“That's disgusting!” Kedzie snarled. “The long-tongued gossips! They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
Mrs. Dyckman's fever began to mount. She dropped Kedzie's hand and tugged at the coverlet.
“You'd better go, my dear. I apologize. It's useless! When did age ever gain anything by warning youth? I'm an old fool, and you're a young one. And nothing will stop your ambition to run through life to the end of it and get all you can out of it.”
Kedzie felt dismissed and rose in bewildered anger. Mrs. Dyckman heaved herself to one elbow and pointed her finger at Kedzie.
“But keep away from Jake Vanderveer! and Pet Bettany! or—or—Send my nurse, please.”
She fell back gasping and Kedzie flew, in a fear that the old lady would die of a stroke and Kedzie be blamed for it forever. Kedzie was so blue and terrified that she had to send for Jake Vanderveer to keep from going crazy. He told her that the market was still on the climb, and that her sympathy had saved his life. He had been desperate enough for suicide when he met her, and now he was one of the rising little suns of finance.
Mrs. Dyckman did not die, but she did not get well, and Jim's father wrote him that he'd better resign and come home. It would do his mother a world of good, and he was doing the country no good down there.
Jim was alarmed; he wrote out his resignation and submitted it to his colonel, who showed him a new order from the War Department announcing that no more resignations would be accepted except on the most urgent grounds. Idleness was destroying the Guard faster than a campaign. Jim returned to the doldrums with a new resentment. He was a prisoner now.
He had gone to Texas to find war and his wife to Newport to find gaiety. She found much more than that. On October 7th the old town was stirred by something genuinely new in sensations—the arrival of a German war submarine, the U-53.