When Charity
came along her anxious eyes found nobody she knew except Dyckman.
The disappointment she revealed hurt him profoundly. But he would
not be shaken off again. He turned in at her side and walked along,
and the two porters with their luggage walked side by side.
Prissy Atterbury was hurrying to a train that would take him for a
week-end visitation to people who hated him but needed him to cancel
a female bore with. As Prissy saw it and described it, Dyckman came
into the big waiting-room alone, looked about everywhere, paused,
turned back for Charity Coe; then walked away with her, followed by
their twinned porters. Prissy said "Aha!" behind his big mustaches
and stared till he nearly lost his train.
Atterbury had gained a new topic to carry with him, a topic of such
fertile resources that it went far to pay his board and lodging.
He made a snowball out of the clean reputations of Charity and Jim
and started it downhill, gathering dirt and momentum as it rolled.
It was bound to roll before long into the ken of Peter Cheever,
and he was not the man to tolerate any levity in a wife. Cheever
might be as wicked as Caesar, but his wife must be as Caesar's.
When Charity Coe was garrulous and inordinately gay, Jim Dyckman,
who had known her from childhood, knew that she was trying to rush
across the thin ice over some deep grief.
When he saw how hurt she was at not being met, and he insisted on
taking her home, she chattered and snickered hysterically at his
most stupid remarks.
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