Kedzie tiptoed away. She felt as Eve must have felt sneaking out of Eden and hearing the nightingales wrangling and the leopards at play.
CHAPTER XXVI
We must fly fast and keep on flying if we would escape from our pasts. Ambition, adventure, or sheer luck may carry us forward out of them as in a cavalry-foray over strange frontiers, but sooner or later we must wait for our wagons or fall back to them.
Kedzie's past was catching up with her. It is a glorious thing when one's past comes up loaded with food, munitions, good deeds, charities, mercies, valued friendships. But poor little Kedzie's little past included one incompetent and unacknowledged husband and two village parents.
Kedzie had concealed the existence of Gilfoyle from her new friends as anxiously as if he had been a baby born out of wedlock instead of a grown man born into it. And Gilfoyle had returned the compliment. He had not told his new friends in Chicago that he was married, because the Anita Adair that he had left in New York was, as F.P.A. would say, his idea of nothing to brag about.
Gilfoyle had loved Kedzie once as a pretty photographer's model, and had admired her as an exquisite dancing-creature who seemed to have spun off at a tangent from the painted side of an old Greek amphora. He had actually written poetry to her! And when a poet has done that for a girl he feels that he has done more for her than she can ever repay. Even if she gives him her mortal self, what is that to the immortality he has given her?
When Kedzie telegraphed Gilfoyle that she had lost her job in Newport and had arrived in New York lonely and afraid, had he not taken care of her good name by giving her his own? Not to mention a small matter of all his money!
She had repaid him with frantic discontent. The morning after the wedding, was she not imitating the parrot's shrill ridicule of life and love? Did she ridicule his poetry, or didn't she? She did. Instead of being his nine Muses, she had become his three Furies.