So one lie was used to bolster another. The firmest structures can be thus established by locking together things that will not stand alone--as soldiers stack arms. Pet went on stacking lies and Kedzie grew more and more distressed, then infuriated. Her bitterness against Charity grew the more acid. Charity's good repute became now the whitewash on a sepulcher of corruption. Her resentment of the woman's imagined hypocrisy and of her husband's apparent duplicity blazed into an eagerness for vengeance--the classic vengeance of punishing a crime by committing another of the sort. Like revenges like; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a loyalty for a loyalty. CHAPTER XVIII But now, as often happens in evil as in virtue, Kedzie had the willingness, but not the resolution. She threw her scruples into the waste-basket, accepted Pet's invitation, went with her and her crowd to one of the most reckless dances in Greenwich Village, where men and women strove to outdo the saturnalia of Montmartre, vied with one another in exposure, and costumed themselves as closely according to the fig-leaf era as the grinning policemen dared to permit. Kedzie screamed with laughter at some of the ribaldry and danced in a jostle of fauns, satyrs, nymphs, and maenads. Yet when her partner clenched her too straitly she could not forget that she was the wife of an absent soldier. And when on the way home he tried to flirt she could not quell the nausea in her soul. But practice makes perfect and Kedzie was learning to be downright bad, though yet awhile she gave but stingy reward to her assiduous cavaliers. She was what Pet called a _demi-veuve_ and unprofitable to the men she used as weapons of her revenge against her innocent and unwitting husband. There was another factor working toward her debasement and that was the emancipation of her pocket-book. It was a fairy's purse now and she could not scatter her money faster than she found it renewed. Her entertainments grew more lavish and more reckless. She had an inspiration at last. She would put Jim's yacht into commission and take a party of friends on a cruise, well chaperoned, of course. She sent instructions to the master of the vessel to get steam up. Knudsen sent back word that he would have to have an order from the boss. She promised to have him discharged and in her anger fired a telegram off to Jim, demanding that he rebuke the surly skipper and order the boat out. The telegram found Jim in a state of doldrums. The food had turned against him, homesickness was like a fever in him, and the monotony of his routine had begun to get his nerves. He was startled and enraged at Kedzie's request for permission to go yachting and he fired back a telegram: Knudsen was right I am astonished at your suggestion do not approve in the slightest.