The wealth that was their drag was proclaimed as their weapon.
The storm grew fiercer and the language more unrestrained. Jim and Charity, reading in the papers the terms applied to them, cowered and shuddered.
Charity grew haggard and peevish. Her obstinacy was hardly more than a lockjaw of fright, the stubbornness of a drowning child afraid to let go.
Jim was almost equally sick. The newspaper pursuit covered him with chagrin. His good old name was precious to him, and he knew how his mother and father were suffering at its abuse, as well as for him in his fugitive distress.
Jim's mother was very much mother. She took into her breast every arrow shot at him. When she saw him she held him fiercely in her arms, her big frame aching with a Valkyrian ardor to lift the brave warrior on a winged horse and carry him away from the earth.
It is hard for the best of mothers to love even the best of daughters-in-law, for how can two fires prosper on the same fuel? It had been a little too hard for Mrs. Dyckman to love Kedzie. It was all too easy to hate her now and to denounce her till even Jim winced.
“Don't think of her, mother,” he pleaded. “Don't let's speak of her any more. She's only one of my past mistakes. You never mention those—why not let her drop?”
“All right, honey. You must forgive me. I'm only a sour old woman and it breaks my heart to think of that little, common—”
“There you go again,” her husband growled, sick with grief, too. “Let the little cat go.”
“What's killing me,” Jim said, “is thinking of what I've brought on Charity. It makes me want to die.”