RSITV OF CALIFORNIA SAN 
 
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 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 ALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 JJNIVERbl i i r OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO' 
 
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 3 1822 01120 6448
 
 presented to the 
 UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SAN DIEGO 
 
 by 
 
 Mr. Russell Kimball
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE 
 EVERYTHING
 
 WAR, THE SUNDERER, HAD REACHED THEM WITH HIS GREAT DIVORCE
 
 We Can't Have 
 Everything 
 
 A NOVEL 
 
 By RUPERT HUGHES 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 'In A Little Town, " "The Thirteenth Commandment, " 
 "Clipped Wings," Etc. 
 
 With Frontispiece 
 By JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAG 
 
 A. L. BURT COMPANY 
 Publishers New York 
 
 Published by arrangement with HARPER & BROTHERS
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Copyright. 1917. by Harper & Brothers 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
 Published, August, 1917
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 THE FIRST BOOK 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Miss KEDZIE THROPP COMES TO TOWN .... i 
 THE SECOND BOOK 
 
 MRS. TOMMIE GlLFOYLE HAS HER PICTURE TAKEN 121 
 
 THE THIRD BOOK 
 MRS. JIM DYCKMAN is NOT SATISFIED .... 403 
 
 THE FOURTH BOOK 
 THE MARCHIONESS HAS QUALMS 523
 
 THE FIRST BOOK 
 
 MISS KEDZIE THROPP COMES 
 TO TOWN
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE 
 EVERYTHING 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THROPP had never seen Fifth Avenue or a 
 yacht or a butler or a glass of champagne or an 
 ocean or a person of social prominence. She wanted to 
 see them. 
 
 For each five minutes of the day and night, one girl 
 comes to New York to make her life; or so the compilers 
 of statistics claim. 
 
 This was Kedzie Thropp's five minutes. 
 
 She did not know it, and the two highly important, 
 because extremely wealthy, beings in the same Pullman 
 car never suspected her never imagined that the tangle 
 they were already in would be further knotted, then 
 snipped, then snarled up again, by this little mediocrity. 
 
 We never can know these things, but go blindly groping 
 through the crowd of fellow-gropers, guessing at our pres* 
 ents and getting our pasts all wrong. What could we 
 know of our futures? 
 
 Jim Dyckman, infamously rich (through no fault of his 
 own), could not see far enough past Charity Coe Cheever 
 that day to make out Kedzie Thropp, a few seats removed. 
 Charity Coe most of Mrs. Cheever's friends still called 
 her by her maiden name sat with her back turned to 
 Kedzie ; and latterly Charity Coe was not looking over her 
 shoulder much. She did not see Kedzie at all. 
 
 3
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 
 
 And Kedzie herself, shabby and commonplace, was so 
 ignorant that if she looked at either Jim or Charity Coe 
 she gave them no heed, for she had never even heard of 
 them or seen their pictures, so frequent in the papers. 
 
 They were among the whom-not-to-know-argues-one- 
 self -unknowns. But there were countless other facts that 
 argued Kedzie Thropp unknown and unknowing. As she 
 was forever saying, she had never had anything or been 
 anywhere or seen anybody worth having, being, or seeing. 
 
 But Jim Dyckman, everybody said, had always had 
 everything, been everywhere, known everybody who was 
 anybody. As for Charity Coe, she had given away more 
 than most people ever have. And she, too, had traveled 
 and met. 
 
 Yet Kedzie Thropp was destined (if there is such a 
 thing as being destined at any rate, it fell to her lot) to 
 turn the lives of those two bigwigs topsy-turvy, and to 
 get her picture into more papers than both of them put 
 together. A large part of latter-day existence has con 
 sisted of the fear or the favor of getting pictures in the 
 papers. 
 
 It was Kedzie's unusual distinction to win into the head 
 lines at her first entrance into New York, and for the 
 quaintest of reasons. She had somebody's else picture 
 published for her that time; but later she had her very 
 own published by the thousand until the little commoner, 
 born in the most neglected corner of oblivion, grew im 
 pudent enough to weary of her fame and prate of the 
 comforts of obscurity! 
 
 Kedzie Thropp was as plebeian as a ripe peach swung in 
 the sun across an old fence, almost and not quite within 
 the grasp of any passer-by. She also inspired appetite, 
 but always somehow escaped plucking and possession. It 
 is doubtful whether anybody ever really tasted her soul 
 if she had one. Her flavor was that very inaccessibility. 
 She was always just a little beyond. Her heart was forever 
 fixed on the next thing, just quitting the last thing. 
 
 4
 
 Eternal, delicious, harrowing discontent was Kedzie's whole 
 spirit. 
 
 Charity Coe's habit was self-denial; Kedzie's self- 
 fostering, all-demanding. She was what Napoleon would 
 have been if the Little Corporal had been a pretty girl with 
 a passion for delicacies instead of powers. 
 
 Thanks to Kedzie, two of the best people that could 
 be were plunged into miseries that their wealth only 
 aggravated. 
 
 Thanks to Kedzie, Jim Dyckman, one of the richest men 
 going and one of the decentest fellows alive, learned what it 
 means to lie in shabby domicile and to salt dirty bread 
 with tears ; to be afraid to face the public that had fawned 
 on him, and to understand the portion of the criminal 
 and the pariah. 
 
 And sweet Charity Coe, who had no selfishness in any 
 motive, who ought to have been canonized as a saint in 
 her smart Parisian robes of martyrdom, found the clergy 
 slamming their doors in her face and bawling her name 
 from their pulpits; she was, as it were, lynched by the 
 Church, thanks again to Kedzie. 
 
 But one ought not to hate Kedzie. It was not her fault 
 (was it ?) that she was cooked up out of sugar and spice and 
 everything nice into a little candy allegory of selfishness 
 with one pink hand over her little heartless heart-place 
 and one pink hand always outstretched for more. 
 
 Kedzie of the sugar lip and the honey eye! She was 
 going to be carried through New York from the sub-sub- 
 cellar of its poverty to its highest tower of wealth. She 
 would sleep one night alone under a public bench in a park, 
 and another night, with all sorts of nights between, she 
 would sleep in a bed where a duchess had lain, and in arms 
 Americanly royal. 
 
 So much can the grand jumble of causes and effects 
 that we call fate do with a wanderer through life. 
 
 During the same five minutes which were Kedzie's 
 other girls were making for New York; some of them 
 
 5
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 to succeed apparently, some of them to fail undeniably, 
 some of them to become fine, clean wives; some of them 
 to flare, then blacken against the sky because of famous 
 scandals and fascinating crimes in which they were to be 
 involved. 
 
 Their motives were as various as their fates, and only 
 one thing is safe to say that their motives and their 
 fates had little to do with one another. Few of the girls, 
 if any, got what they came for and strove for ; and if they 
 got it, it was not just what they thought it was going to be. 
 
 This is Kedzie's history, and the history of the problem 
 confronting Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe Cheever: 
 the problem that Kedzie was going to seem to solve as 
 one solves any problem humanly, which is by substitut 
 ing one or more new problems in place of the old. 
 
 This girl Kedzie who had never had anything had one 
 thing a fetching pout. Perhaps she had the pout be 
 cause she had never had anything. An Elizabethan poet 
 would have said of her upper lip that a bee in search of 
 honey had stung it in anger at finding it not the rose it 
 seemed, but something fairer. 
 
 She had eyes full of appeal appeal for something 
 what? Who knows? She didn't. Her eyes said, " Have 
 mercy on me; be kind to me." The shoddy beaux in 
 her home town said that Kedzie's eyes said, "Kiss me 
 quick!" They had obeyed her eyes, and yet the look of 
 appeal was not quenched. She came to New York with 
 no plan to stay. But she did stay, and she left her foot 
 prints in many lives, most deeply in the life of Jim 
 Dyckman.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 MISS KEDZIE THROPP had never seen Fifth Avenue 
 or a yacht or a butler or a glass of champagne or an 
 ocean or a person of social prominence. She wanted to 
 see them. To Jim Dyckman these things were common 
 place. What he wanted was simple, complex, cheap, 
 priceless things love, home, repose, contentment. 
 
 He was on the top of the world, and he wanted to get 
 down or have somebody else come up to him. Peaks are 
 by definition and necessity limited to small foothold. 
 Climbing up is hardly more dangerous than climbing 
 down. Even to bend and lift some one else up along 
 side involves a risk of falling or of being pushed over 
 board. 
 
 But at present Jim Dyckman was thinking of the other 
 girl, Charity Coe Cheever, perched on a peak as cold and 
 high as his own, but far removed from his reach. 
 
 Even the double seat in the sleeping-car was too small 
 for Jim. He sprawled from back to back, slumped and 
 hunched in curves and angles that should have looked 
 peasant and yet somehow had the opposite effect. 
 
 His shoes were thick-soled but unquestionably expen 
 sive, his clothes of loose, rough stuff manifestly fashionable. 
 Like them, he had a kind of burly grace. He had been 
 used to a well-upholstered life. 
 
 He was one of those giants that often grow in rich 
 men's homes. His father was such another, and his 
 mother suggested the Statue of Liberty in corsets and 
 on high heels. 
 
 Dyckman was reading a weekly journal devoted to 
 
 7
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 horses and dogs, and reading with such interest that he 
 hardly knew when the train stopped. 
 
 He did not see the woman who got out of a motor and 
 got into the train, and whose small baggage the porter put 
 in the empty place opposite his. He did not see that she 
 leaned into the aisle and regarded him with a pathetic 
 amusement in her caressing eyes. She took her time 
 about making herself known; then she uttered only a 
 discreet : 
 
 "Ahem!" 
 
 She put into the cough many subtle implications. 
 Hardly more could be crowded into a shrug. 
 
 Dyckman came out of his kennels and paddocks, 
 blinked, stared, gaped. Then he began to stand up by 
 first stepping down. He bestrode the narrow aisle like a 
 Colossus. 
 
 He caught her two hands, brought them together, 
 placed them in one of his, and covered them with the other 
 as in a big muff, and bent close to pour into her eyes such 
 ardor that for a moment she closed hers against the flame. 
 
 Then, as if in that silent greeting their souls had made 
 a too loud and startling noise of welcome, both of them 
 looked about with an effect of surreptition and alarm. 
 
 There were not many people in the car, and they were 
 absorbed in their own books, gossips, or naps. Only a 
 few head-tops showing above the high-backed seats, and 
 no eyes or ears. 
 
 "Do you know anybody on the train?" the woman 
 asked. 
 
 The man shook his head and sank into the seat opposite 
 her, still clinging to her hands. She extricated them: 
 
 "But everybody knows you." 
 
 He dismissed this with a sniff of reproof. Then they 
 settled down in the small trench and seemed to take a 
 childish delight in the peril of their rencounter. 
 
 " Lord, but it's good to see you!" he sighed, luxuriously. 
 "And you're stunninger than ever!" 
 
 8
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I'm a sight!" she said. 
 
 She was clad even more plainly than he, and had the 
 same spirit of neglectful elegance. She was big, too, for a 
 woman; somewhat lank but well muscled, and decisive 
 in her motions as if she normally abounded in strength. 
 What grace she had was an athlete's, but she looked over 
 trained or undernourished. Seeing that she did not look 
 well, Dyckman said: 
 
 "How well you're looking, Charity." 
 
 She did not look like Charity, either; but her name 
 had been given to her before she was born. There had 
 nearly always been a girl called Charity in the Coe family. 
 They had brought the name with them from New England 
 when they settled in Westchester County some two 
 hundred years before. They had kept little of their 
 Puritanism except a few of the names. 
 
 This sportswoman called Charity had been trying to 
 live up to her name, of late. That was why she was 
 haggard. She smiled at her friend's unmerited praise. 
 
 "Thanks, Jim. I need a compliment like the devil." 
 
 " Where' ve you been since you got back?" 
 
 "Up in the camp, trying to get a little rest and exercise. 
 But it's too lonesome nights. I rest better when I keep 
 on the jump." 
 
 "You're in black; that doesn't mean ?" 
 
 She shook her head. A light of eagerness in his eyes 
 was quenched, and he growled : 
 
 "Too bad!" He could afford to say it, since the object 
 of his obloquy was alive. If the person mentioned had 
 not been alive, the phrase he used would have been the 
 same more gently intoned. 
 
 Charity protested : ' ' Shame on you ! I know you mean 
 it for flattery, but you mustn't, you really mustn't. I'm 
 in black for for Europe." She laughed pitifully at the 
 conceit. 
 
 He answered, with admiring awe: "I've heard about 
 you. You're a wonder; that's what you are, Charity 
 
 9
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Coe, a wonder. Here's a big hulk like me loafing around 
 trying to kill time, and a little tike like you over there in 
 France spending a fortune of money and more strength 
 than even you've got in a slaughter-house of a war hospital. 
 How did you stand it?" 
 
 "It wasn't much fun," she sighed, "but the nurses can't 
 feel sorry for themselves when they see what they see." 
 
 "I can imagine," he said. 
 
 But he could not have imagined her as she daily had 
 been. She and the other princesses of blood royal or 
 bourgeois had been moiling among the red human debris 
 of war, the living garbage of battle, as the wagons and 
 trains emptied it into the receiving stations. 
 
 She and they had stood till they slept standing. They 
 had done harder, filthier jobs than the women who worked 
 in machine-shops and in furrows, while the male-kind 
 fought. She had gone about bedabbled in blood, her hair 
 drenched with it. Her delicate hands had performed 
 tasks that would have been obscene if they had not been 
 sublime in a realm of suffering where nothing was obscene 
 except the cause of it all. 
 
 She sickened at it more in retrospect than in action, 
 and tried to shake it from her mind by a change of subject. 
 
 "And what have you been up to, Jim?" 
 
 "Ah, nothing but the same old useless loafing. Been 
 up in the North Woods for some hunting and fishing," he 
 snarled. His voice always grew contemptuous when he 
 spoke of himself, but idolatrous when he spoke of her as 
 now when he asked: " I heard you had gone back abroad. 
 But you're not going, are you?" 
 
 "Yes, as soon as I get my nerves a little steadier." 
 
 "I won't let you go back!" He checked himself. He 
 had no right to dictate to her. He amended to: "You 
 mustn't. It's dangerous crossing, with all those sub 
 marines and floating mines. You've done your bit and 
 more." 
 
 "But there's so horribly much to do." 
 
 10
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "You've done enough. How many children have you 
 got now?" 
 
 "About a hundred." 
 
 "Holy mother!" he whispered, with a profane piety. 
 ""Can even you afford as big a family as that?" 
 
 "Well, I've had to call for some help." 
 
 ' ' Let me chip in ? Will you ?' ' 
 
 "Sure I will. Go as far as you like." 
 
 "All right; it's a bet. Name the sum, and I'll mail 
 it to you." 
 
 "You'd better not mail me anything, Jim," she said. 
 
 He blenched and mumbled: "Oh, all right! I'll write 
 you a check now." 
 
 "Later," she said. "I don't like to talk much about 
 such things, please." 
 
 "Promise me you won't go back." 
 
 She simply waived the theme: "Let's talk of some 
 thing pleasant, if you don't mind." 
 
 "Something pleasant, eh? Then I can't ask about 
 him, I suppose." 
 
 "Of course. Why not?" 
 
 "How is the hound? begging the pardon of all honest 
 hounds." 
 
 She was too sure of her own feelings toward her husband 
 to feel it necessary to rush to his defense against a former 
 rival. Her answer was, "He's well enough to raise a 
 handsome row if he saw you and me together." 
 
 He grumbled a full double-barreled oath and did not 
 apologize for it. She spoke coldly: 
 
 "You'd better go back to your seat." 
 
 She was as severe as a woman can well be with a man 
 who adores her and writhes with jealousy of a man she 
 adores. 
 
 "I'll be good, Teacher," he said. "Was he over there 
 with you?" 
 
 She evidently liked to talk about her husband. She 
 brightened as she spoke. "Yes, for a while. He drove 
 
 ii
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 a motor-ambulance, you know, but it bored him after a 
 month or two. They wouldn't let him up to the firing- 
 lines, so he quit. Have you seen him?" 
 
 "Once or twice." 
 
 "He's looking well, isn't he?" 
 
 ' ' Yes, confound him ! His handsome features have been 
 my ruin." 
 
 She could smile at that inverted compliment. But 
 Dyckman began to think very hard. He was suddenly 
 confronted with one of the conundrums in duty which 
 life incessantly propounds life that squats at all the 
 crossroads with a sphinxic riddle for every wayfarer.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 EDZIE to say it again did not know enough about 
 New York or the world to recognize Mrs. Cheever 
 and Mr. Dyckman when she glanced at them and glanced 
 away. They did not at all come up to Kedzie's idea or 
 ideal of what swells should be, and she had not even 
 grown up enough to study the society news that makes 
 such thrilling reading to those who thrill to that sort of 
 thing. The society notes in the town paper in Kedzie's 
 town (Nimrim, Missouri) consisted of bombastic chron 
 icles of church sociables or lists of those present at surprise- 
 parties. 
 
 This girl's home was one of the cheapest in that cheap 
 town. Her people not only were poor, but lived more 
 poorly than they had to. They had, in consequence, a 
 little reserve of funds, which they took pride in keeping 
 up. The three Thropps came now to New York for the 
 first time in their three lives. They were almost as 
 ignorant as the other peasant immigrants that steam in 
 from the sea. 
 
 Adna Thropp, the father, was a local claim-agent on a 
 small railroad. He spent his life pitting his wits against 
 the petty greed of honest farmers and God-fearing, rail 
 road-hating citizens. If a granger let his fence fall down 
 and a rickety cow disputed the right of way with a 
 locomotive's cow-catcher, the granger naturally put in a 
 claim for the destruction of a prize-winning animal with 
 a record as an amazing milker; also he added something 
 for damage to the feelings of the family in the loss of a 
 household pet. It was Adna's business to beat the shyster 
 
 13
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 lawyers to the granger and beat the granger to the last 
 penny. One of his best baits was a roll of cash tantaliz- 
 ingly waved in front of his victim while he breathed 
 proverbs about the delayful courts. 
 
 This being Adna's livelihood, it was not surprising 
 that his habit of mind gave pennies a grave importance. 
 Of course, he carried his mind home with him from the 
 office, and every demand of his wife or children for money 
 was again a test of ability in claim-agency tactics. He 
 fought so earnestly for every cent he gave down that his 
 dependents felt that it was generally better to go without 
 things than to enter into a life-and-death struggle for 
 them, with Pa. 
 
 For that reason Ma Thropp did the cooking, baked the 
 "light bread," and made the clothes and washed them 
 and mended them till they vanished. She cut the boys' 
 hair; she schooled the girls to help her in the kitchen 
 and at the sewing-machine and with the preserve- jars. 
 Her day's work ended when she could no longer see her 
 darning-needle. It began as soon as she could see day 
 light to light the fire by. In winter the day began in her 
 dark, cold kitchen long before the sun started his fire on 
 the eastern hills. 
 
 She upheld a standard of morals as high as Mount 
 Everest and as bleak. She made home a region of ever 
 lasting chores, rebukes, sayings wiser than tender, com 
 plaints and bitter criticisms of husband, children, mer 
 chants, neighbors, weather, prices, fabrics of everything 
 on earth but of nothing in heaven. 
 
 Strange to say, the children did not appreciate the ad 
 vantages of their life. The boys had begun to earn their 
 own money early by the splitting of wood and the shovel 
 ing of snow, by the vending of soap, and the conduct of 
 delivery-wagons. They spent their evenings at pool- 
 tables or on corners. The elder girls had accepted posi 
 tions in the various emporia of the village as soon as they 
 could. They counted the long hours of the shop life
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 as an escape from worse. Their free evenings were not 
 devoted to self -improvement. They did not turn out to 
 be really very good girls. They were up to all sorts of 
 village mischief and shabby frivolity. Their poor mother 
 could not account for it. She could scold them well, 
 but she could not scold them good. 
 
 The daughter on the train, the youngest named 
 Kedzie after an aunt who was the least poor of the relatives 
 was just growing up into a similar career. Her highest 
 prayer was that her path might lead her to a clerkship 
 in a candy-shop. Then this miracle! Her father an 
 nounced that he was going to New York. 
 
 Adna was always traveling on the railroad, but he had 
 never traveled far. To undertake New York was hardly 
 less remarkable than to run over to the moon for a few 
 days. 
 
 When he brought the news home he could hardly get 
 up the front steps with it. When he announced it at the 
 table, and tried to be careless, his hand trembled till the 
 saucerful of coffee at his quivering lips splashed over on 
 the clean red-plaid table-cloth. 
 
 The occasion of Thropp's call to New York was this: 
 he had joined a "benevolent order" of the Knights of 
 Something-or-other in his early years and had risen high 
 in the chapter in his home town. When one of the mem 
 bers died, the others attended his funeral in full regalia, 
 consisting of each individual's Sunday clothes, enhanced 
 with a fringed sash and lappets. Also there was a sword 
 to carry. The advantage of belonging to the order was 
 that the member got the funeral for nothing and his 
 wife got the further consolation of a sum of money. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp bore her neighbors no more ill-will than 
 they deserved, but she did enjoy their funerals. They 
 gave her husband an excuse for his venerable silk hat and 
 his gilded glave. Sometimes as she took her hands out 
 of the dough and dried them on her apron to fasten 
 his sash about him, she felt all the glory of a medieval
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 countess buckling the armor on her doughty earl. She 
 had never heard of such persons, but she knew their epic 
 uplift. 
 
 Now, Mr. Thropp had paid his dues and his insurance 
 premiums for years and years. They were his one 
 extravagance. Also he had persuaded Mrs. Thropp' s 
 brother Sol to do the same. Sol had died recently and 
 left his insurance money to Mrs. Thropp. Sol's own wife, 
 after cherishing long-deferred hopes of spending that 
 money herself, had been hauled away first. She never 
 got that insurance money. Neither did any one else; 
 the central office in New York failed to pay up. 
 
 The annual convention was about to be held in the 
 metropolis, and there was to be a tremendous investigation 
 of the insurance scandal. Adna was elected the delegate 
 of^the Nimrim chapter, for he was known to be a demon 
 in a money-fight. 
 
 And this was the glittering news that Adna brought 
 home. Small wonder it spilled his coffee. And that 
 wife of his not only had to go and yell at him about a 
 little coffee-stain, but she had to announce that she 
 hardly saw how she could get ready to go right away 
 and who was to look after those children ? 
 
 Adna's jaw fell. Perhaps he had ventured on dreams of 
 being set free in New York all by himself. She soon 
 woke him. She said she wouldn't no more allow him loose 
 in that wicked place than she would-*-well, she didn't 
 know what! He could get a pass for self and wife as 
 easy as shootin'. Adna yielded to the inevitable with a 
 sorry grace and told her to come along if she'd a mind to. 
 
 And then came a still, small voice from daughter 
 Kedzie. She spoke with a menacing sweetness: "Goody, 
 goody ! Besides seeing New York, I won't have to go to 
 school for How long. we goin' to be gone, poppa?" 
 
 Both parents stared at her aghast and told her to hush 
 her mouth. It was a very pretty mouth even in anger, 
 and Kedzie declined to hush it. She said: 
 
 16
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Well, if you two think you're goin' to leave me home, 
 you got another think comin' that's all I got to say." 
 She betrayed an appalling stubbornness, a fiendish deter 
 mination to subdue her parents or talk them to death. 
 "I never get to go any place," she wailed. " I never been 
 anywhere or seen anything or had anything; I might as 
 well be a bump on a log. And now you're goin' to New 
 York. I'd sooner go there than to heaven. It's my first 
 chance to see a city, and I just tell you right here and now, 
 I'm not goin' to lose it ! You take me or you'll be mighty 
 sorry. I'll I'll " 
 
 "You'll what?" her father sneered. What, after all, 
 could a young girl do ? 
 
 "I'll run off, that's what I'll do! And disgrace you! 
 I'll run away and you'll never see me again. If you're 
 mean enough to not take me, I'm mean enough to do 
 something desprut. You'll see!" 
 
 Her father realized that there were several things a 
 young girl could do to punish her parents. Kedzie 
 frightened hers with her fanatic zeal. They gave in at 
 last from sheer terror. Immediately she became almost 
 intolerably rapturous. She shrieked and jumped ; and she 
 kissed and hugged every member of the household, includ 
 ing the dogs and the cats. She must go down-town and 
 torment her girl friends with her superiority and she 
 could hardly live through the hours that intervened before 
 the train started. 
 
 The Thropps rode all day in the day-coach to Chicago, 
 and Kedzie loved every cinder that flew into her gorgeous 
 eyes. Now and then she slept curled up kittenwise on a 
 seat, and the motion of the train lulled her as with angelic 
 pinions. She dreamed impossible glories in unheard-of 
 cities. 
 
 But her mother bulked large and had been too long 
 accustomed to her own rocking-chair to rest in a day- 
 coach. She reached Chicago in a state of collapse. She
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 told Adna that she would have to travel the rest of the 
 way in a sleeper or in a baggage-car, for she just naturally 
 had to lay down. So Adna paid for two berths. It weak 
 ened him like a hemorrhage. 
 
 Kedzie's first sorrow was in leaving Chicago. They 
 changed trains there, bouncing across the town in a 
 bus. That transit colored Kedzie's soul like dragging 
 a ribbon through a vat of dye. Henceforth she was 
 of a city hue. 
 
 She was enamoured of every cobblestone, and she loved 
 every man, woman, horse, and motor she passed. She 
 tried to flirt with the tall buildings. She was afraid to 
 leave Chicago lest she never get to New York, or find it 
 inferior. She begged to be left there. It was plenty 
 good enough for her. 
 
 But once aboard the sleeping-car she was blissful again , 
 and embarrassed her mother and father with her adora 
 tion. In all sincerity, Kedzie mechanically worshiped 
 people who got things for her, and loathed people who 
 forbade things or took them away. 
 
 She horrified the porter by calling him " Mister "- 
 almost as much as her parents scandalized him the next 
 day by eating their meals out of a filing-cabinet of shoe- 
 boxes compiled by Mrs. Thropp. But it was all picnic 
 to Kedzie. Fortunately for her repose, she never knew 
 that there was a dining-car attached. 
 
 The ordeal of a night in a sleeping-car coffin was to 
 Kedzie an experience of faery. She laughed aloud when 
 she bumped her head, and getting out of and into her 
 clothes was a fascinating exercise in contortion. She was 
 entranced by the wash-room with its hot and cold water 
 and its basin of apparent silver, whose contents did not 
 have to be lifted and splashed into a slop-jar, but magic 
 ally emptied themselves at the raising of a medallion. 
 
 She had not worn herself out with enthusiasm by the 
 time the first night was spent and half the next day. She 
 pressed her nose against the window and ached with regret 
 
 18
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 at the hurry with which towns and cities were whipped 
 away from her eyes. 
 
 She did not care for grass and trees and cows and dull 
 villages, but she thrilled at the beauty of big, dark rail 
 road stations and noble street-cars and avenues paved with 
 exquisite asphalt. 
 
 The train was late in arriving at New York, and it was 
 nearer ten than eight when it roared across the Harlem 
 River. Kedzie was glad of the display, for she saw the 
 town first as one great light-spangled banner. 
 
 The car seemed to be drawn right through people's 
 rooms. Everybody lived up-stairs. She caught glimpses 
 of kitchens on the fourth floor and she thought this 
 adorable, except that it would be a job carrying the 
 wood all the way up. 
 
 The streets went by like the glistening spokes of a 
 swift wheel. They were packed with interesting sights. 
 No wonder most of the inhabitants were either in the 
 streets or leaning out of the windows looking down. Here 
 it was ten o'clock, and not a sign of anybody's having 
 thought of going to bed. New York was a sensible place. 
 She liked New York. 
 
 But the train seemed to quicken its pace out of mere 
 spitefulness just as they reached wonderful market streets 
 with flaring lights over little carts all filled with things 
 to buy. 
 
 When the wonder world was blotted from view by the 
 tunnel it frightened her at first with its long, dark noise 
 and the flip-flops of light. Then a brief glimpse of towers 
 and walls. Then the dark station. And they were 
 There!
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 JIM DYCKMAN had always loved Charity Coe, but 
 he let another man marry her a handsomer, livelier, 
 more entertaining man with whom Dyckman was afraid to 
 compete. A mingling of laziness and of modesty disarmed 
 him. 
 
 As soon as he saw how tempestuously Peter Cheever 
 began his courtship, Dyckman withdrew from Miss Coe's 
 entourage. When she asked him why, he said, frankly: 
 
 "Pete Cheever's got me beat. I know when I'm 
 licked." 
 
 Pete's courtship was what the politicians call a whirl 
 wind campaign. Charity was Mrs. Cheever before she 
 knew it. Her friends continued to call her Charity Coe, 
 but she was very much married. 
 
 Cheever was a man of shifting ardors. His soul was 
 filled with automatic fire-extinguishers. He flared up 
 quickly, but when his temperature reached a certain 
 degree, sprinklers of cold water opened in his ceiling and 
 doused the blaze, leaving him unharmed and hardly 
 scorched. It had been so with his loves. 
 
 After a brief and blissful honeymoon, Peter Cheever's 
 capricious soul kindled at the thought of an exploration 
 of war-filled Europe. His blushing bride was a hurdle- 
 rider, too, and loved a risk-neck venture. She insisted on 
 going with him. 
 
 He accepted the steering-wheel of a motor-ambulance 
 and left his bride to her own devices while he shot along 
 the poplar-plumed roads of France at lightning speed. 
 
 Charity drifted into hospital service. Her first soldier 
 
 20
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 the tortured victim of a gas-attack, was bewailing the fate 
 of his motherless child. Charity brought a smile to what 
 lips he had by whispering: 
 
 " I am rich. I will adopt your little girl." 
 
 It was the first time she had ever boasted of being rich. 
 The man died, whispering: "Merci, Madame! Merci, 
 Madame!" Another father was writhing in the premature 
 hell of leaving a shy little unprotected boy to starve. 
 Charity promised to care for him, too. 
 
 At a committee meeting, a week later, she learned of a 
 horde of war orphans and divided them up with Muriel 
 Schuyler, Mrs. Perry Merithew, and other American 
 angels abroad. 
 
 When Charity's husband wearied of being what he 
 called "chauffeur to a butcher- wagon," he decided that 
 America was a pretty good country, after all. But 
 Charity could not tear herself away from her privilege of 
 suffering, even to follow her bridegroom home. He had 
 cooled to her also, and he made no protest. He promised 
 to come back for her. He did not come. He cabled 
 often and devotedly, telling her how lonely he was and 
 how busy. She answered that she hoped he was lonely, 
 but she knew he was busy. He would be! 
 
 When Cheever first returned, Jim Dyckman saw him at 
 a club. He saw him afterward in a restaurant with one 
 of those astonishing animals which the moving pictures 
 have hardly caricatured as a "vampire." This one would 
 have been impossible if she had not been visible. She 
 was intensely visible. 
 
 Jim Dyckman felt that her mere presence in a public 
 restaurant was offensive. To think of her as displacing 
 Charity Coe in Cheever's attentions was maddening. 
 He understood for the first time why people of a sort 
 write anonymous letters. He could not stoop to that 
 degradation, and yet he wondered if, after all, it would be 
 as degrading to play the informer as to be an unprotesting 
 and therefore accessory spectator and confidant. 
 
 21
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 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 letter 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. Cheever 
 back to America. He disguised his solicitude with 
 brutality; he told her he did not want her to die on their 
 hands. 
 
 When Charity came back, Cheever met her and cele- 
 
 22
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 brated her return. She was a new sensation to him again 
 for a week or two, but her need of seclusion and quiet 
 drove him frantic and he grew busy once more. He re 
 called Miss L'Etoile from the hardships of dancing for her 
 supper. Unlike Charity, Zada never failed to be exciting. 
 Cheever was never sure what she would do or say or throw 
 next. She was delicious. 
 
 When Dyckman learned of Cheever's extra establish 
 ment it enraged him. He had let Cheever push him aside 
 and carry off Charity Coe," and now he must watch 
 Cheever push Charity Coe aside and carry on the next 
 choice of his whims. 
 
 To Dyckman, Charity was perfection. To lose her and 
 find her in the ash-barrel with Cheever's other discarded 
 dolls was intolerable. Yet what could Dyckman do about 
 it? He dared not even meet Charity. He hated her 
 husband, and he knew that her husband hated him. 
 Cheever somehow realized the dogged fidelity of Dyck- 
 man's love for Charity and resented it feared it as a 
 menace, perhaps. 
 
 Dyckman had two or three narrow escapes from run 
 ning into Charity, and he finally took to his heels. He 
 lingered in the Canadian wilds till he thought it safe to 
 return. And now she chanced to board the same train. 
 The problem he had run away from had cornered him. 
 
 He had cherished a sneaking hope that she would learn 
 the truth somehow before he met her. He was not sure 
 what she ought to do when she learned it. He was sure 
 that what she would do would be the one right thing. 
 
 Yet he realized from her placid manner of parrying his 
 threats at her husband that she still loved the wretch and 
 trusted him. It was up to Jim to tell her what he knew 
 about Cheever. He felt that he ought to. Yet how could 
 he? 
 
 It was hideous that she should sit there smiling toler 
 antly at a critic of her infernal husband as serenely as a 
 priestess who is patient with an unenlightened skeptic. 
 
 23
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 It was atrocious that Cheever should be permitted to 
 prosper with this scandal unrebuked, unpunished, act 
 ually unsnubbed, accepting the worship of an angel like 
 Charity Coe and repaying it with black treachery! To 
 keep silent was to co-operate in the evil to pander to it. 
 Dyckman thought it was hideous. The word he thought 
 was "rotten"! 
 
 He actually opened his mouth to break the news. His 
 voice mutinied. He could not say a word. 
 
 Something throttled him. - It was that strange instinct 
 which makes criminals of every degree feel that no crime 
 is so low but that tattling on it is a degree lower. 
 
 Dyckman tried to assuage his self-contempt by the 
 excuse that Charity was not in the mood or in the place 
 where such a disclosure should be made. Some day he 
 would tell her and then ask permission to kill the black 
 guard for her. 
 
 The train had scuttered across many a mile while he 
 meditated the answer to the latest riddle. His thoughts 
 were so turbulent that Charity finally intruded. 
 
 "What's on your mind, Jim?" 
 
 "Oh, I was just thinking." 
 
 "What about?" 
 
 "Oh, things." 
 
 Suddenly he reached out and seized the hand that 
 drooped at her knee like a wilted lily. He wrung her 
 fingers with a vigor that hurt her, then he said, " Got any 
 dogs to show this season?" 
 
 She laughed at the violent abruptness of this, and said, 
 "I think I'll give an orphan-show instead." 
 
 He shook his head in despairing admiration and leaned 
 back to watch the landscape at the window. So did she. 
 On the windows their own reflections were cast in trans 
 parent films of light. Each wraith watched the other, 
 seeming to read the mood and need no speech. 
 
 Dyckman's mind kept shuttling over and over the same 
 rails of thought, like a switch-engine eternally shunting 
 
 24
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 cars from one track to another. His very temples 
 throbbed with the dickety-click of the train. At last he 
 groaned : 
 
 "This world's too much for me. It's got me guessing." 
 
 He seemed to be so impressed with his original and 
 profound discovery of life's unanswerable complexity that 
 Charity smiled, the same sad, sweet smile with which she 
 pored on the book of sorrow or listened to the questions 
 of her orphans who asked where their fathers had gone. 
 
 She thought of Jim Dyckman as one of her orphans. 
 There was a good deal of the mother in her love of him. 
 For she did love him. And she would have married him 
 if he had asked her earlier before Peter Cheever swept 
 over her horizon and carried her away with his zest and 
 his magnificence. 
 
 She rebuked herself for thinking of Jim Dyckman as an 
 orphan. He had a father and mother who doted on him. 
 He had wealth of his own and millions to come. He had 
 health and brawn enough for two. What right had he to 
 anybody's pity? Yet she pitied him. 
 
 And he pitied her. 
 
 And on this same train, in this same car, unnoticed 
 and unnoticing, sat Kedzie. 
 
 Jim and Charity grew increasingly embarrassed as the 
 train drew into New York. Charity was uncertain 
 whether her husband would meet her or not. Jim did 
 not want to leave her to get home alone. She did not 
 want her husband to find her with Jim. 
 
 Cheever had excuse enough in his own life for suspecting 
 other people. He had always disliked Jim Dyckman 
 because Dyckman had always disliked him, and Jim's 
 transparent face had announced the fact with all the 
 clarity of an illuminated signboard. 
 
 Also Charity had loved Jim before she met Cheever, 
 and she made no secret of being fond of him still. In 
 their occasional quarrels, Cheever had taunted her with 
 wishing she had married Jim, and she had retorted that 
 
 25
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 she had indeed made a big mistake in her choice. Lovers 
 say such things for lack of other weapons in such com 
 bats as lovers inevitably wage, if only for exercise. 
 
 Charity did not really mean what she said, but at times 
 Cheever thought she did. He had warned her to keep 
 away from Dyckman and keep Dyckman away from her 
 or there would be trouble. Cheever was a powerful 
 athlete and a boxer who made minor professionals look 
 ridiculous. Dyckman was bigger, but not so clever. A 
 battle between the two stags over the forlorn doe would 
 be a horrible spectacle. Charity was not the sort of 
 woman that longs for such a conflict of suitors. Just now 
 she had seen too much of the fruits of male combat. 
 She was sick of hatred and its devastation. 
 
 So Charity begged Dyckman to get off at One Hundred 
 and Twenty-fifth Street, but he would not show himself 
 so poltroon. He answered, "I'd like to see myself!" 
 meaning that he would not. 
 
 She retorted, "Then I'll get off there myself." 
 
 "Then I'll get off there with you," he grumbled. 
 
 Charity flounced back into her seat with a gasp of 
 mitigated disgust. The mitigation was the irresistible 
 thrill of his devotion. She had a husband who would 
 desert her and a cavalier who would not. It was difficult 
 not to forgive the cavalier a little. 
 
 Yet it would have been better if he had obeyed her 
 command or she her impulse. Or would it have been? 
 The worst might always have been worse.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 WHEN Kedzie was angry she called her father an 
 "old country Jake." Even she did not know how 
 rural he was or how he had oppressed the sophisticated 
 travelers in the smoking-room of the sleeping-car with his 
 cocksure criticisms of cities that he had never seen. He 
 had condemned New York with all the mercilessness of a 
 small-town superiority, and he had told funny stories that 
 were as funny as the moss-bearded cypresses in a lone 
 bayou. While he was denouncing New York as the home 
 of ignorance and vice, the other men were having sport 
 with him sport so cruel that only his own cruelty blinded 
 him to it. 
 
 When the porter summoned the passengers to pass 
 under the whisk broom, Adna remembered that he had 
 not settled upon his headquarters in New York, and 
 he said to a man on whom he had inflicted a vile cigar: 
 "Say, I forgot to ask you. What's a good hotel in New 
 York that ain't too far from the railroad and don't rob 
 you of your last nickel? Or is they one?" 
 
 One of the smoking-room humorists mocked his accent 
 and ventured a crude jape. 
 
 "You can save the price of a hack-ride by going to 
 Mrs. Biltmore's new boarding-house. It's right across the 
 road from the depot." 
 
 If Adna had been as keen as he thought he was, or if 
 the porter had not alarmed him just then by his affection 
 ate interest, even Adna would have noted the grins on the 
 faces of the men. 
 
 But he broke the porter's heart by dodging the whisk 
 broom and hustling his excited family to their feet. They 
 
 27
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 were permitted to hale their own hand-baggage to the 
 platform, where two red-capped Kaffirs reached for it 
 together. There was danger of an altercation, but the 
 bigger of the two frightened the smaller away by snapping 
 his shiny eyeballs alarmingly. The smaller one took a 
 second look at Adna and retreated with scorn, snickering : 
 
 "You kin have him." 
 
 The other, who was a good loser at craps or tips, re- 
 examined his clients, flickered his eyelids, and started down 
 the platform to have it over with as soon as possible. He 
 paused to say: 
 
 "Where you-all want to go to a taxicab?" 
 
 Adna, who was a little nervous about his property, 
 answered with some asperity: 
 
 "No, we don't need any hack to git to Biltmore's." 
 
 " Nossah!" said the red-cap. 
 
 "Right across the street, ain't it?" 
 
 "Yassah!" The porter chuckled. The mention of the 
 family's destination had cheered him a little. He might 
 get a tip, after all. You couldn't always sometimes tell by 
 a man's clothes how he tipped. 
 
 While Kedzie stood watching the red-cap bestow the 
 various parcels under his arms and along his fingers, a 
 man bumped into her and murmured: 
 
 "Sorry!" 
 
 She turned and said, "Huh?" 
 
 He did not look around. She did not see his face. 
 It was the first conversation between Jim Dyckman and 
 Kedzie Thropp. 
 
 Charity Coe, when the train stopped, had flatly refused 
 to walk up the station platform with Jim Dyckman. She 
 had not only virtue, but St. Paul's idea of the impor 
 tance of avoiding even the appearance of evil. She would 
 not budge from the car till Jim had gone. He was forced 
 to leave her at last. 
 
 He swung through the crowd in a fury, jostling and 
 begging pardon and staring over the heads of the pack to 
 
 28
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 see if Cheever were at the barrier. He jolte.d Kedzie Thropp 
 among others, apologized, and thought no more of her. 
 
 Cheever had not come to meet his wife. Her telegram 
 was waiting for him at his official home; he was at his 
 other residence. 
 
 When Dyckman saw that no one was there to welcome 
 the fagged-out Charity, he paused and waited for her him 
 self. 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 down 
 hill, 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 Cassar'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. So he said: 
 
 29
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Don't let hjm break your heart in you, old girl." 
 
 She laughed uproariously, almost vulgarly, over that, 
 and answered: "Me? Let a man break my heart? 
 That's very likely, isn't it?" 
 
 "Very!" Jim groaned. 
 
 When they reached her magnificent home it had a 
 deserted look. 
 
 "Wait here a minute," said Charity when Jim got out 
 to help her out. She ran up the steps and rang the bell. 
 There was a delay before the second man in an improvised 
 toilet opened the door to her and expressed as much sur 
 prise as delight at seeing her. "Didn't Mr. Cheever tell 
 you I was coming home?" she gasped. 
 
 "We haven't seen him, ma'am. There's a telegram 
 here for him, but of course " 
 
 Charity was still in a frantic mood. She wanted to 
 escape brooding, at all costs. She ran back to where Jim 
 waited at the motor door. 
 
 "Got any date to-night, Jim?" she demanded. He 
 shook his head dolefully, and she said: "Go home, jump 
 into your dancing-shoes, and come back for me. I'll 
 throw on something light and you can take me somewhere 
 to dance. I'll go crazy mad, insane, if you don't. I can't 
 endure this empty house. You don't mind my making a 
 convenience of you, do you, Jim?" 
 
 "I love it, Charity Coe," he groaned. He reached for 
 her hand, but she was fleeting up the steps. He crept 
 into the car and went to his home, flung off his traveling- 
 togs, passed through a hot tub and a cold shower into 
 evening clothes, and hastened away. 
 
 Charity kept him waiting hardly a moment. She 
 floated down the stairs in a something fleecily volatile, 
 and he said: 
 
 "You look like a dandelion puff." 
 
 "That's right, tell me some nice things," she said. 
 She did not tell the servant where she was going. She did 
 not know. She hardly cared. 
 
 30
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 TO Kedzie Thropp the waiting-room of the Grand 
 Central Terminal was the terminus of human 
 splendor. It was the waiting-room to heaven. And in 
 deed it is a majestic chamber. 
 
 The girl walked with her face high, staring at the loftily 
 columned recesses with the bay-trees set between the 
 huge square pillars, and above all the feigned blue sky 
 and the monsters of the zodiac in powdered gold. 
 
 Kedzie could hardly breathe it was so beautiful, so 
 much superior to the plain every-night sky she was used 
 to, with stars of tin instead of gold like these. 
 
 Even her mother said "Well!" and Adna paid the 
 architects the tribute of an exclamation: "Humph! 
 So this is the new station we was readin' about. Some 
 bigger 'n ours at home, eh, Kedzie?" 
 
 But Kedzie was not there. They had lost her and had 
 to turn back. She was in a trance. When they snatched 
 her down to earth again and pulled her through the 
 crowds she began to adore the people. They were 
 dressed in unbelievable splendor millions, she guessed, in 
 far better than the best Sunday best she had ever seen. 
 She wondered if she would ever have nice clothes. She 
 vowed that she would if she had to murder somebody to 
 get them. 
 
 The porter led the way from the vastitude of a corridor 
 under the street and through vast empty rooms and up a 
 stairway and down a few steps and through the first 
 squirrel-cage door Kedzie had ever seen (she had to run 
 round it thrice before they could get her out) into a 
 sumptuousness beyond her dream.
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 At the foot of more stairs the porter let down his 
 burdens, and a boy in a general's uniform seized them. 
 The porter said, mopping his brow to emphasize his 
 achievement : 
 
 "This is fur's I go." 
 
 "Oh, all right! Much obliged," said Adna. He just 
 pretended to walk away as a joke on the porter. When 
 he saw the man's white stare aggravated sufficiently, Adna 
 smiled and handed him a dime. 
 
 The porter stared and turned away in bitter grief. 
 Then his chuckle returned as he went his way, telling him 
 self : "And the bes' of it was, I fit for him! I just had to 
 git that man." 
 
 He told the little porter about it, and when the little 
 porter, who had been scared away from the Thropps and 
 left to carry Charity Coe's dainty hand-bags, showed the 
 big porter what he had received, still the big porter 
 laughed. He knew how to live, that big porter. 
 
 Kedzie followed the little general up the steps and 
 around to the desk. Her father realized that his fellow- 
 passenger had been teasing him when he referred to this 
 place as a boarding-house, but he was not at all crushed 
 by the magnificence he was encountering. He felt that 
 he was in for it so he cocked his toothpick pluckily and 
 wrote on the loose-leaf register the room clerk handed him: 
 
 A. Thropp, wife and daughter, Nimrim, Mo. 
 
 The room clerk read the name as if it were that of a 
 potentate whose incognito he would respect, and mur 
 mured : 
 
 "About what accommodation would you want, Mr. 
 Thropp?" 
 
 "Two rooms one for the wife and m'self, one for the 
 daughter." 
 
 "Yes, sir. And about how much would you want to 
 pay?" 
 
 32
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 " How do they run ?" 
 
 "We can give you two nice adjoining rooms for twelve 
 dollars up." 
 
 Mr. Thropp made a hasty calculation. Twelve dollars 
 a week for board and lodging was not so bad. He nodded. 
 
 The room clerk marked down a number and slid a key 
 to the page, who gathered the family treasures together. 
 Kedzie had more or less helplessly recognized the page's 
 admiration of her when he first took the things from the 
 porter. The sense of her beauty had choked the boy's 
 amusement at her parents. 
 
 Later Kedzie caught the glance of the room clerk and 
 saw that she startled him and cheated him of his smile 
 at Adna. Still later the elevator-boy gave her one re 
 spectful look of approval. Kedzie's New York stir was 
 already beginning. 
 
 The page ushered the Thropps into the elevator and 
 said, "Nineteen." 
 
 It was the number of the floor, not the room. Adna 
 warned his women folk that "she" was about to go up, 
 but they were not prepared for that swift vertical leap 
 toward the clouds. Another floor, and Mrs. Thropp 
 would have screamed. The altitude affected her. 
 
 Then the thing stopped, and the boy led them down a 
 corridor so long that Adna said, "Looks like we'd be 
 stranded a hundred miles from nowheres." 
 
 The boy turned in at a door at last. He flashed on the 
 lights, set the bags on a bag-rack, hung up the coats, 
 opened a window, adjusted the shade, lighted the lights in 
 Kedzie's room, opened her window, adjusted the shade, 
 and asked if there were anything else. 
 
 Adna knew what the little villain meant, but he 
 knew what was expected, and he said, sternly, "Ice- 
 water." 
 
 "Right here, sir," said the boy, and indicated in the 
 bathroom a special faucet marked "Drinking Water." 
 
 This startled even Adna so much that it shook a dime 
 
 3 33
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 out of him. . The boy sighed and went away. Kedzie 
 surprised his eye as he left. It plainly found no fault 
 with her. 
 
 Here in seclusion Mrs. Thropp dared to exclaim at the 
 wonders of modern invention. Kedzie was enfranchised 
 and began to jump and squeal at the almost suffocating 
 majesty. Adna took to himself the credit for everything 
 
 "Well, momma, here we are in New York at last. Here 
 we are, daughter. You got your wish." 
 
 Kedzie nearly broke his neck with her hug, and called 
 him the best father that ever was. And she meant it at 
 the moment, for the moment. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp was already making herself at home, 
 loosening her waistband and her corset-laces. 
 
 Adna made himself at home, too that is, he took off 
 his coat and collar and shoes. But Kedzie could not 
 waste her time on comfort while there was so much 
 ecstasy to be had. 
 
 She went to the window, shoved the sash high, and 
 discovered New York. She greeted it with an outcry 
 of wonder. She called to her mother and father to 
 "Come here and looky!" 
 
 Her mother moaned, "I wouldn't come that far to 
 look at New Jerusalem." 
 
 Adna yawned noisily and pulled out his watch. His 
 very eyes yawned at it, and he said: " 'Levum o'clock. 
 Good Lord! Git to bed quick!" 
 
 Kedzie was furious at ending the day so abruptly. 
 She wanted to go out for a walk, and they sent her to her 
 room. She watched at the window as she peeled off her 
 coarse garments and put her soft body into a rough night 
 gown as ill-cut and shapeless as she was neither. She 
 had been turned by a master's lathe. 
 
 She waited till she heard her father's well-known snore 
 seesawing through the panels. Then she went to the 
 window again to gaze her fill at the town. She fell in 
 love with it and told it so. She vowed that she would 
 
 34
 
 never leave it. She had not come to a strange city; she 
 had just reached home. 
 
 She leaned far out across the ledge to look down at the 
 tremendously inferior street. She nearly pitched head 
 foremost and scrambled back, but with a giggle of bliss 
 at the excitement. She stared at the dark buildings of 
 various heights before her. There was something awe- 
 inspiring about them. 
 
 Across a space of roofs was the electric sign of an electric 
 company, partly hidden by buildings. All Kedzie could 
 see of it was the huge phrase LIGHT HEAT POWER. 
 She thought that those three graces would make an 
 excellent motto. 
 
 She could see across and down into the well of the 
 Grand Central Terminal. On its front was some enor 
 mous winged figure facing down the street. She did not 
 know who it was or what street it was. She did not 
 know any of the streets by name, but she wanted to. 
 She had a passionate longing for streets. 
 
 Farther south or north, east or west, or whichever 
 way it was, was a tall building with glowing bulbs looped 
 like the strings of evergreen she had helped to drape the 
 home church with at Christmas-time. Here it was 
 Christmas every day all holidays in one. 
 
 Down in the ravine a little in front of her she could 
 read the sign ATHENS HOTEL. She had heard of Athens. 
 It was the capital of some place in her geography. She 
 who had so much of Grecian in her soul was not quite sure 
 of Athens! 
 
 In one of the opposite office buildings people were work 
 ing late. The curtains were drawn, but the casements 
 were filled with light, a honey-colored light. The build 
 ings were like great honeycombs; the dark windows were 
 like the cells that had no honey in them. Light and life 
 were honey. Kedzie wondered what folks they were 
 behind those curtains who they were, and what were 
 they up to. She bet it was something interesting. She 
 
 35
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 wished she knew them. She wished she knew a whole lot 
 of city people. But she didn't know a soul. 
 
 It was all too glorious to believe. She was in New 
 York! imparadised in New York! 
 
 "Kedzie! Ked-zee-ee!" 
 
 "Yes, momma." 
 
 "Are you in bed?" 
 
 "Yes, momma." She tried to give her voice a far 
 away, sleepy sound, for fear that her mother might open 
 the door to be sure. 
 
 She crept into bed. The lights burned her weary eyes. 
 She could not reach them to put them out. 
 
 By the head of her bed was a little toy lamp. A chain 
 hung from it. She tugged at the chain pouff ! out went 
 the light. She tugged at the chain. On went the light. 
 A magical chain, that ! It put the light on and off, both. 
 Kedzie could find no chains to pull the ceiling lights out 
 with. She let them burn. 
 
 Kedzie covered her head and yet could not sleep. She 
 sat up quickly. Was that music she heard? Somebody 
 was giving a party, maybe. 
 
 She got up and out again and ran barefoot to the hall 
 door, opened it an inch, and peeked through. She saw a 
 man and two ladies swishing along the hall to the elevator. 
 They were not sleepy at all, and the ladies were dressed 
 whew ! skirts short and no sleeves whatever. They really 
 were going to a party. 
 
 Kedzie closed the door and drooped back to bed an 
 awful place to go when all the rest of the world was just 
 starting out to parties. 
 
 She flopped and gasped in her bed like a fish ashore. 
 Then a gorgeous whim came to her. She would dive into 
 her element. Light and fun were her element. She came 
 out of bed like a watch-spring leaping from a case. She 
 tiptoed to the parental door heard nothing but the rumor 
 of slumber. 
 
 She began to dress. She put on her extra-good dress. 
 
 36
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She had brought it along in the big valise in case of an 
 accident to the every-day dress. When she had squirmed 
 through the ordeal of hooking it up, she realized that its 
 skirts were too long for decency. She pinned them up 
 at the hem. 
 
 The gown had a village low-neck that is, it was a 
 trifle V'd at the throat. Kedzie tried to copy the corsage 
 of the women who passed in the hall. She withdrew from 
 the sleeves, and gathering the waist together under her 
 arms, fastened it as best she could. The revelation was 
 terrifying. All of her chest and shoulders and shoulder- 
 blades were bare. 
 
 She dared hardly look at herself. Yet she could not 
 possibly deny the fearful charm of those contours. She 
 put her clothes on again and prinked as much as she could. 
 Then she sallied forth, opening and closing the door with 
 pious care. She went to the elevator, and the car began 
 to drop. The elevator-boy politely lowered it without 
 plunge or jolt. 
 
 Kedzie followed the sound of the music. The lobbies 
 were thronged with brilliant crowds flocking from 
 theaters for supper and a dance. Kedzie made her 
 way to the edge of the supper-room. The floor, like 
 a pool surrounded by chairs and tables, was alive with 
 couples dancing contentedly. Every woman was in 
 evening dress and so was every man. The splendor of 
 the costumes made her blink. The shabbiness of her 
 own made her blush. 
 
 She blushed because her own dress was indecent and 
 immoral. It was indecent and immoral because it was 
 unlike that of the majority. In this parish, convention 
 ality, which is the one true synonym for morality, called for 
 bare shoulders and arms unsleeved. Kedzie was con 
 spicuous, which is a perfect synonym for immoral. If 
 she had fallen through the ceiling out of a bathtub she 
 could not have felt more in need of a hiding-place. She 
 shrank into a corner and sought cover and concealment, 
 
 37
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 for she was afraid to go back to the elevator througk the 
 ceaseless inflow of the decolletees. 
 
 She throbbed to the music of the big band; her feet 
 burned to dance ; her waist ached for the sash of a manly 
 arm. She knew that she could dance better than some 
 of those stodgy old men and block-bodied old women. 
 But she had no clothes on for dancing. 
 
 But there was one woman whom Kedzie felt she could 
 not surpass, a dazzling woman with a recklessly graceful 
 young man. The young man took the woman from a 
 table almost over Kedzie's head. They left at the table 
 a man in evening dress who smoked a big cigar and 
 seemed not to be jealous of the two dancers. 
 
 Some one among the spectators about Kedzie said that 
 the woman was Zada L'Etoile, and her partner was 
 Haviland Devoe. Zada was amazing in her postures and 
 gyrations, but Kedzie thought that she herself could have 
 danced as well if she had had that music, that costume, 
 that partner, and a little practice. 
 
 When Zada had completed her calisthenics she did not 
 sit down with Mr. Devoe, but went back to the table 
 where the lone smoker sat. Now that she looked at him 
 again, Kedzie thought what an extraordinarily handsome, 
 gloriously wicked-looking, swell-looking man he was. 
 Yet the girl who had danced called him Peterkin which 
 didn't sound very swell to Kedzie. 
 
 He had very little to say to Zada, who did most of the 
 talking. He smiled at her now and then behind his cigar 
 and gave her a queer look that Kedzie only vaguely un 
 derstood. She thought little of him, though, because the 
 next dance began, and she had a whole riot of costumes 
 to study. 
 
 There was a constant movement of new-comers past 
 Kedzie's nook. Sometimes people halted to look the 
 crowd over before they went up the steps, and asked two 
 handsome gentlemen in full-dress suits if they could have 
 a table. The gentlemen managers, probably, who got 
 
 38
 
 up the party usually said no. Sometimes they looked 
 at papers in their hands and marked off something, and 
 then the people got a table. 
 
 By and by two men and an elderly woman dressed like 
 a very youngerly woman paused near Kedzie. Both of 
 the men were tall, but the one called Jim was so tall he 
 could see over the rail, or over the moon, for all Kedzie 
 knew. 
 
 The elderly lady said, "Come along, boys; we're miss 
 ing a love of a trot. ' ' 
 
 The less tall of the men said: "Now, mother, restrain 
 yourself. Remember I've had a hard day and I'm only a 
 young feller.. How about you, Jim?" 
 
 "I'll eat something, but I'm not dancing, if you'll par 
 don me, Mrs. Duane," said Jim. "And I'm waiting for 
 Charity Coe. She's in the cloak-room." 
 
 "Oh, come along," said Mrs. Duane. "I've got a table 
 and I don't want to lose it." 
 
 She started away, and her son started to follow, but 
 paused as the other man caught his sleeve and growled: 
 
 "I say, isn't that Pete Cheever there, right there by 
 the rail? Yes, it is and with !" 
 
 Then Tom gave a start and said: "Ssh! Here's Char 
 ity Coe." 
 
 Both men looked confused; then they brightened and 
 greeted a new batch of drifters, and there was a babble of : 
 
 "Why, hello! How are you, Tom! How goes it, Jim? 
 What's the good word, Mary? What you doing here, 
 Charity, and all in black? Oh, I have to get out or go 
 mad." 
 
 Kedzie, eavesdropping on the chatter, wondered at the 
 commonplace names and the small-town conversation. 
 With such costumes she must have expected at least blank 
 verse. 
 
 She was interested to see what the stern sentinels would 
 do to this knot of Toms, Jims, and Marys. She peeked 
 around the corner, and to her surprise saw them greeted 
 
 39
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 with great cordiality. They smiled and chatted with the 
 sentinels and were passed through the silken barrier. 
 
 Other people paused and passed in or were rejected. 
 Kedzie watched Mr. Cheever with new interest, but not 
 much understanding. He had next to nothing to say. 
 After a time she overheard Zada say to him, raising her 
 voice to top the noise of the band: "Say, Peterkin, see 
 that great big lad over there, the human lighthouse by the 
 sea? Peterkin, you can't miss him he's just standing 
 up yes isn't that Jim Dyckman? Is he really so rich 
 as they say?" 
 
 "He's rotten rich!" said Peterkin. 
 
 Then Zada said something and pointed. She seemed 
 to be excited, but not half so excited as Peter was. His 
 face was all shot up with red, and he looked as if he had 
 eaten something that didn't sit easy. 
 
 Then he looked as if he wanted to fight somebody. He 
 began to chew on his words. 
 
 Kedzie caught only a few phrases in the holes in the 
 noisy music. 
 
 "When did she get back? And she's here with him? 
 I'll kill him" 
 
 Kedzie stood on tiptoe, prime vally trying to lift her ears 
 higher still to hear what followed. She saw Zada putting 
 her hand on Peter's sleeve, and she heard Zada say: 
 
 " Don't start anything here. Remember I got a reputa 
 tion to lose, if you haven't." 
 
 This had the oddest effect on Peter. He stared at 
 Zada, and his anger ran out of his face just as the water 
 ran out of the silver washbowl in the sleeping-car. Then 
 he began to laugh softly, but as if he wanted to laugh right 
 out loud. He put his napkin up and laughed into that. 
 
 And then the anger he had lost ran up into Zada's face, 
 and she looked at Peter as if she wanted to kill him. 
 
 Now it was Peter who put his hand on her arm and 
 patted it and said, "I didn't mean anything." 
 
 Mean what? Kedzie wondered. But she had no 
 
 40
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 chance to find out, for Peter rose from the table and, 
 dodging around the dancing couples, made his escape. 
 He reappeared in the very nook where Kedzie watched, 
 and called up to Zada: 
 
 "Did they see me?" 
 
 Zada shook her head. Peter threw her a kiss. She 
 threw him a shrug of contempt. Peter went away laugh 
 ing. Kedzie waited a few minutes and saw that Mr. 
 Devoe had come to sit with Zada. 
 
 After a moment the music was resumed, and Zada rose 
 to dance again with Mr. Devoe a curious sort of dance, 
 in which she lifted her feet high and placed them carefully, 
 as if she were walking on a floor covered with eggs and 
 didn't want to break any. 
 
 But Kedzie's eyes were filling with sand. They had 
 gazed too long at brilliance. She dashed back to the 
 elevator and to her room. She was exhausted, and she 
 pulled off her clothes and let them lie where they fell. 
 She slid her weary frame between the sheets and instantly 
 slept. 
 
 Charity Coe danced till all hours with Jim, with Tom 1 
 Duane and other men, and no one could have fancied that 
 she had ever known or cared what horrors filled the war 
 hospitals across the sea. 
 
 She was frantic enough to accept a luncheon engage 
 ment with Jim and his mother for the next day. She 
 telephoned him in the morning: "Your angel of a mother 
 will forgive me when you tell her I'm lunching down-town 
 with my husband. The poor boy was detained at his- 
 office last night and didn't get my telegram till he got 
 home. When he learned that I had come in and gone out 
 again he was furious with himself and me. I hadn't left 
 word where I was, so he couldn't come running after me. 
 He waited at home and gave me a love of a call-down for 
 my dissipation. It was a treat. I really think he was. 
 jealous."
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Jim Dyckman did not laugh with her. He was thinking 
 hard. He had seen Cheever at the Biltmore, and a little 
 later Cheever vanished. Cheever must have seen Charity 
 Coe then. And if he saw her, he saw him. Then why 
 had he kept silent? Dyckman had a chilling intuition 
 that Cheever was lying in ambush for him. 
 
 Again he was wrung with the impulse to tell Charity 
 Coe the truth about her husband. Again some dubious 
 decency withheld him.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE word "breakfast" was magic stimulant to the 
 Thropps. Kedzie put on her clothes, and the family 
 went down to the elevator together. 
 
 They found their way to the Tudor Room, where a 
 small number of men, mostly barricaded behind news 
 papers, ate briskly. A captain showed the Thropps to a 
 table; three waiters pulled out their chairs and pushed 
 them in under them. Another laid large pasteboards be 
 fore them. Another planted ice-water and butter and salt 
 and pepper here and there. 
 
 Adna had traveled enough to know that the way to 
 order a meal in a hotel is to give the waiter a wise look and 
 say, "Bring me the best you got." 
 
 This waiter looked a little surprised, but he said, "Yes, 
 sir. Do you like fruit and eggs and rolls, maybe?" 
 
 "Nah," said Adna. "Breakfast's my best meal. Bring 
 us suthin' hearty and plenty of it. I like a nice piece of 
 steak and fried potatoes and some griddle-cakes and 
 maple-surrup, and if you got any nice sawsitch and the 
 wife usually likes some oatmeal, and she takes tea and 
 toast, but bring me some hot bread. And the girl 
 What you want, Kedzie? The same's I'm takin'? All 
 right. Oh, some grape-fruit, eh? She wants grape-fruit. 
 Got any good? All right. I guess I'll take some grape 
 fruit, too; and let me see I guess that '11 do to start 
 on Wait! What's that those folks are eatin' over 
 there? Looks good spring chicken humm! I guess 
 you'd like that better 'n steak, ma? Yes. She'd rather have 
 the chicken. All right, George, you hustle us in a nice 
 
 43
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 meal and I'll make it all right with you. You under 
 stand." 
 
 Adna called all waiters "George." It saved their feel 
 ings, he had heard. 
 
 The waiter bowed and retired. Adna spoke to his 
 family: 
 
 "Since we pay the same, anyway, might's well have the 
 best they got." 
 
 The waiter gave the three a meal fitter for the ancient 
 days when kings had dinner at nine in the morning than 
 for these degenerate times when breakfast hardly lives up 
 to its name. 
 
 The waiter and his cronies stood at a safe distance and 
 watched the Thropps surround that banquet. They 
 wondered where the old man got money enough to buy 
 such breakfasts and why he didn't spend some of it on 
 clothes. 
 
 The favorite theory was that he was a farmer on whose 
 acres somebody had discovered oil or gold and bought him 
 out for a million. Mr. Thropp's proper waiter hoped that 
 he would be as extravagant with his tip as he was with 
 his order. He feared not. His waiterly intuition told 
 him the old man put in with more enthusiasm than he 
 paid out. 
 
 At last the meal was over. The Thropps were groan 
 ing. They had not quite absorbed the feast, but they 
 had wrecked it utterly. Mr. Thropp found only one 
 omission in the perfect service. The toothpicks had to 
 be asked for. All three Thropps wanted them. 
 
 While Thropp was fishing in his pocket for a quarter, and 
 finding only half a dollar which he did not want to reveal, 
 the waiter placed before him a closely written manuscript, 
 face down, with a lead-pencil on top of it. 
 
 "What's this?" said Thropp. 
 
 "Will you please to sign your name and room number, 
 sir?" the waiter suggested. 
 
 "Oh, I see," said Thropp, and explained to his little 
 
 44
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 flock, "You see, they got to keep tabs on the regular 
 boarders." 
 
 Then he turned the face of the bill to the light. His 
 pencil could hardly find a place to put his name in the long 
 catalogue. He noted a sum scrawled in red ink :"$n.75." 
 
 " Wha-what's this?" he said, faintly. 
 
 The surprised waiter explained with all suavity: "The 
 price of the breakfast. If it is not added correctlee " 
 
 Thropp added it with accurate, but tremulous, pencil. 
 The total was correct, if the items were. He explained: 
 
 "But I'm a regular er roomer here. I pay by the 
 week." 
 
 " Yes, sir if you will sign, it will be all right." 
 
 "But that don't mean they're going to charge me for 
 breakfast? 'Levum dollars and seventy-five cents for 
 for breakfast? for a small family like mine is? Well, I'd 
 like to see 'em! What do they think I am!" 
 
 The waiter maintained his courtesy, but Adna was in 
 furiated. He put down no tip at all. He lifted his family 
 from the table with a yank of the eyes and snapped at the 
 waiter : 
 
 " I'll soon find out who's tryin' to stick me you or the 
 propri'tor." 
 
 The old man stalked out, followed by his fat ewe and 
 their ewe lamb. Adna's very toothpick was like a small 
 bayonet. 
 
 His wife and daughter hung back to avoid being spat 
 tered with the gore of the unfortunate hotel clerk. The 
 morning trains were unloading their mobs, and it was dif 
 ficult to reach the desk at all. 
 
 When finally Adna got to the bar he had lost some of 
 his running start. With somewhat weakly anger he said 
 to the first clerk he reached : 
 
 "Looky here! I registered here last night, and another 
 young feller was here said the two rooms would be twelve 
 dollars." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 45
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Well, they sent me up to roost on a cloud, but I 
 didn't kick. Now they're tryin' to charge me for meals 
 extry. Don't that twelve dollars include meals?" 
 
 "Oh no, sir. The hotel is on the European plan." 
 
 Adna took the shock bravely but bitterly: "Well, all 
 I got to say is the Europeans got mighty poor plans. I 
 kind of suspicioned there was a ketch in it somewheres. 
 After this we'll eat outside, and at the end of the week we'll 
 take our custom somewheres else. Maybe there was a joke 
 in that twelve dollars a week for the rooms, too." 
 
 "Twelve dollars a week! Oh no, sir; the charge is by 
 the day." 
 
 Adna's knees seemed to turn to sand and run down into 
 his shoes. He supported himself on his elbows. 
 
 "Twelve dollars a day for those two rooms on the top 
 of the moon?" 
 
 "Yes, sir; that's the rate, sir." 
 
 Adna was going rapidly. He chattered, ' ' Ain't there no 
 police in this town at tall?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Well, I've heard they're the wust robbers of all. 
 We'll see about this." He went back to his women folk 
 and mumbled, "Come on up-stairs." 
 
 They followed, Mrs. Thropp murmuring to Kedzie: 
 "Looks like poppa was goin' to be sick. I'm afraid he et 
 too much of that rich food." 
 
 The elevator flashed them to their empyrean floor. 
 Adna did not speak till they were in their room and he had 
 lowered himself feebly into a chair. He spoke thickly: 
 
 "Do you know what that Judas Iscariot down there is 
 doin' to us? Chargin' us twelve dollars a day for these 
 two cubby-holes a day ! Twelve dollars a day ! Eighty- 
 four dollars a week! And that breakfast was 'levum 
 dollars and seventy-five cents! If I'd gave the waiter 
 the quarter I was goin' to, it would have made an even 
 dozen dollars! for breakfast! I don't suppose anybody 
 would ever dast order a dinner here. Why, they'd skin a 
 
 46
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 millionaire and pick his bones in a week. We'd better 
 get out before they slap a mortgage on my house." 
 
 "Well, I just wouldn't pay it," said Mrs. Thropp. " I'd 
 see the police about such goings-on." 
 
 "The police!" groaned Thropp. "They're in cahoots 
 with the burglars here. This hull town is a den of thieves. 
 I've always heard it, and now I know it." 
 
 He was ashamed of himself for being taken in so. He 
 began to throw into the valises the duds that had been 
 removed. 
 
 Throughout the panic Kedzie had stood about in a kind 
 of stupor. When her father tapped her on the shoulder 
 and repeated his "C'm'on!" she turned to him eyes all 
 tears glistening like bubbles, and she whimpered: 
 
 "Oh, daddy, the view! The nice things!" 
 
 Adna snapped: "View? Our next view will be the 
 poorhouse if we don't hustle our stumps. We got to get 
 out of here and find the cheapest place they is in town to 
 live or go back home on the next train." 
 
 Kedzie began to cry, to cry as she had cried when she 
 wept in her cradle because candy had been taken from her, 
 or a box of carpet-tacks, or the scissors that she had some 
 how got hold of. 
 
 Adna dropped his valises with a thud. He began to 
 upbraid her. He had endured too much. He had still 
 his bill to pay. He told her that she was a good-for- 
 nothin' nuisance and he wished he had left her home. 
 He'd never take her anywheres again, you bet. Kedzie 
 lost her reason entirely. She was shattered with spasms 
 of grief aggravated by her mother's ferocity and her 
 father's. She could not give up this splendor. She 
 would not go to a cheap place to live. She would never 
 go back home. She would rather die. 
 
 Her mother boxed her ears and shook her and scolded 
 with all her vim. But Kedzie only shook out more sobs 
 till they wondered what the people next door would think. 
 Adna was wan with wrath. Kedzie was afraid of her 
 
 47
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 father's look. She had a kind of lockjaw of grief such 
 as children suffer and suffer for. 
 
 All she would answer to her father's threats was: "I 
 won't! I won't! I tell you I won't!" 
 
 Her cheeks were blubbered, her nose red, her mouth 
 swollen, her hair wet and stringy. She gulped and swal 
 lowed and beat her hands together and stamped her feet. 
 
 Adna glared at her in hatred equal to her own for him. 
 He said to his wife: "Ma, we got to go back to first prin 
 ciples with that girl. You got to give her a good beatin'." 
 
 Mrs. Thropp had the will but not the power. She was 
 palsied with rage. "I can't," she faltered. 
 
 "Then I will!" said Adna, and he roared with ferocity, 
 "Come here to me, you!" 
 
 He put out his hand like a claw, and Kedzie retreated 
 from him. She stopped sobbing. She had never been so 
 frightened. She felt a new kind of fright, the fright of a 
 nun at seeing an altar threatened with desecration. She 
 had not been whipped for years. She had grown past 
 that. Surely her body was sacred from such infamy now. 
 
 "Come here to me, I tell you!" Adna snarled, as he 
 pursued her slowly around the chairs. 
 
 "You better not whip me, poppa," Kedzie mumbled. 
 "You better not touch me, I tell you. You'll be sorry if 
 you do ! You better not !' ' 
 
 "Come here to me!" said Adna. 
 
 "Momma, momma, don't let him!" Kedzie whispered 
 as she ran to her mother and flung herself in her arms for 
 refuge. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp then lost a great opportunity forever. 
 She tore the girl's hands away and handed her over to her 
 father. And he, with ugly fury and ugly gesture, seized 
 the young woman who had been his child and dragged her 
 to him and sank into a chair and wrenched and twisted 
 her arms till he held her prone across his knees. Then 
 he spanked her with the flat of his hand. 
 
 Kedzie made one little outcry; then there was no 
 
 48
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 sound but the thump of the blows. Adna sickened soon 
 of his task, and Kedzie's silence and non-resistance robbed 
 him of excuse. He growled: 
 
 "I guess that '11 learn you who's boss round here." 
 He thrust her from his knees, and she rolled off to the 
 floor and lay still. She had not really swooned, but her 
 soul had felt the need of withdrawing into itself to ponder 
 this awful sacrilege.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 HER mother knew that she had not fainted. She was 
 sick, too, and blamed Kedzie for the scene. She 
 spurned the girl with her foot and said: 
 
 "You get right up off that floor this minute. Do you 
 hear?" 
 
 Kedzie's soul came back. It had made its decision. 
 It gathered her body together and lifted it up to its knees 
 and then erect, while the lips said, "All right, momma." 
 
 She groped her way into the bathroom and washed her 
 face, and straightened her hair and came forth, a dazed 
 and pallid thing. She took up the valise her father gave 
 her and followed her mother out, pausing to pass her eyes 
 about the beautiful room and the window where the 
 peaks of splendor were. Then she walked out, and her 
 father locked the door. 
 
 Kedzie saw that the elevator-boy saw that she had 
 been crying, but what was one shame extra? She had no 
 pride left now, and no father and no mother, no anybody. 
 
 Adna refused the offices of the pages who clutched at 
 the baggage. He went to the cashier and paid the blood- 
 money with a grin of hate. Then he gathered up his 
 women and his other baggage and set out for the station. 
 He would leave all the baggage there while he hunted a 
 place to stop. 
 
 They could not find the tunnelway, but debouched on 
 the street. Crossing Vanderbilt Avenue was a problem 
 for village folk heavy laden. The taxicabs were hooting 
 and scurrying. 
 
 Adna found himself in the middle of the street, entirely 
 
 So
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 surrounded by demoniac motors. His wife wanted to He 
 down there and die. Adna dared neither to go nor to stay. 
 Suddenly a chauffeur of an empty limousine, fearing to 
 lose a chance to swear at a taxi-driver, kept his head turned 
 to the left and steered straight for the spot where the 
 Thropps awaited their doom. 
 
 Adna had his wife pendent from one arm and a valise 
 or two from the other. Kedzie carried a third valise. 
 Her better than normal shoulders were sagged out of 
 line by its weight. 
 
 When Adna saw the motor coming ne had to choose 
 between dropping his valise or his wife. Characteristi 
 cally, he saved his valise. 
 
 In -spite of his wife's squawking and tugging on his left 
 arm, he achieved safety under the portico of the Grand 
 Central Terminal. He looked about for Kedzie. She was 
 not to be seen. 'Adna saw the taxicab pass over the valise 
 she had carried. It left no trace of Kedzie. Her an 
 nihilation was uncanny. He gaped. 
 
 "Where's Kedzie?" Mrs. Thropp screamed. 
 
 A policeman checked the traffic with uplifted hand. 
 Adna ran to him. Mrs. Thropp told him what had 
 happened. 
 
 "I saw the goil drop the bag and beat it for the walk," 
 said the officer. 
 
 "Which way'd she go?" 
 
 "She lost herself in the crowd," said the officer. 
 
 "She was scared out of her wits," Mrs. Thropp 
 sobbed. 
 
 The officer shook his head. "She was smilin' when I 
 yelled at her. It looks to me like a get-away." 
 
 "A runaway?" Mrs. Thropp gasped. 
 
 "Yes, 'm. I'd have went after her, but I was cut off by 
 a taxi." 
 
 The two old Thropps stood staring at 'each other and 
 the unfathomable New York, while the impatient chauf 
 feurs squawked their horns in angry protest, and train- 
 Si
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 missers with important errands thrust their heads out of 
 cab windows. 
 
 The officer led his bewildered charges to the sidewalk, 
 motioned the traffic to proceed, and beckoned to a 
 patrolman. "Tell your troubles to him," he said, and 
 went back into his private maelstrom. 
 
 The patrolman heard the Thropp story and tried to 
 keep the crowd away. He patted Mrs. Thropp's back 
 and said they'd find the kid easy, not to distoib herself. 
 He told the father which station-house to go to and 
 advised him to have the "skipper " send out a "general." 
 
 Thropp wondered what language he spoke, but he went ; 
 and a soft-hearted walrus in uniform sprawling across a 
 lofty desk took down names and notes and minute descrip 
 tions of Kedzie and her costume. He told the two babes 
 in the wood that such t'ings happened constant, and the 
 goil would toin up in no time. He sent out a general 
 alarm. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp told him the whole story, putting all the 
 blame on her husband with such enthusiasm that the 
 sympathy of everybody went out to him. Everybody 
 included a number of reporters who asked Mrs. Thropp 
 questions and particularly desired a photograph of Kedzie. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp confessed that she had not brought any 
 along. She had never dreamed that the girl would run 
 away. If she had have, she wouldn't have brought the 
 girl along, to say nothing of her photograph. 
 
 The amiable walrus in the cap and brass buttons recom 
 mended the Thropps to a boarding-house whose prices 
 were commensurate with Adna's ideas and means, and 
 he and his wife went thither, where they told a shabby and 
 sentimental landlady all their troubles. She reassured 
 them as best she could, and made a cup of tea for Mrs. 
 Thropp and told Mr. Thropp there was a young fellow 
 lived in the house who was working for a private detective 
 bureau. He'd find the kid sure, for it was a small woild, 
 after all. 
 
 52
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 There was a lull in the European-war news the next 
 day only a few hundreds killed in an interchange of 
 trenches. There was a dearth of big local news also. 
 So the morning papers all gave Kedzie Thropp the hos 
 pitality of their head-lines. The illustrated journals pub 
 lished what they said was her photograph. No two of the 
 photographs were alike, but they were all pretty. 
 
 The copy-writers loved the details of the event. They 
 gave the dialogue of the Thropps in many versions, all 
 emphasizing what is known as "the human note." 
 
 Every one of them gave due emphasis to the historic 
 fact that Kedzie Thropp had been spanked. 
 
 The boarding-house was shaken from attic to basement 
 by the news. The Thropps read the papers. They were 
 astounded and enraged at gaining publicity for such a deed. 
 They visited the walrus in his den. But there was no 
 word of Kedzie Thropp. The sea of people had opened 
 and swallowed the little girl. Her mother wondered 
 where she had slept and if she were hungry and into whose 
 hands she had fallen. But there was no answer from 
 anywhere.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 F)EOPLE who call a child in from All Outdoors and 
 1 make it their infant owe it to their victim to be rich, 
 brilliant, and generous. Kedzie Thropp's parents were 
 poor, stupid, and stingy. 
 
 They were respectable enough, but not respectful at all. 
 Children have more dignity than anybody else, because 
 they have not lived long enough to have their natal dig 
 nity knocked out of them. 
 
 Kedzie's parents ought to have respected hers, but they 
 subjected her to odious humiliation. When her father 
 threatened to spank her and did and when her mother 
 aided and abetted him, they forfeited all claim to her 
 tolerance. The inspiration to run away was forced on 
 Kedzie, though she would have said that her parents ran 
 away from her first. 
 
 Kedzie had preferred her own life to the security of her 
 valise. She dropped the bag without hesitation. When 
 the taxicab parted her family in the middle, Kedzie 
 ran to the opposite sidewalk. She saw a policeman dash 
 ing into the thick of the motors. Her eye caught his. 
 He beckoned to her that he would ferry her across the 
 torrent. He was a nice-looking man, but she shook her 
 head at him. She smiled, however, and hastened away. 
 
 Freedom had been forced on her. Why should she 
 relinquish the boon? 
 
 She lost herself in the crowd. She had no purpose or 
 destination, for the whole city was a mystery to her. 
 Soon she noted that part of the human stream flowed 
 down into the yawning maw of a Subway kiosk as the 
 
 54
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 water ran out of the bath-tub in the hotel. She floated 
 down the steps and found herself in a big subterrene room 
 with walls tiled like those of the hotel bathroom. Every 
 body was buying tickets from a man in a funny little cage. 
 
 Kedzie had a hand-bag slung at her wrist. In it was 
 some small money. She fished out a nickel and slid it 
 across the glass sill as the others did. 
 
 Beneath her eyes she saw a card that asked, "How 
 many ? " She said, ' ' One. ' ' 
 
 The doleful ticket-seller was annoyed at the tautology 
 of passing him a nickel and saying, "One!" He shot out 
 an angry glance with the ticket, but he melted at sight 
 of Kedzie 's lush beauty, recognized her unquestionable 
 plebeiance, and hailed her with a "Here you are, Cutie." 
 
 Kedzie was not at all insulted. She gave him smile for 
 smile, took up her pasteboard and followed the crowd 
 through the gate. 
 
 The ticket-chopper yelled at the back of her head, 
 "Here, where you goin'?" 
 
 She turned to him, and his scowl relaxed. He pointed 
 to the box and pleaded: 
 
 "Put her there, miss, if you please." 
 
 She smiled at the ticket-chopper and dropped the flake 
 into the box. She moved down the stairway as an express 
 rolled in. People ran. Kedzie ran. They squeezed in 
 at the side door, and so did Kedzie. The wicker seats 
 were full, and so Kedzie stood. She could not reach the 
 handles that looked like cruppers. Men and women saw 
 how pretty she was. She was so pretty that one or two 
 men nearly rose and offered her their seats. When the 
 train whooped round the curve beneath Times Square 
 Kedzie was spun into the lap of a man reading a pre 
 maturely born "Night Edition." 
 
 She came through the paper like a circus-lady, and the 
 man was indignant till he saw what he held. Then he 
 laughed foolishly, helped the giggling Kedzie to her feet 
 and rose to his own, gave her his place, and went blushing 
 
 55
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 into the next car. For an hour after his arms felt as if 
 they had clasped a fugitive nymph for a moment before 
 she escaped. 
 
 This train chanced to be an express to iSoth Street in 
 the Bronx Borough. If any one had asked Kedzie if she 
 knew the Bronx she would probably have answered that 
 she did not know them. She did not even know what a 
 borough was. 
 
 It was fascinating how much Kedzie did not know. 
 She had an infinite fund of things to find out. 
 
 She was thrilled thoroughly by the glorious velocity 
 through the tunnel. The train stopped at Seventy-second 
 Street and at Ninety-sixth Street and at many other 
 stations. People got on or off. But Kedzie was too 
 well entertained to care to leave. 
 
 She did not know that the train ran under a corner of 
 Central Park and beneath the Harlem River. She would 
 have liked to know. To run under a river would tell 
 well at home. 
 
 Suddenly the Subway shot out into midair and became a 
 superway. The street which had been invisible above was 
 suddenly visible below, with street-cars on it. Also there 
 was a still higher track overhead. Three layers of tracks ! 
 It was heavenly, the noise they made! She enjoyed 
 hearing the mounting numbers of the streets shouted 
 antiphonally by the gentlemen at either door. 
 
 At iSoth Street, however, the train stopped for good, 
 and the handsome young man at the front door called, 
 "All out !" He said it to Kedzie with a beautiful courtesy, 
 adding, "This is as far as we go, lady." 
 
 That was tremendous, to be called "lady." Kedzie 
 tried to get out like one. She smiled at the guard and left 
 his protection with some reluctance. He studied her as 
 she walked along the platform. She seemed to meet with 
 his approval in general, and in particular. He sighed 
 when she turned out of his sight. 
 
 The station here was very high up in the world. Kedzie 
 
 56
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 counted seventy-seven steps on her way to the level. She 
 was distressed to find herself in a shabby, noisy com 
 munity where streets radiated in six directions. Her fears 
 were true. She had left New York. She must get home 
 to it again. 
 
 She walked back along the way she had come, on the 
 sidewalk beneath the tracks. This meandering street was 
 called Boston Road. Kedzie had no ideas as to the dis 
 tance of Boston. She only knew that New York was good 
 enough for her the New York of Forty-second Street, 
 of course. Kedzie did not know yet how many, many 
 New Yorks there are in New York. 
 
 She was discouraged by her present surroundings. 
 Along the rough and neglected streets were little rows of 
 shanty shops, and there were stubby frame residences. 
 
 There was one two-story cottage snuggling against a 
 hill; it had a little picket fence with a little picket gate 
 leading to a little ragged yard with an old apple-tree in it ; 
 and there was a pair of steps up to the front door, and a 
 rough trellis from there to the woodshed with a grape 
 vine draped across it. It was of the James Whitcomb 
 Riley school of architecture a house with a woodshed. 
 
 Rich people who were tired of the city, and chanced 
 that way, used to pause and look at that little nook and 
 admire its meek attractiveness. It made them homesick. 
 
 But Kedzie was sick of home. This lowly cot was too 
 much like her father's. It had a sign on it that said, 
 "To Let." It was a funny expression. Kedzie studied 
 it a long time before she decided that it was New-Yorkese 
 for "For Rent." 
 
