Jim confirmed Prissy's eager suspicions by taking himself off with a maximum of embarrassment. Charity went to the door with him—to kiss him good-by, as Prissy gloatingly supposed, but actually to say:
“I'll call on your wife to-morrow.”
“You're an angel,” said Jim, and meant it.
He thought all the way home what an angel she was, and Charity was thinking at the same time what a fool she had been to let Peter Cheever dazzle her to the fact that Jim Dyckman was the one man in the world that she belonged to. She needed just him and he just her.
CHAPTER XII
Sometimes Jim Dyckman was foolish enough to wish that he had been his wife's first lover. But a man has to get up pretty early to be that to any woman. The minxes begin to flirt with the milk-bottle, then with the doctor, and then to cherish a precocious passion for the first rag sailor-doll.
Jim had come as near as any man may to being a woman's first love in the case of Charity, and what good had it done him? He was the first boy Charity had ever played with. Her nurse had bragged about her to his nurse when Charity was just beginning to take notice of other than alimentary things. By that time Jim was a blasé roué of five and his main interest in Charity was a desire to poke his finger into the soft spot in her head.
The nurses restrained him in time, and his proud, young, little mother of then, when she heard of it, decided that he was destined to be a great explorer. His young father sniffed that he was more likely to be a gynecologist. They had a grand quarrel over their son's future. He became none of the things they feared or hoped that he would and he carried out none of his own early ambitions.