He could only curse himself for being fool enough to get married, and join the vast club of the Repenters at Leisure. He felt sorrier for Kedzie than ever, but he also felt sorry for himself. The better he came to know his wife the more he came to know how alien she was to him in how many ways. The things she wanted to be or seem were utterly foreign to his own ideals, and if people's ambitions war what hope have they of sympathy? Jim could not help noticing how Kedzie was progressing in her snobology. She had had many languages to learn in her brief day. She had had to change from Missouri to flat New York, then upward through various strata of diction. She had learned to speak with a certain elegance as a movie princess. But she had learned that people of social position do not talk on stilts outside of fiction. She had since been trying to acquire the rough slang of her set. It was not easy to be glib in it. She had attained only a careful carelessness as yet. But she was learning! As soon as she had attained a careless carelessness she would be qualified. But there was another difficulty. She had not yet been able to make up her mind as to what character she should play in her new world. That had to be settled before she could make her final choice of dialect, for dialect is character, and she had found, to her surprise, that the upper world contained as great a variety of characters as any other level. There were tomboys and hoydens and solemn students; hard-working sculptresses and dreamy poetesses; girls who wanted to be boys, and girls who wanted to be nuns; girls who were frantic to vote, and girls who loathed the thought of independence; girls who ached to shock people, and girls of the prunes-and-prismatic type, patricians and precisians, anarchists and Bohemians. She encountered girls who talked appallingly about breeding dogs and babies, about Freudian erotics, and new schools of art, Futurism, Vorticism. Their main interest was Ismism. There were others whose intellectuality ran to new card-mathematics in pirate bridge, gambling algebra. Kedzie was in a chaos of sincere convictions and even more sincere affectations. She could not select an attitude for herself. She could not recapture her own soul or decide what she wanted to be. Her life was busy. She had to learn French and numberless intricacies of fashionable ethics. She had already learned to ride a horse for her moving-picture work, but Jim warned her that she must learn to jump so that she could follow the hounds with him. She watched pupils in hurdling and dreaded to add that to her accomplishments. It made her seasick to witness the race to the barrier, the gathering of the horse, the launch into space, the clatter of the top bar as it came off sometimes, the grunting thud of the big brute as he returned to earth and galloped away, not always with the rider still aboard. She imagined herself skirled along the tan-bark and was afraid.