 She shuddered at the idea of renting or letting such a 
 house especially as it was so close to a church, a small, 
 seedy, frame church nearly all roof, a narrow-chested, 
 slope-shouldered churchlet with a frame cupola for a 
 steeple. It looked abandoned, and an ivy nourished on it 
 so impudently that it almost closed the unfrequented 
 portal. 
 
 57
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 The bill-boards here made mighty interesting reading. 
 There were magnificent works of an art on the grand scale 
 of a people's gallery; one structure promulgated the 
 glories of a notorious chewing-gum. There was a gorgeous 
 proclamation of a fashionable glove with a picture of an 
 extremely swell slim lady all dressed up or rather all 
 dressed down for the opera. 
 
 Kedzie prayed the Lord to send her some day a pair of 
 full-length white kid gloves like those. As for a box at the 
 opera, she would take her chances on the sunniest cloud- 
 sofa in heaven for an evening at the opera. And for a 
 dress cut deckolett and an aigret in her hair, she would 
 have swapped a halo and a set of wings. 
 
 There was no end to the big pages of this literature, and 
 Kedzie read dozens of them from right to left in a south 
 erly direction. Finally she abandoned the Boston Road 
 and walked ever to a better-groomed avenue with more of 
 a city atmosphere. 
 
 But she saw a police signal-station at 17 5th Street, 
 and she thought it better to abandon the Southern Boule 
 vard. She was not sure of her police yet, and she had 
 an uneasy feeling that her father and mother were at that 
 moment telling their troubles to some policeman who 
 would shortly be putting her description in the hands of 
 detectives. She did not want to be arrested. Poppa 
 might try to spank her again. She did not want to have 
 to murder anybody, especially her parents. She liked 
 them better when she was away from them. 
 
 She hated to waste five cents on a street-car, but finally 
 she achieved the extravagance. The car went sliding and 
 grinding through an amazing amount of paved street, with 
 an inconceivable succession of apartment-houses and 
 shops. 
 
 At length she reached a center of what she most desired 
 noise and mob and hurry. At 1 64-th Street she came to a 
 star of streets where the Third Avenue Elevated collabo 
 rated with the surface-cars and the loose traffic to create a 
 
 58
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 delicious pandemonium. She loved those high numbers 
 a hundred and eighty streets! Beautiful! At home 
 Main Street dissolved into pastures at Tenth Street. 
 
 She wanted to find Main Street in New York and see 
 what First Street looked like. It was probably along the 
 Atlantic Ocean. That also was one of the things she must 
 see her first ocean ! 
 
 But while Kedzie was reveling in the splendors of i64th 
 Street her eye was caught by the gaudy placards of a 
 moving-picture emporium. There was a movie-palace at 
 home. It was the town's one metropolitan charm. 
 
 There was a lithograph here that reached out and 
 caught her like a bale-hook. It represented an impos 
 sibly large-eyed girl, cowering behind a door on whose 
 other side stood a handsome devil in evening dress. 
 He was tugging villainously at a wicked mustache, and 
 his eyes were thrillingly leery. Behind a curtain stood 
 a young man who held a revolver and waited. The 
 title of the picture decided Kedzie. It was " The Vampire's 
 Victim; a Scathing Exposure of High Society." 
 
 Kedzie studied hard. For all her gipsy wildness, she 
 had a trace of her father's parsimony, and she hated to 
 spend money that was her very own. Some of the dimes 
 and quarters in that little purse had been there for ages. 
 Besides, her treasury would have to sustain her for an 
 indefinite period. 
 
 But she wanted to know about high society. She was 
 not sure what scathing meant, or what the pronunciation 
 of it was. She rather inclined to "scat-ting." Anyway, 
 it looked important. 
 
 She stumbled into the black theater and found a seat 
 among mysterious persons dully silhouetted against the 
 screen. This was none of the latter-day temples where mov 
 ing pictures are run through with cathedral solemnity, soft 
 lights, flowers, orchestral uplift, and nearly classic song.. 
 This was a dismal little tunnel with one end lighted by the 
 twinkling pictures. Tired mothers came here to escape 
 
 59
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 from their children, and children came here to escape from 
 their tired mothers. The plots of the pictures were as 
 trite and as rancid as spoiled meat, but they suited the 
 market. This plot concerned a beautiful girl who came 
 to the city from a small town. She was a good girl, be 
 cause she came from a small town and had poor parents. 
 
 She was dazzled a little, however, by the attentions of 
 a swell devil of great wealth, and she neglected her poor 
 therefore honest lover temporarily. She learned the fear 
 ful joys of a limousined life, and was lured into a false mar 
 riage which nearly proved her ruin. The villain got a 
 fellow-demon to pretend to be a minister, put on false hair, 
 reverse his collar, and read the wedding ceremony; and the 
 heroine was taken to the rich man's home. 
 
 The rooms were as full of furniture as a furniture-store, 
 and so Kedzie knew it was a swell home. Also there was 
 a butler who walked and acted like a wooden man. 
 
 The heroine was becomingly shy of her husband, but 
 finally went to her room, where a swell maid put her to 
 bed (with a proper omission of critical moments) in a bed 
 that must have cost a million dollars. Some womanly, 
 though welching, intuition led the bride to lock her door. 
 Some manly intuition led the hero to enter- the gardens and 
 climb in through a window into the house. If he had nqt 
 been a hero it would have been a rather reprehensible act. 
 But to the heroes all things are pure. He prowled through 
 the house heroically without attracting attention. Every 
 step of his burglarious progress was applauded by the 
 audience. 
 
 The hero hid behind one of those numberless portieres 
 that hang everywhere in the homes of the moveaux riches, 
 and waited with drawn revolver for the dastard bridegroom 
 to attempt his hellish purpose. 
 
 The locked door thwarted the villain for the time, and 
 he decided to wait till he got the girl aboard one of those 
 yachts which rich people keep for evil purposes. Thus the 
 villain unwittingly saved the hero from the painful neces- 
 
 60
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 sity of committing murder, and added another reel to the 
 picture. 
 
 It is not necessary and it might infringe a copyright 
 to tell the rest of the story. It would be insulting to say 
 that the false minister, repenting, told the hero, who told 
 the heroine after he rescued her from the satanic yacht 
 and various other temptations. Of course she married 
 the plain-clothes man and lived happily ever after in a sin- 
 proof cottage with a garden of virtuous roses. 
 
 Kedzie was so excited that she annoyed the people 
 about her, but she learned again the invaluable lesson 
 that rich men are unfit companions for nice girls. Kedzie 
 resolved to prove this for herself. She prayed for a 
 chance to be tempted so that she might rebuke some swell 
 villain. But she intended to postpone the rebuke until 
 she had seen a lot of high life. This would serve a double 
 purpose: Kedzie would get to see more millionairishness, 
 and the rebuke would be more more "scatting." It is 
 hard even to think a word you cannot pronounce. 
 
 Kedzie gained one thing further from the pictures a 
 new name. She had been musing incessantly on choosing 
 one. She had always hated both Thropp and Kedzie, and 
 had counted on marriage to reform her surname. But she 
 could not wait. She wanted an alias at once. The police 
 were after her. The heroine of this picture was named 
 Anita Adair, and the name just suited Kedzie. She in 
 tended to be known by it henceforth. 
 
 She had not settled on what town she had come from. 
 Perhaps she would decide to have been born in New York. 
 She rather fancied the notion of being a daughter of a 
 terrible swell family who wanted to force her to marry a 
 wicked old nobleman, but she ran away sooner than sub 
 mit to the "imfany" that was the way Kedzie pro 
 nounced it in her head. It was a word she had often seen 
 but never heard. 
 
 Meanwhile she was sure of one thing: Kedzie Thropp 
 was annihilated and Anita Adair was born full grown. 
 
 61
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 At the conclusion of the film Kedzie was saddened by 
 a ballad sung by an adenoid tenor. The song was a 
 scatting exposure of the wickedness of Broadway. The 
 refrain touched Kedzie deeply, and alarmed her somewhat. 
 It reiterated and reiterated: 
 
 "There's a browkin hawt for everee light ton Broad- 
 way-ee." 
 
 Kedzie began to fear that she would furnish one more. 
 And yet it would be rather nice to have a broken heart, 
 Kedzie thought, especially on Broadway.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 watched the moving picture twice through. 
 The second time it was not so good. It lacked 
 spontaneity and sincerity. 
 
 At the first vision everything seemed to rise from what 
 preceded; people did what was natural or noble. The 
 second time it looked mechanical, rehearsed; the thrill 
 was gone, too, because she knew positively that 'the hero 
 was not really going to shoot, and the villain was not 
 really going to break through the door. 
 
 She wandered forth in a tragedy of disillusionment. 
 That was really the cause of the pout that seemed to say, 
 "Please kiss me!" She pouted because when she got 
 what she wanted she no longer wanted it. 
 
 There are hearts like cold storage. They keep what 
 they get fresh and cool; and there are hearts that spoil 
 whatever is intrusted to them. In Kedzie's hot young 
 soul, things spoiled soon. 
 
 She was hungry, and she could not resist the impulse 
 to enter a cheap restaurant. She did not know how 
 cheap it was. It was as good as the best restaurant in 
 Nimrim, Mo. 
 
 Kedzie ordered unfamiliar things for the sake of educat 
 ing her illiterate mid- Western stomach. She ordered clam 
 chowder and Hamburger steak, spaghetti Italienne, lob 
 ster salad, and Neapolitan ice-cream. She ate too much 
 much too much. 
 
 The total bill was ninety-five cents, and she was ter 
 rified. She had thought her father a miser for com 
 plaining of the breakfast bill of eleven-odd dollars at the 
 Biltmore, but that was his money, not hers. 
 
 63
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 When she finished her meal she did not dream of 
 tipping the waiter. He seemed not to expect it, but he 
 grinned as he asked her to come again. He hoped she 
 would. He went to the door and stared after her, sadly, 
 longingly. The dishes she had left he carried away with 
 an elegiac solemnity. 
 
 The streets were darkened now and the lights bewildered 
 Kedzie. The town grew more solemn. It withdrew into 
 itself. People were going home. 
 
 Kedzie did not know where to go. She walked for fear 
 of standing still. The noise fatigued her. She turned 
 west to escape it and found a little park at i6ist Street. 
 
 Many streets flowed thence. There were ten ways to 
 follow, and she could not choose one among them. 
 
 She was pretty, but she had not learned the commercial 
 value of her beauty. She was alone in the great, vicious 
 <;ity, but nobody had threatened her. Nearly everybody 
 had paid her charm the tribute of a stare or a smile, but 
 nobody had been polite enough to flatter her with a 
 menace. 
 
 She was very pretty. But then there are so very many 
 very pretty girls in every big city! June with her mill 
 ions of exquisite roses is no richer in beauty than New 
 York. Yet even New York cannot keep all her beauties 
 supplied with temptation and peril all the time. 
 
 Kedzie sat on the bench wondering which of the ten 
 ways to go. It turned late, but she could not decide. 
 She began to be a little hungry again, but she was always 
 that, and she told her ever- willing young stomach that her 
 late luncheon would have to be an early dinner. 
 
 As she sat still, people began to peer at her through the 
 enveiling dark. A tipsy brewery truck-driver who had ab 
 sorbed too much of his own cargo sank down by her side. 
 He could not see Kedzie through the froth in his brain, 
 but she found him fearful. When he began to talk to 
 himself she fled. 
 
 She saw a brilliantly lighted street-car, and she boarded 
 
 64
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 it. She was all turned around, and the car twisted and 
 turned as it proceeded. She did not realize that it was 
 going north till she heard the conductor calling in higher 
 and higher street numbers. Then she understood, with 
 tired wrath, that she was outbound once more. She 
 wanted to go toward the heart of town, but she could not 
 afford to get off without her nickel's worth of ride. 
 
 The car was all but empty when the conductor called to 
 a drowsy old lady, his penultimate passenger: 
 
 "Hunneran Semty-seckin ! Hey, lady! You ast me 
 to leave you off at Hunneran Semty-seckin, didn't yah?" 
 
 The woman was startled from her reverie and gasped: 
 
 "Dear me! is this a Hundred and Seventy-second?" 
 
 "Thass wat I said, didn't I?" 
 
 She evicted herself with a manner of apology for in 
 truding on the conductor's attention. 
 
 Now Kedzie was alone with the man. His coyote 
 bark changed to an insinuating murmur. He sat down 
 near Kedzie, took up an abandoned evening paper, and 
 said: 
 
 "Goin' all the way, Cutie, or how about it?" 
 
 "I'm get'n 1 off here!" said Kedzie, with royal scorn. 
 She resented his familiarity, and she was afraid that he 
 was going to prove dangerous. Perhaps he meant to 
 abduct her in this chariot. 
 
 Being a street-car conductor, the poor fellow neither 
 understood women nor was understood by them. He 
 accepted Kedzie's blow with resignation. He helped her 
 down the step, his hand mellowing her arm and finding 
 it ripe. 
 
 She flung him a rebukeful glare that he did not get. 
 He gave the two bells, and the car went away like a big 
 lamp, leaving the world to darkness and to Kedzie. 
 
 She walked for a block or two and wondered where she 
 should sleep. There were no hotels up here, and she 
 would have been afraid of their prices. Probably they 
 all charged as much as the Biltmore. At that rate, her 
 
 5 65
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 money would just about pay for the privilege of walking 
 in and out again. 
 
 Boarding-houses there might have been, but they bore 
 no distinguishing marks. 
 
 Kedzie stood and strolled until she was completely 
 fagged. Then she encountered a huge mass of shadowy 
 foliage, a park Crotona Park, although of course Kedzie 
 did not know its name. 
 
 There were benches at the edge, and concreted paths 
 went glimmering among vagueness of foliage, with here 
 and there searing arc-lights as bright as immediate moons. 
 Kedzie dropped to the first bench, but a couple of lovers 
 next to her protested, and she retreated into the park 
 a little. 
 
 She felt a trifle chilled with weariness and discourage 
 ment and the lack of light. She clasped her arms to 
 gether as a kind of wrap and huddled herself close to her 
 self. Her head teetered and tottered and gradually sank 
 till her delicate chin rested in her delicate bosom. Her 
 big hat shaded her face as in a deep blot of ink, and she 
 slept. 
 
 Unprotected, pretty, alone in the wicked city, she slept 
 secure and unassailed.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 MISS ANITA ADAIR (nee Kedzie Thropp) had dozed 
 upon her cozy park bench for an uncertain while 
 when her bedroom was invaded by visitors who did not 
 know she was there. 
 
 Kedzie was wakened by murmurous voices. A man was 
 talking to a woman. They might have been Romeo and 
 Juliet in Verona for the poetry of their grief, but they were 
 in the Bronx Borough, and he was valet and she a house 
 maid, or so Kedzie judged. The man was saying in a 
 dialect new to Kedzie: 
 
 "Ah, ma pauvre p'tite amie t for why you have a jalousie 
 Of my patrie?" 
 
 There was a vague discussion from which Kedzie 
 drowsily gleaned that the man was going to cross the sea 
 to the realm of destruction. The girl was jealous of some 
 body that he called his patrie, and he miserably endeavored 
 to persuade her that a man could love both his patrie and 
 his amie, and yet give his life to the former at her call, 
 
 Kedzie was too sleepy to feel much curiosity. A 
 neighbor's woe is a soothing lullaby. In the very crisis of 
 their debate, the little moan of Kedzie's yawn startled 
 and silenced the farewellers. They stole away unseen, 
 and she knew no more of them. 
 
 Hours later Kedzie woke, shivering and afraid. All 
 about her was a woodland hush, but the circle of the 
 horizon was dimly lighted, as if there were houses on fire 
 everywhere in the distance. 
 
 Poor Kedzie was a-cold and filled with the night dread. 
 She was afraid of burglars, mice, ghosts. She was still 
 
 67
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 more afraid to leave her bench and hunt through those 
 deep shadows for her lost New York. Her drugged brain 
 fell asleep as it wrestled with its fears. Her body pro 
 tested at its couch. All her limbs like separate serpents 
 tried to find resting-places. They could not stretch 
 themselves out on the bench. Fiends had placed cast- 
 iron braces at intervals to prevent people from doing just 
 that. Kedzie did not know that it is against the law of 
 New York, if not of Nature, to sleep on park benches. 
 
 Half unconsciously she slipped down to the ground 
 and found a bed on the warm and dewless grass. Her 
 members wriggled and adjusted themselves. Her head 
 rolled over on one round arm for a pillow; the other arm 
 bent itself above her head, and finding her hat in the 
 way, took out the pins, lifted the hat off, set it on the 
 ground, put the pins back in and returned to its place 
 about her hair all without disturbing Kedzie's beauty 
 sleep. 
 
 Her two arms were all the maids that Kedzie had ever 
 had. They were as kind to her as they could be devoted 
 almost exclusively to her comfort.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 'TT'EDZIE slept alone in a meadow, and slept well. 
 PS. Youth spread the sward with mattresses of eider 
 down, and curtained out the stars with silken tapestry. 
 If she dreamed -at all, it was with the full franchise of 
 youth in the realm of ambition. If she dreamed herself 
 a great lady, then fancy promised her no more than truth 
 should redeem. Charity Coe Cheever had a finer bed but 
 a poorer sleep, if any at all. She had a secretary to do 
 her chores for her and to tell her her engagements where 
 she was to go and what she had promised and what she 
 had better do. Charity dictated letters and committee 
 reports; she even dictated checks on her bank-account 
 (which kept filling up faster than she drew from it). 
 
 While Kedzie was trying to fit her limber frame among 
 the little hillocks and tussocks on the ground, Charity Coe 
 was sitting at her dressing-table, gazing into the mirror, 
 but seeing beyond her own image. Her lips moved, and 
 her secretary wrote down what she said aloud, and her 
 maid was kneeling to take off Charity Coe's ballroom slip 
 pers and slip on her bedroom ditto. The secretary was so 
 sleepy that she tried to keep her eyes open by agitating 
 the lids violently. The maid was trying to keep from fall 
 ing forward across her mistress's insteps and sleeping there. 
 
 But Charity was wide-awake wild awake. Her soul 
 was not in her dictation, but in her features, which she 
 studied in the mirror as a rich man studies his bank- 
 account. Charity was wondering if she had wrecked her 
 beauty beyond repair, or if she could fight it back. 
 
 Charity Coe, being very rich, had a hundred arms and 
 
 69
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 hands and feet, eyes and ears, while Kedzie had but two 
 of each. Charity had some one to make her clothes for 
 her and cut up her bread and meat and fetch the wood for 
 her fire and put her shoes on and take them off. She 
 even had her face washed for her and her hair brushed, 
 and somebody trimmed her finger-nails and swept out her 
 room, sewed on her buttons and buttoned them up or 
 unbuttoned them, as she pleased. 
 
 If Kedzie had known how much Charity was having 
 done for her she would have had a colic of envy. But she 
 slept while Charity could not. Charity could not pay 
 anybody to sleep for her or stay awake for her, or love 
 or kiss for her, and her wealth could not buy the fidelity 
 of the one man whose fidelity she wanted to own. 
 
 Charity had done work that Kedzie would have flinched 
 from. Charity had lived in a field hospital and roughed 
 it to a loathsome degree. She had washed the faces and 
 bodies of grimy soldiers from the bloody ditches of the 
 war-front; she had been chambermaid to gas-blinded 
 peasants and had done the hideous chores that follow 
 operations. Now with a maid to change her slippers and 
 a secretary to make up her mind, and a score of servants 
 within call, she was afraid that she had squandered her 
 substance in spendthrift alms. She was a prodigal 
 benefactress returned from her good works too late, per 
 haps. She wondered and took stock of her charms. She 
 rather underrated them. 
 
 Peter Cheever had been extravagantly gallant the 
 morning after her return from the mountains. He had 
 added the last perfect tribute of suspicion and jealousy. 
 They had even breakfasted together. She had dragged 
 herself down to the dining-room, and he had neglected 
 his morning paper, and lingered for mere chatter. He 
 had telephoned from his office to ask her for the noon 
 hour, too. He had taken her to the Bankers' Club for 
 luncheon in the big Blue Room. He had then suggested 
 that they dine together and go to any theater she liked. 
 
 70
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Charity Coe's head was turned by all this attention. 
 "Three meals a day and a show with her own husband" 
 was going the honeymoon pace. 
 
 But she returned to the normal speed, for he did not 
 come home to dress or to dine or to go to the theater. No 
 word came from him until Chari ty Coe was all dressed ; then 
 a clerk telephoned her that her husband regretted he 
 could not come home, as he had to rush for the Philadelphia 
 train. 
 
 Charity could not quite disbelieve this, nor quite be 
 lieve. She had spent the evening debating married love 
 and honeymoons that wax and wane and wax again, and 
 a wife's duty and her rights and might-have-beens, per- 
 hapses, and if-only's. 
 
 Charity had put on her jewels, which had not been 
 taken out of the safe for years, but he had not arrived. 
 Alarm and resentment wrestled for her heart; they pros 
 pered alternately. Now she trembled with fear for her 
 husband; now she smothered with wrath at his indif 
 ference to her. 
 
 Who was he that he should keep her waiting, and who 
 were the Cheevers that they should break engagements 
 with the Coes? It was only at such times that her pride 
 of birth flared in her, and then only enough to sustain her 
 through grievous humiliations. 
 
 But what are humiliations that we should mind them 
 so? They come to everybody in turn, and they are as 
 relentless and impersonal as the sun marching around the 
 sky. Kedzie had hers, and Charity hers, and the street 
 car conductor Kedzie had rebuffed had his, and the Czar 
 with his driven army had his, with more to come, and the 
 Kaiser with his victorious army had his, with more to 
 come. Even Peter Cheever had his in plenty, and of a 
 peculiar secret sort. 
 
 He had honestly planned to spend his evening with his 
 wife. She seemed to be coming back into style with him. 
 But the long arm of the telephone brought him within the
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 reach of Zada L'Etoile. Zada had plans of her own for his 
 evening dinner, theater, supper, dance till dawn. Peter 
 had answered, gently: 
 
 "Sorry, but I'm booked." 
 
 Zada had seemed to come right through the wire at him. 
 
 "With that wife of yours, of course!" 
 
 She had used a word that fascinated the listening 
 Central, who was lucky enough to transact a good deal 
 of Zada's telephone business. Central could almost see 
 Peter flush as he shook his head and answered: 
 
 "Not necessarily. It's business." 
 
 "You'd better make it your business not to go out with 
 that woman, anywhere," Zada had threatened. "It's in 
 decent." 
 
 Peter winced. A wife is not ordinarily called "that 
 woman." Peter sighed. It was a pretty pass when a 
 man could not be allowed to go to the theater with his 
 own wife. Yet he felt that Zada was right, in a way. 
 He had forfeited the privilege of a domestic evening. 
 He was afraid to brave Zada's fantastic rages. He could 
 best protect Charity Coe by continuing to ignore her. 
 
 He consented to Zada's plan and promised to call up 
 his wife. Zada took a brief triumph from that. But 
 Peter was ashamed and afraid to speak to Charity even 
 across the wire. He knew that it has become as difficult 
 to lie by telephone as face to face. The treacherous little 
 quavers in the voice are multiplied to a rattle, and nothing 
 can ever quite imitate sincerity. So much is bound to be 
 over or under done. 
 
 Cheever made a pretense of rushing out of his office. 
 He looked at his watch violently, so that his secretary 
 should be startled as he politely pretended to be. 
 Cheever gasped, then rushed his lie with sickly histrioiiism: 
 
 "I say, Hudspeth, call up my Mrs. Cheever, will you? 
 And er tell her I've had to dash for the train to er 
 Phila" cough "delphia. Tell her I'm awfully sorry 
 about to-night. Back to-morrow. ' ' 
 
 72
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Yessir," said Hudspeth, winking at the gaping sten 
 ographer, who looked exclamation points at her typewriter. 
 
 Hudspeth called up Mrs. Cheever. He was no more 
 convincing than Cheever would have been. A note of 
 disgust at his task and of deprecatory pity for Mrs. 
 Cheever influenced his tone. 
 
 Charity was not convinced, but she could hardly reveal 
 that to Hudspeth although, of course, she did. She was 
 betrayed by her very eagerness to be a good sport easily 
 bamboozled. 
 
 "Oh, I see. Too bad! I quite understand. Thank 
 you, Mr. Hudspeth. Good-by." 
 
 She did not hear Hudspeth growling to the stenographer 
 as he strolled over and leaned on her chair unnecessarily 
 there were other chairs to lean on, and she was not deaf: 
 
 "Rotten business! He ought to be ashamed of him 
 self. A nice wife like that!" 
 
 The stenographer sat forward and snapped, "You got 
 a nice wife yourself." She was a little jealous of Zada, 
 perhaps or of Mrs. Cheever or of both. 
 
 Peter left his office to escape telephoning Charity, but 
 he could imagine how the message crushed her. He felt 
 as if he had stepped on a hurt bird. When he met Zada 
 he kept trying to be patient and forgiving with her, in 
 spite of her blame worthiness. 
 
 Zada saw through his sullenness, and for a little moment 
 was proud of her victory. Then she began to suffer, too. 
 She understood the frailty of her hold on Cheever. His 
 loyalty to her was in the eyes of the world a treachery, and 
 his disloyalty to her would be applauded as a holy deed. 
 She was becoming an old story with him, as Charity had 
 become one. 
 
 She suffered agonies from the cloud on her title and on 
 her name, and she was afraid of the world. A woman 
 of her sort has no sympathy to expect; her stock in trade 
 vanishes without replenishment, and her business does not 
 build. In spite of herself she cannot help envying and 
 
 73
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 imitating the good women. As a certain great man has 
 confessed, "There is so much good in the worst of us," 
 that there is hardly any fun in being bad. It is almost 
 impossible to be very bad or very good very long at a time. 
 
 So here was Zada already copying a virtuous domestic 
 woe and wondering how she could fasten Cheever to her, 
 win him truly for herself. She honestly felt that she could 
 be of value to him, and make more of a man of him than 
 his lawful wife ever could. Perhaps she was right. At 
 any rate, she was miserable, and if a person is going to be 
 miserable she might as well be right while her misery is 
 going on. 
 
 Zada had dragged Cheever to a cabaret. She could 
 lead him thither, but she could not make him dance. 
 She was one-stepping unwillingly with a young cad who 
 insulted her subtly in everything he said and looked. 
 She could not resent his familiarity beyond sneering 
 at him and calling him a foolish cub. She left him and 
 returned to the table where Peter Cheever smoked a bitter 
 cigar. It is astonishing how sad these notorious revelers 
 look in repose. They are solemner than deacons. 
 
 "Come on, Peterkin dance the rest of this with me," 
 Zada implored. 
 
 Peterkin shook his head. He felt that it was not quite 
 right for him to dance in public with such persons. He 
 had his code. Even the swine have their ethics. Zada 
 put her hand in Cheever's arm and cooed to him, but in 
 vain. 
 
 It was then that Jim Dyckman caught sight of them. 
 He was slinking about the roofs as lonely and dejected as 
 a homeless cat. 
 
 His money could not buy him companionship, though 
 his acquaintance was innumerable and almost anybody 
 would have been proud to be spoken to by such a money 
 monster. But Jim did not want to be spoken to by any 
 body who was ambitious to be spoken to by him. He 
 wanted to talk to Charity. 
 
 74
 
 He eould not even interest himself in dissipation. 
 There was plenty of it for sale, and markets were open to 
 him that were not available to average means. Many 
 a foolish woman, irreproachable and counting herself un 
 approachable, would have been strangely and memorably 
 perturbed by an amorous glance from Jim Dyckman. 
 
 But Jim did not want what he could get. He was 
 hungry for the companionship of Charity Coe. 
 
 When he saw her lord and master, Peter Cheever, with 
 Zada, Dyckman was enraged. Cheever owned Charity 
 Coe; he could flatter her with a smile, beckon her with a 
 gesture, caress her at will, or leave her in safe deposit, 
 while he spent his precious hours with a public servant ! 
 
 Dyckman could usually afford to do what he wanted to. 
 But now he wanted to go to that table and knock the heads 
 of Cheever and Zada together; he wanted to make their 
 skulls whack like castanets. But he could not afford to 
 do that. 
 
 He was so forlorn that he went home. His sumptuous 
 chariot with ninety race-horses concealed in the engine 
 and velvet in its wheels slid him as on smoothest ice to 
 his father's home near the cathedral. The house was like 
 a child of the cathedral, and he went up its steps as a 
 pauper entering a cathedral. He gave up his hat and 
 stick and went past the masterpieces on his walls as if he 
 were a visitor to the Metropolitan Art Gallery on a free 
 day. He stumbled up the stairway, itself a work of art, 
 like a boy sent to bed without supper: he stumbled up 
 stairs, wanting to cry and not daring to. 
 
 His valet undressed him in a motherly way and put him 
 to bed. The valet was feeling very sad. Dyckman real 
 ized that he was about to lose Jules, and he felt more dis 
 consolate. Still, he surprised himself by breaking out: 
 
 " I wish you wouldn't go to the war, Jules." 
 
 Jules smiled with friendship and deference subtly 
 blended: 
 
 "I wish I would not, too, sir." 
 
 75
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "You might get killed, you know." 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "So you're a soldier! How long did you serve?" 
 
 "Shree years, sir." 
 
 "And I don't know the first thing about soldiering' 
 I ought to be ashamed of myself ! Well don't get killed, 
 Jules." 
 
 "Very good, sir." 
 
 But he did. 
 
 Jules said, "Good night, sir," and faded through the 
 door. Dyckman tossed for a while. Then he got up in 
 a rage at his insomnia. He could not find his other slip 
 per, and he stubbed his toe plebeianly against an aristo 
 cratic table. He cursed and limped to the window and 
 glowered down into the street. He might have been a 
 jailbird gaping through iron bars. He could not get out 
 of himself, or his love for Charity. 
 
 He wondered how he could live till morning without her. 
 He went to his telephone to call her and hear her voice. 
 He lifted the receiver and when Central answered, the 
 cowardice of decency compelled him from his resolve, 
 and he shamefully mumbled: 
 
 "The correct time, please." 
 
 What difference did it make to him what hour it was? 
 He was the victim of eternity, not time. 
 
 He went back to his window-vigil over nothing and 
 fell asleep murmuring the biggest swear words he could 
 remember. In his weak mood they had the effect of a 
 spanked boy's last whimpers. 
 
 He was a boy, and fate was spanking him hard. He 
 could not have whom he wanted, and he resolved that 
 there was nothing else in the world to want. And all the 
 time there was a girl sleeping out in Crotona Park on the 
 ground. She was pretty and dangerous, another flower 
 tossing on the girl-tree.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 WHEN the daylight whitened the black air it found 
 Dyckman sprawled along his window-lounge and 
 woke him to the disgust of another morning. He had 
 to reach up and draw a curtain between his eyes and the 
 hateful sun. 
 
 But Kedzie had only her vigilant arm. It slipped down 
 across her brow like a watchful nurse coming in on tip 
 toe to protect a fretful patient from broken sleep. 
 
 Kedzie slept on and on, till at length the section of 
 Crotona Park immediately beneath her refused to adapt 
 itself longer to her squirming search for soft spots. She 
 sat up in startled confusion at the unfamiliar ceiling. 
 The wall-paper was not at all what she always woke to. 
 At first she guessed that she must have fallen out of bed 
 with a vengeance. Then she decided she had fallen out of 
 doors and windows as well, and into the front yard. 
 
 No, these bushes were not those bushes. That beech 
 almost overhead, seen from below by sleep-thick eyes, was 
 an amazing thing. 
 
 She had drowsy childhood memories of being carried 
 up-stairs by her father and put to bed by her mother. 
 Once or twice she had wakened with her head to the foot 
 board and endured agonies of confusion before she got the 
 universe turned round right. But how had she got out 
 doors? Her father had never carried her down-stairs and 
 left her in the yard before. 
 
 At last she saw that she had fallen not merely out of 
 bed and out of doors, but out of town. She remembered 
 
 77
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 her wanderings and her lying down to sleep. She won 
 dered who had taken her hat off for her. 
 
 She looked about for somebody to ask questions of. 
 There was nobody to be seen. There were a few house 
 tops peering over the horizon at her. 
 
 English sparrows were jumping here and there, en 
 gaged in their everlasting spats, but she could not ask 
 them. 
 
 Kedzie sat up straight, her arms back of her, her feet 
 erect on their heels at a distance, like suspicious squirrels. 
 She yawned against the back of her wrist and began to 
 remember her escapade. She gurgled with laughter, but 
 she felt rumpled and lame, and not in the least like Miss 
 Anita Adair. She almost wished she were at home, gaz 
 ing from her bed to the washstand and hearing her mother 
 puttering about in the kitchen making breakfast; to 
 Kedzie's young heart it was the superlative human luxury 
 to know you ought to get up and not get up. 
 
 She clambered to her feet and made what toilet she 
 could while her seclusion lasted. She shook out her skirts 
 like feathers, and shoved her disheveled hair up under her 
 hat as she had always swept the dust under the rug. 
 
 She was overjoyed to find that her hand-bag had not 
 been stolen. The powder-puff would serve temporarily 
 for a wash-basin. The small change in her purse would 
 postpone starvation or surrender for a while. 
 
 She walked out of her sleeping-porch to the path. A 
 few people were visible now workmen and workwomen 
 taking a short-cut, and leisurely gentlemen out of a job 
 already beginning their day's work of holding down 
 benches. No one asked any questions or showed any 
 interest in Kedzie. 
 
 She found a street-car line, made sure that the car she 
 took was bound down-town, and resumed her effort to 
 recapture New York. 
 
 Nearly everybody was reading one morning paper or 
 another, but Kedzie was not interested in the news. 
 
 78
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 One man kept brushing her nose with his paper. She 
 was angry at his absence of mind, but she did not notice 
 that her nose was being annoyed by her own name in the 
 head-lines. 
 
 She rode and rode and rode till her hunger distracted 
 her. She passed restaurant after restaurant, till at last 
 she could stand the famine no longer. She got down from 
 the car and walked till she came to a bakery lunch-room 
 entitled, "The Bon-Ton Bakery by Joe Gidden." It 
 was another like the one she ate in the day before. The 
 same kind of waiter was there, a dish-thrower with the 
 manners of a hostler. 
 
 But Kedzie was so meek after her night on the ground 
 that she was flattered by his grin. "Skip" Magruder 
 was his title, as she learned in time. The "Skip" came 
 to him from a curious impediment in his gait that caused 
 him to drop a stitch now and then. 
 
 Not long afterward Kedzie was so far beyond this poor 
 hamstrung stable-soul that she could not hear the word 
 skip without blushing as if it were an indecency. It was 
 an indecency, too, that such a little Aphrodite should be 
 reduced to a love-affair with such a dismal Vulcan. But 
 if it could happen on Olympus, it could happen on earth. 
 
 Proximity is said to breed love, but priority has its 
 virtues no less. Skip Magruder was the first New-Yorker 
 to help Kedzie in her hour of dismay, and she thought 
 him a great and powerful being profoundly informed about 
 the city of her dreams. 
 
 Skip did know a thing or two possibly three. He was 
 a New-Yorker of a sort, and he had his New York as well 
 as Jim Dyckman had his or Peter Cheever his. He sized 
 Kedzie up for the ignoramus she was, but he was good to 
 her in so far as his skippy faculties permitted. He 
 dropped the paper he was reading when she wandered in, 
 and won her at once by not calling her "Cutie." 
 
 "Wat '11 y'ave, lady?" he said as he skirled a plate and 
 a glass of ice-water along the oil-cloth with exquisite skill, 
 
 79
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 slapped a knife and fork and spoon alongside, and flipped 
 her a check to be punched as she ordered, and a fly- 
 frequented bill of fare to order from. 
 
 Kedzie was stumped by the array of dishes. Skip 
 volunteered his aid suggested "A nor'nge, ham 'n'eggs, 
 a plate o' wheats, anna cuppa corfee." 
 
 "All right," said Kedzie, wondering how much such a 
 barbecue would cost. 
 
 Skip went to bellow the order through a sliding door 
 and grab it when it should be pushed forth from a mysteri 
 ous realm. Kedzie picked up a newspaper that Skip 
 had picked up after some early client left it. 
 
 Kedzie glanced at the front page and saw that the 
 Germans had taken three towns and the Allies one trench. 
 She could not pronounce the towns, and trenches meant 
 nothing in her life. She was about to toss the paper aside 
 when a head-line caught her eye. She read with pardon 
 able astonishment: 
 
 SPANKED GIRL GONE 
 
 Beautiful Kedzie Thropp, Western Society Belle, De 
 serts Her Wealthy Parents at Biltmore and Vanishes 
 POLICE OF NATION IN SEARCH 
 
 Kedzie felt the world blow up about her. Her name was 
 in the New York papers the second morning of her first 
 visit ! Her father and mother were called wealthy ! She 
 was a society belle ! Who could ever hereafter deny these 
 ideal splendors, now that there had been a piece in the 
 paper about them? 
 
 But dog on it! Why did they have to go and do such 
 a thing as put in about her being spanked? She blushed 
 all over with rage. She had once planned to go back 
 home with wondrous gossip of her visit to the big city. 
 She had seen herself gloating over the other girls who had 
 never been to a big city. 
 
 Now they would all give her the laugh. The boys 
 
 80
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 would make up rhymes and yell them at her from a safe 
 distance. She could kill her father for being so mean to 
 her. It was bad enough to hurt her as he did, but to go 
 and tattle when her back was turned was simply awful. 
 She could never go home now. She'd rather die. 
 
 Yet the paper said the police of the nation were search 
 ing for her. She understood how Eliza felt with the blood 
 hounds after her. She must keep out of sight of the 
 police. One good thing was the picture of her that they 
 printed in the paper. It was not her picture at all, and 
 nothing like her. Besides, she had selected a new name. 
 "Anita Adair" was a fine disguise. It sounded awful 
 swell, too. It sounded like her folks had money. She was 
 glad to be rid of "Kedzie Thropp." She would never be 
 Kedzie Thropp again. 
 
 Then the waiter came with her breakfast. It smelled 
 so grand that she forgot to be afraid for a while. The 
 coffee smoked aroma; the ham and eggs were fragrant; 
 and the orange sent up a golden fume of delight. 
 
 Skip entered into conversation as she entered into the 
 orange. "Where you woikin' now?" he said. 
 
 Kedzie did not know what his dialect meant at first. 
 When she learned that "woikin"' was the same as 
 "wurrkin'" she confessed that she had no job. She 
 trembled lest he should recognize her from the paper. 
 He eyed her narrowly and tried to flirt with her across the 
 very head-lines that told who she was. 
 
 She could not be sure that he did not know her. He 
 might be a detective in disguise looking for a reward. 
 
 Skip had been reading about Kedzie when she came in. 
 But he never dreamed that she was she. He befriended 
 her, however, out of the goodness of his heart and the 
 desire to retain her in the neighborhood also out of re 
 spect for the good old brass rule, "Do good unto others 
 now, so that they will do good to you later." 
 
 Skip told Kedzie that he knew a place right near 
 where a goil was wanted. When he told her that it was 
 
 81
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 a candy-store she was elated. A candy-store was her idea 
 of a good place to work. 
 
 Skip told Kedzie where to go and what to say, and to 
 mention that Skip sent her. 
 
 Skip also recommended lodgings next his own in the 
 flat of Mr. and Mrs. Rietzvoller, delicatessen merchants. 
 
 "Nice rooms reasonable," he said, "and I'll be near to 
 look after you." 
 
 "You're awful fresh, seems to me, on short acquaint 
 ance," was Kedzie's stinging rebuke. 
 
 Skip laughed. "Didn't you see the special-delivery 
 stamp on me forehead? But I guess you're a goil can take 
 care yourself." 
 
 Kedzie guessed she was. But she was in need of help. 
 Where else could she turn? Whom else had she for a 
 beau in this multitude of strangers? So she laughed 
 encouragingly. 
 
 "All right. You're elected. Gimme the address." 
 
 Skip wrote it on one of the business cards of the bakery. 
 He added: 
 
 "Another thing: I know a good expressman will rustle 
 your trunk over from Where you boardin' at now?" 
 
 Kedzie flushed. She could hardly tell him that she 
 had boarded in a park up-town somewhere. 
 
 Skip saw that she was confused. He showed exquisite 
 tact. 
 
 "I'm wise, goilie. She's holdin' your trunk out on you. 
 I been in the same boat m'self." 
 
 Kedzie was willing to let it go at that, but Skip 
 pondered: 
 
 "But, say that ain't goin' to make such a hell of a hit 
 scuse me, lady but I mean if you tell your new landlady 
 about your trunk bein' left on your old one, that ain't 
 goin' to get you nothin' but the door-slam in the snoot. 
 ... I tell you: tell her you just come in on the train and 
 your wardrobe-trunk is on the way unless it got delayed 
 in changin' cars at oh, any old place. I guess you did 
 
 82
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 come in, at that, from Buffalo or Pittsboig or some them 
 Western joints, didn' you?" 
 
 Kedzie just looked at him. Her big eyes lied for her, 
 and he hastened to say: 
 
 "Well, scuse me nosin' in on your own business. Tell 
 the landlady what you want to, only tell her it was me sent 
 you. That's as good as a guarantee that she'll have to 
 wait for her money." 
 
 Kedzie laughed at his excruciating wit, but she was 
 touched also by his courtesy, and she told him he was 
 awful kind and she was terrible obliged. 
 
 That bowled him over. But when she rose with stateli- 
 ness and, reaching for her money, offered to pay, he had 
 the presence of mind to snarl, amiably: 
 
 "Ah, ferget it and beat it. This meal's on me, and 
 wishing you many happy returns of the same." 
 
 He certainly was one grand gentleman. The proprietor 
 was away, and Skip could afford to be generous. 
 
 Kedzie left him and found the landlady and got a home ; 
 and then she found the store and got a job. For a time 
 she was in Eden. The doleful proprietor's doleful wife 
 was usually down-cellar making ice-cream while her hus 
 band was out in the kitchen cooking candy. Kedzie 
 was free to guzzle soda-water at her will. Her forefinger 
 and thumb went along the stacks of candy, dipping like 
 a robin's beak. She was forever licking her fingers and 
 brushing marshmallow dust off her chest. She usually had 
 a large, square caramel outlined in one round cheek. 
 
 But the ecstasy did not abide. Kedzie began to realize 
 why Mr. and Mrs. Fleissig were sad. Sweets were a sour 
 business; the people who came into the shop were mainly 
 children who spent whole half-hours choosing a cent's 
 worth of burnt sugar, or young, foolish girls who giggled 
 into the soda bubbles, or housewives ordering ice-cream for 
 Sunday. 
 
 If a young man appeared it was always to buy a box 
 of candy for some other girl. It made Kedzie cynical to 
 
 83
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 see him haggle and ponder, trying to make the maximum 
 hit with a minimum of ammunition. It made her more 
 distrustful to see young men trying to flirt with her while 
 they bought tributes of devotion to somebody else. But 
 Kedzie also found out that several of the neighborhood girls 
 accepted candy from several gentlemen simultaneously, 
 and she drew many cynical conclusions from the candy 
 business. 
 
 Skip Magruder was attentive and took her out to moving 
 pictures when he was free. In return for the courtesy she 
 took her meals at "The Bon-Ton Bakery by Joe Gidden." 
 Whenever he dared, Skip skipped the change. He could 
 always slip her an extra titbit. 
 
 On that account she had to be a little extra gracious 
 to him when he took her to the movies. Holding hands 
 didn't hurt. 
 
 Not a week had gone before Skip had rivals. He 
 caught Kedzie in deceptions. She kept him guessing, 
 and the poor fool suffered the torments and thrills of 
 jealousy. A flip young fellow named Hoke, agent for a 
 jobber in ice-cream cones, and a tubby old codger named 
 Kalteyer, who facetiously claimed to own a chewing-gum 
 mine, were added competitors for Kedzie's smiles, while 
 Skip teetered between homicide and suicide. 
 
 Skip was wretched, and Kedzie was enthralled by her 
 own success. She had conquered New York. She had 
 a job in a candy-store, a room in a flat with the family 
 of a delicatessen merchant; she had as many flirtations 
 as she could carry, and an increasing waiting-list. What 
 more could woman ask? 
 
 And all this was in far upper Third Avenue. She had 
 not yet been down to First Street. In fact, she was in 
 New York two weeks before she got as far south as looth 
 Street. She had almost forgotten that she had ever dwelt 
 elsewhere than in New York. Her imitative instinct 
 was already exchanging her Western burr for a New 
 York purr. 
 
 84
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Her father and mother would hardly have known her 
 voice if they had heard it. And they would hardly 
 meet her, since they had given her up and gone back home, 
 far sadder, no wiser, much poorer. They did not capture 
 the insurance money, and they had no rewards to offer 
 for Kedzie. 
 
 Now and then a Kedzie would be reported in some part 
 of the country, and a wild paragraph would be printed 
 about her. Now and then she would be found dead in a 
 river or would be traced as a white slave drugged and sold 
 and shipped to the Philippine Islands. The stories were 
 heinously cruel to her father and mother, who mourned 
 her in Nimrim and repented dismally of their harshness 
 to the best and pirtiest girl ever lived. 
 
 Meanwhile Kedzie sold candy and ate less and less of 
 it. She began to see more pretentious phases of city life 
 and to be discontent with her social triumph. She began 
 to understand how cheap her lovers were. She called 
 them "mutts." She came to suffer agonies of remorse at 
 the liberties she had given them. 
 
 Mr. Kalteyer, the chewing-gum prince, in an effort to 
 overcome the handicap of weight and age which Mr. 
 Hoke did not carry, told Kedzie that her picture ought to 
 be on every counter in the world, and he could get it there. 
 He'd love to see her presented as a classy dame showing 
 her ivories and proving how "beneficiary" his chewing- 
 gum was for the teeth as well as the digestion. 
 
 Kedzie told the delicatessen merchant's wife all about 
 his glorious promises, and she said, very sagely: 
 
 "Bevare vit dose bo'quet fellers. Better as so many 
 roses is it he should brink you a slice roastbif once. 
 Lengwidge of flowers is nice, but money is de svell talker. 
 Take it by me, money is de svell talker!" 
 
 Kedzie was glad of such wisdom, and she convinced 
 Mr. Kalteyer that it took more than conversation to 
 buy her favor. He kept his word under some duress, and 
 took Kedzie to Mr. Eben E. Kiam, a manufacturer of 
 
 85
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 show-cards and lithographs, with an advertising agency 
 besides. 
 
 Mr. Kiam studied her poses and smiles for days before 
 he got her at her best. An interested observer and a 
 fertile suggester in his office was a young Mr. Gilfoyle, 
 who wrote legends for show-cards, catch-lines for new 
 wares, and poems, if pressed. 
 
 Gilfoyle had the poet's prophetic eye, and he murmured 
 to Mr. Kiam that there were millions in "Miss Adair's" 
 face and form if they were worked right. He took pains 
 to let Kedzie overhear this. It pleased her. Millions 
 were something she decided she would like. 
 
 Gilfoyle developed wonderfully in the sun of Kedzie 's 
 interest. He told Kalteyer that there was no money in 
 handling chewing-gum in a small way as a piker; what 
 he wanted was a catchy name, a special selling-argument, 
 and a national publicity campaign. He advised Kalteyer 
 to borrow a lot of money at the banks and sling himself. 
 
 Kalteyer breathed hard. Gilfoyle was assailed by an 
 epilepsy of inspirations. In place of "Kalteyer's Peerless 
 Gum," he proposed the enthralling title, " Breathasweeta." 
 Others had mixed pepsin in their edible rubber goods of 
 various flavors. Gilfoyle proposed perfume! 
 
 Kalteyer was astounded at the boy's genius. He praised 
 him till Kedzie began to think him worth cultivation, 
 especially as he proposed to flood the country with por 
 traits of Kedzie as the Breathasweeta Girl. 
 
 The muse of advertising swooped down and whispered 
 to Gilfoyle the delicious lines to be printed under Kedzie's 
 smile. 
 
 Kiss me again. Who are you? 
 
 You use Breathasweeta. You must be all right. 
 
 Kalteyer was swept off his feet. He ran to the bank 
 while Kiam raised Gilfoyle's salary. 
 
 The life-size card of Kedzie was made with a prop to 
 hold it up. It was so much retouched and altered in the 
 
 86
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 printing that her own father, seeing it in a Nimrim drug 
 store, never recognized it. Nearly every drug-store in 
 the country set up a Kedzie in its show-window. 
 
 The Breathasweeta came into such demand that 
 Kalteyer was temporarily bankrupted by prosperity. He 
 had to borrow so much money to float his wares that he 
 had none" for Kedzie's entertainment. 
 
 Mr. Kiam took her up as a valuable model for advertis 
 ing purposes. 
 
 He aroused in Kedzie an inordinate appetite for pictures 
 of herself. All day long she was posed in costumes for 
 various calendars, as a farmer's daughter, as a society 
 queen, as a camera girl, as a sausage nymph, and as the 
 patron saint of a brewery. 
 
 In a week she had arrived at classic poses in Greek robes. 
 One by one these were abbreviated, till Kedzie was 
 being very generally revealed to the public eye. 
 
 The modesty her mother had whipped into her was 
 gradually unlearned step by step, garment by garment, 
 without Kedzie's noticing the change in her soul.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 JUST about the hour of that historic day when Kedzie 
 was running away from her father and mother Prissy 
 Atterbury was springing his great story about Jim Dyck- 
 man and Charity. 
 
 Prissy had gone on to his destination, the home of the 
 Winnsboros in Greenwich, but he arrived late, and the 
 house guests were too profoundly absorbed in their games 
 of auction to make a fit audience for such a story. So 
 Prissy saved it for a correct moment, though he nearly 
 burst with it. He slept ill that night from indigestion 
 due to retention of gossip. 
 
 The next forenoon he watched as the week-end prisoners 
 dawdled down from their gorgeous cells, to a living-room 
 as big and as full of seats as a hotel lobby. They threw 
 themselves on lounges and huge chairs and every form of 
 encouragement to indolence. They threw themselves also 
 on the mercy and the ingenuity of their hostess. But 
 Mrs. Winnsboro expected her guests to bring their own 
 plans and take care of themselves. They were marooned. 
 
 When the last malingerer arrived with yawns still 
 unfinished, Prissy seized upon a temporary hush and be 
 gan to laugh. Pet Bettany, who was always sullen be 
 fore luncheon, grumbled: 
 
 "What ails you, Priss? Just seeing some joke you 
 heard last night?" 
 
 Priss snapped, "I was thinking." 
 
 "You flatter yourself," said Pet. "But I suppose 
 you've got to get it off your chest. I'll be the goat. 
 What is it?"
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Prissy would have liked to punish the cat by not telling 
 her a single word of it, but he could not withhold the 
 scandal another moment. 
 
 "Well, I'll tell you the oddest thing you ever heard in 
 all your life." 
 
 Pretending to tell it to Pet, he was reaching out with 
 voice and eyes to muster the rest. He longed for a meg 
 aphone and cursed such big rooms. 
 
 "I was passing through the Grand Central to take my 
 train up here, you understand, and who should I see 
 walk in from an incoming express, you understand, but 
 who, I say, should I see but oh, you never would guess 
 you simply never would guess. Nev-vir-ir!" 
 
 "Who cares who you saw," said Pet, and viciously 
 started to change the subject, so that Prissy had to jump 
 the prelude. 
 
 "It was Jim Dyckman. Well, in he comes from the 
 train, you understand, and looks about among the crowd 
 of people waiting for the train to meet people, you 
 understand." 
 
 Pet broke in, frantically: "Yes, I understand! But if 
 you say 'understand' once more I'll scream and chew up 
 the furniture!" 
 
 Prissy regarded her with patient pity and went on: 
 
 "Jim didn't see me, you un you see and but just 
 as I was about to say hello to him he turns around and 
 begins to stare into the crowd of other people getting off 
 the same train that he got off, you underst Well, I 
 had plenty of time for my train, so I waited not to see 
 what was up, you un I do say it a lot, don't I ? Well, 
 I waited, and who should come along but well, this you 
 never would guess not in a month of Sundays." 
 
 A couple of flanneled oaves impatient for the tennis- 
 court stole away, and Pet said: 
 
 "Speed it up, Priss; they're walking out on you." 
 
 "Well, they won't walk out when they know who the 
 woman was. Jim was waiting for he was waiting for " 
 
 89
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 He paused a moment. Nobody seemed interested, and 
 so he hastened to explode the name of the woman. 
 
 "Charity Coe! It was Charity Coe Jim was waiting 
 for! They had come in on the same train, you under 
 stand, and yet they didn't come up the platform to 
 gether. Why? I ask you. Why didn't they come up the 
 platform together? Why did Jim come along first and 
 wait? Was it to see if the coast was clear? Now, I 
 ask you!" 
 
 There was respect enough paid to Prissy 's narrative 
 now. In fact, the name of Charity in such a story made 
 the blood of everybody run cold not unpleasantly 
 yet not altogether pleasantly. 
 
 Some of the guests scouted Prissy's theory. Mrs. 
 Neff was there, and she liked Charity. She puffed con 
 tempt and cigarette-smoke at Atterbury, and murmured, 
 sweetly, "Prissy, you're a dirty little liar, and your long 
 tongue ought to be cut out and nailed up on a wall." 
 
 Prissy nearly wept at the injustice of such skepticism. 
 It was Pet Bettany, of all people, who came to his rescue 
 with credulity. She was sincerely convinced. A volup 
 tuary and intrigante herself, she believed that her own 
 ideas of happiness and her own impulses were shared by 
 everybody, and that people who frowned on vice were 
 either hypocrites or cowards. 
 
 She could not imagine how small a part and how mo 
 mentary a part evil ambitions play in the lives of clean, 
 busy souls like Charity. In fact, Pet flattered herself as 
 to her own wickedness, and pretended to be worse than 
 she was, in order to establish a reputation for candor. 
 
 Vice has its hypocrisies as well as virtue. 
 
 Pet had long been impatient of the celebration of 
 Charity Coe's saintly attributes, and it had irked her to 
 see so desirable a catch as Jim Dyckman squandering his 
 time on a woman who was already married and liked it. 
 He might have been interested in Pet if Charity had let 
 him alone. 
 
 90
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Pet also was stirred with the detestation of sin in orderly 
 people that actuates disorderly people. She broke out 
 with surprising earnestness. 
 
 "Well, I thought as much! So Charity Coe is human, 
 after all, the sly devil! She's fooling even that foxy 
 husband of hers. She's playing the same game, too 
 and a sweet little foursome it makes." 
 
 She laughed so abominably that Mrs. Neff threw away 
 her cigarette and growled: 
 
 "Oh, shut up, Pet; you make me sick! Let's go out 
 in the air." 
 
 Mrs. Neff was old enough to say such things, and Pet 
 dampered her noise a trifle. But she held Prissy back and 
 made him recount his adventure again. They had a good 
 laugh over it Prissy giggling and hugging one knee, Pet 
 whooping with that peasant mirth of hers. 
 
 The same night, at just about the hour when Kedzie 
 Thropp was falling asleep in Crotona Park and Jim 
 Dyckman was sulking alone in his home and Charity 
 was brooding alone in hers, Prissy Atterbury was de 
 lighted to see a party of raiders from another house- 
 party motor up to the Winnsboros' and demand a drink. 
 
 Prissy was a trifle glorious by this time. He had been 
 frequenting a bowl of punch subtly liquored, but too much 
 sweetened. He leaned heavily on a new-comer as he 
 began his story. The new-comer pushed Prissy aside with 
 scant courtesy. 
 
 "Ah, tell us a new one!" he said. "That's ancient 
 history!" 
 
 "What-what-what," Prissy stammered. "Who told 
 you s'mush?" 
 
 "Pet Bet. telephoned it to us this morning. I heard 
 it from three other people to-day." 
 
 "Well, ain't that abslooshly abdominable." 
 
 Prissy began to cry softly. He knew the pangs of an 
 author circumvented by a plagiarist. 
 
 The next morning his head ached and he rang up an
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 -.eye-opener or two. The valet found him in violet pa 
 jamas, holding his jangling head and moaning: 
 "* "There was too much sugar in the punch." 
 
 He remembered Pet's treachery, and he groaned that 
 there was too much vinegar in life. But he determined 
 to fight for his story, and he did. Long after Pet had 
 turned her attention to other reputations, Prissy was still 
 peddling his yarn. 
 
 The story went circlewise outward and onward like the 
 influence of a pebble thrown into a pool. Two people who 
 had heard the story and doubted it met; one told it to 
 the other; the other said she had heard it before; and 
 they parted mutually supported and definitely convinced 
 that the rumor was fact. Repetition is confirmation, and 
 history is made up of just such self-propelled lies fact 
 founded on fiction. 
 
 We create for ourselves a Nero or a Cleopatra, a Wash 
 ington or a Molly Pitcher, from the gossip of enemies or 
 friends or imaginers, and we can be sure of only one thing 
 that we do not know the true truth. 
 
 But we also do wrong to hold gossip in too much dis- 
 credit. It gives life fascination, makes the most stupid 
 neighbors interesting. It keeps up the love of the great 
 art of fiction and the industry of character-analysis. A 
 small wonder that human beings are addicted to it, when 
 we are so emphatically assured that heaven itself is de 
 voted to it, and that we are under the incessant espionage 
 of our Deity, while the angels are eavesdroppers and re 
 porters carrying note-books in which they write with 
 indelible ink the least things we do or say or think.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 TO see into other people's hearts and homes and lives 
 is one of the primeval instincts. In that curiosity all 
 the sciences are rooted; and it is a scientific impulse that 
 makes us hanker to get back of faces into brains, to push 
 through words into thoughts, and to ferret out of silences 
 the emotions they smother. 
 
 Gossip is one of the great vibrations of the universe. 
 Like rain, it falls on the just and on the unjust; it 
 ruins and it revives; it quenches thirst; it makes the 
 desert bloom with cactuses and grotesque flowers, and 
 it beats down violets and drowns little birds in their 
 nests. 
 
 Gossip was now awakening a new and fearful interest in 
 Charity Coe and Jim Dyckman. 
 
 Two women sitting at a hair-dresser's were discussing 
 the gossip according to Prissy through the shower of their 
 tresses. The manicure working on the nails of one of them 
 glanced up at the coiffeur and gasped with her eyes. 
 The manicure whispered it to her next customer who 
 told it to her husband in the presence of their baby. The 
 baby was not interested, but the nurse was, and when she 
 rode out with the baby she told the chauffeur. The 
 chauffeur used the story as a weapon of scorn to tease Jim 
 Dyckman's new valet with. Jules would have gone into 
 a frenzy of denial, but Jules was by now wearing the livery 
 of his country in the trenches. The new valet Dallam 
 was his name tried to sell the story to a scavenger- 
 editor who did not dare print it yet, though he put it in 
 the safe where he kept such material against the day of 
 
 93
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 need. Also he paid Dallam a retainer to keep him in 
 touch with the comings and goings of Dyckman. 
 
 And thus the good name of a good woman went through 
 the mud like a white flounce torn and dragged and un 
 noticed. For of course Charity never dreamed that any 
 one was giving such importance to the coincidence of her 
 railroad journey with Jim Dyckman. 
 
 No more did Dyckman. He knew all too well what 
 gulfs had parted him from Charity even while he sat with 
 her in the train. He had suffered such rebuffs from her 
 that he was bitterly aggrieved. He was telling himself 
 that he hated Charity for her stinginess of soul at the 
 very time that the whispers were damning her too great 
 generosity in his favor. 
 
 While gossip was recruiting its silent armies against 
 her for her treason to her husband, Charity was wondering 
 why her loyalty to him was so ill paid. She did not 
 suspect Cheever of treason to her. That was so odious 
 that she simply could not give it thought room. 
 
 She stumbled on a newspaper article, the same perennial 
 essay in recurrence, to the effect that many wives lose 
 their husbands by neglect of their own charms. It was 
 full of advice as to the tricks by which a woman may lure 
 her spouse back to the hearth and fasten him there, com 
 bining domestic vaudeville with an interest in his business, 
 but relying above all on keeping Cupid's torch alight by 
 being Delilah every day. 
 
 Charity Coe was startled. She wondered if she were 
 losing Cheever by neglecting herself. She began to pay 
 more heed to her dress and her hats, her hair, her com 
 plexion, her smile, her general attractiveness. 
 
 Cheever noticed the strange alteration, and it bewildered 
 him. He could not imagine why his wife was flirting with 
 him. She made it harder for him to get away to Zada, 
 but far more eager to. He did not like Charity at all, 
 in that impersonation. Neither did Charity. She hated 
 herself after a day or two of wooing her official wooer. 
 
 94
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "You ought to be arrested," she told her mirror-self. 
 
 There were plays and novels that counseled a neglected 
 wife to show an interest in another man. Charity was 
 tempted to use Jim Dyckman as a decoy for her own wild 
 duck; but Dyckman had sailed away in his new yacht, 
 on a cruise with his yacht club. 
 
 The gossip did not die in his absence. It oozed along 
 like a dark stream of fly-gathering molasses. Eventually 
 it came to the notice of a woman who was Zada's dearest 
 friend and hated her devotedly. 
 
 She told it to Zada as a taunt, to show her that Zada's 
 Mr. Cheever was as much deceived as deceiving. Zada, 
 of course, was horribly delighted. She promptly told 
 Cheever that his precious wife had been having a lovely 
 affair with Jim Dyckman. Cheever showed her where she 
 stood by forbidding her to mention his wife's name. He 
 told Zada that, whatever his wife might be, she was good 
 as gold. 
 
 He left Zada with great dignity and made up his mind 
 to kill Jim Dyckman. In his fury he was convinced of 
 the high and holy and cleanly necessity of murder. All 
 of our basest deeds are always done with the noblest mo 
 tives. Cheever forgot his own wickednesses in his mis 
 sion to punish Dyckman. The assassination of Dyck 
 man, he was utterly certain, would have been what 
 Browning called "a. spittle wiped from the beard of God." 
 
 But he was not permitted to carry out his mission, for 
 he learned that Dyckman was somewhere on the Atlantic, 
 far beyond Cheever 's reach. 
 
 Disappointed bitterly at having to let him live awhile, 
 Cheever went to his home, to denounce his wife. He 
 found her reading. She was overjoyed to see him. He 
 stared at her, trying to realize her inconceivable depravity. 
 
 "Hello, honey!" she cried. "What's wrong? You've 
 got a fever, I'm sure. I'm going to take your tempera 
 ture." 
 
 From her hospital experience she carried a little ther- 
 
 95
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 mometer in her hand-bag. She had it by her and rose to 
 put it under his tongue. 
 
 He struck it from her, and she stared at him. He 
 stood quivering like an overdriven horse. He called her 
 a name highly proper in a kennel club, but inappropriate 
 to the boudoir. 
 
 "You thought you'd get away with it, didn't you? 
 You thought you'd get away with it, didn't you?" he 
 panted. 
 
 "Get away with what, honey?" she said, thinking him 
 delirious. She had seen a hundred men shrieking in wild 
 frenzies from brains too hot. 
 
 "You and Dyckman! humph!" he raged. "So you 
 and Jim Dyckman sneaked off to the mountains to 
 gether, did you? And came back on the same train, eh? 
 And thought I'd never find it out. Why, you " 
 
 What he would have said she did not wait to hear. 
 She was human, after all, and had thousands of plebeian 
 and primitive ancestors and ancestresses. They jumped 
 into her muscles with instant instinct. She slapped his 
 face so hard that it rocked out of her view. 
 
 She stood and fumbled at her tingling palm, aghast at 
 herself and at the lightning-stroke from unknown dis 
 tances that shattered her whole being. Then she began 
 to sob. 
 
 Peter Cheever's aching jaw dropped, and he gazed at 
 her befuddled. His illogical belief in her guilt was 
 illogically converted to a profound conviction of her in 
 nocence. The wanton whom he had accused was meta 
 morphosed into a slandered angel who would not, could 
 not sin. In his eyes she was hopelessly pure. 
 
 "Thank God!" he moaned. "Oh, thank God for one 
 clean woman in this dirty world!" 
 
 He caught her bruised hand and began to kiss it and 
 pour tears on it. And she looked down at his beautiful 
 bent head and laid her other hand on it in benison. 
 
 It is one way of reconciling families. 
 
 96
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Cheever was so filled with remorse that he was tempted 
 to write Jim Dyckman a note of apology. That was one 
 of the few temptations he ever resisted. 
 
 Now he was going to kill everybody who had been 
 dastard enough to believe and spread the scandal he had 
 so easily believed himself. But he would have had to 
 begin with Zada. He was afraid of Zada. He enjoyed 
 a few days of honeymoon with Charity. 
 
 He dodged Zada on the telephone, and he gave Mr. 
 Hudspeth instructions to. say that he was always out in 
 case of a call from "Miss You Know." "I know," Mr. 
 Hudspeth answered. 
 
 One morning, at an incredibly early hour for Zada, she 
 walked into his office and asked Mr. Hudspeth to retire 
 also the suspiciously good-looking stenographer. Then 
 Zada said: 
 
 "Peterkin, it's time you came home." 
 
 His laugh was hard and sharp. She took out a little 
 weapon. She had managed to evade the Sullivan law 
 against the purchase or possession of weapons. Peter 
 was nauseated. Zada was calm. 
 
 "Peterkin," she said, "did you read yesterday about 
 that woman who shot a man and then herself?" 
 
 Peter had read it several times recently the same 
 story with different names. It had long been a fashionable 
 thing: the disprized lover murders the disprizing lover 
 and then executes the murderer. It was expensive to rugs 
 and cheated lawyers and jurors out of fees, but saved the 
 State no end of money. 
 
 Cheever surrendered. 
 
 "I'll come home," he said, gulping the last quinine 
 word. It seemed to him the most loyal thing he could 
 do at the moment. It would have been unpardonably 
 unkind to Charity to let himself be spattered all over his 
 office and the newspapers by a well-known like Zada. 
 
 Once "home" with Zada, he took the pistol away from 
 her. But she laughed and said: 
 7 97
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I can always buy another one, deary." 
 
 Thus Zada re-established her rights. Cheever was very 
 sorry. He cursed himself for being so easily led astray. 
 He wondered why it was his lot to be so fickle and in 
 capable of loyalty. He did not know. He could only 
 accept himself as he was. Oneself is the most wonderful, 
 inexplicable thing in the world. 
 
 So Charity's brief honeymoon waned, blinked out 
 again. 
 
 Jim Dyckman came home from the yacht cruise in 
 blissless ignorance of all this frustrated drama. He longed 
 to see Charity, but dared not. He took sudden hope from 
 remembering her determination to go back abroad to her 
 nursery of wounded soldiers. 
 
 He had an inspiration. He would go abroad also as 
 a member of the aviation corps. He already owned a 
 fairly good hydro-aeroplane which had not killed him yet 
 he was a good swimmer, and lucky 
 
 He ordered the best war-eagle that could be made, 
 and began to take lessons in military maps, bird's-eye 
 views, and explosives. He was almost happy. He would 
 improve on the poet's dream-ideal, "Were I a little bird, 
 I'd fly to thee." 
 
 He would be a big bird, and he'd fly with his Thee. 
 He would call on Charity in France when they both had 
 an evening off, and take her up into the clouds for a sky- 
 ride. 
 
 He had an ambition. At worst, he could die for France. 
 It is splendid to have something to die for. It makes life 
 worth living. 
 
 He was so ecstatic in his first flight with his finished 
 machine that he fell and broke one of its wings, also one 
 of his own. Charity heard of his accident and called on 
 him at his mother's house. He told her his plans. 
 
 "Too bad!" she sighed. "I'm not going abroad. Be 
 sides, I couldn't see you if I did." 
 
 Then she told him what Cheever had said, but not how
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 she had slapped. Jim was wild. He rose on his bad 
 arm and fell back again, groaning: 
 
 "I'll kill him for that." 
 
 Everybody is always going to kill everybody. Some 
 times somebody does kill somebody. But Dyckman went 
 over to the great majority. Charity begged him not to 
 kill her husband, and to please her he promised not to. 
 
 Charity, having insured her husband's life, said: "And 
 now, Jimmie old boy, I mustn't see you any more. Gos 
 sip has linked our names. We must unlink them. My 
 husband and you will butcher each other if I'm not care 
 ful, so it's good-by for keeps, and God bless vou, isn't it? 
 Promise?" 
 
 " I'll promise anything, if you'll go on away and let me 
 alone," Jim groaned, his broken arm being quite sufficient 
 trouble for him at the moment. 
 
 Charity laughed and went on away. She was deeply 
 comforted by a promise which she knew he would not 
 keep. 
 
 Dyckman himself, as soon as his broken bones ceased 
 to shake his soul, groaned with loneliness and despaired of 
 living without Charity vowed in his sick misery that 
 nobody could ever come between them. He could not, 
 would not, live without her. 
 
 Still the gossip oozed along that he had not lived with 
 out her.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 TV^EDZIE had come to town with no social ambitions 
 1\. whatsoever beyond a childish desire to be enormously 
 rich and marry a beautiful prince. Her ideal of heaven 
 at first was an eternal movie show interrupted at will by 
 several meals a day, incessant soda-water and ice-cream 
 and a fellow or two to spoon with, and some up-to-date 
 duds most of all, several pairs of those white-topped 
 shoes all the girls in town were wearing. 
 
 The time would shortly come when Kedzie would 
 abhor the word swell and despise the people who used it, 
 violently forgetting that she had herself used it. She 
 would soon be overheard saying to a mixed girl of her 
 mixed acquaintance: "Take it from me, chick, when you 
 find a dame calls herself a lady, she ain't. Nobody who 
 is it says it, and if you want to be right, lay off such words 
 .as swell and classy." 
 
 Later, she would be finding that it took something still 
 more than avoiding the word lady to deserve it. She 
 would writhe to believe that she could never quite make 
 herself exact with the term. She would hate those who 
 had been born and made to the title, and she would 
 revert at times to common instincts with fierce anarchy. 
 
 But one must go forward before one can backslide, and 
 Kedzie was on the way up the slippery hill. 
 
 She had greatly improved the quality of her lodgings, 
 her suitors, and her clothes. Her photographic successes 
 in risky exposures had brought her a marked increase of 
 wages. She wore as many clothes as she could in private, 
 to make up for her self-denial before the camera. Her 
 
 100
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 taste in dress was soubrettish and flagrant, but it was not 
 small-town. She was beginning to dislike ice-cream soda 
 and candy and to call for beer and Welsh rabbit. She 
 would soon be liking salads with garlic and Roquefort 
 cheese in the dressing. She was mounting with splendid 
 assiduity toward the cigarette and the high-ball. There 
 was no stopping Kedzie. She kept rising on stepping- 
 stones of her dead selves. 
 
 Landladies are ladder-rungs of progress, too; Kedzie's 
 history might have been traced by hers. 
 
 Her camera career had led her from the flat of the 
 delicatessen merchant, through various shabby lairs, into 
 the pension of a vaudeville favorite of prehistoric fame. 
 The house was dilapidated, and the brownstone front had 
 the moth-eaten look of the plush furniture within. 
 
 Mrs. Jambers was as fat as if she fed on her own board 
 ers, but she was once no less a person than Mrs. Trixie 
 Jambers Coogan, of Coogan and Jambers. She had once 
 evoked wild applause at Tony Pastor's by her clog-dancing. 
 
 There was another dancer there, an old grenadier of a 
 woman who had been famous in her time as a premiere 
 danseuse at the opera. Mrs. Bottger had spent a large 
 part of her early life on one toe, but now she could hardly 
 balance herself sitting down. She held on to the table 
 while she ate. She did not look as if she needed to eat 
 any more. 
 
 Kedzie was proud to know people who had been as 
 famous as these two said they had been, but Bottgei and 
 Jambers used to fight bitterly over their respective schools 
 of expression. Bottger insisted that the buck-and-wing. 
 and the double shuffle and other forms of jiggery were low. 
 Jambers insisted that the ballet was immoral and, what 
 was more, insincere. Mrs. Bottger was furious at the 
 latter charge, but the former was now rather flattering. 
 She used secretly to take out old photographs of herself 
 as a slim young thing in tights with one toe for support 
 and the other resting on one knee. She would gloat over 
 
 101
 
 these as a miser over his gold; and she would shake her 
 finger at her quondam self and scold it lovingly "You 
 wicked little thing, you!" Then she would hastily move 
 it out of the reach of her tears. It was safe under the 
 aves of her bosom against her heart. 
 
 It was a merry war, with dishonors even, till a new- 
 -comer appeared, a Miss Eleanor Silsby, who taught the 
 ultimate word in dancing; she admitted it herself. As 
 she explained it, she went back to nature for her inspira 
 tion. Her pupils dressed as near to what nature had pro 
 vided them with as they really dared. Miss Silsby said 
 that they were trying to catch the spirit of wind and waves 
 and trees and flowers, and translate it into the dance. 
 They translated seaweed and whitecaps and clouds into 
 steps. Miss Silsby was booking a few vaudeville dates 
 "in order to bring the art of nature back to the people and 
 bring the people back to the art of nature." What the 
 people would do with it she did not explain nor what the 
 police would do to them if they tried it. 
 
 Miss Silsby had by the use of the most high-sounding 
 phrases attained about the final word in candor. What 
 clothes her pupils wore were transparent and flighty. 
 The only way to reveal more skin would have been to 
 grow it. Her pupils were much photographed in airy at 
 titudes on beaches, dancing with the high knee-action so 
 much prized in horses; flinging themselves into the air; 
 curveting, with the accent on the curve; clasping one 
 another in groups of nymphish innocence and artificial 
 grace. It was all, somehow, so shocking for its insincerity 
 that its next to nudity was a minor consideration. It was 
 so full of affectation that it seemed quite lacking in the 
 dangers of passion. 
 
 So gradually indeed had the mania for disrobing spread 
 about the world that there was little or no shock to be had. 
 People generally assumed to be respectable took their 
 children to see the dances, even permitted them to learn 
 them. According to Miss Silsby 's press-notices, "Mem- 
 
 102
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 bers of wealthy and prominent families are taking up 
 the new art." And perhaps they were doing as well by 
 their children as more careful parents, since nothing is- 
 decent or indecent except by acclamation, and if nudity 
 is made commonplace, there is one multitude of temp 
 tations removed from our curiosity. 
 
 But Bottger, whose ballet-tights and tulle skirt were 
 once the horror of all good people Bottger was disgusted 
 with the dances of Miss Silsby, and said so. 
 
 Miss Silsby was merely amused by Bottger's hostility. 
 She scorned her scorn, and with the utmost scientific and 
 ethnological support declared that clothes were immoral 
 in origin, and the cause of immorality and extravagance, 
 since they were not the human integument. Jambers 
 was not quite sure what "integument" was, but she 
 thanked God she had never had it in her family. 
 
 An interested onlooker and in-listener at these boarding- 
 house battles was Kedzie. By now she was weary of her 
 present occupation of course! She was tired of pho 
 tographs of herself, especially as they were secured at the 
 cost of long hours of posing under the hot skylight of a 
 photograph gallery. Miss Silsby gave Kedzie a pair of 
 complimentary seats to an entertainment at which the 
 Silsby sirens were to dance. Kedzie was swept away with 
 envy of the hilarity, the grace, the wild animal efferves 
 cence and elegance of motion. 
 
 She contrasted the vivacity of the dancer's existence 
 with the stupidity of her still-life poses. She longed to run 
 and pirouette and leap into the air. She wished she could 
 kick herself in the back of the head to music the way the 
 Silsby girls did. 
 
 When she told this to Miss Silsby the next day Miss 
 Silsby was politely indifferent. Kedzie added: 
 
 "You know, I'm up on that classic stuff, too. Oh, 
 yessum, Greek costumes are just everyday duds to me." 
 
 "Indeed!" Miss Silsby exclaimed. 
 
 Kedzie showed her some trade photographs of herself as 
 
 103
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 an Athenienne, and Miss Silsby pondered. Although her 
 dances were supposed to purify and sweeten the soul, 
 one of her darlings had so fiendish a temper that she had 
 torn out several Psyche knots. She was the demurest of 
 all in seeming when she danced, but she was uncontrollably 
 jealous. 
 
 Miss Silsby saw that Kedzie's pout had commercial 
 value. She invited Kedzie to join her troupe. And Ked- 
 zie did. The wages were small, but the world was new. 
 She became one of the most attractive of the dancers. 
 But once more the rehearsals and the long hours of idle 
 ness wore out her enthusiasm. She hated the regularity 
 of the performances; every afternoon and evening she 
 must express raptures she did not feel, by means of la 
 borious jumpings and runnings to the same music. And 
 she abominated the requirement to keep kicking herself 
 in the back of the head. 
 
 Even the thrill of clotheslessness became stupid. It 
 was disgusting not to have beautiful gowns to dance in. 
 Zada L'Etoile and others had a new costume for every 
 dance. Kedzie had one tiresome hip-length shift and 
 little else. As usual, poor Kedzie found that realization 
 was for her the parody of anticipation. 
 
 Kedzie's new art danced into her life a few new suitors, 
 but they came at a time when she was almost imbecile 
 over Thomas Gilfoyle, the advertising bard. He was the 
 first intellectual man she had met that is, he was in 
 tellectual compared with any other of her men friends. 
 He could read and write something besides business 
 literature. In fact, he was a fellow of startling ideas. 
 He called himself a socialist. What the socialists would 
 have called him it would be hard to say; they are given 
 to strong language. 
 
 Kedzie had known in Nimrim what church socials were, 
 for they were about the height of Nimrim excitement. 
 But young Mr. Gilfoyle was not a church socialist. 
 He detested all creeds and all churches and said things 
 
 104
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 about them and about religion that at first made Kedzie 
 look up at the ceiling and dodge. But no brimstone 
 ever broke through the plaster and she grew used to his 
 diatribes. 
 
 She had never met one of these familiar enough figures 
 before, and she was vaguely stirred by his chantings in 
 behalf of humanity. He adored the poor laborers, though 
 he did not treat the office-boy well and he was not gallant 
 to the scrub-woman. But his theories were as beautiful 
 as music, and he intoned them with ringing oratory. 
 Kedzie did not know what he was talking about, any more 
 than she knew what Caruso was singing about when she 
 turned him on in Mrs. Jambers's phonograph, but his 
 melodies put her heart to its paces, and so did Gilfoyle's. 
 
 Gilfoyle wrote her poems, too, real poems not meant for 
 publication at advertising rates. Kedzie had never had 
 anybody commit poetry at her before. It lifted her like 
 that Biltmore elevator and sent her heart up into her 
 head. He lauded Kedzie' s pout as well as her more sal tan t 
 expressions. He voiced a belief that life in a little hut 
 with her would be luxury beyond the contemptible stu 
 pidities of life in a palace with another. Kedzie did not 
 care for the hut detail, but the idolatry of so "brainy" a 
 man was inspiring. 
 
 Kedzie and Gilfoyle were mutually afraid: she of his- 
 intellect, he of her beauty and of her very fragility. Of 
 course, he called her by her new name, "Miss Adair." 
 Later he implored the priceless joy of calling her by her 
 first name. 
 
 Gilfoyle feared to ask this privilege in prose, and so he 
 put it in verse. Kedzie found it in her mail at the stage 
 door. She huddled in a corner of the big undressing- 
 room where the nymphs prepared for their task. The 
 young rowdies kept peeking over her shoulder and snatch 
 ing at her letter, but when finally she read it aloud to 
 them as a punishment and a triumph, they were stricken 
 with awe. It ran thus: 
 
 105
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you "Anita"? 
 Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter. 
 
 Kedzie stumbled over this, because she had not yet 
 eradicated the Western final "r" from her pronunciation. 
 She thought Mr. Gilfoyle was awful swell because he 
 dropped it naturally. But she read on, scrambling over 
 some of the words the way a horse jumps a fence one 
 rail too high. 
 
 You are so adorable 
 I find it deplorable, 
 
 Absurd and abnormal. 
 
 To cling to the formal 
 'Twere such a good omen 
 To drop the cognomen. 
 
 So I beg you to promise 
 
 That you'll call me "Thomas," 
 Or better yet, "Tommie," 
 Instead of th' abomi- 
 
 Nable "Mr. Gilfoyle." 
 
 You can, and you will foil 
 My torments Mephistian 
 By using my Christian 
 
 Name and permitting Yours Truly 
 
 To call you yours too-ly. 
 
 Miss Adair, 
 Hear my prayer 
 Do I dare 
 
 Call my love when I meet her 
 
 "Anita"? Anita! Anita!! 
 
 In the silence that followed she whisked out a box 
 of shrimp-pink letter-paper she had bought at a drug 
 store. It was daintily ruled in violet lines and had a 
 mauve "A" at the top. It was called "The Nobby 
 Note," and so she knew that it was all right. 
 
 She wrote on it the simple but thrilling answer: 
 
 DEAR TOMMIE, You bet your boots! 
 
 ANITA. 
 1 06
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 By the time she had sealed and addressed the shrimpy 
 envelope and begun feverishly to make up for lost time 
 in changing her costume, the other girls had recovered 
 a little from the suffocation of her glory. One of them 
 murmured : 
 
 "Say, Aneet, what is your first name? Your really 
 truly one." 
 
 Another snarled, "What's your 'really truly last name?" 
 
 A third dryad whooped, "I bet it's Lizzie Smoots 
 or Mag Wimpfhauser." 
 
 The others had other suggestions to howl, and Anita 
 cowered in silence, wondering if one of the fiends would 
 not at any moment guess "Kedzie Thropp." 
 
 The call to arms and legs cut short her torment, and 
 for once the music seemed appropriate. Never had she 
 danced with such lyricism. 
 
 Gilfoyle had the presence of mind to be waiting in the 
 alley after the matinee, and took from her hand the note 
 she was carrying to the mail-box. When he read it he 
 almost embraced her right there. 
 
 They took a street-car to Mrs. Jambers's boarding- 
 house, but cruel disappointment waited for them. An 
 other boarder was entertaining her gentleman friend in the 
 parlor. Kedzie was furious. So was the other boarder. 
 
 That night Gilfoyle met Kedzie again at the stage door, 
 but they could not go to the boarding-house, for Mrs. 
 Jambers occupied at that time a kind of false mantel-' 
 piece that turned out to be a bed in disguise. So they 
 went to the Park. 
 
 Young Gilfoyle treated Kedzie with almost more respect 
 than she might have desired. He was one of those self- 
 chaperoning young men who spout anarchy and practise 
 asceticism. Even in his poetry it was the necessitous 
 limitations of rhyme-words that dragged him into his 
 boldest thoughts. 
 
 Sitting on a dark Park bench with Kedzie, he could 
 not have been more circumspect if there had been sixteen 
 
 107
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 duennas gathered around. The first time he hugged her 
 was a rainy night when Kedzie had to snuggle close and 
 haul his arm around her, and then his heart beat so last 
 against her shoulder that she was afraid he would die of it. 
 
 Cool, wet, windy nights in late summer feel very cold, 
 and a damp bench under dripping trees was a nuisance to 
 a tired dancing-girl. Love was so inconvenient that 
 when Kedzie bewailed .the restrictions imposed on un 
 married people Gilfoyle proposed marriage. It popped 
 out of him so suddenly that Kedzie felt his heart stop and 
 listen. Then it began to race, and hers ran away, too. 
 
 "Why, Mr. Gilfoyle! Why, Tommie!" she gurgled. 
 It was her first proposal of marriage, and she lost her head. 
 "And you a socialist and telling me you didn't believe 
 in marriages!" 
 
 "I don't," said Gilfoyle, with lovely sublimity above 
 petty consistencies, "except with you, Anita. I don't 
 believe in anything exclusive for anybody except you for 
 me and me for you. We've just got to be each other's 
 own, haven't we?" 
 
 Kedzie could think of nothing to add except a little 
 emphasis; so she cried, "Each other's very ownest own!" 
 
 Thus they became engaged. That made it possible for 
 her to have him in her own room at the boarding-house. 
 Also it enabled him to borrow money from her with 
 propriety when they were hungry for supper. Fortu 
 nately, he did not mind her going on working. Not a.t 
 all. 
 
 Gilfoyle was a fiend of jealousy concerning individuals, 
 but he was not jealous of the public. It did not hurt him 
 at all to have Kedzie publishing her structural design to 
 the public, because he loved the public, and the public 
 paid indirectly. He wanted the masses to have what the 
 classes have. That delighted Kedzie, at first. 
 
 What she thought she understood of his socialistic 
 scheme was that every poor girl like herself was going to 
 have her limousine and her maid and a couple of footmen. 
 
 1 08
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She did not pause to figure out how complicated that 
 would be, since the maid would have to have her maid, 
 and that maid hers, and so on, ad infinitum, ad absurdum. 
 
 Later Kedzie found that Gilfoyle's first intention was to 
 impoverish the rich, elimousinate their wives, and put an 
 end to luxury. It astonished her how furious he got when 
 he read of a ball given by people of wealth, though a 
 Bohemian dance at Webster Hall pleased him very much, 
 even though some of the costumes made Kedzie 's Greek 
 vest look prudish. 
 
 But all this Kedzie was to find out after she had mar 
 ried the wretch. One finds out so many things when one 
 marries one. It is like going behind the scenes at a per 
 formance of "Romeo and Juliet," seeing the stage-braces 
 that prop the canvas palaces, and hearing Juliet bawl out 
 Romeo for crabbing her big scene. The shock is apt to 
 be fatal to romance unless one is prepared for it in ad 
 vance as an inevitable and natural conflict.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 L/^EDZIE and Tommie enjoyed a cozy betrothal. He 
 1^. was busy at his shop, and she was busy at hers. 
 They did not see much of each other, and that made for 
 the prosperity of their love. They talked a great deal of 
 marriage, but it seemed expedient to wait till one or the 
 other acquired a raise of wage. The Silsby dancers were 
 playing at cut salaries in accord with the summer schedules, 
 and business was very light at the advertising agency. 
 
