“Only married her, didn't he?”
“That's allie.”
“Zada is only really wifie?”
“Only onlykins.”
Charity listened with a greed of self-torment like a fanatic penitent. The chatter of the two had none of the indecency she had expected, and that made it the more intolerably indecent.
She saw that Cheever's affair with Zada had settled down to a state of comfort, of halcyon delight.
It had taken on domestication. He was at home with her and an alien in Charity's home. He told the woman his business affairs and little office jokes. He laughed with a purity of cheer that he had long lost in his legal establishment. He used many of the love-words that he had once used to Charity, and her heart was wrung with the mockery of it.
Charity listened helplessly. She was as one manacled or paralyzed and submitted to such a torture as she had never endured. She harkened in vain for some hopeful note of uncongeniality, some reassurance for her love or at least her vanity, some certainty that her husband, her first possessor, had given her some emotion that he could never give another. But he was repeating to Zada the very phrases of his honeymoon, repeating them with all the fervor of a good actor playing Romeo for the hundredth time with his new leading lady. Indeed, he seemed to find in Zada a response and a unity that he had never found in Charity's society. Her intelligence was cruelly goaded to the realization that she had never been quite the woman for Cheever.
She had known that he had not been the full complement of her own soul. They had disagreed fiercely on hundreds of topics. He had been chilled by many of her ardors, as many of his interests had bored her. She had supposed it to be an inevitable inability of a man and a woman to regard the world through the same eyes. She had let him go his way and had gone her own. And now it seemed that he had in his wanderings found some one who mated him exactly. The butterfly had liked the rose, but had fluttered away; when it found the orchid it closed its wings and rested content.
It was a frightful revelation to Charity, for it meant that Cheever had been merely flirting with her. She had caught his eye as a girl in a strange port captivates a sailor. He had haunted her window with serenades. Finding her to be what we call “a good girl,” he had called upon her father and mother that he might talk to her longer. And then he had gone to church with her and married her that he might get rid of her father and mother and her own scruples. And so he had made her his utterly, and after a few days and nights had sailed away. He had come back to her now and then as a sailor does.