“Wait here a minute,” said Charity when Jim got out to help her out. She ran up the steps and rang the bell. There was a delay before the second man in an improvised toilet opened the door to her and expressed as much surprise as delight at seeing her. “Didn't Mr. Cheever tell you I was coming home?” she gasped. “We haven't seen him, ma'am. There's a telegram here for him, but of course--” Charity was still in a frantic mood. She wanted to escape brooding, at all costs. She ran back to where Jim waited at the motor door. “Got any date to-night, Jim?” she demanded. He shook his head dolefully, and she said: “Go home, jump into your dancing-shoes, and come back for me. I'll throw on something light and you can take me somewhere to dance. I'll go crazy mad, insane, if you don't. I can't endure this empty house. You don't mind my making a convenience of you, do you, Jim?” “I love it, Charity Coe,” he groaned. He reached for her hand, but she was fleeting up the steps. He crept into the car and went to his home, flung off his traveling-togs, passed through a hot tub and a cold shower into evening clothes, and hastened away. Charity kept him waiting hardly a moment. She floated down the stairs in a something fleetily volatile, and he said: “You look like a dandelion puff.” “That's right, tell me some nice things,” she said. She did not tell the servant where she was going. She did not know. She hardly cared. CHAPTER VI To Kedzie Thropp the waiting-room of the Grand Central Terminal was the terminus of human splendor. It was the waiting-room to heaven. And indeed it is a majestic chamber. The girl walked with her face high, staring at the loftily columned recesses with the bay-trees set between the huge square pillars, and above all the feigned blue sky and the monsters of the zodiac in powdered gold. Kedzie could hardly breathe--it was so beautiful, so much superior to the plain every-night sky she was used to, with stars of tin instead of gold like these. Even her mother said “Well!” and Adna paid the architects the tribute of an exclamation: “Humph! So this is the new station we was readin' about. Some bigger'n ours at home, eh, Kedzie?” But Kedzie was not there. They had lost her and had to turn back. She was in a trance. When they snatched her down to earth again and pulled her through the crowds she began to adore the people. They were dressed in unbelievable splendor--millions, she guessed, in far better than the best Sunday best she had ever seen. She wondered if she would ever have nice clothes. She vowed that she would if she had to murder somebody to get them. The porter led the way from the vastitude of a corridor under the street and through vast empty rooms and up a stairway and down a few steps and through the first squirrel-cage door Kedzie had ever seen (she had to run round it thrice before they could get her out) into a sumptuousness beyond her dream.