Ferriday began to think seriously that the only way he could break Kedzie's pride completely would be to make her his wife. He began to wonder if that were not, after all, what she was driving at--or trying to drive him to. Life will be so much more wholesome when women propose marriage as men do and have a plain, frank talk about it instead of their eternal business of veils and reticences, fugitive impulses real or coquettish, modesties real or faked. Ferriday could not be sure of Kedzie, and he grew so curious to know that finally he broke out, “In the Lord's name, will you or will you not marry me, damn you?” And Kedzie answered: “Of course not. I wouldn't dream of such a thing.” But that did not prove anything, either. Perhaps she merely wanted to trawl him along. She had Ferriday almost crazy--at least she had added one more to his manias--when Jim Dyckman wandered into the studio and set up an entirely new series of ambitions and discontents. CHAPTER XVII Charity Coe forgot her great moving-picture enterprise for a time in the agony of her discovery that her husband was disloyal and that the Church did not accept that as a cancellation of her own loyalty. For a long time she was in such misery of uncertainty that she went up to the mountains to recover her strength. She came back at last, made simple and stoical somehow by the contrast of human pettiness with the serenity (as we call it) of those vast masses of debris that we poetize and humanize as patient giants. Her absence had left Cheever entirely to his own devices and to Zada's. They had made up and fought and made up again dozens of times and settled down at length to that normal alternation of peace and conflict known as domestic life. With Charity out of the way there was so little interruption to their communion that when she came back Zada forbade Cheever to meet her at the station, and he obeyed. Charity felt that she had brought with her the weight of the mountains instead of their calm when she detrained in the thronged solitude of the Grand Central Terminal. And the house with its sympathetic family of servants only was as home-like as the Mammoth Cave. She took up her work with a frenzy. The need of a man to act as her adjutant in the business details was imperative. She thought of Jim Dyckman again, and with a different thought. When he pleaded to her before she had imagined that she was at least officially a wife. Now she felt divorced and abandoned, a waif on the public mercy. She wanted to talk to Jim because she felt so disprized and downtrodden that she wanted to see somebody who adored her. She felt wild impulses to throw herself into his keeping. She wanted to be bad just to spite the bad. But she merely convinced herself that she was wicked enough already and deserving of her punishment.