The prima donna sang Donna Elvira's ferocious aria full of indignation at discovering Don Giovanni's Don Juanity.
Charity, noting that Kedzie had flitted straight to Strathdene and was trying to appease his cold rage, felt an envy of the prima donna, who was enabled to express her feelings at full lung power with the fortissimo reinforcement of several powerful musicians. The primeval woman in Charity longed for just such a howling prerogative, but the actual Charity was so cravenly well-bred that she dared not even say to her dearest friend, “Jim, old man, you ought to go over and wring the neck of that little cat of yours.”
Jim sat beaming at Kedzie and Kedzie beamed back while she murmured sweet everythings to her little Marquess. Jim seemed to imagine that he had left her in such a pumpkin shell as Mr. Peter P. Pumpkineater left his wife in, and kept her so very well. But Kedzie was not that kind of kept or keepable woman.
Jim would have expected that if Kedzie were guilty of any spiritual corruption it would show on her face. People will look for such things. But she was still young and pretty and ingenuous and seemed incapable of duplicity. And indeed such treachery was no more than a childish turning from one toy to another. The traitors and traitresses have no more sense of obligation than a child feels for a discarded doll.
Jim paid Charity the uncomfortable compliment of feeling enough at home with her to say, “Well, Charity, that little wife of mine takes to the English nobility like a duck seeing its first pond, eh?”
“She seems to be quite at her ease,” was all that Charity could say. Now she felt herself a sharer in the wretched intrigue, as treacherous as Kedzie, no better friend than Kedzie was wife, because with a word she could have told Jim what he ought to have known, what he was almost the only person in the room that did not know. Yet her jaw locked and her tongue balked at the mere thought of telling him. She protected Kedzie, and not Jim; felt it abominable, but could not brave the telling.
She resolved that she would rather brave the ocean and get back to Europe where there were things she could do.
The support of all the French orphans she had adopted had made deep inroads in her income, but her conscience felt the deeper inroads of neglected duty.
It was like Charity to believe that she had sinned heinously when she had simply neglected an opportunity for self-sacrifice. When other people applauded their own benevolence if they said, “How the soldiers must suffer! Poor fellows!” Charity felt ashamed if her sympathy were not instantly mobilized for action.
A great impatience to be gone rendered her suddenly frantic. While she encouraged Jim to talk of his experiences in Texas she was making her plans to sail on the first available boat.