he had deceived the world a year ago, and every 
 year before. Even Mame, to all physical appear 
 ance unchanged, marvelously heard him and 
 believed. 
 
 " Charley," she said one evening as she casually 
 paused in the hall before starting for her missionary- 
 meeting, " it won t make any difference to your life 
 here, and everything ll be as pleasant as it s always 
 been, for we ll all keep right on; but next week I m 
 going to marry Mr. Zoller. Now, be sure you have 
 the shutters shut by ten o clock, and don t forget the 
 back door: the lock s out of order; use the bolt." 
 
 Charley was capable only of a schoolboy wrig 
 gling of his shoulders. He had been expecting this. 
 He did not raise his voice to protest that voice 
 trembling and uncertain now : he merely waited until 
 she went out and then, coatless, collarless, and un 
 shaven, shuffled away upstairs in his father s carpet- 
 slippers that were too large for him. 
 
 Only very deep in his heart did he hear the call 
 of Spring or reckon with the announcement of his 
 sister s approaching wedding. With Zoller perma 
 nently quartered in the house, he would be a bit more 
 uncomfortable than he was now, but to all intents and 
 purposes Zoller, or at any rate Zoller s orders, had 
 for so long shared the rule there that this new change 
 could hardly count. Charley had been informed 
 that he was to " go along " just as he had been 
 going, and he knew that nothing could set him free. 
 So, when he reached his room, he kicked off his slip 
 pers and sat in his stocking feet under the gas-jet, 
 his hair a little thinner, his face a little looser and 
 more bloated, and his eyes a little more like a bull-
 
 JIM 407 
 
 frog s than they used to be. With a scanty half pint 
 of whisky beside him, some cheap tobacco in a cheap 
 pipe he could no longer afford even the cheapest 
 cigars he read the evening newspaper line by line 
 and felt but vaguely the summons of the season. 
 
 Then, oddly side by side in the paper, where Fate 
 loves to play in strange juxtapositions and odd con 
 trasts, his glance came upon two brief items of news. 
 One was an account of the work of James Trent; it 
 told how the French Government had bought, for 
 the Luxembourg collection, the portrait of the paint 
 er s wife and son; how a church-society had pur 
 chased his portrait of Bishop Peel, and presented 
 it to the bishop s wife, and how a millionaire, famous 
 for buying whatever he was told was good, had now 
 paid a large price for the same artist s tango-dancers 
 and that other portrait named simply " A Woman." 
 The second paragraph announced what it called a 
 " Society Engagement " between the daughter of one 
 of the richest men in New York and Robert Tyr 
 rell, of Boston. 
 
 For a half hour the lonely Charley sat with those 
 items before his eyes, drinking his bad whisky and 
 smoking his bad tobacco. He was long past swear 
 ing at the power which shapes the destinies of men; 
 he was past anything save a mild regret and a sneak 
 ing longing and a futile hatred that he knew to be 
 futile. But, fretful and weak as he was, his very 
 hatred of Jim made him now, realizing the utter 
 hopelessness of his own wreck, see one thing clearly: 
 he saw clearly that what had happened to him had 
 happened not because he married a divorced woman; 
 what had happened had happened because he and
 
 408 JIM 
 
 Edith had cheated at the game and had so made their 
 strongest bond the mutual knowledge of a mutual 
 unworthiness and distrust. 
 
 Charley rather thought he would like to tell her 
 of the evening s news. He could hear her saying: 
 "The idea! He sold that old thing! I wonder 
 how he could swindle anybody into buying that." 
 It would be a relief to join with her in condemning 
 Jim, even in quarreling with her again. Besides, he 
 would vaguely like her to know that he felt her no 
 more to blame than he had been. A trifle befud 
 dled by the liquor, for he was now as easily affected 
 by it as in the days when he took his first drink 
 with Jim the days before the days when he could 
 take so much and show so little he tiptoed down 
 stairs to the telephone, wondering whether, by search 
 ing the directory, he could find the name of any old 
 acquaintance that might know her present address. 
 And, as he reached the hall, the phone-bell rang. 
 
