Kedzie was having a good time, but she regretted that her wedding-ring was so small. She felt that wives ought to wear some special kind of plume, the price of the feather varying with the bank account. Kedzie would have had to carry an umbrella of plumes.
Still, she did pretty well on her exit. She went out like a million dollars. But her haughtiness fell from her when she reached home and found Mr. and Mrs. Thropp comfortably installed there, saving hotel bills.
Charity Coe had gone out feeling a million years old. She left the presence of Kedzie in a mood of tragic laughter. She was in one of those contemptible, ridiculous plights in which good people frequently find themselves as a result of kindliness and self-sacrifice.
For well-meant actions are as often and as heavily punished in this world as ill-meant—if indeed the word punishment has any respectability left. It is certainly obsolescent.
Many great good men, such as Brand Whitlock, the saint of Belgium, had been saying that the whole idea of human punishment of human beings is false, cruel, and futile, that it has never accomplished anything worth while for either victim or inflictor. They place it among the ugly follies, the bloody superstitions that mankind has clung to with a fanaticism impervious to experience. They would change the prisons from hells to schools and hospitals.
Even the doctrine of a hell beyond the grave is rather neglected now, except by such sulphuric press agents as Mr. Sunday. But in this world we cannot sanely allege that vice is punished and virtue rewarded until we know better what virtue is and what is vice. All that it is safe to say is that punishment is a something unpleasant and reward a something pleasant that follows a deed—merely follows in point of time, not in proof of judgment.
So the mockery of Charity's good works was neither a punishment nor a ridicule. It was a coincidence, but a sad one. Charity had befriended Kedzie without making a friend thereby; she had lost, indeed, her good friend Jim. Charity's affection for Jim would make her suspect in Kedzie's eyes, and Kedzie's gratitude had evidently already cut its sharper-than-a-serpent's wisdom tooth.
Charity had been patient with her husband and had lost him. She had asked the Church for her freedom and had been threatened with exile. Then her husband had demanded his freedom and forced her to choose between blackening her own soul with the brand “divorcée” or blackening her husband's mistress's baby's soul with the brand “illegitimate.”
She had preferred to take the shame upon herself. But who would give her credit? She knew how false was the phrase that old Ovid uttered but could not comfort even himself with, “The mind conscious of rectitude laughs at the lies of gossip.” No woman can afford such security.
Charity had such a self-guying meekness, indeed, that instead of clothing herself in the robes of martyrdom she ridiculed herself because of one thing: In a pigeonhole of her brain a little back-thought had lurked, a dim hope that if she gave her husband the divorce he implored she might be free to remold her shattered life nearer to her heart's desire—with Jim Dyckman. Her husband, indeed, had taunted her with that intention, and now she had no sooner launched her good name down the slippery ways of divorce than she found Jim Dyckman married and learned that her premature and unwomanly hopes for him were ludicrously thwarted!