 The last week the troupe was playing at the Bronx 
 Opera House, and there Skip Magruder chanced to see her 
 to see more of her than he had ever expected to on the 
 hither side of matrimony. 
 
 His old love came back with a tidal rush, and he sent 
 her a note written with care in a barroom or so Kedzie 
 judged from the beery fragrance of it. It said: 
 
 DEAR ANITA, Was considerable supprise to see you to-night 
 as didn't' know you was working in vawdvul and as I have 
 been very loansome for you thought would ask you would 
 you care to take supper after show with your loveing admirror 
 and friend will wait for anser at stage door hopping to see you 
 for Old Lang's Sign. 
 
 PATRICK X. MAGRUDER "SKIP." 
 
 Kedzie did not read this letter to the gang of nymphs. 
 She blushed bitterly and mumbled, "Well, of all the 
 nerve!" After some hesitation she wrote on Skip's note 
 the "scatting" words, "Nothing doing" and sent it back 
 by the dismal stage doorkeeper. 
 
 She had hoped Skip would have the decency to go 
 
 no
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 away and die quietly and not hang round to see her leave 
 with Mr. Gilfoyle. Skip had a hitch in one leg, but Mr. 
 Gilfoyle had a touch of writer's cramp, and Kedzie had 
 no desire to see the result of a conflict between two such 
 victims of unpreparedness. 
 
 She forgot both rivals in the excitement of a sudden 
 incursion of Miss Silsby, who came crying: 
 
 "Oh, girls, girls, what Do you sup-Pose has Happened? 
 I have been en-Gaged to give my dances at Noxon's 
 old Mrs. Noxon's, in Newport." 
 
 Miss Silsby always used the first person singular, though 
 she never danced; and if she had, in the costume of her 
 charges, the effect would have been a fatal satire. 
 
 By now Kedzie was familiar enough with names of 
 great places to realize the accolade. To be recognized by 
 the Noxons was to be patented by royalty. And Newport 
 was Mecca. 
 
 The pilgrimage thither was a voyage of discovery with 
 all an explorer's zest. Her first view of the city disap 
 pointed her, but her education had progressed so far that 
 she was able to call the pleasant, crooked streets of the 
 older towns "picturesque." A person who is able to 
 murmur "How picturesque!" has made progress in snob- 
 bical education. Kedzie murmured, "How picturesque!" 
 when she saw the humbler portions of Newport. 
 
 But there was a poignant sincerity in her admiration of 
 the homes of the rich. Bad taste with ostentation moved 
 her as deeply as true stateliness. Her heart made out 
 cry for experience of opulence. . She now despised the 
 palaces of New York because they had no yards. New 
 port houses had parks. Newport was the next candy- 
 shop she wanted to work in. 
 
 The splendor of the visit was dimmed for her, however, 
 when she learned that she would not be permitted to 
 swim at Bailey's Beach. Immediately she felt that 
 swimming anywhere else was contemptible. 
 
 Still, she was seeing Newport, and she could not tell 
 
 in
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 what swagger fate might now be within reach of her 
 hands or her feet, rather for Kedzie was gaining her 
 golden apples not by clutching at them, but by kicking 
 them off the tree of opportunity with her carefully mani 
 cured little toes. 
 
 Also she said "swagger" now instead of "classy" or 
 "swell." Also she forgot to telegraph Tommie Gilfoyle, 
 as she promised, of her safe arrival. Also she was too busy 
 to write to him that first night.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 WHEN Prissy Atterbury started the gossip roll 
 ing that he had seen Jim Dyckman enter the 
 Grand Central Terminal alone and wait for Charity Coe 
 Cheever to come from the same train it did not take long 
 for the story to roll on to Newport. By then it was a 
 pretty definite testimony of guilt in a vile intrigue. When 
 Mrs. Noxon announced her charity circus people won 
 dered if even she would dare include Mrs. Cheever on her 
 bead-roll. The afternoon was for guests; the evening 
 was for the public at five dollars a head. 
 
 One old crony of Charity's, a Mrs. Platen, revived the 
 story for Mrs. Noxon at the time when she was editing 
 the list of invitations for the afternoon. Mrs. Noxon 
 seemed to be properly shocked. 
 
 "Of course, you'll not invite lier now," said Mrs. 
 Platen. 
 
 "Not invite her!" Mrs. Noxon snorted. " I'll invite her 
 twice. In the first place, I don't believe it of Charity 
 Coe. I knew her mother. In the second, if it's true, 
 what of it? Charity Coe has done so much good that she 
 has a right to do no end of bad to balance her books." 
 
 To emphasize her support, Mrs. Noxon insisted on 
 Charity Coe's coming to her as a house-guest for a week 
 before the f <3te. This got into all the papers and redeemed 
 Charity's good name amazingly. Perhaps Jim Dyckman 
 saw it in the papers. At least he and his yacht drifted 
 into the harbor the day of the affair. Of course he had 
 an invitation. 
 
 The Noxon affair was the usual thing, only a little more 
 
 "3
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 so. People dressed themselves as costlily as they could v 
 for hours beforehand then spent a half-hour or more 
 fuming in a carriage-and-motor tangle waiting to arrive 
 at the entrance, while the heat sweat all the starch out of 
 themselves and their clothes. 
 
 A constant flood poured in upon Mrs. Noxon, or tried 
 to find her at the receiving-post. She was usually not 
 there. She was like a general running a big battle. She 
 had to gallop to odd spots now and then. 
 
 The tradition of her selectness received a severe strain 
 in the presence of such hordes of guests. They trod on 
 one another's toes, tripped on one another's parasols, 
 beg-pardoned with ill-restrained wrath, failed to get near 
 enough to see the sights, stood on tiptoe or bent down 
 to peer through elbows like children outside a ball-park. 
 
 The entertainment was vaudeville disguised by expense. 
 It was not easy to hold the attention of those surfeited eyes 
 and ears. Actors and actresses of note almost perished 
 with wrath and humiliation at the indifference to their 
 arts. Loud laughter from the back rows broke in at the 
 wrong time, and appalling silences greeted the times to 
 laugh. 
 
 The fame, or notoriety, of the Silsby dancers attracted 
 a part of the throng to the marble swimming-pool and the 
 terraced fountain with its deluged statuary. Jim Dyck- 
 man and Charity Coe suddenly found themselves to 
 gether. They hated it, but they could not easily escape. 
 Jim felt that all eyes were bulging out at them. He had 
 murder in his heart. 
 
 There was the usual delay, the frank impatience and 
 leg-fag of people unused to standing about except at 
 receptions and dressmakers'. Finally the snobbish string- 
 orchestra from Boston, which played only the most ex 
 clusive music, began to tune up, and at length, after 
 much mysterious wigwagging of signals to play, it played 
 a hunting-piece. 
 
 Suddenly from the foliage came what was supposed to 
 
 114
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 be a startled nymph. The spectators were startled, too, 
 for a moment, for her costume was amazing. Even on 
 Bailey's Beach it would have attracted attention. 
 
 Kedzie was the nymph. She was making her debut 
 into great society. What would her mother have said 
 if she could have seen her there? Her father would have 
 said nothing. He would have fainted unobtrusively, for 
 the first time in his life. 
 
 Kedzie was scared. She had stage-fright of all these 
 great people so overdressed when she was not even under- 
 clothed. 
 
 "Poor little thing!" said Charity, and began to applaud 
 to cheer her up. She nudged Jim. "Come on, help her 
 out. Isn't she beautiful?" 
 
 "Is she?" said Jim, applauding. 
 
 It did not seem right to praise one woman's beauty to 
 another. It was like praising one author's work to an 
 other, or praising another preacher's sermon to a preacher's 
 face. 
 
 Still, Jim had to admit that Kedzie was pretty. Sud 
 denly he wanted to torment Charity, and so he exclaimed: 
 
 "You're right, she is a little corker, a very pleasant 
 dream!" Anger at Charity snatched away the blindfold 
 which is another name for fidelity. Scales fell from his 
 eyes, and he saw truth in nakedness. He saw beauty 
 everywhere. All about him were beautiful women in 
 rich costume. He saw that beauty is not a matter of 
 opinion, a decision of love's, but a happening to be 
 regular or curvilinear or warm of color or hospitable in 
 expression. 
 
 Particularly he saw the beauty of Kedzie. There was 
 more of her to see than of those other women behind their 
 screens of silk and lace and linen. His infatuation for 
 Charity Coe had befuddled him, wrapped him in a fog 
 through which all other women passed like swaddled 
 figures. He felt free now. 
 
 Over Charity's shoulder and through the spray of the 
 
 "5
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 goura on her hat he saw Kedzie sharp and stark, her 
 suavities of line and the milk-smooth fabric of her en 
 velope. He studied Kedzie with emancipation, not seeing 
 Charity at all any more nor she him. 
 
 For Charity studied Kedzie, too. She felt academically 
 the delight of the girl's beauty, a statue coming to life, 
 or a living being going back into statue Galatea in one 
 phase or the other. She felt the delight of the girl's suc 
 cessful drawing. She smiled to behold it. Then her smile 
 drooped, for the words of the old song came back crooning 
 the ancient regret: 
 
 How small a part of time they share 
 
 There was elegy now in Kedzie's graces. Youth was of 
 their essence, and youth shakes off like the dust on the 
 moth's wing. Youth is gone at a touch. 
 
 In her sorrow she turned to look up at Jim. She was 
 shocked to see how attentively he regarded Kedzie. He 
 startled her by the fascination in his mien. She looked 
 again at Kedzie. 
 
 Somehow the girl immediately grew ugly or what 
 beauty she had was that of a poisonous snake. And she 
 looked common, too. Who else but a common creature 
 would come out on a lawn thus unclothed for a few 
 dollars? 
 
 She looked again at Jim Dyckman, and he was not what 
 he had been. He was as changed as the visions in Lewis 
 Carroll's poem. She saw that he had his common streak, 
 too: he was mere man, animal, temptable. But she for 
 gave him. Curiously, he grew more valuable since she 
 felt that she was losing him. 
 
 There was an impatient shaking at her breast. In any 
 body else she would have called it jealousy. This as 
 tounded her, made her afraid of herself and of him. What 
 right had she to be jealous of anybody but Peter Cheever? 
 She felt that she was more indecent than Kedzie. She 
 
 116
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 bowed her head and blushed. Scales fell from her eyes 
 also. She was like Eve after the apple had taught her 
 what she was. She wanted to hide. But she could not 
 break through the crowd. She must stand and watch the 
 dance through. 
 
 All this brief while Kedzie had stood wavering. There 
 had been a hitch somewhere. The other nymphs were de 
 layed in their entrance. One of them had stepped on a 
 thorny rose and another had ripped her tunic she came 
 in at last with a safety-pin to protect her from the law; 
 but then, safety-pins are among the primeval inventions. 
 
 According to the libretto, the wood-nymphs, terrified 
 by a hunting-party, ran to take refuge with the water- 
 nymphs. The water-nymphs were late likewise. The 
 dryads came suddenly through Mrs. Noxon's imported 
 shrubs, puncturing them with rhythmic attitudes. These 
 lost something of their poetry from being held so long 
 that equilibria were lost foolishly. 
 
 Finally, the water-sprites came forth from cleverly man 
 aged concealment in a bower and stood mid-thigh in the 
 water about the fountain. They attitudinized also, with 
 a kind of childish poetry that did not quite convince, for 
 the fountain rained on them, and some of them shivered 
 as cold gouts of water smote their shoulder-blades. One 
 little Yiddish nymph gasped, "Oi, oi!" which was perfect 
 Greek, though she didn't know it. Neither did anybody 
 else. Several people snickered. 
 
 The hunting-music died away, and the wood-nymphs 
 decided not to go into the water home; instead, they 
 implored the water-nymphs to come forth from their 
 liquid residence. But the water-nymphs refused. The 
 dryads tried to lure them with gestures and dances. 
 It was all dreadfully puerile, and yet somehow worth 
 while. 
 
 The wood-nymphs wreathed a human chain about the 
 marge of the pool. Unfortunately the marble had been 
 splashed in spots by the fountain spray, and it was on the 
 
 117
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 slipperiest of the spots that Kedzie had to execute a 
 pirouette. 
 
 Her pivotal foot slid; the other stabbed down in a wild 
 effort to restore her balance. It slipped. She knew that 
 she was gone. She made frenzied clutches at the air, but 
 it would not sustain her. She was strangely sincere now 
 in her gestures. The crowd laughed then stopped short. 
 
 It was funny till it looked as if the nymph might be 
 hurt. Jim Dyckman darted forward to save her. He 
 knocked Charity aside roughly and did not know it. He 
 arrived too late to catch Kedzie. 
 
 Kedzie sat into the pool with great violence. The spray 
 she cast up fatally spotted several delicate robes. That 
 would have been of some consolation to Kedzie if she had 
 known it. But all she knew was that she went backward 
 into the wrong element. Her wrath was greater than her 
 sorrow. 
 
 Her head went down: she swallowed a lot of water, 
 and when she kicked herself erect at last she was half 
 strangled, entirely drenched, and quite blinded. The 
 other nymphs, wood and water, giggled and shook with 
 sisterly affection. 
 
 Kedzie was the wettest dryad that ever was. She 
 stumbled forward, groping. Jim Dyckman bent, slipped 
 his hands under her arms, and hoisted her to land. He 
 felt ludicrous, but his chivalry was automatic. 
 
 Kedzie was so angry at herself and everybody else that 
 she flung off his hands and snapped, "Quit it, dog on it!" 
 
 Jim Dyckman quit it. He had for his pains an insult 
 and a suit of clothes so drenched that he had to go back to 
 his yacht, running the gantlet of a hundred ridicules. 
 
 When he vanished Kedzie found herself in garments 
 doubly clinging from being soaked. She was ashamed 
 now, and hid her face in her arm. 
 
 Charity Coe took pity on her, and before the jealous 
 Charity could check the generous Charity she had stepped 
 forward and thrown about the girl's shoulders a light wrap 
 
 118
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 she carried. She led the child to the other wood-nymphs, 
 and they took her back into the shrubbery. 
 
 "Wait till you hear what Miss Silsby's gotta say!" 
 said one dryad, and another added: 
 
 " Woisse than that is this: you know who that was you 
 flang out at so regardless?" 
 
 "I don't know, and I don't care," sobbed Kedzie. 
 
 "You would care if you was wise to who His Nibs was!" 
 
 "Who was it?" Kedzie gasped. 
 
 "Jim Dyckman no less! You was right in his arms, 
 and you hadda go an' biff him." 
 
 "Oh, Lord!" sighed Kedzie. "I'll never do." She 
 was thinking that destiny had tossed her into the very arms 
 of the aristocracy and she had been fool enough to fight 
 her way out. 
 
 Jim Dyckman, meanwhile, was clambering into his car 
 with clothes and ardor dampened. He was swearing to 
 cut out the whole herd of women. 
 
 And Charity Coe Cheever was chattering flippantly 
 with a group of the dispersing audience, while her heart 
 was in throes of dismay at her own feelings and Jim 
 Dyckman's.
 
 THE SECOND BOOK 
 
 MRS. TOMMIE GILFOYLE HAS 
 HER PICTURE TAKEN
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 r ~PHE scene was like one of the overcrowded tapestries; 
 1 of the Middle Ages. At the top was the Noxon palace, 
 majestic, serene, self-confident in the correctness of its 
 architecture and not afraid even of the ocean outspread 
 below. 
 
 The house looked something like Mrs. Noxon at her 
 best. Just now she was at her worst. She stood by her 
 marble pool and glared at her mob of guests dispersing 
 in knots of laughter and indifference. There were hun 
 dreds of men and women of all ages and sizes, and almost 
 all of them were startling the summer of 1915 with the 
 fashion-plates of 1916. 
 
 Mrs. Noxon turned from them to the dispersing nymphs 
 of Miss Silsby's troupe. The nymphs were dressed in the 
 fashion of 916 B.C. They also were laughing and 
 snickering, as they sauntered toward the clump of trees 
 and shrubs which masked their dressing-tent. One of 
 them was not laughing Kedzie. She was slinking along 
 in wet clothes and doused pride. The beautiful wrap that 
 Mrs. Charity Cheever had flung about her she had let 
 fall and drag in a damp mess. 
 
 Mrs. Noxon was tempted to hobble after Kedzie and 
 smack her for her outrageous mishap. But she could not 
 afford the luxury. She must laugh with her guests. She 
 marched after them to take her medicine of raillery more 
 or less concealed as they went to look at the other side 
 shows and permit themselves to be robbed handsomely for 
 charity. 
 
 Kedzie was afraid to meet Miss Silsby, but there was no 
 
 123
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 escape. The moment the shrubs closed behind her she 
 fell into the ambush. Miss Silsby was shrill with rage 
 and scarlet in the face. She swore, and she looked as if 
 :she would scratch. 
 
 "You miserable little fool!" she began. "You ought 
 to be whipped within an inch of your life. You have 
 ruined me! It was the biggest chance of my career. I 
 should have been a made woman if it hadn't been for you. 
 Now I shall be the joke of the world!" 
 
 "Please, Miss Silsby," Kedzie protested, "if you please, 
 Miss Silsby I didn't mean to fall into the water. I'm as 
 sorry as I can be." 
 
 "What good does it do me for you to be sorry? I'm 
 the one to be sorry. I should think you would have 
 had more sense than to do such a thing!" 
 
 "How could I help it, dog on it!" Kedzie retorted, her 
 anger recrudescent. 
 
 " Help it? Are you a dancer or are you a cow?" 
 
 Kedzie quivered as if she had been lashed. She struck 
 back with her best Nimrim repartee, "You're a nice one 
 to call me a cow, you big, fat, old lummox!" 
 
 Miss Silsby fairly mooed at this. 
 
 "You you insolent little rat, you! You oh, you 
 you! I'll never let you dance for me again never!" 
 
 "I'd better resign, then, I suppose," said Kedzie. 
 
 "Resign? How dare you resign ! You're fired ! That's 
 how you'll resign. You're fired! The impudence of her! 
 She turns my life-work into a laughing-stock and then 
 .says she'd better resign!" 
 
 "How about to-night?" Kedzie put in, dazed. 
 
 ' ' Never you mind about to-night. I'll get along without 
 you if I have to dance myself." 
 
 The other nymphs shook under this, like corn-stalks 
 in a wind. 
 
 But Kedzie was a statuette of pathos. She stood 
 cowering barelegged before Miss Silsby, fully clothed in 
 everything but her right mind. There was nothing Gre- 
 
 124
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 cian about Miss Silsby except the Medusa glare, and that 
 turned Kedzie into stone. She finished her tirade by 
 thrusting some money into Kedzie 's hand and clamoring: 
 
 "Get into your clothes and get out of my sight." 
 
 Rage made Miss Silsby generous. She paid Kedzie an 
 extra week and her fare to New York. Kedzie had no 
 pocket to put her money in. She carried it in her hand 
 and laid it on the table in the tent as she bent to whip her 
 lithe form out of her one dripoing garment. 
 
 The other nymphs followed her into the tent and made 
 a Parthenonian frieze as they writhed out of their tunics 
 and into their petticoats. They gathered about Kedzie 
 in an ivory cluster and murmured their sympathy Miss 
 Silsby not being within ear-shot. 
 
 Kedzie blubbered bitterly as she glided into her every 
 day things, hooking her corsets askew, drawing her 
 stockings up loosely, and lacing her boots all wrong. She 
 was still jolted with sobs as she pushed the hat-pins home 
 in her traveling-hat. 
 
 She kissed the other girls good-by. They were sorry 
 to see her go, now that she was going. And she was very 
 sorry to go, now that she had to. 
 
 If she had lingered awhile Miss Silsby would have found 
 her there when she relented from sheer exhaustion of 
 wrath, and would have restored her to favor. But Kedzie 
 had stolen away in craven meekness. 
 
 To reach the trade-entrance Kedzie had to skirt the 
 accursed pool of her destruction. Charity Coe was near 
 it, seated on a marble bench alone. She was pensive with 
 curious thoughts. She heard Kedzie's childish snivel as 
 she passed. Charity looked up, recognized the girl with 
 difficulty, and after a moment's hesitation called to her: 
 
 "What's the matter, you poor child? Come here! 
 What's wrong?" 
 
 Kedzie suffered herself to be checked. She dropped on 
 the bench alongside Charity and wailed: 
 
 "I fell into that damn' pool, and I've lost my jah-ob!" 
 
 "5
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Charity patted the shaken back a moment, and said, 
 "But there are other jobs, aren't there?" 
 
 "I don't know of any." 
 
 "Well, I'll find you one, my dear, if you'll only smile. 
 You have such a pretty smile." 
 
 "How do you know?" Kedzie queried, giving her a 
 sample of her best. 
 
 Charity laughed. "See! That proves it. You are a 
 darling, and too pretty to lack for a job. Give me your 
 address, and I'll get you a better place than you lost. I 
 promise you." 
 
 Kedzie ransacked her hand-bag and found a printed card, 
 crumpled and rouge-stained. She poked it at Charity, 
 who read and commented: 
 
 "Miss Anita Adair, eh? Such a pretty name! And 
 the address, my dear if you don't mind. I am Mrs. 
 Cheever." 
 
 "Oh, are you!" Kedzie exclaimed. "I've heard of you. 
 Pleased to meet you." 
 
 Then Kedzie whimpered, and Charity wrote the address 
 and repeated her assurances. She also gave Kedzie her 
 own card and asked her to write to her. That seemed to 
 nd the interview, and so Kedzie rose and said: "Much 
 obliged. I guess I gotta go now. G'-by!" 
 
 "Good-by," said Charity. "I'll not forget you." 
 
 Kedzie moved on humbly. She looked back. Charity 
 had fallen again into a listless reverie. She seemed sad. 
 Kedzie wondered what on earth she could have to be 
 sorry about. She had money and a husband, and she was 
 swagger. 
 
 Kedzie slipped through the gate out to the road. She 
 did not dare hire a carriage, now that she was jobless. 
 She wished she had not left paradise. But she dared not 
 try to return. She was not "classy" enough. Suddenly 
 a spasm of resentment shook the girl. 
 
 She felt the hatred of the rich that always set Tommie 
 Gilfoyle afire. What right had such people to such maj- 
 
 126
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 esty when Kedzie must walk? What right had they to 
 homes and yards so big that it tired Kedzie out just to 
 trudge past? Who was this Mrs. Cheever, that she should 
 be so top-lofty and bend-downy? Kedzie ground her 
 teeth in anger and tore Charity's card to bits. She flung 
 them at the sea, but the wind brought them back about her 
 face stingingly. She walked on, loathing the very motors 
 that flashed by, flocks of geese squawking contempt. 
 
 She walked and walked and walked. The overpowering 
 might of the big houses in their green demesnes made her 
 feel smaller and wearier, but big with bitterness. She 
 would have been glad to have a suit-case full of bombs to 
 blow those snobbish residences into flinders. 
 
 She was dog tired when, after losing her way again and 
 again, she reached the boarding-house where the dancers 
 lodged. She packed her things and went to the train, 
 lugging her own baggage. When she reached the station 
 she was footsore, heartsore, soulsore. Her only comfort 
 was that the Silsby dancers had been placed early enough 
 on Mrs. Noxon's program for her to have failed in time 
 to get home the same day. She hated Newport now. It 
 had not been good to her. New York was home once 
 more. 
 
 "When's the next train to New York?" she asked a 
 porter. 
 
 "It's wint," said the porter. "Wint at four-five." 
 
 "I said when's the next train," Kedzie snapped. 
 
 "T'-marra 1 marnin'," said the porter. 
 
 "My Gawd!" said Kedzie. "Have I gotta spend the 
 night in this hole?" 
 
 The porter stared. He was not used to hearing Mecca 
 called a hole. 
 
 "Well, if it's that bad," he grinned, "you might take 
 the five-five to Providence and pick up the six-forty there. 
 But you'll have to git a move on." 
 
 Kedzie got a move on. The train swept her out along 
 the edge of Rhode Island. She knew nothing of its heroic 
 
 127
 
 history. She cared nothing for its heroic splendor. She 
 thought of it only as the stronghold of an embattled aris 
 tocracy. She did not blame Miss Silsby for her disgrace, 
 nor herself. She blamed the audience, as other actors 
 and authors and politicians do. She blazed with the 
 merciless hatred of the rich that poor people feel when they 
 are thwarted in their efforts to rival or cultivate or sell 
 to the rich. Their own sins they forget as absolved, 
 because the sins have failed. It is the success of sin and 
 the sin of success that cannot be forgiven. 
 
 The little dancer whose foot had slipped on the wet 
 marble of wealth was shaken almost to pieces by philo 
 sophic vibrations too big for her exquisite frame. They 
 reminded her of her poet, of Tommie Gilfoyle, who was 
 afraid of her and paid court to her. He appeared to her 
 now as a radiant angel of redemption. From Providence 
 she telegraphed him that she would arrive at New York 
 at eleven-fifteen, and he would meet her if he loved her. 
 
 This done, she went to the lunch-counter, climbed on 
 a tall stool, and bought herself a cheap dinner. She was 
 paying for it out of her final moneys, and her brain once 
 more told her stomach that it would have to be prudent. 
 She swung aboard the train when it came in, and felt as 
 secure as a lamb with a good shepherd on the horizon. 
 When she grew drowsy she curled up on the seat and slept 
 to perfection. 
 
 Her invasion of Newport was over and done dis 
 astrously done, she thought; but its results were just 
 beginning for Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe. 
 
 Eventually Kedzie reached the Grand Central Terminal 
 a much different Kedzie from the one that once followed 
 her father and mother up that platform to that concourse ! 
 Her very name was different, and her mind had learned 
 multitudes of things good and bad. She had a young 
 man waiting for her a poet, a socialist, a worshiper. 
 Her heavy suit-case could not detain her steps. She 
 dragged it as a little sloop drags its anchor in a gale. 
 
 128
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Gilfoyle was waiting for her at the barrier. He bent to 
 snatch the suit-case from her and snatched a kiss at the 
 same time. His bravery thrilled her; his gallantry com 
 forted her immeasurably. She was so proud of herself and 
 of him that she wasted never a glance at the powdered gold 
 on the blue ceiling. 
 
 "I'm terrible glad to see you, Tommie," she said. 
 
 "Are you? Honest?" he chortled. 
 
 They jostled into each other and the crowd. 
 
 "I'm awful hungry, though," she said, "and I've got 
 oodles of things to tell you." 
 
 "Let's eat," he said. They went to the all-night dairy 
 restaurant in the Terminal. He led her to one of the broad- 
 armed chairs and fetched her dainties -a triangle of apple 
 pie, a circle of cruller, and a cylinder of milk. 
 
 She leaned across the arm of the chair and told him of 
 her mishaps. He was so enraged that he knocked a plate 
 to the floor. She snatched the cruller off just in time to 
 save it, and the room echoed her laughter. 
 
 They talked and talked until she was talked out, and it 
 was midnight. He began to worry about the hour. It 
 was a long ride on the Subway and then a long walk 
 to her boarding-house and then a long walk and a long ride 
 to his. 
 
 "I hate to go back to that awful Jambers woman and 
 let her know I'm fired," Kedzie moaned. "My trunk's in 
 storage, anyhow, and maybe she's got no room." 
 
 "Why go back?" said Tommie, not realizing the import 
 of his words. It was merely his philosophical habit to 
 ask every custom "Why?" 
 
 "Where else is there to go to?" she sighed. 
 
 "If we were only married " he sighed. 
 
 "Why, Tommie!" 
 
 " As we ought to be !" 
 
 "Why, Tommie Gilfoyle!" 
 
 And now he was committed. As when he wrote poetry 
 the grappling-hooks of rhyme dragged him into statements 
 9 129
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 he had not dreamed of at the start and was afraid of at the 
 finish so now he stumbled into a proposal he could not 
 clamber out of. He must flounder through. 
 
 The idea was so deliciously unexpected, so fascinatingly 
 novel to Kedzie, that she fell in love with it. Immediately 
 she would rather have died than remain unmarried to 
 Tommie Gilfoyle. 
 
 But there were difficulties.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 IN the good old idyllic days it had been possible for 
 romantic youth to get married as easily as to get din 
 ner and as hard to get unmarried as to get wings. 
 Couples who spooned too long at seaside resorts and missed 
 the last train home could wake up a preacher and be 
 united in indissoluble bonds of holy matrimony for two 
 dollars. The preachers of that day slept light, in order to 
 save the reputations of foolish virgins. 
 
 But now a greedy and impertinent civil government had 
 stepped in and sacrilegiously insisted on having a license' 
 bought and paid for before the Church could officiate. 
 And the license bureau was not open all night, as it should 
 have been. 
 
 Kedzie knew nothing of this, but Gilfoyle was in 
 formed. Theoretically he believed that marriage should 
 be rendered impossible and divorce easy. But he could 
 no more have proposed an informal alliance with his 
 precious Kedzie than he could have wished that his mother 
 had made one with his father. His mother and father had 
 eloped and been married by a sleepy preacher, but that, 
 was poetic and picturesque, seeing that they did not fail 
 to wake the preacher. Gilfoyle's reverence for Kedzie 
 demanded at least as much sanctity about his union with 
 her. 
 
 It is curious how habits complicate life. Here were two 
 people whom it would greatly inconvenience to separate. 
 Yet just because it was a custom to close the license 
 bureau in the late afternoon they must wait half a night 
 while the license clerk slept and snored, or played cards
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 or read detective stories or did whatever license clerks do 
 between midnight and office hours. And just because peo 
 ple habitually crawl into bed and sleep between midnight 
 and forenoon, these two lovers were already rinding it 
 hard to keep awake in spite of all their exaltation. They 
 simply must sleep. Romance could wait. 
 
 Gilfoyle knew that there were places enough where 
 Kedzie and he could go and have no questions asked 
 except, "Have you got baggage, or will you pay in 
 advance?" But he would not take his Kedzie to any such 
 place, any more than he would leave a chalice in a saloon 
 for safe-keeping. 
 
 In their drowsy brains projects danced sparklingly, but 
 they could find nothing to do except to part for the 
 eternity of the remnant of the night. So Gilfoyle 
 escorted Kedzie to the Hotel Belmont door, and told 
 her to say she was an actress arrived on a late train. He 
 stood off at a distance while he saw that she registered 
 and was respectfully treated and led to the elevator by 
 a page. 
 
 Then he moved west to the Hotel Manhattan and found 
 shelter. And thus they slept with propriety, Forty-second 
 Street lying between them like a sword. 
 
 The alarm-clock in Gilfoyle's head woke him at seven. 
 He hated to interrupt Kedzie's sleep, but he was afraid 
 of his boss and he needed his salary more than ever twice 
 as much as ever. He telephoned from his room to Kedzie's 
 room down the street and up ten stories and was com 
 forted to find that he woke her out of a sleep so sound 
 that he could hardly understand her words. But he 
 eventually made sure that she would make haste to dress 
 and meet him in the restaurant. 
 
 They breakfasted together at half past eight. Kedzie 
 was aglow with the whole procedure. 
 
 "You ought to write a novel about us," she told Gil 
 foyle. "It would be a lot better than most of the awful 
 stories folks write nowadays. And you'd make a million 
 
 132
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 dollars, I bet. We need a lot of money now, too, don't 
 we?" 
 
 "A whole lot," said Gilfoyle, who was beginning to fret 
 over the probable cost of the breakfast. 
 
 It cost more than he expected as he expected. But 
 he was in for it, and he trusted that the Lord would pro 
 vide. They bought a ring at a petty jewelry-shop in 
 Forty-second Street and then descended to a Subway 
 express and emerged at the Brooklyn Bridge Station. 
 
 The little old City Hall sat among the overtowering 
 buildings like an exquisite kitten surrounded by mastiffs, 
 but Gilfoyle' s business took him and his conquest into the 
 enormous Municipal Building, whose windy arcades blew 
 Kedzie against him with a pleasant clash. 
 
 The winds of life indeed had blown them together as 
 casually as two leaves met in the same gutter. But they 
 thought it a divine encounter arranged from eons back and 
 to continue for eons forward. They thought it so at that 
 time. 
 
 They went up in the elevator to the second floor, where, 
 in the fatal Room 258, clerks at several windows vended 
 for a dollar apiece the State's permission to experiment 
 with matrimony. 
 
 There was a throng ahead of them brides, grooms, 
 parents, and witnesses of various nationalities. All of 
 them looked shabby and common, even to Kedzie in her 
 humility. All over the world couples were mating, as the 
 birds and animals and flowers and chemicals mate in their 
 seasons. The human pairs advertised their union by 
 numberless rites of numberless religions and non-religions. 
 The presence or absence of rite or its nature seemed to 
 make little difference in the prosperity of the emulsion. 
 The presence or absence of romance seemed to make little 
 difference, either. But it seemed to be generally agreed 
 upon as a policy around the world that marriage should 
 be made exceedingly easy, and unmarriage exceedingly 
 difficult. In recruiting armies the same plan is observed;
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 every encouragement is offered to enlist; one has only to 
 step in off the street and enlist. But getting free! That 
 is not the object of the recruiting business. 
 
 Gilfoyle and Kedzie had to wait their turns before they 
 could reach a window. Then they had a cross-examina 
 tion to face. 
 
 Kedzie giggled a good deal, and she leaned softly against 
 the hard shoulder of Gilfoyle while the clerk quizzed him 
 as to his full name, color, residence, age, occupation, birth 
 place, the name of his father and mother and the country 
 of their birth, and the number of his previous marriages. 
 
 She grew abruptly solemn when the clerk looked at her 
 for answers to the same questions on her part; for she 
 realized that she was expected to tell her real name and 
 her parents' real names. She would have to confess to 
 Tommie that she had deceived him and cheated him out 
 of a beautiful poem. Had he known the truth he would 
 never have written: 
 
 Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you Kedzie? 
 Your last name is Thropp, but your first name is 
 
 Nothing rhymed with Kedzie. 
 
 While she gaped, wordless, Gilfoyle magnificently spoke 
 for her, proudly informed the clerk that her name was 
 ' ' Anita Adair , ' ' that she was white (he nearly said ' ' pink " ) , 
 that her age was he had to ask that, and she told him 
 nineteen. He gave her residence as New York and her 
 occupation as "none." 
 
 "What is your father's first name, honey?" he said, a 
 little startled to realize how little he knew of her or her 
 past. She had learned much news of him, too, in hearing 
 his own answers. 
 
 "Adna," she whispered, and he told the clerk that her 
 father's name was Adna Adair. She told the truth about 
 her mother's maiden name. She could afford to do that, 
 and she could honestly aver that she had never had any 
 husband or husbands "up to yet," and that she had not
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 been divorced "so far." Also both declared that they 
 knew of no legal impediment to their marriage. There 
 are so few legal impediments to marriage, and so many 
 to the untying of the knot into which almost anybody 
 can tie almost anybody ! 
 
 The clerk's facile pen ran here and there, and the license 
 was delivered at length on the payment of a dollar. For 
 one almighty dollar the State gave the two souls per 
 mission to commit mutual mortgage for life. 
 
 Gilfoyle was growing nervous. He told Kedzie that 
 he was expected at the office. There were several adver 
 tisements to write for the next day's papers, and he had 
 given the firm no warning of what he had not foreseen 
 the day before. If they hunted for a preacher, Gilfoyle 
 would get into trouble with Mr. Kiam. 
 
 If they had listened to the excellent motto, " Business 
 before pleasure," they might never have been married. 
 That would have saved them a vast amount of heart 
 ache, both blissful and hateful. But they were afraid to 
 postpone their nuptials. The mating instinct had them 
 in its grip. 
 
 They fretted awhile in the hurlyburly of other love- 
 mad couples and wondered what to do. Gilfoyle finally 
 pushed up to one of the windows again and asked: 
 
 "What's the quickest way to get married? Isn't there 
 a preacher or alderman or something handy?" 
 
 "Aldermen are not allowed to marry folks any more," 
 he was told. "But the City Clerk will hitch you up for a 
 couple of dollars. The marriage-room is right up-stairs." 
 
 This seemed the antipodes of romance and Gilfoyle 
 hesitated to decide. 
 
 But Kedzie, knowing his religious ardor against re 
 ligions, said: 
 
 "What's the diff? I don't mind." 
 
 Gilfoyle smiled at last, and the impatient lovers hur 
 ried out into the corridor. They would not wait for the 
 elevator, but ran up the steps. They passed a trio of 
 
 135
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 youth, a girl and two young fellows. One of the lads gave 
 the other a shove that identified the bridegroom. The 
 girl was holding her left hand up and staring at her new 
 ring. A pessimist might v have seen a portent in the 
 cynical amusement of her smile, and another in the 
 aweless speed with which Gilfoyle and Kedzie hustled 
 toward the awful mystery of such a union as marriage 
 attempts. 
 
 The wedlock-factory was busy. In spite of the earliness 
 of the hour the waiting-room was crowded, its benches full. 
 The only place for Kedzie to sit was next to a couple of 
 negroes, the man in Ethiopian foppery grinning up into 
 the face of a woman who held his hat and cane, and 
 simpered in ebony. 
 
 Kedzie whispered to Gilfoyle her displeased surprise: 
 
 "Why, they act just like we do." 
 
 Kedzie liked to use like like that. She felt belittled 
 at sharing with such people an emotion that seemed to her 
 far too good for them. Also she felt that the emotion itself 
 was cheapened by such company. She wished she had not 
 consented to the marriage. But it would excite attention 
 to back out now, and the dollar already invested would be 
 wasted. For all she knew, the purchase of the license 
 compelled the completion of the project. 
 
 A group of Italians came from Room 365 two girls in 
 white, a bareheaded mother who had been weeping, a fat 
 and relieved-looking father, an insignificant youth who was 
 unquestionably the new-born husband. 
 
 Gilfoyle kept looking at his watch, but he had to wait 
 his turn. There was a book to be signed and a two- 
 dollar bill to be paid. At last, when the negro pair came 
 forth chuckling, Kedzie and Gilfoyle rushed into the so- 
 called "chapel" to meet their fate. 
 
 The chapel was a barrenly furnished office. Its nearest 
 approach to an altar was a washstand with hot and cold 
 running water. At the small desk the couple stood while 
 the City Clerk read the pledge drawn up in the Corpora- 
 
 136
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 tion Counsel's office with a sad mixture of religious, legal, 
 and commercial cant: 
 
 " In the name of God, Amen. 
 
 "Do either of you know of any impediment why you should 
 not be legally joined together in matrimony, or if any one 
 present can show any just cause why these parties should 
 not be legally joined together in matrimony let them now 
 speak or hereafter hold their peace. 
 
 " Do you, Thomas Gilfoyle, take this woman as your lawfully 
 wedded wife, to live together in the state of matrimony? Will 
 you love, honor, and keep her, as a faithful man is bound to do, 
 in health, sickness, prosperity, and adversities, and forsaking all 
 others keep you alone unto her as long as you both shall live? 
 
 " Do you, Anita Adair, take this man for your lawfully wedded 
 husband to live together in the state of matrimony? Will you 
 love, honor, and cherish him as a faithful woman is bound to 
 do, in health, sickness, prosperity, and adversities, and forsaking 
 all others keep you alone unto him as along as you both shall live? 
 
 "For as both have consented in wedlock and have acknowl 
 edged same before this company I do by virtue of the authority 
 vested in me by the laws of the State of New York now pro 
 nounce you husband and wife. 
 
 "And may God bless your union." 
 
 The City Clerk had to furnish witnesses from his own 
 staff while he administered the secular rites and exacted 
 the solemn promises which so few have kept, and invoked 
 the help of God which is so rarely manifest or so subtly 
 hidden, in the human-animal-angel relation of marriage. 
 
 And now Anita Adair and Thomas Gilfoyle were of 
 ficially welded into one. They had received the full 
 franchise each of the other's body, soul, brain, time, 
 temper, liberty, leisure, admiration, education, past, 
 future, health, wealth, strength, weakness, virtue, vice, 
 destructive power, procreative power, parental gift or 
 lack, domestic or bedouin genius, prejudice, inheritance 
 all. 
 
 It was a large purchase for three dollars, and it remained 
 to be seen whether either or both delivered the goods. At 
 the altar of Hymen, Kedzie had publicly vowed to love, 
 
 137
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 honor, and cherish under all circumstances. It was like 
 swearing to walk in air or water as well as on earth. 
 The futile old oath to "obey" had been omitted as a 
 perjury enforced. 
 
 Kedzie Thropp, who had come to New York only a few 
 months before, had done one more impulsive thing. First 
 she had run away from her parents. Now she had run 
 away from herself. She had loved New York first. Now 
 she was infatuated with Tommie Gilfoyle. He was as 
 complex and mysterious a city as Manhattan. She would 
 be as long in reaching the heart of him. 
 
 There had been no bridesmaids to give the scene social 
 grace, no music or flowers to give it poetry, no minister 
 to give it an odor of sanctity. It was marriage in its cold, 
 business-like actuality, without hypnotism, superstition, 
 or false pretense. Small wonder that Kedzie had hardly 
 left the marriage-room before she felt that she was not 
 married at all. The vaccination had not taken. She 
 was not one with Gilfoyle. And yet she must pretend 
 that she was. She must act as if they were one soul, one 
 flesh; must share his tenement, his food, his joys and 
 anxieties. Of these last there promised to be no famine. 
 
 Gilfoyle was in a panic about his office. He told Kedzie 
 to devote the morning to looking up some place to live. 
 He would join her at luncheon. He fidgeted while they 
 waited for the elevator, Kedzie staring at her ring with 
 the same curious smile as the other girl.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 HPHEY rode up-town m a Subway express to Forty- 
 1 second Street. Their first business treaty had to be 
 drawn up in the crowd. 
 
 "How much do you want to pay for the flat, honey?" 
 said Kedzie. 
 
 Gilfoyle was startled. Already the money-snake was 
 in their Eden. And she asked him how much he ' ' wanted ' ' 
 to pay ! It was only a form of speech, but it grated on him. 
 
 "I haven't time to figure it out," he fretted. "I get 
 twenty-five dollars a week darling. That's a hundred a 
 month dear." His pet names came afterward, mere 
 trailers. "Out of that we've got to get something to eat 
 and to wear, and there'll be street-car fare to pay and 
 tooth-powder to buy, and we'll want something for theater 
 tickets, and " He was aghast at the multitude of things 
 married people need. He added, "And we ought to save 
 a little, I suppose." 
 
 "I suppose so," said Kedzie, who was as much taken 
 aback by the mention of economy at such a time as he 
 was by the mention of expenditure. But she rose bravely 
 to the responsibility: "I'll do the best I can, and we'll be 
 so cozy ooh!" 
 
 Kedzie was used to small figures. He put into her 
 hand all the cash he had with him, which was all he had on 
 earth forty-two dollars. He borrowed back the two 
 dollars. Kedzie had her own money, about forty more 
 dollars. This, with twenty-five dollars a week, seemed big 
 enough to her to keep them in luxury. They parted at 
 the Grand Central Terminal with looks of devoted agony. 
 
 139
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She set out at once to look at flats and to visit furniture- 
 stores. She bought a Herald and read the numberless 
 advertisements. Something was the matter everywhere. 
 She had gone far and found nothing but discouragement 
 when the luncheon hour arrived. 
 
 Humble as her ideas were, they rebelled at what she 
 and her bridegroom would have to accept for their home. 
 She had always dreamed of marrying a beautiful man with 
 a million dollars and a steam yacht. She was to have been 
 married by a swagger parson, in a swagger church, and 
 to have gone on a long voyage somewhere, and come back 
 at last to a castle on Fifth Avenue. She had lost the 
 parson; the voyage was not to be thought of; and the 
 castle was not even in the air. 
 
 She looked at one or two expensive apartments, just 
 to see what real apartments could be like. They stunned 
 her with their splendors, their liveried outguards, their 
 elevators clanking like caparisoned chariot-horses, their 
 conveniences, their rentals six or eight thousand dollars 
 a year, unfurnished! six or seven times her husband's 
 whole annual earnings. They were beyond the folly of 
 a dream. 
 
 She would have to be content with what one could rent 
 furnished for twenty-five dollars a month. She would 
 have to be her own hired girl. She would have to toil 
 in a few cells of a beehive on a side-street. She would be 
 chauffeuse to a gas-stove only. 
 
 She went to the luncheon tryst with a load of fore 
 bodings, but Gilfoyle did not appear. She heard her 
 name paged by a corridor-crier and was called to the 
 telephone, where her husband's voice told her that there 
 was a big upset at the office and he dared not leave. He 
 forgot to be tender in his endearments, and he forgot 
 to explain to her that he was talking in a crowded office 
 with an impatient boss waiting for him and a telephone- 
 girl probably listening in. 
 
 Kedzie lunched alone, already a business man's wife. 
 
 140
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She scoured the town all afternoon, and at last, in despera 
 tion, took the furnished flat she happened to be in when 
 she could go no farther. She had to sign a year's lease, 
 and pay twenty-five dollars in advance. 
 
 They would live a condensed life there. Even the hall 
 was shared with another family. The secrets were also 
 to be shared, evidently, for Kedzie could hear all that 
 went on in the other home all, all! 
 
 But by this time she was so tired that any cranny 
 would have been welcome. She was even wearier than 
 she had been when she occupied the outdoor apartment 
 under the park bench where she spent her second night in 
 New York. She called that an "aparkment" and liked 
 the pun so well that she longed to tell her husband. But 
 that would have compelled the telling of her real name, 
 and she did not know him well enough for that yet. 
 She found that she did not know him well enough yet for 
 an increasing number of things. She began to be afraid 
 to have him come home. What would he be like as a 
 husband? What would she be like as a wife? Those 
 are all-important facts that one is permitted to learn after 
 the vows of perfection are sealed. 
 
 When Kedzie had rested awhile she grew braver and 
 lonelier. She would welcome almost any husband for 
 companionship's sake. She resolved to have Tom's din 
 ner ready for him. She dragged herself down the stairs 
 and up the hill to the grocer's and the butcher's and 
 bought the raw material for dinner and breakfast. 
 
 She telephoned Gilfoyle at his office, gave him the 
 address and invited him to dine with "Mrs. Gilfoyle." 
 She chuckled over the romance of it, but he was harrowed 
 with office troubles. Her ardor was a trifle dampened 
 by his voice, but she found new thrills in the gas-stove, 
 a most dramatic instrument to play. It frightened her 
 with every manifestation. She turned the wrong handles 
 and got bad odors from it, and explosions. She burned 
 her fingers and the chops. 
 
 141
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She stared in dismay at the charred first banquet and 
 then marched her weary feet down the stairs again and 
 up the hill again to a delicatessen shop. She had pre 
 viously learned the fatal ease of the ready-made meals 
 they vend at such places, and she compiled her first menu 
 there. 
 
 When Gilfoyle came down the street and up the steps 
 into his new home and into her arms he tried to lay off 
 care for a while. But he could not hide his anxiety 
 and his ecstasy was half an ecstasy of dread. 
 
 He did not like the shabby, showy furniture the landlord 
 had selected. But the warmed-up dinner amazed him. He 
 had not imagined Kedzie so scholarly a cook. She dared 
 not tell him that she had cheated. He found her wonder 
 fully refreshing after a day of office toil and told her how 
 happy they would be, and she said, "You bet." Kedzie 
 cleared the table by scooping up all the dishes and dumping 
 them into a big pan and turning the hot water into it 
 with a cake of soap. Then she retreated to the wabbly 
 divan in the living-room. 
 
 Gilfoyle went over to Kedzie like a lonely hound; and 
 she laced still tighter the arms that encircled her. They 
 told each other that they were all they had in the world, 
 and they forgot the outside world for the world within 
 themselves. But the evening was maliciously hot and 
 muggy; it was going to rain in a day or so. That divan 
 would hardly support two, and there was no comfort in 
 sitting close; it merely added two furnaces together. 
 
 Clamor rose in the adjoining apartment. Their neigh 
 bors had children, and the children did not want to go to 
 bed. The parents nagged the children and each other. 
 The wrangle was insufferable. And the idea came to 
 Kedzie and Gilfoyle that children were one of the liabilities 
 of their own marriage. They were afraid of each other, 
 now, as well as of the world. If only they had not been 
 in such haste to be married! If only they could recall 
 those hasty words! 
 
 142
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Gilfoyle put out the lights "because they draw the 
 insects," he said, but Kedzie thought that he was begin 
 ning to economize. He was. Across the street they 
 could see other heat-victims miserably preparing for the 
 night. They were careless of appearances. 
 
 In the back of the parlor was a window opening into a 
 narrow air-shaft. The one bedroom's one window opened 
 on the same cleft. If the curtain were not kept down 
 the neighbors across the area could see and be seen. If 
 the window were left open they could be heard ; and when 
 the curtain flapped in the occasional little puffs of hot air, 
 it gave brief glimpses of family life next door. That 
 family had a squalling child, too. Somewhere above, a 
 rickety phonograph was at work; and somewhere below, 
 a piano was being mauled; and somewhere else a ukelele 
 was being thumped and a doleful singer was snarling "The 
 Beach at Waikiki." This racket was their only epitha- 
 lamium. It was more like the "chivaree" with which 
 ironic crowds tormented bridal couples back in Nim- 
 rim, Mo. 
 
 Gilfoyle was poet enough to enjoy a little extra doldrums 
 at what might have made a longshoreman peevish. He 
 mopped sweat and fanned himself with a newspaper till 
 he grew frantic. He flung down the paper and rose with a 
 yawn. 
 
 "Well, this is one helluva honeymoon. I'm going to 
 crawl into the oven and fry." 
 
 Kedzie sat alone in the dark parlor a long while. She 
 was cold now. She had danced Greek dances in public, 
 but she blushed in the dark as she loitered over her shoe 
 laces. She was so forlorn and so disappointed with life 
 that tears would have been bliss. 
 
 Somebody on that populous, mysterious air-shaft kept 
 a parrot. It woke Kedzie early in the morning with 
 hysterical laughter that pierced the ears like steel saws. 
 There was something uncannily real but hideously mirth 
 less in its Ha-ha-ha ! It would gurgle with thick-tongued
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 idiocy: "Polly? Polly? Polly wanny clacky? Polly? 
 Polly?" 
 
 Kedzie wondered how any one could care or dare to 
 keep such a pest. She wanted to kill it. She leaned out 
 of the window and stared up. Somewhere above the fire- 
 escape rungs she could see the bottom of its cage. If * 
 only she had a gun, how gladly she would have blown 
 Polly to bits. 
 
 She saw a frowsy-haired man in a nightgown staring 
 up from another window and yelling at the parrot. She 
 drew her head in hastily. 
 
 The idol of her soul slept on. The inpouring day 
 illumined him to his disadvantage. His head was far 
 back, his jaw down, his mouth agape. During the night 
 a beard had crept out on his cheeks. He was startlingly 
 unattractive. 
 
 Kedzie crouched on the bed and stared at him in wonder, 
 in a fascination of disgust. This was the being she had 
 selected from all mankind for her companion through the 
 long, long years to come. This was her playmate, partner, 
 hero, master, financier, bedfellow, lifefellow. For him 
 she had given up her rights to freedom, to praise, to 
 chivalry, to individuality, her hopes of wealth, luxury, 
 flattery. 
 
 She glanced about the room the pine bureau with its 
 imitation stain, broken handles, and curdled mirror, the 
 ugly chairs, the gilt radiator, the worn rug, the bed that 
 other wretches had occupied. She wondered who they 
 were and where they were. 
 
 She remembered Newport, the Noxon home. She 
 tried to picture a bedroom there. She saw a palace of 
 the best moving-picture period. She remembered the 
 first moving picture she had seen in New York, and 
 contrasted the Anita Adair of that adventure with the 
 Anita Adair of this. She recalled that girl locking her 
 door against the swell husband, and the poor but honest 
 lover with the revolver. 
 
 144
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie wished she had locked her own door only 
 there was no door, merely a shoddy portiere, for there was 
 not room to open a door. Her old ambitions came back 
 to her. She had planned to know rich people and rebuke 
 their wicked wiles. One rich man had held her in his 
 arms, lifted her out of the pool. It was no less a man 
 than Jim Dyckman, and she had repulsed him. 
 
 She caught a glimpse of her own tousled head in the 
 mirror, and she sneered at it. "You darn fool oh, you 
 darn fool!" 
 
 At last the parrot woke Gilfoyle. He snorted, bored his 
 fists into his eyes, yawned, scratched his head, stared at 
 the unusual furniture, flounced over, saw his mate, stared 
 again, grinned, said: 
 
 "Why, hello, Anita!" 
 
 He put out his hand to her. She wiggled away; he 
 followed. She slid to the floor and gasped: 
 
 "Don't touch me!" 
 
 "Why, what's the matter, honey?" 
 
 "Huh! What isn't the matter?" 
 
 He fumbled under the pillow for his watch, looked at it, 
 yawned : 
 
 "Lord, it's only five o'clock. Good night!" He dis 
 posed himself for sleep again. The parrot broke out in 
 another horrible Ha-ha! He sat up with an oath. "I'd 
 like to murder the beast." 
 
 ' ' Don't ! I'm much obliged to it. " 
 
 " Obliged to it ? You must be crazy. Good Lord! hear 
 it scream." 
 
 "Well, ain't life a scream?" 
 
 Gilfoyle was a graceless sleeper and a surly waker. He 
 forgot that he was a bridegroom. 
 
 He sniffed, yawned, flopped, buried one ear in the pillow 
 and pulled the cover over the other and almost instantly 
 slept. His head on the pillow looked like some ugly, 
 shaggy vegetable. Kedzie wanted to uproot the object 
 and throw it out of the window, out of her life. That 
 
 US
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 was the head of her husband, the lord and master of her 
 dreams ! 
 
 Dainty-minded couples have separate bedrooms. Or 
 dinary people accept the homely phases of coexistence 
 as inevitable and therefore unimportant. They grow to 
 enjoy the intimacy: they give and take informality as 
 one of the comforts of a home. They see frowsy hair 
 and unshaven cheeks and yawns as a homely, wholesome 
 part of life and make a pleasant indolence of them. 
 
 But Kedzie was in an unreasoning mood. She had 
 hoped for unreasonable delights. Marriage had been a 
 goal beyond the horizon, at the base of the rainbow. She 
 had reached it. The girl Kedzie was no more. She was 
 a wife. Kedzie Thropp and Anita Adair were now Mrs. 
 Thomas Gilfoyle. Her soul cried out: 
 
 "This is my honeymoon! I am married, married for 
 ever to that tousle-headed, bristle-jawed, brainless, heart 
 less dub. I won't stand for it. I won't! I won't!" 
 
 She wanted to outscream the parrot. Its inarticulate,, 
 horrible cachinnations voiced her humor uncannily. She 
 had to bury her pouting lips in her round young arm to 
 keep from insanely echoing that maniacal Ha-ha-ha! 
 That green-and-red philosopher expressed her own mock 
 ery of life and love, with its profound and eloquent 
 Ha-ha-ha! Oh, ha-ha-ha! Ee, ha-ha-ha!
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 NOW, of course, Kedzie ought to have been happy. 
 Millions of girls of her age were waking up that 
 morning and calling themselves wretched because their 
 parents or distance or some other cause prevented them 
 from marrying young fellows no more prepossessing asleep 
 than Gilfoyle was. 
 
 In Europe that morning myriads of young girls tossed 
 in their beds and shivered lest their young men in the 
 trenches might have been killed or mangled by some shell 
 dropped from an airship or sent over from a cannon or 
 shot up from a mine. And those young men, alive or 
 dead, looked no better than Gilfoyle, if as neat. 
 
 In Europe and in Asia, that morning, there were young 
 girls and nuns and wives who were in the power of foreign 
 soldiers whose language they could not speak but could 
 understand all too well poor, ruined victims of the tidal 
 waves of battle. There were wives, young and old, who 
 had got their husbands back from war blind, crippled, 
 foolish, petulant. They had left part of their souls on 
 the field with their blood. 
 
 It was a time when it seemed that nobody had a right 
 to be unhappy who had life, health, shelter, and food. 
 Yet America was perhaps as discontented as Europe. 
 
 Kedzie had reason enough to make peace with life. 
 Gilfoyle was as valuable a citizen as she. She might 
 have helped to make him a good business man or a genuine 
 poet. What is poetry, anyway, but the skilful advertise 
 ment of emotions? She might at least have made of 
 Gilfoyle that all-important element of the Republic, a 
 
 147
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 respectable, amiable, ordinary man, perhaps the father 
 of children who would be of value, even of glory, to the 
 world. 
 
 There was romance enough in their wedding. Others 
 of the couples who had bought licenses that day were 
 rapturous in yet cheaper tenements, greeting the new day 
 with laughter and kisses and ambition to earn and to save, 
 to breed and grow old well. 
 
 But to be content with what or whom she had, Kedzie 
 would have had to be somebody else besides Kedzie; 
 and then Gilfoyle would not perhaps have met her or 
 married her. Some man in Nimrim, Mo., would have 
 wed the little stay-at-home. 
 
 Kedzie, the pretty fool, apparently fancied that she 
 would have been happy if Gilfoyle had been a handsomer 
 sleeper, and the apartment a handsomer apartment, and 
 the bank-account an inexhaustible fountain of gold. 
 
 But would she have been? Peter Cheever was as hand 
 some as a man dares to be, awake or asleep; he had vast 
 quantities of money, and he was generous with it. But 
 Zada L'Etoile was not happy. She dwelt in an apartment 
 that would have overwhelmed Kedzie by the depth of its 
 velvets and the height of its colors. 
 
 Yet Zada was crying this very morning crying like 
 mad because while she had Cheever she had no marriage 
 license. She tore her hair and bit it, and peeled diamonds 
 off her fingers and threw them at the mirror like pebbles, 
 and sopped up her tears with point-lace handkerchiefs 
 and hurled those to the floor then hurled herself after 
 them. She was a tremendous weeper, Zada. 
 
 And in Newport there was a woman who had a marriage 
 license but no husband. She slept in a room too beautiful 
 for Kedzie to have liked. She did not know enough to 
 like it. She would have found it cold. Charity Cheever 
 found it cold, but she slept at last, though the salt wind 
 blowing in from the sea tormented the light curtains and 
 plucked at the curls about Charity's face. There was salt 
 
 148
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 in the air, and her eyelashes were still wet with tears. 
 She was crying in her sleep, for loneliness. 
 
 Kedzie thought her room was small, but it was nearly 
 as big as the bedroom where Jim Dyckman had slept. He 
 had a bigger room, but he had given it to his father and 
 mother, who had come to Newport with him. They were 
 a stodgy old couple enough now, and snoring idyllically 
 in duet after a life of storms and tears and discontents in 
 spite of wealth. 
 
 Jim's room was big for a yacht, but the yacht was 
 narrow, built for speed. Thirty-six miles an hour its 
 turbines could shoot it through the sea. It had to 
 be narrow. We can't have everything especially on 
 yachts. 
 
 Jim was barefoot, standing in his pajamas at a port-hole 
 and trying to see the Noxon home, imagining Charity 
 there. He was denied her presence and was as miserable 
 as any waif in a poor farm attic. Money seemed to make 
 no visible difference in his despair. 
 
 If he thought of Kedzie at all, he dismissed her as a 
 trifling memory. He wanted Charity, who did not want 
 him. Charity had Cheever, who did not want her. 
 Kedzie had Gilfoyle, and did not want him. It looked as 
 if the old jingle ought to be changed from "Finders 
 keepers, losers weepers" to "Losers keepers, finders 
 weepers." 
 
 The day after Jim Dyckman pulled Kedzie out of the 
 water he made a desperate effort to convince himself that 
 he could be happy without the forbidden Charity Coe. 
 
 He breakfasted and played tennis, then swam at 
 Bailey's Beach. Beauties of every type and every con 
 science were there pale, slim ash blondes with legs like 
 banister-spindles, and swarthy, slender brunettes of the 
 same Sheraton furniture. There were brunettes of gen 
 erous ovals, and blondes of heroic rotundities, and every 
 scheme of shape between. Minds were equally diver 
 sified maternal young girls and wicked old ladies, 
 
 149
 
 hilarious and sinister, intellectual and athletic, bookish 
 and horsy, a woman of a sort for every mood. 
 
 And Jim Dyckman was so wealthy and so simple and 
 so likable and important that it seemed nobody would 
 refuse to accept him. But he wanted Charity. 
 
 Later in the afternoon he gave up the effort to snub 
 her and went to the Noxon home. It was about the hour 
 when Kedzie in her new flat had been burning her fingers 
 at the gas-stove. Jim Dyckman was preparing to burn 
 his fingers at the shrine of Mrs. Cheever. 
 
 He rang the bell and asked for Mrs. Noxon, though 
 her motor was waiting at the door, as he was glad to note. 
 Mrs. Noxon came down with her hat on and her gloves 
 going on. She pinched Dyckman's cheek and kissed him 
 and said : 
 
 "It's sweet of you, Jimmie, to call on an old crone like 
 me, and so promptly. She'll be down in a minute. But 
 you must be on your good behavior, Jim, for they're 
 talking about you, you know. They're bracketing your 
 name with Charity's." 
 
 "The dirty beasts! I'll" 
 
 "You can't, Jim. But you can behave. Cheer her up 
 a little. She's blue about that dog of a Cheever. I've 
 got to go and turn over the money we earned yesterday. 
 Quite a tidy sum, but I'll never give another damned show 
 as long as I live." 
 
 She left, and by and by Charity Coe drifted in, bringing 
 strange contentment with her. She greeted Jim with a 
 weary cordiality. He took her hand and kissed it and 
 laid his other hand over it as usual. She put her other 
 hand on top of his and patted it then withdrew her 
 slender fingers and sat down. 
 
 They glanced at each other and sighed. Jim was 
 miserably informed now that he had made the angelic 
 Charity Coe a theme for gossip. He felt guilty irritat- 
 edly guilty, because he had the name without the game. 
 
 Charity Coe was in a dull mood. She was in a love 
 
 150
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 lethargy. Her mind was trying to persuade her heart that 
 her devotion to Peter Cheever was a wasted lealty, but her 
 heart would not be convinced, though it began to be 
 afraid. She was as a watcher who sits in the next room 
 to one who is dying slowly and quietly. She could neither 
 lose hope nor use it. 
 
 Jim and Charity sat brooding for a long while. He had 
 outstretched himself on a sumptuous divan. She was 
 seated on a carved chair, leaning against the tall back of it 
 like a figure in high relief. About them the great room 
 brooded colossally. 
 
 Gilfoyle would have hated Charity and Jim as perfect 
 examples of the idle rich, too stupid to work, too pam 
 pered to be worthy of sympathy. But whether these two 
 had a right to suffer or not, suffer they did. 
 
 The mansion was quiet. The other house-guests were 
 motoring or darting about the twilit tennis-court or 
 trading in the gossip-exchange at the Casino. Jim and 
 Charity were marooned in a sleeping castle. 
 
 At length Jim broke forth, "For God's sake, sing." 
 
 Charity laughed a little and said, "All right anything 
 to make you talk." 
 
 She went to the piano and shifted the music. There 
 were dozens of songs about roses. She dropped to the 
 bench and began to play and croon Edward Carpenter's 
 luscious music to Waller's old poem, "Go, Lovely Rose." 
 
 Jim began to talk almost at once. Charity went on 
 singing, smiling a little at the familiar experience of being 
 asked to sing only to be talked over. Jim grew garrulous 
 as he read across her shoulder with characteristic im 
 politeness. 
 
 " Tell her that wastes her time and me," he quoted; then 
 he groaned: "That's you and me, Charity Coe. But 
 you're wasting yourself most 6f all." 
 
 He bent closer to peek at the name of the author. 
 "Who's this feller Waller, who knows so much?" 
 
 "Hush and listen," she said, and hummed the song
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 through. It made a new and deep impression on her in 
 that humor. She felt that she had wasted the rosiness 
 of her own life. Girlhood was gone; youth was gone; 
 carefreedom was gone. Like petals they had fallen from 
 the core of her soul. The words of the lyric stabbed her: 
 
 Then die that she 
 
 The common fate of all things rare 
 May read in thee. 
 
 How small a part of time they share 
 
 That are so sweet and fair. 
 
 Her fingers slipped from the keys and, as it were, died 
 in her lap. Jim Dyckman understood a woman for once, 
 and in a gush of pity for her and of resentment for her 
 disprized preciousness caught at her to embrace her. 
 Her hands came to life. The wifely instinct leaped to the 
 fore. She struck and wrenched and drove him off. She 
 was panting with wrath. 
 
 "What a rotten thing to do! Go away and don't come 
 near me again. I'm ashamed of you." 
 
 "Me, too," he snarled.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 JIM slunk out and slunk down the marble steps and 
 down the winding walk and through the monstrous 
 gate into the highway along the sea, enraged at himself 
 and at Charity and at Peter Cheever. If he had met 
 Cheever he would have picked him up and flung him over 
 the sea-wall. But there was little danger of Peter 
 Cheever's being found so near his wife. 
 
 " Tell her that wastes her time and me," kept running 
 through Jim's head. He was furious at Charity for wast 
 ing so much of him. He had followed her about and 
 moped at her closed door like a stray dog. And she had 
 never even thrown him a bone. 
 
 A wave ran up on the beach and seemed to try to 
 embrace the earth, possess it. But it fell away baffled. 
 Over its subsiding pother sprang a new wave with the 
 same bosomful of desire and the same frantic clutching 
 here and there the same rebuff, the same destruction 
 under the surge of the next and the next. The descending 
 night gave a strange pathos to the eternal vanity. 
 
 Jim Dyckman stood and faced the ocean. Once more 
 he discovered that life was too much for him to understand. 
 He was ashamed of himself for his vain endeavor to en 
 velop Charity Coe and absorb her into the deeps of his 
 love. He was most ashamed because he had failed and 
 must slither back into the undertow with the many other 
 men whom Charity had refused to love. 
 
 He was ashamed of Charity Coe, too, for squandering 
 her prime and her pride. He was enraged at her blindness 
 to Pete Cheever's duplicity or her complacency with it.
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 He hated Charity for a while nearly. At any rate he 
 was ashamed of her, ashamed of the world, in a rebel 
 mood. 
 
 As he stood wind-blown and spray-flogged and glad 
 to be beaten, a shabby old carriage went by. It was 
 piled to overflowing with some of Miss Silsby's girls taking 
 a seeing-Newport tour on the cheap. 
 
 The driver was, or said he had been in his time, coach 
 man to some of the oldest families. He ventured their 
 names with familiarity and knew their houses by heart. 
 He told quaint stories of their ways, how old Mrs. Noxon 
 once swore down a mutinous stableman, how Miss Wos- 
 som ran away with her coachman. There was something 
 finely old-fashioned and conservative about that. A new- 
 rich would have run away with a chauffeur. 
 
 The driver knew Jim Dyckman's back and pointed him 
 out. The girls laughed, remembering Kedzie's encounter 
 with him. They laughed so loud that Dyckman turned, 
 startled by the racket. But the carriage rolled them 
 away and he did not hear them wondering what had 
 become of Kedzie. The gloaming saddened them, and 
 they felt very sorry for her. But Jim Dyckman gave her 
 no thought. 
 
 He was tearing apart his emotions toward Charity and 
 resolving that he must never see her again. In the 
 analytical chemistry of the soul he found that this resolu 
 tion was three parts hopelessness of winning her, three 
 parts a decent sense of the wickedness of courting an 
 other man's woman, three parts resentment at her for 
 treating him properly, and one part a feeling that he would 
 make himself most valuable to her by staying away. 
 
 Never a homeless dog slinking through an alley in 
 search of a sidelong ash-barrel to sleep in felt more poverty- 
 stricken, woebegone, than Jim Dyckman. He moped 
 along the stately road, as much afraid of his future as 
 Kedzie had been, trudging the same highway. She had 
 wondered if board and lodging would fail her. This was
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 not Jim Dyckman's fear, but his own was as great, for 
 everybody was some dreadful elbow-companion. 
 
 Lucian showed Jupiter himself cowering on his throne 
 in the sky and twiddling his thunderbolt with trembling 
 hand as he wondered what the fates held in store for him, 
 and saw on earth the increasing impudence of the skeptics. 
 
 So Jim Dyckman, unconscious that he was following in 
 Kedzie's footsteps, walked miserably on his way. He had 
 no place to go to but the finest yacht in the harbor. He 
 had no money to depend on but a few millions of his own 
 and the Pelion plus Ossa fortunes of his father and 
 mother and their relatives a mere sierra of gold moun 
 tains. 
 
 He drifted down to the landing-place and went out to 
 his yacht in a hackney launch. He was received at her 
 snowy sides as if he were the emperor of somewhere come 
 to visit one of his rear admirals. He went up the steps 
 as if he were a school-boy caught playing hooky and 
 going up-stairs to play the bass drum to his mother's 
 slipper. 
 
 His mother was on the shade-deck, reclining. The big 
 white wicker lounge looked as if a small avalanche had 
 fallen on it. From the upturned points of her white 
 shoes back to her white hair she was a study in foreshorten 
 ing that would have interested a draftsman. 
 
 Spread out on a huge wicker arm-chair sat Jim's father, 
 also all white, except for his big pink hands and his big 
 pink face. It seemed that he ought to have been smoking 
 a white cigar. As a matter of fact, he had sat so still 
 that half the weed was ash. 
 
 When the two moved to greet Jim there was a mighty 
 creaking of wicker. There was another when Jim spilled 
 his own great weight into a chair. A steward in white 
 raised his eyebrows inquiringly and Jim nodded the 
 eighth of an inch. It was the equivalent of ordering a 
 drink. 
 
 Dyckman senior turned to Dyckman seniora and said . 
 
 155
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 *' Enter Hamlet in the graveyard! Where's the skull, my 
 boy, where's the skull?" 
 
 "Let the child alone," Mrs. Dyckman protested. "It's 
 too hot for fooling. You might kiss your poor mother, 
 though. No, don't get up, just throw me one." 
 
 Jim rose heavily, went to her, bent far down, kissed 
 her, and would have risen again, but her big arms encom 
 passed his neck and held him, uncomfortably, till he knelt 
 by her side and laid his head on her bosom. 
 
 He felt exceedingly foolish, but nearer to comfort than 
 he had been for a long while. He wished that he might be 
 a boy again in his mother's arms and be altogether 
 content and carefree as he had been there. As if children 
 were content and carefree! Great Heavens! do they not 
 begin to squirm and kick before they are born? 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman was suffocated a trifle by his weight and 
 her own and her corsets, but her heart ached for him some 
 where down deep and she whispered: 
 
 "Can't he tell his mother what he wants? Maybe she 
 can get it for him." 
 
 He laughed bitterly and extricated himself from her 
 clasp, patted her fat 'arm, and turned away. His father 
 jealously seized his sleeve. 
 
 "Anything serious, old man? You know I'm here." 
 
 Jim squeezed his father's hand and shook his head and 
 turned to the drink which had arrived. He took it from 
 the tray to his chair and sat meditating Newport across 
 the top of his glass. Between the rail of the deck and the 
 edge of the awning he saw a long slice of it. It was vanity 
 and emptiness to him. He spoke at length. 
 
 "Fact is, folks, I've got to go back to New York or 
 somewhere." 
 
 "Good Lord!" his father said. "I'm all mixed up in a 
 golf tournament. I think I've got a chance to lick the 
 boots off old Wainwright." 
 
 "Oh dear!" sighed Mrs. Dyckman, "there's to be the 
 most interesting lecture by that Hindu poet. And it's so 
 
 156
 
 WE CAN'T- HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 much more comfortable here than ashore. This boat is; 
 the coziest you've ever had." 
 
 "Stay here, darling," said Jim. "I'll make you a 
 present of her." 
 
 "Oh, that's glorious," said Mrs. Dyckman. "I've 
 never had a yacht of my own. It's a shame to take 
 it from you, but you can get another. And of course 
 you'll always be welcome here which is more than a 
 certain other big Dyckman will be if he doesn't look 
 sharp." 
 
 "For the Lord's sake, Jim, don't give it to her. She's 
 the meanest old miser about her own things." Dyckman 
 senior pushed his chair back against the rail. 
 
 "Watch out!" Mrs. Dyckman gasped. "You're scrap 
 ing the paint off my yacht." 
 
 Jim rose again. "I've just about time to make the 
 last train for the day," he said. 
 
 His mother sat up and clutched at his hand. "Can't 
 I help you, honey? Please let me! What is the matter?" 
 
 "The matter is I'm a lunkhead and Newport bores me 
 stiff. That's all. Don't worry. I'll go get the packing 
 started." 
 
 He went along the deck, and his parents helplessly 
 craned their necks after him. His father groaned. Jim 
 had "everything." There was nothing to get for him, 
 no toy to buy to divert him with. 
 
 " He wants a new toy, and he doesn't know what it is," 
 said the old man. 
 
 But Jim wanted an old toy on a shelf too high for his 
 reach. He ran away from the sight of it. 
 
 And Dyckman was fleeing to Charity's next resting- 
 place, after all, for she also returned in a few days to 
 New York. She was restive under the goad to return to 
 France. She repented her selfish neglect of the children 
 of all ages she had adopted abroad. One thing held her 
 back the dread of putting the ocean again between her 
 and her husband.
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She thought it small of her to leave so many heroes to 
 suffer without her ministrations, in order that she might 
 prevent one non-hero from having too good a time without 
 her ministrations. But womankind has never been en 
 couraged to adopt the policy of the greatest good to the 
 greatest number. Hardly! 
 
 . Charity was conscience-smitten, however, and she cast 
 about for a way to absolve herself. Money is the old 
 and ever-reliable way of paying debts physical, moral, 
 and religious. Charity determined to arrange some big 
 fete to bring in a heap of money for the wounded of 
 France, the blind fathers, and the fatherless children. 
 
 Everybody was giving entertainments at this time in 
 behalf of some school of victims of the war. The only 
 excuse for amusements in America seemed to be that the 
 profits went to the belligerents in one way or another. 
 
 Charity was distressed by the need of an oddity, a 
 novel note which should make itself heard among the 
 clamors for Belgian relief, for Polish relief, for Armenian 
 succor, for German, French, Italian, Russian widows and 
 orphans. 
 
 Charity's secretary, Miss Gurdon, made dozens of sug 
 gestions, but none of them was big enough to interest 
 Charity. One day a card came up to her with a letter of 
 introduction from Mrs. Noxon: 
 
 CHARITY DEAR, This will acquaint you with a very clever 
 girl, Miss Grace Havender. Her mother was a school friend 
 of mine. Miss Havender arranges to have moving pictures 
 taken of people. They are ever so much quainter than stupid 
 still-life pictures. Posterity ought to see you with your poor 
 wounded soldiers, but meanwhile we really should have a chance 
 to perpetuate you as you are. You are always on the go, 
 and an ordinary picture does not represent you. 
 
 Anyway, you will be nice to Miss Havender, for the sake of 
 Yours affectionately, 
 
 MARTHA NOXON. ' 
 
 Charity did not want a picture of herself, but she 
 went down to get rid of Miss Havender politely and to 
 
 158
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 recommend her to friends of greater passion for their own 
 likenesses. Miss Havender was a forward young person 
 and launched at once into a defense of moving pictures. 
 
 "Oh, I admire the movies immensely," Charity inter 
 posed. "We had some of them in the hospitals abroad. 
 If you could have seen that dear Charlie Chaplin convulse 
 a whole ward of battered soldiers and make them forget 
 their pain and their anxieties! He was more of a nurse 
 than a hundred of us. If he isn't a benefactor, I don't 
 know who is. Oh, I admire the movies, but I'd rather see 
 them than be them, you know. 
 
 "Still, an idea has just occurred to me. You know I'm 
 terribly in need of a pile of money." 
 
 Miss Havender looked about her and smiled. 
 
 "Oh, I don't mean for myself. I have far too much, 
 but for the soldiers. I want something that will bring 
 in a big sum. It occurs to me that if a lot of us got up 
 a story and acted it ourselves, it would be tremendously 
 interesting to well, to ourselves. And our friends would 
 flock to see it. Amateur performances are ghastly from 
 an artistic standpoint, but they're great fun. 
 
 ' ' It just struck me that if we got up a play and had a 
 cast made up of Mr. Jim Dyckman and Tom Duane and 
 Winnie Nicolls and Miss Bettany and the young Stowe 
 Webbs and Mrs. Neff and people like that it would be 
 dreadfully bad art, but much more amusing than if we 
 had all the stars in the world Mr. Drew and his daughter 
 and his niece Miss Barrymore and her brothers, and Miss 
 Anglin and Miss Bates or Miss Adams or anybody like 
 that. Don't you think so? Or what do you think? 
 Could it be done, or has it been or what about it?" 
 
 Miss Havender gasped. She saw new vistas of business 
 opening before her. 
 
 "Yes, it has been done in a small way, and it was great 
 fun, as you say; but it would have been more fun if it 
 hadn't been so crude. What you would need would be a 
 director who was not an amateur. Now, our director is
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 marvelous Mr. Ferriday. He's the Belasco of the photo 
 plays. He's as great as Griffith. He takes his art like a 
 priest. If you had him you could do wonders." 
 
 "Then we must have him, by all means," said Charity, 
 smiling a little at the gleam in Miss Havender's eyes. 
 She had a feeling that Miss Havender had a deep, personal 
 interest in Mr. Ferriday. Miss Havender had; most of 
 the women in his environs had. In the first place, he was 
 powerful and could increase or diminish or check salaries. 
 He distributed places and patronage with a royal preroga 
 tive. But he was hungry for praise and suffered from the 
 lack of social prestige granted "the new art." 
 
 Miss Havender seconded Charity's motion with en 
 thusiasm. After a long conference it was agreed that Miss 
 Havender should broach the matter to the great Mr. 
 Ferriday while Charity recruited actors and authors. 
 
 As Charity rummaged in her hand-bag for a pencil 
 to write Miss Havender's telephone number with, she 
 turned out Kedzie Thropp's crumpled, shabby card. She 
 started. 
 
 "Oh, for Heaven's sake! The poor child! I had for 
 gotten her completely. You might be able to do some 
 thing for her. This Miss Adair is the prettiest thing, 
 and I promised to get her a job. She might photograph 
 splendidly. Won't you try to find her a place?" 
 
 "I'll guarantee her one," said Miss Havender, who was 
 sure that the firm would be glad to put Mrs. Cheever under 
 obligations. The firm was in need of patronage, as Mr. 
 Ferriday 's lavish expenditures had crippled its treasury, 
 while his artistic whims had held up the delivery of nearly 
 finished films. 
 
 Miss Havender told Charity to send the girl to her at 
 the office any day and she would take care of her. Charity 
 kept Kedzie's card in her hand, and, as soon as Miss 
 Havender was gone, ran to her desk to write Kedzie. She 
 told a pale lie it seemed a gratuitous insult to confess 
 that she had forgotten. 
 
 160
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 DEAR Miss ADAIR, Please forgive my delay in keeping my 
 promise, but I have been unable to find anything likely to 
 interest you till to-day. But now Miss Grace Havender, of the 
 Hyperfilm Company, has just assured me that if you will call 
 on her at her office she will see that you are engaged. You will 
 photograph so beautifully that I am sure you will have a great 
 career. Please don't fail to call on Miss Havender. 
 Yours, with best wishes, 
 
 CHARITY C. CHEEVER. 
 
 She sent the letter to the address Kedzie had given her 
 which was that of Kedzie's abandoned boarding-house.. 
 ii
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 SINCE Kedzie, by the time her marriage had reached 
 its first morning-after, had already found her brand- 
 new husband odious, there was small hope of her learning 
 to like him or their poverty better on close acquaintance. 
 
 When he left her for his office she missed him, and her 
 heart warmed toward him till he came home again. He 
 always brought new disillusionment with him. He spent 
 his hours out of office in bewailing his luck, celebrating the 
 hardness of the times, and proclaiming the hopelessness of 
 his prospects. 
 
 And then one evening he arrived with so doleful a 
 countenance that Kedzie took pity on him. She perched 
 herself on his lap and asked him what was worrying him. 
 
 "Nothing much, honey," he groaned, "except that I've 
 lost my job." 
 
 Kedzie was thunderstruck. She breathed the expletive 
 she learned from her latest companions. "My Gawd!" 
 
 Gilfoyle nodded dreadfully: "Business has been bad, 
 anyway. Kalteyer, with his chewing-gum, was about our 
 only big customer, and now he's gone bust. Yep. The 
 bank's shut down on his loans, and he was caught with a 
 mountain of bills on his hands. And the Breathasweeta 
 Chewing Gum stopped selling. People didn't seem to 
 take to the perfume idea." 
 
 "I just hate people!" Kedzie growled, pacing the floor. 
 
 Gilfoyle went on, bitterly: "Remember how they all 
 said I was such a genius for thinking up the name ' Breath 
 asweeta,' and the perfumery idea? And how they liked 
 my catch-phrase ? ' ' 
 
 162
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie nodded. 
 
 Gilfoyle grew sarcastic: "Well, a man's a genius if he 
 succeeds, and a fool if he doesn't. I'm just as sure as 
 ever that there's a fortune in Breathasweeta. But when 
 Kalteyer's bankers got cold feet I lost my halo. He and 
 Kiam have been roasting the life out of me. They blame 
 me! They've kept knocking me and quoting 'Kiss me 
 again who are you?' and then groaning. It's funny. I 
 loved it when everybody else said it was great. But I 
 didn't care much for it myself, the way they said it." 
 
 Kedzie flung herself on the tremulous wabbly-legged 
 divan. Kedzie didn't like the phrase, either, now. When 
 he had first smitten it from his brain she had thought it 
 an inspiration and him a king. Now it sounded silly, 
 coarse, a little indecent. Of course it had not succeeded. 
 How could he ever have been so foolish as to utter it 
 "Kiss me again who are you?" Why, it was vulgar! 
 
 Gilfoyle looked dismally incompetent as he drooped 
 and mumbled. It is hard to tell an autobiography of 
 failure and look one's best. 
 
 "Didn't you tell him you was you were married?" 
 queried Kedzie. 
 
 "I hadn't the courage." 
 
 "Courage! Well, I like that! So you're fired! Just 
 like me. Funny! And here we are, married and all. 
 My Gaw " 
 
 "Here we are, married and all. They'll let me finish 
 the week, but my goose is cooked, I guess. Jobs are 
 mighty scarce in my line of business. Everybody's poor 
 except the munitions crowd. I wish I knew how to make 
 dynamite." 
 
 Kedzie pushed her wet hair back from her brow and 
 tore her waist open a little deeper at the throat. This was 
 carrying the joke of marriage a little too far even for her 
 patient soul. 
 
 Soon Gilfoyle's office was closed to him and he was at 
 home almost all day. That finished him with Kedzie. 
 
 163
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 He had not improved on connubial acquaintance. He was 
 lazy and sloven of mornings, and since he had no office 
 to go to he grew more neglectful of his appearance than 
 ever. His end-to-end cigarettes got on Kedzie's nerves 
 and cost a nagging amount of money, especially as she 
 could not learn to like them herself. 
 
 He tried to write poetry for the magazines and per 
 manently destroyed what little respect Kedzie had for the 
 art. Hunting for some little love- word that was unim 
 portant when found threw him into frenzies of rage. He 
 went about mumbling gibberish. 
 
 "What in hell rhymes with heaven?" he would snarl. 
 "Beven, ceven, Devon, fevon, gevin, given " And so on 
 to "&even." Then "breven, creven, dreven" and "bleven, 
 eleven, dleven" and " p seven, spleven, threven" and so forth. 
 
 At length he would hurl his pen across the room, pull 
 at his hair, and light another cigarette. Cigarette always 
 rhymed with cigarette. 
 
 After a day or two of this drivel he produced a brief lyric 
 with a certain fleetness of movement ; it had small freight 
 to carry. He took it to a number of editors he knew, and 
 one of them accepted it as a kindness. 
 
 Kedzie was delighted till she heard that it would bring 
 into the exchequer about seven dollars when the check 
 came, which would be in two weeks. 
 
 When Gilfoyle was not fighting at composition he was 
 calling the editors hard names and deploring the small 
 remuneration given to poets by a pork-packing nation. 
 Or he would be hooting ridicule at the successful poets and 
 growing almost as furious against the persons addicted 
 to the fashionable vers libre as he was against the wealthy 
 classes. 
 
 It seemed to Kedzie that nothing on earth was less 
 important than prosody, and that however badly poets 
 were paid, they were paid more than they earned. She 
 grew so lonely for some one to talk to that she decided 
 to call on old Mrs. Jambers at the boarding-house. She 
 
 164
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 planned to stop in at dinner-time, in the hope of being 
 asked to sit in at a real meal. The task of cooking what 
 she could afford to buy robbed her of all appetite, and she 
 was living mainly on fumes of food and gas. 
 
 She was growing thinner and shabbier of soul, and she 
 knew it. She put off the call till she could endure her 
 solitude no longer; then she visited Mrs. Jambers. A 
 new maid met her at the door and barred her entrance 
 suspiciously. Mrs. Jambers was out. So was Mrs. 
 Bottger. So were the old boarders that Kedzie knew. 
 New boarders had their rooms. Kedzie was exiled indeed. 
 
 She turned away, saying: "Tell Mrs. Jambers that 
 Anita Adair stopped to say hello. I was just passing." 
 
 "Anita Adair?" said the maid. "You Was Anita 
 Adair, yes? Wait once. It is a letter for you by down 
 stairs." 
 
 She closed the door in Kedzie 's face. Some time later 
 she came back and gave Anita the letter from Charity. 
 It was several days old. She read it with amazement. 
 The impulse to tear it up as she had torn up Charity's card 
 in Newport did not last long. She went at once to a drug 
 store and looked up the telephone number and the address 
 of the Hyperfilm Company. She repaid the druggist with 
 a smile and a word of thanks ; then she took a street-car 
 to the office. 
 