 He took up the receiver through which Edith had 
 listened to Tyrrell on the morning that Mame came 
 in and caught her. It was as he had almost, for no 
 discernible reason, expected: somewhere, out in the 
 softness of that night in lying Spring, Edith had 
 also seen those two pieces of news in the evening 
 paper and was telephoning him. 
 
 " Hello ! " she said, and he knew her voice. 
 
 His heart beat swiftly, but it could never again 
 beat so swiftly as it used to beat. 
 
 " Hello! " he whispered, afraid to raise his voice 
 in the house that was Mame s, even when Mame was 
 out of it. " This is Charley." 
 
 "This is this is Edith."
 
 JIM 409 
 
 11 Yes, I know." 
 
 "Are you alone, Charley?" 
 
 4 Yes, but but not for long. Mame s at a mis 
 sionary-meeting. She ll be back any minute now." 
 
 There was a momentary pause. Then Edith s 
 voice resumed: 
 
 " I was just wondering how you were." 
 
 " Oh, I m all right. How about you? " 
 
 " No worse off than I ll ever be, I guess." She 
 gave him the address of her lodging-house. " I ve 
 been hard up," she said. 
 
 " So have I," said Charley. " What have you 
 been doing? " 
 
 " Almost nothing. I did try to get a job tangoing 
 in a cabaret, but I wasn t good enough." 
 
 " Tangoing? " He had no hatred of it now; he 
 had no hatred of the other things he had heard 
 of her. " I didn t know you could do it." 
 
 " It seems I can t." 
 
 "When did you learn?" 
 
 " After I left you. How s the invention, 
 Charley?" 
 
 He told her of its collapse. " So I m living on 
 a few dollars a week from Mame," he said. 
 
 He heard her gasp: 
 
 " So you re on her list? I found out to-day that 
 I was, too. She s hunted me up: Zoller says she 
 considers it her Christian duty not to let me starve." 
 Edith s voice was acrid. " A lot of people seem 
 more afraid of me dead than alive. Another one 
 turned up a while ago. Mame s three dollars a 
 week had conditions: I wasn t to see you; the first 
 one hadn t any."
 
 410 JIM 
 
 Nowadays Mame led his thoughts: 
 
 " Well, / can t move hand or foot without Mame s 
 say-so." There were tears of self-pity in his eyes, 
 not so much at the fact as at the telling of it. " And 
 I m too busted-up and too middle-aged ever to get 
 a job again. Edith " his voice became insinuating 
 " do you think you could lend me enough to give 
 me a start in business? A month or so ago I got 
 a great idea, and if I could only get a little capital 
 
 together It d pay you five per cent, on your 
 
 investment from the jump." 
 
 "Lend you money? I know you too well for 
 that, Charley and my whole income s ten a week. 
 Seven of it comes from Jim." 
 
 "Jim?" he repeated. The receiver shook in his 
 hands. " And he s only giving you " 
 
 " Seven per. Of course he s pretending it s the 
 best he can do. Isn t that like him?" 
 
 There was silence. 
 
 " I m sorry for you," Charley said at last. 
 
 " And I m sorry for you," she returned. 
 
 " Did you did you see to-night s paper, Edith? " 
 
 "About Jim?" 
 
 " Yes, and about " 
 
 " Oh, I knew about that a week ago. You needn t 
 worry; I ll never see him again." 
 
 " I wasn t worrying about Tyrrell," said Charley; 
 " I was only wondering whether you ever thought 
 how it all happened, of how " 
 
 She interrupted as of old, and her voice was full 
 of hate. 
 
 " Think of that luck of Jim s. His wife and son,
 
 JIM 4II 
 
 too I Some people have all the luck. But his won t 
 last forever I m sure of that. . . . Almost sure. 
 . . . Can t you come round to see me sometimes? " 
 she was asking. " I m not so good to look at as I 
 used to be: I ve had some hard luck and I m afraid 
 I ve been drinking a little lately. Still, for old times 
 sake " 
 
 She now meant, it was evident, only what she said. 
 Remarriage between paupers, and in the face of the 
 forever disapproving Mame, could never be. 
 
