This was all news to Kedzie and it sickened her. She demanded more poison, and Pet ladled it out joyously.
She told Kedzie how Prissy Atterbury found Jim at Charity's home. But Kedzie remembered vividly that Jim had said he met Charity on the street. And now she had caught him in a lie, a woman-lie! He was not there to explain that he visited Charity in Kedzie's behalf, and if he had explained it would only have embittered her the more.
Being quite convinced now of Jim's perfidy, she denied the possibility of it.
“Jim's square, I'm sure. There couldn't be anything wrong with him. And Mrs. Cheever is an awful prig, everybody says.”
Pet whooped with laughter: “They're the worst sort. Why, only a couple of years ago Jim and Charity were up in the Adirondacks alone together. Prissy Atterbury caught them sneaking back.”
So one lie was used to bolster another. The firmest structures can be thus established by locking together things that will not stand alone—as soldiers stack arms. Pet went on stacking lies and Kedzie grew more and more distressed, then infuriated. Her bitterness against Charity grew the more acid. Charity's good repute became now the whitewash on a sepulcher of corruption. Her resentment of the woman's imagined hypocrisy and of her husband's apparent duplicity blazed into an eagerness for vengeance—the classic vengeance of punishing a crime by committing another of the sort. Like revenges like; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a loyalty for a loyalty.
CHAPTER XVIII
But now, as often happens in evil as in virtue, Kedzie had the willingness, but not the resolution. She threw her scruples into the waste-basket, accepted Pet's invitation, went with her and her crowd to one of the most reckless dances in Greenwich Village, where men and women strove to outdo the saturnalia of Montmartre, vied with one another in exposure, and costumed themselves as closely according to the fig-leaf era as the grinning policemen dared to permit.