 Miss Havender, who was also a scenario-writer and 
 editor, was very busy. She had an executive manner that 
 strangely contradicted her abilities to suffer under the 
 pangs of love and unrequited idolatry. But then, busi 
 ness men are no more immune to the foolish venom on 
 Cupid's arrows than poets perhaps less, since they have 
 no outlet of rhapsody. That was one of the troubles with 
 Kedzie' s poet. By the time Gilfoyle had finished a poem 
 of love he was so exhausted that any other emotion was 
 welcome, best of all a good quarrel and the healthful ex 
 ercise of his poetic gifts for hate. He could hate at the 
 drop of a hat. 
 
 165
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 When the office-boy brought Charity's letter of intro 
 duction to Miss Havender with the verbal message that 
 Miss Adair was waiting outside Miss Havender nodded. 
 She decided to procure this Miss Adair a good job in order 
 to curry favor with Mrs. Cheever. She would advise 
 Mr. Ferriday to pay her marked attention, too. 
 
 But when she caught sight of Kedzie running the 
 gantlet of the battery of authors and typists, and noted 
 how pretty she was, Miss Havender decided that it would 
 not be good for Mr. Ferriday to pay marked attention to 
 this minx. He had a habit of falling in love with women 
 more ardently than with scenarios. He was a despot 
 with a scenario, and he could quickly make a famous 
 novel unrecognizable by its own father or mother. But a 
 pretty woman could rule him ludicrously while her charm 
 lasted. 
 
 Miss Havender would gladly have turned Kedzie from 
 the door, but she did not dare. She had promised Mrs. 
 Cheever to give the girl a job. But she had not promised 
 what kind of job it should be. 
 
 She received Kedzie with such brusqueness that the 
 frightened girl almost fell off the small rim of chair she 
 dared to occupy. She offered Kedzie a post as a typist, 
 but Kedzie could not type; as a film-cutter's assistant, 
 but Kedzie had never seen a film; as a printing-machine 
 engineer or a bookkeeper's clerk, but Kedzie had no 
 ability to do things. She could merely look things. 
 
 Finally Miss Havender said: "I'm awfully sorry, Miss 
 Adair, but the only position open is a place as extra 
 woman. There is a big ballroom scene to be staged to 
 morrow, and a low dance-hall the next day, and on Monday 
 a crowd of starving Belgian peasants. We could use you 
 in those, but of course you wouldn't care to accept the 
 pay." 
 
 She said this hopefully. Kedzie answered, hopelessly: 
 
 "What's the pay?" 
 
 "Three dollars." 
 
 166
 
 WE, CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I'll take it." 
 
 Miss Havender accepted the inevitable, gave her the 
 address of the studio far up-town in the Bronx and told 
 her to report at eight the next morning. 
 
 Kedzie went back to her home in a new mood. She 
 was the breadwinner now, if not a cake-earner. Gilfoyle 
 was depressed by her good news, and she was indignant 
 because he was not happy. The poor fellow was simply 
 ashamed of his own inability to support her in the style 
 she had been accustomed to dreaming about. 
 
 Kedzie was sullen at having to get the dinner that night. 
 The hot water would not help to give her hands the ball 
 room texture. The next morning she had to leave early. 
 Gilfoyle was too tired of doing nothing to get up, and 
 she resolved to buy her breakfast ready-made outside. 
 Her last glance at her husband with his frowsy hair on his 
 frowsy pillow infuriated her. 
 
 The experience at the big studio assuaged her wrath 
 against life. It was something new, and there was a thrill 
 in the concerted action of the crowds. She wore a rented 
 ball-gown which did not fit her. Seeing how her very 
 shoulders winced at their exposure, one would not have 
 believed that she was a graduate of the Silsby school of 
 near to nature in next to nothing. 
 
 She danced with an extra man, Mr. Clarence Yoder, a 
 portly actor out of work. He was a costume-play gentle 
 man, and Kedzie thought him something grand. He found 
 her an entrancing armload. He was rather aggressive 
 and held her somewhat straitly to his exuberant form, but 
 he gave her so much information that she did not snub him. 
 She did not even tell him that she was married. Indeed, 
 when at the close of a busy day he hinted at a willingness to 
 take her out to see a picture that evening, she made other 
 excuses than those that actually prevented her accepting. 
 She spent a doleful evening at home with her dour husband 
 and resented him more than ever. 
 
 On the second day Kedzie was a slum waif and did 
 
 167
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 not like it. She pouted with a sincerity that was irre 
 sistible. 
 
 Mr. Ferriday did not direct the crowd scenes in these 
 pictures. His assistant, Mr. Garfinkel, was the slave- 
 driver. Mr. Yoder cleverly called him "Simon Legree." 
 Kedzie did not know who Mr. Legree was, but she laughed 
 because Mr. Yoder looked as if he wanted her to laugh, 
 and she had decided that he was worth cultivating. 
 
 During the course of the day, however, Mr. Garfinkel 
 fell afoul of Mr. Yoder because of the way he danced with 
 Kedzie. It was a rough dance prettily entitled "Walking 
 the Dog." Mr. Yoder, who did a minuet in satin breeches 
 to his own satisfaction, pleased neither himself nor Mr. 
 Garfinkel in the more modern expression of the dancer's 
 art. 
 
 Mr. Garfinkel called him a number of names which Mr. 
 Yoder would never have tolerated if he had not needed the 
 money. He quivered with humiliation and struggled to 
 conform, but he could not please the sneering overseer. 
 He sought the last resort of those persecuted by critics: 
 
 " Maybe you can do better yourself!" 
 
 "Well, I hope I choke if I can't," Garfinkel said as he 
 passed the manuscript to the camera-man and summoned 
 Kedzie to his embrace. "Here, Miss What's-your-name, 
 git to me." 
 
 Kedzie slipped into his clutch, and he took her as if she 
 were a sheaf of wheat. His arms loved her lithe elasticities. 
 He dragged her through the steps with a wondering increase 
 of interest. "Well, say!" he muttered for her private con 
 sumption, "you're a little bit of all right. I'm not so worse 
 myself when I have such help." 
 
 He danced with her longer than was necessary for the 
 demonstration. Then he reluctantly turned her over to 
 Mr. Yoder. Kedzie did not like Mr. Yoder any more. 
 She found him fat and clumsy, and his hands were fat and 
 clammy. 
 
 Mr. Garfinkel had to show him again. 
 
 168
 
 Kedzie could not help murmuring up toward his chin, 
 "I wish I could dance with you instead of him." 
 
 Garfinkel muttered down into her topknot: "You can, 
 girlie, but not before the camera. There's a reason. How 
 about a little roof garden this evening, huh?" 
 
 Kedzie sighed, "I'm sorry I can't." 
 
 Garfinkel realized that the crowd was sitting up and 
 taking notice, and so he flung Kedzie back to Yoder and pro 
 ceeded with the picture. He was angry at himself and at 
 Kedzie, but Kedzie was angered at her husband, who was 
 keeping her from every opportunity of advancement. 
 Even as he loafed at home he prevented her ambitions. 
 "The dog in the manger!" she called him. 
 
 Garfinkel paid her no further attention except to take 
 a close-up of her standing at a soppy table and drinking a 
 glass of stale beer with a look of desperate pathos. She was 
 supposed to be a slum waif who had never had a mother's- 
 care. Kedzie had had too much of the same. 
 
 The next day was a Saturday. Kedzie did not work. 
 She was lonely for toil, and she abhorred the flat and the 
 neighbors. The expressive parrot was growing tautological. 
 Kedzie went out shopping to be rid of Gilfoyle's nerves. 
 He was in travail of another love-jingle, and his tantrums- 
 were odious. He kept repeating love and dove and above, 
 and tender, slender, offend her, defender, and kiss and bliss 
 till the very words grew gibberish, detestable nonsense. 
 
 Kedzie wandered the shops in a famine of desire for some 
 of the new styles. Her pretty body cried out for appro 
 priate adornment as its birthright. She was ashamed to 
 go to the studio a third time in the same old suit. She 
 ordered one little slip of a dress sent home "collect." She 
 had hoarded the remnant of her Silsby dollars. When 
 she reached home the delivery-wagon was at the curb and 
 the man was up-stairs. Gilfoyle greeted Kedzie with re 
 sentment. 
 
 " What's this thing ? I've got no money to pay it. You 
 know that." 
 
 169
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 " Oh, I know that well," said Kedzie, and she went to the 
 kitchen, where she surreptitiously extracted the money 
 from the depths of the coffee-canister. 
 
 She paid for the dress and put it on. But she would not 
 let Gilfoyle see her in it. She did not mind buying his 
 cigarettes half so much as she minded paying for her own 
 clothes. It outraged the very foundation principles of 
 matrimony to have to pay for her own clothes. 
 
 Sunday was an appallingly long day to get through. She 
 was so frantic for diversion that she would have gone to 
 church if she had had anything fashionable enough to wor 
 ship in. In the afternoon she went out alone and sat on a 
 bench in upper Riverside Drive. A number of passers- 
 by tried to flirt with her, but it was rather her bitterness 
 against men than any scruple that kept her eyes lowered. 
 
 She would have been excited enough if she had known that 
 the pictures in which she played a small part were being 
 run off in the projection-room at the studio for Mr. Fern- 
 day's benefit. 
 
 Everybody was afraid of him. The heads of the firm 
 were hoping that he would approve the reels and not order 
 them thrown out. They were convinced that they would 
 have to break with him before he broke them. Mr. 
 Garfinkel was hoping for a word of approval from the 
 artistic tyrant. 
 
 But Ferriday was fretful and sarcastic about everything. 
 Suddenly Miss Havender noted that he was interested, 
 noted it by the negative proof of his sudden repose and 
 silence. She could tell that he was leaning forward, taut 
 with interest. She saw that Anita Adair was floating 
 across the screen in the arms of Mr. Yoder. 
 
 There followed various scenes in which Kedzie did not 
 appear, close-up pictures of other people. Ferriday fell 
 back growling. Then he came bolt upright as the purring 
 spinning-wheel of the projection machine poured out more 
 of Kedzie. 
 
 Suddenly he shouted through the dark: "Stop! Wait! 
 
 170
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Go back! Give us the last twenty feet again. Who is 
 that girl that dream? Who is she, Garfinkel?" 
 
 "I don't know her name, sir." 
 
 "Don't know her name! You wouldn't! Well, the 
 whole world will know her name before I get through with 
 her. Who is she, anyway?" 
 
 Miss Havender spoke. "Her name is Adair Anita 
 Adair." 
 
 "Anita Adair, eh? Well, where did she come from? 
 Who dug her up?" 
 
 "I did," said Miss Havender. 
 
 "Good for you, old girl! She's just what I need." 
 And now he studied again the scene in which Kedzie 
 took down the draught of bitter beer, and there was a 
 superhuman vividness in the close-up, with its magnified 
 details in which every tiny muscle revealed its soul. 
 
 "Look at her!" Ferriday cried. "She's perfect. The 
 pathos of her! She wants training, like the devil, but, 
 Lord, what material!" 
 
 He was as fanatic as a Michelangelo finding in a quarry 
 a neglected block of marble and seeing through its hard 
 edges the mellow contours of an ideal. He was as im 
 patient to assail his task and beat off the encumbering 
 weight.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 wore her new frock when she reached the 
 studio on Monday morning. She greeted Mr. Gar- 
 finkel with an entreating smile, and was alarmed by the 
 remoteness of his response. He was cold because she 
 was not for him. He led her respectfully to the anteroom 
 of the sacred inclosure where Ferriday was behaving 
 like a lion in a cage, belching his wrath at his keepers, 
 ordering the fund-finders to find more funds for his 
 great picture. It threatened to bankrupt them before 
 it was finished, but he derided them as imbeciles, money 
 changers, misers. 
 
 Garfinkel was manifestly afraid of Ferriday's very echo, 
 and he cowered a little when Ferriday burst through the 
 door with mane bristling and fangs bared. 
 
 "Well, well, well!" Ferriday stormed. "What do you 
 want, Garfinkel? What do you want, Garfinkel? What 
 do you want?" 
 
 "You told me to bring Miss Adair to you as soon as she 
 arrived, and " 
 
 The lion roared as gentle as a sucking dove. 
 
 "And this is Miss Adair, is it? Of course it is. Wel 
 come to our little boiler-factory, my dear. Come in and 
 sit down. Garfinkel, get her a chair and then get out. 
 Sit down, child. I never bite pretty girls." 
 
 Kedzie was pleasantly terrified, and she wondered 
 what would befall her next. She gave the retreating 
 Garfinkel no further thought. She sat and trembled be 
 fore the devouring gaze of the great Ferriday. He studied 
 her professionally, but he was intensely, extravagantly 
 
 172
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 human. That was why he appealed to the public so 
 potently. He took their feelings and set them on fire and 
 juggled with them flaming. 
 
 He had such caloric that he kindled actors and actresses 
 to unsuspected brilliances. He made tinder of the dry- 
 as-dusts, and he brought the warm-hearted to a white-hot 
 glow. 
 
 He dealt with primary emotions crudely but vigorously. 
 A soldier saluting an officer became in a Ferriday picture a 
 zealot rendering a national homage. A maid watching 
 her lover walk away angry became a Juliet letting Romeo 
 go; a child weeping over a broken doll was an epitome of 
 all regret. A mother putting a light in the window for an 
 erring daughter's guidance was something new, an allegory 
 as great as Bartholdi's Liberty putting her lamp in the 
 window of the nation. 
 
 He was as intense with humor as with sorrow. A girl 
 washing dishes brought shrieks of laughter at the little 
 things she did the struggle with the slippery soap, the 
 recoil from the hot plate, the carelessness with the towel. 
 
 Ferriday had not talked to Kedzie two minutes before 
 she was wringing her hands with excitement. He was 
 discovering her to herself. He told her the story of a 
 picture he wanted to put her in. He had withheld it for 
 months, looking for the right interpreter. He resolved 
 to postpone the completion of the big picture till he had 
 finished a five-reel idyl for the apotheosis of Kedzie. 
 
 "The backers of the enterprise will have apoplexy 
 when they hear of it," he laughed. "But what do I care ?" 
 
 The whole army of the studio stood meanwhile at ease, 
 drawing salary and waiting for Ferriday to remember his 
 day's program and give the order to go ahead. But he 
 was busy with his new story, in the throes of nympholepsy, 
 seeing visions, hearing voices. 
 
 Kedzie sat in a marble expectancy, Galatea watching 
 Pygmalion create her and prepare to bring her to life. 
 She had never lived. She realized that. All her previous
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 existence had been but blind gropings in the womb of 
 time. 
 
 The backers came to remind Ferriday that there was 
 waiting a costly mob of actors, wooed from the speaking 
 drama by trebled salaries. Ferriday howled to them to 
 get out. They did not respect his inspirations; they sus 
 pected his motives toward Kedzie. 
 
 But Ferriday was deep in love with his art ; he was pant 
 ing with the afflation of Apollo. Old motives, old scenes, 
 old characters that had served as "sure-fire stuff" since 
 the earliest Hindu drama now fell into their ancient places 
 and he thought them new. Kedzie was sure she had never 
 heard such original ideas. Her gratitude to Ferriday was 
 absolute. And he was clever enough, or crazy enough, 
 to say that he was grateful to her. He had been looking 
 for just Her, and she had come to him just in time. He 
 made her promises that Solomon could not have made to 
 Sheba, or Shakespeare to the dark lady. 
 
 Solomon could offer to his visitor Ophirian wealth, and 
 Shakespeare could guarantee with some show of success 
 (up to date) that his words of praise would outlive all 
 other monuments. But Ferriday did not offer Kedzie 
 minerals or adjectives. He cried: 
 
 "Little girl, I'll put you on a girdle of films that will 
 encircle the world. Your smile will run round the globe 
 like the sun, and light up dark places in Africa. Your 
 tears will shower the earth. People in thousands of towns 
 will watch your least gesture with anxiety. Queens will 
 have you brought to their palaces to make them laugh 
 and cry. The soldiers of the world will call you their 
 mascot and write love-letters to you from the trenches. 
 I will have a billion pictures made of you, and you shall 
 breathe and move in all of them. You shall live a 
 million lives at once. I will have your other self placed 
 in museums so that centuries from now they can take 
 you out and bring you to life again." 
 
 It was a mighty good speech. It would be hard to find
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 a serenade to beat it. And he read it superbly. He 
 had sung it to every one of his only girls in the world, his 
 eternal (pro tern.) passions. He had had about nineteen 
 muses already. 
 
 Kedzie did not know this, of course. And it would 
 not have mattered much. Better the nine-and-ninetieth 
 muse to such a man than the first and final gas-stove slave 
 of a Tommie Gilfoyle. 
 
 Kedzie sat in the state of nerves of a little girl alone 
 on a mountain-top with lightning shimmering and striking 
 all round her. She was so happy, so full of electrical 
 sparks, that she was fairly incandescent. As she said 
 afterward, she felt "all lit up." 
 
 Ferriday spun out the plot of his new five-reel scenario 
 until he was like an unreeled spider. He was all out. The 
 mechanical details interested and refreshed him now. 
 He must order the studio scenery and select the outdoor 
 ' ' locations. ' ' He must pick the supporting cast and devise 
 one or two blood-curdling moments of great peril. 
 
 Kedzie was too excited to note the ghoulish joy with 
 which he planned to put her into the most perilous plights 
 that had ever threatened even a movie star with death or 
 crippledom. 
 
 "Do they scare you, my dear?" he asked. 
 
 "Scare me?" said Kedzie. "Why, Mr. Ferriday, if you 
 told me to, I'd go out to the Bronx Zoo-ological Gardens 
 and bite the ear off the biggest lion they got in the lion- 
 house." 
 
 Ferriday reached out, put his arm about her farther 
 shoulder, and squeezed her to him after the manner of 
 closing an accordeon. Kedzie emitted the same kind of 
 squeak. But she was not unhappy, and she did not even 
 say, "Sir!" 
 
 The plot of The Kedziad was to be based on the From- 
 Rags-to-Riches leitmotiv. Kedzie was to be a cruelly 
 treated waif brought up as a boy by a demoniac Italian 
 padrone who made her steal. She was to be sent into a
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 rich man's home to rob it. She would find the rich man 
 about to commit suicide all over his sumptuous library. 
 She would save him, and he would save her from the 
 padrone's revenge, on condition that she should dress as a 
 girl (he had not, of course, suspected that she really was 
 one at the time had always been one, in fact). She 
 would dress as a girl and conduct a very delicate diplomatic 
 mission with a foreign ambassador, involving a submarine 
 wrecked (in the studio tank) and a terrific ride across 
 one of the deadliest battle-fields of Verdun (New Jersey) 
 with a vast army of three hundred supers. 
 
 When Kedzie had saved two or three nations and kept 
 the United States from war the millionaire would regret 
 that she was, after all, only a boy and be overcome with 
 rapture when she told him the truth. The three hundred 
 supers would then serve as wedding-guests in the biggest 
 church wedding ever pulled off. 
 
 Kedzie liked this last touch immensely. It would make 
 up for that disgusting guestless ceremony in the Municipal 
 Building. 
 
 Ferriday got rid of her exquisitely by writing a note and 
 saying to her: 
 
 "Now you run down and hop into my car and take this 
 note to Lady Powell-Carewe don't fail to call her 'Pole 
 Gary.' She is to design your wealthy wardrobe, and I 
 want her to study you and do something unheard of in 
 novelty and beauty. Tell her that the more she spends 
 the better I'll like it." 
 
 Kedzie was really a heroine. She did not swoon even 
 at that. 
 
 When Ferriday dismissed her he enfolded her to his 
 beautiful waistcoat, and then held her off by her two arms 
 and said : 
 
 "Little girl, you've made me so happy! So happy! 
 Ah ! We'll do great things together ! This is a red-letter 
 day for the movie art." 
 
 Kedzie never feared that it might have a scarlet-letter 
 
 176
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 significance. She forgot that she was anything but a new 
 born, full-fledged angel without a past only a future with 
 the sky for its limit. Alas! we always have our pasts. 
 Even the unborn babe has already centuries of a past. 
 
 It was Ferriday who brought Kedzie home to hers. 
 
 "What about dinner to-night, my dear? I feel like 
 having a wonderful dinner to-night! Are partridge in 
 season now? What is your favorite sherry? Let me call 
 for you at, say, seven. Where shall I call?" 
 
 Kedzie flopped back from the empyrean to her flat. 
 Gilfoyle again blockaded her. 
 
 She nearly swooned then. Her soul rummaged frantic 
 ally through a brain like her own work-basket. She 
 finally dug up an excuse. 
 
 "I'd rather meet you at the restaurant." 
 
 Ferriday smiled. He understood. The poor thing was 
 ashamed of her boarding-house. 
 
 "Well, Cinderella, let me send my pumpkin for you, at 
 least. I won't come. Where shall my -chauffeur find 
 you?" 
 
 Kedzie whimpered the shabby number of the shabby 
 street. 
 
 "Shall he ask for Miss Adair, or " 
 
 Kedzie was inspired: "I live in Mrs. Gilfoyle's flat- 
 partment." 
 
 "I see," said Ferriday. "Miss Anita Adair ring 
 Mrs. Gilfoyle's bell. All right, my angel, at seven. Run 
 along." 
 
 He kissed her, and she was ice-cold. But then women 
 were often like that before Ferriday's genius.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 '"PHE things we are ashamed of are an acid test of our 
 1 souls. Kedzie Thropp was constantly improving the 
 quality of her disgusts. 
 
 A few months ago she was hardly ashamed of sleeping 
 under a park bench. And already here she was sliding 
 through the street in a limousine. It was a shabby 
 limousine, but she was not yet ready to be ashamed of 
 any limousine. She was proud to have it lent to her, proud 
 to know anybody who owned such a thing. 
 
 What she was ashamed of now was the home it must 
 take her to a'nd the jobless husband waiting for her there. 
 She was ashamed of herself for tying up with a husband so 
 soon. She had married in haste and repented in haste. 
 And there was a lot of leisure for more repentance. 
 
 Already her husband was such a handicap that she 
 had refrained from mentioning his existence to the great 
 moving-picture director who had opened a new world of 
 glory to her thrown on a screen, as it were, a cinemation 
 of her future, where triumphs followed one another with 
 moving-picture rapidity. He had made a scenario of her 
 and invited her to dinner. 
 
 She smiled a little at the inspiration that had saved her 
 from confessing that she was Mrs. Gilfoyle. It was neat 
 of her to tell Mr. Ferriday that she could be addressed "in 
 care of Mrs. Gilfoyle." In care of herself! That was just 
 what she was. Who else was so interested in Kedzie's 
 advancement as Kedzie? 
 
 She was a bitterly disappointed Kedzie just now. 
 Ferriday had told her to go to Lady Powell-Carewe and 
 
 178
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 get herself a bevy of specially designed gowns at the 
 expense of the firm. There was hardly a woman alive 
 who would not have rejoiced at such a mission. To 
 Kedzie, who had never had a gown made by anything 
 higher than a sewing-woman, the privilege was heavenly. 
 Also, she had never met a Lady with a capital L. 
 
 The dual strain might have been the death of her, but 
 she was saved by the absence of Lady Powell-Carewe. 
 Kedzie went back to the street, sick with deferred hope. 
 Ferriday's chauffeur was waiting to take her home. 
 She felt grateful for the thoughtfulness of Ferriday and 
 crept in. 
 
 The nearer Kedzie came to her lowly highly flat the 
 less she wanted even the chauffeur of Mr. Ferriday's 
 limousine to see her enter it. He would come for her 
 again at night, but the building did not look so bad at 
 night. 
 
 So she tapped on the glass and told him to let her out, 
 please, at the drug-store, as she had some marketing to do. 
 
 "Sure, Miss," said the chauffeur. 
 
 Kedzie liked that " Miss." It was ever so much prettier 
 than "Mizzuz." She bought some postage-stamps at the 
 drug-store and some pork chops at the butcher's and went 
 down the street and up the stairs to her life-partner, dog 
 on him! 
 
 Gilfoyle was just finishing a poem, and he was the least 
 attractive thing in the world to her, next to his poem. 
 He was in his sock feet; his suspenders were down he 
 would wear the hateful things! his collar was off, his 
 sleeves up ; his detachable cuffs were detached and stuck 
 on the mantelpiece; his hair was crazy, and he had ink 
 smears on his nose. 
 
 " Don't speak to me !" he said, frantically, as he thumped 
 the table with finger after finger to verify the meter. 
 
 "No danger!" said Kedzie, and went into the bedroom 
 to look over her scant wardrobe and choose the least of its 
 evils to wear. 
 
 179
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She shook her head at her poverty and went to the 
 kitchen to cook lunch for her man. He followed her and 
 read her his poem while slie slammed the oven door of the 
 gas-stove at the exquisitely wrong moments. She broke 
 his heart by her indifference and he tore up the poem, 
 carefully saving the pieces. 
 
 "A whole day's work and five dollars gone!" he groaned. 
 He was so sulky that he forgot to ask her why she had 
 come home so early. He assumed that she had been 
 turned off. She taxed her ingenuity to devise some way 
 of getting to the dinner with Ferriday without letting 
 Gilfoyle know of it. At last she made so bold as to tell 
 her husband that she thought she would drop in at her 
 old boarding-house and stay for dinner if she got asked. 
 
 "I'm sick of my cooking," she said. 
 
 "So am I, darling. Go by all means!" said Gilfoyle, 
 who owed her one for the poem. 
 
 Kedzie was suspicious of his willingness to let her go, 
 but already she had outgrown jealousy of him. As a 
 matter of fact, he had been invited to join a few cronies 
 at dinner in a grimy Italian boarding-house. They gave 
 it a little interest by calling it a "speak-easy," because 
 the proprietor sold liquor without a license. Gilfoyle's 
 cronies did not know of his marriage and he was sure that 
 Kedzie would not fit. She did not even know the names 
 of the successful, therefore mercenary, writers and illus 
 trators, much less the names of the unsuccessful, there 
 fore artistic and sincere. 
 
 To Kedzie's delight, Gilfoyle took himself off at the end 
 of a perfect day of misery. He left her alone with her 
 ambitions. She was in very grand company. She 
 hated the duds she had to wear, but she solaced herself 
 with planning what she should buy when money was 
 rolling in. 
 
 When Ferriday's car came for her she was standing in 
 the doorway. She hopped in like the Cinderella that 
 Ferriday had called her. When the car rolled up to the
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Knickerbocker Hotel she pretended that it was her own 
 motor. 
 
 Ferriday was standing at the curb, humbly bareheaded. 
 He wore a dinner-jacket and a soft hat which he tucked 
 under his arm so that he might clasp her hands in both of 
 his with a costume-play fervor. He had been an actor 
 once and he boasted that he had been a very bad one. 
 
 Kedzie felt as if he were helping her from a sedan chair. 
 She imagined her knee skirts lengthened to a brocaded 
 train, and his trousers gathered up into knee breeches with 
 silver buckles. 
 
 Bitterness came back to her as she entered the hotel 
 and her slimpsy little cloth gown must brush the Parisian 
 skirts of the richly clad other women. 
 
 She pouted in right earnest and it was infinitely becom 
 ing to her. Ferriday was not thinking of the price or cut 
 of her frock. He was perceiving the flexile figure that 
 informed it, the virginal shoulders that curved up out of 
 it, the slender, limber throat that aspired from them and 
 the flower-poise of her head on its white stalk. 
 
 "You are perfect," he groaned into her ear, with a 
 flattering agony of appreciation. 
 
 That made everything all right and she did not tremble 
 much even before the maitre d'hotel. She was a trifle 
 alarmed at the covey of waiters who hastened to their 
 table to pull out the chairs and push them in and fetch 
 the water and bread and butter and silver and plates. 
 She was glad to have long gloves to take off slowly while 
 she recovered herself and took in the gorgeous room full 
 of gorgeous people. Gloves are most useful coming off 
 and going on. 
 
 Kedzie was afraid of the bill of fare with its complex 
 French terms, but Ferriday took command of the menu. 
 
 When he was working Ferriday could wolf a sandwich 
 with the greed of a busy artist and give orders with a shred 
 of meat in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other. 
 But when he luxuriated he luxuriated. 
 
 tSi
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 To-night he was tired of life and dejected from a battle 
 with the stingy backers, who had warned him for the 
 last time once more that he had to economize. He 
 needed to forget such people and the loathsome enemy of 
 fancy, economy. 
 
 "I want to order something as exquisite as you are," 
 he said. "Of course, there could be nothing as exquisite 
 as you are, Miss Adair unless you were curled up on a 
 silver dish with a little apple in your mouth like a young 
 roast pig. Ever read Lamb on pig?" 
 
 Kedzie laughed with glancing tintinnabulations as if one 
 tapped a row of glasses with a knife. 
 
 Ferriday sighed. He saw that she had never heard 
 of Lamb and thought he was perpetrating an an 
 cient pun. But he did not like bookish women and 
 he often said that nothing was more becoming to a 
 woman than ignorance. They should have wisdom, 
 but no learning. 
 
 Ferriday was one of those terrifying persons who know, 
 or pretend to know, curious secrets about restaurants and 
 their resources. Wine-cellars and the individualities of 
 chefs had no terror for him so far as she could see. He 
 expressed contempt for apparent commonplaces that 
 Kedzie had never heard of. He used French words with 
 an accent that Kedzie supposed to be perfect. 
 
 The waiters knew that he did not know much and had 
 merely picked up a smattering of dining-room lore, but 
 they humored his affectations. And of all affectations, 
 what is more futile than the printing of American bills 
 of fare in French? 
 
 "Would you prefer the Astrakhan caviar?" he began on 
 Kedzie, "or some or-durv? The caviar here is fairly 
 trustworthy." 
 
 Kedzie shrugged her perfectly accented shoulders in a 
 cowardly evasion, and he ordered the first caviar Kedzie 
 had ever eaten. It looked as if it came from a munitions- 
 factory, but she liked it immensely, especially as a side- 
 
 182
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 long glance at the bill of fare told her that it cost one 
 dollar and twenty-five cents per person. 
 
 Next he proposed either a potage madrilene or a creme 
 de volaille, Marie Louise. 
 
 Kedzie chose the latter because it was the latter. She 
 mumbled : 
 
 "I think a little cremmy vly Marie Louisa would be 
 nice." 
 
 She was amazed to find later how much it tasted like 
 chicken soup. 
 
 "We don't want any fish, do we?" Ferriday moaned. 
 "Or do we? They don't really understand the supreme 
 de sole a la Verdi here, so suppose we skip to the roast, 
 unless you would risk the aigulette de pompano, Coquelin. 
 The last time I had a troncon de saumon here I had to 
 send it back." 
 
 Kedzie said, "Let's skip." 
 
 She shuddered. The word reminded her, as always, of 
 Skip Magruder. She remembered how he had hung over 
 the table that far-away morning and recommended 
 ham 'n'eggs. His dirty shirt-sleeves and his grin came 
 back to her now. The gruesome Banquo reminded her 
 so vividly of her early guilt of plebeiancy that she shivered. 
 The alert Ferriday noticed it and called: 
 
 "Have that window closed at once. There's an infernal 
 draught here." 
 
 Kedzie was thrilled at his autocratic manner. He 
 scared off the ghost of Magruder. 
 
 Ferriday pondered aloud the bill of fare as if it were 
 the plot of a new feature film. 
 
 "Capon en casserole, milk-fed guinea-hen escoffier, 
 plover en cocotte, English golden pheasant, partridge 
 do any of those tiresome things interest you?" 
 
 It was like asking her whether she would have a Gorham 
 tea-set, a Balcom gown, or a Packard landaulet. She 
 wanted them all. 
 
 But her eyes caught the prices. Four dollars for an 
 
 183
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 English pheasant! No wonder they called it golden. 
 It seemed a shame, though, to stick such a nice man, 
 after he had already ordered two dollars and a half's worth 
 of caviar. 
 
 She chose the cheapest thing. She was already falling 
 in love with Ferriday. 
 
 The plover was only a dollar. She was not quite sure 
 what kind of animal it would turn out to be. She had a 
 womanly intuition that it was a fowl of some breed. She 
 wanted to know. She had come to the stomach school. 
 
 "I think I'll take a bit of the plover," she said. 
 
 "Nice girl!" thought Ferriday, who recognized her 
 vicarious economy. 
 
 "Plover it is," he said to the waiter, and added, "tell 
 Pierre it's for me and he'd better not burn it again." 
 
 The waiter was crushed by Pierre's lapse, especially as 
 the chef's name was Achille. 
 
 Ferriday went on: "With the plover we might have 
 some champignons frais sous cloche and a salade de laitue 
 avec French dressing, yes? Then a substantial sweet: 
 a coupe aux marrons or a nesselrode pudding, yes?" 
 
 Kedzie wanted to ask for a plain, familiar vanilla ice 
 cream, but she knew better. She ordered the nesselrode 
 and got her ice-cream, after all. There were chest 
 nuts in it, too so she was glad she had not selected the 
 coupe aux marrons. 
 
 Ferriday did not take a sweet, but had a cheese instead, 
 after an anxious debate with the waiter about the health of 
 the Camembert and the decadence of the Roquefort. When 
 this weighty matter was settled he returned to Kedzie : 
 
 "Now for something to drink. A little sherry and 
 bitters to begin with, of course; and a oh, umm, let 
 me see simple things are best; suppose we stick to 
 champagne." He called it "shah pine," according to 
 Kedzie's ear, but she hoped he meant shampane. She 
 had always wanted to taste "wealthy water," as Gilfoyle 
 called it, but never called for it. 
 
 184
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie was a trifle alarmed when Ferriday said: "I 
 hope you don't like it sweet. It can't be too dry for me." 
 
 "Me, either," Kedzie assured him and made a face 
 implying that she always took it in the form of a powder. 
 
 Ferriday smiled benignly and said to the waiter: "You 
 might bring us een boo-tay de Bollinger Numero er 
 katter vang kanz." He knew that the French for 
 ninety-five was four-twenties-fifteen, but the waiter could 
 not understand till he placed his finger on the number 
 with his best French accent. He saved himself from col 
 lapse by a stern post-dictum: 
 
 "Remember, it's the vintage of nineteen hjundred. If 
 you bring that loathsome eighteen ninety-three I'll have 
 to crack the bottle over your head. You wouldn't want 
 that, would you?" 
 
 " Non, m'zoo, oui, mon&oo," said the German waiter. 
 
 "Then we'll have some black coffee and a liqueur a 
 Curagao, say, or a green Chartreuse, or a white mint. 
 Which?" 
 
 Naturally Kedzie said the white mint, please. 
 
 With that Ferriday released the waiter, who hurried 
 away, hoping that Ferriday's affectations included ex 
 travagant tips. 
 
 Kedzie gobbled prettily the food before her. Ferriday 
 could tell that she was anxiously watching and copying 
 his methods of attack. He soon knew that this was her 
 first real meal de luxe, but he did not mind that. Colum 
 bus was not angry at America because it had never seen 
 an explorer before. 
 
 It delighted Ferriday to think that he had discovered 
 Kedzie. He would say later that he invented her. And 
 she wanted tremendously to be discovered or invented or 
 anything else, by anybody who could find a gold-mine in 
 her somewhere and pay her a royalty on her own mineral 
 wealth. 
 
 When her lips met the shell-edge of the champagne- 
 glass and the essence of all mischief flung its spray against 
 
 185
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 the tip of her cleverly whittled nose sue winced at first. 
 But she went boldly back, and soon the sprites that 
 rained upward in her glass were sending tiny balloons of 
 hope through her brain. They soared past her small skull 
 and her braided hair and the crown of her hat and on up 
 through the ceiling, and none of them broke as yet. 
 
 Her soul was pleasantly a-simmer now and she could not 
 tell whether the wine made her exultant or she the wine. 
 But she was sure that she had at last discovered her life. 
 
 And with it all she was dreadfully canny. She was 
 only a little village girl unused to city ways, and the 
 handsome city stranger was plying her with wine; but 
 she was none of your stencil figures that blot romance. 
 
 Kedzie was thinking over the cold, hard precepts that 
 women acquire somehow. She was resolving that since 
 she was to be as great as he said she should be, she must 
 not cheapen herself now. 
 
 Many of these little village girls have come to town 
 since time was and brought with them the level heads of 
 icily wise women who make love a business and not 
 a folly. Many men are keeping sober mainly nowadays 
 because it is good business; many women pure for the 
 same reason 
 
 Turkish sultans as fierce as Suleiman the Magnificent 
 have bought country girls kidnapped by slave-merchants 
 and have bought tyrants in the bargain. Ferriday the 
 Magnificent was playing with holocaust when he set a 
 match to Kedzie. 
 
 But now she was an attractive little flame and he 
 watched her soul flicker and gave it fuel. He also gave it a 
 cigarette; at least he proffered her his silver case, but she 
 shook her head. 
 
 ' ' Why not ?" he asked. ' ' All the women, old and young, 
 are smoking here." 
 
 She tightened her plump lips and answered, "I don't 
 like 'em; and they give me the fidgets." 
 
 "You'll do!" he cried, softly, reaching out and clench- 
 
 1 86
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 ing her knuckles in his palm a moment. "You're the wise 
 one! I felt sure that pretty little face of yours was only 
 a mask for the ugliest and most valuable thing a woman 
 can possess." 
 
 "What's that?" said Kedzie, hoping he was not going 
 to begin big talk. 
 
 "Wisdom," said Ferriday. "A woman ought to be as 
 wise as the serpent, but she ought to have the eyes of a dove. 
 Your baby sweetness is worth a fortune on the screen 
 if you have brains enough to manage it, and I fancy you 
 have. Here's to you, Miss Anita Adair!" 
 
 He drank deep, but she only touched the brim. She 
 saw that he was drinking too much he had had several 
 cocktails while he waited for her to arrive. Kedzie felt 
 that one of the two must keep a clear head. She found 
 that ice-water was a good antidote for champagne. 
 
 When Ferriday sharply ordered the waiter to look to 
 her glass she shook her head. When he finished the bottle 
 and the waiter put it mouth down in the ice as an eloquent 
 reminder Ferriday accepted the challenge and ordered 
 another bottle. He was just thickened of tongue enough 
 to say "boddle." 
 
 Kedzie spoke, quickly: "Please, no. I must go home. 
 It's later than I thought, and " 
 
 "And Mrs. Gilfoyle will wonder," Ferriday laughed. 
 "That's right, my dear. You've got to keep good hours 
 if you are going to succeethe on the screen. Early to bed v 
 for you must early-to-rise. Gar$on, gargon, I 'addition, s'il 
 wus please." 
 
 While he was paying the bill Kedzie was thinking 
 fleetly of her next problem. He would want to take her 
 home in his car, and it would be just her luck to find her 
 husband on the door-step. In any case, she was afraid 
 that Ferriday would be sentimental and she did not want 
 Ferriday to be sentimental just yet. And she would not 
 tolerate a sentiment inspired or influenced by wine.. 
 Love from a bottle is the poorest of compliments. 
 
 187
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Already she was a little disappointed in Ferriday. 
 He was a great man, but he had his fault, and she had 
 found him out. If he were going to be of use to her she 
 must snub that vinous phase at once. 
 
 The cool air outside seemed to gratify Ferriday and he 
 took off his hat while the carriage-starter whistled up his 
 car. Now Kedzie said: 
 
 "Please, Mr. Ferriday, just put me in a taxicab." 
 
 "Nonsense! I'll take you home. I'll certainly take 
 you home." 
 
 "No, please; it's 'way out of your way, and I I'd 
 rather really I would." 
 
 Ferriday stared hard at her as if she were just a trifle 
 Hurred. He frowned; then he smiled. 
 
 "Why, bless your soul, if you'd rather I wouldn't op 
 pose you, I wouldn't not for worlds. But you sha'n't 
 go home in any old cabby taxishab ; you'll take my wagon 
 and I'll walk. The walk will do me good." 
 
 Kedzie thought it would, too, so she consented with 
 appropriate reluctance. He lifted her in and closed the 
 door then leaned in to laugh : 
 
 "Give my love to old Mrs. Gilfoyle. And don't fail 
 to be at the shudio bright and early. We'll have to make 
 sun while the hay shines, you know. Good night, Miss 
 Adair!" 
 
 "Good night, Mr. Ferriday, and thank you ever so 
 much for the perfectly lovely evening." 
 
 "It has been 1-1-lovely. Goo-ood night!" 
 
 The car swept away and made a big turn. She saw 
 Ferriday marching grandiosely along the street, with his 
 head bared to the cool moonlight. She settled back 
 and snuggled into the cushions, imagining the car her 
 very own. 
 
 She left her glory behind her as she climbed the long 
 stairs, briskly preparing her lies and her defensive temper 
 for her husband's wrathful greeting. 
 
 He was not there. 
 
 1 88
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 "T/^EDZIE had no sooner rejoiced in the fortunate ab- 
 ISk. sence of her husband than she began to worry 
 because he was away. Where was he and with whom? 
 She sat by the window and looked up and down the 
 street, but she could find none among the pedestrians 
 who looked like her possessor. She forgot him in the 
 beauty of the town all black velvet and diamonds. 
 
 Once more she sat with her window open toward her 
 Jerusalem and worshiped the holy city of her desire. 
 That night at the Biltmore she was an ignorant country- 
 town girl who had never had anything. Now she had 
 had a good deal, including a husband. But, strangely, 
 there was just as much to long for as before more, in 
 deed, for she knew more things to want. 
 
 As the scientist finds in every new discovery a new dark 
 continent, in each atom a universe, so Kedzie found from 
 each acquired desire infinite new desires radiating fanwise 
 to the horizon and beyond. 
 
 At first she had wanted to know the town now she 
 wanted to be known by the town. Then her father stood 
 in her way ; now, her husband. She had eloped from her 
 parents with ease and they had never found her again. 
 She had succeeded in being lost. 
 
 She did not want to be lost any more ; but she was lost, 
 utterly nobody to anybody that mattered. Now was 
 her chance, but she could not run away from her husband 
 and get famous without his finding her. If he found her 
 he would spoil her fun and her fame. She did not know 
 how many public favorites are married, how many 
 
 189
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 matinee idols are managed by their wives. She had neve* 
 heard of the prima donna's husband. 
 
 She fell asleep among her worries. She was awakened 
 by the noisy entrance of her spouse. He was hardly 
 recognizable. She thought at first that her eyes were 
 bleary with sleep, but it was his face that was bleary. 
 He was what a Flagg caricature of him would be, with 
 the same merciless truth in the grotesque. 
 
 Kedzie had never seen him boozy before. She groaned, 
 expressively, "My Gawd! you're pie-eyed." 
 
 He sang an old song, "The girl guessed right the very 
 first time, very firstime, verfirstime." 
 
 He tried to take her into his arms. She slapped his 
 hands away. He laughed and flopped into a chair, giggling. 
 She studied him with almost more interest than repug 
 nance. He was idiotically jovial, as sly as an idiot and 
 as inscrutable. 
 
 Without waiting to be asked he began a recital of his 
 chronicles. He was as evidently concealing certain things 
 as boasting of others. Kedzie rather hoped he had done 
 something to conceal, since that would be an atonement 
 for her own subtleties. 
 
 "I have been in Bohemia," he said, "zhenuine old 
 Bohemia where hearts are true and eyes are blue and 
 ev'body loves ev'body else. Down there a handclasp is a 
 pledzh of loyalty. There's no hypocrisy in Bohemia not 
 a dambit. No, sirree. The idle rish with their shnob- 
 beries and worship of mere-mere someshing or oth' have 
 no place in Bohemia, for in Bohemia hearsh are true and 
 wine is blue and " 
 
 "Oh, shut up!" said Kedzie. 
 
 "Thass way you're always repressin' me. You're a 
 hopeless Philisterine. But I have no intentions of shuttin* 
 up, my darlin' Anita Anita Shh! shh!" 
 
 He was hushing himself. He was very patently remem 
 bering something and conspicuously warning himself not 
 to divulge it. Kedzie loathed him too much to care. 
 
 190
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Now that he was safely, housed he ceased to interest her. 
 She went to bed. He spiraled into a chair to meditate his 
 wickedness. He felt that he was as near to being a 
 hypocrite as was possible in Bohemia. 
 
 He had met two talented ladies at the dinner, one was a 
 sculptress from Mr. Samuel Merwin's Washington Square 
 and the other was a paintress from Mr. Owen Johnson's 
 Lincoln Square. Neither lady had had any work accepted 
 by the Academy or bought by a dealer. Both were con 
 sequently as fierce against intrenched art as Gilfoyle was 
 against intrenched capital and literature. 
 
 They were there in the company of two writers. One 
 of these could not get anything published at all except in 
 the toy magazines, which paid little and late and died 
 early. The other writer could get published, but not sold. 
 Both were young and needed only to pound their irons 
 on the anvil to get them hot, but they blamed the world 
 for being cold to true art. In time they would make the 
 sparks fly and would be in their turn assailed as mere 
 blacksmiths by the next line of younger apprentices. 
 They were at present in the same stage as any other new 
 business they were building up custom in a neighborhood 
 of strangers. 
 
 But at present they were suppressed, all four, men 
 and women; suppressed and smothered as next June's 
 flowers and weeds are held back by the conspiracy of 
 December's snows and the harsh criticisms of March. 
 
 The sculptress's first name was Marguerite and Gilfoyle 
 longed to call her by it, after his second goblet of claret- 
 and-water. He had a passion for first names. He had the 
 quick enthusiasm of a lawyer or an advertising-man for a 
 new client. Before he quite realized the enormity of his 
 perfidy he was pretending to compose a poem to Mar 
 guerite. He wrote busily on an old bill of fare which had 
 already been persecuted by an artist or two. And he 
 wrote his Anita poem over again in Marguerite's honor, 
 mutatis mutandis. 
 
 191
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I say Marguerita? 
 Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter. 
 
 And so on to the bitter end. 
 
 He slipped the lyric to Marguerite and she read it with 
 squeals of delight, while Gilfoyle looked as modest as such 
 a genius could. The other girl had to read it, of course, 
 while Gilfoyle tried to look unconscious. He was as suc 
 cessful as one is who tries to hold a casual expression for a 
 photograph. 
 
 The other girl's reward was a shrug and the diluted claret 
 of a "Very nice!" Gilfoyle said, "You're no judge or else 
 you're jealous." The two men read it, and said, " Mush !" 
 and " Slushgusher !" but Marguerite's eyes belonged to 
 Gilfoyle the rest of the evening, also her hands now and 
 then. 
 
 Remembering this, Gilfoyle was uneasy. One ought to 
 be careful to keep an aseptic memory at home. Yet if 
 this was not infidelity, what would be? In a rich man 
 Gilfoyle would have called it a typical result of the evil 
 influence of wealth. In the absence of wealth it was a gay 
 little Pierrot-perfidy of the me de Boheme. Still, poets 
 have to be like that. An actor must make love to what 
 ever leading lady confronts him, and so must poets, the 
 lawyers and press agents of love. 
 
 But when he got home Gilfoyle repented as he remem 
 bered. He suffered on a rack of guilty bliss, but he man 
 aged to hold back the secret which was bubbling up in 
 him with a bromo-seltzer effervescence. Incidentally his 
 "pretty maid, pretty maid, Marguerite" had kept back 
 the fact that she had a husband in the hardware business 
 in Terre Haute. What the husband was keeping back is 
 none of this history's business. 
 
 It was all as old and unoriginal as original sin. The 
 important thing to Kedzie was the fact that shortly after 
 the poem had been revamped a stranger had joined, first 
 in song with Gilfoyle's table-load and then in conversation. 
 
 192
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 He had ended by introducing his companion and bringing 
 her over. Had it not been for the fine democracy of 
 Bohemia they would have cut the creature dead. She 
 was a buyer, one of Miss Ferber's Emma McChesneys on 
 a lark. 
 
 Gilfoyle did not tell Kedzie any of this. He told what 
 followed as he toiled at the fearfully complicated problem 
 of his shoe-laces, a problem rendered almost insuperable 
 by the fact that he could not hold his foot high very long 
 and dared not hold his head low at all. 
 
 "Wonnerful thing happent t'night, Anita. Just shows- 
 you never know where your lucksh goin' to hit you. I'm 
 down there with er er couple of old frensh, you know,, 
 and who comes over to our table but big feller from 
 out Wesh Chicago Chicago Gobbless Ch'cag! His 
 name is entitled Deshler. In coursh conv'sation I men 
 tion Breathasweeta Shewing Gum see ? he says he knew 
 that gum and he'd sheen the advershments, bes' ol' ad- 
 vershments ever sheen, thass what Mr. Beshler said and 
 I'm not lyin' to you, Anita. No, sir. 
 
 "Whereupon whereupon I modes'ly remark, 'Of 
 course they're clever nashurally they're clever, because 
 they were written by 1'i'l Mr. ME ! ' He says, ' You really 
 wrote 'em?' and I say, 'I roally wretem!' And Mr, 
 Keshler says, 'Well, I'll be g'dam'.' Then he says, 'Who 
 coined that name Breathasweeta?' And I says, 'I did!" 
 and he says, 'Well, I'll be g'dam'!' 
 
 "Anyway, to make long shory stort, Mr. Nestor he 
 says, 'What you doin' now? Writen copy for the Kaiser 
 or the K-zar?' and I says, 'I am a gen'leman of leisure,' 
 and he says, ' There's a good job waitin' fer lad your size 
 out in Ch'cag! Would you come 'way out there?' and 
 I says, ' I fear nothing!' 
 
 "So Mr. Zeisselberg wrote his name on a card, and if I 
 
 haven't los' card, or he doesn't change his old mind, I am 
 
 now Mr. John J. Job of Chicago. And now I got a 
 
 unsolishited posish imposishible solishion solution un- 
 
 13 193
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 polusion solishible you know what I mean. So kiss 
 me!" 
 
 Kedzie escaped the kiss, but she asked, with a sleepy 
 eagerness, " Did you tell him you were married?" 
 
 "Nashur'ly not, my dear. It was stric'ly business 
 conv'sation. I didn' ask him how many shildren he had 
 and he didn' ask me if I was a Benedictine or a or a pony 
 of brandy thass pretty good. Hope I can rememmer 
 it to-mor'." 
 
 Kedzie smiled, but not at his boozy pun. She seemed 
 more comfortable. She fell asleep. Next to being inno 
 cent, being absolved is the most soothing of sensations.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 HPHE next morning that parrot, still unmurdered, woke 
 I Kedzie early. She buried one ear deep in the pillow 
 and covered the other with her hair and her hand. The 
 parrot's voice receded to a distance, but a still smaller 
 voice began to call to her. She was squirming deeper for 
 a long snooze when her foot struck another. 
 
 Her husband! King Log, audibly a-slumber. She 
 pouted drowsily, frowned, slid away, and tried to commit 
 temporary suicide by drowning herself in sleep. 
 
 Then her stupor faded as the tiny call resounded again 
 in her soul. She was no longer merely Mrs. Anita Gilfoyle, 
 the flat-dwelling nobody. She was now Anita Adair, the 
 screen-queen. She was needed at the studio. 
 
 She sat up, looked at her husband, her unacknowledged 
 and unacknowledging husband. A mysterious voice drew 
 her from his side as cogently as the hand of Yahweh drew 
 the rib that became a woman from under the elbow of 
 Adam. 
 
 She rose and looked back and down at the man whom ' 
 the law had united her with indissolubly . Eve must have 
 wondered back at Adam with the same sense of escape 
 while he lay asleep. According to one of the conflicting 
 legends of the two gods of Genesis, woman was then 
 actually one with man. Marriage has ever since been an 
 effort to put her back among his ribs, but she has always 
 efused to be intercostal. It is an ancient habit to pre 
 tend that she is, and sometimes she pretends to snuggle 
 into place. Yet she has never been, can never be, re- 
 ribbed -especially not since marriage is an attempt to 
 
 195
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 fit her into the anatomy of an Adam who is always, in 
 a sense, a stranger to her. 
 
 Kedzie gazed on her Adam with a sense of departure, 
 of farewell. She felt a trifle sorry for Gilfoyle, and the 
 moment she resolved to quit him he became a little more 
 attractive. 
 
 There was something pitiful about his helpless sprawl: 
 his very awkwardness endeared him infinitesimally. She 
 nearly felt that tenderness which good wives and fond 
 mothers feel for the gawky creatures they hallow with 
 their devotion. 
 
 Kedzie leaned forward to kiss the poor wretch good-by, 
 but, unfortunately (or fortunately), a restlessness seized 
 him, he rolled over on his other side, and one limp, floppy 
 hand struck Kedzie on the nose. 
 
 She sprang back with a gasp of pain and hurried away, 
 feeling abused and exiled. 
 
 At the studio she was received by Garfinkel with dis 
 tinction. Ferriday came out to meet her with a shining 
 morning face and led her to the office of the two backers. 
 
 A contract was waiting for her and the pen and ink were 
 handy. Kedzie had never seen a contract before and she 
 was as afraid of this one as if it were her death warrant. 
 It was her life warrant, rather. She tried to read it as 
 if she had signed dozens of contracts, but she fooled no 
 body. She could not make head or tail of "the party of 
 the first part" and the terms exacted of movie actors. 
 She understood nothing but the salary. One hundred 
 dollars a week ! That bloomed like a rose in the crabbed 
 text. She would have signed almost anything for that. 
 
 The deed was finally done. Her hundred-odd pounds 
 of flesh -belonged to the Hyperfilm Company. The 
 partners gave her their short, warm hands. Ferriday 
 wrung her palm with his long, lean fingers. Then he 
 caught her by the elbow and whisked her into his studio. 
 He began to describe her first scene in the big production. 
 The backers had insisted that she prove her ability as a 
 
 196
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 minor character in a play featuring another woman. 
 Kedzie did not mind, especially when Ferriday winked 
 and whispered: "We'll make you make her look like 
 something the cat brought in. First of all, those gowns 
 of yours " 
 
 She had told him of her ill luck the day before in finding 
 Lady Powell-Care we out. He sent her flying down again 
 in his limousine. She stepped into it now with assurance. 
 It was beginning to be her very own. At least she was 
 beginning to own the owner. 
 
 She felt less excitement about the ride now that it was 
 not her first. She noticed that the upholstery was frayed 
 in spots. Other cars passed hers. The chauffeur was not 
 so smart as some of the drivers. And he was alone. 
 On a few of the swagger limousines there were two men 
 in livery on the box. She felt rather ashamed of having 
 only one. 
 
 Her haughty discontent fell from her when she arrived 
 at Lady Powell-Carewe's shop. She wished she had not 
 come alone. She did not know how to behave. And 
 what in Heaven's name did you call her "Your Lady 
 ship" or "Your Majesty" or what? 
 
 She walked in so meekly and was so simply clad that 
 nobody in the place paid any heed to her at first. It was 
 a very busy place, with girls rushing to and fro or saunter 
 ing limberly up and down in tremendously handsome 
 gowns. 
 
 Kedzie could not pick out Lady Powell-Carewe. One 
 of the promenaders was so tall and so haughty that 
 Kedzie thought she must be at least a "Lady." She 
 was in a silvery, shimmery green-and-gray gown, and the 
 man whom the customers called "Mr. Charles" said: 
 
 "Madame calls this the Blown Poplar. Isn't it 
 bully?" 
 
 Kedzie caught Mr. Charles's eye. He spoke to her 
 sharply: 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 197
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 He evidently thought her somebody looking for a job as 
 bundle-carrier. She was pretty, but there were tons of 
 pretty girls. They bored Mr. Charles to death. He had 
 a whole beagle-pack of them to care for. 
 
 Kedzie poked at him Ferriday's letter of introduction 
 addressed to Lady Powell-Care we. Mr. Charles took it 
 and, not knowing what it contained, bore it into the 
 other room without asking Kedzie to sit down. 
 
 He reappeared at the door and bowed to her with great 
 amazement. She slipped into a chaotic room where there 
 were heaps of fabrics thrown about like rubbish, long 
 streamers of samples littering a desk full of papers. 
 
 A sumptuous creature of stately manner bowed creakily 
 to Kedzie, and Kedzie said, trying to remember the pro 
 nunciation : 
 
 "Lady Pole-Carrier?" 
 
 A little plainly dressed woman replied: "Yes, my child. 
 So you're the Adair thing that Ferriday is gone half 
 witted over. He's just been talking my ear off about you. 
 Sit down. Stop where you are. Let me see you. Turn 
 around. I see." She turned to the stately dame. 
 "Rather nice, isn't she, Mrs. Congdon? H'mm!" She 
 beckoned Kedzie to come close. "What are your eyes 
 like?" She lorgnetted the terrified girl, as if she were 
 a throat-specialist. "Take off that horrid hat. Let 
 me see your hair. H'mm! Rather nice hair, isn't it, 
 Mrs. Congdon? that is, if she knew how to do it. Let 
 me see. Yes, I get your color, but it will be a job to 
 suit you and that infernal movie-camera. It kills my 
 colors so! I have to keep remembering that crimson 
 photographs black and cream is dirty, and blue and yellow 
 are just nothing." 
 
 Mr. Charles came in to say that Mrs. Noxon was out 
 side. Kedzie recognized the great name with terror. 
 Lady Powell-Carewe snapped: 
 
 "Tell the old camel I'm ill. I can't see ner to-day ; 
 I'm ill to everybody to-day. I've taken a big job on." 
 
 198
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 This was sublime. To have aristocrats turned away 
 for her ! 
 
 While Madame prowled among the fabrics and bit her 
 lorgnon in study, Kedzie looked over the big albums filled 
 with photographs of the creations of the great creatrix. 
 For Lady Powell-Care we was a creative artist, taking her 
 ideas where she found them in art or nature, and in re 
 vivals and in inventions. She took her color schemes 
 from paintings, old and new, from jewels, landscapes. 
 It was said that she went to Niagara to study the floods 
 of color that tumble over its brink. 
 
 She began to interest herself in Kedzie, to wish to ac 
 complish more than the mere selling of dress goods made 
 up. She decided to create Kedzie as well as her clothes. 
 
 "Do you wear that pout all the time?" she asked. 
 
 "Do I pout?" Kedzie asked, in an amazement. 
 
 "Don't pretend that you don't know it and do it in 
 tentionally. Also why do you Americans always answer 
 a question by asking another?" 
 
 "Do we?" said Kedzie. 
 
 Lady Powell-Carewe decided that Kedzie was as short 
 on brains as she was long on looks. But it was the looks 
 that Lady Powell-Carewe was going to dress, and not 
 the brains. 
 
 She ordered Kedzie to spend a lot of money having her 
 hair cared for expertly. 
 
 She tried various styles on Kedzie, ordering her to throw 
 off her frock and stand in her combination while Mrs. 
 Congdon and Mr. Charles brought up armloads of silks 
 and velvets and draped them on Kedzie as if she were a 
 clothes-horse. 
 
 The feel of the crisp and whispering taffetas, the ele 
 vation of the brocades, the warm nothingness of the chif 
 fons like wisps of fog, the rich dignity of the cloths, gave 
 Kedzie rapture on rapture. Standing there with a 
 burden of fabrics upon her and Lady Powell-Carewe 
 kneeling at her feet pinning them up and tucking them 
 
 199
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 here and there, Kedzie was reminded of those ancient 
 days of six months gone when her mother used to kneel 
 about her and fit on her the home-made school-dress cut 
 according to Butterick patterns. Now Kedzie had a 
 genuine Lady at her feet. It was a triumph indeed. It 
 was not hard now to believe that she would have all the 
 world at her feet one day. 
 
 Lady Powell-Carewe used Kedzie's frame as a mere 
 standard to fly banners from. Leaving the head and 
 shoulders to stand out like the wax bust of a wistful doll, 
 she started a cloud of fabric about her in the most extrav 
 agant fashion. She reined it in sharply at the waist, 'but 
 again it flared to such distances on all sides that Kedzie 
 could never have sailed through any door but that of a 
 garage without compression. 
 
 On this vast bell of silk she hung streamers of rosettes, 
 flowers of colors that would have been strident if they 
 had been the eighteenth of a shade stronger. As it was, 
 they were as delicious as cream curdled in a syrup of 
 cherries. The whole effect would have been burlesque 
 if it had not been the whim of a brilliant taste. Men 
 would look it at and say, "Good Lord!" Women would 
 murmur, enviously, "Oh, Lord!" Kedzie's soul expanded 
 to the ultimate fringe of the farthest furbelow. 
 
 When the fantasy was assured Lady Powell-Carewe had 
 Kedzie extracted from it. Then pondering her sapling 
 slenderness, once more she caught from the air an inspira 
 tion. She would incase Kedzie in a sheath of soft, white 
 kid marked with delicate lines and set off with black 
 gloves and a hat of green leaves. And this she would call 
 "The White Birch." 
 
 And that was all the creating she felt up to for the day. 
 She had Kedzie's measure taken in order to have a slip 
 made as a model for use in the hours when Kedzie should 
 be too busy to stand for fitting. 
 
 It was well for Kedzie that there was a free ride waiting 
 for her. Her journey to the studio was harrowed by the 
 
 200
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 financial problem which has often tortured people in 
 limousines. She did not like to ask Mr. Ferriday for 
 money in advance. He might think she was poor. 
 There is nothing that bankrupts the poor so much as the 
 effort to look unconcerned while they wait for their next 
 penny. 
 
 Kedzie was frantic with worry and was reduced to 
 prayer. "O Lord, send me some money somehow." The 
 number of such prayers going up to heaven must cause 
 some embarrassment, since money can usually be given to 
 one person only by taking it from another and that other 
 is doubtless praying for more at the very moment. 
 
 To Kedzie's dismay, when she arrived at the studio and 
 asked for Mr. Ferriday, Mr. Garfinkel appeared. He was 
 very deferential, but he was, after all, only a Garfinkel 
 and she needed a Ferriday. He explained that his chief 
 was very busy and had instructed Garfinkel to teach Miss 
 Adair the science of make-up for the camera, to take test 
 pictures of her, and give her valuable hints in lens be 
 havior. 
 
 Late in the afternoon Ferriday came in to see the result 
 of the first lesson. He said, "Much obliged, Garfinkel," 
 and Garfinkel remembered pressing duty elsewhere. 
 
 His departure left Kedzie alone with Ferriday in a 
 cavern pitch black save for the cone of 'light spreading from 
 the little hole in the wall at the back to the screen where 
 the spray of light-dust became living pictures of Kedzie. 
 
 Kedzie did not know that the operator behind the wall 
 could peek and peer while his picture-wheel rolled out the 
 cataract of photographs. Ferriday was careful of her 
 or of himself. He held her hand, of course, and murmured 
 to her how stunning she was, but he made no effort to 
 make love, to her great comfort and regret. 
 
 At length he invited her to ride home in his limousine, 
 but he did not invite her to dinner. She told herself that 
 she would have had to decline. But she would have 
 liked to be asked. 
 
 201
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 While he rhapsodized once more about her future she 
 was thinking of her immediate penury. As she ap 
 proached the street of her residence she realized that she 
 must either starve till pay-day or borrow. It was a bad 
 beginning, but better than a hopeless ending. After 
 several gasps of hesitation she finally made her plea: 
 
 " I'm awfully sorry to have to trouble you, Mr. Ferriday, 
 but I'm Well, could you lend me twenty-five dollars?" 
 
 "My dear child, take fifty," he cried. 
 
 She shook her head, but it hurt her to see the roll of 
 bills he dived for and brought up, and the careless grace 
 with which he peeled two leaves from the cabbage. Easy 
 money is always attended with resentment that more did 
 not come along. Kedzie pouted at her folly in not ac 
 cepting the fifty. If she had said, "Lend me fifty," he 
 would have offered her a hundred. But the twenty-five 
 was salvation, and it would buy her food enough to keep 
 her and her useless husband alive, and to buy her a pair of 
 shoes and some gloves. 
 
 As the car drew near her corner she cried that she had 
 some shopping' to do and escaped again at the drug-store. 
 
 She found her husband at home. There was an un 
 wonted authority about his greeting : 
 
 "Well, young woman, you may approach and kiss my 
 hand. I am a gentleman with a job. I am a Chicago 
 gentleman with a job." 
 
 "You don't mean it!" Kedzie gasped; and kissed him 
 from habit with more respect than her recent habit had 
 shown. 
 
 "I mean it," said Gilfoyle. "I am now on the staff 
 of the Deshler Advertising Agency. I was afraid when 
 Mr. D. offered me an unsolicited position (he could say 
 it to-day) that it was the red wine and not the real money 
 that was talking, but he was painfully sober this noon, 
 took me out to lunch, and told me that he would be proud 
 to avail himself of my services." 
 
 "Splendid!" said Kedzie, with sincere enthusiasm. It 
 
 202
 
 is always pleasant to learn that money is setting toward 
 the family. 
 
 But something told Kedzie that her late acquisition of 
 twenty-five dollars would not be with her long. Easy 
 come, easy go. "How much is the fare to Chicago?" 
 she asked, in a hollow voice. 
 
 "Twenty-two dollars is the fare," said Gilfoyle, "with 
 about eight dollars extra. I couldn't borrow a cent. I've 
 got only five dollars." 
 
 "I thought so," said Kedzie. 
 
 "Thought what so?" said Gilfoyle. 
 
 "Nothing," said Kedzie. "Well, I happen to have 
 twenty-five dollars." 
 
 "That's funny," said Gilfoyle. "Where did you get 
 it?" 
 
 "Oh, I saved it up." 
 
 "From what?" 
 
 "Well, do you want the twenty-five, or don't you?" 
 
 Gilfoyle pondered. If he questioned the source of the 
 money he might find it out, and be unable to accept it. 
 He wanted the money more than the hazardous informa 
 tion ; so he said : 
 
 "Of course I want the twenty-five, darling, but I hate 
 to rob you. Of course I'll send for you as soon as I can 
 make a nest out there, but how will you get along?" 
 
 "Oh, I'll get along," said Kedzie; "there'll be some 
 movie-money coming to me Saturday." 
 
 "Well, that's fine," Gilfoyle said, feeling a weight of 
 horrible guilt mingled with superior wings of relief. 
 He hesitated, hemmed, hawed, perspired, and finally 
 looked to that old source of so many escapes, his watch. 
 "There's a train at eight-two; I could just about make 
 it if I scoot now." 
 
 "You'd better scoot," said Kedzie. And she gave him 
 the money. 
 
 "I'd like to have dinner with you," Gilfoyle faltered, 
 "but" 
 
 203
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Yes, I'd like to have you, but " 
 
 They looked at each other wretchedly. Their love 
 was so lukewarm already that they bothered each other. 
 There was no impulse to the delicious bitter-sweet of a 
 passionate farewell. She was as eager to have him gone 
 as he to go, and each blamed the other for that. 
 
 "I'll write you every day," he said, "and I'll send the 
 fare to you as soon as I can get it." 
 
 "Yes, of course," Kedzie mumbled. "Well, good-by 
 don't miss your train, darling." 
 
 "Good-by, honey." 
 
 They had to embrace. Their arms went out about each 
 other and clasped behind each other's backs. Then some 
 impulse moved them to a fierce clench of desperate sorrow. 
 They were embracing their dead loves, the corpses that lay 
 dead in these alienated bodies. It was an embrace across 
 a grave, and they felt the thud of clods upon their love. 
 
 They gasped with the pity of it, and Kedzie's eyes were 
 reeking with tears and Gilfoyle's lips were shivering when 
 they wrenched out of that lock of torment. 
 
 He caught her back to him and kissed her salt-sweet 
 mouth. Her kiss was brackish on his lips as life was. 
 She felt a kind of assault in the fervor of his kiss, but she 
 did not resist. He was a stranger ^who sprang at her 
 from the dark, but he was also very like a poet she had 
 loved poetically long, long ago. 
 
 Then they wrung hands and called good-bys and he 
 caught up his suit-case and rushed through the door. 
 
 She hung from the window to wave to him as he ran 
 down the street to the Subway, pausing now and again 
 to wave to her vaguely, then stumbling on his course. 
 
 At last she could not see him, whether for the tears or 
 for the distance, and she bowed her head on her lonely sill 
 and wept. 
 
 She had a splendid cry that flushed her heart clean as 
 a new whistle. She washed her eyes with fine cold water 
 and half sobbed, half laughed, "Well, that's over." 
 
 204
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 CHARITY COE CHEEVER was making less progress 
 with her amateur movie-show than Kedzie with her 
 professional cinematic career. 
 
 Charity telephoned to ask Jim Dyckman to act, but he 
 proved to be camera-shy and intractable. 
 
 She had difficulties with all her cast. It was impossible 
 to satisfy the people who were willing to act with the rdles 
 they were willing to assume. 
 
 Charity was lunching at the Ritz-Carlton with Mrs. 
 Noxon when she saw Jim Dyckman come in with his 
 mother. Mrs. Noxon left Charity and went over to 
 speak to Mrs. Dyckman. So Charity beckoned Jim 
 over and urged him to accept the job of impresario. 
 
 He protested, but she pleaded for his help at least on 
 an errand or two. 
 
 "Jim, I want you to go up to the studio of these people 
 and find this great man Ferriday and get him to promise 
 to direct for us. And by the way, that little girl you 
 pulled out of the pool, you know well, they promised to 
 get her a job at the studio. You look her up and find 
 out how she's doing there's a darling." 
 
 He shook his head, resisting her for once, and answered: 
 
 "Go to the devil, Charity darling. You won't let me 
 love you, so I'll be cussed if I'll let you get me to working 
 for you. I've had you bad and I'm trying to get well of 
 you. So let me alone." 
 
 That was how Peter Cheever, talking to the headwaiter 
 at the head of the stairs, saw his wife and Jim Dyckman 
 with their heads together at a table. He wanted to 
 
 205
 
 go over and crack a water-bottle over Dyckman's 
 head. He did not do it, for the excellent reason 
 that Zada L'Etoile was at his side. She had insisted 
 on his taking her there "to lunch with the bunch," as 
 she expressed it. 
 
 She also saw Charity and Jim and Cheever's sudden 
 flush of rage. She felt that the way was opening for her 
 dreams to come true. She was so happy over the situa 
 tion that she helped Cheever out of the appalling problem 
 before him. 
 
 He did not know how to go forward or how to retreat. 
 He could think of nothing to say to the headwaiter who 
 offered him his choice of tables. 
 
 Zada caught his elbow and murmured in her very best 
 voice just loud enough for the headwaiter's benefit: 
 
 "Mr. Cheever, I'm so sorry but I'm feeling dizzy. 
 I'm afraid I shall faint if I don't get out in the air. It's 
 very close in here." 
 
 "It is very close, madam," said the headwaiter, and 
 he helped to support her down the steps quietly and 
 deferentially, just as if he believed it. 
 
 Zada and Cheever thought they were escaping from a 
 crisis, but they were drifting deeper and deeper into the 
 converging currents. When they were safe in the motor 
 outside Zada was proud. 
 
 "Some get-away, that?" she laughed. 
 
 "Wonderful!" said Cheever. "I didn't know you had 
 so much social skill." 
 
 "You don't know me," she said. "I'm learning! 
 You'll be proud of me yet." 
 
 "I am now," he said. "You're the most beautiful 
 thing in the world." 
 
 "Oh, that's old stuff," she said. "Any cow can be 
 glossy. But I'm going in for the real thing, Peterkin. 
 I've cut out the cocktails and I don't dance with anybody 
 but you lately. Have you noticed that? It's the quiet 
 Hfe and the nice ways for me. Do you mind?" 
 
 206
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "It's very becoming," he said. "Anything for a 
 novelty." 
 
 Yet he liked her surprisingly well in this phase. She 
 had been cutting down his liquor, too. She had been 
 cutting down his extravagances. She had even achieved 
 the height of denying herself luxuries one of the surest 
 and least-trodden short-cuts to a man's heart a little 
 secret path he hardly knows himself. 
 
 The affair of Zada and Cheever was going the normal 
 course. It had lost the charm of the wild and wicked 
 through familiarity; and it was tending to domestication, 
 as all such moods do if nothing interrupts them. There 
 are all sorts of endings to such illicit relations: most 
 of them end with the mutual treachery of two fickle 
 creatures; some of them end with bitter grief for one or 
 the other or both ; some of them end in crime, or at least 
 disgrace; and some of them finish, with disconcerting im 
 morality, in an inexcusable respectability. 
 
 The improvement in Zada's mind and heart was, 
 curiously, the most dangerous thing in the world for 
 Cheever. If she had stayed noisy and promiscuous and 
 bad, he would have tired of her. But she was growing 
 soft and homey, gentle as ivy, and as hard to tear away 
 or to want to tear away. After all, marriage is only the 
 formalizing of an instinct that existed long before exists 
 in some animals and birds who mate without formality 
 and stay mated without compulsion. 
 
 When Zada and Cheever had escaped from the Ritz- 
 Carlton they took lunch at another restaurant. Zada 
 was childishly proud of her tact and of Cheever's ap 
 preciation. But afterward, on the way "home" as she 
 called what other people called her "lair" she grew 
 suddenly and deeply solemn. 
 
 "So your wife is with Dyckman again," she said. "It 
 looks to me like a sketch." 
 
 Cheever flushed. He hated her slang and he did not 
 accept her conclusion, but this time he did not forbid her 
 
 207
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 to mention his wife. He could hardly do that when her 
 tact had saved him and Charity from the results of their 
 double indiscretion and the shame of amusing that room 
 ful of gossips. 
 
 Zada misunderstood his silence for approval; so she 
 spoke her thoughts aloud: 
 
 "If that He and She business goes on I suppose you'll 
 have to divorce the lady." 
 
 " Divorce Charity!" Cheever gasped. "Are you dotty?" 
 
 That hit Zada pretty hard, but she bore it. She came 
 back by another door. 
 
 "I guess I am nearly as dotty as she is about Dyck- 
 man. First thing you know she'll be trying to get free 
 herself. What if she asks you for a divorce?" 
 
 "I'd like to see her!" 
 
 "You mean you wouldn't give her her freedom?" 
 
 "Not in a thousand years." 
 
 He was astounded at the sepulchral woe of Zada's groan. 
 "O Lord, and I thought oh you don't love me at all 
 then! You never really loved me really! God help 
 me." 
 
 Cheever wondered what Zada would smash first. He 
 hoped it would not be the window of the car. He hoped 
 he could get her safely indoors before the smashing began. 
 
 He did. She was a grim and murky storm-cloud full of 
 tornado when they crossed the pavement and the vestibule 
 of the apartment-house and went up in the elevator. 
 
 But once inside the door, her breast began to heave, her 
 nostrils to quiver, her fingers to work. Her maid came to 
 take her hat, and paled to see her torment. Zada gave 
 her her things and motioned her away. She motioned her 
 four or five times. The maid had needed only one 
 motion. 
 
 Cheever watched Zada out of the corner of his eye and 
 wondered why he had ever been fated to fall in love with 
 such a creature. He was convinced that he had been fate- 
 forced into the intrigue. He had no sense whatever of 
 
 208
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 volition or wicked intent. He could only feel that he had 
 tried to be decent and play fair and be generous. 
 
 The thought of what the neighbors were about to hear 
 made him sick with chagrin. The fact that the neigh 
 bors were under suspicion themselves only aggravated 
 the burden of shame. 
 
 The hardest part of Zada's agony was her pitiful effort 
 to take her medicine like a lady. It was terrific how hard 
 it was for one of a wildcat heritage and habit to keep 
 the caterwaul back and the claws muffled. The self- 
 duel nearly wrecked Zada, but she won it. She was not 
 thoroughbred, but she had tried to be thoroughgoing. 
 She was evidently not a success as a self-made lady. She 
 kept whispering to herself: 
 
 "What's the use? Oh, why did I try? Oh, oh, oh, 
 what a fool I've been! To think! to think! to think!" 
 
 Cheever was distraught. He had waited for the out 
 break, and when it did not come he suffered from the re 
 coil of his own tension. 
 
 "For the Lord's sake, yell!" he implored. 
 
 She turned on him eyes of extraordinary abjection. 
 She saw at last where her lawlessness had brought her, 
 and she despised herself. But she did not love him any 
 the more for understanding him. She saw at last that one 
 cannot be an honest woman without actually being an 
 honest woman. She was going to get honesty if it broke 
 a bone. 
 
 She told her accomplice: "I want you to go away and 
 stay away. Whatever you do, leave me be. There's 
 nothing else you can do for me except to take back all the 
 stuff you've bought me. Give it to that wife you love so 
 much and wouldn't suspect no matter what she did. You 
 love her so much that you wouldn't let her go even if she 
 wanted to leave you. So go back to her and take these 
 things to her with my comp'ments." 
 
 Now it was Cheever who wanted to scream as he had 
 not screamed since he was the purple-faced boy who used 
 
 209
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 to kick the floor and his adoring nurse. But he had lost 
 the safety valve of the scream. He smothered. 
 
 When Zada began to peel off her rings and thrust them 
 out to him he swiftly turned on his heel and fled. He 
 never knew whether Zada woke the block with her howls. 
 or not when he left her forever. 
 
 He forgot to ask when he came back.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 FIRST he went home to take his temper to Charity. 
 On the way he worked up a splendid rage at her for 
 giving such a woman as Zada grounds for gossip. He went 
 straight to her room and walked in without knocking. 
 
 Charity was dictating a letter to her secretary. Cheever 
 surprised a phrase before she saw him. 
 
 " ' Thousands of blind soldiers and thousands of orphans 
 hold out their hands to us. We must all do what we can ' 
 Why, hello! Where did you drop from? Give me just 
 a minute while I finish this letter. Let me see. Where 
 was I?" 
 
 The secretary read in a dull, secretarial voice: 
 
 ' " Thousblinsoldiersorphs wem'sdo'll we can.'" 
 
 "Oh yes," said Charity. "You have never failed to 
 respond to such an appeal,' comma; no, semicolon; no, 
 period. 'So I shall put you down for a subscription of 
 dash 'how much' question-mark. 'Thanking you in 
 adv' no, just say, 'My husband joins me in kindest re 
 gards to your dear wife and yourself, cordially yours' 
 and that will be all for the present." 
 
 The secretary garnered her sheaves and went out. 
 Charity said to Cheever: 
 
 "Well, young man, sit down and tell us what's on your 
 mind. But first let me tell you my troubles. There's a 
 ma,tch on my dresser there. Peter, I'm in an awful mess 
 with this movie stunt. I can get plenty of people to pose 
 for the camera, but I can't find a man to manage the 
 business end of it. I was lunching with Mrs. Noxon at 
 the Ritz to-day. I called your friend Jim Dyckman over 
 
 211
 
 from another table and begged him to take the job. But 
 he refused flatly, the lazy brute. Don't you think you 
 could take it on? I wish you would. It's such a big 
 chance to make a pile of money for those poor soldiers." 
 
 Cheever was lost. Unconsciously she had cleared up 
 the scandal of her talk with Dyckman. He remembered 
 that he had seen Mrs. Noxon at another table, standing. 
 He felt like a dog and he wanted to fawn at the heels he 
 had prepared to bite. He felt unworthy to be the associate 
 of his sainted wife in her good works. He said: 
 
 "You flatter me. I couldn't manage a thing like that. 
 I'm busy. I I couldn't." 
 
 "You've got to play a part, then," she said. "You're 
 looking so well nowadays, taking such good care of your 
 self. Will you?" 
 
 "I might," he said. " I'll think it over." 
 
 She was called to the telephone then and he escaped 
 to his own room. He moped about and sulked in his un 
 comfortable virtue. He dressed for dinner with unusual 
 care. He was trying to make a hit with his wife. 
 
 In going through his pocket-book he came across two 
 theater tickets. He had promised to take Zada. He felt 
 like a low hound, both for planning to take her and for 
 not taking her. She would have a dismal evening. And 
 she was capable of such ferocious lonelinesses. He had 
 driven away all her old friends. She would recall them 
 now, he supposed. That would be a pity, for they were an 
 odious gang. It would be his fault if she relapsed. It 
 was his duty, in a way, to help her to reform. 
 
 The ludicrous sublimity of such an ethical snarl re 
 duced him to inanity. He stayed to dinner. Charity 
 had not expected him to stop. She had planned an 
 evening's excavation into her correspondence and had 
 not changed her street dress. She was surprised and 
 childishly delighted to have him with her then child 
 ishly unhappy as she observed: 
 
 "But you're all togged up. You're going out." 
 
 212
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "No well that is er I was thinking you would 
 like to see a show. I've got tickets." 
 
 " But it's late. I'm not dressed." 
 
 "What's the odds? You look all right. There's never 
 anybody but muckers there Saturday nights. We'll miss 
 it all if you stop to prink." 
 
 "All right," she cried, and hurried through the dinner. 
 
 He was glad at least that he had escaped a solemn eve 
 ning at home. He could not keep awake at home. 
 
 So they went to the theater; but there was not "no 
 body there," as he had promised. 
 
 Zada was there alone in a box, dressed in her best, 
 and wearing her East-Lynniest look of pathos. 
 
 The coincidence was not occult. After several hours 
 of brave battle with grief and a lonely dinner Zada had 
 been faced by the appalling prospect of an evening alone. 
 
 She remembered Cheever's purchase of the theater 
 tickets, and she was startled with an intuition that he 
 would take his wife in her place. Men are capable of such 
 indecent economies. 
 
 Zada was suffocated with rage at the possibility. She 
 always believed implicitly in the worst things she could 
 think of. If Peter Cheever dared do such a thing! 
 And of course he would! Well, she would just find 
 out! 
 
 She threw a lonely wineglass at the fern-dish and 
 smashed a decanter. Then she pushed off the table about 
 a hundred dollars' worth of chinaware, and kicked her 
 chair over backward. She had been famous for her back- 
 kick in her public dancing-days. 
 
 She howled to her maid and went into her wardrobe 
 with both hands. She acted like a windmill in a dress- 
 shop. Finally she came upon what she was looking for 
 the most ladylike theater-gown that ever combined mag 
 nificence with dazzling respectability. 
 
 She made up her face like a lady's it took some 
 paint to do that. Meanwhile, her maid was telephoning 
 
 213
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 speculators for a box. Zada arrived before Cheever and 
 Charity did. She waited a long time, haughtily indif 
 ferent to the admiration she and her gown were achieving. 
 At last she was punished and rewarded, revenged, and 
 destroyed by the sight of Cheever coming down the aisle 
 with Charity. They had to pause to let a fat couple rise, 
 and they paused, facing Zada. Cheever caught her eye 
 and halted, petrified, long enough for Charity to sit down, 
 look up at him, follow the line of his gaze, and catch a full 
 blast of Zada's beauty and of the fierce look she fastened 
 on Cheever. Charity's eyes ran back on the almost 
 visible clothes-line of that taut gaze and found Cheever 
 wilting with several kinds of shame. 
 
 He sat down glum and scarlet, and Charity's heart 
 began to throb. A second glance told her who Zada was. 
 She had seen the woman often when Zada had danced in 
 the theaters and the hotel ballrooms. 
 
 Charity found herself thinking that she was not Cheev- 
 er's wife, but only a poor relation by marriage. The 
 worst of it was that she was not dressed for the theater. 
 The gown she wore was exquisite in its place, but it was 
 dull and informal and it gave her no help in the ordeal she 
 was suddenly submitted to. Her hair had not been 
 coiffed by the high-elbowed artist with the waving-tongs. 
 Her brains were not marceled for a beauty-contest with 
 her rival. She was at her worst and Zada was at her 
 supreme. 
 
 Zada was not entirely unknown to Charity. She had 
 not been able to escape all the gossip that linked Cheever 
 with her, but she had naturally heard little of it, and 
 then only from people of the sort who run to their friends 
 with all the bad news they can collect. They are easily 
 discredited. 
 
 Charity had spent so many bad hours wondering at her 
 husband's indifference and had heard his name linked 
 with so many names that she had temporized with the 
 situation. Cheever was of the sort that looks at every 
 
 214
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 woman with desire, or looks as if he looked so. The 
 wives of such men grow calloused or quit them. 
 
 Charity had not quit Cheever. She had hardly dreamed 
 of it. She had not outgrown being hurt. Her slow 
 wrath had not begun to manifest itself. This crushing 
 humiliation smote her from a clear sky. 
 
 She was not ready for it. She did not know what to do. 
 She only knew, by long training, that she must not do what 
 she first wanted to do. She had been taught from child 
 hood what Zada was only now trying to learn. 
 
 Charity pretended a great interest in her program and 
 laughed flightily. Cheever was morose. He stole glances 
 at Zada and saw that she was in anguish. He felt that he 
 had treated her like dirt. He was unworthy of her, or of 
 his wife, or of anything but a horsewhip. 
 
 He glanced at Charity and was fooled by her casual 
 chatter. He supposed that she was as ignorant of the 
 affair with Zada as he wanted her to be. He wished that 
 he could pretend to be unconcerned, but he could not 
 keep his program from shivering; his throat was full of 
 phlegm; he choked on the simplest words. He thought 
 for some trick of escape, a pretended illness, a remembered 
 business engagement, a disgust with the play. 
 
 He was afraid to trust his voice to any proposal or even 
 to go out between the acts. 
 
 The worst of it was that he felt sorrier for Zada than 
 for his wife. Poor Zada had nothing, Charity had every 
 thing. How easily we vote other people everything! 
 Cheever was afraid of the ride home with Charity; he 
 dreaded to be at home to-night and to-morrow and 
 always. He longed to go to Zada and help her and let 
 her revile him and scratch him, perhaps, provided only 
 that she would throw her arms about him afterward. 
 He never imagined that a duel of self-control, a mortal 
 combat in refinement, was being fought over him by those 
 two women. 
 
 Zada's strength gave out long before Charity's; she was 
 
 215
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 newer to the game. During a dark scene she surrendered 
 the field and decamped. But Cheever and his wife both 
 caught the faint shimmer of her respectable robe as it 
 floated from the rail and vanished in the curtains. It 
 was like a dematerialization at a seance. 
 
 Cheever wanted to crane his neck and dared not. 
 Charity felt a great withdrawal of support in the flight 
 of her rival. She had not Zada's presence now to sustain 
 her through the last act. But she sat it out. 
 