 "Oh!" Charley caught his breath. "I d like 
 to; but if Mame ever found out " 
 
 Edith s voice was softer. u You could sneak 
 around once in a while, couldn t you? I m lonely." 
 
 That was it, he knew: she did not love him; her 
 very passion was dead; but she was lonely without 
 the one man left in the world with whom she had 
 something in common, even if that something was 
 only the memory of a mutual and really ineffectual 
 conspiracy. 
 
 " I don t understand why you should be lonely," 
 he nevertheless said. 
 
 " You wouldn t understand, Charley. But I ve 
 had to worry, and that leaves its marks. Can t you 
 come round? Won t you?" It was not like the 
 manner of the former Edith. 
 
 " If Mame found out 
 
 " She d stop both our allowances. Yes, I know. 
 But just once in a while, Charley: she ll never get 
 to know." 
 
 Charley gulped. 
 
 " Well," he said, " I ll try." 
 
 He laughed, they both laughed, at the idea of
 
 JIM 
 
 tricking Mame; she was the only person left for 
 them to trick. 
 
 " Do ! " Edith s voice was almost happy at the 
 prospect. " Do try. If you will only try, you can 
 work it. Nobody need know." 
 
 There was something I wanted to ask you," 
 said Charley. " It was about us about the reason 
 
 everything went wrong between us. I " He 
 
 groped in his poisoned mind, but the subtlety had 
 escaped him. "I can t think of it now," he said; 
 
 " but when we have our talk Oh, Edith " he 
 
 had heard someone at the front door " here comes 
 Mame. I ve got to ring off quick 1 " 
 
 "Good-night!" called Edith. 
 
 Charley had not the courage to respond to that 
 farewell. He hung up the receiver just in time to 
 face Mame and Zoller, who, as was now his custom, 
 had brought her home. 
 
 " I thought I heard you," said Charley, " and I 
 thought I d just run down " 
 
 Mame sniffed. Standing in the hall beside her 
 grim and dry fiance, she was a picture of vacuous 
 self-satisfaction. 
 
 " Charley," she said, " you ve been drinking 
 again." 
 
 " No, I haven t, Mame, indeed " 
 
 " Don t lie about it, Charley. I m ashamed of 
 you. And Mr. Zoller here, too ! You ve forgotten 
 about the shutters I noticed them as we came by 
 and I bet you forgot the back door. Go to bed." 
 
 He turned meekly and went upstairs, and there, 
 from his own room, he looked out at the stars and 
 the warm, inviting, deceptive Spring night.
 
 JIM 413 
 
 He thought of Edith. Of course they could never 
 be openly together, and of course when they were 
 secretly together they would often hate each other, 
 
 and yet He wondered why he had gone to the 
 
 telephone. Had he gone only because he had seen 
 that paragraph in the paper about Tyrrell? No, 
 he knew that, had there been but the mention of Tyr 
 rell, he would not have gone. He went because of 
 that mention of Jim; and that was why Edith had 
 telephoned. They had made Jim serve their turn, 
 and, because of their triumph, Jim, by merely re 
 maining alive and doing his work in the world, had 
 ruined both their lives. He had brought them to 
 gether; he had driven them apart; he had taken their 
 youth, their hopes, their friends, their means of live 
 lihood ; he had made them thieves and left them pen 
 sioners; and now it was Jim, honored and successful, 
 who was once more drawing them together in a 
 frightful and furtive companionship. 
 
 6. Downtown, Edith was leaning at her win 
 dow. The faint breeze of the May night stirred the 
 curtains of her brightly lighted room. The scent of 
 the season rose above the heavy odors of the nar 
 row street below. It floated over the window-sill. 
 Spring, the oldest, the sweetest, and the subtlest of 
 liars, was at the ear of the world once more. It was 
 whispering something. . . . 
 
 Edith could not catch the words. 
 
 THE END
 
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