Then came the evening when Jim Dyckman telephoned her that he could not keep his appointment with her. It was the evening he responded to Charity Coe's appeal and met Peter Cheever fist to fist. Kedzie heard, in the polite lie he told, a certain tang of prevarication, and that frightened her. Why was Jim Dyckman trying to shake her? Once begun, where would the habit end? That was a dull evening for Kedzie. She stuck at home without other society than her boredom and her terrors. She had few resources for the enrichment of solitude. She tried to read, but she could not find a popular novel or a short story in a magazine exciting enough to keep her mind off the excruciating mystery of the next instalment in her own life. Her heart ached with the fear that she might never know the majesty of being Mrs. Jim Dyckman. That almost royal prerogative grew more and more precious the more she feared to lose it. She imagined the glory with a ridiculous extravagance. Her theory of the life lived by the wealthy aristocrats was fantastic, but she liked it and longed for it. The next day she waited to hear from Jim till she could endure the anxiety no longer. She ventured to call him at his father's home. She waited with trepidation while she was put through to his room, but his enthusiasm when he recognized her voice refreshed her hopes and her pride. She did not know that part of her welcome was due to the fierce rebuke Charity Coe had inflicted on him a little before because he had mauled her husband into a wreck. That evening she waited for Jim Dyckman's arrival with an ardor almost akin to love. He had begged off from dinner. He did not explain that he carried two or three visible fist marks from Cheever's knuckles which he did not wish to exhibit in a public restaurant. So Kedzie dined at home in solitary gloom. She had only herself for guest and found herself most stupid company. She dined in her bathrobe and began immediately after dinner to dress for conquest. She hoped that Dyckman would take her out to the theater or a dance, and she put on her best bib and tucker, the bib being conspicuously missing. She was taking a last look at the arrangement of her little living-room when the telephone-bell rang and the maid came to say: “'Scuse me, Miss Adair, but hall-boy says your father and mother is down-stairs.” Kedzie almost fainted. She did not dare refuse to see them. She had not attained that indifference to the opinions of servants which is the only real emancipation from being the servant of one's servants. While she fumbled with her impulses the maid rather stated than asked, “Shall I have 'em sent up, of course?” “Of course,” Kedzie snapped. CHAPTER XXXIII