 She was bitter against Cheever, and her thoughts dark. 
 The burden of his infidelity was heavy enough for her 
 to bear, but for him to subject her to such a confrontation 
 was outrageous. She had no doubt that it was a cooked- 
 up scheme. That vile creature had planned it and that 
 worm of a husband had consented to it! 
 
 The most unforgivable thing of all, of course, was the 
 clothes of it. 
 
 Charity, in the course of time, forgave nearly everybody 
 everything, but she never forgave her husband that. 
 
 On the way home she had nothing to say. Neither had 
 Cheever. He felt homesick for Zada. Charity felt home 
 less. She must have been the laughing-stock or the pity 
 ing-stock of the whole world for a long time. 
 
 When they reached home she bade Cheever a per 
 fectly cheerful good-night and left him to a cold supper 
 the butler had laid out for him. She did not know that he 
 stole from the house and flew to Zada. 
 
 Charity was tempted to an immediate denunciation of 
 Cheever and a declaration of divorce. She would cer 
 tainly not live with him another day. That would be to 
 make herself an accomplice, a silent partner of Zada's. 
 It would be intolerable, immoral, not nice.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 HP HE next morning proved to be a Sunday and she 
 1 felt a need of spiritual help in her hour of affliction. 
 Man had betrayed her; religion would sustain her grim 
 determination to end the unwholesome condition of her 
 household. The Bible said (didn't it?), "If thy right 
 hand offend thee, cut it off." That surely meant, "If 
 thy husband offend thee, divorce him." 
 
 She went to church, her ancestral Episcopalian church, 
 where her revered Doctor Mosely, the kindliest old gentle 
 man in the world, had poured sermons down at her like 
 ointment and sent prayers up like smoke since she was a 
 little girl. But on this day he chose to preach a ferocious 
 harangue against divorce as the chief peril, the ruination 
 of modern society. 
 
 The cowering Charity got from him the impression that 
 home life had always been flawless in this country until 
 the last few years, when divorce began to prosper, and 
 that domestic life in countries where there is little or no 
 divorce had always been an unmitigated success. If only 
 divorce and remarriage were ended, the millennium of our 
 fathers would return. 
 
 This had not been her previous opinion; it was her vivid 
 impression from Doctor Mosely, as honest an old darling 
 as ever ran facts through a sieve and threw away all the 
 big chunks that would not go through the fine mesh of his 
 prejudices. He abhorred falsehood, cruelty, skepticism, 
 sectarianism, and narrowness, and his sermons were un 
 conscious mixtures of hand-picked truth and eloquent 
 legends, ruthless denunciations of misunderstood people 
 
 217
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 and views, atheism toward the revelations of all the 
 sciences (particularly the science of biblical criticism, 
 which he hated worse than he hated Haeckel), and a 
 narrowness that kept trying to sharpen itself into a razor 
 edge. 
 
 Fortunately he belied in his life almost all of his pulpit 
 crimes and moved about, a tender, chivalrous, lovable 
 old gentleman. It was this phase that Charity knew, for 
 she had not heard one of his sermons for a year or more, 
 though she saw him often in his parish work. She was the 
 more amenable to his pulpit logic to-day. 
 
 Charity had always assumed that the United States 
 was the most virtuous, enlightened, and humane of na 
 tions. According to Doctor Mosely, it was shockingly 
 corrupt, disgusting. The family as an institution was 
 almost completely gone; its only salvation would be an 
 immediate return to a divorceless condition. (Like that 
 of Italy and Spain and France during the Middle Ages?) 
 
 Hitherto Charity had not thought much about divorce, 
 except to regret that certain friends of hers had not hit 
 it off better and had had to undergo cruel notoriety after 
 their private distresses. But divorce was no longer an 
 academic question to her. It had come home. 
 
 When she realized that her husband had been not only 
 neglectful of her, but devoted to a definite other woman, she 
 felt at first that it would be heinous to receive him back 
 in her arms fresh from the^ arms of a vile creature like 
 Zada L'Etoile. Now she got from the pulpit the distinct 
 message that just this was her one important duty, and 
 that any attempt to break from such a triple yoke would 
 be a monstrous iniquity which the Church could not 
 condone. 
 
 Doctor Mosely implied that when one partner to a 
 marriage wandered aside into forbidden paths (as he very 
 prettily phrased the very ugly matter) it was always the 
 fault of the other partner. He thundered that the wives 
 of to-day were not like their simple-minded mothers, be- 
 
 218
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 cause they played bridge and smoked cigarettes and did 
 not attend prayer-meetings and would not have children. 
 It was small wonder, he said, that their husbands could 
 not be held. Doctor Mosely had preached the same ser 
 mon at Charity's mother and her generation, and his 
 father had preached it at his generation, with the necessary 
 terms changed and the spirit the same. He and his kind 
 had been trying since time began to cure the inherent ills 
 of human relationships by railing at old errors and calling 
 them new. 
 
 So in the dark ages the good priests had tried to cure 
 insane people by shouting denunciations at the devils 
 that inhabited them. The less they cured the louder 
 they shouted, and when the remedy failed they blamed 
 the patients. 
 
 So fathers try to keep their little sons from being 
 naughty and untruthful by telling them how good and 
 obedient little boys were when they were little boys. 
 They tell a silly lie to rebuke a lie and wonder at their non- 
 success. 
 
 Marital unrest is no more a sign of wickedness than 
 stomach-ache is; it is a result of indigestion or ptomaine 
 poisoning, and divorce is only a strong purge or an emetic, 
 equally distressing and often the only remedy. 
 
 But Doctor Mosely honestly abominated divorce; he 
 regretted it almost as much as he regretted the Methodist 
 Episcopal heresies or the perverseness of the low-Church 
 doctrines. 
 
 Charity had always been religious; she had wrecked 
 her health visiting the sick and cherishing the orphan 
 and she had believed everything she 'was told to believe. 
 But now when she went to church for strength and comfort 
 she came away feeling herself a condemned and branded 
 failure, blameworthy for all her husband's sins and sins of 
 her own that she had not suspected. 
 
 She prayed to be forgiven for causing her husband to 
 sin and asked strength to win him back to his duty. She 
 
 219
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 \ 
 
 reached home in such a mood of holy devotion that when 
 :she found her husband there she bespoke him tenderly 
 .and put out her arms to him and moaned: 
 
 "Forgive me!" 
 
 "For what?" he said as he went to her from habit before 
 he could check himself. But even as he clasped her she 
 felt that Ms very sleeves were warm from Zada L'Etoile's 
 embrace and she slipped through his arms to the floor. 
 
 When he came to, she was lying on a couch with a 
 cushion under her heels, and Cheever was chafing her 
 wrists and kissing her hand. She drew it away feebly and 
 :said: 
 
 "Thank you. I'll be all right. Just leave me alone." 
 
 He remembered that Zada had said much the same 
 thing. He was glad to leave the room. When he had 
 gone Charity got up and washed her hands, particularly 
 the hand, particularly the spot, he had kissed. 
 
 She seemed to feel that some of the rouge from Zada's 
 lips had been left there by Cheever's lips. There was a 
 red stain there .and she could not wash it away. Perhaps 
 it was there because she tried so hard to rub it off. But 
 it tormented her as she went sleep-walking, rubbing her 
 hand like another Lady Macbeth.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 ON Monday there was a meeting of one of the com 
 mittees she had organized for the furtherance of 
 what she called the movie stunt. The committee met at 
 the Colony Club. Most of the committee were women 
 of large wealth and of executive ability, and they ac 
 complished a deal of business with expedition in their 
 own way. 
 
 There was some chatter, but it was to the point. At 
 length during a discussion of various forms of entertain 
 ment Mrs. Noxon said she was afraid that the show would 
 be deadly dull with only amateurs in it. Mrs. Dyckman 
 thought that professionals would make the amateurs 
 look more amateurish than ever. The debate swayed 
 from side to side, but finally inclined toward the be 
 lief that a few professional bits would refresh the 
 audience. 
 
 And then suddenly Mrs. Neff had to sing out: "Oh, 
 Charity, I've an idea. Let's get some stunning dancer to 
 do a special number. I remember one who would be just 
 the ticket. What's the name Zada Le Something or 
 other. She's a gorgeous creature. Have you seen her 
 recently?" 
 
 Several women began signaling wildly to Mrs. Neff to 
 keep quiet. Charity saw their semaphores at work, but 
 Mrs. Neff was blind blind, but not" speechless. She 
 kept on singing the praises of Zada till everybody wanted 
 to gag her. 
 
 An open mind to gossip is an important thing. We 
 ought to keep up with all the scandals concerning our 
 
 221
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 friends and enemies. Otherwise we lose many an op 
 portunity to undercut the latter and we are constantly 
 annoying the former. 
 
 It was Mrs. Neff, of all people and she loved Charity 
 Coe dearly who caused her public shame and suffering. 
 Mrs. Neff had defended Charity from the slanderous as 
 sumptions of Prissy Atterbury and had refused to listen 
 to Pet Bettany's echoes. 
 
 She had, indeed, a bad reputation for rebuking well- 
 meaning disseminators of spice. This attitude discouraged 
 several persons who would otherwise have told her all 
 sorts of interesting things about Charity's husband's 
 entente cordiale with Zada. 
 
 Charity had dwelt in a fool's paradise of trust in Peter 
 Cheever for a while, then had dropped back into a fool's 
 purgatory of doubt, where she wandered bewildered. 
 Now she was thrown into the fool's hell. She knew that 
 her love had been betrayed. Everybody else knew it and 
 was wondering how she would act. 
 
 Charity was sick. This was really more than she had 
 bargained for. As before, she felt it immodest to expose 
 her emotions in public, so she said: 
 
 "Yes, I've seen her. She is very attractive, isn't she? 
 I don't know if she is dancing in public any more, but 
 111 find out." 
 
 Mrs. Neff sat back triumphantly and let the meeting 
 proceed. But there was a gray pall on the occasion. 
 Women began to look at their wrist-watches and pretend 
 to be shocked at the lateness of the hour, and all of them 
 shook hands solemnly with Charity. There was a 
 poorly veiled condolence in their tone. 
 
 Charity carried it off pluckily, but she was in a danger 
 ous humor. She' really could not endure the patronizing 
 mercy of these women. 
 
 That night Cheever made again his appearance at the 
 dinner-table. He had some notion of putting Charity off 
 her guard or of atoning to her in part for his resumed al- 
 
 222
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 liance with Zada. He could not have told what his own 
 motives were, for he was in a state of bewilderment be 
 tween his duties to Mrs. Charity Tweedledum and Miss 
 Zada Tweedledee. He could not tell which one had the 
 greater claim on his favors. 
 
 Charity studied him across the table and wondered 
 what he really was, faun or traitor, Mormon or weakling. 
 He was certainly handsome, but the influence of Zada 
 L'Etoile seemed to hang about him like a green slime on a 
 statue. 
 
 She could not find any small talk to carry the meal 
 along. At length Cheever asked: 
 
 "What you been up to all day?" 
 
 "Oh, committee stuff that movie thing, you know.'* 
 
 "How's it coming on? Got a manager yet?" 
 
 "Not yet. We were talking about getting some pro 
 fessionals in to brighten up the evening." 
 
 "Good work! Those amateurs make me sick." 
 
 "Mrs. Neff proposed that we get some stunning dancer 
 to do a turn." 
 
 "Not a bad idea. For instance " 
 
 He emptied his glass of Chablis and the butler was 
 standing by to refill it when Charity answered: 
 
 "Mrs. Neff suggested a dancer I haven't seen on the 
 stage for some time. You used to admire her." 
 
 "Yes?" said Cheever, pushing his glass along the table 
 toward the butler, who began to pour as Charity slid home 
 her coup de grace. 
 
 ' ' Zada L'Etoile. What's become of her ? ' ' 
 
 Cheever's eyes gaped and his jaws dropped. The 
 butler's expression was the same. He poured the Chablis 
 on the back of Cheever's hand and neither noticed it till 
 Charity laughed hysterically and drove the sword a little 
 deeper : 
 
 "Is she still alive? Have you seen her?" 
 
 Cheever glared at her, breathed hard, swore at the 
 butler, wiped his hand on his napkin, gnawed his lips, 
 
 223
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 twisted his mustache, threw down the napkin, rose, and 
 left the table. 
 
 Charity's smile turned to a grimace. She saw that the 
 butler was ashamed of tier. He almost told her that she 
 ought to have known better than subject him and the 
 other servants to such a scene. 
 
 Charity caught herself about to say, "I beg your pardon, 
 Hammond." 
 
 She felt as if. she ought to beg the pardon of everybody 
 in the world. 
 
 She could not stand the lonely dining-room long. She 
 r%se and walked out. It seemed that she would never 
 reach the door. It was a via crucis to her. Her back 
 ached with the sense of eyes upon it. 
 
 The hall was lonely. The thud of the front door jarred 
 her. She went into the library. It was a dark and 
 frowning cavern. She went into the music-room, ap 
 proached the piano, looked over the music, turned up 
 "Go, Lovely Rose." The rose that Jim Dyckman said 
 she was had been thrown into the mud. She went up to 
 her room. The maid was arranging her bed for the 
 night. She had turned down one corner of the cover, 
 built nip one heap of pillows, set one pair of slippers by 
 the edge. 
 
 Charity felt like a rejected old spinster. She sat and 
 mused and her thoughts were bitter. She remembered 
 Doctor Mosely's sermon and wondered if he would preach 
 what he preached if he knew what she knew. She would 
 go to him and tell him. 
 
 But what did she know? Enough to convince herself, 
 but nothing at all that even a preacher would call evidence. 
 
 She must have proof. She resolved to get it. There 
 must be an abundance of it. She wondered how one went 
 at the getting of evidence.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 WHILE Charity wag resolving to tear down her life 
 Kedzie Thropp was building herself a new one on 
 the foundations that Charity had laid for her with a card 
 of introduction to Miss Havender. 
 
 In the motion-picture world Kedzie had found herself.. 
 Her very limitations were to her advantage. She would 
 have failed dismally in the spoken drama, but the flowing; 
 photograma was just to her measure. 
 
 The actor must not only know how to read his lines 
 and express emotions, but must keep up the same spon 
 taneity night after night, sometimes for a thousand per 
 formances or more. The movie actor is expected to> 
 respond to a situation once or twice for rehearsal, and 
 once or twice for the camera. There is no audience to 
 struggle against and listen for and to. The director is; 
 always there at the side calling, reminding, pleading, en-' 
 couraging, threatening, suggesting the thoughts, the lines, 
 and the expression, doing all the work except the pan 
 tomime. 
 
 That was Kedzie' s salvation. Tell her a story and 
 make her the heroine of it, and her excitable heart would 
 thrill to the emotional crisis. Take a snapshot of her,, 
 and the picture was caught. 
 
 Ferriday soon learned this and protected her from her 
 own helpless vice of discontent. She lapsed always from 
 her enthusiasm after it was once cold. As an actress 
 she would have been one of those frequent flashers who 
 give a splendid rehearsal or two and then sink back into 
 a torpor. She might have risen to an appealing first- 
 is 225
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 night performance. Thereafter, she would have become 
 dismal. The second week would have found the audi 
 ences disgusted and the third would have found her 
 breaking her contract and running away with somebody. 
 A horse that has run away once is likely to run away again. 
 Kedzie had run away twice. 
 
 But the movie life was just the thing for her. She did 
 not play always the same set scenes in the same scene sets. 
 She was not required even to follow the logic of the story. 
 For a while she would play a bit in a tiny angle represent 
 ing a drawing-room. When that was taken she would 
 play, not the next moment of the story, but the next scene 
 in that scene. It might be a year further along in the 
 story. It was exciting. 
 
 Her second picture had great success. She played the 
 girl brought up as a boy by a cruel Italian padrone who 
 made her steal. Her third picture was as nearly the same 
 as possible. 
 
 Now she was a ragged waif, a girl, who dressed as a boy 
 and sold newspapers so as to keep her old father in liquor. 
 The garret was a rickety table, a rusty stove, a broken 
 chair, and a V of painted canvas walls with a broken 
 window and a paper snowstorm falling back of it. There 
 Kedzie was found in very becoming ragged breeches, 
 pouting with starvation. Her father drove her out for 
 gin. 
 
 She walked out of the set, picked up a bottle^and brought 
 it back. The scene in the saloon would be taken later: 
 also the street scenes to and from. 
 
 An officer of the "Cruelty" came and took her from 
 the garret. That was the beginning of a series of advent 
 ures culminating in a marriage with a multimillionaire. 
 While the garret was set, the finish of the story was taken. 
 
 She ran and changed her costume to one of wealth with 
 ermine. She came in with the handsome young million 
 aire. It was the next winter. Her father was dying. 
 He asked her forgiveness and gave her his blessing. 
 
 226
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Then Kedzie changed back to her first costume and 1 
 went in the motor to a dismal street where she was shown 
 coming out of the tenement, and going back to it gin- 
 laden, and again with the officer of the Society for the 
 Prevention of Cruelty to Children. 
 
 She changed once more to her wealthy garb with the 
 ermine and was photographed going in with her young 
 millionaire. 
 
 The next day the scene in the Cruelty office was built 
 and she acted in it. The drawing-room in the millionaire's 
 home was assembled and she acted in that. Then she 
 went out in rags and sold newspapers on a corner. So it 
 went. The chronology hopelessly jumbled, but the 
 change incessant. 
 
 The studio was a palace of industry. Many of the 
 scenes were played on the great glass-covered roof. On 
 bright days she would ride in a closed automobile to some 
 street or some lonely glen or to the home of some wealthy 
 person who had lent his house to the movies on the bribe 
 of a gift to his favorite benevolence. 
 
 There was the thrill of sitting in the projection-room 
 and watching herself scamper across the scene, or flirt 
 or weep, look pretty or gorgeous, sad or gay. 
 
 One's own portrait is always a terribly fascinating 
 thing, for it is always the inaccurate portrait of a stranger 
 curiously akin to one and curiously alien. But to see one's 
 portrait move and breathe and feel is magic unbelievable. 
 
 In the enlarged close-ups when Kedzie was a girl 
 giantess, the effect was uncanny. She loved herself and 
 was glad of the friendly dark that hid her own wild pride 
 in her beauty, but did not prevent her from hearing the 
 exclamations of Ferriday and the backers and the other 
 actors who were admitted to the preliminary views. 
 
 There was a quality in her work that surpassed Fer- 
 riday's expectations and made her pantomime singularly 
 legible. The modulations of her thought from one ex 
 treme mood to another were always traceable. This was 
 
 227
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 true of the least feelings, Ferriday wo.uld say: "Now 
 you decide to telephone your lover. You hesitate, you 
 telephone., a girt answers, you wait, he speaks, you smile." 
 
 Kedzie would nod with impatint zest and one could 
 read each gradation of thought* "I'd better telephone 
 him. I will No, I'd better not. Yes. No. Shall I? 
 Well, I wiU. Hello! Hello, Central! Hurry up ! Gram- 
 ercy 816. What takes so long? Is this Gramercy 816? 
 Mr. Monteith. Oh, -isn't she smart? What keeps him? 
 Is he out? No, there he is! Oh, joy! I must be very 
 severe. Hello, Harry." 
 
 All these thoughts the spectator could follow. They 
 ran, as it were, under her skin. There was no stolidity 
 or phlegm. She was astoundingly alive and real. Unim 
 portant, without sublimity of emotion or intellectual 
 power, she was irresistibly real. The public understood 
 all she told it, and adored her, 
 
 Her petulance, quick temper, pretty discontent, did not 
 harm her on the screen, but helped immensely, for they 
 gave her- character. It was delicious to see her eyes nar 
 row with sudden resentment or girlish malice and widen 
 again with equally abrupt affection. She was so pretty 
 that she could afford to act ugly. 
 
 It took time, however, to get Kedzie from the studio 
 to the negative^ then to the positive. There was editing 
 to do, and it seemed to her that her most delicious bits 
 had to be cut out, because Ferriday always took three or 
 four, thousand, feet of film for every thousand he used. 
 They had' to. cut. out more Kedzie to let in the titles and 
 subtitles, and.it angered her to see how much space was 
 given to other members of the cast. She simply loathed 
 the scenes- she was not the center of, and she developed 
 an acerbity of: protest against any "trespass" on her 
 "rights" that- proved her a genuine business woman. 
 
 She learned the tricks of the trade with magnificent 
 speed. She was never so meek and helpless of expression 
 as when :She slipped in front of another actor or actress 
 
 228
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 and filled as much of the foreground as her slenderness 
 permitted. When she was crowded into the background 
 she knew how to divert attention to herself during the best 
 moments of the other people in the scene. And she could 
 most innocently spoil any bit that she did not like to do 
 herself or have done by another. 
 
 In the studio she was speedily recognized as an am 
 bitious young woman zealous for self-advancement. In- 
 fact, they called her a "reel hog" and a "glutton for 
 footage." A number of minor feuds were turned into 
 deep friendships through a common resentment at 
 Kedzie's impartial robberies. 
 
 Ferriday did not object to these professional traits. 
 They exist in all trades, and success is never won in large 
 measure without them. Almost all businesses are little 
 trusts, monopolies more or less tiny, more or less ruthless. 
 
 Ferriday delighted in Kedzie's battle for space with the 
 other members of the troupe. They kept everybody 
 intense. The lover loved her better on the screen for 
 hating her personal avarice. Her mother in the picture 
 was more meltingly tender in her caresses for wanting to 
 scratch the little cat's eyes out. The clergyman who 
 pointed her the way to heaven grew more ardently devout 
 for having to grip the floor with his feet to keep the adoring 
 Kedzie from edging him off his own pulpit. 
 
 This rivalry is better than any number of chaperons, 
 and Kedzie was saved from any danger of falling in love 
 with the unspeakably beautiful leading man by the 
 ferocity of her jealousy of him. She had once, as a little 
 girl in Nimrim, Missouri, nearly swooned at the glory of 
 this Lorraine Melnotte, and she had written him a little 
 letter of adoration, one of some nineteen he received that 
 day from lovelorn girls about the globe. 
 
 When she met him first in the studio he was painted 
 as delicately as a barber-pole, and he stood sweating in a 
 scene under the full blast of a battery of sick green Cooper- 
 Hewitt lights. He looked about three days dead and 
 
 229
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE-EVERYTHING 
 
 loathsome as an iguana. He was in full evening dress, 
 and Kedzie had always marveled at the snowiness of his 
 linen. 
 
 Now she saw how he got the effect. He wore a yellow 
 shirt, collar, tie, and waistcoat in order that the photo 
 graphic result should be the purest white. The yellow 
 linen was the completing horror under the spoiled mustard 
 color of his face with its mouth the color of an over 
 ripe plum. 
 
 His expression did not redeem his appalling features 
 that day, nor did his language help. While the camera 
 man leaned on his idle machine and looked weary Lorraine 
 Melnotte was having a sweet little row with the actress 
 playing his sainted mother. He was threatening to have 
 her fired if she didn't keep her place. 
 
 That finished him for Kedzie. She could not tolerate 
 professional jealousy. She never could. Her own was 
 merely a defense of her dignity and her rights against 
 the peculiarly impossible people who infested the studio. 
 That was Kedzie' s own phrase, for she had not lived with 
 .a poet long before she began to experiment with large 
 words. She practised before a mirror any phrases she 
 particularly liked. She had probably heard Ferriday use 
 the expression and she got herself up on it till she was glib. 
 Anybody who can be glib with "peculiarly impossible" 
 is in a fair way to be articulate. All Kedzie needed was a 
 little more certainty on her grammar; and her ear was 
 giving her that. 
 
 Her contempt for Lorraine Melnotte culminated in a 
 dark suspicion that that was not his real born name. If 
 Anita Adair was Kedzie Thropp what would Lorraine 
 Melnotte have been? It was a pretty problem in algebra. 
 But Kedzie despised a man that would take another name. 
 And such a name as unworthy of a man as a box of 
 chocolate fudge. 
 
 So the image of Mr. Melnotte fell out of the niche 
 in her heart and went over into the gallery of her hates. 
 
 230
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She fought him with every weapon and every foul thrust 
 known to shy little women in dealing with big, blustering 
 men. She loved to call him " Melnit" or "naughty Mel." 
 
 He was lost from the start and was soon begging to be 
 released from his contract. The backers were too sure 
 of his vogue, however, to let him go, and it was none of 
 their affair how fiercely Adair and Melnotte indulged 
 in mutual loathing, so long as their screen-love was so 
 wholesomely sweet. 
 
 With Ferriday Kedzie's relations were more perilous. 
 He had invented her and was patenting her. She dreaded 
 his wisdom and accepted his least theory as gospel at 
 first. He combined a remote and godlike intellect with 
 a bending and fatherly grace. And now and then, like 
 the other gods of all the mythologies, he came down to 
 earth in an amorous mood. 
 
 Now Kedzie's surety was her canny realization of the 
 value of tantalism. She was not long left in ignorance of 
 his record for flitting fancy and she felt that he would flit 
 from her as soon as he conquered her. Her duty was 
 plain. 
 
 She played him well and drove him frantic. It would 
 have been hard to say whether he hated her or loved her 
 more when he found her always just a little beyond. He 
 had begun with the greatest gift in his power. He had 
 promised her world-wide fame, and no other gift could 
 count till he had made that good. And it would take a 
 long, long while of incessant labor to build. 
 
 Ferriday belittled himself in Kedzie's eyes by his 
 groans of baffled egotism. She could read his plots on his 
 countenance, and thwart him in advance. But this was 
 not always easy for her, and again and again he had only 
 himself to blame for his non-success with Kedzie's heart. 
 With Kedzie's fame he was having a very sudden and 
 phenomenal triumph if anything could be called phenom 
 enal in a field which itself was phenomenal always.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 "T7ERRIDAY did not know, of course, that Kedzie was 
 1 married. She hardly knew it herself now. Gilfoyle 
 had been three weeks late in sending her the thirty dollars' 
 fare to Chicago. Then she wrote him that she was doing 
 fairly well at the studio and she would stick to her work. 
 She sent him oceans of love, but she did not send him the 
 thirty dollars. 
 
 Besides, he had borrowed it of her in the first place, 
 and she had had to borrow more of Ferriday. She had 
 neglected to pay him back. She needed so much for her 
 new clothes and new expenses innumerable inflicted on 
 her by her improved estate. 
 
 And, of course, she left the miserable little flat on the 
 landlord's hands. He wasted a good deal of time trying 
 to get the rent paid. Besides, it was rented in Gilfoyle's 
 name and he was safe in Chicago. And yet not very safe, 
 for Chicago has also its Bohemia, its clusters of real and 
 imitation artists, its talkers and dabblers, as well as its 
 toilers and achievers. 
 
 Gilfoyle found some wonderful Western sirens who 
 listened to his poetry. They were new to him and he to 
 them. His Eastern pronunciations fascinated them as 
 they had fascinated Kedzie, and he soon found in them 
 all the breeziness and wholesomeness of the great prairies 
 which are found in the mid- Western women of literature. 
 
 Gilfoyle had apparently forgotten that his own wife 
 was a mid-Westerness, and the least breezy, wholesome, 
 prairian thing imaginable. He saw mid- Western women 
 of all sorts about him, but he was of those who must have a 
 
 232
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 type for every section of humanity and who will not be 
 shaken in their belief by any majority of exceptions. 
 
 When Gilfoyle got Kedzie's letter saying that she would 
 not join him yet awhile he wrote her a letter of poetic grief 
 at the separation. But poets, like the rest of us, are 
 the better for getting a grief on paper and otlt of the 
 system. 
 
 Kedzie did not answer his letter for a long while and he N 
 did not miss her answer much, for he was having his own 
 little triumphs. The advertisements he wrote were re^ 
 ceiving honorable mention at the office and he was having 
 success with his poetry and his flirtations of evenings. 
 
 He returned to his boarding-house ong night and looked 
 at his face in the mirror, stared into the eyes that stared 
 back. A certain melting and molten and molting lady 
 had told him that he had poet's eyes like Jtiliafl Street's' 
 and was almost as witty. Gilfoyle tried with liig shaving- 
 glass and the bureau mirror to study the profile that some 
 one else had compared to the cameonic visage of Richard 
 Le Gallienne. 
 
 Gilfoyle was gloriously ashamed of himself. In the' 
 voice that some one else had compared to Charlie Towne'S 
 "reading W s own verses he addressed his reflection with 
 scorn: 
 
 "You heartless dog ! You ought to be shot forgetting 
 that you have a poor little deserted wife toiling in the 
 great city. You're as bad as Lord Byron ever was." 
 
 Then he wrote a sonnet against his own perfidy and 
 accepted confession as atonement and plenary indulgence. 
 
 He was one of those who, when they have cried, " I have 
 sinned," hear a mysterious voice saying, "Poor sufferer, 
 go and sin some more." 
 
 So he did, and he went the way of millions of lazy* 
 minded, lazy-moraled husbands while Kedzie went the 
 way of men and women who succeed by self -exploitation 
 and count only that bad morals which is also bad busk 
 ness. 
 
 233
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 And that was the status of the matrimonial adventure 
 of the Gilfoyles for the present. It made no perceptible 
 difference to anybody that they were married least of all 
 to themselves for the present. But of course Kedzie 
 was obscurely preparing all this while for a tremendous 
 explosion into publicity and into what is known as "the 
 'big money." And that was bound to make a vast dif 
 ference to Gilfoyle as well as to Mrs. Gilfoyle. 
 
 In these all-revolutionary days a man had better be a 
 little polite always to his wife, for in some totally un- 
 expectable way she may suddenly prove to be a bigger 
 man than he is, a money-getter, a fame or shame acquirer 
 if only by way of becoming the president of a suffrage 
 association or a best-seller or an inventor of a popular doll. 
 
 And again, all this time a very short time, considering 
 the changes it made in everybody concerned Ferriday 
 was Kedzie' s alternate hope and despair, good angel and 
 bad, uplifter and down-yanker. 
 
 Sometimes he threatened to stop the picture and destroy 
 it unless she kissed him. And she knew that he could and 
 would do almost anything of that sort. Had not his 
 backers threatened to murder him or sue him if he did 
 not finish the big feature? At such times Kedzie usually 
 kissed Ferriday to keep him quiet. But she was as care 
 ful not to give too many kisses as she had been not to put 
 too many caramels in half a pound when she had clerked 
 in the little candy-store. Nowadays she would pause and 
 watch the quivering scale of policy intently with one more 
 sweet poised as if it were worth its weight in gold. The 
 ability to stop while the scale wavers in the tiny zone of 
 just-a-little-too-little and just-a-little-too-much is what 
 makes success in any business of man- or woman-kind. 
 
 It was not always easy for Kedzie to withhold that extra 
 bonbon. There were times when Ferriday raised her 
 hopes and her pride so high that she fairly squealed with 
 love of him and hugged him. That would have been the 
 destruction of Kedzie if there had not been the counter- 
 
 234
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 weight of conceit in Ferriday's soul, for at those times he 
 would sigh to himself or aloud: 
 
 "You are loving me only because I am useful to you." 
 
 This thought always sobered and chilled Mr. Ferriday. 
 He worked none the less for her and himself and he tried 
 in a hundred ways to surprise the little witch into an 
 adoration complete enough to make her forget herself, 
 make her capable of that ultimate altruism to which a 
 woman falls or rises when she stretches herself out on the 
 altar of love. 
 
 Ferriday began to think seriously that the only way 
 he could break Kedzie's pride completely would be to 
 make her his wife. He began to wonder if that were 
 not, after, all, what she was driving at or trying to drive 
 him to. 
 
 Life will be so much more wholesome when women pro 
 pose marriage as men do and have a plain, frank talk about 
 it instead of their eternal business of veils and reticences, 
 fugitive impulses real or coquettish, modesties real or 
 faked. 
 
 Ferriday could not be sure of Kedzie, and he grew so 
 curious to know that finally he broke out, " In the Lord's 
 name, will you or will you not marry me, damn you?" 
 
 And Kedzie answered: "Of course not. I wouldn't 
 dream of such a thing." 
 
 But that did not prove anything, either. Perhaps she 
 merely wanted to trawl him along. 
 
 She had Ferriday almost crazy at least she had added 
 one more to his manias when Jim Dyckman wandered 
 into the studio and set up an entirely new series of am 
 bitions and discontents.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 HARITY COE forgot her great moving-picture enter- 
 V_> prise for a time in the agony of her discovery that 
 her husband was disloyal and that the Church did not 
 accept that as a cancellation of her own loyalty. 
 
 For a long time she was in such misery of uncertainty 
 that she went up to the mountains to recover her strength. 
 She came back at last, made simple and stoical somehow 
 by the contrast of human pettiness with the serenity (as 
 we call it) of those vast masses of debris that we poetize 
 and humanize as patient giants. 
 
 Her absence had left Cheever entirely to his own de 
 vices and to Zada's. They had made up and fought and 
 made up again dozens of times and settled down at length 
 to that normal alternation of peace and conflict known as 
 domestic life. 
 
 With Charity out of the way there was so little interrup 
 tion to their communion that when she came back Zada 
 forbade Cheever to meet her at the station, and he 
 obeyed. 
 
 Charity felt that she had brought with her the weight 
 
 of the mountains instead of their calm when she detrained 
 
 in the thronged solitude of the Grand Central Terminal. 
 
 uid the. house with its sympathetic family of servants 
 
 nly was as home-like as the Mammoth Cave. 
 
 She took up her work with a frenzy. The need of a 
 man to act as her adjutant in the business details was im 
 perative. She thought of Jim Dyckman again, and with a 
 different thought. 
 
 When he pleaded to her before she had imagined 
 
 236
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 she was at least officially a wife. Now she felt divorced 
 and abandoned, a waif on the public mercy. 
 
 She wanted to talk to Jim because she felt so disprized 
 and downtrodden that she wanted to see somebody who 
 adored her. She felt wild impulses to throw herself into 
 his keeping. She wanted to be bad just to spite the bad. 
 But she merely convinced herself that she was wicked 
 enough already and deserving of her punishment. 
 
 She made the moving-picture scheme a good excuse 
 for asking Jim to grant her a talk a business talk. To 
 protect herself from him and from herself she made a 
 convenience of Mrs. Neff's home. Jim met her there. 
 She was not looking her best and her mood was one of 
 artificial indirectness that offended him. He never 
 dreamed that it was because she was afraid to show him 
 how glad she was to see him. 
 
 He was furious at her so he said he would do her bid 
 ding. She dumped the financial and mechanical ends of 
 the enterprise on his hands and he accepted the burden. 
 He had nothing else pressing for his time. 
 
 One of his first duties, Charity told him, was to call at 
 the Hyperfilm Studio and try to engage that Mr. Ferriday 
 for director and learn the ropes. 
 
 " While you're there you might inquire about that little 
 girl you pulled out of the pool. I sent her there. They 
 promised her a job. Her name was I have it at home 
 in my address-book. I'll telephone it to you." 
 
 And she did. She had no more acquaintance with the 
 history Kedzie was making in the moving-picture world 
 than she had of the sensational rise of the latest politician 
 in Tibet. Neither had Jim. 
 
 He had been traveling about on his mother's yacht 
 and in less correct societies, trying to convince himself 
 that he was cured of Charity. He did not know that 
 the first pictures of Anita Adair were causing lines to 
 gather outside the moving-picture theaters of numberless 
 cities and towns. 
 
 237
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 When his car halted before the big studio where Ferriday 
 was high priest Jim might have been a traveler entering a 
 temple in Lassa, for all he knew of its rites and its powers. 
 
 No more did the doorman know the power and place of 
 Jim Dyckman. When Jim said he had an appointment 
 with Mr. Ferriday the doorman thumbed him up the 
 marble stairs. There were many doors, but no signs on 
 them, and Dyckman blundered about. At length he 
 turned down a corridor and found himself in the work 
 shop. 
 
 A vast room it was, the floor hidden with low canvas 
 walls and doors marked "Keep out." Overhead were 
 girders of steel from which depended heavy chains sup 
 porting hundreds of slanting tubes glowing with green fire. 
 
 From somewhere in the inclosures came a voice in dis 
 tress. It was the first time Dyckman ever heard Ferri- 
 day's voice, and it puzzled him as it cried: 
 
 "Come on, choke her choke harder, you fool; you're 
 not a masseur you're a murderer. Now drag her across 
 to the edge of the well. Pause, look back. Come on, 
 Melnotte: yell at him! 'Stop, stop, you dog!' Turn 
 round, Higgins; draw your knife. Go to it now! Give 
 'em a real fight. That's all right. Only a little cut. 
 The blood looks good. Get up, Miss Adair; crawl away 
 on hands and knees. Don't forget you've been choked. 
 Now take the knife away, Melnotte. Rise; look tri 
 umphant; see the girl. Get to him, Miss Adair. Easy 
 on the embrace: you're a shy little thing. 'My hero! 
 you have saved me!' Now, Melnotte: 'Clarice! it is 
 you! you!' Cut! How many feet, Jones? 
 
 "Now we'll take the scene in the vat of sulphuric acid. 
 Is the tank ready? You go lie down and rest, Miss 
 Adair. We won't want you for half an hour." 
 
 As Kedzie left the scene she found Dyckman waiting 
 for her. He lifted his hat and spoke down at her : 
 
 "Pardon me, but you're Miss Adair, aren't you?" 
 
 "Yes," said Kedzie, with as much modesty as a queen 
 238
 
 could show, incidentally noting that the man who be 
 spoke her so timidly was plainly a real swell. She was 
 getting so now that she could tell the real from the plated. 
 
 "I heard them murdering you in there and I Well, 
 Mrs. Cheever asked me to look you up and see how 
 you were getting along. I see you are." 
 
 "Mrs. Cheever!" said Kedzie, searching her memory. 
 Then, with great kindliness, "Oh yes! I remember her." 
 
 "You've forgotten me, I suppose. I had the pleasure 
 the sad pleasure of helping you out of the water at 
 Mrs. Noxon's." 
 
 "Oh, Lord, yes," Kedzie cried, forgetting her rank. 
 "You're Jim Dyckman I mean, Mr. Dyckman." 
 
 "So you remember my name," he flushed. "Well, I 
 must say!" 
 
 "I didn't remember to thank you," said Kedzie. "I 
 was all damp and mad. I've often thought of writing 
 to you." And she had. 
 
 "I wish you had," said Dyckman. "Well, well!" 
 
 He didn't know what to say, and so he laughed and she 
 laughed and they were well acquainted. Then he thought 
 of a good one. 
 
 "I pulled you out of the cold water, so it's your turn 
 to pull me out of the hot." 
 
 "What hot?" said Kedzie. 
 
 "I've been sent up here to learn the trade." 
 
 Kedzie had a horrible feeling that he must have lost his 
 money. Wouldn't it be just her luck to meet her first 
 millionaire after he had become an ex-? 
 
 But Dyckman said that he had come to try and engage 
 Mr. Ferriday, and that sounded so splendid to Kedzie 
 that she snuggled closer. Ordinarily when a woman 
 cowers under the eaves of a man's shoulder it is taken for a 
 signal for amiabilities to begin. 
 
 Dyckman could not imagine that Kedzie was already 
 as bad as all that. She wasn't. She was just trying to 
 get as close as she could to a million dollars. Her feelings 
 
 239
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 were as innocent and as imbecile as those of the mobs that 
 stand in line for the privilege of pump-handling a politician. 
 
 Jim Dyckman kept forgetting that he was so rich. 
 He hated to be reminded of it. He did not suspect 
 Kedzie of such a thought. He stared down at her and 
 thought she was cruelly pretty. He wanted to tell her so, 
 but he found himself saying: 
 
 "But I mustn't keep you. I heard somebody say that 
 you were to lie down and rest up." 
 
 "Oh, that was only Mr. Ferriday. I'm not tired a bit." 
 
 "Ferriday. Oh yes, I'm forgetting him. He's the 
 feller I've come to see." 
 
 1 ' He can't be approached when he's working. Sit down, 
 won't you?" 
 
 He sat down on an old bench and she sat down, too. 
 She had never felt quite so contented as this. And Dyck 
 man had not felt so teased by beauty in a longer time than 
 he could remember. 
 
 Kedzie was as exotic to him as a Japanese doll. Her 
 face was painted in picturesque blotches that reminded 
 him of a toy-shop. Her eyes were made up with a delicate 
 green that gave them an effect unknown to him. 
 
 She was dressed as a young farm girl with a sunbonnet 
 a-dangle at the back of her neck, her curls trailing across 
 her rounded shoulders and down upon her dreamy bosom. 
 She sat and swung her little feet and looked up at him 
 sidewise. 
 
 He forgot all about Ferriday, and when Ferriday came 
 along did not see him. Kedzie did not tell him. She 
 pretended not to see Ferriday, though she enjoyed enor 
 mously the shock it gave him to find her so much at ease 
 with that big stranger. 
 
 Ferriday was so indignant at being snubbed in his own 
 domain by his own creation that he sent Garfinkel to see 
 who the fellow was and throw him out. Garfinkel came 
 back with Dyckman, followed by Kedzie. 
 
 Before Garfinkel could present Dyckman to the great 
 
 240
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Ferriday, Kedzie made the introduction. Dyckman was 
 already her own property. She had seen him first. 
 
 Ferriday was jolted by the impact of the great name 
 of Dyckman. He was restored by the suppliant attitude 
 of his visitor. He said that he doubted if he could find 
 the time to direct an amateur picture. Dyckman hast 
 ened to say: 
 
 "Of course, money is no object to us . . ." 
 
 "Nor to me," Ferriday said, coldly. 
 
 Dyckman went on as if he had not heard: "... Except 
 that the more the show costs the less there is for the 
 charity." 
 
 "I should be glad to donate my services to the cause," 
 said Ferriday, who could be magnificent. 
 
 "Three cheers for you!" said Dyckman, who could 
 not. 
 
 Ferriday had neither the time nor the patience for the 
 task. But when the chance came to dazzle the rich by the 
 rich generosity of working for nothing, he could not 
 afford to let it pass. To tip a millionaire ! He had to do 
 that. 
 
 He saw incidentally that Kedzie was fairly hypnotized 
 by Dyckman and Dyckman by her. His first flare of 
 jealousy died out. To be cut out by a prince has always 
 been a kind of ennoblement in itself. 
 
 Also one of Ferriday's inspirations came to him. If 
 he could get those two infatuated with each other it would 
 not only take Kedzie off his heart, but it might be made to 
 redound to the further advantage of his own genius. A 
 scheme occurred to him. He was building the scenario 
 of it in the back room of his head while his guest occupied 
 his parlor. 
 
 He wanted to be alone and he wanted Dyckman and 
 Kedzie to be alone together. And so did Kedzie. Ferri 
 day suggested: 
 
 "Perhaps Mr. Dyckman would like to look over the 
 studio and perhaps Miss Adair would show him about." 
 
 241
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie started to cry, "You bet your boots," but she 
 caught herself in time and shifted to, "I should be 
 chawmed." Millionaires did not use plain words. 
 
 Then Dyckman said, "Great!" 
 
 He followed Kedzie wherever she led. He was as 
 awkward and out of place as a school-boy at his first big 
 dance. Kedzie showed him a murder scene being enacted 
 under the bluesome light. She took great pains not to 
 let any of it stain her skin. She showed him a comic 
 scene with a skeletonic -man on a comic bicycle. Dyck 
 man roared when the other comedian lubricated the 
 cyclist's joints with an oil-can. 
 
 Kedzie showed him the projection-room and told the 
 operator to run off a bit of a scene in which she was re 
 vealed to no disadvantage. She sat alone in the dark with 
 a million dollars that were crazy about her. She could 
 tell that Dyckman was tremendously excited. 
 
 Here at last was her long-sought opportunity to rebuff 
 the advances of a wicked plutocrat. But he didn't make 
 any, and she might not have rebuffed them. Still, the 
 air was a-quiver with that electricity generated almost 
 audibly by a man and a woman alone in the dark. 
 
 Dyckman was ashamed of himself and of his arm for 
 wanting to gather in that delectable partridge, but he 
 behaved himself admirably. 
 
 He told her that she was a "corker," a "dream," and 
 "one sweet song," and that the picture did not do her 
 justice. 
 
 Kedzie showed him the other departments of the picture- 
 factory and he was amazed at all she knew. So was she. 
 He stayed a long while and saw everything and yet he 
 said he would come again. 
 
 He suggested that it might be nice if Mr. Ferriday and 
 Miss Adair would dine with him soon. Ferriday was free 
 "to-morrow," and so they made it to-morrow evening at 
 the Vanderbilt. 
 
 Kedzie was there and Dyckman was there, but a boy 
 
 242
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 brought a note from Mr. Ferriday saying that he was 
 unavoidably prevented from being present. 
 
 Dyckman grinned: "We'll have to bear up under it the 
 best we can. You won't run away just because your 
 chaperon is gone, will you?" 
 
 Kedzie smiled and said she would stay. But she was 
 puzzled. What was Ferriday up to? One always sus 
 pected that Ferriday was up to something and thinking 
 of something other than what he did or said. 
 
 Kedzie was not ashamed of her clothes this time. In 
 deed, when she gave her opera-cloak to the maid she came 
 out so resplendent that Jim Dyckman said: 
 
 "Zowie! but you're a Whew! aren't you great? 
 Some change-o from the little farm girl I saw up at the 
 studio. I don't suppose you'll eat anything but a little 
 bird-seed." 
 
 She was elated to see the maitre d'hotel shake hands with 
 her escort and ask him how he was and where he had been. 
 Jim apologized for neglecting to call recently, and the two 
 sauntered like friends across to a table where half a dozen 
 waiters bowed and smiled and welcomed the prodigal home. 
 
 When they were seated the headwaiter said, "The 
 moosels vit sauce mariniere are nize to-nide." 
 
 Dyckman shook his head: "Ump-umm! I'm on the 
 water-wagon and the diet kitchen. Miss Adair can go as 
 far as she likes, but I've got to stick to a little thick soup, 
 a big, thick steak, and after, a little French pastry, some 
 coffee, and a bottle of polly water and I'll risk a mug of 
 old musty." He turned to Kedzie: "And now I've or 
 dered, what do you want? I never could order for any 
 body else." 
 
 Kedzie was disappointed in him. He was nothing like 
 Ferriday. He didn't use a French word once. She was 
 afraid to venture on her own. 
 
 "I'll take the same things," she said. 
 
 "Sensible lady," said Jim. "Women who work must 
 eat." 
 
 243
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie hated to be referred to as a worker by an idler. 
 She little knew how much Jim Dyckman wished he were 
 a worker. 
 
 She could not make him out. Her little hook had 
 dragged out Leviathan and she was surprised to find how 
 unlike he was to her plans for her first millionaire. He ate 
 like a hungry man who ordered what he wanted and made 
 no effort to want what he did not want. He had had so 
 much elaborated food that he craved few courses and 
 simple. He said what came into his head, without frills 
 or pose. He was sincerely delighted with Kedzie and 
 made neither secret nor poetry of it. 
 
 Toward the last of the dinner Kedzie ceased to try to 
 find in him what was not there. She accepted him as the 
 least affected person she had ever met. He could afford 
 to be unaffected and careless and spontaneous. He had 
 nothing to gain. He had everything already. Kedzie 
 would have said that he ought to have been happy be 
 cause of that, as if that were not as good an excuse for 
 discontent as any. In any case, Kedzie said to herself: 
 
 "He's the real thing." 
 
 She wanted to be that very thing that most difficult 
 thing real. It became her new ambition. 
 
 After the dinner Dyckman offered to take her home. 
 He had a limousine waiting for him. She did not ask 
 him to put her into a taxicab. She was not afraid to have 
 him ride home with her. She was afraid he wouldn't. 
 She was not ashamed of the apartment-house she was 
 living in now. It was nothing wonderful, but all the 
 money had been spent on the hall. And that was as far 
 as Dyckman would get yet. 
 
 Kedzie had acquired a serenity toward all the world 
 except what she called "high society." In her mind the 
 word high had the significance it has with reference to 
 game that has been kept to the last critical moments, and 
 trembles, exquisitely putrid, between being eaten imme 
 diately gnd being thrown away soon. 
 
 244
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 There is enough and to spare of that high element 
 among the wealthy, but so there is among the poor and 
 among all the middlings. Kedzie had met with it on 
 her way up, and she expected to find it* in Dyckman. 
 She looked forward to a thrilling adventure. 
 
 She could not have imagined that Dyckman was far 
 more afraid of her than she of him. She was so tiny and 
 he so big that she terrorized him as a mouse an elephant, 
 or a baby a saddle-horse. The elephant is probably afraid 
 that he will squash the little gliding insect, the horse that 
 he might step on the child. 
 
 The disparity between Jim Dyckman and Kedzie was 
 not so great, and they were both of the same species. 
 But he felt a kind of terror of her. And yet she fascinated 
 him as an interesting toy that laughed and talked and 
 probably would not say "Mamma!" if squeezed. 
 
 Dyckman had been lonely and blue, rejected and de 
 jected. Kedzie was something different. He had known 
 lots of actresses, large and small, stately, learned, cheap, 
 stupid, brilliant, bad, good, gorgeous, shabby, wanton, 
 icy. But Kedzie was his first movie actress. She dwelt 
 in a strange realm of unknown colors and machineries. 
 
 She was a new toy in a new toyhouse a whole Noah's 
 ark of queer toys. He wanted to play with those toys. 
 She made him a revenant to childhood. ^Or^f-; he put it: 
 
 "Gee! but you make me feel as silly as a kid." 
 
 That surprised Kedzie. It was not the sort of talk she 
 expected from a world which was stranger to her than the 
 movie studio to him. He was perfectly natural, and that 
 threw her into a spasm of artificiality. 
 
 He sat staring down at her. He put his hands under 
 his knees and sat on them to keep them from touching her, 
 as they wanted to. For all he knew, she was covered with 
 fresh paint. That made her practically irresistible. 
 Would it come off if he kissed her? He had to find out. 
 
 Finally he said, so helplessly, passively, that it would 
 be more accurate to say it was said by him: 
 
 245
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Say, Miss Adair, I'm a dead-goner if you don't gimme 
 a kiss." 
 
 Kedzie was horrified. Skip Magruder would have been 
 eleganter tha that. She answered, with dignity: 
 
 "Certainly, if you so desire." 
 
 That ought to have chaperoned him back to his senses, 
 but he was too far gone. His long arms shot out, went 
 round her, gathered her up to his breast. His high head 
 came down like a swan's, and his lips pressed hers. 
 
 Whatever her soul was, her flesh was all girlhood in one 
 flower of lithe stem, leaf, petal, sepal, and perfume. 
 There was nothing of the opiate poppy, the ominous orchid, 
 or even that velvet voluptuary, the rose. She was like a 
 great pink, sweet, shy, fragrant, common wild honeysuckle 
 blossom. 
 
 Jim Dyckman was so whelmed by the youth and flavor 
 of her that his rapture exploded in an unsmothered gasp : 
 
 ' ' Golly ! but you're great !' ' 
 
 Kedzie was heartbroken. Gilfoyle had done better than 
 that. She had been kissed by several million dollars, 
 and she was not satisfied ! 
 
 But Dyckman was. He felt that Kedzie had solved 
 the problem of Charity Coe. She had cleared his soul 
 of that hopeless obsession he thought just then.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 WHEN a young man suddenly goes mad in a cab,' 
 grapples the young woman who has intrusted 
 herself to his protection, pins her arms to her sides, 
 squeezes her torso till her bones crunch and she has no 
 breath to squawk with, then kisses her deaf and dumb 
 and blind, it is still a nice question which of the two is the 
 helpless one and which has overpowered the other. 
 
 Appearances are never more deceitful than in such 
 attacks, and while eye-witnesses are infrequent, they are 
 also untrustworthy. They cannot even tell which of the 
 two is victim of the outrage. The motionless gazelle in 
 the folds of the constrictor may be in full control of the 
 situation. 
 
 It undoubtedly has happened, oftcner than it should 
 have, in the history of the world that young men have 
 made these onsets without just provocation and have 
 been properly slapped, horsewhipped, or shot for their 
 
 1 unwelcome violence. It has also happened that young 
 men have failed to make these onsets when they would 
 have been welcome. 
 
 But the perfection of the womanly art of self-pretense 
 is when she subtly wills the young man to overpower her 
 and is so carried away by her own success that she forgets 
 who started it. She droops, swoons, shivers before the 
 fury of her own inspiration, and cries out, with absolute 
 sincerity: "How dare you! How could you! What 
 made you!" or simply moans, "Why, Oswald!" and re 
 sists invitingly. 
 
 247
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie had been hoping and praying that Jim Dyckman 
 would kiss her, and mutely daring him to. Yet when he 
 obeyed her tacit behest and asked her permission she was 
 too frightened to refuse. He was stronger than she 
 expected, and he held her longer. When at last she came 
 out for air she was shattered with a pleasant horror. 
 
 She barely had the strength to gasp, "Why, Mr. 
 Dyckman, aren't you awful?" and time to straighten her 
 jumbled hat and hair when her apartment-building drew 
 up alongside the limousine and came to a halt. 
 
 Dyckman pleaded, like a half-witted booby, "Let's 
 take a little longer ride." 
 
 But she remembered her dignity and said, with im 
 perial scorn, "I should hope not!" 
 
 She permitted him to help her out. 
 
 He said: "When may I see you again? Soon, please!" 
 
 She smiled, with a hurt patience, and answered, "Not 
 for a long while." 
 
 He chuckled: "To-morrow, eh? That's great!" 
 
 She wished that he would not say, "That's great." 
 If he would only say, "Ripping!" or, "I say, that's rip 
 ping!" or, "Awfully good of you," or, "No end" any 
 thing swagger. But he would not swagger. 
 
 He escorted her to the elevator, where she gave him a 
 queenly hand and murmured, "Good night!" 
 
 He watched her go up like Medea in machina; then he 
 turned away and stumbled back into his limousine. It 
 was still fragrant from her presence. The perfume she 
 was using then was a rather aggressive essence of a 
 lingering tenacity upon the atmosphere. But Dyckman 
 was so excited that he liked it. The limousine could 
 hardly contain him. 
 
 Kedzie felicitated herself on escaping from his thrall 
 just in time to avoid being stupefied by it. She thanked 
 Heaven that she had not flung her arms around him and 
 claimed him for her own. She had the cleverness of elu 
 sion that her sex displays in all the species, from Cleo- 
 
 248
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 patras to clams, froni butterflies to rhinoceroses. Mow 
 wisely they practise to ev'Sde 1 what they demand, leatvirig 
 the stupid male to ponder the 1 mysteries of womankind? 
 
 When Kedzie reached her mifro'f sfae told the approving 
 person she found there that she was doing, pretty weH for 
 a poor young girl not long in from he' country. She 
 postured joyously as she undressed, and dWiefed^femmine : 
 war-dance in much the same costume that srf# wore when' 
 Jim Dyckman fished her out of the pool at New-port. She^ 
 sang: 
 
 "I dreamt that I fell in a mar-arble pool 
 With nobles and swells on all si-i-ides." 
 
 She had slapped her rescuer's hands away then and 
 groaned to learn that she had driven off a famous pluto-' 
 crat. But now he was back; indeed he was in the pool 
 now, and she had him on her hook. He had grievously 
 disappointed her by turning out to be a commonplace 
 young man with no gilt on his phrases. But one must be 
 merciful to a million dollars. 
 
 The next morning she dreamed of him as a suitor pre 
 senting her with a bag of gold instead of a bouquet. 
 Just as she reached for it the telephone rang and a hall- 
 boyish voice told her that it was seven o'clock. 
 
 This was the midnight alarm to Cinderella, and she 
 became again a poor working-girl. She had to abandon 
 her prince and run from the palace of dreams to the studio 
 of toil. 
 
 She was a trifle surly when she confronted Ferriday. 
 He studied her, smilingly queerly and overplaying in 
 difference : 
 
 "Have a nice dinner last night?" 
 
 Kedzie fixed him with a skewery glare: "What's your 
 little game? Why did you turn up missing?" 
 
 "I had another engagement. Didn't you get my 
 note?" 
 
 "Ah, behave, behave!" said Kedzie, then blushed at the 
 249
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 plebeian phrase. She was beginning to have a quickly 
 remorseful ear. As soon as she should learn to hear her 
 first thoughts first, and suppress them unspoken, she 
 Would be a made lady. 
 
 "Oh, you're a true artist, Anita," said Ferriday. 
 "Nothing can hinder your flight into the empyrean." 
 
 "Don't sing it. Explain it," Kedzie sneered. 
 
 Ferriday laughed so delightedly that he must embrace 
 her. She shoved him back and brushed the imaginary 
 dust of his contact from the shoulders that had but 
 lately been compressed by a million dollars. 
 
 "I see you landed him," said Ferriday. 
 
 "And I see that all your talk about loving me so much 
 was just a fake," said Kedzie. 
 
 "Why do you say that? I adore you." 
 
 " If you did, would you throw me at the head of another 
 fellow?" asked Kedzie. 
 
 "If it was for the advancement of your career, yes," 
 Ferriday insisted. 
 
 "What's Mr. Dyckman got to do with my career?" 
 
 "He can make it, if he doesn't break it." 
 
 "Come again." 
 
 "If you fall in love with that big thug, or if you play 
 him for a limousine like a chorus-girl on the make, your 
 career is gone. But if you use him for your future 
 well, I have a little scheme that might bounce you up to 
 the sky in a hurry. You could have your millionaire 
 and your fame as well." 
 
 "What's the little scheme, Ferri darling?" 
 
 "I'll tell you later. We've got to go to the projection- 
 room and see your new film run off. It's assembled, cut, 
 subtitled, ready for the market. Come along." 
 
 Kedzie went along and sat in the dark room watching 
 the reel go by. Her other selves came forth in troops 
 to reveal themselves: Kedzie the poor little shy girl, for 
 she was that at times; Kedzie the petulant, the revenge 
 ful, the forgiving; Kedzie on her knees in prayer she 
 
 250
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 prayed at times, as everybody does, the most villainous 
 no less ardently than the most blameless; Kedzie dancing;. 
 Kedzie flirting, in love, tempted, tipsy; Kedzie seduced, 
 deserted, forgiven, converted, happily married; Kedzie a. 
 mother with a little hired baby at her little breast. There 
 was even a picture of her in a vision as a sweet old lady 
 with snowy hair about her face, and she was surrounded 
 by grown men who were her sons, and young mothers 
 who were her daughters. The unending magic of the 
 moving pictures had enabled her to see hersel' as ithers 
 saw her, and as she saw hersel', and as nobody should 
 ever see her. 
 
 Kedzie doted on the picture of herself as a dear old 
 lady leaning on her old husband among their children. 
 She shed tears over that delightful, most unusual, privi 
 lege of witnessing herself peacefully, blessedly ancient. 
 
 Whether she ever reached old age and had a husband 
 living then and children grown is beyond the knowledge 
 of this chronicle or its prophecy, for this book goes only 
 so far as 1917. But just for a venture, assuming Kedzie 
 to be about twenty in 1916, that would make Kedzie 
 born four years back in the last century. Now, adding 
 sixty to 1896 brings one to 1956; and what the world 
 will be like then and who'll be in it or what they may be 
 doing, how dressing, if at all, what riding in, fighting about,, 
 agreeing upon it were folly to guess at. 
 
 It is safe to say only that people will then be very much: 
 at heart what they are to-day and were in the days when 
 the Assyrian women and men felt as we do about most 
 things. Kedzie will be scolding her children or her 
 grandchildren and telling them that in her day little girls 
 did not speak disrespectfully to their parents or run away 
 from them or do immodest, forward things. 
 
 That much is certain to be true, as it has always been. 
 The critics of then will be saying that there are no great 
 novelists in 1956 such as there were in 1916, when giants 
 wrote, but not for money or for cheap sensations. 
 
 251
 
 They will laud the Wilsonian era when America not 
 only knew a millennium of golden fiction, poetry, drama, 
 humor, sculpture, painting, architecture, and engineering, 
 but revealed its greatness in moving-picture classics, in a 
 lofty conception of the dance as an eloquence; when the 
 nation acted as a sister of charity to bleeding Europe, 
 pouring eleemosynary millions from the cornucopia 
 stretched across the sea, and finally entered the war with 
 reluctant majesty and unexampled might, her citizens 
 unanimously patriotic. Ye gods! even the politicians 
 will be statesmen and their debates classics. 
 
 Critics of then will be regretting that American fiction, 
 poetry, drama, art, and journalism are so inferior to 
 foreign work, and foreign critics will admit it and tell them 
 why. Some military writers will be pointing out that war 
 is no longer possible, and others will be crying out that it is 
 inevitable and America unprepared. 
 
 Doctors will be complaining that modern restlessness is 
 creating new nervous diseases, as doctors did in 1916 
 A.D., B.C., and B.A. (which is, Before Adam). Doctors 
 will complain that modern mothers do not nurse their own 
 babies which has always been both true and untrue 
 and that women do not wear enough clothes for health, 
 not to mention modesty. 
 
 In fact, Kedzie, if she lives, will find the spirit of the 
 world almost altogether what grandmothers have always 
 found it. But Kedzie must be left to find this out for 
 herself. 
 
 When, then, Kedzie saw how beautifully she photo 
 graphed and how well she looked as an old lady, she wept 
 rapturously and sighed, "I'll never give up the pictures." 
 
 Ferriday sighed, too, for that meant to his knowing soul 
 that she was not long for this movie world. But he did 
 not tell her so. He told her: 
 
 "You're as wise as you are beautiful. You'll be as 
 famous as you'll be rich. And this Dyckman lad can 
 hurry things up." 
 
 252
 
 "How?" asked Kedzie, already foreseeing his game. 
 
 "The backers of the Hyperfilm Company are getting 
 writer's cramp in the spending hand. They call it con 
 servatism, but it's really cowardice. The moving-picture 
 business has gone from the Golconda to the gambling 
 stage. A few years ago nearly anybody could get rich 
 in a minute. A lot of cheap photographers and street-car 
 conductors were caught in a cloudburst of money and 
 thought they made it. They treated money like rain, 
 and the wastefulness in this trade has been rivaled by 
 nothing recent except the European war. Some of the 
 biggest studios are dark; some of the leaders of yesterday 
 are so bankrupt that their banks don't dare let 'em drop 
 for fear they'll bust and blow up the whole business. 
 Most of the actors are not getting half what they're adver 
 tised to get, but they're getting four times what they 
 ought to get. 
 
 "There are a few men and women who are earning 
 even more than they are getting, and that's a million a 
 minute. Now, the one chance for you, Anita, is to have 
 some tremendous personal backing. You've come into 
 the game a little late. This firm you're with is tottering. 
 They blame me for it, but it's not my fault altogether. 
 Anyway, this company is riding for a fall, and down we 
 may all go in the dust with a dozen other big companies, 
 any day." 
 
 Kedzie's heart stopped. In the dark she clutched 
 Ferriday's arm so tightly that he ouched. To have her 
 career smashed at its beginning would be just her luck. 
 It grew suddenly more dear than ever, because it was 
 imperiled. The thought of having her pictures fail of 
 their mission throughout the world was as hideous as 
 was the knowledge to Carlyle that the only manuscript 
 of his history was but a shovelful of ashes. 
 
 Ferriday put his arm about her, and she crept in under 
 his chin for safety. She felt very cozy to him, there, and 
 he rejoiced that he had her his at last. Then as before 
 
 253
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 he saw that he was no more to her than an umbrella or an 
 awning in a shower. He wanted to fling her away; but 
 she was still to him an invention to patent and promote. 
 So he told her: 
 
 " If you can persuade this Dyckman to boost your career, 
 get behind you with a bunch of kale and whoop up the 
 publicity, we can stampede the public, and the little 
 theater managers will mob the exchanges for reels of you. 
 It's only a question of money, Anita. Talk about the 
 Archimedean lever! Give me the crowbar of advertising, 
 and I'll set the earth rolling the other way round so the 
 sun will rise in the west and print no other pictures but 
 yours. 
 
 "There isn't room for everybody in the movie business 
 any more. There's room only for the people who wear 
 lightning-rods and stand on solid gold pedestals that 
 won't wash away. Go after your young millionaire, 
 Anita, and put his money to work." 
 
 Kedzie pondered. She brought to bear on the problem 
 all the strategic intuition of her sex. She saw the im 
 portance of getting Dyckman's money into circulation. 
 She was afraid it might not be easy. 
 
 Kedzie sighed: " It's a little early for me to ask a gentle 
 man I've only met a couple o' times to kindly pass the 
 millions. He must have met a lot of women by now 
 who've held out their hands to him and said, 'Please,' 
 and not got anything but the cold boiled eye. I don't 
 know much about millionaires, but I have a feeling that 
 if they started giving the money out to every girl they 
 met, they'd last just about as long as a real bargain does 
 in Macy's. The women would trample them to death 
 and tear one another to pieces." 
 
 "But Dyckman's crazy about you, Anita. I could see 
 it in his eyes. He's plumb daffy." 
 
 " Maybe so and maybe not. Maybe he's that way with 
 every girl under forty. I've never seen him work, but 
 I've seen him in the midst of that Newport bunch and 
 
 254
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 they've got me lashed to the mast for clothes, looks, 
 language, and everything." 
 
 "You're a novelty to him, Anita. He's tired of those 
 blasees creatures." 
 
 "They didn't look very blah-zay to me. They seemed 
 to be up and doing every minute. But supposing he was 
 crazy about me, if I said to him, ' You can have two kisses 
 for a million dollars apiece?' can you see him begin to 
 holler: 'Where am I? Please take me home!'" 
 
 Ferriday sighed: "Perhaps you're right. It wouldn't 
 do to give a mercenary look to your interest in him too 
 soon. Let me talk to him." 
 
 "What's your peculiar charm?" 
 
 "I'd put it up to him as a business proposition. I'd 
 say, 'The moving-picture field is the greatest gold-field 
 in the world.' I'd tell him how many hundred thousand 
 theaters there are in the world, all of them eager for your 
 pictures and only needing to be told about them. I'd tell 
 him that for every dollar he put in he'd take out ten, in 
 addition to furthering the artistic glory of the most beauti 
 ful genius on the dramatic horizon. I'd show him how he 
 couldn't lose." 
 
 "But you just said " 
 
 "Oh, I know, but we can't put on the screen every 
 thing we say in the projection-room. And it is a fact 
 that there is big money in the movies." 
 
 "There must be," said Kedzie, "if as much has been 
 sunk in 'em as you say." 
 
 "Yes, and it's all there for the right man to dig up if 
 he only goes about it intelligently. Let me talk to 
 him." 
 
 Kedzie thought hard. Then she said: "No! Not yet! 
 You'd only scare him away. I'll do my best to get him 
 interested in me, and you do your best to get him in 
 terested in the business; and then when the time is just 
 right we can talk turkey. But not now, Ferri, not yet." 
 
 "You're as wise as you are beautiful," said Ferriday, 
 
 255
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 again. "I can't see your beauty, but your wisdom shines 
 in the dark. We'll do great things together, Anita." 
 
 His arm tightened around her, reminding her that she 
 was still in his elbow. Before she was quite alive to his 
 purpose his lips touched her cheek. 
 
 "Don't do that!" she snapped. "How dare you!" 
 
 He laughed: "I forgot. The price on your kisses has 
 just skyrocketed to a million apiece. Don't forget my 
 commission." 
 
 She growled pettishly. He spoke more soberly: 
 
 "You need me yet, little lady. Don't quench my 
 enthusiasms too roughly or I might take up some other 
 pretty little girl as my medium of expression. There are 
 lots and lots of pretties born every minute, but it takes 
 years to make a director like me." 
 
 And she knew that this was true. 
 
 "I was only fooling," she said. "Don't be mad at me. 
 You can kiss me if you want to." 
 
 "I don't want to," he said, as hurt as an overgrown 
 boy or a prima donna. 
 
 The door opened, and a wave of light swept into the 
 room. A voice followed it. 
 
 "Is Miss Adair in there?" 
 
 "Yes," Kedzie answered, in confusion. 
 
 "Gent 'man to see you." 
 
 It was Jim Dyckman. He followed closely and en 
 tered the room just as Ferriday found the electric button 
 and switched on the light. 
 
 Kedzie and Ferriday were both encouraged when they 
 saw a look of jealous suspicion cross his face. Ferriday 
 hastened to explain: 
 
 "We've been editing Miss Adair's new film. Like to see 
 an advance edition of it?" 
 
 "Love to," said Dyckman. 
 
 "Oh, Simpson, run that last picture through again," 
 Ferriday called through a little hole in the wall. 
 
 A faint "All right, sir" responded. 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie led Dyckman to a chair and took the next one 
 to it. 
 
 Ferriday beamed on them and switched on the dark. 
 Then, as if by a divine miracle, the screen at the end of 
 the room became a world of life and light. People were 
 there, and places. Mountains -were swung into view and 
 removed. Palaces were decreed and annulled. Fields 
 blossomed with flowers; ballrooms swirled; streets 
 seethed. 
 
 Anita Adair was created luminous, seraphic, composed 
 of light and emotion. She came so near and so large 
 that her very thoughts seemed to be photographed. She 
 drifted away; she smiled, danced, wept, and made her 
 human appeal with angelic eloquence. 
 
 Dyckman groaned with the very affliction of her 
 charm. She pleased him so fiercely that he swore about 
 it. He cried out in the dark that she was the blank- 
 blankest little witch in the world. Then he groveled in 
 apology, as if his profanity had not been the ultimate 
 gallantry. 
 
 When the picture was finished he turned to Kedzie and 
 said, "My God, you're great!" He turned to Ferriday. 
 "Isn't she, Mr. Fenimore?" 
 
 " I think so," said Ferriday; "and the world will think 
 no soon." 
 
 Kedzie shook her head. "I'm only a beginner. I 
 don't know anything at all." 
 
 "Why, you're a genius!" Dyckman exploded. "You're 
 simply great. You know everything; you " 
 
 Ferriday touched him on the arm. "We mustn't spoil 
 her. There is a charm and meekness about her that we 
 must not lose." 
 
 Dyckman swallowed his other great's and after pro 
 found thought said, "Let's lunch somewhere." 
 
 Ferriday excused himself, but said that the air would 
 be good for Miss Adair. She was working too hard. 
 
 So she took the air. 
 17 257
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Dyckman had come to the studio with Charity's busi 
 ness as an excuse. He had forgotten to give the excuse, 
 and now he had forgotten the business. He did not 
 know that he was now Kedzie Thropp's business. And 
 she was minding her own business. 

 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 QETER CHEEVER was going to dictagraph to his 
 1 wife. The quaint charm of the dictagram is that 
 the sender does not know he is sending it. It is a good 
 deal like an astral something or other. 
 
 Peter had often telegraphed his wife, telephoned her, 
 and wirelessed her. Sometimes what he had sent her was 
 not the truth. But now she was going to hear from 
 him straight. She would have all the advantages of the 
 invisible cloak and the ring of Gyges eavesdropping 
 made easy and brought to a science, a combination of 
 perfect alibi with intimate propinquity. 
 
 Small wonder that the device which justice has made 
 such use of should be speedily seized upon by other 
 interests. Everything, indeed, that helps virtue helps 
 evil, too. And love and hate find speedy employment 
 for all the conquests that science can make upon the 
 physical forces of the universe. 
 
 How Charity's motives stood in heaven there is no 
 telling. It is safe to say that they were the usual human 
 mixture of selfish and altruistic, wise and foolish, honor 
 able and impudent, profitable and ruinous. She came 
 by the dictagraphic idea very gradually. She had plenti 
 ful leisure since she had taken a distaste for good works. 
 She had been so roughly handled by the world she was 
 toiling for that she decided to let it get along for a while 
 without her. 
 
 It was a benumbing shock to learn definitely that her 
 husband was in liaison with a definite person, and to be 
 
 259
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 confronted in shabby clothes with that person all dressed 
 up. When she hurried to the Church for mercy it was 
 desolation to learn from the pulpit that her heart clamor 
 for divorce was not a cleanly and aseptic impulse, but an 
 impious contribution to the filthy social condition of the 
 United States. 
 
 Charity had no one to confide in, and she had no new 
 grievance to air. Everybody else had evidently been long 
 assured of her husband's profligacy. For her to wake up 
 to it only now and run bruiting the stale information 
 would be a ridiculous nuisance a newsgirl howling yes 
 terday's extra to to-day's busy crowd. 
 
 Besides, she had in her time known how uninteresting 
 and unwelcome is the celebrant of one's own misfortunes. 
 Husbands and wives who tell of their bad luck are enter 
 taining only so long as they are spicy and sportsman 
 like. When they ask for a solution they are embarrassing, 
 since advice is impossible for moral people. The truly 
 good must advise him or her either to keep quiet or 
 to quit. But to say "Keep quiet!" is to say "Don't 
 disturb the adultery," while to say "Quit !" is to say " Com 
 mit divorce!" which is far worse, according to the best 
 people. 
 
 We have always had adultery and got along beautifully, 
 while divorce is new and American and intolerable. Of 
 course, one can and sometimes does advise a legal separa 
 tion, but that comes hard to minds that face facts, since 
 separation is only a license to well, we all know what 
 separation amounts to; it really cannot be prettily 
 described. 
 
 Charity, left alone at the three-forked road of divorce, 
 complacency, or separation, sank down and waited in dull 
 misery for help or solution, as do most of the poor way 
 farers who come upon such a break in their path of 
 matrimony. She imagined Cheever with Zada and won 
 dered what peculiar incantations Zada used to hold him so 
 long. She wished that she had positive evidence against 
 
 260
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 him not for public use, but as a weapon of self-defense. 
 She felt that from his pulpit Doctor Mosely had chal 
 lenged her to a spiritual duel in that sermon against 
 divorce and remarriage of either guilty or innocent. 
 
 Also she began to want to get evidence to silence her 
 own soul with. She wanted to get over loving Cheever. 
 To want to be cured of such an ailment is already the 
 beginning of cure. 
 
 Abruptly the idea came to her to put a detective on the 
 track of Zada and Cheever. She had no acquaintance in 
 that field, and it was a matter of importance that she 
 should not put herself in the hands of an indelicate de 
 tective. She ought to have consulted a lawyer first, but 
 her soul preferred the risk of disaster to the shame of 
 asking counsel. 
 
 She consulted the newspapers and found a number of 
 advertisements, some of them a little too mysterious, a 
 little too promiseful. But she took a ' chance on the 
 Hodshon & Hindley Bureau, especially as it advertised 
 a night telephone, and it was night when she reached her 
 decision. 
 
 She surprised Mr. Hodshon in the bosom of his family. 
 He was dandling a new baby in the air and trying not 
 to step on the penultimate child, who was treating one of 
 his legs as a tree. When the telephone rang he tossed the 
 latest edition to its mother and hobbled to the table, 
 trying to tear loose the clinger, for it does not sound well 
 to hear a child gurgling at a detective's elbow. 
 
 When Charity told Hodshon who she was his eyes 
 popped and he was greatly excited. When she asked 
 Mr. Hodshon to call at once he looked at his family and 
 his slippers and said he didn't see how he could till the 
 next day. Charity did not want to go to a detective's 
 office in broad daylight or to have anybody see a detective 
 coming to her house. She had an idea that a detective 
 could be recognized at once by his disguise. He prob 
 ably could be if he wore one; and he usually can be, 
 
 261
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 anyway, if any one is looking for him. But she could not 
 get Hodshon till she threatened to telephone elsewhere. 
 At that, he said he would postpone his other engagement 
 and come right up. 
 
 Charity was disappointed in Mr. Hodshon. He looked 
 so ordinary, and yet he must know such terrible things 
 about people. We always expect doctors, lawyers, priests, 
 and detectives to show the scars of the searing things they 
 know. As if we did not all of us know enough about 
 ourselves and others to eat our eyes out, if knowledge 
 were corrosive! 
 
 Charity was further disappointed in Hodshon's lack 
 of picturesqueness. He was like no detective she had 
 read about between Sherlock Holmes and Philo Gubb. 
 He was like no detective at all. It was almost impossible 
 to accept him as her agent. 
 
 He seemed eager to help, however, and when she told 
 him that she suspected her husband of being overly 
 friendly with an insect named Zada L'Etoile, and that she 
 wanted them shadowed, he betrayed a proper agitation. 
 
 Now, of course, women's scandals are no more of a 
 luxury to a detective than their legs were to the 'bus- 
 driver of tradition or to any one in knee-skirted 1916. 
 Mr. Hodshon was a good man as good men go, though he 
 was capable of the little dishonesties and compromises 
 with truth that characterize every profession. A man 
 simply cannot succeed as a teacher, lawyer, doctor, 
 merchant, thief, author, scientist, or anything else if he 
 blurts out everything he knows or believes. No preacher 
 could occupy a pulpit for two Sundays who told just what 
 he actually thought or knew or could find out. The de 
 tective is equally compelled to manipulate the truth. 
 
 Hodshon gave his soul to Charity's cause. He outlined 
 the various ways of establishing Cheever's guilt and 
 promised that the agency would keep him shadowed and 
 make a record of all his hours. 
 
 "It '11 take some time to get the goods on 'em good," 
 
 262
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 he explained, "but there's ways we got. When we learn 
 what we got to know we'll arrange it and tip you off. 
 Then you and me will go to the door and break in on the 
 parties at the right moment, and " 
 
 "No, Thank You!" said Charity, with a firm pressure 
 on each word. 
 
 "You better get some friend to go with us, for a de 
 tective needs c'roboration, you know. The courts won't 
 accept a detective's uns'ported testimony. And if you 
 could know what some of these crooks are capable of 
 you wouldn't wonder. Is that all right? We get the 
 goods on 'em and you have a friend ready, and we'll bust 
 in on the parties, and " 
 
 "No, thank you!" said Charity, with undiminished 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 This stumped Mr. Hodshon. She amazed him further. 
 "I don't intend to bring this case into court. I don't 
 want to satisfy any judge but myself." 
 
 But what he had said about the credibility of the un 
 supported detective had set Charity to thinking. It would 
 be folly to pay these curious persons to collect evidence 
 that was worthless when collected. She mused aloud: 
 
 "Would it be possible of course it wouldn't but if 
 it were, what I should like would be to be able to see my 
 hu Mr. Ch those two persons without their knowing 
 about it at all. Of course that's impossible, isn't it?" 
 
 "Well, it was a few years ago, but we can do wonders 
 nowadays. There's the little dictagraph. We could 
 string one up for you and give you the usual stenographic 
 report or you could go and listen in yourself." 
 
 "Could I really?" Charity gasped, and she began to 
 shiver with the frightfulness of the opportunity. 
 
 "Surest thing you know," said Hodshon. 
 
 "But how could you install a dictagraph without their 
 finding it out?" 
 
 "Easiest thing you know. We'll probably have to 
 rent an apartment in the same building or another one 
 
 263
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 near-by, and one of the hall-boys there may be workin' 
 for us now. If not, we can usually bring him in. There's 
 a hundred ways to get into a house and put the little dictor 
 behind a picture or somewheres and lead the wire out to 
 us." 
 
 "But can you really hear if they talk low?" Charity 
 mumbled, with dread. 
 
 "Let 'em whisper!" said Hodshon. "The little fellow 
 just eats a whisper. Leave it to us, madam, and we'll 
 surprise you." 
 
 The compact was made. Charity suggested an ad 
 vance payment as a retainer, and Hodshon permitted 
 her to write a check and hand it to him before he assured 
 her that it wasn't necessary. 
 
 He went away and left Charity in a state of nerves. 
 Her. curiosity was a mania, but she feared that assuaging 
 it might leave her in a worse plight. She hated herself 
 for her enterprise and was tempted to cancel it. But 
 when she heard Cheever come home at midnight and go 
 to his room without speaking to her she felt a grim resent 
 ment toward him that was like a young hate with a big 
 future. 
 
 Every night Charity received a typewritten document 
 describing Cheever's itinerary for the day. The mute, in 
 glorious Boswell took him up at the front steps, heeled 
 him to his office, out to lunch, back to the office, thence 
 to wherever he went. 
 
 The name of Zada did not appear in the first report at 
 all, but on the second day she met Cheever at luncheon, 
 and he went shopping with her. Charity, reading, 
 flushed to learn that he bought her neither jewelry nor 
 hats, but household supplies and delicacies. He went 
 with her to her apartment and thence with her to dinner 
 and the theater and then back, and thence again after an 
 hour to his home. 
 
 The minute chronicle of his outdoor doings, intercalated 
 with the maddening bafflement of his life in that im- 
 
 264
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 penetrable apartment, made such dramatic reading as 
 Charity had never known. She grew haggard with wait 
 ing for the arrival of her little private daily newspaper. 
 When she saw Cheever she could hardly keep from 
 screaming at him what she knew. His every entrance 
 into the house became a hideous insult. She felt that it 
 was herself who was the kept woman and not the other. 
 
 She longed to take the documents and visit the Rever 
 end Doctor Mosely with them, make him read them and 
 tell her if he still thought it was her duty to endure such 
 infamy. She felt that the good doctor would advise her 
 to lay them before Cheever and confound him with guilt, 
 bring him to what the preachers call "a realizing sense" 
 of it and win him home. 
 
 She was tempted to try the imaginary advice on 
 Cheever, but something held her back. She wondered 
 what it was, till suddenly she came to a realizing sense 
 of one fearful bit of news : her soul had so changed toward 
 him, her love had turned to such disgust, that she was 
 afraid he might come back to her ! He might cast off his 
 discovered partner in guilt and renew his old claim to 
 Charity's soul and body. That would be degradation 
 indeed ! 
 
 Now she was convinced that her love had starved even 
 unto death, that it was a corpse in her home, corrupted 
 the air and must be removed.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 lay extended on her chaise longue, looking as 
 much unlike Madame Recamier as one could look 
 who was so pretty a woman. A Sunday supplement 
 dropped from her hand and joined the heap of papers on 
 the floor. Kedzie was tired of looking at pictures of 
 herself. 
 
 She had had to look over all the papers, since she was 
 in them all. At least her other self, Anita Adair, was in 
 them. 
 
 In every paper there was a large advertisement with a 
 large picture of her and the names of the theaters at which 
 she would appear simultaneously in her new film. In the 
 critical pages devoted to the moving-picture world there 
 were also pictures of her and at least a little text. 
 
 In two or three of the papers there were interviews with 
 the new comet; in others were articles by her. These 
 entertained her at first, because she had never seen the 
 interviewers or the articles. She had not thought many 
 of the thoughts attached to her name. The press agent 
 of the Hyperfilm Company had written everything. He 
 reveled in his new star, for the editors were cordial 
 toward her "press stuff." They "ate it up," "gave it 
 spread." 
 
 This was the less surprising since the advertising-man of 
 the Hyperfilm Company was so lavish with purchase of 
 space that the publishers could well afford to throw in a 
 little free reading matter especially since it did not cost 
 them a cent for the copy. 
 
 The press agent unaided has a hard life, but when the 
 
 266
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 advertising-man gives him his arm he is welcome to the 
 most select columns. 
 
 In some of the interviews Kedzie gave opinions she had 
 never held on themes she had never heard of. When she 
 read that her favorite poet was Rabindranath Tagore she 
 wondered who that "gink" was. When she read that 
 she owed her figure to certain strenuous flexion exercises 
 she decided that they might be worth trying some day. 
 Her advice to beginners in the motion-picture field proved 
 very interesting. She wondered how she had ever got 
 along without it. 
 
 She was greatly excited by an article of hers in which 
 she told of the terrific adventures she had had in and out 
 of the studio; there was one time when an angry tiger 
 would have torn her to pieces if she had not had the 
 presence of mind to play dead. She read of another oc 
 casion when she had either to spoil a good film or en 
 danger her existence as the automobile she was steering 
 refused to answer the brake and plunged over a cliff. 
 Of course she would not ruin the film. By some miracle 
 she escaped with only a few broken bones, and after a 
 week in the hospital returned to the interrupted picture. 
 These old stories were told with such simple sincerity 
 that she almost believed them. But she tossed them 
 aside and sneered: 
 
 "Bunc!" 
 
 She yawned over her own published portraits and to 
 be able to do that is to be surfeited indeed. 
 
 Suddenly Kedzie stopped purring, thought fiercely, 
 whirled to her flank; her hands went among the papers. 
 She remembered something, found it at last, an article 
 she had glanced at and forgotten for the moment. 
 
 She snatched it up and read. It discussed the earning 
 powers of several film queens. It credited them with 
 salaries ten or twenty times as much as hers. Two or 
 three of them had companies of their own with their 
 names at the head of their films. 
 
 267
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie groaned. She rose and paced the floor, shamed r 
 trapped, humbled. The misers of the Hyperfilm Com 
 pany paid her a beggarly hundred dollars a week ! merely 
 featured her among other stars of greater magnitude, 
 while certain women had two thousand a week and were 
 "incorporated," whatever that was! 
 
 Kedzie longed to get at Ferriday and tell him what a 
 sneak he was to lure her into such a web and tie her up 
 with such cheap ropes. She would break her bonds and 
 fling them in his face. 
 
 She slid abruptly to the floor and began to go over the 
 film pages again, comparing her portraits with the portraits 
 of those higher-paid creatures. She hated vanity and 
 could not endure it in other women; it was a mere 
 observation of a self-evident fact that she was pret 
 tier than all the other film queens put together. She 
 sat there sneering at the presumptuousness of screen 
 idols whom she had almost literally worshiped a year 
 before. 
 
 Then something gave her pause. The celluloid- 
 queens had certain pages allotted to them, the actresses 
 certain pages. 
 
 But there was another realm where women were por 
 trayed in fashionable gowns debutantes, brides, matrons. 
 And their realm was called "The Social World." These 
 women toiled not, earned not; they only spent money 
 and time as they pleased. They were in "society," 
 and she was out of it. They were ladies and she was a 
 working- woman . 
 
