"No, no, Jim!" she gasped. "I've brought you enough trouble and
enough disgrace. I won't let you ruin your life by marrying me
out of pity."
"Pity! Good God!" Jim groaned. "Why, you don't think I meant that,
do you? I was just trying to be funny, because I was so happy.
I'll promise never to try to be funny again. It was like saying to
Venus, 'You're a homely old thing, but I'll let you cook for me';
or saying to--whoever it was was the Goddess of Wisdom, 'You don't
know much, but'--Why, Charity Coe, you're Venus and Minerva and all
the goddesses rolled into one."
Charity shook her head.
He roared: "If it's pity you're talking about, isn't it about time
you had a little for me? Life won't be worth a single continental
damn to me if I don't get you."
Charity had needed something of this sort for a long time. It
sounded to her like a serenade by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Her acknowledgment was a tearful, smileful giggle-sob:
"Honestly?"
"Honest-to-God-ly!"
"All right, as soon as you're a free man fetch the parson, for I'm
pretty tired of being a free woman."
Jim had learned from McNiven that a part of his freedom, when he got
it, would be a judicial denial of the right to surrender it for five
years. He had learned that if he wanted to marry Charity he must
persuade her over into New Jersey. It did not please Jim to have to
follow the example of Zada and Cheever, and it hit him as a peculiar
cruelty that he and Charity had to accept not only an unearned
increment of scandal in the verdict of divorce, but also a marriage
contrary to the laws of New York.
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