Life will be so much more wholesome when women propose marriage as men do and have a plain, frank talk about it instead of their eternal business of veils and reticences, fugitive impulses real or coquettish, modesties real or faked.
Ferriday could not be sure of Kedzie, and he grew so curious to know that finally he broke out, “In the Lord's name, will you or will you not marry me, damn you?”
And Kedzie answered: “Of course not. I wouldn't dream of such a thing.”
But that did not prove anything, either. Perhaps she merely wanted to trawl him along.
She had Ferriday almost crazy—at least she had added one more to his manias—when Jim Dyckman wandered into the studio and set up an entirely new series of ambitions and discontents.
CHAPTER XVII
Charity Coe forgot her great moving-picture enterprise for a time in the agony of her discovery that her husband was disloyal and that the Church did not accept that as a cancellation of her own loyalty.
For a long time she was in such misery of uncertainty that she went up to the mountains to recover her strength. She came back at last, made simple and stoical somehow by the contrast of human pettiness with the serenity (as we call it) of those vast masses of débris that we poetize and humanize as patient giants.