 Now Kedzie's cake was dough indeed. Now her pride 
 was shame. She did not want to be a film queen. She 
 did not want to work for any sum a week. She wanted 
 to be a debutante and a bride and a matron. 
 
 She had never had a coming-out party, and never would 
 have. She studied the aristocrats, put their portraits 
 on her dressing-table and tried to copy their simple 
 grandeur in her mirror. But she lacked a certain some- 
 
 268
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 thing. She didn't know a human being who was swell 
 to use as a model. 
 
 Oh yes, she did one Jim Dyckman. 
 
 A dark design came to her to dally with him no longer. 
 He had dragged her out of that pool at Newport ; now he 
 must drag her into the swim. 
 
 The telephone-bell rang. The hall-boy said: 
 
 "A gen'leman to see you Mistoo Ferriday." 
 
 "Send him along." 
 
 "He's on the way now." 
 
 "Oh, all right." 
 
 As Kedzie hung up the receiver it occurred to her that 
 this little interchange was about the un-swellest thing 
 she had ever done. She had been heedless of the con 
 venances. Her business life made her responsible only 
 to herself, and she felt able to take care of herself any 
 where. 
 
 Now it came over her that she could not aspire to 
 aristocracy and allow negro hall-boys to send men up 
 in the elevator and telephone her afterward. She snatched 
 up the telephone and said: 
 
 "That you?" 
 
 "Yassum, Miss Adair." 
 
 "How dare you send anybody up without sending the 
 name up first?" 
 
 "Why, you newa " 
 
 "Who do you think I am that I permit anybody to 
 walk in on me?" 
 
 "Why, we alwiz " 
 
 "The idea of such a thing! It's disgraceful." 
 
 "Why, I'm sorry, but" 
 
 "Don't ever do it again." 
 
 "No'm." 
 
 She slapped the receiver on the hook and fumed again, 
 realizing that a something of elegance had been lacking 
 in her tirade. 
 
 The door-bell rang, and she did not wait for her maid, 
 
 269
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 but answered it in angry person. Ferriday beamed on 
 her. 
 
 "Oh, it's you. You didn't stop to ask if I was visible. 
 You just came right on up, didn't you?" 
 
 He whispered: "Pardon me. Somebody else is here. 
 Exit laughingly!" 
 
 That was insult on insult. 
 
 "Stop it! There is not anybody else. Come back. 
 What do you want?" 
 
 He came back, his laughter changed to rage. 
 
 "Look here, you impudent little upstart from nowhere! 
 I invented you, and if you're not careful I'll destroy you." 
 
 "Is that so?" she answered; then, like Mr. Charles 
 Van Loan's baseball hero, she realized with regret that 
 the remark was not brilliant as repartee. 
 
 Ferriday was too wroth to do much better: 
 
 "Yes, that's so. You little nobody!" 
 
 "Nobody!" she laughed, pointing to the newspapers 
 spangled with her portraits. 
 
 Ferriday snorted, "Paid for by Jim Dyckman's money." 
 
 "What do you mean Jim Dyckman's money?" 
 
 "Oh, when I saw how idiotic he was over you, and how 
 slow you were in landing him, and when I realized that the 
 Hyperfilm Company was going to slide your pictures out 
 with no special advertising, I went to him and tried to 
 get him into the business." 
 
 "You had a nerve!" 
 
 "Praise from Lady Hubert!" 
 
 "Whoever she is! Well, did he bite?" 
 
 "Yes and no. He's not such a fool as he looks in your 
 company. He has a hard head for business; he wouldn't 
 invest a cent." 
 
 "I thought you said " 
 
 "But he has a soft head for you. He said he wouldn't 
 invest a cent in the firm, but he'd donate all I could use 
 for you. It was to be a little secret present. He told 
 me you refused to accept presents from him. Did you?" 
 
 270
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie blushed before his cynic understanding. 
 
 He laughed: "You're all right. You know the game, 
 but you've got to quicken your speed. You're taking too 
 much footage in getting to the climax." 
 
 Kedzie was still incandescent with the new information : 
 
 "And Jim Dyckman paid for my advertising?" 
 
 "On condition that his name was kept out of it. That's 
 why you're famous. You couldn't have got your face 
 in a paper if you had been fifty times as pretty if he 
 hadn't swamped the papers with money. And he would 
 never have thought of it if I hadn't gone after him. 
 So you'd better waste a little politeness on me or your 
 first flare will be your last." 
 
 Kedzie acknowledged his conquest, bowed her head, 
 and pouted up at him with such exquisite impudence that 
 he groaned: 
 
 " I don't know whether I ought to kiss you or kill you." 
 
 "Take your choice, my master," Kedzie cooed. 
 
 He snarled at her: "I guess the news I bring will do 
 for you. There was a fire in the studio last night. You 
 didn't know of it?" 
 
 Kedzie, dumbly aghast, shook her head. 
 
 "If you'd read any part of the newspapers except your 
 own press stuff you'd have seen that there was a war in 
 Europe yesterday and a fire in New York last night. I 
 was there trying to save what I could. I got a* few 
 blisters and not much else. Most of your unfinished work 
 is finished gone up in smoke." 
 
 "You don't mean that my beautiful, wonderful films 
 are destroyed?" 
 
 He nodded then caught her as her knees gave way. 
 He felt a stab of pity for her as he dragged her to her 
 chaise longue and let her fall there. She was dazed 
 with the shock. 
 
 She had been indifferent to the destruction of fortresses 
 and cathedrals even of Rheims, with its titanic granite 
 lace. She had read, or might have read, of the air- 
 
 271
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 ship that dropped a bomb through the great fresco in 
 Venice where Tiepolo revealed his unequaled mastery of 
 aerial perspective, taking the eye up through the dome 
 and the human witnesses, cloud by cloud, past the hier 
 archies of angels, past Christ and the Mother of God, on 
 up to Jehovah himself, bending down from infinite 
 heights. The eternal loss of this picture meant nothing 
 to her. But the destruction of her own recorded smiles 
 and tears and the pretty twistings and turnings of her 
 young body that was cataclysm. 
 
 She was like everybody else, in that no multiplication 
 of other people's torments could be so vivid as the catching 
 of her own thumb in a door. Kedzie was too crushed to 
 weep. This little personal Pompeii brought to the dust 
 all the palaces and turrets of her hope upon her head. 
 She whispered to Ferriday: 
 
 ' ' What are you going to do ? Must you make them over 
 again?" 
 
 He shook his head. "The Hyperfilm Company will 
 probably shut up shop now." 
 
 "And let my pictures die?" 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 She beckoned him close and clung to him, babbling: 
 "What will become of me? Oh, my poor pictures! My 
 pretty pictures! The company owes me a week's salary. 
 And I had counted on the money. What's to become of 
 me?" 
 
 Ferriday resented her eternal use of him for her own 
 advantages. "Why do you appeal to me? Where's 
 your friend Dyckman?" 
 
 " I was to see him this evening dine with him." 
 
 "Well, he can build you ten new studios and not feel 
 it. Better ask him to set you up in business." 
 
 Kedzie revolted at this, but she had no answer. Ferri 
 day saw the papers folded open at the society pages. He 
 stared at them, at her, then sniffed: 
 
 "So that's your new ambition!" 
 272
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "What?" 
 
 '"In the Social World!' You want to get in with that 
 gang, eh? Has Dyckman asked you to marry him?" 
 
 "Of course not." 
 
 "Well, if he does, don't ever let him take you into his 
 own set." 
 
 "What do you mean by that?" 
 
 "Just to warn you. Those social worldlings wouldn't 
 stand for you, Anita darling. You can make monkeys 
 of us poor men. But those queens will make a little 
 scared worm out of you and step on you. And they won't 
 stop smiling for one minute." 
 
 " Is that so?" Kedzie snarled. There it was again. 
 
 The telephone rang. Kedzie answered it. The hall- 
 boy timidly announced : 
 
 " Mistoo Dyckman is down year askin' kin he see you. 
 Kin he?" 
 
 "Send him up, please," said Kedzie. Then she turned 
 to Ferriday. "He's here at this hour! I wonder 
 why." 
 
 "I'd better slope." 
 
 "Do you mind?" 
 
 "Not in the least. I'll go up a flight of stairs and take 
 the elevator after His Majesty has finished with it. Good- 
 by. Get busy!" 
 
 He slid out, and Kedzie scurried about her primping. 
 The bell rang. She sent her maid to the door. Dyckman 
 came in. She let him wait awhile then went to him 
 with an elegiac manner. 
 
 She accepted his salute on a martyr-white brow. He 
 said: 
 
 " I read about the fire. I was scared to death for you 
 till I learned that all the people were safe. I motored 
 up to see the ruins. Some ruins! Like to see 'em?" 
 
 " I don't think I could stand the sight of them. They're 
 my ruins, too." 
 
 "How so?" 
 
 273
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Because the company won't rebuild or go on, and most 
 of my pictures were destroyed." 
 
 "Your pretty, beautiful, gorgeous pictures gone! Oh, 
 God help us! That's too terrible to believe." 
 
 She sighed, "It's true." 
 
 "Why, I'd rather lose the Metropolitan Art Gallery 
 than your films. Can't they be made over?" 
 
 "They could, but who's to stand the expense?" 
 
 "I will, if you'll let me." 
 
 "Mr. Dyckman!" 
 
 "I thought we'd agreed that my name was Jim." 
 
 "Jim! You would do that for me!" 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "But why so?" 
 
 "Because why, simply er it's the most natural 
 thing in the world, seeing that Well, you're not sitting 
 there pretending that you don't know I love you, are 
 you?" 
 
 "Oh dear, oh dear! It's too wonderful to believe, you 
 angel!" 
 
 And then for the first time she flung her arms about his 
 neck and kissed him and hugged him, knelt on his lap 
 and clasped him fiercely. 
 
 He felt as if a simoom of rapture had struck him, and 
 when she told him a dozen times that she loved him he 
 could think of nothing to say but, "Say, this is great!' 
 
 She forgave him the banality this time. When she had 
 calmed herself a little she said : 
 
 "But it would mean a frightful lot of money." 
 
 "Whatever it costs, it's cheap considering this." 
 He indicated her arm about his neck. "I wouldn't let 
 the world be robbed of the pictures of you, Anita, not for 
 any money." He told her to tell Ferriday to make 
 the arrangements and send the estimates to him. And 
 he said, "I won't ask you to quit being photographed, 
 even when we are married." 
 
 "When we are married?" Kedzie parroted. 
 274
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Of course! That's where we're bound for, isn't it? 
 Where else could we pull up that is, of course, assuming 
 that you'll do me the honor of anchoring a great artist 
 like you up to a big dub like me. Will you?" 
 
 "Why why I'd like to think it over; this is so 
 sudden." 
 
 "Of course, you'd better think it over, you poor angel!" 
 
 Kedzie could not think what else to say or even what to 
 think. The word "marriage" reminded her that she had 
 what the ineffable Bunker Bean would have called "a 
 little old last year's husband" lying around in the garret 
 of her past. 
 
 She went almost blind with rage at that beast of a 
 Gilfoyle who had dragged her away and married her while 
 she was not thinking. He must have hypnotized her or 
 drugged her. If only she could quietly murder him! 
 But she didn't even know where he was.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE investigations of Messrs. Hodshon & Hindley 
 in the life of Zada and Cheever prospered exceed 
 ingly. In blissless ignorance of it, Zada had been in 
 spired to set a firm of sleuths on Charity's trail. She 
 wanted to be able to convince Cheever that Charity was 
 intrigued with Dyckman. The operators who kept Mrs. 
 Charity Coe Cheever under espionage had the most stupid 
 things to report to Zada. 
 
 To Zada's disgust, Mrs. Cheever never called upon 
 Jim Dyckman, and he never called on her. Zada accused 
 the bureau of cheating her, and finally put another agency 
 to shadowing Jim Dyckman. According to the reports 
 she had, his neglect of Mrs. Cheever was perfectly ex 
 plained. He was a mere satellite of a moving-picture 
 actress, a new-comer named Anita Adair. 
 
 The detectives reported that such gossip as they could 
 pick up about the studio indicated that Dyckman was 
 putting money into the firm on her account. 
 
 "A movie angel!" sneered Zada. She had wasted a 
 hundred dollars on him to find this out, and two hundred 
 and fifty on Mrs. Cheever to find out that she was intensely 
 respectable. That was bitter news to Zada.. She can 
 celed her business with her detective agency. And they 
 called in the shadows that haunted Charity's life. 
 
 The detectives on Zada's trail, however, had more 
 rewarding material to work with although they found 
 unexpected difficulties, they said, in getting the dictagraph 
 installed in her apartment. They did not wish to ruin 
 the whole enterprise by too great haste especially as 
 
 276
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 they were receiving eight dollars a day and liberal ex 
 penses per man. 
 
 At last, however, Hodshon sent word to Mrs. Cheever 
 that the dictagraph was installed and working to a T, 
 and she could listen-in whenever she was ready. 
 
 Charity was terrified utterly now. New scales were to 
 be shaken from her eyes at the new tree of knowledge. 
 She was to hear her man talking to his leman. 
 
 She had almost an epilepsy of terror, but she could 
 not resist the importunate opportunity. 
 
 She selected from her veils a heavy crepe that she had 
 worn during a period of mourning for one of her husband's 
 relatives. It seemed appropriate now, for she was going 
 into mourning for her own husband, living, yet about to 
 die to her. 
 
 She left the house alone after dark and walked along 
 Fifth Avenue till she found a taxicab. She gave the 
 street number Hodshon had given her and stepped in. 
 She kept an eye on the lighted clock and in the dark sorted 
 out the exact change and a tip, adding dimes as they were 
 recorded on the meter. She did not want to have to pause 
 for change, and she did not wish to make herself con 
 spicuous by an extravagant tip. 
 
 As the taxicab slid along the Avenue Charity wondered 
 if any of the passengers in other cabs could have an errand 
 so gruesome as hers. She was tortured by fantastic 
 imaginings of what she might hear. She wondered how a 
 man would talk to such a person as Zada, and how she 
 would answer. She imagined the most dreadful things 
 she could. 
 
 The taxicab surprised her by stopping suddenly before 
 a brown-fronted residence adjoining an apartment-house 
 of (more or less literally) meretricious ornateness. She 
 stepped out, paid her fare, and turned, to find Mr. Hodshon 
 at her elbow. He had been waiting for her. He recog 
 nized her by her melodramatic veil. He gave her needed 
 help up a high stoop and opened the door with a key. 
 
 277
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She found herself in a shabby, smelly hall where no one 
 else was. 
 
 He motioned her up the stairway, and she climbed 
 with timidity. At each level there were name-plates 
 over the electric buttons. The very labels seemed illicit. 
 Hodshon motioned her up and up for four flights. 
 
 Then he opened a door and stepped back to let her 
 enter a room unfurnished except for a few chairs and a 
 table. Two men were in the room, and they were laughing 
 with uproar. One of them had a telephone-receiver 
 clamped to his ear, and he was making shorthand notes, 
 explaining to his companion what he heard. 
 
 They turned in surprise at Hodshon's entrance and 
 rose to greet Charity with the homage due so great a 
 client. 
 
 Charity could hardly bespeak them civilly. They took 
 her curtness for snobbery, but it was not. It swept over 
 her that these people were laughing over her most sacred 
 tragedy. 
 
 She advanced on the operator and put out her hand 
 for the headpiece he wore. He took it off and rubbed it 
 with his handkerchief, and told her that she must remove 
 her hat and veil. 
 
 She came out startlingly white and brilliant from the 
 black. She put the elastic clamp over her head and set 
 the receiver to her ear. Instantly she was assailed by 
 dreadful noises, a jangle of inarticulate sounds like the 
 barking of two dogs. 
 
 "I can't hear a word," she protested. 
 
 "They're talkin' too loud," said the operator. "The 
 only way to beat the dictagraph is to cut the wire or yell." 
 
 "Are they quarreling, then?" Charity asked, almost 
 with pleasure. 
 
 "Yes, ma'am. But it's the lady and her maid. They 
 been havin' a terrible scrap about marketin'. He Mr. 
 Cheever ain't there yet. They're expectin' him, though." 
 
 Charity felt that she had plumbed the depths of degrada- 
 
 278
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 tion in listening to a quarrel between such a creature and 
 her maid. What must it be to be the maid of such a 
 creature! She was about to snatch away the earpiece 
 when she heard the noise of a door opening. She looked 
 toward the entrance of the room she was in, but the door 
 that opened was in the other room in the other building. 
 
 The voices of Zada and her maid stopped jangling, and 
 she heard the most familiar of all voices asking: 
 
 "What's the row to-day?" 
 
 There was an extra metal in the timbre and it had 
 the effect of an old phonographic record, but there was no 
 questioning whose voice it was. 
 
 Zada's voice became audibly low in answer. 
 
 "She is such a fool she drives me crazy." 
 
 A sullen, servile voice answered: "It ain't me's the 
 fool, and as for crazy her wantin' me to bring home what 
 they ain't in no market. How 'm I goin' to git what 
 ain't to be got, I asts you. This here war is stoppin' 
 ev'y kind of food." 
 
 Cheever's answer was characteristic. He didn't believe 
 in servants' rights. 
 
 "Get out. If you're impudent again I'll throw you out, 
 and your baggage after you." 
 
 "Yassar," was the soft answer. 
 
 There was the sound of shuffling feet and a softly closed 
 door. Then Zada's voice, very mellow: 
 
 " I thought you'd never come, dearie." 
 
 "Awfully busy to-day, honey." 
 
 "You took dinner with her, of course." 
 
 "No. It was a big day on the Street, and there was so 
 much to do at the office that I dined down-town at the 
 Bankers' Club with several men and then went back to 
 the office. I ought to be there all night, but I couldn't 
 keep away from you any longer." 
 
 There were mysterious quirks of sound that meant kisses 
 and sighs and tender inarticulations. There were cooing 
 tones which the dictagraph repeated with hideous fidelity. 
 
 279
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Zada asked, " Did he have hard daydie old office-urns?" 
 
 And he answered, with infatuated imbecility, "Yes, he 
 diddums, but worst was lonelying for his Zadalums." 
 
 " Did Peterkin miss his Zadalums truly truly?" 
 
 The inveterate idioms of wooers took on in Charity's 
 ear a grotesque obscenity, a sacrilegious burlesque of 
 words as holy to her as prayer or the sacred dialect of 
 priests. When Zada murmured, "Kissings! kissings!" 
 Charity screamed: "Stop it, you beasts! You beasts!" 
 
 Then she clapped her hand over her lips, expecting to 
 hear their panic at her outcry. But they were as ob 
 livious of her pain or her rage as if an interplanetary space 
 divided them. They went on with the murmur and 
 susurrus of their communion, while Charity looked askance 
 at the three men. They could not hear, but could im 
 agine, and they stared at her doltishly. 
 
 "Leave the room! Go away!" she groaned. 
 
 They slipped out through the door and left her to her 
 shame. 
 
 In the porches of her ear the hateful courtship purled 
 on with its tender third-personal terms and its amorous 
 diminutives, suffixed ridiculously. 
 
 "Zada. was af'aid her booful Peterkin had forgotten 
 her and gone to the big old house." 
 
 "Without coming home first?" 
 
 "Home! that's the wordie I want. This is his homie, 
 isn't it, Peterkin?" 
 
 "Yessy." 
 
 "He doesn't love old villain who keeps us apart?" 
 
 "Nonie, nonie." 
 
 "Never did, did he?" 
 
 "Never." 
 
 "Only married her, didn't he?" 
 
 "That's allie." 
 
 "Zada is only really wifie?" 
 
 "Only onlykins." 
 
 Charity listened with a greed of self-torment like a 
 
 280
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 fanatic penitent. The chatter of the two had none of the 
 indecency she had expected, and that made it the more 
 intolerably indecent. 
 
 She saw that Cheever's affair with Zada had settled 
 down to a state of comfort, of halcyon delight. 
 
 It had taken on domestication. He was at home with 
 her and an alien in Charity's home. He told the woman 
 his business affairs and little office jokes. He laughed with 
 a purity of cheer that he had long lost in his legal estab 
 lishment. He used many of the love-words that he had 
 once used to Charity, and her heart was wrung with the 
 mockery of it. 
 
 Charity listened helplessly. She was as one manacled 
 or paralyzed and submitted to such a torture as she had 
 never endured. She harkened in vain for some hope 
 ful note of uncongeniality, some reassurance for her love 
 or at least her vanity, some certainty that her husband, 
 her first possessor, had given her some emotion that he 
 could never give another. But he was repeating to Zada 
 the very phrases of his honeymoon, repeating them with 
 all the fervor of a good actor playing Romeo for the 
 hundredth time with his new leading lady. Indeed, he 
 seemed to find in Zada a response and a unity that he had 
 never found in Charity's society. Her intelligence was 
 cruelly goaded to the realization that she had never been 
 quite the woman for Cheever. 
 
 She had known that he had not been the full complement 
 of her own soul. They had disagreed fiercely on hundreds 
 of topics. He had been chilled by many of her ardors, 
 as many of his interests had bored her. She had sup 
 posed it to be an inevitable inability of a man and a 
 woman to regard the world through the same eyes. She 
 had let him go his way and had gone her own. And 
 now it seemed that he had in his wanderings found some 
 one who mated him exactly. The butterfly had liked the 
 rose, but had fluttered away; when it found the orchid 
 it closed its wings and rested content. 
 
 281
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 It was a frightful revelation to Charity, for it meant 
 that Cheever had been merely flirting with her. She had 
 caught his eye as a girl in a strange port captivates a 
 sailor. He had haunted her window with serenades. 
 Finding her to be what we call "a good girl," he had 
 called upon her father and mother that he might talk to 
 her longer. And then he had gone to church with her 
 and married her that he might get rid of her father and 
 mother and her own scruples. And so he had made her 
 his utterly, and after a few days and nights had sailed 
 away. He had come back to her now and then as a sailor 
 does. 
 
 Meanwhile in another port he had found what we call 
 "a bad woman." There had been no need to serenade 
 her out into the streets. They were her shop. No par 
 ents had guarded her hours; no priest was intermediary 
 to her possession. But once within her lair he had found 
 himself where he had always wanted to be, and she had 
 found herself with the man she had been hunting. She 
 closed her window, drove her frequenters, old and new, 
 from the door; and he regretted that he had given pledges 
 to that other woman. 
 
 It was a pitiful state of affairs, no less pitiful for being 
 old and ugly and innumerously commonplace. It meant 
 that Cheever under the white cloak of matrimony had 
 despoiled Charity of her innocence, and under the red 
 domino of intrigue had restored to Zada hers. 
 
 If Charity, sitting like a recording angel, invisible but 
 hearing everything, had found in the communion of Zada 
 and Cheever only the fervor of an amour, she could have 
 felt that Cheever was merely a libertine who loved his 
 wife and his home but loved to rove as well. She 
 had, however, ghastly evidence that Cheever was only 
 now the rake reformed; his marriage had been merely one 
 of his escapades ; he had settled down now to monogamy 
 with Zada, and she was his wife in all but style and title. 
 
 There was more of Darby and Joan than of Elvira and 
 282
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Don Juan in their conversation. He told Zada with 
 pride that he had not had a drink all day, though he had 
 needed alco-help and the other men had ridiculed him. 
 She told him that she had not had a drink for a week and 
 only one cigarette since her lonely dinner. They were in 
 a state of mutual reformation ! 
 
 Where, then, was the sacrament of marriage? Which 
 of the women held the chalice now? 
 
 It was enforced on Charity that it was she and not 
 Zada who had been the inspirer and the victim of Cheever 's 
 flitting appetite. It was Zada and not she who had won 
 him to the calm, the dignity, the sincerity, the purity 
 that make marriage marriage. It was a hard lesson for 
 Charity, and she did not know what she ought to do with 
 her costly knowledge. She could only listen. 
 
 When Zada complained that she had had a dreadful 
 day of blues Cheever made jokes for her as for a child, and 
 she laughed like the child she was. For her amusement 
 he even went to a piano and played, with blundering three- 
 chord accompaniment, a song or two. He played jokes 
 on the keyboard. He revealed none of the self-conscious 
 ness that he manifested before Charity when he ex 
 ploited his little bag of parlor tricks. 
 
 Charity's mood had changed from horror to eager 
 curiosity, and thence to cold despair, to cold resentment. 
 It went on to cold intelligence and a belief that her life 
 with Cheever was over. Their marriage was a proved 
 failure, and any further experiments with its intimacies 
 would be unspeakably vile. Or so she thought. 
 
 She had consented to this dictagraphic inspection of her 
 husband's intrigue merely to confirm or refute gossip. 
 She had had more than evidence enough to satisfy her. 
 Her first reaction to it was a primitive lust for revenge. 
 
 Once or twice she blazed with such anger that she rose 
 to tear the wire loose from the wall and end the torment. 
 But her curiosity restrained her. She set the earpiece 
 to her ear again. 
 
 283
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 At length she formed her resolution to act. She called 
 out, "Mr. Hodshon, come here!*' 
 
 He came in and found her a pillar of rage. 
 
 "I've heard enough. I'll do what I refused before. 
 I'll go with you and break in." 
 
 Hodshon was dazed. He was not ready to act. She 
 had refused his plan to break in according to the classic 
 standards. He had let the plan lapse and accepted Mrs. 
 Cheever as a poor rich wretch whom he had contracted 
 to provide with a certain form of morbid entertainment. 
 He could do nothing now but stammer: 
 
 "Well well is that so? Do ypu really? You know 
 you didn't O' course Well, let's see now. You know 
 we ain't prepared. I told you we had to have a c'rob'rat- 
 ing witness. It wouldn't be legal if we were to Still, 
 they probably would accept you as witness and us as 
 corroboration, but you wouldn't want to go on the stand 
 and tell what you found not a nice refined lady like 
 you are. The witness-stand is no place for a lady, 
 anyway. 
 
 "The thing is if you could get some gentleman friend 
 to go with you and you two break in. Then you'd both 
 be amateurs, kind of. You see? Do you know any 
 gentleman who might be willing to do that for you? 
 The best of friends get very shy when you suggest such 
 a job. But if you know anybody who would be interested 
 and wanted to help you Do you?" 
 
 Only two names came to Charity's searching mind 
 Jim Dyckman's impossible name and one that was so 
 sublimely unfit that she laughed as she uttered it. 
 
 "There's the Reverend Doctor Mosely." 
 
 Hodshon tried to laugh. 
 
 "I was reading head-lines of a sermon of his. He's 
 down on divorce." 
 
 "That's why he'd be the ideal witness," said Charity. 
 
 "But would he come?" 
 
 "Of course not," she laughed. "There's no use of 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 carrying this further. I've had all I can stand to-night. 
 Let me go." 
 
 As usual with people who have had all they can stand T 
 Charity wanted some more. She glanced at the receiver,, 
 curious as to what winged words had flown unattended 
 during her parley with Hodshon. 
 
 She put the receiver to her ear and fell back. Again 
 she was greeted with clamor. They were quarreling 
 ferociously. 
 
 That might mean either of two things: there are the 
 quarrels that enemies maintain, and those that devoted 
 lovers wage. The latter sort are perhaps the bitterer, 
 the less polite. Charity could not learn what had started 
 the wrangle between those two. 
 
 Slowly it died away. Zada's cries turned to sobs, and' 
 her tirade to sobs. 
 
 "You don't love me. Go back to her. You love her 
 still." 
 
 "No, I don't, honey. I just don't want her name 
 brought into our conversation. It doesn't seem decent, 
 somehow. It's like bringing her in here to listen to our 
 quarrels. I'm sorry I hurt you. I'm trying not to,, 
 but you're so peculiarly hard to keep peace with lately. 
 What's the reason, darling?" 
 
 Charity was smitten with a fear more terrible than any 
 yet. She heard its confirmation. Zada whispered: 
 
 "Can't you guess?" 
 
 "No, I can't." 
 
 "Stupid!" Zada murmured. "You poor, stupid boy." 
 
 Charity heard nothing for a long moment then a gasp. 
 
 "Zada!" 
 
 She greeted his alarm with a chuckle and a flurry of 
 proud laughter. He bombarded her with questions: 
 
 " Why didn't you tell me ? How long? What will you 
 do? How could you? you're no fool." 
 
 Her answers were jumbled with his questions his 
 voice terrified, hers victorious. 
 
 285
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I've kept it a secret for months, because I was afraid 
 of you. It's my right. It's too late to do anything now. 
 And now we'll see whether you love me or not and how 
 much, if any." 
 
 There was again silence. Charity could hardly tolerate 
 the suspense. Both she and Zada were hanging breath 
 lessly on Cheever's answer. 
 
 He did not speak for so long that Zada gave up. "You 
 don't love me, then? I'd better kill myself, I suppose. 
 It's the only solution now. And I'm willing, since you 
 don't love me enough." 
 
 "No, no yes, I do. I adore you more than ever. 
 But it's such a strange ambition for you; and, God! what 
 a difference it makes, what a difference!" 
 
 That was what Charity thought. For once she agreed 
 with Cheever, echoed his words and his dismay and stood 
 equally stunned before the new riddle. It was a perfect 
 riddle now, for there was no end to the answers, and every 
 one of them was wrong.
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 CHARITY let the receiver fall. She had had enough. 
 \^s She sank into a chair and would have slipped to the 
 floor, but her swimming eyes made out the blurred face 
 of Hodshon, terrified at her pallor. 
 
 If she fainted he would resuscitate her. She could not 
 add that to her other ignominies. She clenched herself 
 like one great fist of resolution till the swoon was frus 
 trated. She sat still for a while then rose, put on her 
 hat, swathed her face in the veil, and went down the 
 flights of stairs and out into the cool, dark street. 
 
 She had forgotten that she had dismissed the taxicab. 
 Fortunately another was lurking in the lee of the apart 
 ment-house. Hodshon summoned it and would have 
 ridden home with her, but she forbade him. She passed 
 on the way the church of Doctor Mosely and his house 
 adjoining. She was tempted to stop, but she was too 
 weary for more talk. 
 
 She slept exceedingly well that night, so well that when 
 she woke she regretted that she had not slept on out of 
 the world. She fell asleep again, but was trampled by 
 a nightmare. She woke trying to scream. Her eyes, 
 opening, found her beautiful room about her and the dream 
 dangers vanished. 
 
 But the horrors of her waking hours of yesterday had 
 not vanished. They were waiting for her. She could 
 not end them by the closing of her eyes. In the cool, 
 clear light of day she saw still more problems than before 
 problems crying for decisions and contradicting each 
 other with a hopeless conflict of moralities. To move 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 in any direction was to commit ugly deeds ; to move in no 
 direction was to commit the ugliest of all. 
 
 She rang for her coffee, and she could hardly sit up to 
 it. Her maid cried out at her age-worn look, and begged 
 her to see a doctor. 
 
 " I'm going to as soon as I'm strong enough," said Char 
 ity Coe. But she meant the Reverend Doctor Mosely. 
 She thought that she could persuade even him that surgery 
 was necessary upon that marriage. At any rate, she 
 determined to force a decision from him. She telephoned 
 the unsuspecting old darling, and he readily consented to 
 .see her. She spent an hour or two going over her Bible 
 ^and concordance. They gave her little comfort in her 
 plight. 
 
 When finally she dragged herself from her home to 
 Doctor Mosely's his butler ushered her at once into the 
 ;study. Doctor Mosely welcomed her both as a grown-up 
 child and as an eminent dealer in good deeds. 
 
 She went right at her business. "Doctor Mosely, I 
 loathe myself for adding to the burdens your parish puts 
 upon your dear shoulders but you're responsible for my 
 present dilemma." 
 
 "My dear child, you don't tell me! Then you must 
 let me help you out of it. But first tell me what I'm 
 responsible for." 
 
 "You married me to Peter Cheever." 
 
 "Why, yes, I believe I did. I marry so many dear girls. 
 Yes, I remember your wedding perfectly. A very pretty 
 occasion, and you looked extremely well. So did the 
 bridegroom. I was quite proud of joining two such 
 
 :SUch " 
 
 "Please unjoin us." 
 
 "Great Heavens, my child! What are you saying?" 
 
 " I am asking you to untie the knot you tied." 
 
 The old man stared at her, took his glasses off, rubbed 
 
 them, put them on, and peered into her face to make sure 
 
 <of her. Then he said : 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "If that were in my power and you know perfectly 
 well that it is not it would be a violation of all that I 
 hold sacred in matrimony." 
 
 "Just what do you hold sacred, Doctor Mosely?" 
 
 "Dear, dear, this will never do. Really, I don't wish 
 to take advantage of my cloth, but, really, you know, 
 Charity, you have been taught better than to snap at 
 the clergy like that." 
 
 "Forgive me; I'm excited, not irreverent. But well,, 
 you don't believe in divorce, do you?" 
 
 "I have stated so with all the power of my poor elo 
 quence." 
 
 " Do you believe that the seventh commandment is the 
 least important of the lot?" 
 
 "Certainly not!" 
 
 "If a man breaks any commandment he ought to da 
 what he can to remedy the evil?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Then if a man violates the seventh, why shouldn't 
 he be compelled to make restitution, too?" 
 
 "What restitution could he make?" 
 
 "Not much. He has taken from the girl he marries", 
 her name, her innocence, her youth he can restore only 
 one thing her freedom." 
 
 "That is not for him to restore. 'What, therefore,, 
 God hath joined, let not man put asunder.'" 
 
 The old man grew majestic when he thundered the 
 sonorities of Holy Writ. Charity was cowed, but she 
 made a craven protest : 
 
 "But who is to say what God hath joined?" 
 
 "The marriage sacraments administered by the or 
 dained clergy established that. There is every warrant 
 for clergymen to perform marriages; no Christian clergy 
 man pretends to undo them." 
 
 "You believe that marriage is an indissoluble sacra 
 ment, then?" 
 
 "Indeed I do." 
 19 289
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Who made my marriage a sacrament?" 
 
 "I did, as the agent of God." 
 
 "And the' minute you pronounce a couple married 
 they are registered in heaven, and God completes the 
 union?" 
 
 "You may put it as you please; the truth is divine." 
 
 "In other words, a man like you can pronounce two 
 people man and wife, but once the words have escaped 
 his lips nothing can ever correct the mistake." 
 
 "There are certain conditions which annul a marriage, 
 tut once it is genuinely ratified on earth it is ratified in 
 heaven." 
 
 "In heaven, where, as the New Testament says in 
 several places, married people do not live together? 
 The woman who had seven husbands on earth, you know, 
 didn't have any at all in heaven." 
 
 "So Christ answered the Sadducee who tempted him 
 with questions." 
 
 "Marriage is strictly a matter of the earth, earthy, 
 then?" 
 
 "Nothing is strictly that, my child. But what in the 
 name of either earth or heaven has led you to come over 
 here and break into my morning's work with such a 
 fusillade of childish questions? You know a child can 
 ask questions that a wise man cannot answer. Also, a 
 child can ask questions which a wise man can answer to 
 another wise man but not to a child. You talk like an 
 excited, an unreasoning girl. I am surprised to hear you 
 ridiculing the institution of Christian marriage, but your 
 ridicule does not prove it to be ridiculous." 
 
 "Oh, it's not ridiculous to me, Doctor Mosely; and 
 I'm not ridiculing it. I am horribly afraid of what it has 
 done to me and will do to me." 
 
 "Explain that, my dear." 
 
 She did explain with all bluntness : ' ' My husband openly 
 lives with a mistress. He prefers her to me." 
 
 The old man was stunned. He faltered: "Dear me! 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 That is most reprehensible most! He should be sub 
 jected to discipline." 
 
 "Whose? He isn't a member of your church. And 
 how can you discipline such a man especially as you don't 
 believe in divorce?" 
 
 "Have you tried to win him back to the path of duty,. 
 to waken him to a realizing sense of his obliquity?" 
 
 "Often and long. It can't be done, for he loves the 
 other woman." 
 
 "Don't use the beautiful word love for such a debasing 
 impulse." 
 
 "But I know he loves her!" 
 
 "How could you know?" 
 
 " I heard him tell her." 
 
 "You heard him! Do you ask me to believe that he 
 told her that in your presence?" 
 
 "I heard him on the dictagraph." 
 
 "You have been collecting evidence for divorce, then?"' 
 
 " No, I was collecting it to assure myself that the gossip 
 I had heard was false and to submit to you." 
 
 "But why to me?" 
 
 "When I first learned of this hideous situation my 
 first impulse was to rush to the courts. I went to church 
 instead. I heard your sermon. It stopped me from see 
 ing a lawyer." 
 
 "I am glad my poor words have served some useful 
 end." 
 
 "But have they?" 
 
 "If I have prevented one divorce I have not lived in 
 vain." 
 
 "You don't think I have a right to ask for one?" 
 
 "Absolutely and most emphatically not." 
 
 "In spite of anything he may do?" 
 
 "Anything! He will come back to you, Charity. 
 Possess your soul in patience. It may be years, but keep 
 the light burning and he will return." 
 
 "In what condition?" 
 
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 "My child, you shock me! You've been reading the 
 horrible literature that gets printed under the guise of 
 .-science." 
 
 "I must wait, then?" 
 
 "Yes. If you wish to separate from him for a time, 
 your absence might waken him to a realizing sense. There 
 are no children, I believe." 
 
 "None, yet." 
 
 "Yet? Oh, then" 
 
 "If there were, would it make a difference?" 
 
 ' ' Of course ! an infinite difference ! ' ' 
 
 "You think a man and woman ought to let their child 
 keep them together in any event?" 
 
 "Need I say it? What greater bond of union could 
 there be? Is it not God's own seal and blessing on the 
 wedlock, rendering it, so to speak, even more indissoluble ? 
 You blush, my child. Is it true, then, that " 
 
 "A child is expected." 
 
 "Ah, my dear girl! How that proves what I have 
 maintained! The birth of the little one will bring the 
 errant father to his senses. The tiny hands will unite 
 its parents as if they were the hands of a priest drawing 
 them together. That child is the divine messenger con 
 firming the sacrament." 
 
 "You believe that?" 
 
 "Utterly. Oh, I am glad. Motherhood is the crowning 
 triumph; it hallows any woman howsoever lowly or 
 wicked. And you are neither, Charity. I know you to 
 be good and busy in good works. But were you never so 
 evil, this heavenly privilege would make of you a very 
 vessel of sanctity." 
 
 Charity turned pale as she sprung the trap. "The 
 child is expected not by me, but by the other woman." 
 
 Doctor Mosely's beatitude turned to a sick disgust. 
 Red and white streaked his face. His first definite reac 
 tion was wrath at the trick that had been played upon 
 him. 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Mrs. Cheever! This is unworthy of you! You dis 
 tress me! Really!" 
 
 "I was a little distressed myself. What am I to do?" 
 
 "I will not believe what you say." 
 
 "I heard her confess it boast of it. She agrees with 
 you that the tiny hands will bring her and the father to 
 gether and confirm the sacrament." 
 
 "It can't be. It must not be!" 
 
 "You don't advocate that form of birth-control? 
 They are arresting people who preach prevention of 
 conception. You are not so modern as that." 
 
 "Hush!" 
 
 "What am I to do? You advise me to possess my soul 
 in patience for years. But the child won't wait that long. 
 Doesn't the situation alter your opinion of divorce?" 
 
 "No!" 
 
 "But if I don't divorce Mr. Cheever and let him marry 
 her the child will have no father legally." 
 
 "The responsibility is his, not yours." 
 
 "You don't believe in infant damnation, do you? At 
 least not on earth, do you?" 
 
 "I cannot control the evil impulses of others. The 
 doctrines of the Church cannot be modified for the con 
 venience of every sinner." 
 
 "You advise against divorce, then?" 
 
 "I am unalterably opposed to it." 
 
 "What is your solution, then, of this situation?" 
 
 "I shall have to think it over and pray. Please go. 
 You have staggered me." 
 
 "When you have thought it over will you give me the 
 help of your advice?" 
 
 "Certainly." 
 
 "Then shall I wait till I hear from you?" 
 
 "If you will." 
 
 "Good-by, Doctor Mosely." 
 
 "Good-by, Mrs. Charity my child!" 
 
 He pressed her long hand in his old palms. He was 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 trembling. He was like a priest at bay before the altar 
 while the arrows of the infidel rain upon him. These 
 arrows were soft as rain and keen as silk. He was more 
 afraid of them than if they had been tipped with flint or 
 steel. 
 
 Charity left the parsonage no wiser than she entered it. 
 She had accomplished nothing further than to ruin Doctor 
 Mosely's excellent start on an optimistic discourse in the 
 prevailing fashion of the enormously popular " Pollyanna" 
 .stories: it was to be a "glad" sermon, an inexorably 
 glad sermon. But poor Doctor Mosely could not preach 
 it now in the face of this ugly fact. 
 
 Charity went home with her miserable triumph, which 
 only emphasized her defeat. 
 
 She found at home a mass of details pressing for im 
 mediate action if the big moving-picture project were not 
 to lapse into inanity. The mere toil of such a task ought 
 to have been welcomed, at least as a diversion. But her 
 lieart was as if dead in her. 
 
 She wondered how Jim Dyckman was progressing with 
 his portion of the task. He had not reported to her. She 
 wondered why. 
 
 She decided to telephone him. She put out her hand, 
 but did not lift the receiver from the hook. She began 
 to muse upon Jim Dyckman. She began to think strange 
 thoughts of him. If she had married him she might not 
 have failed so wretchedly to find happiness. Of course, 
 she might have failed more wretchedly and more speedily, 
 but the wayfarer who chooses one of two crossroads and 
 meets a wolf upon it does not believe that a lion was wait 
 ing on the other.
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 HARITY pondered her whole history with Jim Dyck- 
 man, from their childhood flirtations on. He had 
 had other flings, and she had flung herself into Peter 
 Cheever's arms. Peter Cheever had flung her out again. 
 Jim Dyckman had opened his arms again. 
 
 He had told her that she was wasting herself. He had 
 offered her love and devotion. She had struck his hands 
 away and rebuked him fiercely. A little later she had felt a 
 pang of jealousy because he looked at that little Greek 
 dancer so interestedly. She had tried to atone for this 
 appalling thought by interesting herself in the little 
 dancer's welfare and hunting a position for her with the 
 moving-picture company. She had told Jim Dyckman 
 to look for the girl in the studio and find how she was 
 getting along. He had never reported on that, either. 
 Charity smiled bitterly. 
 
 Last night it had come over her that her love for Peter 
 Cheever was dead. Was love itself, then, dead for her? 
 or was her heart already busy down there in the dark of 
 her bosom, busy like a seed germinating some new lily 
 or fennel to thrust up into the daylight ? 
 
 The sublime and the ridiculous are as close together as 
 the opposite sides of a sheet of cloth. The sublime is the 
 obverse of the tapestry with the figures heroic, saintly or 
 sensuous, in battle or temple or bower, in conquest, love, 
 martyrdom, adoration. The reverse of the tapestry is a 
 matter of knots and tufts, broken patterns, ludicrous 
 accidents of contour. The same threads make up both 
 sides. 
 
 295
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 On one side of Charity's tapestry she saw herself as a 
 pitiful figure, a neglected wife returned from errands of 
 mercy to find her husband enamoured of a wanton. She 
 spurned the proffered heart of a great knight while her 
 own heart bled openly in her breast. 
 
 On the other side she saw the same red threads that 
 crimsoned her heart running across the arras to and from 
 the heart of Jim Dyckman. It was the red thread of life 
 and love, blood-color blood-maker, blood-spiller, heart- 
 quickener, heart-sickener, the red thread of romance, of 
 motherhood and of lust, birth and murder, family and 
 bawdry. 
 
 In the tapestry her heart was entire, her eyes upon her 
 faithless husband. On the other side her eyes faced the 
 other knight; her heartstrings ran out to his. She 
 laughed harshly at the vision. Her laugh ended in a 
 fierce contempt of herself and of every body and thing 
 else in the world. 
 
 She was too weak to fight the law and the Church and 
 the public in order to divorce her husband. Would it be 
 weakness or strength to sit at home in the ashes and 
 deny herself to life and love? She could always go to 
 Jim Dyckman and take him as her cavalier. But then 
 she would become one of those heartbroken, leash-broken 
 women who are the Maenads of society, more or less cir 
 cumspect and shy, but none the less lawless. But 
 wherein were they better than the Zadas? 
 
 Charity was wrung with a nausea of love in all its 
 activities; she forswore them. Yet she was human. 
 She was begotten and conceived in the flesh of lovers. 
 She was made for love and its immemorial usages. How 
 could she expect to destroy her own primeval impulse 
 just because one treacherous man had enjoyed her awhile 
 and passed on to his next affair? 
 
 There was no child of hers to grow up and replace her 
 in the eternal armies of love and compel her aside among 
 the veteran women who have been mustered out. She 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 was in a sense already widowed of her husband. Cer 
 tainly she would never love Cheever again or receive him 
 into her arms. He belonged to the mother of his child. 
 Let that woman step aside into the benches of the spec 
 tators, those who have served their purpose and must 
 become wet-nurses, child-dryers, infant-teachers, peram 
 bulator-motors, question-answerers, nose-blowers, mis- 
 chief-punishers, cradleside-bards. 
 
 Charity laughed derisively at the vision of Zada as a 
 mother. The Madonna pose had fascinated this Mag 
 dalen, but she would find that mothers have many, many 
 other things to do for their infants than to sit for portraits 
 and give them picturesque nourishment many, many 
 other things. If Zada's child inherited its father's and 
 mother's wantonness, laziness, wickedness, and violence 
 of temper, there was going to be a lively nursery in that 
 apartment. 
 
 Zada had so wanted a baby as a reward of love that she 
 was willing to snatch it out of the vast waiting-room with 
 out pausing for a license. She would find that she had 
 bought punishment at a high price. The poor baby was 
 in for a hard life, but it would give its parents one in 
 exchange. 
 
 Charity was appalled at this unknown harshness of her 
 soul; it sneered at all things once held beautiful and 
 sacred. Her soul was like a big cathedral broken into 
 by a pagan mob that ran about smashing images, defil 
 ing fonts, burlesquing all the solemn rituals. Her quiet 
 mind was full of sunburnt nymphs and goatish fauns 
 with shaggy fetlocks. She saw the world as a Brocken 
 and all the Sabbath there was was a Sabbath orgy of 
 despicably brutish fiends. 
 
 She tried to run away. She went to her piano; her 
 fingers would play no dirges; they grew flippant, profane 
 in rhythm. She could think of no tunes but dances 
 andantes turned scherzi, the Handelian largo became a 
 Castilian tango. She found herself playing a something 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 strange she realized that it was a lullaby! She fled 
 from the piano. 
 
 She went to her books for nepenthe. There were ro 
 mances in French, Italian, German, English, and Amer 
 ican, new books, old books, all repeating the same stencils 
 of passion in different colors. She could have spat at them 
 and their silly ardors over the same old banality: I love 
 him; he loves me beatitude ! I love him ; he loves her 
 tragedy ! 
 
 The novelists were like stupid children parroting the 
 ancient monotony amo, amas, amat; amamus, amatis, 
 amant; amo, amas, amat away with such primer stuff! 
 She had learned the grammar of love and was graduated 
 from the school-books. She was a postgraduate of love 
 and wedlock. She had had enough of them too much; 
 she would read no more of love, dwell no more upon it; 
 she would forget it. 
 
 She wanted some antiseptic book, something frigid, 
 intellectual, ascetic. At last she thought she had it. 
 On her shelf she found an uncut volume, a present from 
 some one who had never read it, but had bought it be 
 cause it cost several dollars and would serve as a gift. 
 
 It was Gardner's biography of Saint Catherine of 
 Siena, "a study in the religion, literature, and history of 
 the fourteenth century of Italy." That sounded heart 
 less enough. The frontispiece portrait of the wan, meager, 
 despondent saint promised freedom from romantic balder 
 dash. 
 
 Charity found a chair by a window and began to read. 
 The preface announced the book to be "history centered 
 in the work and personality of one of the most wonderful 
 women that ever lived." This was the medicine Charity 
 wanted the story of a woman who had been wonderful 
 without love or marriage. 
 
 There followed a description of the evil times and the 
 wicked town in which Caterina Benincasa was born as 
 long ago as 1347. A pestilence swept away four-fifths 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 of the populace. One man told how he had buried five 
 of his sons in one trench. People said that the end of the 
 world had come. 
 
 The word trench, the perishing of the people and the ap 
 parent end of the world, gave the story a modern sound. 
 It might concern the murderous years of 1914-16. 
 
 Catherine was religious, as little girls are apt to be. 
 She even wanted to enter a monastery in the disguise of a 
 boy. Later her sister persuaded her to dye her hair and 
 dress fashionably. Charity began to fear for her saint, 
 but was reassured to find that already at sixteen she was 
 a nun and had commenced that "life of almost incredible 
 austerity," freeing herself from all dependence on food 
 and sleep and resting on a bare board. 
 
 Charity read with envy how Catherine had devoted 
 herself for three whole years to silence broken only by 
 confessions. How good it would be not to talk to any 
 body about anything for years and years! How blissful 
 to live a calm, gray life in a strait cell, doing no labor but 
 the errands of mercy and of prayer! 
 
 Charity read on, wondering a little at Catherine's idea 
 of God, and her morbid devotion to His blood as the 
 essence of everything beautiful and holy. Charity could 
 not put herself back into that Middle Age when the most 
 concrete materialism was mingled inextricably with the 
 most fantastic symbolism. 
 
 Suddenly she was startled to find that appalling tempta 
 tions found even Catherine out even in her cloistral soli 
 tude. It frightened Charity to read such a passage as this : 
 
 There came a time, towards the end of these three years, 
 when these assaults and temptations became horrible and un 
 bearable. Aerial men and women, with obscene words and still 
 more obscene gestures, seemed to invade her little cell, sweeping 
 round her like the souls of the damned in Dante's "Hell," 
 inviting her simple and chaste soul to the banquet of lust. 
 Their suggestions grew so hideous and persistent that she 
 fled in terror from the cell that had become like a circle of the 
 infernal regions, and took refuge in the church; but they pur- 
 
 299
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 sued her thither, though there their power seemed checked. 
 And her Christ seemed far from her. At last she cried out, 
 remembering the words in the vision: "I have chosen suffering 
 for my consolation, and will gladly bear these and all other tor 
 ments, in the name of the Saviour, for as long as shall please 
 His Majesty." When she said this, immediately all that 
 assemblage of demons departed in confusion, and a great light 
 from above appeared that illumined all the room, and in the 
 light the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, nailed to the Cross and 
 stained with blood, as He was when by His own blood He 
 entered into the holy place; and from the Cross He called the 
 holy virgin, saying: "My daughter Catherine, seest thou 
 how much I have suffered for thee? Let it not then be hard to 
 thee to endure for Me." 
 
 This terrified Charity, and the further she read the less 
 comfort she gained. Her matter-of-fact Manhattan mind 
 could vaguely understand Saint Catherine's mystic nup 
 tials with Christ; but that definite gold ring He placed on 
 her finger, that diamond with four pearls around it, frus 
 trated her comprehension. 
 
 When she read on and learned how Catherine's utter 
 self-denial offended the other churchmen and church- 
 women; how her confessions of sinful thought brought 
 "accusations of sinful deed; how the friars actually threw 
 her out of a church at noon and kicked her as she lay 
 senseless in the dust; how she was threatened with as 
 sassination and was turned from the doors of the people; 
 and in what torment she died from these strange events 
 in the progress of a strange soul through a strange world 
 Charity found no parallel to guide her life along. 
 
 For hours she read; but all that remained to her was 
 the vision of that poor woman who could find no refuge 
 from her flesh and from the demons that played evil 
 rhapsodies upon the harp-strings of her nerves. 
 
 Charity closed the book and understood fear. She was 
 now not so much sick of love as afraid of it. She was 
 afraid of solitude, afraid of religion and of the good 
 works that cause ridicule or resentment. 
 
 Darkness gathered about her with the closing of the 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 day. She dreaded the night and the day, people and the 
 absence of people. She knew no woman she could take 
 her anguish to for sympathy; it would provoke only re 
 buke or laughter. The Church had rebuffed her. There 
 remained only men, and what could she hope from them? 
 Even Jim Dyckman had not been a friend merely. He 
 had told her that she wasted herself as well as him. 
 
 Beyond this night there were years of nights, years on 
 years of days. She could not even be alone; for who was 
 ever actually alone? Even in the hush and the gloom of 
 the deepening twilight there were figures here, shadows 
 that sighed, delicate insinuators. There were no satyrs 
 or bassarids, but gentlemen in polo garb, in evening dress, 
 in yachting flannels. There were moon-nights in Florida, 
 electric floods on dancing-floors, this dim corner of this 
 room with some one leaning on her chair, bending his 
 head and whispering: 
 
 " Charity, it's Jim. I love you." 
 
 She rose and thrust aside the arms that were not there. 
 She could not order him away, because he was not there. 
 And yet he was there. 
 
 She was afraid that he still loved her and afraid that 
 he did not. She was afraid that she had always loved him 
 and that she never could. She was afraid that she would 
 go to him or send for him, and afraid that she would be 
 afraid to. She thrust away the phantom, but her palms 
 pleaded against his departure. Softer than a whisper and 
 noisier than a cry was her thought : 
 
 "I don't want to be alone. I am afraid to be alone."
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 TV'EDZIE wanted to be a lady, and with the ladies 
 rS. stand a tall tiara in her hair, a lorgnette in her 
 hand. 
 
 She had succeeded dizzily, tremendously, in her cinema 
 career. The timid thing that had watched the moving- 
 picture director to see how he held his wineglass, and 
 accepted his smile as a beam of sunshine breaking through 
 the clouds about his godlike head, now found his graceful 
 ness "actory," his intimacy impudent, and his association 
 compromising. Ferriday's very picturesqueness and ar 
 tistry convinced her now that he was not quite the 
 gemtleman. 
 
 Kedzie was beginning to imitate the upper dialect 
 already. She who but a twelvemonth past was dividing 
 people into "hicks" and "swells," and whose epithets were 
 "reub" and "classy," was now a generation advanced. 
 
 Ferriday saw it and raged. One day in discussing the 
 cast of a picture he mentioned the screen-pet Lorraine 
 Melnotte as the man for the principal male r61e. 
 . Kedzie sighed : "Oh, he is so hopelessly romantic, never 
 quite the gentleman. In costume he gets by, but in 
 evening clothes he always suggests the handsome waiter 
 don't you think?" 
 
 Ferriday roared, with disgust: "Good Lord, but you're 
 growing. What is this thing I've invented? Are you a 
 Frankenstein?" 
 
 Kedzie looked blank and sneered, "Are you implying 
 that I have Yiddish blood in me?" 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She wondered why he laughed, but she would not ask. 
 Along many lines Kedzie did not know much, but in 
 others she was uncannily acute. 
 
 Kedzie was gleaning all her ideas of gentlemanship from 
 Jim Dyckman. She knew that he had lineage and heritage 
 and equipage and all that sort of thing, and he must be 
 great because he knew great people. His careless sim 
 plicity, artlessness, shyness, all the things that distressed 
 her at first, were now accepted as the standards of conduct 
 for everybody. 
 
 In life as in other arts, the best artists grow from the 
 complex to the simple, the tortuous to the direct, from 
 pose to poise, from tradition to truth, from artifice to 
 reality. Kedzie was beginning to understand this and to 
 ape what she could not do naturally. 
 
 Her comet-like scoot from obscurity to fame in the 
 motion-picture sky had exhausted the excitement of that 
 sky, and now she was ashamed of being a wage-earner, 
 a mere actress, especially a movie actress. 
 
 If the studio had not caught fire and burned up so 
 many thousands of yards of her portraiture she would have 
 broken her contract without scruple. But the shock of 
 the loss of her pretty images drove her back to the scene. 
 The pity of so much thought, emotion, action, going up 
 in smoke was too cruel to endure. 
 
 It was not necessary for Dyckman to pay the expenses 
 of their repetition in celluloid, as he offered. The Hyper- 
 film Company rented another studio and began to remake 
 the destroyed pictures. They were speedily renewed be 
 cause the scenarios had been rescued and there was little 
 of that appalling waste of time, money, and effort which 
 has almost wrecked the whole industry. They did not 
 photograph a thousand feet for every two hundred used. 
 
 Kedzie's first pictures had gone to the exchanges before 
 the fire, and they were continuing their travels about the 
 world while she was at work revamping the rest. 
 
 About this time the Hyperfilm managers decided to 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 move their factory to California, where the sempiternal 
 sunlight insured better photography at far less expense. 
 This meant that Kedzie must leave New York only partly 
 conquered and must tear herself away from Jim Dyckman. 
 
 She broke down and cried when she told Dyckman of 
 this, and for the first time his sympathies were stampeded 
 on her account. He petted her, and she slid into his 
 arms with a child-like ingratiation that made his heart 
 swell with pity. 
 
 "What's the odds," he said, attempting consolation, 
 "where you work, so long as you work?" 
 
 "But it would mean," she sobbed "it would mean 
 taking me away-ay from you-ou." 
 
 This tribute enraptured Dyckman incredibly. That 
 he should mean so much to so wonderful a thing as she 
 was was unbelievably flattering. He had dogged Char 
 ity's heels with meek and unrewarded loyalty until he had 
 lost all pride. Kedzie's tears at the thought of leaving 
 him woke it to life again. 
 
 "By golly, you sha'n't go, then!" he cried. "I was 
 thinking of coming out there to visit you, but but it 
 would be better yet for you to stay right here in little old 
 New York." 
 
 This brought back Kedzie's smile. But she faltered, 
 "What if they hold me to my contract, though?" 
 
 "Then we'll bust the old contract. I'll buy 'em off. 
 You needn't work for anybody." 
 
 There was enough of the old-fashioned woman of one 
 sort left in Kedzie to relish the slave-block glory of being 
 fought over by two purchasers. She spoke rather slyly : 
 
 "But I'll be without wages then. How would I live? 
 I've got to work." 
 
 Dyckman answered at once : " Of course not. I'll take 
 care of you. I offered to before, you know." He had 
 made a proposal of marriage some time before; it was the 
 only sort of proposal that he had been tempted to make 
 to Kedzie. He liked her immensely; she fascinated him; 
 
 34
 
 he loved to pet her and kiss her and talk baby talk to her; 
 but she had never inflamed his emotions. 
 
 Either it was the same with her, or she had purposely 
 controlled herself and him from policy, or had been re 
 strained by coldness or by a certain decency, of which she 
 had a good deal, after all and in spite of all. 
 
 Throughout their relations they had deceived Ferriday 
 and other cynics. For all their indifference to appear 
 ances, they had behaved like a well-behaved pair of young 
 betrothed Americans, with a complete freedom from 
 chaperonage, and a considerable liberality of endearments, 
 but no serious misdemeanor. 
 
 Kedzie knew what he meant, but she wanted to hear 
 him propose again. So she murmured: 
 
 "How do you mean, take care of me?" 
 
 "I mean marry you, of course." 
 
 "Oh!" said Kedzie. And in a whirlwind of pride she 
 twined her arms about his neck and clung to him with a 
 desperate ardor. 
 
 Dyckman said: "This isn't my first proposal, you 
 know. You said you wanted time to think it over. 
 Haven't you thought it over yet?" 
 
 "Yes," Kedzie sighed, but she said no more. 
 
 "Well, what's the answer?" he urged. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 She whispered, torn between rapture and despair. 
 
 Any woman might have blazed with pride at being 
 asked to marry Jim Dyckman. The little villager was 
 almost consumed like another Semele scorched by Jupiter's 
 rash approach. 
 
 In Dyckman's clasp Kedzie felt how lonely she had 
 been. She wanted to be gathered in from the dangers of 
 the world, from poverty and from work. She had not 
 realized how tiny a thing she was, to be combating the 
 big city all alone, until some one offered her shelter. 
 
 People can usually be brave and grim in the presence 
 of defeat and peril and hostility. It is the kind word, 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 the sudden victory, the discovery of a friend that breaks 
 one down. Even Kedzie wept. 
 
 She wept all over Jim Dyckman's waistcoat, sat on his 
 lap and swallowed throat-lumps and tears and tugged at 
 his cuff-links with her little fingers. 
 
 Then she looked up at him and blushed and kissed him 
 fiercely, hugging him with all the might of her arms. 
 He was troubled by the first frenzy she had ever shown 
 for him, and he might have learned how much more than a 
 merely pretty child she was if she had not suddenly felt 
 an icy hand laid on her hands, unclasping them. 
 
 A cold arm seemed to bend about her throat and drag 
 her back. She slid from Dyckman's knees, gasping: 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 She could not become Mrs. Jim Dyckman, because she 
 was Mrs. Thomas Gilfoyle. 
 
 Dyckman was astounded and frightened by her action. 
 He put his hand out, but she unclenched his fingers from 
 her wrist, mumbling: 
 
 "Don't please!" 
 
 "Why not? What's wrong with you, child?" 
 
 How could she tell him? What could she do? She 
 must do a lot of thinking. On one thing she was resolved : 
 that she would not give Dyckman up. She would find 
 Gilfoyle and get quit of him. They had been married so 
 easily; there must be an easy way of unmarrying. 
 
 She studied Dyckman. She must not frighten him 
 away, or let him suspect. She laughed nervously and 
 went back to his arms, giggling: 
 
 "Such a wonderful thing it is to have you want me for 
 your wife! I'm not worthy of your name, or your love, 
 or anything." 
 
 Dyckman could hardly agree to this, whatever misgiv 
 ings might be shaking his heart. He praised her with the 
 best adjectives in his scant vocabulary and asked her 
 when they should be wed. 
 
 "Oh, not for a long while yet," she pleaded. 
 
 306
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Why?" he wondered. 
 
 "Oh, because!" It sickened and alarmed her to put 
 off the day, but how could she name it ? 
 
 When he left her at las*" the situation was still a bit 
 hazy. He had proposed and been accepted vaguely. 
 But when he had gallantly asked her to "say when" 
 she had begged for time. 
 
 Dyckman, once outside the spell of Kedzie's eyes and 
 her warmth, felt more and more dubious. He was 
 ashamed of himself for entertaining any doubts of the 
 perfection of his situation, but he was ashamed also of 
 his easy surrender. Here he was with his freedom gone. 
 He had escaped the marriage-net of so many women of so 
 much brilliance and prestige, and yet a little movie 
 actress had landed him. 
 
 He compared Anita Adair with Charity Coe, and he 
 had to admit that his fiancee suffered woefully in every 
 contrast. He could see the look of amazement on Char 
 ity's face when she heard the news. She would be com 
 pletely polite about it, but she would be appalled. So 
 would his father and mother. They would fight him 
 tremendously. His friends would give him the laugh, 
 the big ha-ha! They would say he had made a fool 
 of himself; he had been an easy mark for a little out 
 sider. 
 
 He wondered just how it had happened. The fact was 
 that Kedzie had appealed to his pity. That was what 
 none of the other eligibles had ever done, least of all 
 Charity the ineligible. 
 
 He went home. He found his father and mother play 
 ing double Canfield and wrangling over it as usual. They 
 were disturbed by his manner. He would not tell them 
 what was the matter and left them to their game. It 
 interested them no more. It seemed so unimportant 
 whether the cards fell right or not. The points were 
 not worth the excitement. Their son was playing soli 
 taire, and it was not coming out at all. They dis- 
 
 307
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 cussed the possible reasons for his gloom. There were so 
 many. 
 
 "I wish he'd get married to some nice girl," sighed 
 Mrs. Dyckman. A mother is pretty desperate when she 
 wants to surrender her son to another woman.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 made a bad night of it. She hated her lone- 
 liness. She hated her room. She hated her maid. 
 She wanted to live in the Dyckman palace and have a 
 dozen maids and a pair of butlers to boss around, and 
 valets, and a crest on her paper, and invitations pouring 
 in from people whose pictures were in "the social world." 
 She wanted to snub somebody and show certain folks 
 what was what. 
 
 The next morning she was sure of only one thing, and 
 that was that Dyckman had asked her to be his wife; 
 and be his wife she would, no matter what it cost. 
 
 She wondered how she could get rid of Gilfoyle, whom 
 she looked upon now as nothing less than an abductor. He 
 was one of those "cadets " the papers had been full of a few 
 years before, who lured young girls to ruin under the guise 
 of false marriages and then sold them as "white slaves." 
 
 Kedzie's wrath was at the fact that Gilfoyle was not 
 legally an abductor. She would have been glad merely to 
 be ruined, and she would have rejoiced at the possibility 
 of a false marriage. In the movies the second villain 
 only pretended to be a preacher, and then confessed his 
 guilt. But such an easy solution was not for Kedzie. 
 New York City had licensed Gilfoyle's outrage; the 
 clerk had sold her to him for two dollars; the Municipal 
 Building was the too, too solid witness. 
 
 She felt a spiritual solace in the fact that she had not 
 had a religious marriage. The sacrament was only 
 municipal and did not count. Her wedding had lacked 
 the blessing of the duly constituted ministry; therefore 
 
 309
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 it was sacrilegious; therefore it was her conscientious duty 
 to undo the pagan knot as quickly as possible. She re 
 verted to the good old way of the Middle Ages. There 
 was no curse of divorce then, and indeed there was small 
 need of it, since annulment could usually be managed 
 on one religious ground or another, or if not, people went 
 about their business as if it had been managed. 
 
 Kedzie felt absolved of any fault of selfishness now, 
 and justified in taking any steps necessary to the punish 
 ment of Gilfoyle. Religion is a large, loose word, and it 
 can be made to fit any motive; but once assumed it 
 seems to strengthen every resolution, to chloroform mercy 
 and hallow any means to the self-sanctified end. What 
 people would shrink from as inhuman they constantly 
 embrace as divine. 
 
 Kedzie wondered how she could communicate with her 
 adversary. She might best go to Chicago and fight her 
 self free there. There would be less risk of Dyckman's 
 hearing about it. 
 
 She shuddered at what she would have to tell him 
 unless she kept the divorce secret. He might not love 
 her if he knew she was not the nice new girl he thought 
 her, but an old married woman. And what would he say 
 when he found that her real name was Mrs. Thomas 
 Gilfoyle nee Kedzie Thropp? 
 
 But first Kedzie must divorce herself from the Hyper- 
 film Company. She went to the studio with rage in her 
 heart. She told Ferriday that she would not go to 
 California. He proposed that she break with the Hyper- 
 film Company and form a corporation of her own with 
 Dyckman as angel. 
 
 Kedzie was wroth at this. From now on, spending 
 Dyckman's money would be like spending her own. 
 Ferriday, once her accomplice in the noble business 
 of getting Dyckman to back her, was revealed now as a 
 cheap swindler trying to keep Mrs. Dyckman in trade 
 at her husband's expense. 
 
 310
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I'm through with the pictures, I tell you !" she stormed. 
 "I'm sick of the cheap notoriety. I'm tired of being 
 public property. I can't go out on the street without 
 being pointed at. It's disgusting. I don't want to be in 
 corporated or photographed or interviewed. I want to be let 
 alone. I'm tired. I've worked too hard. I need a rest. ' ' 
 
 Ferriday hated her with great agility. He had been 
 willing to abet her breach of contract, provided she let 
 him form a new company, but if she would not that made 
 a great difference. He reminded her: 
 
 "The Hyperfilm Company will hold you to your bond. 
 They want your hundred and twenty-five pounds of flesh. 
 If you should break with them they'd have a case against 
 you for damages." 
 
 "How much?" said Kedzie, feeling like Mrs. Croesus. 
 
 Ferriday whistled and murmured: "Spoken like the 
 wife of a multimillionaire! So you've got him at last." 
 
 "To who," Kedzie began, with an owl-like effect that 
 she corrected with some confusion, " to whom do you 
 refer to?" 
 
 Ferriday grinned: "You're going to marry out of the 
 movies, and you're going to try to horn into sassiety. 
 Well, I warned you before that if you became Dyckman's 
 wife you would find his world vastly different from the 
 ballroom and drawing-room stuff you pull off in the 
 studio strangely and mysteriously different." 
 
 He frightened her. She was not sure of herself. She 
 could not forget Nimrim, Missouri, and her arrival at the 
 edge of society via the Bronx, the candy-shop, and the 
 professional camera. 
 
 She felt that the world had not treated her squarely. 
 Why should she have to carry all this luggage of her past 
 through the gate with her? She wondered if it would 
 not be better to linger in the studios till she grew more 
 famous and could bring a little prestige along. 
 
 But Ferriday was already ousting her even from that 
 security. 
 
 3"
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "The managers of the Hyperfilm Company will think 
 you have done them dirt, but I'll explain that you are not 
 really responsible. You've seen a million dollars, and 
 you're razzle-dazzled. They'll want a bit of that million, 
 I suppose, as liquidated damages, but I'll try to keep 
 them down." 
 
 Kedzie was at bay in her terror. She struck back. 
 
 "Tell 'em they won't get a cent if they try to play the 
 hog." 
 
 "They don't have hogs on Fifth Avenue, Anita. Don't 
 forget that Well, good-by and good luck." 
 
 This was more like an eviction than a desertion. Ked 
 zie felt a little softening of her heart toward the old 
 homestead. 
 
 "I'm sure I'm much obliged for all you've done for 
 me." 
 
 Ferriday roared his scorn. 
 
 She went on: "I am. Honest-ly! And I hope I 
 haven't caused you too much inconvenience.'" 
 
 Ferriday betrayed how much he was hurt by his violent 
 efforts to conceal it. 
 
 "Not at all. It happens that I've just found another 
 little girl to take your place. This one drifted in among 
 the extras, just as you did, and she's a dream. I'll show 
 her to the managers, and they may be so glad to get her 
 they won't charge you a cent. In fact, if you say the 
 word, I might manage it so that they would pay you 
 something to cancel your contract." 
 
 This was quite too cruel. It crushed the tears out of 
 Kedzie's eyes, and she had no fight left in her. She 
 simply stammered: 
 
 " No, thank you. Don't bother. Well, good-by." 
 
 "Good-by, Anita good luck!" 
 
 He let her make her way out of his office alone. She 
 had to skirt the studio. From behind a canvas wall over 
 which the Cooper-Hewitt tubes rained a quivering blue 
 glare came the words of the assistant director: 
 
 312
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Now choke her, Hazlitt! Harder! Register despair, 
 Miss Hardy. Try to scream and can't! That's good. 
 Now, Walsh, jump in to the rescue. Slug him. Knock 
 his bean off. 'S enough! Fall, Hazlitt. Now gather up 
 Miss Hardy, Walsh. Register devotion, gratitude, adora 
 tion now you got it. Turn on your lamps full power, 
 dearie ! Wow ! Bully ! A couple of tears, please. That's 
 the stuff. You'll be the queen of the world. Weep a 
 little more. Real tears. That's it! Now clinch for the 
 fade-out. Cut!" 
 
 Kedzie tiptoed away. She felt as Eve must have felt 
 sneaking out of Eden and hearing the nightingales wran 
 gling and the leopards at play.
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 WE must fly fast and keep on flying if we would 
 escape from our pasts. Ambition, adventure, or 
 sheer luck may carry us forward out of them as in a 
 cavalry-foray over strange frontiers, but sooner or later 
 we must wait for our wagons or fall back to them. 
 
 Kedzie's past was catching up with her. It is a glorious 
 thing when one's past comes up loaded with food, muni 
 tions, good deeds, charities, mercies, valued friendships. 
 But poor little Kedzie's little past included one incom 
 petent and unacknowledged husband and two village 
 parents. 
 
 Kedzie had concealed the existence of Gilfoyle from her 
 new friends as anxiously as if he had been a baby born 
 out of wedlock instead of a grown man born into it. 
 And Gilfoyle had returned the compliment. He had not 
 told his new friends in Chicago that he was married, be 
 cause the Anita Adair that he had left in New York was, 
 as F. P. A. would say, his idea of nothing to brag about. 
 
 Gilfoyle had loved Kedzie once as a pretty photog 
 rapher's model, and had admired her as an exquisite 
 dancing-creature who seemed to have spun off at a tangent 
 from the painted side of an old Greek amphora. He had 
 actually written poetry to her ! And when a poet has done 
 that for a girl he feels that he has done more for her than 
 she can ever repay. Even if she gives him her mortal 
 self, what is that to the immortality he has given her? 
 
 When Kedzie telegraphed Gilfoyle that she had lost 
 her job in Newport and had arrived in New York lonely 
 and afraid, had he not taken care of her good name by
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 giving her his own? Not to mention a small matter of 
 all his money! 
 
 She had repaid him with frantic discontent. The morn 
 ing after the wedding, was she not imitating the parrot's- 
 shrill ridicule of life and love? Did she ridicule his^ 
 poetry, or didn't she? She did. Instead of being his nine 
 Muses, she had become his three Furies. 
 
 When he lost his job and she went out to get one of her 
 own, had she succeeded in getting anything with dignity 
 in it ? No ! She had become an extra woman in a movie 
 mob. That was a belittling thing to remember. But 
 worst of all, she had committed the unpardonable sin for 
 a woman she had lent him money. He could never for 
 give or forget the horrible fact that he had borrowed her 
 last cash to pay his fare to Chicago. 
 
 Next to that for inexcusableness was her self-support 
 and, worse, self-sufficiency. Gilfoyle had sent Kedzie 
 no money beyond returning what he had borrowed, and, 
 she had not used that to buy a ticket to Chicago with. 
 She had written rarely, and had not asked him for money. 
 That was mighty convenient for him, but it was extremely 
 suspicious, and he cherished it as a further grudge. 
 
 He never found himself quite flush enough to force any 
 money on her, because he had found that it costs money 
 to live in Chicago, too. People in New York get the 
 idea that it costs everything to live in New York and 
 nothing to live anywhere else if it can be called living.. 
 
 Gilfoyle also discovered that his gifts were not ap 
 preciated in Chicago as he had expected them to be. 
 Chicago people seemed to think it quite natural for New 
 York to call for help from Chicago, and successful Western 
 men were constantly going East; but for a New-Yorker 
 to revert to Chicago looked queer. He appeared to 
 patronize, and yet he must have had some peculiar reason 
 for giving up New York. 
 
 All in all and by and large, Gilfoyle was not happy in 
 Chicago. The few persons, mainly women, who took
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 him up as an interesting novelty grew tired of him. His 
 advertising schemes did not dazzle the alert Illini, For 
 one reason or another the wares he celebrated did not 
 "go big." 
 
 He lost his first job and took an inferior wage with a 
 shabbier firm. He took his women friends to the movies 
 now instead of the theaters. And so it was that one 
 night when he was beauing a Denver woman, who was on 
 her way to New York and fame, he found the box-line 
 extending out on the sidewalk and half-way up the block. 
 It was irksome to wait, but people like to go to shows 
 where the crowds are. He took his place in the line, and 
 his Miss Clampett stood at his elbow. 
 
 The queue was slowly drawn into the theater and he 
 finally reached a place in front of the lithographs. He 
 almost jumped out of his skin when he saw a colossal 
 head of Anita Adair smiling at him from a sunbonnet 
 streaming with curls. 
 
 The letterpress informed Gilfoyle that it was indeed 
 his own Anita. The people in the line were talking of her 
 as the new star. They were calling her familiarly by her 
 first name and discussing her with all the freedom of the 
 crowd : 
 
 "That's Anita. Ain't she sweet?" 
 
 "Everybody says Anita's just too lovely." 
 
 "Some queen, boy? Me for Anita. She can pack her 
 clothes in my trunk!" 
 
 Gilfoyle felt that he ought in common decency to knock 
 down this fellow who claimed the privileges belonging to 
 himself. But he remembered that he had abandoned 
 those privileges. And the fellow looked unrefinedly 
 powerful. 
 
 Gilfoyle gnawed the lip of silence, realizing also that his 
 announcement would make a strange impression on Miss 
 Clampett. She was one of those authors one reads about 
 who think it necessary to hunt experiences and live ro 
 mances in order to find literary material. 
 
 316
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Gilfoyle had done his best to teach her how wildly well 
 a born New-Yorker can play the lute of emotion. To pro 
 claim now that he was the anonymous husband of this 
 glitterer on the billboard would have been a shocking 
 confession. 
 
 Gilfoyle swallowed his secret, but it made his heart 
 flutter tremendously. When at length he and Miss 
 Clampett were admitted to the theater and walked down 
 the aisle Kedzie came from the background of the screen 
 forward as if to meet him. She came on and on, and 
 finally as he reached his seat, a close-up of her brought 
 them face to face with a vividness that almost knocked 
 him over. She looked right at him, seemed to recognize 
 him, and stopped short. 
 
 He felt as guilty as if she had actually caught him at a 
 rendezvous. Yet he felt pride, too. 
 
 This luminous being was his wife. He remembered all 
 that she had been to him. Miss Clampett noted his 
 perturbations and made a brilliant guess at their cause. 
 She asked him if he wanted to leave her and go around to 
 the stage door to meet this wonderful Miss Adair. Gil 
 foyle laughed poorly at her quip. He was surprised to 
 learn from her that Anita Adair was already a sensation 
 among the film stars. He had not chanced to read the 
 pages where her press-matter had celebrated her. He 
 defended himself from the jealousy of Miss Clampett very 
 lamely; for the luscious beauty of his Anita, her graphic 
 art, and her sway over the audience rekindled his primal 
 emotions to a greater fire than ever. 
 
 When the show was over he abandoned Miss Clampett 
 on her door-step and went to his own boarding-house in a 
 nympholepsy. He was a mortal wedded to a fairy. He 
 was Endymion with a moon enamoured of him. Kedzie 
 indeed had come down from the screen to Gilfoyle, clothed 
 in an unearthly effulgence. 
 
 The next morning he turned to the moving-picture 
 columns of the Chicago Tribune, the Herald, and the other
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 papers, and he found that Kedzie was celebrated there 
 with enthusiasm by Kitty Kelly, "Mae Tinee," Mrs. Par 
 sons, and the rest of the critics of the new art. On Sunday 
 several of her interviews appeared, and her portraits, in 
 eminent company. 
 
 Gilfoyle's forgotten affections came back to life, ex 
 panding and efflorescent. He throbbed with the wonder 
 of it. The moving picture had brought romance again to 
 earth. 
 
 Thousands of men all over the country were falling in 
 love with Kedzie. Who had a better right to than her 
 husband? Unconsciously his resentments against her fell 
 away. His heart swelled with such plenitude of forgive 
 ness that he might in time have overlooked the money she 
 lent him. It was not a disgrace to accept money from a 
 genius of her candle-power. 
 
 For a long while he had been afraid that she would 
 telegraph him for funds, or descend on him in Chicago 
 and bring a heavy baggage of necessities. Now he was no 
 longer afraid of that. He was afraid that if he called on 
 her in New York she might not remember him. 
 
 He had heard of the real and the alleged salaries of 
 moving-picture stars, and he assumed that Kedzie must 
 be as well paid as she was well advertised. He did not 
 know of the measly little hundred dollars a week she was 
 bound down to by her contract. If he had known he 
 would have rejoiced, because one hundred dollars a week 
 was about four times more than Gilfoyle had ever earned. 
 
 Of course Gilfoyle resolved to go to New York. Of 
 course he started to telegraph his wife and found the 
 telegram hard to write. Then he began a long letter and 
 found it harder to write. And of course he finally decided 
 to surprise her. He resigned his job. His resignation was 
 accepted with humiliating cordiality. 
 
 Of course he took the Twentieth Century Limited to 
 New York. It was more expensive, but it was quicker; 
 and what did a few dollars matter, now that he was the
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 husband of such an earner? He had unwittingly hitched 
 his wagon to a star, and now he would take a ride through 
 heaven. He wrote a poem or two to that effect, and the 
 train-wheels inspired his prosody. 
 
 He dreamed of an ideal life in which he should loll 
 upon a sofa of ease, thrumming his lyre, while his wife 
 devoted herself to her career outside. 
 
 Where would Horace and Virgil have be^n if they had 
 not had their expenses paid by old Mr. Maecenas? Since 
 Mrs. Gilfoyle could afford to be a patroness* let her 
 patronage begin at home. Her reward would be beyond 
 price, for Gilfoyle decided to perpetuate her fame in 
 powerful rhyme far outlasting the celluloid in which she 
 was writing her name now. 
 
 Celluloid is perishable indeed, and very inflammable. 
 Gilfoyle did not know that the Hyperfilm studio had 
 burned to the ground before he saw Kedzie's picture in 
 Chicago. But he blithely left that city to its fate and 
 sped eastward.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 /-^ILFOYLE reached New York on the Twentieth 
 \_J> Century. It was an hour late, and so the railroad 
 company paid him a dollar. He wished it had been later. 
 In his present plight time Was anything but money to 
 him. 
 
 It took him some time to find the Hyperfilm Company's 
 temporary studio. He learned of the fire, and his hope 
 wavered. When he reached the studio Kedzie was not 
 there. The news of her resignation had percolated even 
 to the doorman, who rarely knew anything from inside 
 or outside the studio an excellent non-conductor of 
 information he was. Gilfoyle had some difficulty in find 
 ing Kedzie's address, but at last he learned it, and he 
 made haste to her apartment. 
 
 He was impressed by its gaudy vestibule. He told the 
 hall-boy that he wanted to see Miss Adair. 
 
 "Name, please?" 
 
 "Just say a gentleman to see her." 
 
 "Gotta git the name, or I can't 'phome up. Miss Adair 
 naturally won't see no gempman ain't got a name." 
 
 " Does she see many men?" Gilfoyle asked, with sudden 
 alarm. 
 
 "Oh, nossa. Mainly Mr. Dyckman. But that's her 
 business." 
 
 "What Dyckman is that, the rich Jim Dyckman?" 
 
 "Well, I ain't s'posed to give out info'mation." 
 
 "Are you supposed to take in money?" Gilfoyle 
 juggled with a half-dollar. 
 
 The hall-boy juggled his eyes in unison, and laughed 
 320
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 yearningly: "I reckon I might let you up by mistake. 
 Does you know Miss Adair right well?" 
 
 "Very well I'm a relative of hers by marriage. I 
 want to surprise her." , 
 
 "Oh, well, you better go on up." 
 
 Gilfoyle applied the magic silver wafer to the itching 
 palm and stepped into the elevator when it came. 
 
 21
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 TV"EDZIE was alone. She had sent her maid out to get 
 PS^ some headache powders. She had had a good cry 
 when she reached home. She had pondered her little 
 brain into a kink, trying to figure out her campaign. 
 When she had a headache, or a cold, or a sleepless night, 
 or a lethargy, she always put a powder in her stomach. 
 It never did any good, and she was always changing the 
 nostrum, but she never changed the idea. 
 
 She felt ill and took off her street suit and her corsets, 
 put on a soft, veilly thing, and stretched out on her long- 
 chair. 
 
 She was coddling a photograph of Jim Dyckman. He 
 had scrawled across it, "To Little Anita from Big Jim." 
 She kissed the picture and cherished it to her aching breast. 
 
 The door-bell rang. She supposed that, as usual, the 
 maid had forgotten to take her key with her. She went 
 into the hall in a rage, still holding the photograph. She 
 flung the door open and in walked Gilfoyle. 
 
 She fell back stupefied. He grinned, and took her in 
 with devouring eyes. If he had no right to devour her, 
 who had? He approved of her with a rush of delight: 
 
 "Well, Anita, here I am. And how's the little wife?" 
 
 She could not answer him. He stared ferociously, and 
 gasped as if he had forgotten how she had looked: 
 
 "Golly, but you're beautiful? Where's the little kiss?" 
 
 He threw his arms about her, garnering in the full sheaf 
 of her beauty. She tried to escape, to protest, but he 
 smothered her with his lips. She had been so long 
 away from him, she had so long omitted him from her 
 
 322
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 plans, that she felt a sense of outrage in his assault. Some 
 thing virginal had resumed her heart, and his proprietor 
 ship revolted her. 
 
 Her shoulders were so constrained that she could 
 not push free. She could only raise her right hand outside 
 his left arm, and reaching his face, thrust it away. Her 
 nails were long and sharp. They tore deep gashes in his 
 cheeks and across his nose. 
 
 He let her go with a yelp of pain and shame. His fists 
 gathered; primeval instinct told him to smash the mask 
 of pale hatred he saw before him. But he saw the photo 
 graph in her left hand. It had been bent double in the 
 scuffle. He snatched at it and tore away the lower half. 
 He read the inscription with disgust and growled: 
 
 "That's the reason you didn't write me! That's why 
 you don't want to see me, eh? So he's keeping you! 
 And that's why you resigned from the studio!" 
 
 The atrocity of this slander was too much. With a 
 little cat-like yowl she went for him, dropping the broken 
 photograph and spreading all ten claws. 
 
 He caught her arms and held them apart where she could 
 scratch nothing more than his wrists, which she did ven 
 omously. The cat tribe is a bad tribe to fight at close 
 quarters. One must kill or break loose. 
 
 When Kedzie tried to bite him, Gilfoyle realized that 
 she was in no mood for argument. He dragged her to the 
 living-room door and then flung her as far as he could 
 from him. She toppled over into a chair and began to cry. 
 
 It was not a pretty scene. Gilfoyle took out his 
 handkerchief and pressed it to his face and the bridge of 
 his nose. Then he looked at the red marks and held them 
 out for her to observe : 
 
 "See what you did to me!" 
 
 "I'm glad of it," she snapped. "I wish I'd torn your 
 eyes out." 
 
 This alone would not necessarily have proved that she 
 did not love him devotedly, but in this case it corroborated 
 
 323
 
 a context of hatred. Gilfoyle felt rebuffed. There was 
 a distinct lack of hospitality in her welcome. This re 
 ception was the very opposite of his imagined rencounter. 
 
 He did what a man usually does, revealing a masculine 
 inability to argue with a woman. He told her all her 
 faults of omission and commission as if that would bring 
 her to a reconciliating humor. She listened awhile, and 
 then answered, with a perfect logic that baffled him: 
 
 "All you say only goes to show that you don't love me. 
 You never did. You went away and left me. I might 
 have starved, for all you cared. But I've worked like a 
 dog, and now that I've had a little success you come back 
 and say: 'How's the little wife? Where's the little kiss?' 
 Agh! And you dare to kiss me! And then you slander 
 me. You don't give me credit for these plain little rooms 
 that I rent with my own hard-earned money. You 
 couldn't imagine me living in a place like this unless some 
 man paid for it. Heaven knows I'd have lived with you 
 long enough before I ever had a decent home. Humph! 
 Well, I guess so! Humph!" 
 
 Gilfoyle mopped his face again and looked at his 
 handkerchief. One's own blood is very interesting. 
 The sight of his wounds did not touch Kedzie's heart. 
 She could never feel sorry for anybody she was mad at. 
 
 Gilfoyle's wits were scattered. He mumbled, futilely, 
 "Well, if that's the way you feel about it!" 
 
 "That's the way I feel about it !" Kedzie raged on. " I 
 suppose you've had so many affairs of your own out there 
 that you can't imagine anybody else being respectable, 
 can you?" 
 
 Gilfoyle had not come East to publish his autobiography. 
 He thought that a gesture of misunderstood despair would 
 be the most effective evasion. So he made it, and 
 turned away. He put his handkerchief to his nose and 
 looked at it. He turned back. 
 
 "Would you mind if I went into your bathroom to 
 wash my face?" 
 
 324
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I certainly would. Where do you think you are? 
 You get on out before my maid comes back. I don't 
 want her to think I receive men alone!" 
 
 Her heart was cold as a toad in her breast, and she 
 loathed his presence. He repeated his excellent gesture 
 of despair, sighed, "All right," and left the room. The 
 two pieces of Jim Dyckman's photograph were still on 
 the floor of the hall. He stooped quickly and silently 
 and picked them up as he went out. He closed the door 
 with all the elegy one can put in a door with a snap-lock. 
 
 He was about to press the elevator button, but he did 
 not like to present himself gory to the elevator-boy. He 
 walked down the marble and iron steps zigzagging around 
 the elevator shaft. 
 
 He paused on various landings to think and mop. He 
 looked at the photograph of Dyckman, and his heart 
 spoiled in him. He recalled his wife's anxiety lest her 
 maid should find a man there. He recalled the hall- 
 boy's statement that Mr. Dyckman was often there. His 
 wife was lying to him, plainly. 
 
 He had known detectives and newspaper men and had 
 heard them speak of what a friend they had in the usual 
 hall-boy. He thought that he had here the makings of 
 a very pretty little bit of detectivity. 
 
 He reached the main floor, but made a hasty crossing 
 of the gaudy vestibule without stopping to speak to the 
 hall-boy. He had left his baggage at the station, expect 
 ing to send it to his wife's apartment when he found it. 
 He had found it, but he could imagine what would happen 
 to the baggage if he sent it there. 
 
 ' ' All right !" he said to himself. " If it's war she wants, 
 cry havoc and let slip the sleuth hounds." 
 
 He went to a drug-store and had his wounds sterilized 
 and plastered, saying that a pet cat had scratched him. 
 
 "Just so," said the drug clerk, with a grin. "Pet cats 
 are very dangerous." 
 
 Gilfoyle wanted to slug him, but he wanted his wounds
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 dressed more. He walked and walked down the back 
 avenues till he reached his old boarding-house district 
 near Greenwich Village. He found a landlady who had 
 trusted him often and been paid eventually. He gave 
 his baggage checks to an expressman and went into 
 retirement for meditation. 
 
 When his suit-case arrived he got out the poems he had 
 been writing to Anita. He clenched them for destruction, 
 but an exquisite line caught his eye. Why should his 
 art suffer because of a woman's perfidy? He had in 
 tended to sonnetize Anita into perenniality. She had 
 played him false. Just for that he would leave her mortal. 
 She should perish. 
 
 The poems would keep. He might find another and a 
 worthier client for posterity. Or he might put an im 
 aginary name there, as other poets had done. He wanted 
 one that would slip into the poetry easily. He could use 
 "Pepita" without deranging the rhyme. 
 
 He glared at the picture of Dyckman. He knew the 
 face well. He had seen it in print numberless times. He 
 had had the man pointed out to him at races and horse- 
 shows and polo-games and bazaars. 
 
 He struck the photograph in the face, realizing that he 
 could not have reached the face of the big athlete. He 
 wondered why this fellow should have been given such 
 stature with such wealth. He was ghastly rich, the snob, 
 the useless cumberer of the ground ! 
 
 All of Gilfoyle's pseudo-socialistic hostility to wealth and 
 the wealthy came to the aid of his jealousy. To despoil 
 the man was a duty. He had decoyed Anita from her 
 duty by his millions. Not that she was unwilling to be 
 decoyed. And now she would revel in her ill-got luxury, 
 while her legal husband could starve in a garret. 
 
 As he brooded, the vision of Dyckman's money grew 
 huger and huger. The dog had not merely thousands or 
 hundreds of thousands, but thousands of thousands. 
 Gilfoyle had never seen a thousand-dollar bill. Yet 
 
 326
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Dyckman, he had heard, was worth twenty millions. 
 If his wealth were changed into thousand-dollar bills 
 there would be twenty thousand of them in a stack. 
 
 If Gilfoyle peeled off one thousand of those thousand- 
 dollar bills the stack would not be perceptibly diminished. 
 If Gilfoyle could get a million dollars from Dyckman, or 
 any part of it, Dyckman would never notice it; and yet 
 it would mean a life of surety and poetry and luxury for 
 Gilfoyle. 
 
 If he caught Dyckman and Anita together in a com 
 promising situation he could collect heavily under threat 
 of exposure. Rather than be dragged into the news 
 papers and the open courts Dyckman would pay almost 
 any sum. 
 
 There was a law in New York against the violation of the 
 seventh commandment, and the penitentiary was the 
 punishment. The law had failed to catch its first victim, 
 but it had been used in Massachusetts with success. 
 The threat against Dyckman would surely work. 
 
 Then there was the recent Mann Law aimed at white- 
 slavery but a more effective weapon for blackmailers. 
 If Gilfoyle could catch Dyckman taking Anita motoring 
 across the State line into New Jersey or Connecticut he 
 could arrest them or threaten them. 
 
 Also he could name Dyckman as co-respondent in a 
 divorce suit or threaten to and collect heavily that 
 way. This was not blackmail in Gilfoyle's eyes. He 
 scorned such a crime. This was honorable and necessary 
 vindication of his offended dignity. There was probably 
 never a practiser of blackmail who did not find a better 
 word for the duress he applied. 
 
 Gilfoyle needed help. He had no cash to hire a detec 
 tive with. But he knew a detective or two who might go 
 into the thing with him on spec'. 
 
 Gilfoyle began to compose a scheme of poetic revenge. 
 It should be his palinode to Anita. He would keep her 
 under surveillance, but he would not let her know of his 
 
 327
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 propinquity. A happy thought delighted him. To throw 
 her off her guard, he wrote and sent a little note: 
 
 DEAR ANITA, Since you evidently don't love me any longer, 
 I will not bother you any more. I am taking the train back to 
 Chicago. Address me there care of General Delivery if you 
 ever want to see me again. 
 
 YOUR ONCE LOVED HUSBAND. 
 
 He addressed it and gave it to the waitress to drop in 
 the mail-box. He had no money to squander on detec 
 tives, but he had a friend, Connery, who as a reporter had 
 achieved a few bits of sleuthing in cases that had baffled 
 the police. That evening Gilfoyle went hunting for 
 Connery.
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 'LT'EDZIE simmered in her own wrath a long while 
 iS. before she realized that she had let Gilfoyle escape. 
 He was the very man she was looking for, and she had 
 planned to go even to Chicago to find him. 
 
 He had stumbled into her trap, and she had driven 
 him out. She ran to the window and stared up and down 
 the street, but there was no trace of him. She had no 
 idea where he could have gone. She wrung her hands 
 and denounced herself for a fool. 
 
 She went to the hall to pick up the photograph of 
 Jim Dyckman. Both halves of it were gone. Now 
 she was frightened. Gilfoyle had departed meekly, but 
 he had taken the picture; therefore he must have been 
 filled with hate. He had revenge in his mind. And 
 she trembled at her danger. He might strike at any 
 time. 
 
 She suspected his exact intention. She dreaded to have 
 Jim Dyckman call on her. She had a wild notion of asking 
 him to take her away from New York down to Atlantic 
 City or up to the Berkshires anywhere to be rid of 
 Gilfoyle without being left alone. If she had done this 
 she would have done just what Gilfoyle wanted her to, 
 and the Mann Act could have been wielded again as a 
 blackjack. 
 
 Meanwhile Anita was afraid to have Dyckman come to 
 her apartment as he constantly did. She telephoned to 
 him that she would be busy at the studio all day. She 
 would meet him at dinner somewhere. But afterward 
 she would come home alone on one pretext or another. 
 
 329
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She carried out this plan and spent a day of confused 
 terror and anger. 
 
 When Gilfoyle's letter arrived, saying that he was on 
 his way to Chicago, it gave her more delight than any 
 other writing of his had ever given her. She need not 
 skulk any more. Her problem was as far from solution 
 as ever, but she wanted a respite from it, and she gave 
 herself up to a few days of rapture. She was free from 
 her work at the studio, and she was like a girl home from 
 boarding-school on a vacation. 
 
 Dyckman found her charming in this mood. She made 
 a child of him, and his years of dissatisfaction were for 
 gotten. He romped through the festivals of New York 
 like a cub. 
 
 There was no discussion of any date of marriage, and he 
 was glad enough to let the matter drift. He did not want 
 to marry Kedzie. He was satisfied to have her as a play 
 mate. He was afraid to think of her as a wife, not only 
 from fear of the public sensation it would make, but from 
 fear of her in his home. Young men also know the 
 timidities that are considered maidenly; He did not 
 dream of Kedzie's reason for postponing always the matter 
 of a wedding date. 
 
 Kedzie had come to depend on Jim for her entertain 
 ment. He took care of her evenings, gave them vivacity 
 and opulence. He took her to theaters, to the opera, the 
 music-halls, the midnight roofs, and other resorts for the 
 postponement of sleep. Occasionally he introduced her 
 to friends of his whom they encountered. It pained and 
 angered him, and Kedzie, too, to note that the men were 
 inclined to eye Kedzie with tolerant amusement. There 
 was a twinkle of contempt in their smiling eyes that 
 seemed to say: 
 
 "Where did Dyckman pick you up, my pretty?" 
 
 Kedzie's movie fame was unknown to Dyckman's crowd. 
 She was treated, accordingly, as some exquisite chorus-girl 
 or cabaret-pony that he had selected as a running-mate. 
 
 330
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Dyckman could not openly resent what was subtly 
 implied, but it touched his chivalry, and since he was 
 engaged to Kedzie he felt that he ought at least to an 
 nounce the fact. He was getting the game without the 
 name, and that seemed unfair to Kedzie. 
 
 Kedzie felt the same veiled scorn, and it alarmed her; 
 yet when Dyckman proposed the publication of their 
 troth she forbade it vigorously. She writhed at the worse 
 than Tantalus fate that compelled her to push from her 
 own thirsty lips the grapes of felicity. 
 
 She had no intention of committing bigamy, even if 
 she had been temptable to such recklessness. The in 
 evitable brevity of its success was only too evident. A 
 large part of the fun of marrying Dyckman would be the 
 publication of it, and that would bring Gilfoyle back. 
 She never before longed so ardently to see her husband 
 as now. 
 
 She finally wrote him a letter begging him to return to 
 New York for a conference. She couched it in luringly 
 affectionate tones and apologized lavishly for scratching 
 his face when he called. She addressed the appeal to the 
 General Delivery in Chicago, as he had directed in the 
 letter he wrote as a blind. 
 
 She neglected, as usual, to put her own address on the 
 envelope or inside on the letter, which she signed with a 
 mere "Anita." Gilfoyle did not call for the letter in 
 Chicago, since he was in New York. It was held in 
 Chicago for the legal period and then it was sent to the 
 Dead Letter Office, where a clerk wasted a deal of time 
 and ingenuity in an effort to trace the sender or the 
 addressee. 
 
 Kedzie meanwhile had watched for the postman and 
 hunted through her mail with frenzy. There was a vast 
 amount of mail, for it is one of the hardships of the movie 
 business that the actors are fairly showered with letters 
 of praise, criticism, query, and flirtation. 
 
 But there was no letter ever from Gilfoyle. 
 331
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Yet Gilfoyle was constantly within hailing distance. 
 With the aid of his friend Connery he had concocted a 
 scheme for keeping Kedzie and Dyckman under espionage. 
 They had speedily learned that Dyckman was in constant 
 attendance on Kedzie, and that they were careless of the 
 hours alone, careless of appearances. 
 
 Gilfoyle never dreamed that the couple was chaperoned 
 doubly by a certain lukewarmth of emotion and by an 
 ambition to become man and wife. Gilfoyle imagined 
 their relations to be as intimate as their opportunities 
 permitted. He suffered jealous wrath, and would have 
 assaulted Dyckman in public if Connery had not quelled 
 him. 
 
 Connery kept a cool head in the matter because his 
 heart was not involved. He saw the wealth of Dyckman 
 as the true object of their attack, and he convinced 
 Gilfoyle of the profitableness of a little blackmail. He 
 convinced Gilfoyle.. easily when they were far from Kedzie 
 and close to poverty; but when they hovered near 
 Kedzie, Connery had the convincing to do all over again. 
 
 He worked up an elaborate campaign for gaining en 
 trance to Kedzie's apartment without following the classic 
 method of smashing the door down. He disliked that 
 noisy approach because it would command notice; and 
 publicity, as he well knew, is death to blackmail. 
 
 Connery adopted a familiar stratagem of the private 
 detectives. He went to the apartment one day when he 
 knew that Kedzie was out, and inquired for an alleged 
 sister of his who had worked for Kedzie. He claimed to 
 be a soldier on furlough. He engaged the maid in a 
 casual parley which he led swiftly to a flirtation. She 
 was a lonely maid and her plighted lover was away on a 
 canal-boat. Connery had little difficulty in winning her 
 to the acceptance of an invitation to visit a movie-show 
 on her first evening off. 
 
 He paid the girl flattering attentions, and when he 
 brought her back, gallantly asked for the key to unlock 
 
 332
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 the door for her. He dropped the key on the floor, 
 stooped for it, pressed it against a bit of soft soap he had 
 in his left palm. Having secured the outline of the key, 
 he secured also a return engagement for the next evening 
 off. On this occasion he brought with him a duplicate 
 of the key, and when he unlocked the door for the maid 
 this time he gave her the duplicate and kept the original. 
 
 And now that he and Gilfoyle had an "open sesame" 
 to the dovecote they grew impatient with delay. Gil- 
 foyle's landlady had also grown impatient with delay, 
 but Connery forced her to wait for what he called the 
 psychological moment. 
 
 And thus Kedzie moved about, her life watched over 
 by an invisible husband like a malignant Satan to whom 
 she had sold her soul.
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 JIM DYCKMAN had many notes from Kedzie, gush 
 ing, all adjectives and adverbs, capitalized and under 
 scored. He left them about carelessly, or locked them 
 up and left the key. If he had not done that the lock 
 on his desk was one that could be opened with a hair 
 pin or with a penknife or with almost any key of a proper 
 size. 
 
 There was no one to care except his valet. Dallam 
 cared and read and made notes. He was horrified at the 
 thought of Dyck^nan's marrying a movie actress. He 
 would have preferred any intrigue to that disgrace. It 
 would mean the loss of a good position, too, for while 
 Dyckman was an easy boss, if he were going to be an 
 easy marrier as well, Dallam had too much self-respect 
 to countenance a marriage beneath them. 
 
 If he could only have known of Gilfoyle's existence and 
 his quests, how the two of them could have collaborated ! 
 
 But Dallam's interest in life woke anew when one 
 evening, as he was putting away the clothes Dyckman had 
 thrown off, he searched his master's coat and found a 
 letter from Mrs. Cheever. 
 
 DEAR OLD JIM, What's happent you? I haven't seen you 
 for ages. Couldn't you spare this evening to me? I'm alone 
 as always and lonelier than usual. Do take pity on 
 
 Your devoted 
 
 CHARITY C. 
 
 That note, so lightly written in seeming, had been torn 
 from a desperate heart and written in tears and blood. 
 Since she had learned that her husband really loved 
 
 334
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Zada and that she was going to mother him a child, 
 Charity had been unable to adjust her soul to the new 
 problem. 
 
 The Reverend Doctor Mosely had promised her advice, 
 but the poor man could not match his counsel with the 
 situation. He did not believe in divorce, and yet he did 
 not approve of illegal infants. How happy he could 
 have been with either problem, with t'other away! In 
 his dilemma he simply avoided Charity and turned his 
 attention to the more regular chores of his parish. 
 
 Charity understood his silence, and it served to deepen 
 her own perplexity. She was sure of only one thing that 
 she was caged and forgotten. 
 
 Cheever came home less and less, and he was evidently 
 so harrowed with his own situation that Charity felt 
 almost more sorry for him than angry at him. She 
 imagined that he must be enduring no little from the 
 whims and terrors of Zada. He was evidently afraid to 
 speak to Charity. To ask for her mercy was contrary 
 to all his nature. He never dreamed that the dictagraph 
 had brought her with him when he learned of Zada's 
 intensely interesting condition, and her exceedingly 
 onerous demands. He did not dare ask Charity for a 
 divorce in order that he might legitimize this byblow of 
 his. He could imagine only that she would use the in 
 formation for some ruinous vengeance. So he dallied 
 with his fate in dismal irresolution. 
 
 Charity had his woes to bear as well as hei own. She 
 knew that she had lost him forever. The coquetries she 
 had used to win him back were impossible even to attempt. 
 He had no use for her forgiveness or her charms. He was 
 a mere specter in her home, doomed for his sins to walk 
 the night. 
 
 In despising herself she rendered herself lonelier. She 
 had not even herself for companion. Her heart had 
 always been eager with love and eager for it. The spirit 
 that impelled her to endure hardships in order to expend 
 
 335
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 her surplusage of love was unemployed now. She had 
 feasted upon love, and now she starved. 
 
 Cheever had been a passionate courtier and, while he 
 was interested, a fiery devotee. When he abandoned her 
 she suffered with the devastation that deserted wives and 
 recent widows endure but must not speak of. It meant 
 terribly much to Charity Coe to be left alone. It was 
 dangerous to herself, her creeds, her ideals. 
 
 She began to be more afraid of being alone than of any 
 other fear. She grew resentful toward the conventions 
 that held her. She was like a tigress in a wicker cage, 
 growing hungrier, lither, more gracefully fierce. 
 
 People who do not use their beauty lose it, and Charity 
 had lost much of hers in her vigils and labors in the 
 hospitals, and it had waned in her humiliations of Chee- 
 yer's preference for another woman. Her jealous shame 
 at being disprized and notoriously neglected had given 
 her wanness and bitterness, instead of warmth and 
 sweetness. 
 
 But now the wish to be loved brought back loveliness. 
 She did not know how beautiful she was again. She 
 thought that she wanted to see Jim Dyckman merely 
 because she wanted to be flattered and because as 
 women say in such moods men are so much more sen 
 sible than women. Often they mean more sensitive. 
 Charity did not know that it was love, not friendship, 
 that she required when at last she wrote to Jim Dyckman 
 and begged him to call on her. 
 
 The note struck him hard. It puzzled him by its tone. 
 And he, remembering how vainly he had pursued her, 
 forgot her disdain and recalled only how worthy of 
 pursuit she was. He hated himself for his disloyalty to 
 Anita in comparing his fiance'e with Charity, and he 
 cursed himself for finding Charity infinitely Anita's su 
 perior in every way. But he hated and cursed in vain. 
 
 Kedzie, or "Anita," as he called her, w r as an outsider, 
 a.pretty thing like a geisha, fascinating by her oddity and 
 
 336
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 her foreignness, but, after all, an alien who could interest 
 one only temporarily. There was something transient 
 about Kedzie in his heart, and he had felt it vaguely the 
 moment he found himself pledged to her forever. But 
 Charity he had loved her from perambulator days. 
 She was his tradition. His thoughts and desires had 
 always come home to Charity. 
 
 Yet he was astonished at the sudden upheaval of his 
 old passion. It shook off the new affair as a volcano 
 burns away the weeds that have grown about its crater. 
 He supposed that Charity wanted to take up the moving- 
 picture scheme in earnest, and he repented the fact that 
 he had gone to the studio for information and had come 
 away with a flirtation. 
 
 One thing was certain: he must not fail to answer 
 Charity's summons. He had an engagement with Kedzie, 
 but he called her up and told her the politest lie he could 
 concoct. Then he made himself ready and put on his 
 festival attire. 
 
 Charity had grown sick of having people say, " How pale 
 you are!" "You've lost flesh, haven't you?" "Have you 
 been ill, dear?" those tactless observations that so many 
 people feel it necessary to make, as if there were no mirrors 
 or scales or symptoms for one's information and distress. 
 
 Annoyed by these conversational harrowers, Charity 
 had finally gone to her dressmaker, Dutilh, and asked him 
 to save her from vegetation! He saw that she was a 
 young woman in sore need of a compliment, and he 
 flattered her lavishly. He did more for her improvement 
 in five minutes than six doctors, seventeen clergymen, and 
 thirty financiers could have done. A compliment in time 
 is a heart-stimulant with no acetanilid reaction. Also 
 he told her how wonderful she had been in the past, re 
 calling by its name and by the name of its French author 
 many a gown she had worn, as one would tell a great 
 actress what roles he had seen her in. 
 
 337
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 He clothed her with praise and encouragement, threw 
 a mantle of crimson velvet about her. And she crim 
 soned with pride, and her hard, thin lips velveted with 
 beauty. 
 
 She responded so heartily that he was enabled to sell 
 her a gown of very sumptuous mode, its colors laid on as 
 with the long sweeps of a Sargent's brush. A good deal 
 of flesh was not left to the imagination; as in a Sargent 
 painting, the throat, shoulders, and arms were part of 
 the color scheme. It was a gown to stride in, to stand 
 still in, in an attitude of heroic repose, or to recline in 
 with a Parthenonian grandeur. 
 
 This gown did not fit her perfectly, just as it came from 
 Paris, but it revealed its possibilities and restored her 
 shaken self-confidence immeasurably. If women or 
 their husbands could afford it, they would find perhaps 
 more consolation, restoration, and exaltation at the dress 
 makers' than at it would be sacrilege to say where. 
 
 By the time Charity's new gown was ready for the last 
 fitting Charity had lost her start, and when Dutilh went 
 into the room where she had dressed he was aghast at 
 the difference. On the first day the gown had thrilled 
 her to a collaboration with it. Now she hardly stood up 
 in it. She drooped with exaggerated awkwardness, 
 shrugged her shoulders with sarcasm, and made a face of 
 disgust. 
 
 Dutilh tried to mask his disappointment with anger. 
 When Charity groaned, "Aren't we awful this dress and 
 I?" he retorted: "You are, but don't blame the gown. 
 For God's sake, do something for the dress. It would do 
 wonders for you if you would help it!" He believed in a 
 golden rule for his wares: do for your clothes what you 
 would have them do for you. 
 
 He threatened not to let Charity have the gown at all 
 at any price. He ordered her to take it off. She re 
 fused. In the excitement of the battle she grew more 
 animated. Then he whirled her to a mirror and said: 
 
 338
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Look like that, and you're a made woman." 
 
 She was startled by the vivacity, the authority she 
 saw in her features so long dispirited. She caught the 
 trick of the expression. And actors know that one's 
 expression can control one's moods almost as much as 
 one's moods control one's expressions. 
 
 So she persuaded Dutilh to sell her the dress. When 
 she got it she did not know just when to wear it, for she 
 was going out but rarely, and then she did not want to 
 1?e conspicuous. She decided to make Jim Dyckman's 
 call the occasion for the launching of the gown. His 
 name came up long before she had put it on to be locked 
 in for the evening. 
 
 When she thrust her arms forward like a diver and 
 entered the gown by way of the fourth dimension her 
 maid cried out with pride, and, standing with her finger 
 tips scattered over her face, wept tears down to her 
 knuckles. She welcomed the prodigal back to beauty. 
 
 "Oh, ma'am, but it's good to see you lookin' lovely 
 again!" 
 
 While she bent to the engagement of the hooks Chanty 
 feasted on her reflection in the cheval-glass. She was 
 afraid that she was a little too much dressed up and a 
 little too much undressed. There in Dutilh's shop, with 
 the models and the assistants about, she was but a lay 
 figure, a clothes-horse. At the opera she would have been 
 one of a thousand shoulder-showing women. For a 
 descent upon one poor caller, and a former lover at that, 
 the costume frightened her. 
 
 But it was too late to change, and she caught up a 
 scarf of gossamer and twined it round her neck to serve 
 as a mitigation. 
 
 Hearing her footsteps on the stairs at last, Dyckman 
 hurried to meet her. As she swept into the room she 
 collided with him, softly, fragrantly. They both laughed 
 nervously, they were both a little influenced. 
 
 She found the drawing-room too formal and led him 
 339
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 into the library. She pointed him to a great chair and 
 seated herself on the corner of a leather divan nearly as 
 big as a touring-car. In the dark, hard frame she looked 
 richer than ever. He could not help seeing how much 
 more important she was than his Anita. 
 
 Anita was pretty and peachy, delicious, kissable, hug- 
 gable, a pleasant armful, a lapload of girlish mischief. 
 Charity was beautiful, noble, perilous, a woman to live 
 for, fight for, die for. Kedzie was to Charity as Rosalind 
 to Isolde. 
 
 It was time for Jim to play Tristan, but he had no 
 more blank verse in him than a polo score-card. Yet 
 the simple marks on such a form stand for tremendous 
 energy and the utmost thrill. 
 
 "Well, how are you, anyway, Charity? How goes it 
 with you?" he said. "Gee! but you look great to-night. 
 What's the matter with you? You're stunning!" 
 
 Charity laughed uncannily. "You're the only one that 
 thinks so, Jim." 
 
 "I always did admire you more than anybody else 
 could; but, good Lord! everybody must have eyes." 
 
 "I'm afraid so," said Charity. "But you're the only 
 one that has imagination about me." 
 
 "Bosh!" 
 
 "My husband can't see me at all." 
 
 "Oh, him!" Jim growled. "What's he up to now?" 
 
 " I don't know," said Charity. "I hardly ever see him. 
 He's chucked me for good." 
 
 Jim studied her with idolatry and with the intolerant 
 ferocity of a priest for the indifferent or the skeptical. 
 The idol made her plaint to her solitary worshiper. 
 
 "I'm horribly lonely, Jim. I don't go anywhere, meet 
 anybody, do anything but mope. Nobody comes to see 
 me or take me out. Even you kept away from me till 
 I had to send for you." 
 
 "You ordered me off the premises in Newport, if you 
 remember." 
 
 340
 
 "Yes, I did, but I didn't realize that I was mistreating 
 the only admirer I had." 
 
 This was rather startling in its possible implications. 
 It scared Dyckman. He gazed at her until her eyes met 
 his. There was something in them that made him look 
 away. Then he heard the gasp of a little sob, and she 
 began to cry. 
 
 "Why, Charity!" he said. "Why, Charity Coe!" 
 
 She smiled at the pet name and the tenderness in his 
 voice, and her tears stopped. 
 
 "Jim," she said, "I told Doctor Mosely all about my 
 affairs, and I simply spoiled his day for him and he 
 dropped me. So I think I'll tell you." 
 
 "Go to the other extreme, eh?" said Jim. 
 
 "Yes, I'm between the devil and the high-Church. 
 I've no doubt I'm to blame, but I can't seem to stand the 
 punishment with no change in sight. I've tried to, but 
 I've got to the end of my string and well whether you 
 can help me or not I've got to talk or die. Do you mind 
 if I run on?" 
 
 "God bless you, I'd be tickled to death." 
 
 "It will probably only ruin your evening." 
 
 "Help yourself. I'd rather have vou wreck all my 
 evenings than than " 
 
 He had begun well, which was more than usual. She 
 did not expect him to finish. She thanked him with a 
 look of more than gratitude^ 
 
 "Jim," she said, "I've found out that my husband is 
 well there's a certain ex-dancer named L'Etoile, and he 
 she they ' ' 
 
 Instead of being astounded, Dyckman was glum. 
 
 "Oh, you've found that out at last, have you? Maybe 
 you'll learn before long that there's trouble in France. 
 But of course you know that. You were over there. 
 Why, before you came back he was dragging that animal 
 around with him. I saw him with her." 
 
 "You knew it as long ago as that?" 
 
 34i
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Everybody Knew it." 
 
 "Why didn't you tell me?" 
 
 "Because I'm a low-lived coward, I suppose. I tried 
 to a dozen times, but somehow I couldn't. By gad ! I came 
 near writing you an anonymous letter. I couldn't seem 
 to stoop to that, though, and I couldn't seem to rise to 
 telling you out and out. And now that you know, what 
 are you going to do about it?" 
 
 " That's what I don't know. Doctor Mosely wanted me 
 to try to get him back." 
 
 "Doctor Mosely 's got softening of the brain. To think 
 of your trying to persuade a man to live with you ! You 
 of all people, and him of all people! Agh! If you got 
 him, what would you have? And how long would you 
 keep him? You can't make a household pet out of a 
 laughing hyena. Chuck him, I say." 
 
 "But that means the divorce-court, Jim." 
 
 "What of it? It's cleaner and sweeter than this ar 
 rangement." 
 
 "But the newspapers?" 
 
 "Ah, what do you care about them? They'd only 
 publish what everybody that knows you knows already. 
 And what's the diff' if a lot of strangers find out that 
 you're too decent to tolerate that man's behavior? Some 
 body is always roasting even the President, but he gets 
 along somehow. A lot of good people oppose divorce, but I 
 was reading that the best people used to oppose anesthetics 
 and education and republics. It's absolutely no argument 
 against a thing to say that a lot of the best people think 
 it is outrageous. They've always fought everything, 
 especially freedom for the women. They said it was 
 dangerous for you to select your husbands, or manage 
 your property, or learn to read, or go out to work, or vote, 
 or be in a profession or even be a war nurse. The hatred 
 of divorce is all of a piece with the same old habit good 
 people have of trying to mind other people's business for 
 'em." 
 
 342
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "But Doctor Mosely says that marriage is a sacrament." 
 
 "Well, if a marriage like yours is a sacrament, give me 
 a nice, decent white-slave market." 
 
 "That's the way it seems to me, but the Church, 
 especially our Church, is so ferocious. Doctor Mosely 
 preached a sermon against divorce and remarriage, and 
 it was frightful what he said about women who change 
 husbands. I'm afraid of it, Jim. I can't face the abuse 
 and the newspapers, and I can't face the loneliness, either. 
 I'm desperately lonely." 
 
 "For him?" Jim groaned. 
 
 "No, I've got over loving him. I'll never endure him 
 again, especially now that she has a better right to him." 
 
 She could not bring herself at first to tell him what she 
 knew of Zada, but at length she confessed that she had 
 listened to the dictagraph and had heard that Zada was 
 to be a mother. Dyckman was dumfounded; then he 
 snarled: 
 
 "Thank God it's not you that's going to be for him 
 Well, don't you call that divorce enough? How can you 
 call your marriage a sacrament when he has gone and 
 made a real sacrament with another woman? It takes 
 two to keep a sacrament, doesn't it? Or does it? I don't 
 think I know what a sacrament is. But I tell you, there 
 was never a plainer duty in the world. Turn him over to 
 his Zada.. She's the worst woman in town, and she's too 
 good for him, at that. I don't see how you can hesitate ! 
 How long can you stand it?" 
 
 " I don't know. I'm ready to die now. I'd rather die. 
 I'd better die." 
 
 And once more she was weeping, now merely a lonely 
 little girl. He could not resist the impulse to go to her 
 side. He dropped down by her and patted her wrist 
 gawkily. She caught his hand and clenched it with 
 strange power. He could tell by her throat that her heart 
 was leaping like a wild bird against a cage. 
 
 His own heart beat about his breast like a bird that has 
 
 343
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 been set frantic by another bird, and his soul ached for 
 her. He yearned to put his long arm about her and hold 
 her tight, but he could not. 
 
 He had never seen her so. He could not understand 
 what it was that made a darkling mist of her eyes and 
 gave her parted lips such an impatient ecstasy of pain. 
 
 Suddenly, with an intuition unusual to him, he under 
 stood. He shrank from her, but not with contempt or 
 blame. There was something divine about his merciful 
 comprehension, but his only human response was a most 
 ungodly wrath. He got to his feet, muttering: 
 
 "I ought to kill him. Maybe I will. I've got to beat 
 him within an inch of his life." 
 
 Charity was dazed by his abrupt revolt. "What do 
 you mean, Jim? Who is it you want to beat?" 
 
 He laughed, a bloodthirsty laugh. "I'll find him!" 
 
 He rushed out into the hall, caught up his hat and coat, 
 and was gone. Charity was bewildered out of her wits. 
 She could not imagine what had maddened him. She 
 only knew that Dyckman also had abandoned her. He 
 would find Cheever and fight him as one stag another. 
 And the only result would be the death of one or both and 
 a far more odious disgrace than the scandal she had de 
 termined to avoid.
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 
 
 DYCKMAN was at least half mad, and half inspired. 
 Charity had been his lifelong religion. He had 
 thought of her with ardor, but also with a kind of awe. 
 He had wanted to be her husband. Failing to win her, 
 he had been horrified to see that Cheever, possessing her, 
 was still not satisfied. 
 
 He had never dreamed what this neglect might mean to 
 her. He had not thought of her as mere woman, after 
 all, with more than pride to satisfy, with more than a mind 
 to suffer. When the realization overwhelmed him her 
 nobility was not diminished in his eyes, but to all her 
 former qualities was added the human element. She was 
 flesh and blood, and a martyr in the flames. And the 
 ingrate who had the godlike privilege of her embrace 
 abandoned her for a public creature. 
 
 Dyckman felt himself summoned to avenge her. 
 
 It happened that he found the Cheever limousine wait 
 ing outside. He said to the chauffeur: 
 
 "Where does Miss Zada L'Etoile live?" 
 
 The' chauffeur was startled. He answered, with a 
 touch of raillery: 
 
 "Search me, sir. How should I know?" 
 
 "I want none of your back talk," said Dyckman, ready 
 to maul the chauffeur or anybody for practice. He took 
 out his pocket-book and lifted the first bill he came to. 
 It was a yellow boy. He repeated, "Where does Zada 
 L'Etoile live?" 
 
 The chauffeur told him and got the bill. It was better 
 than the poke in the eye he could have had instead. 
 
 345
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Dyckman had sent his own car home. He had difficulty 
 in finding a taxicab on Fifth Avenue along there. At 
 length he stopped one and named the apartment-house 
 where Zada lived. 
 
 The hall-boy was startled by his manner, amazed to 
 hear the famous Dyckman ask for Miss L'Etoile. He 
 telephoned the name while Dyckman fumed. After some 
 delay he was told to come up. 
 
 Zada was alone at least Cheever was not there. She 
 had been astounded when Dyckman' s name came through 
 the telephone. Her first thought had been that Cheever 
 had met with an accident and that Dyckman was bringing 
 the news. She had given up the hope of involving 
 Dyckman with Mrs. Cheever, after wasting Cheever 's 
 money on vain detectives. 
 
 When Dyckman was ushered in she greeted him from 
 her divan. 
 
 "Pardon my negligee," she said. "I'm not very 
 well." 
 
 He saw at a glance that the dictagraph had told the 
 truth. She was entirely too well. He felt his wrath at 
 Zada vanishing. But this also he transferred to Cheever's 
 account. He spoke as quietly as he could, though his face 
 revealed his excitement. 
 
 "Sorry to trouble you, but I had hoped to find Mr. 
 Cheever here." 
 
 "Mr. Cheever?! Here?!" Zada exclaimed, with that 
 mixture of the interrogation and exclamation points for 
 which we have no symbol. She tried to look surprised 
 at the unimaginable suggestion of Cheever's being in her 
 environs. She succeeded as well as Dyckman did in pre 
 tending that his errand was trivial. 
 
 "Er yes, I imagined you might happen to know where 
 I could find him. I have a little business with him." 
 
 Zada thought to crush him with a condescension a 
 manicurial sarcasm: 
 
 "Have you been to the gentleman's home?" 
 346
 
 Dyckman laughed: "Yes, but he wasn't there. He 
 isn't there much nowadays they say." 
 
 "Oh, do they?" Zada sneered. "Well, did They tell 
 you he would be here?" 
 
 "No, but I thought" 
 
 "Better try his office in the morning.' 
 
 "Thanks. I can't wait. What club does he affect 
 most now?" 
 
 "Ask They," said Zada, ending the interview with a 
 labored yawn. But when Dyckman bowed" and turned to 
 go, her curiosity bested her indignation. "In case I 
 should by any chance see him, could I give him your 
 message?" 
 
 Dyckman laughed a sort of pugilistic laugh, and his 
 self-conscious fist asserted itself. 
 
 "No, thanks, I'm afraid you couldn't. Good-by." 
 
 Zada saw his big fingers gathering convening, as it 
 were, into a fist like a mace, and she was terrified for her 
 man. She scrambled to her feet and caught Dyckman in 
 the hall. 
 
 "What are you going to do to Mr. Cheever?" 
 
 Dyckman answered in the ironic slang, "I'm not going 
 to do a thing to him." 
 
 Zada's terror increased. "What harm has he ever done 
 to you?" 
 
 "I didn't say he had done me any harm." 
 
 "Is it because of his wife?" 
 
 "Leave her out of it." 
 
 There was the old phrase again. Cheever kept hurling 
 it at her whenever she referred to the third corner of the 
 triangle. 
 
 Zada remembered when Cheever had threatened to kill 
 Dyckman if he found him. Now he would be unarmed. 
 He was not so big a man as Dyckman. She could see him 
 being throttled slowly to death, leaving her and her 
 child-to-be unprotected in their shameful folly. 
 
 "For God's sake, don't!" she implored him. "I'm not 
 
 347
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 well. I mustn't have any excitement. I beg you for 
 my sake " 
 
 "For your sake," said Dyckman, with a scorn that 
 -changed to pity as she clung to him "for your sake 
 I'll give him a couple of extra jolts." 
 
 That was rather dazzling, the compliment of having 
 Jim Dyckman as her champion ! Her old habit of taking 
 everybody's flattery made her forget for the moment that 
 she was now a one-man woman. Her clutch relaxed 
 under the compliment just long enough for Dyckman to 
 escape without violence. He darted through the door 
 and closed it behind him. 
 
 She tugged at the inside knob, but he was so long that 
 he could hold the outside knob with one hand and reach 
 the elevator-bell with the other. 
 
 When the car came up he released the knob and lifted 
 his hat with a pleasant "Good-night." She dared not 
 pursue him in the garb she wore. 
 
 She returned terrified to her room. Then she ran to 
 the telephone to pursue Cheever and warn him. They 
 had quarreled at the dinner-table. He had left her on 
 the ground that it was dangerous for her to be excited as 
 he evidently excited her. It is one of the most craven 
 shifts of a man for ending an endless wrangle with a 
 woman. 
 
 Zada tried three clubs before she found Cheever. 
 When she heard his voice at last she was enraptured. 
 She tried to entice him into her own shelter. 
 
 "I'm sorry I was so mean. Come on home and make 
 peace with me." 
 
 "All right, dear, I will." 
 
 "Right away?" 
 
 "After a while, darling. I'm sitting in a little game of 
 poker." 
 
 "You'd better not keep me waiting !" she warned. The 
 note was an unfortunate reminder of his bondage. It 
 rattled his shackles. He could not even have a few hours 
 
 348
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 with old cronies at the club. She was worse than Charity 
 had ever dreamed of being. She heard the resentment in 
 his answer and felt that he would stay away from her 
 for discipline. She threw aside diplomacy and tried to 
 frighten him home. 
 
 " Jim Dyckman is looking for you." 
 
 "Dyckman? Me! Why?" 
 
 "He wants to beat you up." 
 
 Cheever laughed outright at this. "You're crazy , 
 darling. What has Dyckman got against me?" 
 
 "I don't know, but I know he's hunting you." 
 
 "I haven't laid eyes on him for weeks. We've had no 
 quarrel." 
 
 Zada was frantic. She howled across the wire: "Come 
 home, I beg and implore you. He'll hurt you he may 
 kill you." 
 
 Again Cheever laughed : ' ' You're having hallucinations, 
 my love. You'll feel better in the morning. Where the 
 deuce did you get such a foolish notion, anyway?" 
 
 "From Jim Dyckman," she stormed. "He was here 
 looking for you. If anybody's going crazy, he's the one, 
 I had a struggle with him. He broke away. I begged 
 him not to harm you, but he said he'd give you a few 
 extra jolts for my sake. Please, please, don't let him find 
 you there." 
 
 Cheever was half convinced and quite puzzled. He 
 knew that Dyckman had never forgiven him for marrying 
 Charity. The feud had smoldered. He could not con 
 ceive what should have revived it, unless Charity had been 
 talking. He had not thought of any one's punishing him 
 for neglecting her. But if Dyckman had enlisted in her 
 cause well, Cheever was afraid of hardly anything in the 
 world except boredom and the appearance of fear. He 
 answered Zada with a gruff : 
 
 "Let him find me if he wants to. Or since you know 
 him so well, tell me where he'll be, and I'll go find him." 
 
 He could hear Zada's strangled moan. How many 
 
 349
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 times, since male and female began, have women made 
 wild, vain protests against the battle-habit, the duel- 
 tribunal? Mothers, daughters, wives, mistresses, they 
 have been seldom heard and have been forced to wait 
 remote in anguish till their man has come back or been 
 brought back, victorious or baffled or defeated, maimed, 
 wounded, or dead. 
 
 It meant everything to Zada that her mate should not 
 suffer either death or publicity. But chiefly her love of 
 him made outcry now. She could not endure the vision of 
 her beloved receiving the hammering of the giant Dyck- 
 man. 
 
 The telephone crackled under the load of her prayers, 
 but Cheever had only one answer: 
 
 "If you want me to run away from him or anybody, 
 you don't get your wish, my darling." 
 
 Finally she shrieked, "If you don't come home I'll 
 come there and get you." 
 
 "Ladies are not allowed in the main part of this club, 
 dearest," said Cheever. "Thank God there are a few 
 places where two men can settle their affairs without the 
 help of womanly intuition." 
 
 "He wants to pound you to death," -she screamed. 
 "If you don't promise me, I'll come there and break in if 
 I have to scratch the eyes out of the doorkeeper." 
 
 He knew that she was capable of doing this very thing; 
 so he made answer, "All right, my dear. I surrender." 
 
 "You'll come home?" 
 
 "Yes, indeed. Right away." 
 
 "Oh, thank God! You do love me, then. How soon 
 will you be here?" 
 
 "Very shortly, unless the taxi breaks down." 
 
 "Hurry!" 
 
 "Surely. Good-by!" 
 
 He hung up the reverberant receiver and said to the 
 telephone-boy: "If anybody calls me, I've gone out. 
 No matter who calls me, I'm out." 
 
 350
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 Then he went to the card-room, found that the game 
 had gone on without him, cashed in his chips, and ex 
 cused himself. He was neither winning nor losing, so 
 that he could not be accused of "cold feet." That was 
 one of the most intolerable accusations to him. He could 
 violate any of the Commandments, but in the sportsman's 
 decalogue "Thou shalt not have cold feet" was one that 
 he honored in the observance, not the breach. 
 
 He went down to the reading-room, a palatial hall 
 fifty yards long with a table nearly as big as a railroad 
 platform, on a tremendous rug as wide and deep as a lawn. 
 About it were chairs and divans that would have satisfied 
 a lotus-eater. 
 
 Cheever avoided proffers of conversation and pretended 
 to read the magazines and newspapers. He kept his eyes 
 on the doors. He did not want to take any one into his 
 confidence, as he felt that, after all, Zada might have been 
 out of her head. He did not want any seconds or bottle- 
 holders. He was not afraid. Still, he did not care to be 
 surprised by a mad bull. He felt that he could play tore 
 ador with neatness and despatch provided he could fore 
 see the charge. 
 
 Among the magazines Cheever glanced at was one with 
 an article on various modes of self-defense, jiu-jitsu, and 
 other devices by which any clever child could apparently 
 remove or disable a mad elephant. But Cheever's 
 traditions did not incline to such methods. He had the 
 fisting habit. He did not feel called toward clinching or 
 choking, twisting, tripping, knifing, swording, or sand 
 bagging. His wrath expressed itself, and gaily, in the 
 play of the triceps muscle. For mobility he used foot 
 work and headwork. For shield he had his forearms or 
 his open hands for weapons, the ten knuckles at the 
 other end of the exquisite driving-shafts beginning in his 
 shoulder-blades. 
 
 He had been a clever fighter from childhood. He had
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 been a successful boxer and had followed the art in its 
 professional and amateur developments. He knew more 
 of prize-ring history and politics than of any other. He 
 often regretted that his inherited money had robbed him 
 of a career as a heavy-weight. He was not so big as 
 Dyckman, but he had made fools of bigger men. He felt 
 that the odds were a trifle in his favor, especially if 
 Dyckman were angry, as he must be to go roaring about 
 town frightening one silly woman for another's sake. 
 
 He would have preferred not to fight in the club. It 
 was the best of all possible clubs, and he supposed that he 
 would be expelled for profaning its sacrosanctity with a 
 vulgar brawl. But anything was better than cold feet. 
 
 Finally his hundredth glance at the door revealed Jim 
 Dyckman. He was a long way off, but he looked bigger 
 than Cheever remembered him. Also he was calmer than 
 Cheever had hoped him to be, and not drunk, as he half 
 expected. 
 
 Dyckman caught sight of Cheever, glared a moment, 
 tossed his head as if it had antlers on it, and came forward 
 grimly and swiftly. 
 
 A few members of the club spoke to him. An attendant 
 or two, carrying cocktails or high-balls in or empty glasses 
 out, stepped aside. 
 
 Dyckman advanced down the room, and his manner 
 was challenge enough. But he paused honorably to say, 
 "Cheever, I'm looking for you." 
 
 "So I hear." 
 
 "You had fair warning, then, from your woman?" 
 
 "Which one?" said Cheever, with his irresistible im 
 pudence. 
 
 That was the fulminate that exploded Dyckman's 
 wrath. "You blackguard!" he roared, and plunged. His 
 left hand was out and open, his great right fist back. As 
 he closed, it flashed past him and drove into the spot 
 where Cheever's face was smirking. 
 
 But the face was gone. Cheever had bent his neck just 
 
 35 2
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 enough to escape the fist. He met the weight of Dyck 
 man's rush with all his own weight in a short-arm jab- 
 that rocked Dyckman's whole frame and crumpled the 
 white cuirass of his shirt. 
 
 The fight was within an ace of being ended then and 
 there, but Dyckman's belly was covered with sinew, and 
 he digested the bitter medicine. He tried to turn his 
 huge grunt into a laugh. He was at least not to be guilty 
 of assaulting a weakling. 
 
 Dyckman was a bit of a boxer, too. Like most rich 
 men's sons, he was practised in athletics. The gentleman 
 of our day carries no sword and no revolver; he carries 
 his weapons in his gloves. 
 
 Dyckman acknowledged Cheever's skill and courage 
 by deploying and falling back. He sparred a moment.. 
 He saw that Cheever was quicker than he at the feint 
 and the sidestep. 
 
 He grew impatient at this dancing duet. His wrath 
 was his worst enemy and Cheever's ally. Cheever 
 taunted him, and he heard the voices of the, club members 
 who were rushing from their chairs in consternation, and 
 running in from the other rooms, summoned by the wire 
 less excitement that announces fights. 
 
 There was not going to be time for a .bout, and the 
 gallery was bigger than Dyckman had expected. He went 
 in hell-for-leather. He felt a mighty satisfaction when 
 his good left hand slashed through Cheever's ineffectual 
 palms, reached that perky little mustache and smeared 
 that amiable mouth with blood. 
 
 In the counterblow the edge of Cheever's cuff caught 
 on Dyckman's knuckles and ripped the skin. This saved 
 Dyckman's eye from mourning. And now wherever he 
 struck he left a red mark. It helped his target-practice.. 
 
 Cheever gave up trying to mar Dyckman's face and 
 went for his waistcoat. All is fair in such a war, and 
 below the belt was his favorite territory. He hoped ta 
 put Dyckman out. Dyckman tried to withhold his vul- 
 
 23 353
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 nerable solar plexus by crouching, but Cheever kept 
 whizzing through his guard like a blazing pinwheel even 
 when it brought his jaw in reach of an uppercut. 
 
 Dyckman clinched and tried to bear him down, but 
 Cheever, reaching round him, battered him with the 
 terrific kidney-blow, and Dyckman flung him off. 
 
 And now servants came leaping into the fray, venturing 
 to lay hands on the men. They could hear older members 
 pleading: "Gentlemen! Gentlemen! For God's sake 
 Temember where you are." One or two went calling, 
 "House Committee!" 
 
 Such blows as were struck now were struck across other 
 heads and in spite of other arms. Both men were seized 
 at length and dragged away, petted and talked to like 
 infuriated stallions. They stood panting and bleeding, 
 trying not to hear the voices of reason. They glared at 
 each other, and it became unendurable to each that the 
 other should be able to stand erect and mock him. 
 
 As if by a signal agreed on, they wrenched and flung 
 aside their captors and dashed together again, forgetting 
 science, defense, caution, everything but the lust of 
 carnage. Dyckman in freeing himself left his coat in the 
 grasp of his retainers. 
 
 There is nothing more sickeningly thrilling than the 
 bare-handed ferocity of two big men, all hate and stupid 
 power, smashing and being smashed, trying to defend 
 and destroy and each longing to knock the other lifeless 
 before his own heart is stopped. It seemed a pity to 
 interrupt it, and it was perilous as well. 
 
 For a long moment the two men flailed each other, bored 
 in, and staggered out. 
 
 It was thud and thwack, slash and gouge. Wild blows 
 went through the air like broadswords, making the specta 
 tors groan at what they might have done had they landed. 
 Blows landed and sent a head back with such a snap that 
 one looked for it on the floor. Flesh split, and blood 
 spurted. Cheever reached up and swept his nose and 
 
 354
 
 WE CA'N'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 mouth clear of gore then shot his ' reeking fist into 
 Dyckman's heart as if he would drive it through. 
 
 It was amazing to see Dyckman's answering swing 
 batter Cheever forward to one knee. Habit and not 
 courtesy kept Dyckman from jumping him. He stood 
 off for Cheever to regain his feet. It was not necessary, 
 for Cheever' s agility had carried him out of range, but the 
 tolerance maddened him more than anything yet, and 
 he ceased to duck and dodge. He stood in and battered 
 at Dyckman's stomach till a gray nausea began to 
 weaken his enemy. Dyckman grew afraid of a sudden- 
 blotting out of consciousness. He had known it once 
 when the chance blow of an instructor had stretched him 
 flat for thirty seconds. 
 
 He could not keep Cheever off far enough to use his 
 longer reach. He forgot everything but the determination: 
 to make ruins of that handsome face before he went out.. 
 He knocked loose one tooth and bleared an eye, but it 
 was not enough. Finally Cheever got to him with a 
 sledge-hammer smash in the groin. It hurled Dyckman 
 against and along the big table, just as he put home one 
 magnificent, majestic, mellifluous swinge with all his body 
 in it. It planted an earthquake under Cheever's ear. 
 
 Dyckman saw him go backward across a chair and 
 spinning over it and with it and under it to the floor. 
 Then he had only the faintness and the vomiting to fight. 
 He made one groping, clutching, almighty effort to stand 
 up long enough to crow like a victorious fighting cock r 
 and he did. He stood up. He held to the table; he 
 did not drop. And he said one triumphant, "Humph!" 
 
 And now the storm of indignation began. Dyckman 
 was a spent and bankrupt object, and anybody could 
 berate him. A member of the house committee reviled 
 him with profanity and took the names of witnesses who 
 could testify that Dyckman struck the first blow. 
 
 The pitiful stillness of Cheever, where a few men knelt 
 about him, turned the favor to him. One little whiffet 
 
 355
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 told Dyckman to his face that it was a dastardly thing 
 he had done. He laughed. He had his enemy on the 
 floor. He did not want everything. 
 
 Dyckman made no answer to the accusations. He did 
 not say that he was a crusader punishing an infidel for his 
 treachery to a poor, neglected woman. He had almost 
 forgotten what he was fighting for. He was too weak 
 even to oppose the vague advice he heard that Cheever 
 should be taken "home." He had a sardonic impulse to 
 give Zada's address, but he could not master his be 
 fuddled wits enough for speech. 
 
 The little fussy rooster who called Dyckman dastardly 
 said that he ought to be arrested. The reception he got 
 for his proposal to bring a policeman into the club or take 
 a member out of it into the jail and the newspapers was 
 almost annihilating. The chairman of the house com 
 mittee said: 
 
 " I trust that it is not necessary to say that this wretched 
 and most unheard-of affair must be kept unheard of. 
 But I may say that I have here a list of the members 
 present, and I shall make a list of the club servants pres 
 ent. If one word of this leaks out, each gentleman present 
 will be brought before the council, and every servant 
 will be discharged immediately every servant without 
 regard to guilt, innocence, or time of service." 
 
 Dyckman would have liked to spend the night at the 
 club, but its hospitable air had chilled. He sent for his 
 big coat, turned up the collar, pulled his hat low, and 
 crept into a taxicab. His father and mother were out, 
 and he got to his room without explanations. His valet, 
 Dallam, gasped at the sight of him, but Dyckman laughed : 
 
 "You ought to see the other fellow." 
 
 Then he crept into the tub, thence into his bed, and 
 slept till he was called to the telephone the next morning 
 by Mrs. Cheever. 
 
 As he might have expected, Charity was as far as pos- 
 
 356
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 sible from gratitude. The only good news she gave him 
 was that Cheever had been brought home half dead, 
 terribly mauled, broken in pride, and weeping like a baby 
 with his shame. Dyckman could not help swelling a 
 little at that. 
 
 But when Charity told him that Cheever accused her 
 of setting him on and swore that he would get even with 
 them both, Dyckman realized that fists are poor poultices 
 for bruises, and revenge the worst of all solutions. Finally, 
 Charity denounced Jim and begged him once more to 
 keep out of her sight and out of her life. 
 
 Dyckman was in the depths of the blues, and a note 
 to the effect that he had been suspended from his club, 
 to await action looking toward his expulsion, left him 
 quite alone in the world. 
 
 In such a mood Kedzie Thropp called him up, with a 
 cheery hail that rejoiced him like the first cheep of the 
 first robin after a miserable winter. He said that he 
 would call that evening, with the greatest possible delight. 
 She said that she was very lonely for him, and they should 
 have a blissful evening with just themselves together. 
 
 But' it proved to be a rather crowded occasion in 
 Kedzie's apartment. Her father and mother reached 
 there before Dyckman did, to Kedzie's horror and theirs.
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 TURN a parable upside down, and nearly everything 
 falls out of it. 
 
 Even the beautiful legend of the prodigal son return 
 ing home to his parents could not retain its value when it 
 was topsy-turvied by the Thropps. 
 
 Their son was a daughter, but she had run away from 
 them to batten on the husks of city life, and had pros 
 pered exceedingly. It was her parents who heard of her 
 fame and had journeyed to the city to ask her forgiveness 
 and throw, themselves on her neck. Kedzie was now 
 wonderful' before the nation under the nom de film of 
 Anita Adair; but if her father had not spanked her that 
 fatal day in New York she might never have known 
 glory. So many people have been kicked up-stairs in 
 this world. 
 
 But Kedzie had not forgiven the outrage, and her 
 father had no intention of reminding her how much she 
 owed to it. In fact, he wished he had thought to cut 
 off his right hand, scripturally, before it caused him to 
 offend. 
 
 When the moving-picture patrons in Nimrim, Missouri, 
 first saw Kedzie's pictures on the screen they were thrilled 
 far beyond the intended effect of the thriller. The name 
 "Anita Adair" had meant nothing, of course, among her 
 old neighbors, but everybody had known Kedzie's ways 
 ever since first she had had ways. Her image had no 
 sooner walked into her first scene than fellows who had 
 kissed her, and girls who had been jealous of her, began 
 to buzz. 
 
 358
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Look, that's Kedzie." 
 
 "For mercy's sake, Kedzie Thropp!" 
 
 "Yep, that's old Throppie." 
 
 "Why would you believe it? that's old Ad Thropp's 
 girl the one what was lost so long." 
 
 In the Nimrim Nickeleum films were played twice of an 
 evening. The seven-thirty audience was usually willing 
 to go home and leave space for the nine-o'clock audience 
 unless the night was cold. But on this immortal evening 
 people were torn between a frenzy to watch Kedzie go by 
 again and a frenzy to run and get Mr. and Mrs. Thropp. 
 
 A veritable Greek chorus ran and got the Thropps, and 
 lost their seats. There was no room for the Thropps to 
 get in. If the manager had not thrown out a few children 
 and squeezed the parents' through the crowd they would 
 have lost the view. 
 
 The old people stood in the narrow aisle staring at the 
 apotheosis of this brilliant creature in whose existence they 
 had collaborated. They had the mythological experience 
 of two old peasants seeing their child translated as in a 
 chariot of fire. Their eyes were dazzled with tears, for 
 they had mourned her as lost, either dead in body or dead 
 of soul. They had imagined her drowned and floating 
 down the Bay, or floating along the sidewalks of New 
 York. They had feared for her the much-advertised fate 
 of the white slaves she might be bound out to Singapore 
 or destined for Alaskan dance-halls. There are so many 
 fates for parents to dread for their lost children. 
 
 To have their Kedzie float home to them on pinions 
 of radiant beauty was an almost intolerable beatitude. 
 Kedzie's mother started down the aisle, crying, "Kedzie, 
 my baby! My little lost baby!" before Adna could 
 check her. 
 
 Kedzie did not answer her mother, but went on with 
 her work as if she were deaf. She came streaming from 
 the projection-machine in long beams of light. This 
 vivid, smiling, weeping, dancing, sobbing Kedzie was only 
 
 359
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 a vibration rebounding from a screen. Perhaps that is all 
 any of us are. 
 
 One thing was certain: the Thropps determined to re 
 deem their lost lamb as soon as they could get to New 
 York. Their lost lamb was gamboling in blessed pastures. 
 The Nimrim people spoke to the parents with reverence, 
 as if their son had been elected President which would 
 not have been, after all, so wonderful as their daughter's 
 being a screen queen. 
 
 There is no end to the astonishments of our every-day 
 life. While the Thropps had been watching their daugh 
 ter disport before them in a little dark room in Missouri, 
 and other people in numbers of other cities were seeing her 
 in duplicate, she herself was in none of the places, but 
 in her own room with Jim Dyckman paying court 
 to her. 
 
 Kedzie was engaged in reeling -off a new life of her own 
 for the astonishment of the angels, or whatever audience 
 it is for whose amusement the eternal movie show of 
 mankind is performed. Kedzie's story was progressing 
 with cinematographic speed and with transitions almost 
 as abrupt as the typical five-reeler. 
 
 Kedzie was an anxious spectator as well as an actor in 
 her own life film. She did not see how she could get out 
 of the tangled situation her whims, her necessities, and 
 her fates had constructed about her. She had been more 
 or less forced into a betrothal with the wealthy Jim 
 Dyckman before she had dissolved her marriage with 
 Tommie Gilfoyle. She could not find Gilfoyle, and she 
 grew frenzied with the dread that her inability to find 
 him might thwart all her dreams. 
 
 Then came the evening when Jim Dyckman telephoned 
 her that he could not keep his appointment with her. It 
 was the evening he responded to Charity Coe's appeal 
 and met Peter Cheever fist to fist. Kedzie heard, in the 
 polite lie he told, a certain tang of prevarication, and that 
 
 360
 
 . WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 frightened her. Why was Jim Dyckman trying to shake 
 her? Once begun, where would the habit end? 
 
 That was a dull evening for Kedzie. She stuck at home 
 without other society than her boredom and her terrors. 
 She had few resources for the enrichment of solitude. 
 She tried to read, but she could not find a popular novel 
 or a short story in a magazine exciting enough to keep her 
 mind off the excruciating mystery of the next instalment 
 in her own life. Her heart ached with the fear that she 
 might never know the majesty of being Mrs. Jim Dyck 
 man. That almost royal prerogative grew more and more 
 precious the more she feared to lose it. She imagined the 
 glory with a ridiculous extravagance. Her theory of the 
 life lived by the wealthy aristocrats was fantastic, but she 
 liked it and longed for it. 
 
 The next day she waited to hear from Jim till she 
 could endure the anxiety no longer. She ventured to call 
 him at his father's home. She waited with trepidation 
 while she was put through to his room, but his enthusiasm 
 when he recognized her voice refreshed her hopes and her 
 pride. She did not know that part of her welcome was 
 due to the fierce rebuke Charity Coe had inflicted on him 
 a little before because he had mauled her husband into a 
 wreck. 
 
 That evening she waited for Jim Dyckman's arrival 
 with an ardor almost akin to love. He had begged off 
 from dinner. He did not explain that he carried two or 
 three visible fist marks from Cheever's knuckles which he 
 did not wish to exhibit in a public restaurant. 
 
 So Kedzie dined at home in solitary gloom. She had 
 only herself for guest and found herself most stupid 
 company. 
 
 She dined in her bathrobe and began immediately after 
 dinner to dress for conquest. She hoped that Dyckman 
 would take her out to the theater or a dance, and she 
 put on her best bib and tucker, the bib being conspicuously 
 missing. She was taking a last look at the arrangement
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 of her little living-room when the telephone-bell rang and 
 the maid came to say: 
 
 " 'Scuse me, Miss Adair, but hall-boy says your father 
 and mother is down-stairs." 
 
 Kedzie almost fainted. She did not dare refuse to see 
 them. She had not attained that indifference to the 
 opinions of servants which is the only real emancipation 
 from being the servant of one's servants. 
 
 While she fumbled with her impulses the maid rather 
 stated than asked, "Shall I have 'em sent up, of course?" 
 
 "Of course," Kedzie snapped.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 Thropps knew Kedzie well enough to be afraid 
 1 of her. A parental intuition told them that if they 
 wrote to her she would be a long while answering; if they 
 telephoned her she would be out of town. So they came 
 unannounced. It had taken them the whole day to trace 
 her. They learned with dismay that she was no longer 
 "working" at the Hyperfilm Studio. 
 
 Adna Thropp and his wife were impressed by the ornate 
 lobby of the apartment-house, by the livery of the hall- 
 boy and the elevator-boy, by the apron and cap of the 
 maid who let them in, and by the hall furniture. 
 
 But when they saw their little Kedzie standing before 
 them in her evening gown her party dress as Mrs. 
 Thropp would say they were overwhelmed. A daughter 
 is a fearsome thing to a father, especially when she is 
 grown up and dressed up. Adna turned his eyes away 
 from his shining child. 
 
 But the sense of shame is as amenable to costume as to 
 the lack of it, and Kedzie the shoulder-revealer was as 
 much shocked by what her parents had on as they by 
 what she had off. 
 
 The three embraced automatically rather than heartily, 
 and Kedzie came out of her mother's bosom chilled, 
 though it was a warm night and Mrs. Thropp had traveled 
 long. Also there was a lot of her. 
 
 Kedzie gave her parents the welcome that the prodigal's 
 elder brother gave him. She was thinking: "What will 
 Jim Dyckman say when he learns that my real name is 
 
 363
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Thropp and sees this pair of Thropps? They look as if 
 their name would be Thropp." 
 
 Adna made the apologies glad tidings being mani 
 festly out of place. 
 
 "Hope we 'ain't put you out, daughter. We thought 
 we'd s'prise you. We went to the fact'ry. Man at the 
 door says you wasn't workin' there no more. Give us 
 this address. Right nice place here, ain't it? Looks like 
 a nice class of folks lived here." 
 
 Kedzie heard the rounded "r" and the flat "a" which 
 she had discarded and scorned the more because she had 
 once practised them. Children are generally disappointed 
 in their parents, since they cherish ideals to which few 
 parents may conform from lack of time, birth, breeding, 
 or money. Kedzie was not in any mood for parents that 
 night, anyway, but if she had to have parents, she would 
 have chosen an earl and a countess with a Piccadilly 
 accent and a concert-grand manner. Such parents it 
 would have given her pleasure and pride to exhibit to 
 Dyckman. They would awe-inspire him and arrange the 
 marriage settlement, whatever that was. 
 
 But these poor old shabby dubs in their shabby duds 
 a couple who were plebeian even in Jayville ! If there had 
 not been such a popular prejudice against mauling one's 
 innocent parents about, Kedzie would probably have taken 
 her father and mother to the dumb-waiter and sent them 
 down to the ash-can. 
 
 As she hung between despair and anxiety the telephone- 
 bell rang. Jim Dyckman called her up to say that he 
 was delayed for half an hour. Kedzie came back and 
 invited her parents in. It made her sick to see their 
 awkwardness among the furniture. They went like scows 
 adrift. They priced everything with their eyes, and the 
 beauty was spoiled by the estimated cost. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp asked Kedzie how she was half a dozen 
 times, and, before Kedzie could answer, went on to tell 
 about her own pains. Mr. Thropp was freshly alive to 
 
 3 6 4
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 the fact that New York's population is divided into two 
 classes innocent visitors and resident pirates. 
 
 While they asked Kedzie questions that she did not 
 care to answer, and answered questions she had not cared 
 to ask, Kedzie kept wondering how she could get rid of 
 them before Dyckman came. She thanked Heaven that 
 there was no guest-room in her apartment. They could 
 not live with her, at least. 
 
 Suddenly it came over the pretty, bewildered little thing 
 with her previous riddle of how to get rid of a last-year's 
 husband so that she might get a new model suddenly 
 it came over Kedzie that she had a tremendous necessity 
 for help, advice, parentage. The crying need for a father 
 and a mother enhanced the importance of the two she had 
 on hand. 
 
 She broke right into her mother's description of a 
 harrowing lumbago she had suffered from : it was that bad 
 she couldn't neither lay nor set that is to say, comfort 
 able. Kedzie's own new-fangled pronunciations and 
 phrases fell from her mind, and she spoke in purest 
 Nimrim: 
 
 "Listen, momma and poppa. I'm in a peck of trouble, 
 and maybe you can help me out." 
 
 "Is it money?" Adna wailed, sepulchrally. 
 
 "No, unless it's too much of the darned stuff." 
 
 Adna gasped at the paradox. He had no time to com 
 ment before she assailed him with : 
 
 "You see, I've gone and got married." 
 
 This shattered them both so that the rest was only 
 shrapnel after shell. But it was a leveling bombardment 
 of everything near, dear, respectable, sacred. They were 
 fairly rocked by each detonation of fact. 
 
 "Yes, I went and married a dirty little rat name's 
 Gilfoyle he thinks my real name's Anita Adair. I got 
 it out of a movie, first day I ran off from you folks. I 
 had an awful time, momma like to starved would have, 
 only for clerkin' in a candy-store. Then I got work 
 
 365
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 posin' for commercial photographers. Did you see the 
 Breathasweeta Chewin' Gum Girl? No? That was me. 
 Then I was a dancer for a while on the stage and the 
 other girls were awful cats. But what d'you expect? 
 The life was terrible. We didn't wear much clo'es. That 
 didn't affect me, though; some of those nood models are 
 terribly respectable not that I was nood, o' course. But 
 well so I married Tommie Gilfoyle. I don't know 
 how I ever came to. He must have mesmerized me, I 
 guess." 
 
 "What did he work at?" said Adna. 
 
 "Poetry." 
 
 "Is poetry work?" 
 
 "Work? That's all it is. Poetry is all work and no 
 pay. You should have seen that gink sweatin' over the 
 fool stuff. He'd work a week for five dollars' worth of 
 foolishness. And besides, as soon as he married me he 
 lost his job." 
 
 " Poetry?" Adna mumbled. 
 
 "Advertising." 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 "Well, we didn't live together very long, and I was 
 perfectly miser 'ble every minute." 
 
 "You poor little honey child!" said Mrs. Thropp, who 
 felt her lamb coming back to her, and even Adna reached 
 over and squeezed her hand and rubbed her knuckles with 
 his rough thumb uncomfortably. 
 
 But it was good to have allies, and Kedzie went on: 
 
 " By an' by Gilfoyle got the offer of a position in Chicago, 
 and he couldn't get there without borrowing all I had. 
 But I was glad enough to pay it to him. I'd 'a' paid his 
 fare to the moon if he'd 'a' gone there. Then I got a 
 position with a moving-picture company as a jobber I 
 began very humbly at first, you see, and I underwent 
 great hardships." (She was quoting now from one of her 
 favorite interviews.) " My talent attracted the attention 
 of the director, Mr. Ferriday. He stands very high in the 
 
 366
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 p'fession, but he's very conceited very! He thought he 
 owned me because he was the first one I let direct me. 
 He wanted me to marry him." 
 
 " Did you?" said Adna, who was prepared for anything. 
 
 "I should say not!" said Kedzie. "How could I, with 
 a husband in Chicago? He wasn't much of a husband 
 just enough to keep me from marrying a real man. For 
 one day, who should come to the studio but Jim Dyck- 
 man!" 
 
 "Any relation to the big Dyckmans?" said Adna. 
 
 "He's the son of the biggest one of them all," said 
 Kedzie. 
 
 "And you know him?" 
 
 "Do I know him? Doesn't he want to marry me? 
 Isn't that the whole^ trouble? He's coming here this 
 evening." 
 
 To Adna, the humble railroad claim-agent, the careless 
 tossing off of the great railroad name of Dyckman was 
 what it would have been to a rural parson to hear Kedzie 
 remark: 
 
 "I'm giving a little dinner to-night to my friends Isaiah, 
 Jeremiah, and Mr. Apostle Paul." 
 
 When the shaken wits of the parents began to return 
 to a partial calm they remembered that Kedzie had men 
 tioned somebody named Gilfoyle Gargoyle would have 
 been a better name for him, since he grinned down in 
 mockery upon a cathedral of hope. 
 
 Adna whispered, "When did you divorce the other 
 feller?" 
 
 "I didn't; that's the trouble." 
 
 "Why don't you?" 
 
 "I can't find him." 
 
 Adna spoke up: 'Til go to Chicago and find him and 
 get a divorce, if I have to pound it out of him. You say 
 he's a poet?" 
 
 Adna had the theory that poetry went with tatting and 
 china-painting as an athletic exercise. Kedzie had no 
 
 367
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 reason to think differently. She had whipped her own 
 poet, scratched him and driven him away in disorder. 
 She told her people of this and of her inability to recall 
 him, and of his failure to answer the letter she had sent to 
 Chicago. 
 
 Her father and mother grew incandescent with the 
 strain between the obstacle and the opportunity the 
 irresistible opportunity chained to the immovable ob 
 stacle. They raged against the fiend who had ruined 
 Kedzie's life, met her on her pathway, gagged and bound 
 her, and haled her to his lair. 
 
 Poor young Gilfoyle would have been flattered at the 
 importance they gave him, but he would not have recog 
 nized himself or Kedzie. 
 
 According to his memory, he had married Kedzie be 
 cause she was a pitiful, heartbroken waif who had lost her 
 job and thrown herself on his mercy. He had married 
 her because he adored her and he wanted to protect her 
 and love her under the hallowing shelter of matrimony. 
 He had given her his money and his love and his toil, and 
 they had not interested her. She had berated him, 
 chucked him, taken up with a fast millionaire ; and when 
 he returned to resume his place in her heart she had greeted 
 him with her finger-nails. 
 
 Thus, as usual in wars, each side had bitter grievances 
 which the other could neither acknowledge nor understand. 
 Gilfoyle was as bitter against Kedzie as she was against 
 him. 
 
 And even while the three Thropps were wondering how 
 they could summon this vanquished monster out of the 
 vasty deep of Chicago they could have found him by 
 .putting their heads out of the wipdow and shouting his 
 name. He was loitering opposite in the areaway of an 
 empty residence. He did not know that Kedzie's father 
 .and mother were with her, any more than they knew that 
 he was with them.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV 
 
 AFTER a deal of vain abuse of Gilfoyle for abducting 
 /x their child and thwarting her golden opportunity, 
 Adna asked at last, "What does Mr. Dyckman think of all 
 this?" 
 
 "You don't suppose I've told him I was married, do 
 you?" Kedzie stormed. " Do I look as loony as all that?" 
 
 "Oh!" said Adna. 
 
 "Why, he doesn't even know my name is Thropp, to 
 say nothing of Thropp-hyphen-Gilfoyle." 
 
 "Oh!" said Adna. 
 
 "Who does he think you are?" asked Mrs. Thropp.r bsrf 
 
 "Anita Adair, the famous favorite of the screen," said 
 Kedzie, rather advertisingly. 
 
 " Hadn't you better tell him?" Adna ventured. i bos 
 
 "I don't dast. He'd never speak to me again. He'd 
 run like a rabbit if he thought I was a grass widow." 
 
 Mrs. Thropp remonstrated: "I don't believe he'd ever 
 give you up. He must love you a heap if he wants to 
 marry you." 
 
 "That's so," said Kedzie. "He's always begging me to 
 name the day. But I don't know what he'd think if I was 
 to tell him I'd been lying to him all this time. He thinks 
 I'm an innocent little girl. I just haven't got the face 
 to tell him I'm an old married woman with a mislaid 
 husband." . !>nobirri9q R 
 
 "You mean to give him up, then?" Mrs. Thropp sighed. 
 
 Adna raged back: "Give up a billion-dollar man for a 
 fool poet? Not on your tintype!" nllrrrt nfifrobvC 
 
 Kedzie gave her father an admiring look. They were 
 3 6 9
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 getting on sympathetic ground. They understood each 
 other. 
 
 Adna was encouraged to say: "If I was you, Kedzie, 
 I'd just lay the facts before him. Maybe he could buy 
 the feller off. You could probably get him mighty 
 cheap." 
 
 Mrs. Thropp habitually resented all her husband's ar 
 guments. She scorned this proposal. 
 
 "Don't you do it, Kedzie. Just as you said, he'd 
 most likely run like a rabbit." 
 
 "Then what am I going to do?" Kedzie whimpered. 
 
 There was a long silence. Mrs. Thropp pondered bit 
 terly. She was the most moral of women. She had 
 brought up her children with all rigidity. She had abused 
 them for the least dereliction. She had upheld the grim 
 mest standard of virtue, with " Don't!" for its watchword. 
 Of virtue as a warm-hearted, alert, eager, glowing spirit, 
 cultivating the best and most beautiful things in life, she 
 had no idea. Virtue was to her a critic, a satirist, a neigh 
 borhood gossip, something scathing and ascetic. That 
 delicate balance between failing to mind one's own business 
 and failing to respond to another's need did not bother 
 her nor did that theory of motherhood which instils 
 courage, independence, originality, and enthusiasm for 
 life, and starts children precociously toward beauty, love, 
 grace, philanthropy, invention, art, glory. 
 
 She had the utmost contempt for girls who went right 
 according to their individualities, or went wrong for any 
 reason soever. The least indiscretions of her own daugh 
 ters she visited with endless tirades. Kedzie had escaped 
 them for a long while. She had succeeded as far as she 
 had because she had escaped from the most dangerous 
 of all influences a perniciously repressive mother. She 
 would have been scolded viciously now if it had not been 
 for Dyckman's mighty prestige. 
 
 The Dyckman millions in person were about to enter 
 this room. The Dyckman millions wanted Kedzie, If 
 
 37
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 they got her it would be a wonderful thing for a poor, 
 hard-working girl who had had the spunk to strike out 
 for herself and make her own way without expense to her 
 father and mother. The Dyckman millions, furthermore, 
 would bring the millennium at once to the father and 
 mother. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp, fresh from her village (yet not so very 
 fresh say, rather, recent from sordid humility), sat 
 dreaming of herself as a Dyckman by marriage. She 
 imagined herself and the great Mrs. Dyckman in adjoining 
 rocking-chairs, exchanging gossip and recipes and anec 
 dotes of their joint grandchildren-to-be. Just to inhale 
 the. aroma of that future, that vision of herself as Mr. 
 Dyckman's mother-in-law, was like breathing in deeply 
 of laughing-gas; a skilful dentist could have extracted a 
 molar from her without attracting her attention. And in 
 the vapor of that stupendous temptation the devil actu 
 ally did extract from her her entire moral code without her 
 noticing the difference. 
 
 If Kedzie had been married to Gilfoyle and besought 
 in marriage by another fellow of the same relative standard 
 of income Mrs. Thropp could have waxed as indignant as 
 anybody. If Kedzie's new suitor had earned as high as 
 four thousand a year, which was a pile of money in Nim- 
 rim, she would still have raged against the immorality 
 of tampering with the sacrament of marriage. She might 
 have withstood as much as twenty thousand a year for the 
 sake of home and religion. She abhorred divorce, as well 
 as other people do (especially divorcees). 
 
 But to resist a million dollars and all that went with it 
 was impossible. To resist a score of millions was twenty 
 times impossibler. She made up her mind that Dyckman 
 should not escape from this temporary alliance with the 
 Thropps without paying at least a handsome initiation- 
 fee. Suddenly she set her jaw and broke into the parley 
 of her husband and their daughter: 
 
 "Well, I've made up my mind. Adna, you shut up 
 371
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 awhile and get on out this room. I'm going to have a few 
 words with my girl." 
 
 Adna looked into the face of his wife and saw there that 
 red-and-white-striped expression which always puts a wise 
 man to flight. He was glad to be permitted to retreat. 
 When he was gone Mrs. Thropp beckoned Kedzie to sit 
 by her on the chaise tongue. She gathered her child up as 
 some adoring old buzzard might cuddle her nestling and 
 impart choice ideals of scavengery. 
 
 "Look here, honey: you listen to your mother what 
 loves you and knows what's best for you. You've struck 
 out for yourself and you've won the grandest chance any 
 girl ever had. If you throw it away you'll be slappin' 
 Providence right in the face. The Lord would never have 
 put this op'tunity in your reach if He hadn't meant you 
 to have it." 
 
 "What you talking about, momma?" said Kedzie. 
 
 " My father always used to say: ' Old Man Op'tunity is 
 bald-headed except for one long scalplock in the middle 
 his forehead. Grab him as he comes toward you, for 
 there's nothing to lay holt on as he goes by.' " 
 
 "What's all this talk about bald-heads?" Kedzie pro 
 tested. 
 
 "Hush your mouth and listen to a woman that's older 'n 
 what you are and knows more. Look at me ! I've slaved 
 all my life. I've been a hard-workin', church-goin' 
 woman, a good mother to a lot of ungrateful children, a 
 faithful, lovin' wife and what have I got for it? Look 
 at me. Do you want to be like me when you get my age ? 
 Do you?" 
 
 It was a hard question to answer politely, so Kedzie 
 said nothing. Mrs. Thropp went on: 
 
 "You got a chance to look like me and live hard and die 
 poor, and that's what '11 happen if you stick by this low- 
 life, good-for-nothing dawg you married. Don't do it.. 
 Money's come your way. Grab it quick. Hold on to it 
 tight. Money's the one thing that counts. You take 
 
 372
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 my word for it. It don't matter much how you get it; 
 the main thing is Get it! People don't ask you How? 
 but How Much? If you got enough they don't care 
 How." 
 
 "That's all right enough," said Kedzie, "but the main 
 question with me is How?" 
 
 "How is easy," said Mrs. Thropp, and her face seemed 
 to turn yellow as she lowered ner voice. "This Mr. 
 Dyckman is crazy about you. He wants you. If he's 
 willin' to marry you to get you, I guess he'll be still 
 more willin' to get you without marryin' you." 
 
 "Why, momma!" 
 
 It was just a whisper. Kedzie had lived through village 
 perils and city perils; she had been one of a band of 
 dancers as scant of morals as of clothes; she had drifted 
 through all sorts of encounters with all sorts of people; 
 but she had never heard so terrible a thought so terribly 
 expressed. She flinched from her mother. Her mother 
 saw that shudder of retreat and grew harsher: 
 
 " You tell Mr. Dyckman about your husband, and you'll 
 lose him. You will for sure! If you lose him, you lose 
 the greatest chance a girl ever had. Take him and 
 make him pay for you! in advance. Do you under 
 stand? You can't get much afterward. You can get a 
 fortune if you get your money first. Look at you, how 
 pretty you are! He'd give you a million if you asked 
 him. Get your money; then tell him if you want to; 
 but don't lose this chance. Do you hear me?" 
 
 "Yes," Kedzie sighed. "Yes, momma." 
 
 " Promise me on your solemn honor!" 
 
 Kedzie giggled with sheer nervousness at the phrase. 
 But she would not promise. . 
 
 The door-bell rang, and the maid admitted Jim Dyck 
 man, who had not paused to send his name up by the 
 telephone. While he gave his hat and stick to the maid 
 and peeled off his gloves Kedzie was whispering: 
 
 "It's Jim." 
 
 373
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Mrs. Thropp struggled to her feet. "He mustn't find 
 me here," she said. "Don't tell him about us." 
 
 But before she could escape Dyckman was in the door 
 way, almost too tall to walk through it, almost as tall as 
 twenty million dollars. 
 
 To Mrs. Thropp he was as majestic as the Colossus of 
 Rhodes would have been. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, 
 he was a gilded giant.
 
 CHAPTER XXXV 
 
 was paralyzed. Mrs. Thropp was inspired. 
 Unity of purpose guided her true. She had told 
 her daughter to ignore Gilfoyle as an unimportant detail. 
 She certainly did not intend to substitute a couple of 
 crude parents as a new handicap. 
 
 No one knew Mrs. Thropp's cheapness of appearance 
 better than she did. A woman may grow shoddy and 
 careless, but she rarely grows oblivious of her uncomeliness. 
 She will rather cherish it as the final cruelty of circum-r 
 stances. Mrs. Thropp was keenly alive to the effect it 
 would have on Dyckman if Kedzie introduced her and 
 Adna as the encumbrances on her beauty. 
 
 Adna, hearing the door-bell and Dyckman's entrance, 
 returned to the living-room from the bathroom, where he 
 had taken refuge. He stood in the hall now behind the 
 puzzled Dyckman. 
 
 There was a dreadful silence for a moment. Jim spoke, 
 shyly : 
 
 4 ' Hello, Anita ! How are you ?" 
 
 "Hello, Jim!" Kedzie stammered. "This is" 
 
 "I'm the janitor's wife," said Mrs. Thropp. "My 
 husband had to come up to see about the worter not run 
 ning in the bathroom, and I came along to see Miss the 
 young lady. She's been awful good to me. Well, I'll 
 be gettin' along. Good night, miss. Good night, sir." 
 
 To save herself, she could not think of Kedzie's screen 
 name. To save her daughter's future, she disowned her. 
 She pushed past Dyckman, and silencing the stupefied 
 Adna with a glare, swept him out through the dining-room 
 into the kitchen. 
 
 375
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 It amazed Mrs. Thropp to find a kitchen so many flights 
 up-stairs. The ingenuity of the devices, the step-saving 
 cupboard, the dry ice-box with its coils of cold-air pipes, 
 the gas-stove, the electric appliances, were like wonderful 
 new toys to her. 
 
 Adna was as comfortable as a cow in a hammock, and 
 she would have sent him away, but his hat was in the hall 
 and she dared not go for it. Besides, she wanted to wait 
 long enough to learn the outcome of Kedzie's adventure 
 with Dyckman. 
 
 As soon as he was alone with Kedzie, Jim had taken 
 her into his arms. She blushed with an unwonted timid 
 ity in a new sense of the forbiddenness of her presence 
 there. 
 
 Her upward glance showed her that Jim had been in 
 trouble, too. His jaw had a mottled look, and one eye 
 brow was a trifle mashed. 
 
 "What on earth has happened to you?" she gasped. 
 
 "Oh, I had a little run-in with a fellow." 
 
 "What about?" said Kedzie. 
 
 "Nothing much." 
 
 "He must have hurt you terribly." 
 
 "Think so? Well, you ought to see him." 
 
 "What was it all about?" 
 
 "Oh, just a bit of an argument." 
 
 "Who was he?" 
 
 "Nobody you know." 
 
 "You mean it's none of my business?" 
 
 "I wouldn't put it that way, honey. I'd just rather 
 not talk about it." 
 
 Kedzie felt rebuffed and afraid. He had spent an 
 evening away from her and had reappeared with scars 
 from a battle he would not describe. She would have been 
 still more terrified if she had known that he had fought 
 as the cavalier of Charity Coe Cheever. She would have 
 been somewhat reassured if she had known that Jim 
 smarted less under the bruises of Cheever's fists than under 
 
 376
 
 the rebuke he had had from Charity for his interference 
 in her marital crisis. 
 
 Jim was the more in need of Kedzie's devotion for being 
 discarded again by Charity. The warmth in Kedzie's 
 greeting was due to her fear of losing him. But he did not 
 know that. He only knew that she was exceedingly cor 
 dial to him, and it was his nature to repay cordiality with 
 usury. 
 
 He noted, however, that Kedzie's warmth had an 
 element of anxiety. He asked her what was worrying her, 
 but she would not answer. 
 
 At length he made his usual remark. It had become a 
 sort of standing joke for him to say, "When do we marry?" 
 
 She always answered, "Give me a little more time." 
 But to-night when he laughed, "Well, just to get the sub 
 ject out of the way, when do we marry?" Kedzie did not 
 make her regular answer. Her pretty face was sud 
 denly darkened with pain. She moaned: " Never, I guess. 
 Never, I'm afraid." 
 
 "What's on your mind, Anita?" 
 
