Adna spoke up: “I'll go to Chicago and find him and get a divorce, if I have to pound it out of him. You say he's a poet?”
Adna had the theory that poetry went with tatting and china-painting as an athletic exercise. Kedzie had no reason to think differently. She had whipped her own poet, scratched him and driven him away in disorder. She told her people of this and of her inability to recall him, and of his failure to answer the letter she had sent to Chicago.
Her father and mother grew incandescent with the strain between the obstacle and the opportunity—the irresistible opportunity chained to the immovable obstacle. They raged against the fiend who had ruined Kedzie's life, met her on her pathway, gagged and bound her, and haled her to his lair.
Poor young Gilfoyle would have been flattered at the importance they gave him, but he would not have recognized himself or Kedzie.
According to his memory, he had married Kedzie because she was a pitiful, heartbroken waif who had lost her job and thrown herself on his mercy. He had married her because he adored her and he wanted to protect her and love her under the hallowing shelter of matrimony. He had given her his money and his love and his toil, and they had not interested her. She had berated him, chucked him, taken up with a fast millionaire; and when he returned to resume his place in her heart she had greeted him with her finger-nails.
Thus, as usual in wars, each side had bitter grievances which the other could neither acknowledge nor understand. Gilfoyle was as bitter against Kedzie as she was against him.
And even while the three Thropps were wondering how they could summon this vanquished monster out of the vasty deep of Chicago they could have found him by putting their heads out of the window and shouting his name. He was loitering opposite in the areaway of an empty residence. He did not know that Kedzie's father and mother were with her, any more than they knew that he was with them.