When
other people applauded their own benevolence if they said, "How
the soldiers must suffer! Poor fellows!" Charity felt ashamed if
her sympathy were not instantly mobilized for action.
A great impatience to be gone rendered her suddenly frantic. While
she encouraged Jim to talk of his experiences in Texas she was
making her plans to sail on the first available boat.
If the boat were sunk by a submarine or a mine, death in the
strangling seas would be preferable to any more of this drifting
among the strangling problems of a life that held no promise of
happiness for her. She felt gagged with the silence imposed upon
her by the code in the very face of Kedzie's disloyalty, a
disloyalty so loathsome that seeing was hardly believing.
It seemed inconceivable that a man or woman pledged in holy matrimony
could ever be tempted to an alien embrace. And yet she knew dozens
of people who made a sport of infidelity. Her own husband had found
temptation stronger than his pledge. She wondered how long he would
be true to Zada, or she to him. Charity had suffered the disgrace of
being insufficient for her husband's contentment, and now Jim must
undergo the same disgrace with Kedzie. It was a sort of post-nuptial
jilt.
Of course Charity had no proof that Kedzie had been more than
brazenly indiscreet with Strathdene, but that very indifference
to gossip, that willingness to stir up slander, seemed so odious
that nothing could be more odious, not even the actual crime.
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