After a brief and blissful honeymoon, Peter Cheever's capricious soul kindled at the thought of an exploration of war-filled Europe. His blushing bride was a hurdle-rider, too, and loved a risk-neck venture. She insisted on going with him.
He accepted the steering-wheel of a motor-ambulance and left his bride to her own devices while he shot along the poplar-plumed roads of France at lightning speed.
Charity drifted into hospital service. Her first soldier, the tortured victim of a gas-attack, was bewailing the fate of his motherless child. Charity brought a smile to what lips he had by whispering:
“I am rich. I will adopt your little girl.”
It was the first time she had ever boasted of being rich. The man died, whispering: “Merci, Madame! Merci, Madame!” Another father was writhing in the premature hell of leaving a shy little unprotected boy to starve. Charity promised to care for him, too.
At a committee meeting, a week later, she learned of a horde of war orphans and divided them up with Muriel Schuyler, Mrs. Perry Merithew, and other American angels abroad.
When Charity's husband wearied of being what he called “chauffeur to a butcher-wagon,” he decided that America was a pretty good country, after all. But Charity could not tear herself away from her privilege of suffering, even to follow her bridegroom home. He had cooled to her also, and he made no protest. He promised to come back for her. He did not come. He cabled often and devotedly, telling her how lonely he was and how busy. She answered that she hoped he was lonely, but she knew he was busy. He would be!
When Cheever first returned, Jim Dyckman saw him at a club. He saw him afterward in a restaurant with one of those astonishing animals which the moving pictures have hardly caricatured as a “vampire.” This one would have been impossible if she had not been visible. She was intensely visible.
Jim Dyckman felt that her mere presence in a public restaurant was offensive. To think of her as displacing Charity Coe in Cheever's attentions was maddening. He understood for the first time why people of a sort write anonymous letters. He could not stoop to that degradation, and yet he wondered if, after all, it would be as degrading to play the informer as to be an unprotesting and therefore accessory spectator and confidant.
Gossip began to deal in the name of Cheever. One day at a club the he-old-maid “Prissy” Atterbury cackled: