Late editions of the evening papers gave the Dyckman divorce a fanfare rivaling the evidence that the Germans were about to resume their unrestricted submarine Schrecklichkeit.
If the spoken word is impossible to recall, how much more irretrievable the word that is printed in millions of newspapers. The name of Dyckman was a household word. It resounded now in every household throughout the country, and across the sea, where the name had become familiar in all the nations from the big financial dealings of the elder Dyckman as a banker for the Allies.
Reporters played about Jim Dyckman that night as if they were banderilleros and he a raging bull. He fought them with the same success.
They tried to find Charity, but she was in the doctor's care—actually. The doctor himself dismissed the reporters. He called them “ghouls,” which did not sweeten their hearts toward his patient.
The next day there was probably not a morning paper in the United States in any language that failed to star the news that Mrs. Dyckman had found her husband's relations with Mrs. Cheever intolerable.
That morning saw the conference in McNiven's office, as promised by Beattie. But Kedzie did not appear; she had vanished to some place where she could not be found by anybody except the man who wrote her highly imaginative affidavits for her and the notary public who attested her signature.
At the conference with Jim, Kedzie was represented by counsel, also by father. Jim called the lawyer Beattie some hard old Anglo-Saxon names, and told him that if he were a little bigger he would give him the beating that was coming to him. Then he turned to Kedzie's father.
“Mr. Thropp,” he pleaded, “you and I have always got along all right. You know I've tried to do the right thing by your daughter. I'm ready to now. She's too decent a girl to have done this thing on her own. This is the work of that rotten skunk of a lawyer—I apologize to the other skunks and the real lawyers. She has done a frightful injustice to the best woman on earth. She can never undo it, but surely she doesn't want to do any more. She's through with me, I suppose, but we ought to be able to clean up this affair respectably and quietly and not in the front show-window of all the damned newspapers in the world.
“Can't you and I make a little quiet gentleman's agreement to withdraw the charge and let the divorce go through decently? I'll make any settlement on your daughter that she wants.”
Adna pondered aloud, his claim-agent instincts alert: “Settlement, eh? What might you call settlement?”