She began to be more afraid of being alone than of any other fear. She grew resentful toward the conventions that held her. She was like a tigress in a wicker cage, growing hungrier, lither, more gracefully fierce. People who do not use their beauty lose it, and Charity had lost much of hers in her vigils and labors in the hospitals, and it had waned in her humiliations of Cheever's preference for another woman. Her jealous shame at being disprized and notoriously neglected had given her wanness and bitterness, instead of warmth and sweetness. But now the wish to be loved brought back loveliness. She did not know how beautiful she was again. She thought that she wanted to see Jim Dyckman merely because she wanted to be flattered and because--as women say in such moods--men are so much more sensible than women. Often they mean more sensitive. Charity did not know that it was love, not friendship, that she required when at last she wrote to Jim Dyckman and begged him to call on her. The note struck him hard. It puzzled him by its tone. And he, remembering how vainly he had pursued her, forgot her disdain and recalled only how worthy of pursuit she was. He hated himself for his disloyalty to Anita in comparing his fiancee with Charity, and he cursed himself for finding Charity infinitely Anita's superior in every way. But he hated and cursed in vain. Kedzie, or “Anita,” as he called her, was an outsider, a pretty thing like a geisha, fascinating by her oddity and her foreignness, but, after all, an alien who could interest one only temporarily. There was something transient about Kedzie in his heart, and he had felt it vaguely the moment he found himself pledged to her forever. But Charity--he had loved her from perambulator days. She was his tradition. His thoughts and desires had always come home to Charity. Yet he was astonished at the sudden upheaval of his old passion. It shook off the new affair as a volcano burns away the weeds that have grown about its crater. He supposed that Charity wanted to take up the moving-picture scheme in earnest, and he repented the fact that he had gone to the studio for information and had come away with a flirtation. One thing was certain: he must not fail to answer Charity's summons. He had an engagement with Kedzie, but he called her up and told her the politest lie he could concoct. Then he made himself ready and put on his festival attire. * * * * * Charity had grown sick of having people say, “How pale you are!” “You've lost flesh, haven't you?” “Have you been ill, dear?”--those tactless observations that so many people feel it necessary to make, as if there were no mirrors or scales or symptoms for one's information and distress.