Gossip began to deal in the name of Cheever. One day at a club
the he-old-maid "Prissy" Atterbury cackled:
"I saw Pete Cheever at a cabaret--"
Jim asked, anxiously, "Was he alone?"
"Nearly."
"What do you mean--nearly alone?"
"Well, what he had with him is my idea of next to nothing. I wonder
what sinking ship Cheever rescued her from. They tell me she was
a cabaret dancer named Zada L'Etoile--that's French for Sadie Starr,
I suppose."
Dyckman's obsession escaped him.
"Somebody ought to write his wife about it."
"That would be nice!" cried Prissy. "Oh, very, very nice! It would be
better to notify the Board of Health. But it would be still better if
his wife would come home and mind her own business. These Americans
who hang about the edges of the war, fishing for sensations, make me
very tired--oh, very, very tired."
Prissy never knew how near he was to annihilation. Jim had to hold
one fist with the other. He was afraid to yield to his impulse to
smash Prissy in the droop of his mustache. Prissy was too frail to
be slugged. That was his chief protection in his gossip-mongering
career.
Besides, it is a questionable courtesy for a former beau to defend
another man's wife's name, and Dyckman proved his devotion to Charity
best by leaving her slanderer unrebuked.
It was no anonymous better that brought Charity Coe home. It was
the breakdown of her powers of resistance. Even the soldiers had to
be granted vacations from the trenches; and so an eminent American
surgeon in charge of the hospital she adorned finally drove Mrs.
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