Jim wondered, too. He sat and watched the two women, wondering as men do when they see women painfully courteous to each other; wondering as women must when they see men polite to their enemies.
Charity and Kedzie prattled on in a kind of two-story conversation, and Jim studied them with shameless objectivity. He hardly heard what they said. He watched the pantomime of their so different souls and bodies: Charity, lean and smart and aristocratic, beautiful in a peculiar mixture of sophistication and tenderness; Kedzie, small and nymph-like and plebeian, beautiful in a mixture of innocence and hardness of heart.
Charity's body was like the work of a dashing painter—long lines drawn with brave force and direction. Kedzie's body was a thing of dainty curves and timidities. Charity was fashionable and wise, but her wisdom had lifted her above pettiness. Kedzie was of the village, for all her Parisian garb, and she had cunning, which is the lowest form of wisdom.
When at length Charity left, Jim and Kedzie sat brooding. Kedzie wanted to say something nice about Charity and was afraid to. The poor child always distrusted her generous impulses. She thought it cleverer to withhold trust from everybody, lest she misplace it in somebody. At length an imp of perversity taught her how to get rid of the credit she owed to Charity. She spoke after a long silence.
“Mrs. Cheever must be horribly fond of you.”
“Why do you say that?” said Jim, startled.
“Because she's so nice to me.”
Jim groaned with disgust. Kedzie giggled, accepting the groan as confession of a palpable hit. She sat musing on various costumes she might wear. She had a woman's memory for things she had caught a glimpse of in a shop-window or in a fashion magazine; she had a woman's imagination for dressing herself up mentally.
As a trained mathematician can do amazing sums in his head, so Kedzie could juggle modes and combinations, colors and stuffs, and wrap hem about herself. While Kedzie composed her new gown, her husband studied her, still wondering at her and his inability to get past the barriers of her flesh to her soul. Charity's flesh seemed but the expression of herself. It was cordial and benevolent, warm and expressive in his eyes. Her hands were for handclasp, her lips for good words, her eyes for honest language. He had not embraced her except in dances years before, and in that one quickly broken embrace at Newport. He had not kissed her since they had been boy and girl lovers, but the savor of her lips was still sweet in his memory. He felt that he knew her soul utterly.
He had possessed all the advantages of Kedzie without seeming to get acquainted with the ultimate interior Kedzie at all. She was to him well-known flesh inhabited by a total stranger, who fled from him mysteriously. When she embraced him she held him aloof. When she kissed him her lips pressed him back. He could not outgrow the feeling that their life together was rather a reckless flirtation than a communion of merged souls.