She subsided in wails of terror and loneliness. They touched his heart so that he determined to end his effort at amphibian existence, give up his legal establishment and legalize the illegal.
He wrote a note to Charity with much difficulty, since his knuckles were sore and his pride was black and blue. His spoken language was of the same tints. His written language was polite and formal.
It was a silly, tragic situation that led a husband to write his wife a letter requesting an interview. Charity sent back a scrawl—“Yes, in fifteen minutes.”
Cheever spent a bad quarter of an hour dressing himself. His face was too raw to endure a razor, and the surgeon had put little cross-patches of adhesive tape on one of his cheek-bones and at the edge of his mouth, where his lip had split as the tooth behind it went overboard.
He yowled as he slipped his arms into a long bathrobe, and he struck at the valet when the wretch suggested a little powder for one eye.
Charity had seen Cheever brought in at midnight and had looked to it that he had every care. But now she came into his room with a maidenly timidity. He did not know that she had rebuked Jim Dyckman with uncharacteristic wrath for the attack. She did not tell Cheever this, even though his first words to her demanded some such defense.
In the quarrels of lovers, or of those who have exchanged loves, it makes little difference what the accusation is all about: the thing that hurts is the fact of accusation.
Charity was so shamed at being stormed at by her husband that it was a mere detail that he stormed at her with a charge that she had goaded Jim Dyckman on to attack him.
Cheever had a favor to ask; so he put the charge more mildly now than he had in his first bewildered rage. He accepted Charity's silence as pleading guilty. So he went on:
“The fact that you chose Dyckman for your authorized thug and bravo proves what I have thought for some time, that you love him and he loves you. Now I have no desire to come between two such turtle-doves, especially when one of them is one of those German flying-machine Taubes and goes around dropping dynamite-bombs on me through club roofs.