 She hesitated, but when he repeated his query she took 
 the plunge and told him the truth. 
 
 Her mother had pleaded just a little too well. If Mrs. 
 Thropp had begged Kedzie to do the right thing for the 
 right's sake Kedzie would have felt the natural reaction 
 daughters feel toward motherly advice. But the en 
 treaty to do evil that evil might come of it aroused even 
 more resistance, issuing as it did from maternal lips that 
 traditionally give only holy counsel. It had a more re 
 forming effect on Kedzie's crooked plans than all the 
 exhortations of all the preachers in the world could have 
 had. 
 
 Kedzie turned to honesty because it seemed the less 
 .horrible of two evils. She assumed the r61e of a little 
 penitent, and made Jim Dyckman a father confessor. 
 She told her story as truthfully as she could tell it or feel 
 it. She was too sincere to be just. 
 
 377
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She made herself the martyr that she felt herself to be. 
 She wept plentifully and prettily, with irresistible gulps 
 and swallo wings of lumps and catches of breath, fetches 
 of sobs, and dartings and gleamings of pearls from her 
 shining eyelids. Her handkerchief was soon a little 
 wad of wet lace, ridiculously pathetic; her lips were 
 blubbered. She wept on and on till she just had to blow 
 her little red nose. She blew it with exquisite candor, 
 and it gave forth the heartbreaking squawk of the first toy 
 trumpet a child breaks of a Christmas morning. 
 
 One radical difference between romance and realism 
 is that in romance the heroines weep from the eyelashes 
 out; in realism, some of the tears get into the nostrils. 
 In real life it is reality that moves our hearts, and Dyck- 
 man was convinced by Kedzie's realism. 
 
 She did not need to tell him of her humble and Western 
 birth. He had recognized her accent from the first, and 
 forgiven it. He knew a little of her history, because 
 Charity Coe had sent him to the studio to look her up, 
 reminding him that she had been the little dancer he 
 pulled out of Mrs. Noxon's pool. 
 
 At length Kedzie revealed the horrible fact that her 
 real name was Kedzie Thropp. He laughed aloud. He 
 was so tickled by her babyish remorse that he made her 
 say it again. He told her he loved it twice as well as the 
 stilted, stagy "Anita Adair." 
 
 "That's one of the reasons I wanted you to marry me," 
 he said, "so that I could change your horrible name." 
 
 "But I changed it myself first," Kedzie howled; and 
 now the truth came ripping. "The day after you pulled 
 me out of the pool at Newport I I married a fellow 
 named Tommie Gilfoyle." 
 
 Dyckman's smile was swept from his face; his chuckle 
 ended in a groan. Kedzie's explanation was a little dif 
 ferent from the one she gave her parents. Unconsciously 
 she tuned it to her audience. It grew a trifle more 
 literary. 
 
 378
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "What could I do? I was alone in the world, without 
 friends or money or position. He happened to be at the 
 railroad station. He saw how frightened I was, and he 
 had loved me for a long time. He begged me to take 
 mercy on him and on myself, and marry him. He offered 
 me his protection; he said I should be his wife in name 
 only until I learned to love him. And I was alone in the 
 world, without friends or money but I told you that 
 once, didn't I?" 
 
 Dyckman was thinking hard, aching hard. He mum 
 bled, "What became of him?" 
 
 "When he saw that I couldn't love him he took some 
 money I had left from my earnings and abandoned me. I 
 had a desperate struggle to get along, and then I got my 
 chance in the moving pictures, and I met you there and 
 learned what love is too late too late!" 
 
 Dyckman broke in on her lyric grief, "What became of 
 the man you married?" 
 
 "He never came near me till awhile ago. He saw my 
 pictures on the screen and thought I must be making a 
 big lot of money. He came here and tried to sneak back 
 into my good graces. He even tried to kiss me, and I 
 nearly tore his eyes out." 
 
 "Why?" Jim asked. 
 
 "Because I belong to nobody but you at least, I did 
 belong to nobody but you. But now you won't want me 
 any more. I don't blame you for hating me. I hate 
 myself. I've deceived you,; and you'll never believe me 
 again, or love me, or anythirlg." 
 
 She wept ardently, for she was appalled by the mag 
 nitude of her deception, now that it stood exposed. She 
 had no idea of the magnitude of Dyckman's chivalry. 
 She slipped to the floor and laid her head on his knee. 
 
 It was Dyckman's nature to respond at once to any 
 appeal to his sympathy or his courtesy. Automatically 
 his heart warmed toward human distress. He felt a 
 deeper interest in Kedzie than before, because she threw 
 
 379
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 herself on his mercy as never before. His hand went out 
 to her head and fell upon her hair with a kind of apostolic 
 benediction. He poured, as it were, an ointment of abso 
 lution and acceptance upon her curls. 
 
 She felt in his very fingers so much reassurance that 
 she was encouraged to unburden herself altogether of her 
 hoard of secrets. 
 
 "There's one more awful thing you'll never forgive me 
 for, Jim. I want to tell you that, and then you'll know 
 all the worst of me. My father and mother came to town 
 to-day, and and that was my mother who said she was 
 the janitor's wife." 
 
 "Why did she do that?" said Jim. 
 
 "I had been telling them how much I loved you, and 
 poor dear mother was afraid you might be scared away 
 if you knew how poor my people are." 
 
 "What kind of a ghastly snob do they take me for?" 
 Jim growled. 
 
 "They don't know you as I do," said Kedzie; "but 
 even I can't expect you to forgive everything. I've lied to 
 you about everything except about loving you, and I was 
 a long while telling you the truth about that. But now 
 you know all there is to know about me, and I wouldn't 
 blame you for despising me. Of course I don't expect 
 you to want to marry me any longer, so I'll give you back 
 your beautiful engagement ring." 
 
 With her arms across his knees, one of her delicate 
 hands began to draw from the other a gold circlet knobbed 
 with diamonds. 
 
 "Don't do that," Jim said, taking her hands in his. 
 "The engagement stands." 
 
 "But how can it, darling?" said Kedzie. "You can't 
 love me any more." 
 
 "Of course I do, more and more." 
 
 "But you can never marry me, and surely you don't 
 want" 
 
 Suddenly she ran plump into the situation her mother 
 380
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 had imagined and encouraged. She blushed at the colli 
 sion with it, and became a very allegory of innocence con 
 fronted with abhorrent evil. 
 
 "Of course I don't," said Dyckman, divining exactly 
 what she meant. "I'll find this Gilfoyle and buy him 
 up or beat him to a pulp." 
 
 Kedzie lifted her downcast eyes in gratitude for such a 
 godlike resolution. But before she could cry out in 
 praise of it she cried out in terror. 
 
 For right before her stood the long-lost Gilfoyle.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI 
 
 TIRING his long wait this evening Gilfoyle had 
 \-J grown almost uncontrollable with impatience to un 
 dertake the assault. His landlady had warned him not to 
 return to his room until he brought some cash on account. 
 He was for making the charge the moment he saw Jim 
 Dyckman enter the building, but Connery insisted on giv 
 ing Dyckman time to get forward with his courtship. 
 They had seen the maid come out of the servants' en 
 trance and hurry up the street to the vain tryst Connery 
 had arranged with her to get her out of the way. 
 
 At length, when time had passed sufficiently, they had 
 crossed to the apartment-house and told the elevator-boy 
 they were expected by the tenants above. He took them 
 up without question. They pretended to ring the bell 
 there, waited for the elevator to disappear, then walked 
 down a flight of steps and paused at the fatal sill. 
 
 Connery inserted the key stealthily into the lock, 
 turned it, opened the door in silence, and let Gilfoyle slip 
 through. He followed and closed the door without shock. 
 
 They heard Kedzie's murmurous tones and the rumble 
 of Dyckman's answer. Then Gilfoyle strode forward. 
 He saw Kedzie coiled on the floor with her elbows on 
 Dyckman's knees. He caught her eye, and her start of 
 bewilderment held him spellbound a moment. Then he 
 cried: 
 
 "There you are! I've got you! You faithless little 
 beast." 
 
 Dyckman rose to an amazing height, lifted Kedzie to 
 her feet, and answered: 
 
 382
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Who the devil are you, and what the devil do you 
 want?" 
 
 "I'm the husband of that shameless woman; that's 
 who I am," Gilfoyle shrilled, a little cowed by Dyckman's 
 stature. 
 
 "Oh, you are, are you!" said Dyckman. "Well, you're 
 the very chap I'm looking for. Come in, by all means." 
 
 Connery, seeing that the initiative was slipping from 
 Gilfoyle's flaccid hand, pushed forward with truculence. 
 
 "None of that, you big bluff! You needn't think you 
 can put anything over on me." 
 
 "And who are you?" said Dyckman. 
 
 "I'm Connery the detective, and I've got the goods on 
 you." 
 
 He advanced on Dyckman, and Gilfoyle came with him. 
 Gilfoyle took courage from the puzzled confusion of 
 Dyckman, and he poured forth invectives. 
 
 "You think because you're rich you can go around 
 breaking up homes and decoying wives away, do you? 
 Not that she isn't willing enough to be decoyed! I wasn't 
 good enough for her. She had to sell herself for money 
 and jewelry and a gay time! I ought to kill you both,, 
 and maybe I will; but first I'm going to show you up in 
 the newspapers." 
 
 "Oh, you are, are you!" was the best that Dyckman 
 could improvise. 
 
 "Yes, he is," Connery roared. " I'm a newspaper man, 
 and your name's worth head-lines in every paper in the 
 country. And I'll see that it gets there, too. It will 
 go on the wires to-night unless " 
 
 "Unless what?" 
 
 "Unless you come across with " 
 
 " Oh, that's it, is it !" said Dyckman. "Just a little old- 
 fashioned blackmail!" 
 
 He had tasted the joys of violence in his bout with 
 Cheever, and now he had recourse to it again. His long 
 arms went out swiftly toward the twain of his assailants. 
 
 383
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 His big hands cupped their heads as if they were melons, 
 and he knocked their skulls together smartly. 
 
 He might have battered them to death, but he heard 
 Kedzie's little cry of horror, and forbore. He flung the 
 heads from him, and the bodies followed limply. Con- 
 nery went to the floor, and Gilfoyle sprawled across a 
 chair. They were almost unconscious, their brains re 
 duced to swirling nebulae. 
 
 Kedzie thought for a moment that she and ner love- 
 affairs had brought about a double murder. She saw her 
 self becoming one of those little women who appear with 
 an almost periodic regularity in the annals of crime, and 
 whose red smiles drag now this, now that great family's 
 name into the mud and vomit of public nausea. 
 
 She would lose Jim Dyckman, after all, and ruin him in 
 the losing. She clung to his arm to check him in his work 
 of devastation. He, too, stood wondering at the amazing 
 deed of his rebellious hands, and wondering what the result 
 would be. 
 
 He and Kedzie rejoiced at seeing the victims move. 
 Connery began to squirm on the floor and get to his 
 wabbly knees, and Gilfoyle writhed back to consciousness 
 with wits a-flutter. 
 
 There was a silence of mutual attention for a while. 
 Connery was growling from all-fours like a surly dog: 
 
 "I'll get you for this you'll see! You'll be sorry for 
 this." 
 
 This restored Dyckman's temper to its throne. He 
 seized Connery by the scruff of his coat, jerked him to his 
 feet, and snarled at him: 
 
 "Haven't you had enough, you little mucker? You 
 threaten me or Miss Adair again and I'll not leave enough 
 of you to to " 
 
 He was not apt at phrases, but Connery felt metaphors 
 enough in the size of the fist before his nose. He put up 
 his hands, palms forward, in the ancient gesture of sur 
 render. 
 
 384
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Then Gilfoyle turned cry-baby and began to sob. 
 
 "You call her Miss Adair! But she's my wife. Mrs. 
 Gilfoyle is what she is, and you've taken her away from 
 me. ,This is a rotten country, and you rotten millionaires 
 can do nearly anything you want to but not quite. 
 You'll find that out. There are still a few courts and a few 
 newspapers you can't muzzle." 
 
 Dyckman advanced against him, but Gilfoyle merely 
 clung to 1<he back of his chair, and his.non-resistance was his 
 best shelter. It was impossible for Dyckman to strike 
 him. Secure in his helplessness, he took full advantage 
 of the tyranny of impotence. He rose to his feet and went 
 on with his lachrymose philippic. 
 
 "You're going to pay for what you've done, and pay 
 high!" 
 
 The one thing that restrained Dyckman from offering 
 to buy him out was that he demanded purchase. Like 
 most rich people, Dyckman was the everlasting target of 
 prayers and threats. He could be generous to an appeal, 
 but a demand locked his heart. 
 
 He answered Gilfoyle's menace, bluntly, "I'll pay 
 you when hell freezes over, and not a cent before." 
 
 "Well, then, you stand from under," Gilfoyle squealed. 
 "There's a law in this State against home- wreckers like 
 you, and I can send you to the penitentiary for breaking 
 it." 
 
 Dyckman's rage blackened again; he caught Gilfoyle 
 by the shoulder and roared: "You foul-mouthed, filthy- 
 minded little sneak! You say a word against your wife 
 and I'll throw you out of the window. She's too decent 
 for you to understand. You get down on your knees and 
 ask her pardon." 
 
 He forced Gilfoyle to his knees, but he could not make 
 him pray. And Kedzie fell back from him. She was 
 afraid to pose as a saint worthy of genuflection. Connery 
 re-entered the conflict with a sneer: 
 
 "Aw, tell it to the judge, Dyckman! Tell it to the 
 25 385
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 judge! See how good it listens to him. We'll tell him 
 how we found you here ; and you tell him you were holding 
 a prayer-meeting. You didn't want to be disturbed, so 
 you didn't have even a servant around all alone together 
 at this hour." 
 
 Then a new, strange voice spoke in. 
 
 "Who said they were alone?" 
 
 The four turned to see Mrs. Thropp filling the hall door 
 way, and Adna's head back of her shoulder. It was really 
 a little too melodramatic. The village lassie goes to the 
 great city; her father and mother arrive in all their bucolic 
 innocence just in time to save her from destruction. 
 
 Connery, whose climax she had spoiled, though she had 
 probably saved his bones, gasped, "Who the hell are you?" 
 
 "I'm this child's mother; that's who I am. And 
 that's her father. And what's more, we've been here all 
 evening, and you'd better look out how you swear at me 
 or I'll sick Mr. Dyckman on you." 
 
 If there are gallery gods in heaven, 'and angels with a 
 melodramatic taste (as there must be, for how else could 
 we have acquired it?), they must have shaken the cloudy 
 rafters with applause. Only one touch was needed to 
 perfect the scene, and that was for the First and Second 
 Villains to slink off, cursing and muttering, "Foiled 
 again !' ' 
 
 But these villains were not professionals, and they had 
 not been rehearsed. They were like childish actors in a 
 juvenile production at five pins per admission. An un 
 expected line threw them into complete disorder. 
 
 Connery turned to Gilfoyle. "Did you ever lamp this 
 old lady before?" 
 
 Gilfoyle answered, stoutly enough, "I never laid eyes 
 on her." 
 
 Connery was about to order Mrs. Thropp out of the 
 room as an impostor, but she would not be denied her 
 retort. 
 
 "0' course he never laid eyes on me. If he had have 
 
 386
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 he'd never tried to pull the wool over that innocent baby's 
 eyes; and if I'd ever laid eyes on him I'd have run him 
 out of the country before I'd ever have let my child 
 look at him a second time." 
 
 Connery made one last struggle: "What proof have 
 you got that you're her mother?" 
 
 "Ask my husband here." 
 
 "What good is his word in such a matter?" 
 
 Connery did not mean this as in any sense a reflection 
 on Mrs. Thropp's marital integrity, but she took it so. 
 Now, in Nimrim the question of fidelity is not dealt with 
 lightly, at least in repartee. Mrs. Thropp emitted a roar 
 of scandalized virtue and would have' attacked the young 
 men with her fists if her husband, who should have at 
 tacked them in her stead, had not clung to her, murmuring: 
 
 "Now, momma, don't get excited. You young fellers 
 better vamoose quick. I can't holt her very long." 
 
 So they vamosed and were much obliged for the op 
 portunity, leaving Kedzie to fling her arms about her 
 mother with spontaneous filial affection, and to present 
 Dyckman to her with genuine pride. 
 
 Dyckman had been almost as frightened as Kedzie. 
 He had been more afraid of his own temper than of his 
 assailants, but afraid enough of their shadowy powers. 
 Mrs. Thropp would have had to be far less comely than 
 she was to be unwelcome. She had the ultimate charm 
 of perfect timeliness. He greeted her with that deference 
 he paid to all women, and she adored him at once, in 
 dependently of his fortune. 
 
 Adna said that he had always been an admirer of the 
 old Dyckman and was glad to meet his boy, being as he 
 was a railroad man himself, in a small way. He rather 
 gave the impression that he was at least a third vice- 
 president, but very modest about it. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp gleaned from the first words that Kedzie 
 had gone contrary to her advice and had told Dyckman 
 the truth. She took the credit calmly 
 
 387
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I come on East to clear things up, and I advised my 
 daughter to tell you just the way things were as I always 
 say to my children-, use the truth and shame the devil." 
 
 Kedzie was too busy to notice the outrage. She was 
 thanking Heaven for her impulse to reveal the facts, 
 realizing how appalling it would have been if Gilfoyle 
 had been the first to inform Dyckman. 
 
 They were all having a joyous family party when it 
 suddenly came over them that Gilfoyle had once more ap 
 peared and resubmerged. But Dyckman said: "I'll find 
 him for you, and I'll buy him. He'll be cheap at any 
 price." 
 
 He bade good night early and went to his own home, 
 carrying a backload of trouble. He was plainly in for it. 
 Whatever happened, he was the scapegoat-elect.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVII 
 
 THE villain in melodrama is as likely as not to be as 
 decent a fellow as any. When he slinks from the 
 stage in his final hissed exit he goes to his dressing-room, 
 scours off his grease-paint, and probably returns to his de 
 voted family or seats himself before a bowl of milk-and- 
 crackers in his club. 
 
 Gilfoyle was as decent a fellow as ever villain was. 
 Circumstances and not himself cast him in an evil r61e, 
 and as actors know, once so established, it is almost im 
 possible to return to heroic parts. Gilfoyle could not even 
 remove his grease-paint. He could not go back to his 
 dressing-room, for his landlady had told him that the only 
 key to her front door was cash. He had gone out to bring 
 home a millionaire, and he had achieved nothing but a 
 headache and a moral cataclysm. 
 
 He hardly knew how he escaped from the apartment- 
 house. The dark cool of the street brought him into the 
 night of things. It came upon him like a black fog what 
 he had tried to do. The bitter disgrace of a man who has 
 been whipped in a fight was his, but other disgraces were 
 heaped upon it. For the first time he saw himself as 
 Kedzie saw him. 
 
 He had neglected his wife till she grew famous in spite 
 of him. He had gone back to her to share her bounty. 
 When she repulsed him he had entered into a conspiracy 
 to spy on her. He had waited impatiently for a rich man 
 to compromise her, so that he could surprise them in guilt 
 and extort money from them. 
 
 He had not warned the girl of her danger from the other 
 
 389
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 man or from himself. He had not pleaded with her to be 
 good, had not asked her to come back to honeymoon again 
 in poverty with him; he had preferred to live on borrowed 
 money and on unpaid board while he fooled with verses 
 and refused the manual tasks that waited everywhere 
 about the busy city. He might have cleaned the streets 
 or earned a decent living handling garbage in the city 
 scows. But he had preferred to speculate in blackmail 
 and play the badger-game with his wife as an unwitting 
 accomplice. He had hated millionaires, and counted 
 them all criminals deserving spoliation, but he felt that 
 he had sunk lower than the millionaires. 
 
 The remembrance of Kedzie haunted him. She had 
 been supremely beautiful to-night, frightened into greater 
 beauty than ever. She was afraid of him who should have 
 been her refuge, and she hid for protection behind the man 
 who should have seemed her enemy. 
 
 He recalled her as she was when he first loved her, the 
 pretty little candy-store clerk, the lissome, living marble in 
 her Greek tunic, the quaint, sweet girl who came to him 
 in the Grand Central Terminal, lugging her suit-case, the 
 shy thing at the License Bureau, the ineffably exquisite 
 bride he had made his wife. He saw her at the gas-stove 
 and loved her very petulance and the pretty way she 
 banged the oven door and pouted at fate. 
 
 The lyrics he had written to her sang through his 
 aching head. He was wrung to anguish between the 
 lover and the poet he had meant to be, and the spurned 
 and hated cur he had become. He stumbled along the 
 street at Connery's side, whispering to himself, while 
 his earliest verses to Kedzie ran in and out through his 
 thoughts like a catchy tune: 
 
 Pretty maid, pretty maid, may I call you Anita? 
 Your last name is sweet, but your first name is sweeter. 
 
 He recalled the sonnets he had begun which were to 
 make them both immortal. He regretted the spitefulness 
 
 390
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 that had led him to write in another name than hers 
 because she had refused to support him. He had been a 
 viler beast than the cutpurse poet of old France, without 
 the lilies of verse that bloom pure white above the dunghill 
 of Villon's life. 
 
 Gilfoyle's soul went down into a hell of regret and 
 wriggled in the flames of self-condemnation. He grew 
 maudlin with repentance and clung to his friend Connery 
 with odious garrulity. Connery was disgusted with him, 
 but he was afraid to leave him because he kept sighing: 
 
 " I guess the river's the only place for me now." 
 
 At length Connery steered him into a saloon for medicine 
 and bought him a stiff bracer of whisky and vermouth. 
 But it only threw Gilfoyle into deeper befuddlement. 
 He was like Charles Lamb, in that a thimbleful of alcohol 
 affected him as much as a tumbler another. He wanted 
 to tell his troubles to the barkeeper, and Connery had to 
 drag him away. 
 
 In the hope that a walk in the air might help to steady 
 him, Connery set out toward his own boarding-house. 
 They started across Columbus Avenue under the pillars 
 of the Elevated tracks. 
 
 Habituated to the traffic customs, the New-Yorker 
 crossing a street looks to the left for traffic till he gets half 
 way across, then looks to the right for traffic bound in the 
 opposite direction. Connery led Gilfoyle to the middle of 
 the avenue, paused for a south-bound street-car to go 
 banging by them, darted back of it and looked to the right 
 for a north-bound car or motor. But a taxicab trying to 
 pass the south-bound car was shooting south along the 
 north-bound tracks. 
 
 Connery saw it barely in time to jump back. He 
 yanked Gilfoyle's arm, but Gilfoyle had plunged forward. 
 He might have escaped if Connery had let him go. But 
 the cab struck him, hurled him in air against an iron 
 pillar, caught him on the rebound and ran him down. 
 Kedzie Thropp was a widow. 
 
 391
 
 CHAPTER XXXVIII 
 
 DEATHS from the wheeled torpedoes that shoot along 
 the city streets are too monotonously numerous to 
 make a stir in the newspapers unless the victims have 
 some other claim on the public attention. 
 
 Gilfoyle had been writing advertisements of other 
 people's wares, but nobody was going to pay for the 
 advertisement of him. The things that he might have 
 become were even more obscure than the things he was. 
 The pity of his taking-off would have had no more record 
 than a few lines of small type, but for one further accident. 
 
 The taxicab-driver whose reckless haste had sent him 
 down the wrong side of the street had been spurred on by 
 the reckless haste of his passenger. The pretty Mrs. 
 Twyford had been for years encouraging the reporters to 
 emphasize her social altitude, and had seen that they 
 obtained her photographs at frequent intervals. But on 
 this night she had gone up-town upon one of the few 
 affairs for which she did not wish publicity. She had 
 learned by telephone that her husband had returned to 
 New York unexpectedly, and she was intensely impatient 
 to be at home when he got there. 
 
 When her scudding taxicab solved all of Gilfoyle's 
 earthly problems in one fierce erasure she made such ef 
 forts to escape from the instantly gathered crowd that 
 she attracted the attention of the policeman who happened 
 to be at the next corner. He proceeded to take the name 
 and addresses of witnesses and principals, and he detained 
 her as an important accessory. 
 
 Connery was one of the news-men who had been in- 
 
 392
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 debted to Mrs. Twyford for many a half -column of gossip, 
 and he recognized her at once. He was a -reporter, first, 
 last, and all the time, and he was very much in need of 
 something to sell. 
 
 He was greatly shattered by the annihilation of his 
 friend, but his instinctive journalism led him to control 
 himself long enough to call Mrs. Twyford by name and 
 assure the policeman that she was a lady of high degree 
 who should not be bothered 
 
 Neither the policeman nor Mrs. Twyford thanked him. 
 They were equally rude to him and to each other. Con- 
 nery thought the incident might interest the night city 
 editor of his paper, and so he telephoned a good story in 
 to the office as soon as he had released himself from the 
 inquisition and had seen an ambulance carry poor Gilfoyle 
 away. 
 
 Mrs. Twyford reached home too late, and in such a 
 state of nerves that she made the most unconvincing 
 replies to the cross-examination that ensued. When she 
 saw her name in the paper the next morning her friends 
 also began to make inquiries and eventually to deny that 
 they were her friends or had ever been. 
 
 It was her name in the heavy type that caught the 
 heavy eyes of Jim Dyckman at breakfast the next morning. 
 It was thus that he came upon the fate of Thomas Gilfoyle, 
 whose death had been the cause of all this pother. 
 
 Before he could telephone Anita or Kedzie, as he 
 mentally corrected himself he was informed that a Mr. 
 Connery was at the door, asking for him. He nodded and 
 went into the library, carrying the newspaper with him. 
 
 Connery grinned sadly and mumbled: "I see you've 
 seen it. I thought you'd like to know about it." 
 
 "I should," said Dyckman. " Sit down." 
 
 Connery sat down and told of the accident and what 
 led up to it. He spoke in a lowered voice and kept his eye 
 on the door. When he had finished his story he said, 
 "Now, of course this all comes out very convenient for 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 you, but I suppose you see how easy it would be for me to 
 tell what I know, and that mightn't be so convenient for 
 you." 
 
 "Are you beginning your blackmail again so early in 
 the morning?" 
 
 "Cut out that kind of talk or there's nothing doing," 
 said Connery. "I can make a lot of trouble for you, and I 
 can hush up a lot. Unless I speak I don't suppose any 
 body else is going to peep about Miss Adair being Mrs, 
 Gilfoyle, and about Mr. Dyckman being interested in his 
 wife. If I do speak it would take a lot of explaining." 
 
 " I am not afraid of explaining to the whole world that 
 Miss Adair is a friend of mine and that her father and 
 mother were present when I called." 
 
 Connery met this with a smile. "But how often were 
 they present when you called?" 
 
 Dyckman grew belligerent again: " Do you want me to 
 finish what I began on you last night?" 
 
 "I'm in no hurry, thank you. You can outclass me in 
 the ring, but it wouldn't help you much to beat me up, 
 would it ? or Miss Adair, either. She's got some rights, 
 hasn't she?" 
 
 "Has she any that you are capable of respecting?" 
 
 "Sure she has. I don't want to cause the little lady any 
 inconvenience. She and Tommie Gilfoyle didn't belong 
 together, anyway. She was through with him long ago, 
 and the only thing that saved his face was the fact that 
 he's dead poor fellow! 
 
 " But you see I've got to appear as a witness in the trial 
 of the taxicab-driver, who'll be held for manslaughter or 
 something. If I say that Gilfoyle and I had just come 
 from a battle with you and that he got the wits knocked 
 out of him because he accused you of making a mistress 
 out of his wife " 
 
 "Be careful!" 
 
 "The same to you, Mr. Dyckman." 
 
 Dyckman felt himself nettled. Kedzie's silence about 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 the existence of a husband had enmeshed him. He would 
 not attempt to justify himself. It would do no good to 
 thresh about. The big gladiator sat still waiting for the 
 retiarius to finish him. But Connery's voice grew merci 
 ful. It was a luxury beyond price to extend an alms to 
 this plutocrat. 
 
 "What I'm getting at, Mr. Dyckman," he resumed, "is 
 this: Tommie owed some money to his landlady. He 
 owed me some money that I could use. He's got a mother 
 and father up-State. He told me he'd never told them 
 about his marriage. They'll want him back, I suppose. 
 From what he's told me, it would be a real hardship for 
 them to pay the funeral expenses. You could pay all 
 that, and you could even say that he had a little money in 
 the bank and send that along with him, and never know 
 the difference. But they would." 
 
 "I see," said Dyckman, very solemnly. 
 
 "You called me some rough names, Mr. Dyckman, and 
 I guess I earned 'em. Looking things over the morning 
 after, I'm not so stuck on myself as I was, but you stack 
 up pretty well. I like a man who can use his hands in an 
 argument. My name is Connery, you know. What you 
 did to me was a plenty, but it looks better to me now than 
 it felt last night. 
 
 " You know a reporter just gets naturally hungry to see 
 a man face a scandal in a manly way. If you had shown 
 a yellow streak and tried to buy your way out I would 
 have taken your money and thought I was doing a public 
 service in getting it away from a quitter. But when you 
 cracked my bean against poor Gilfoyle's you made me see 
 a lot of things besides stars. 
 
 "There's nothing to be gained by keeping up this war. 
 I want to put it all out of sight for your sake and for 
 Gilfoyle's mother's sake, and for the sake of that pretty 
 little Adair lady. I don't know what she's been or done, 
 but she's pretty and she's got a nice, spunky mother. 
 
 "I'm a good newspaper man, Mr. Dyckman, and that 
 
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 means I've kept quiet about even better stories than I've 
 sprung. If I had a lot of money now I'd add this story 
 to the list and treat Gilfoyle's folks right without giving 
 you a look-in. But being dead-broke, I thought maybe 
 you'd like to see things done in a decent manner. It's 
 going to be hard enough for that old couple up-State to 
 get Tommie back, as they've got to, without taking any 
 excess heartbreak up in the baggage-car. Do you follow 
 me?" 
 
 "I do," said Dyckman; and now he asked the "How 
 much?" that he had refused to speak the night before. 
 
 Connery did a little figuring with a pencil, and Dyckman 
 thought that some life-insurance in the mother's name 
 would be a pleasant thing to add. Then he doubled the 
 total, wrote a check for it, and said: 
 
 "There'll probably be something left over. I wish 
 you'd keep it as your attorney-fee, Mr. Connery." 
 
 They shook hands as they parted.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX 
 
 DYCKMAN telephoned to Kedzie and asked if he 
 could see her. She said that he could, and dressed 
 furiously while he made the distance to her apartment. 
 
 She gleaned from his look and from the way he took her 
 two hands in his that he had serious news to bring her. 
 She had not been awake long enough to read the papers, 
 and this was her first death. She cried helplessly when 
 she learned that her husband was gone away with all 
 her bitterness for his farewell. She remembered the best 
 of him, and he came back to her for a while as the poet 
 who had made her his muse the only one she could tele 
 graph to when she returned to New York alone, her first 
 and only husband. 
 
 She was afraid that she belittled herself in Dyckman's 
 eyes when she let slip the remorseful wail, "I wish I had 
 been kinder to the poor boy!" 
 
 But she did not belittle herself in any such tendernesses 
 of regret. She endeared herself by her grief, her self- 
 reproach, her childish humility before the power of death. 
 Her tears were beautiful in Jim's sight. But it is the bless 
 ing and the shame of tears that they cure the grief that 
 causes them. At first they bleed and burn; then they 
 flow soft and cool. They cleanse and brighten the eyes 
 and even wash away the cinders from the funeral smoke. 
 
 Dyckman's heart was drawn out of him toward Kedzie 
 and his arms held her shaken body devotedly. But at 
 length she ceased to weep, and a last long sob became 
 dangerously like a sigh of relief. She smiled through the 
 rain and apologized for weeping, when she should have 
 
 397
 
 apologized for stopping weeping. Then Dyckman's love 
 of her seemed to withdraw backward into his heart. 
 And his arms suddenly wearied of clasping her. 
 
 When she had seemed hardly to know that he was there 
 he felt necessary and justified. When she took comfort 
 in his arms and held them about her he felt ashamed, 
 revolted, profane. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp had wept a little in sympathy with 
 Kedzie, and Adna hacl looked amiably disconsolate; but 
 by and by Mrs. Thropp was murmuring : 
 
 "After all, perhaps it was for the best. The Lord's will 
 be done!" 
 
 D3^ckman shrank as if a blasphemy had been shouted. 
 In a hideously short time Mrs. Thropp was saying, briskly: 
 
 "Of course, honey, you've got no idea of puttin' on 
 black for him." 
 
 "If I believed in mourning, I would," Kedzie answered 
 without delay, "but the true mourning is in the heart." 
 
 Dyckman felt an almost uncontrollable desire to get 
 away before he said something that might be true. He 
 began to wonder what, after all, poor Gilfoyle had ex 
 perienced from this hard-hearted little beauty. He saw 
 that he was almost forgotten already. He thought, 
 "How fast they go, the dead!" That same Villon had 
 said it centuries before : ' ' Les marts vont vites. ' ' 
 
 The Thropps settled down to a comfortable discussion 
 of future plans. One ledger had been finished. They 
 would open a new one. Jim saw that Gilfoyle' s departure 
 had been accepted as a Heaven-sent solution of Kedzie's 
 problems. 
 
 Abruptly it came to Dyckman that the solution of their 
 problem was the beginning of a whole volume of new prob 
 lems for him. He recalled that while he had become 
 Kedzie's fiance in ignorance of his predecessor, he had 
 rashly promised to buy off Gilfoyle as soon as he learned 
 of him. But death had come in like a perfect waiter and 
 subtly removed from the banquet-table the thing that 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 offended. Nothing had happened, however, to release 
 Dyckman from his engagement. Gilfoyle's death ought 
 not to have made a more important difference than his life 
 would have made, and yet it made all the difference in the 
 world to Dyckman's feelings. 
 
 He could not say this, however. He could not ask to 
 be excused from his compact. His heart and his brain 
 cried out that they did not want this merry little widow 
 for their wife, but his lips could not frame the words. 
 During the long silences and the evasive chatter that 
 alternated he felt one idea in the air: "Why doesn't 
 Mr. Dyckman offer to go on with the marriage?" Yet he 
 could not make the offer. Nor could he make the counter 
 claim for a dissolving of the betrothal. 
 
 He studied the Thropp trio and pictured the ridicule 
 and the hostility they would arouse among his family and 
 friends not because they were poor and simple and lowly, 
 but because they were not honest and sweet and meek. 
 The Dyckmans had poor relations and friends in poverty 
 and old peasant-folk whom they loved and admired and 
 were proud to know. But Dyckman felt that the elder 
 Thropps deserved to be rebuffed with snobbery because 
 of their own snobbery. Nevertheless, he was absolutely 
 incapable of administering discipline. 
 
 At last Mrs. Thropp grew restive, fearsome that the mar 
 riage might not take place, and desperately fearful that 
 she might be cheated out of her visit in the spare room 
 at the home of the great Mrs. Dyckman. She said, grimly : 
 
 "Well, we might as well understand one another, 
 Mr. Dyckman. You asked my daughter to marry you, 
 didn't you?" 
 
 "Yes, Mrs. Thropp." 
 
 "Do you see anything in what's happened to prevent 
 your getting married?" 
 
 "No, Mrs. Thropp." 
 
 "Then I don't see much use wastin' time, do you? 
 Life's too uncertain to go postponin' happiness when it's 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 right within your reach. Kedzie's father and I ought to 
 be gettin' back home, and I'd feel a heap more comfortable 
 if I could know my poor little chick was safe in the care- 
 of a good man." 
 
 The possibility of getting Mr. and Mrs. Thropp out of 
 town soon was the one bright thought in Dyckman's 
 mind. He felt compelled to say: 
 
 "Then let us have the ceremony, by all means. We 
 shall have to wait awhile, I suppose, for decency's sake." 
 
 "Decency!" said Mrs. Thropp, managerially. "My 
 Kedzie hadn't lived with the man for a long while. No 
 body but us knows that she ever did live with him. He'd 
 abandoned her, and when he came back it was only to 
 try to get money out of her. I can't see that she has any 
 call to worry about decency's sake. He's done her harm 
 enough. She can't do him any good by keepin' you 
 waitin'." 
 
 "Just as you think best, Mrs. Thropp," said Dyckman. 
 He began to smile in spite of himself. He was thinking 
 how many mothers and daughters had tried to get him 
 to the altar, not because they loved him, but because they 
 loved his father's money and fame. Jim had dodged them 
 all and made a kind of sport of it. And now he was 
 cornered and captured by this old barbarian with her 
 movie-beauty daughter who was a widow and wouldn't 
 wear weeds. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp saw Dyckman's smile, but did not dare 
 to ask its origin. She asked, instead: 
 
 "Would you be having a church wedding, do you 
 think?" 
 
 "Indeed not," said Dyckman, with such incision that 
 Mrs. Thropp felt it best not to risk a debate. 
 
 "Just a quiet wedding, then?" 
 
 "As quiet as possible, if you don't mind." 
 
 Kedzie sat speechless through all this. She wished that 
 Jim would show more ardor for her, but she felt that he 
 was doing fairly well not to knock her parents' heads 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 together the way he had her husband's and his friend's. 
 She was as eager as Jim to get rid of the elder Thropps, 
 but she wanted to make sure of the wedding, and her 
 mother was evidently to be trusted to bring it about. 
 At length Jim spoke in the tone of the condemned man 
 who says, "Well, let's hurry up and get the execution off 
 our minds" : 
 
 " I'll go and see a lawyer and make inquiries about how 
 the marriage can be done." 
 
 He started to say to Kedzie, "You ought to know." 
 
 She started to tell him about the Marriage License 
 Bureau in the Municipal Building. Both recaptured 
 silence tactfully. 
 
 He kissed Kedzie, and he had a narrow escape from 
 being kissed by Mrs. Thropp.
 
 THE THIRD BOOK 
 
 MRS. JIM DYCKMAN IS NOT 
 SATISFIED
 
 CHAPTER I . 
 
 IN the history of nations sometimes a paragraph serves 
 for a certain decade, while a volume is not enough for a 
 certain day. It is so with the history of persons. 
 
 In the thirty-six hours after he received Charity Coe's 
 invitation to call Jim Dyckman passed from being Char 
 ity's champion against her own husband to being Kedzie's 
 champion against hers. Charity rewarded his chivalrous 
 pommeling of Cheever by asking him never to come near 
 her again. Kedzie rewarded his punishment of Gilfoyle 
 by arranging that he should never leave her again. 
 
 It was Charity that he longed for, and Kedzie that he 
 engaged to marry. 
 
 In that period Peter Cheever had traveled a very short 
 distance in a journey he had postponed too long. Cheever 
 had been hardly conscious when they smuggled him at 
 midnight from his club to his own home. He had slept ill 
 and achily. He was ashamed to face the servants, and 
 he wanted to murder his valet for being aware of the 
 master's defeat. 
 
 He did not know how ashamed the household retainers 
 were of him and of themselves. The valet and butler had 
 earned good sums on occasions by taking tips from 
 Cheever on prize-fighters and jockeys. But they felt be 
 trayed now, and as disconsolate as the bottle-holders and 
 towel-flappers of a defeated pugilist. 
 
 They did not know who had whipped their master till 
 the word came from the Dyckman household that their 
 master had come home glorious from whipping the 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 stuffing out of somebody. It was easy to put one and one 
 together and make two. 
 
 One of Cheever's worst embarrassments was the matter 
 of Zada. His battered head suffered tortures before it 
 contrived a proper lie for her. Then he called Zada up 
 from his house and explained that as he was leaving his 
 club to fly to her, his car had skidded into another, with 
 the result that he had been knocked senseless and cut 
 up with flying glass; otherwise he was in perfect shape. 
 Unfortunately, he had been recognized and taken to his 
 official home instead of to the residence of his heart. 
 
 Zada was all for dashing to him at once; but he per 
 suaded her that that would be quite impossible. He was 
 in no real danger in his own house, and he would come 
 back to his heart's one real first, last, only, and onliest 
 darling love just as soon as he could. 
 
 She subsided in wails of terror and loneliness. They 
 touched his heart so that he determined to end his effort 
 at amphibian existence, give up his legal establishment 
 and legalize the illegal. 
 
 He wrote a note to Charity with much difficulty, since 
 his knuckles were sore and his pride was black and blue. 
 His spoken language was of the same tints. His written 
 language was polite and formal. 
 
 It was a silly, tragic situation that led a husband to 
 write his wife a letter requesting an interview. Charity 
 sent back a scrawl " Yes, in fifteen minutes.'" 
 
 Cheever spent a bad quarter of an hour dressing him 
 self. His face was too raw to endure a razor, and the sur 
 geon had put little cross-patches of adhesive tape on one 
 of his cheek-bones and at the edge of his mouth, where his 
 lip had split as the tooth behind it went overboard. 
 
 He yowled as he slipped his arms into a long bath 
 robe, and he struck at the valet when the wretch suggested 
 a little powder for one eye. 
 
 Charity had seen Cheever brought in at midnight and 
 had looked to it that he had every care. But now she 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 came into his room with a maidenly timidity. He did 
 not know that she had rebuked Jim Dyckman with un 
 characteristic wrath for the attack. She did not tell 
 Cheever this, even though his first words to her demanded 
 some such defense. 
 
 In the quarrels of lovers, or of those who have exchanged 
 loves, it makes little difference what the accusation is all 
 about: the thing that hurts is the fact of accusation. 
 
 Charity was so shamed at being stormed at by her 
 husband that it was a mere detail that he stormed at her 
 with a charge that she had goaded Jim Dyckman on to 
 attack him. 
 
 Cheever had a favor to ask; so he put the charge more 
 mildly now than he had in his first bewildered rage. He 
 accepted Charity's silence as pleading guilty. So he went 
 on: 
 
 "The fact that you chose Dyckman for your authorized 
 thug and bravo proves what I have thought for some time, 
 that you love him and he loves you. Now I have no 
 desire to come between two such turtle-doves, especially 
 when one of them is one of those German flying-machine 
 Taubes and goes around dropping dynamite-bombs on 
 me through club roofs. 
 
 "I'm not afraid of your little friend, and as soon as I 
 get well I'll get him; but I want it to be purely an exercise 
 in the fistic art, and not a public fluttering of family linen. 
 So since you want Jim Dyckman, take him, by all means, 
 and let me bow myself out of the trio. 
 
 "I'll give you a nice, quiet little divorce, and do the 
 fair thing in the alimony line, and then after a proper in 
 terval you and little Jimmie can toddle over to the parson 
 and then toddle off to hell-and-gone, for all I care. How 
 does that strike you, my dear?" 
 
 Charity pondered, and then she said, "And where do 
 you toddle off to?" 
 
 "Does that interest you?" 
 
 "Anything that concerns your welfare interests me." 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I see. Well, don't worry about me." 
 
 "There's no hurry, of course?" 
 
 1 ' Not on my part, ' ' said Cheever. "But Dyckman must 
 be growing impatient, since he tries to murder me to save 
 the lawyer's fees." 
 
 "Well, if you're in no hurry, Peter, I'm not. I'll think 
 it over for a few months. It's bad weather for divorces 
 now, anyway." 
 
 Cheever's heart churned in his breast. He knew that 
 Zada could not afford to wait. He should have married 
 her long ago, and there was no time to spare now. Char 
 ity's indifference frightened him. He did not dream that 
 through the dictagraph Charity had shared with him 
 Zada's annunciation of her approaching motherhood. 
 
 He turned and twisted in flesh and spirit, trying to 
 persuade Charity to proceed immediately for a divorce, 
 but in vain. 
 
 Finally she ceased to laugh at him and demanded, 
 sternly, "Why don't you tell me the truth for once?" 
 
 He stared at her, and after a crisis of hesitation broke 
 and informed her of what she already knew. Now that 
 he was at her feet, Charity felt only pity for him, and 
 even for Zada. She was sorrier for them than for herself. 
 
 So she said: "All right, old man; let's divorce us. 
 Will you or shall I?" 
 
 "You'd better, of course; but you must not mention 
 poor Zada." 
 
 "Oh, of course not!" 
 
 A brief and friendly discussion of ways and means fol 
 lowed, and then Charity turned to go, saying: 
 
 "Well, I'll let you know when you're free. Are there 
 any other little chores I can do for you?" 
 
 " No, thanks. You're one damned good sport, and I'm 
 infernally sorry I " 
 
 "Let's not begin on sorries. Good night!" 
 
 And such was unmarriage a la mode.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 AMD now having felt sorry for everybody else, Charity 
 began to feel pleasantly sorry for Jim Dyckman. Her 
 own rebuke of him for assaulting Cheever had absolved 
 him. In the retrospect, the attack took on a knightli- 
 ness of devotion. She recalled his lonely dogging of her 
 footsteps. If he had played the dog, after all, she loved 
 dogs. What was so faithful, trustworthy, and lovable as 
 a dog? 
 
 But how was Charity to get word to Jim of her new 
 heart? She could not whistle him back. She could 
 hardly go to him and apologize for having been a good 
 wife to a bad husband. And a married lady simply must 
 not say to a bachelor: "Pardon me a moment, while I 
 divorce my present consort. I'd like to wear your name 
 for a change." 
 
 Charity might have been capable even of such a derring- 
 do if she had known that Jim Dyckman's bachelorhood 
 was threatened with immediate extinction by the Thropps. 
 But she could not know. For, however Jim's soul may 
 have been mumbling, "Help, help!" he made no audible 
 sound. Unwilling brides may shriek for rescue, but un 
 willing bridegrooms must not complain. 
 
 By a coincidence that was not strange Charity selected 
 for her lawyer Travers McNiven, the very man that Jim 
 Dyckman selected. All three had been friends since 
 childhood. McNiven had been taken into the famous 
 partnership of Hamnett, Dawsey, Coggeshall, Thurlow & 
 McNiven. 
 
 When Jim Dyckman telephoned him for an appoint- 
 
 409
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 ment he was told to make it the next morning, as another 
 client had pre-empted the afternoon. Jim was glad 
 enough of an excuse to postpone his marriage by a day, 
 never dreaming that Charity was the client who had pre 
 empted McNiven. 
 
 McNiven wondered at the synchrony, but naturally 
 mentioned neither client to the other. His office was far 
 down-town and far up in the air. Its windows gave an 
 amplitudinous vision of the Harbor which Mr. Ernest 
 Poole has made his own, but which was now a vestibule 
 to the hell of the European war. All the adjoining land 
 was choked far backward with a vast blockade of explosive 
 freight-trains waiting to be unloaded into the unheard-of 
 multitude of munition-ships waiting to run the gantlet 
 of the German submarines. 
 
 Charity had run that gantlet and was ready to run it 
 again on another errand of mercy, but first she must make 
 sure that Zada's baby should not enter the world before its 
 mother entered wedlock. 
 
 After McNiven had proffered her a chair and she had 
 exclaimed upon the grandeur of the harborscape, she 
 began : 
 
 "Sandy, I've come to see you about " 
 
 ' ' One moment ! ' ' McNiven broke in. " Before you speak 
 I must as an honest lawyer warn you against the step 
 you contemplate." 
 
 "But you don't know what it is yet." 
 
 "I don't have to. I know that people come to lawyers 
 only to get out of scrapes or to get into scrapes dishonestly 
 or unwisely. Furthermore, every step that any human 
 being contemplates is a dangerous one and bound to lead 
 to trouble." 
 
 "Oh, hush!" said Charity. "Am I supposed to pay 
 you for that sort of advice?" 
 
 "Being a friend, and a woman, and very rich, you will 
 doubtless never pay me at all. But let me warn you, 
 Charity, that there is nothing in life more dangerous than 
 
 410
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 taking a step in any possible direction unless it is staying 
 where you are." 
 
 "Oh, dear," sighed Charity, "you're worse than dear 
 Doctor Mosely." 
 
 "Ah, you've been to the dear old doctor! And he's 
 refused to help you. When the Church denies a woman 
 her way she conies to the devil. You interest me. It's 
 a divorce, then?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 McNiven remembered Jim Dyckman's ancient squire 
 dom to Charity and his recent telephony and he said to 
 himself, "Aha!" But he said to Charity, "Go on." 
 
 "Sandy, my husband and I have agreed to disagree." 
 
 "Then for Heaven's sake don't tell me about it!" 
 
 "But I've got to." 
 
 "But you mustn't! Say, rather, I have decided to 
 divorce my husband." 
 
 "All right. Consider my first break unmade. Peter 
 has asked me I mean, Peter has said that he will furnish 
 me with the evidence on one condition: that I shall not 
 mention a certain person with whom he has been living. 
 He offers to provide me with any sort of evidence you 
 lawyers care to cook up." 
 
 McNiven stared at her and spoke with startling rigor. 
 "Are you trying to involve me in your own crimes?" 
 
 "Don't be silly. Peter says it is done all the time." 
 
 "Not in this office. Do you think I'd risk and deserve 
 disbarment even to oblige a friend?" 
 
 "You mean you won't help me, then?" Charity sighed, 
 rising with a forlorn sense of friendlessness. 
 
 McNiven growled: " Sit down ! Of course I'll help you, 
 but I don't intend to let you drag me into ruin, and I won't 
 help you get a divorce that would be disallowed at the 
 first peep of light." 
 
 "What can I do then? Peter said it could be man 
 aged quickly and quietly." 
 
 "There are ways and ways, Charity Coe. The great 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 curse of divorce is the awful word 'collusion.' It can be 
 avoided as other curses can with a little attention to the 
 language. Remember the old song, ' It's not so much the 
 thing you say, as the nasty way you say it.' That hound 
 of a husband of yours wants to protect that creature he 
 has been flaunting before the world. So he offers to 
 arrange to be caught in a trap with another woman, and 
 make you a present of the evidence. Isn't that so?" 
 
 "I believe it is." 
 
 "Now the law says that 'any understanding pre 
 ceding the act of adultery' is collusion; it involves 
 the committing of a crime. It would be appalling 
 for a nice little body like you to connive at such a 
 thing, wouldn't it?" 
 
 Charity turned pale. "I hadn't realized just what 
 it meant." 
 
 " I thought not," said McNiven. 
 
 "He'll have to give me evidence of of something that 
 has already happened, then, won't he?" 
 
 "The law calls that collusion also." 
 
 "Then what am I to do?" 
 
 "Couldn't you get evidence somehow without taking 
 it from him?" 
 
 Charity was about to shake her head, but she nodded it 
 violently. She remembered the detectives she had en 
 gaged and the superabundant evidence they had furnished 
 her. She told McNiven about it and he was delighted till 
 she reminded him that she had promised not to make use 
 of Zada's name. 
 
 McNiven told her that she had no other recourse, and 
 advised her to see her husband. She said that it was 
 hopeless and she expressed a bitter opinion of the law. It 
 seemed harsher than the Church, especially harsh to those 
 who did not flout its authority. 
 
 While Charity talked McNiven let his pipe-smoke trail 
 out of the window into the infinite where dreams fade 
 from reality and often from memory, and he thought, 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "If I can help Jim and Charity to get together after all 
 this blundering it will be a good job." 
 
 He was tempted to tell her that Jim was coming to see 
 him, too, but he was afraid that she knew it. If he had 
 told her but there goes that eternal "if" again!
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 IT is a fierce and searching test of a woman's mettle 
 when first she is confronted with temptation to rebel 
 against the control of her preacher. Men are used to it, 
 and women must grow more and more used to it as they 
 advance into their long-deferred heritage. 
 
 Charity Coe Cheever was religious by every instinct. 
 From childhood she had thrilled to the creed and the 
 music and the eloquence of her Sundays. The beautiful 
 industries of Christianity had engaged her. She had been 
 happy within the walls and had felt that her piety gave 
 her wings rather than chains. 
 
 And then she came abruptly to the end of her tether. 
 She found her soul revolted by a situation which her 
 pastor commanded her to accept as her lifelong portion. 
 She found that to tolerate, and by tolerating to collaborate 
 in, the adultery of her husband and his mistress was better 
 religion than to free herself from odious triplicity. She 
 found that it was better religion to annul her womanhood 
 and remain childless, husbandless, and comfortless than 
 to claim the privileges, the freedoms, the renewing oppor 
 tunities the law allowed. 
 
 She came suddenly face to- face with the terrifying 
 fact that the State offered her help and strength that the 
 Church denied her. 
 
 She had reached indeed what the doleful balladists 
 would call "the parting of the ways," though no poet 
 has yet chosen for his heroine the distraught wretch who 
 is driven to the bleak refuge of divorce. 
 
 414
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 So long as it concerned only her own happiness Charity 
 could put away the choice. But the more she pondered 
 that unless she divorced her husband his mistress's baby 
 would come into the world with a hideous birthmark, the 
 more she felt it her duty to flout the Church. She shud 
 dered to think of the future for that baby, especially if it 
 should be a girl. She felt curiously a mother-obligation 
 toward it. She blamed herself for her husband's in 
 fidelity. She humbled herself and bowed her neck to the 
 shame. 
 
 She left the Church and went to the law. And then 
 she found that the law had its own cruelties, its own 
 fetters and walls and loopholes and hypocrisies. She 
 found that it is not even possible to be a martyr and 
 retain all one's dignity. One cannot even go to the stake 
 without some guile. 
 
 The wicked law which the Church abhorred had its own 
 idea of wickedness, and in the eyes of the law the agree 
 ment of a husband and a wife to part was something 
 loathsome. She expressed her amazement to McNiven. 
 
 "It seems to me," she sighed, "if both husband and 
 wife want a divorce, they know best ; and that fact ought 
 to be sufficient grounds in itself. And yet you tell me 
 that if the law once gets wind of the fact they've got to 
 live together forever." 
 
 "That's it. They've got to live together whether they 
 love together or not though of course you can get a 
 separation very easily, on almost any ground." 
 
 "But a separation is only a guarantee of of infidelity, 
 I should think." 
 
 "Of course it is," said Lawyer McNiven. 
 
 "Then everything seems all wrong." . 
 
 "Of course it is." 
 
 "Then why doesn't somebody correct it?" 
 
 "Who's going to bell the cat? Anybody who advo 
 cates divorce by mutual consent is sure to be lynched 
 more or less fatally, and especially lynched by the very
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 people who are making a mockery of matrimony in 
 their own lives. 
 
 "One marriage in twelve in the United States ends in 
 divorce. You'll not find anybody who dares to say that 
 that is not a crying scandal. Yet you and I know that 
 home life in America is as pure and honorable as in any 
 other country. I'm an awful heathen, of course, but 
 I'll bet you I'm a true prophet when I say that divorce 
 will increase as the world goes on, instead of decreasing, 
 and that in all the countries where divorce is forbidden 
 or restricted it will grow freer and freer. Statistics prove 
 it all over the globe." 
 
 To Charity Coe, the devout churchwoman, this pict 
 ure was appalling. 
 
 "Oh, in Heaven's name, what will happen? The world 
 will go all to pieces!" 
 
 "That's what they said when men asked for the vote 
 and for education, when women asked for education and 
 the vote; that's what they said when people opposed the 
 divine right of kings, and when they asked for religious 
 freedom; that's what they said when people opposed 
 slavery; that's what they said when people said that 
 insane people were not inhabited by devils and should be 
 treated as invalids. The trouble, Charity, is that a 
 certain spirit has always been abroad in the world fight 
 ing imaginary devils with the best intentions in the world. 
 And in all history there has never been anybody so 
 dangerous to human welfare as the zealot who wants to 
 protect other people from themselves and from the devils. 
 
 "The insane people were never inhabited by devils, 
 and neither are the sane people. Most men want one 
 wife and most women want one husband. Even in the 
 polygamous countries you'll not find any more real 
 polygamy than you find in the countries with the strictest 
 marriage laws. Bluebeard was a Mohammedan, but Don 
 Juan was a Christian. Spain has no divorce on any 
 grounds; neither has Italy. Would you point to those 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 countries as models of domestic purity? Does any sane 
 person dare say that home life in Spain is purer than in 
 the United States? 
 
 "I tell you, easy divorce goes right along with mer 
 ciful laws, public schools, clean prisons, free press, free 
 speech." 
 
 Mrs. Cheever was a very good woman, and she abomi 
 nated divorces. She had very peculiar reasons for wanting 
 one herself, as every one has who wants one, but she 
 felt her case to be so exceptional that it proved the rule 
 against divorces. She shrank a little from the iconoclastic 
 lawyer she had come to for aid, and reminded him of the 
 solemnity of the theme. 
 
 " Don't you believe in the sanctity of matrimony?" 
 
 "Just as much as I believe in the sanctity of personal 
 liberty and a contract and a debt and the obligation to- 
 vote and bear arms and equality of opportunity and 
 responsibility and oh, a lot of other sacred things just 
 as much and no more." 
 
 "But the Church calls marriage a sacrament." 
 
 " It does now, yes; but it didn't for over fifteen hundred 
 years." 
 
 "What!" 
 
 "It's true. The trouble with you religious people is 
 that you never know the history of your own religion. 
 And remember one more thing : the marriage rules of the 
 Christian Church are all founded on the theories of men 
 who never married. No wonder they found it easy to lay 
 down hard and fast rules. Remember another thing : the 
 early Church fathers, Saint Paul, Hieronymus, and 
 thousands of others, believed that marriage was only a 
 little bit better than the worst evil, and that womankind 
 was hardly more than the devil's natural weapon. 
 
 "It was not until the Church was eleven hundred and 
 
 sixty-four years old that Peter Lombard put marriage 
 
 among the seven sacraments. And marriage did not 
 
 become an official matter of Church jurisdiction till the 
 
 27 417
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Council of Trent in fifteen hundred and sixty-three. 
 Think of that ! Marriage was not a sacrament for fifteen 
 centuries, and it has been one for less than four. And 
 at that the Church could only manage the problem by 
 increasing the number of impediments to marriage, which 
 meant that it increased the number of excuses for annul 
 ling it. 
 
 "The total number of marriages annulled would amaze 
 you. History is full of the most picturesque devices for 
 granting divorce without seeming to. Sometimes they 
 would illegitimize two or three generations in order to find 
 a marriage within the forbidden degrees. 
 
 "According to Saint Matthew, Christ allowed divorce 
 on the ground of adultery; according to Mark and Luke 
 he made no such allowance. New York State follows 
 Saint Matthew. The Catholic Church follows Luke and 
 John. Old Martin Luther said that marriage was none 
 of the Church's business. And that's what I think." 
 
 "You don't believe in the religious ceremony?" 
 
 " I'm afraid I don't believe in religious ceremonies about 
 anything. I'm rather a heathen, you know brought up 
 in a good Presbyterian Calvinistic atmosphere, 'but I've 
 lost it all. I'll give three cheers for virtue and the home 
 as well as anybody; but my study and my experience lead 
 me to distrust preachers and preaching. 
 
 "Still, this is a free country, and married people have 
 a right to go to church if they want to, or to stay away. 
 But I believe that marriage must be a civil contract and 
 that no preacher has a right to denounce the State's 
 prerogative, or try to belittle it. It is strange, but true, 
 that when the Church has ruled the State the world has 
 always groaned in corruption and cruelty. 
 
 " I believe that the law of New York is ridiculous in al 
 lowing only one ground for divorce, and if the United 
 States ever arranges a uniform divorce law it will un 
 doubtedly follow the policy of the more liberal States. 
 I believe, with Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy and 
 
 418
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 a number of other good, great men, in cheap and easy 
 divorce, divorce within reach of the poor. 
 
 "As for morality, you have only to read the literature 
 .of the time when there was no divorce to realize how 
 little a safeguard it is for the home. Boccaccio gives a 
 social portrait of such a life, and he is almost too indecent 
 to read. Yet the picture he gives is not half so terrible 
 as Saint Catherine of Siena gives. They had to cut that 
 chapter out of her works." 
 
 "Oh, do you read her works, too?" said Charity, re 
 membering her experience with that flaming biography. 
 
 "I read a little of everybody. But everything I read 
 and see confirms my opinion that too much law is the 
 curse of the world. Still, as I say, I'm not a lawmaker. 
 I'm a law-manipulator. I've been wondering how long 
 you would stand Cheever's scandalous behavior, and how 
 long you could be convinced that you were helping the 
 morals of the world by condoning and encouraging such 
 immorality. Now that you've brought your troubles to 
 my shop I'm going to help you if I can. But I don't want 
 to get you or myself into the clutches of the law. You'll 
 have to take care of your Church relations as best you 
 can. They may turn you out, and you may roast on a 
 gridiron hereafter, but that's your business. Personally, I 
 think the only wicked thing I've ever heard of you doing 
 was permitting your husband to board and lodge at your 
 house while he carried on with that woman. A harem 
 divided against itself will not stand." 
 
 Charity was terrified by the man's profane view of 
 sacred things, and she was horrified to learn that she could 
 only release herself and Cheever from the shackles by a 
 kind of trickery. She would have to make her escape 
 somewhat as she had seen Houdini break from his ropes 
 in the vaudevilles, by retiring behind dark curtains for a 
 while. 
 
 She felt guilty and craven whichever way she turned, 
 and she imagined the revulsion with which the good pastor 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 would regard her. Yet she was in a kind of mania to 
 accept the scapegoat's burdens and be off into the wilder 
 ness. She was resolved to undergo everything for the 
 sake of that poor child of Zada's hastening toward the 
 world. She thanked Heaven she had no child of her own 
 to complicate her duty. 
 
 She understood why Cheever wanted to protect the 
 name of the child's mother from the courts, and she was 
 baffled by the situation. The lawyer, who was so flippant 
 about the things the Church held so sacred, was like a 
 priest in his abhorrence of any tampering with the letter 
 of the law. 
 
 She left his office for a conference with Cheever. She 
 found at home that he had been telephoning to her. She 
 called him up, and he came over at once. 
 
 "I'm in a devil of a mess, Charity," he said. "My 
 lawyer refuses to help me give you evidence, and Zada 
 Miss L'Etoile has developed a peculiar streak of 
 obstinacy. She is determined that no other woman shall 
 be named as the er co-respondent. She would rather 
 be named herself. She says everybody knows about our 
 er relations, anyway; and she doesn't care if they 
 do." 
 
 Zada's character and her career had rendered her as 
 contemptuous of public disapproval as any zealot of a 
 loftier cause than love. There was a kind of barbaric 
 insolence in her passion that Charity could not help ad 
 miring a little. She felt a whit ashamed of her own 
 timidities and delicacies. The trouble with these proud 
 defiers of the public, however, is that they do not ask the 
 consent of the babies that are more or less implied in their 
 superb amours. 
 
 Cheever was so distracted between the scruples of his 
 lawyer and Zada's lack of them that when Charity con 
 fessed how she had set detectives on him and had secured 
 a dictagraphic record of his alliance with Zada he was 
 overcome with gratitude. 
 
 420
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 So little a shift of circumstances makes all the dif 
 ference between a spy and a savior. The deed that he 
 would once have cursed his wife for stooping to, perhaps 
 have beaten her for, was now an occasion for overwhelm 
 ing her with thanks. 
 
 He hurried away to his lawyer, and Charity telephoned 
 McNiven for another appointment the next afternoon. 
 Jim Dyckman's appointment was for the next morning.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 WHEN Jim reached his office the next morning 
 McNiven recommended the view to him, gave 
 him a chair, refused a cigar, lighted his pipe instead, 
 opened a drawer in his desk, put his feet in it, and leaned 
 far back in his swivel chair. 
 
 Jim began, "Well, you see, Sandy, it's like this " 
 
 "One moment," McNiven broke in. "Before you 
 speak I must as an honest lawyer warn you against the 
 step you contemplate." 
 
 "But, damn it, you don't know what it is yet." 
 
 " I don't have to. I know you, and I know that people 
 don't come to lawyers, as a rule, except to get out of a 
 scrape dishonestly or to get into one unwisely." 
 
 It was his office joke, and something more, a kind of 
 formula for squaring himself with his conscience, a 
 phrase for warding off the devil as a beggar spits on the 
 penny he accepts. 
 
 Having exorcised the demon, he said, "Go on, tell 
 me: what's her name and how much does she want for 
 silence?" 
 
 "How much do you want for silence?" Jim growled. 
 
 "Shoot!" 
 
 McNiven was startled and grieved when he learned 
 that Jim was not making ready to marry Charity Coe, 
 "but some one else. Jim told him as much as he thought 
 necessary, and McNiven guessed the rest. He groaned: 
 "It seems impossible to surround marriage with such 
 difficulties that people won't break in and out. I've got 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 a friend ef yours trying to bust a home as quietly as 
 you're trying to build one." 
 
 Of course, he did not mention Charity's name. He tried 
 fervently to convince Jim that he ought not to marry 
 Kedzie, but, failing to persuade him from the perils of 
 matrimony, he did his best to help him to a decent 
 secrecy. His best was the program Jim and Kedzie 
 followed. 
 
 They motored over to the village of Jolicosur in New 
 Jersey. There a local attorney, a friend of McNiven's, 
 met them and vouched for them before the town clerk, 
 who made out the license. He asked Kedzie if she had 
 been married before, and she was so young and pretty and 
 so plainly a girl that he laughed when he asked the ques 
 tion. And for answer Kedzie just laughed, too. He wrote 
 down that she had never been married before. Kedzie 
 had not really lied, and they can't arrest a person, surely, 
 for just laughing. Not that she did not believe in the 
 motto which Blanche Bates used to read so convincingly 
 in "The Darling of the Gods" : " It is better to lie a little 
 than to be unhappy much." 
 
 Jim was shocked at the situation, but he could hardly 
 be so ungallant as to call his fiancee a liar at such a time. 
 Besides, he had heard that the law is interested in people's 
 persons and not their names, and he was marrying Kedzie 
 personally. 
 
 When the license was made out the lawyer whispered 
 to the town clerk that it would be made worth his while 
 to suppress the news for thirty days or more, and the clerk 
 winked and grinned. Business was slow in matrimony, 
 and he needed any little tips. 
 
 Now that they were licensed, Jim and Kedzie, being 
 non-residents of New Jersey, must wait twenty-four hours 
 before they could be married. They motored back to 
 New York and went to the theater to kill the evening. 
 The next afternoon Jim called for Kedzie, and they mo 
 tored again to Jolicceur for the ceremony. Mr. and 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Mrs. Thropp went along as witnesses and to make 
 sure. 
 
 The lawyer had found a starveling parson in Jolicoeur 
 who asked the fatal questions and pronounced the twain 
 man and wife, adding the warning, "Whom God hath 
 joined, let no man put asunder." Jim Dyckman was so 
 befuddled that he heard it, "Let no man join whom God 
 hath put asunder." But he paid the preacher well and 
 added a large sum for the church on condition that the 
 news of the marriage be kept out of the public records 
 till the last legal moment. 
 
 Dyckman had tried to do the honorable thing by Ked- 
 zie. He was certainly generous, for a man can hardly give 
 a woman more than himself and all he has. Dyckman, 
 however, had been ashamed of a mental reservation or 
 two. He could not repress a sneaking feeling that he 
 had been less the kidnapper than the napped kid in this 
 elopement. If anybody were to be arrested for abduc 
 tion, it would not be he. 
 
 He reviled himself for confessing this to himself, and 
 his sympathies went out to Kedzie because the poor child 
 had to be yoked with a reluctant mate. A bridegroom 
 ought to bring to his bride, above all things else, an 
 eager heart. And that Jim could not bring. 
 
 He had been in his time a man and had sowed his meas 
 ure of wild oats more than a poor man could, less than 
 a rich man might, far less than his unusual opportunities 
 and the greedy throngs of temptresses encouraged. But 
 he had taken Kedzie seriously, never dreaming how large 
 a part ambition played in her devotion to him. He had 
 been good to her and with her. The marriage ceremony 
 had solemnized him further. 
 
 He had made a try at secrecy, because he felt shy 
 about the affair. He knew that his name would lead the 
 newspapers to haze him, as the rustic neighbors deride 
 a rural couple with a noisy "chivaree." He dreaded the 
 head-lines, as a kind of invasion of the bridal chamber. 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 In any case he had always hated flamboyant weddings 
 with crowds and splendor. He did not believe that a 
 marriage should be circused. 
 
 And thus at last he and Kedzie were united into one 
 soul and one flesh, for better, for worse, etc., etc. Then 
 they sped away to the remotest pleasant hotel to be found 
 in darkest Jersey. 
 
 Jim registered under his own name, but blushed more 
 hotly than if he had been engaged in an escapade. He 
 could, perhaps, have taken Kedzie so with less regret 
 than under the blessing of the clergy. For now he felt 
 that he owed to her the all-hallowing grace of that utter 
 love which was something he could not bestow. 
 
 She was the first wife he had ever had, and he wished 
 a devoutness in that consummation. Lacking the sanctify 
 ing ardor, he was remorseful rather than triumphant, feel 
 ing himself more of a brute than even a bridegroom 
 usually feels. 
 
 Kedzie did not seem to miss any perfection in his de 
 votion, but he imputed that more to her innocent kindli 
 ness than to any grace of his own. The more he studied 
 her the more he wondered why he did not love her more. 
 She was tremendously exquisite, ferociously delicate, and 
 almighty pretty. She was altogether too delectable, too 
 cunningly wrought and fragile, for a hulking Titan like 
 him. 
 
 He was positively afraid of her, and greatly amazed to 
 see that she was not at all afraid of him. The moment the 
 parson had done his worst a new Kedzie had appeared. 
 She took command of everything instantly: ordered the 
 parson about, shipped her mother and father back to town 
 as if they were bothersome children, gave directions to 
 Jim's chauffeur in a way that taught him who was to be 
 who thenceforward, and made demands upon the hotel 
 clerk in a tone that was more convincing of her wifehood 
 than a marriage license could have been. 
 
 The quality missing in Kedzie was the sense of terror 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 and meekness expectable in brides. Her sole distress was, 
 to Jim's amazement, the obscurity and solitude of their 
 retreat. Kedzie was rapturous, but she had not the 
 slightest desire to hide it from the world. She was Mrs. 
 Jim Dyckman, and she didn't care who knew it. 
 
 Poor Kedzie had her own sorrows to mar her triumph. 
 She was being driven to believe that the world was as 
 badly managed as the Hyperfilm Studio. Providence 
 seemed to provide tribulations for her like a scenario editor 
 pursuing a movie heroine. The second reel had begun 
 well, the rich but honest lover putting the poor but dis 
 honest husband to flight. And now Honeymoon Number 
 Two! She had dreamed of a gorgeous church ceremony 
 with two pipe-organs, and an enlarged cast of clergymen, 
 and wedding guests composed of real millionaires instead 
 of movie "extras." But lo and behold, her adorer whisks 
 her off to a little town in New Jersey and the great treaty 
 is sealed in the shoddy parlor of a village parsonage! 
 Gilfoyle's Municipal Building was a cathedral compared 
 to this. 
 
 Then with never a white ribbon fluttering, not an old 
 shoe or a grain of rice hurtling, the limousine of love rolled 
 away to a neglected roadhouse. It was attractive enough 
 as a roadhouse, but it was wretched as an imitation 
 paradise. 
 
 In the face of this outrage everything else was a detail, a 
 minor humiliation. There was no parrot on an area fire- 
 escape to mock her next morning, but there was a still 
 earlier rooster to banish sleep and parody her triumph. 
 She slipped out of bed and went barefoot to the window- 
 seat and gazed out into a garden. 
 
 She made a picture there that Ferriday would have 
 loved in a " close-up." Her hair was tumbling down upon 
 and around her shoulders, and her silken nightgown 
 shimmered blissfully about her, sketching her contours 
 in iridescent lines. She gazed, through an Elizabethan 
 window of small panes, into a garden where sunrise 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 bloomed rosily in petals of light. She was the prettiest 
 thing in the pretty picture ; yet she was pouting at Fate 
 Fate, the old scenario writer who never could seem to bring 
 off a happy ending. 
 
 Jim Dyckman, waking, saw her there and rubbed his 
 eyes. Then he remembered. He pondered her and saw 
 a tear or two slip out of her eyes, run along her cheek 
 and pitch off into the tiny ravine of her bosom. He felt 
 that he was a contemptible fiend who had committed a 
 lynchable crime upon a tender and helpless victim. He 
 closed his eyes in remorse, pretending to sleep, tormented 
 like the repentant purchaser of a "white slave" or rather 
 a pink slave. 
 
 They breakrasted early and prettily. Kedzie was ra 
 diant now. She usually was when she was dealing in 
 futures. They took up the question of their future 
 residence. Jim proposed all the honeymoon haunts. 
 Europe was out of the question, so he suggested Bermuda, 
 Jamaica, California, Atlantic City, North Carolina, the 
 Adirondacks. But Kedzie wanted to get back to New 
 York. 
 
 This pained and bewildered him at first, because he felt 
 that wedded rapture should hide itself awhile in its own 
 lovely loneliness. Besides, his appearance in New York 
 with a wife would involve him in endless explanations 
 and there would be reporters to see, and society editors and 
 photographers, and his family and all his friends. 
 
 But those were just what Kedzie wanted. And at last 
 she told him so. 
 
 "You act as if you were ashamed to be seen with me," 
 she cried out. 
 
 The only answering argument to this was to take her 
 back to town at once. The question of how and where 
 they were to live was important. They had not settled 
 it in the flurry of their hasty secret marriage. 
 
 Jim supposed that a hotel would be necessary till they 
 found a house. He loathed the thought of a hotel, but 
 
 427
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 a suitable furnished house might not be in the market at 
 the moment. He suggested an apartment. 
 
 This reminded Kedzie of how Gilfoyle had sent her 
 out on a flat-hunt. She would have more money now, 
 but there would doubtless be something the matter with 
 every place. The most urgent thing was to get out of 
 New Jersey. They could discuss residences in the car. 
 
 And they did discuss them. Building a new house 
 would take years. Buying a ready-made house and 
 furnishing it would take days, perhaps weeks. Kedzie 
 could not choose which one of the big hotels she most 
 wanted to camp in. Each had its qualities and their 
 defects. 
 
 When they were on the ferry crossing the river she had 
 not yet made up her mind. Jim had no mind to make 
 up. He was reduced to a mere waiter on her orders. 
 He laughed at himself. This morning at daybreak he had 
 been reproaching himself for being a vicious gorilla who 
 had carried off a little girl; now he was realizing that the 
 little girl had carried him off and was making a monkey 
 of him. 
 
 Kedzie' s mental disarray was the overwhelming in 
 fluence of infinite money. For the first time in her life 
 she could disregard price-marks entirely. Curiously, that 
 took away half the fun of the thing. It seemed practically 
 impossible for her to be extravagant. She would learn 
 before long that there are countless things that plutocrats 
 cannot afford, that they also must deny themselves much, 
 feel shabby, and envy their neighbors. For the present 
 she realized only that she had oodles of money to sprinkle. 
 
 But it takes training to spend money, and Kedzie was 
 now unpractised. Her wisher was so undeveloped that 
 she could only wish for things available to people of 
 moderate affluence. She could not wish for a yacht, 
 because Jim had a yacht. She could not wish for a bal 
 loon because she would not go up in it. She could wish 
 for a house, but she could not walk into it without delay. 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She could not live in two hotels at once. Jewelry she 
 could use in quantities, but even at that she had only 
 so much surface area to hang it on. In fact, when she 
 came right face to face with facts, what was there worth 
 wishing for? What was the use of being so dog-on rich, 
 anyway? 
 
 And there she hung on the door-sill of her new life like 
 a child catching sight of a loaded Christmas tree and 
 palsied with inability to decide which toy to grab first, 
 horrified to realize that he cannot suck the orange and 
 blow the trumpet at the same time. 
 
 When they reached the New York side of the Hudson 
 the car rolled off the boat into the ferry-house and into 
 the street, and when Jim said again, "Well, where do you 
 want to go?" she had to sigh. 
 
 "Oh, Heavens! let's go home to my old apartment and 
 talk it over." She gave the address to the chauffeur, and 
 Jim smiled grimly. It gave him a little cynical amuse 
 ment to act as passenger. 
 
 On the way up-town Kedzie realized that she was hungry 
 and that there would be no food in her apartment. They 
 turned to Sherry's. Kedzie left Jim and went into the 
 dressing-room to smooth her hair after the motor flight. 
 
 And now, just too late, Charity Coe Cheever happened 
 to arrive as the guest of Mrs. Duane. The sight of Jim 
 alone brought a flush of hope to Charity's eyes. She 
 greeted him with a breeziness she had hardly known since 
 she was a girl. There was nothing about his appearance 
 to indicate that he had just come across from New Jersey, 
 where he had been made the husband of Mrs. Kedzie 
 Thropp Gilfoyle. 
 
 Seeing Charity so unusually bright, Jim said, "What's 
 happened to you, Charity, that you look so gay and free?" 
 
 "That's what I am." 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "Gay and free. Can you keep a secret?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I'm getting divorced." 
 
 "My Lord, no!" 
 
 "Yes, my lord." 
 
 "Oh, God, and me just married!" 
 
 Charity looked for an instant as if an arrow had flashed 
 into her heart and struck her dead. Then with relentless 
 courage she plucked out the steel and let the blood gush 
 while she smiled. 
 
 "Congratulations, old boy. Who's the lucky lady?" 
 
 "It's the little girl I yanked out of Mrs. Noxon's pool." 
 
 "The one I asked you to look out for?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Well, isn't that fine! She was very pretty. I hope 
 you'll be ever so happy." 
 
 "Thanks, Charity thank you. Mighty nice of you! 
 Of course, you know er Well, here she is." He beck 
 oned to Kedzie, who came forward. "Mrs. Cheever, my 
 wife. But you've met, haven't you?" 
 
 "Oh yes, indeed," said Charity Coe, with an effusion 
 of cordiality that roused Kedzie's suspicions more than her 
 gratitude. The first woman she met was already trying 
 to get into her good graces! Charity Coe went on, with 
 a little difficulty: 
 
 "But Mrs. Dyckman doesn't remember me. I met 
 you at Mrs. Noxon's." 
 
 "Oh yes," said Kedzie, and a slow, heavy crimson 
 darkened her face like a stream of treacle. 
 
 The first woman she met was reminding her of the time 
 she was a poor young dancer with neither clothes nor 
 money. It was outrageous to have this flung in her face 
 at the very gate of Eden. 
 
 She was extremely cold to Charity Coe, and Charity 
 saw it. Jim Dyckman died the death at finding Kedzie 
 so cruel to the one who had befriended her. But he could 
 not rebuke his wife, even before his lost love. So he said 
 nothing. 
 
 Charity caught the heartsick, hangdog look in his eyes, 
 
 43
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 
 
 and she forbore to slice Kedzie up with sarcasm. She 
 bade her a most gracious farewell and moved on. 
 
 Kedzie stared after her and her beautiful gown, and 
 said: "Say, Jim, who were the Goes, anyway? Did they 
 make their money in trade?" 
 
 Jim said that he would be divinely condemned, or words 
 to that effect.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 AND now Kedzie Thropp was satisfied at last at 
 /~\ least for the time being. She was a plump kitten, 
 replete and purr-full, and the world was her catnip-ball. 
 
 There was no visible horizon to her wealth. Her name 
 was one of the oldest, richest, noblest in the republic. 
 She was a Dyckman now, double-riveted to the name 
 with a civil license and a religious certificate. Tommie 
 Gilfoyle had politely died, and like an obliging rat had 
 died outside the premises. Hardly anybody knew that 
 she had married him, and nobody who knew was going to 
 tell. 
 
 Kedzie forgot Charity in the joy of ordering a million 
 aire's luncheon. This was not easy. She was never a 
 glutton for food; excitement dimmed what appetite she 
 had, and her husband, as she knew, hated made dishes 
 with complex sauces. 
 
 Kedzie was baffled by the futility of commanding a lot 
 of things she could not eat, just for the fun of making a 
 large bill. She was like the traditional prospector who 
 struck it rich and, hastening to civilization, could think 
 of nothing to order but "forty dollars' worth of pork and 
 beans." 
 
 Kedzie had to satisfy her plutocratic pride by bossing 
 the waiter about, by complaining that the oysters were not 
 chilled and the sherry was. She sent back the salad 
 for redressing and insisted that the meat was from cold 
 storage. She was no longer the poor girl afraid of the 
 waiter. 
 
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 Kedzie was having a good time, but she regretted that 
 her wedding-ring was so small. She felt that wives ought 
 to wear some special kind of plume, the price of the feather 
 varying with the bank account. Kedzie would have had 
 to carry an umbrella of plumes. 
 
 Still, she did pretty well on her exit. She went out 
 like a million dollars. But her haughtiness fell from her 
 when she reached home and found Mr. and Mrs. Thropp 
 comfortably installed there, saving hotel bills. 
 
 Charity Coe had gone out feeling a million years old. 
 She left the presence of Kedzie in a mood of tragic laugh 
 ter. She was in one of those contemptible, ridiculous 
 plights in which good people frequently find themselves 
 as a result of kindliness and self-sacrifice. 
 
 For well-meant actions are as often and as heavily 
 punished in this world as ill-meant if indeed the word 
 punishment has any respectability left. It is certainly 
 obsolescent. 
 
 Many great good men, such as Brand Whitlock, the 
 saint of Belgium, had been saying that the whole idea of 
 human punishment of human beings is false, cruel, and 
 futile, that it has never accomplished anything worth 
 while for either victim or inflictor. They place it among 
 the ugly follies, the bloody superstitions that mankind 
 has clung to with a fanaticism impervious to experience. 
 They would change the prisons from hells to schools and 
 hospitals. 
 
 Even the doctrine of a hell beyond the grave is rather 
 neglected now, except by such sulphuric press agents as 
 Mr. Sunday. But in this world we cannot sanely allege 
 that vice is punished and virtue rewarded until we know 
 better what virtue is and what is vice. All that it is safe 
 to say is that punishment is a something unpleasant and 
 reward a something pleasant that follows a deed merely 
 follows in point of time, not in proof of judgment. 
 
 So the mockery of Charity's good works was neither a 
 punishment nor a ridicule. It was a coincidence, but a 
 
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 sad one. Charity had befriended Kedzie without making 
 a friend thereby; she had lost, indeed, her good friend 
 Jim. Charity's affection for Jim would make her suspect 
 in Kedzie's eyes, and Kedzie's gratitude had evidently 
 already cut its sharper- than-a-serpent's wisdom tooth. 
 
 Charity had been patient with her husband and had lost 
 him. She had asked the Church for her freedom and had 
 been threatened with exile. Then her husband had de 
 manded his freedom and forced her to choose between 
 blackening her own soul with the brand "divorcee" or 
 blackening her husband's mistress's baby's soul with the 
 brand ' ' illegitimate. ' ' 
 
 She had preferred to take the shame upon herself. 
 But who would give her credit? She knew now false was 
 the phrase that old Ovid uttered but could not comfort 
 even himself with, "The mind conscious of rectitude 
 laughs at the lies of gossip." No woman can afford such 
 security. 
 
 Charity had such a self-guying meekness, indeed, that 
 instead of clothing herself in the robes of martyrdom 
 she ridiculed herself because of one thing: In a pigeon 
 hole of her brain a little back-thought had lurked, a dim 
 hope that if she gave her husband the divorce he implored 
 she might be free to remold her shattered life nearer to 
 her heart's desire with Jim Dyckman. Her husband, 
 indeed, had taunted her with that intention, and now 
 she had no sooner launched her good name down the 
 slippery ways of divorce than she found Jim Dyckman 
 married and learned that her premature and unwomanly 
 hopes for him were ludicrously thwarted! 
 
 She went to McNiven's office with a dark life ahead 
 of her. She had no desire left except to disentangle her 
 self from Peter Cheever's life as quietly and swiftly as 
 possible. She told McNiven this and said: 
 
 "How quickly can the ghastly job be finished?" 
 
 "Theoretically it could be done in a day, but practically 
 it takes a little longer. For we must avoid the look of 
 
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 collusion like the plague. So we'll allow, say, a week. 
 If we're lucky with our judges, it may take less." 
 
 Then he outlined the steps to be taken. An unusual 
 chain of circumstances enabled him to carry them out 
 with unexpected neatness and despatch, so that the case 
 became a very model of how gracefully the rigid laws of 
 divorce could be manipulated in the Year of Our Lord 
 1916 and of the Founding of the Republic 140. 
 
 It may be interesting to outline the procedure as a so 
 cial document in chicanery, or social surgery, as one wills 
 to call it. 
 
 McNiven first laid under Charity's eyes a summons 
 and complaint against Peter Cheever. She glanced over 
 it and found it true except that Zada L'Etoile was not 
 named; Cheever 's alleged income was vastly larger than 
 she imagined, and her claim for alimony was exorbitant. 
 
 Her first question was: "Who is this unknown woman 
 going by the name of Sarah Tishler? I thought Miss 
 L'Etoile was to be the only woman mentioned." 
 
 McNiven explained: "L'Etoile is her stage name. 
 She doesn't know her real name herself, for she was taken 
 from the foundling-asylum as a child by a family named 
 Tishler. We have taken advantage of that disadvantage." 
 
 Charity bowed to this, but she protested the income 
 credited to her husband. 
 
 "Peter doesn't earn half as much as that." 
 
 "How do you know what he earns?" said McNiven. 
 
 "He's told me often enough." 
 
 "Do you believe all he told you?" 
 
 " No; but, anyway, I don't want any of his old alimony. 
 I have money enough of my own." 
 
 "That can be arranged later, but if you don't swear to 
 this as it lies you can't have your divorce." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Because there has to be a contest, and we've got to 
 give his lawyer something to fight." 
 
 Charity yielded wearily. She fought against making 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 an affidavit to the truth of the complaint, but when 
 NcNiven said, "No affidavit, no divorce," she took her 
 oath before the clerk who was called in as a notary public. 
 
 "Now you may go home," said McNiven; and Charity 
 stole out, feeling herself a perjured criminal. Then the 
 divorce-mill began to grind. 
 
 A process-server from McNiven's office went across 
 Broadway to Tessier's office, where Cheever was waiting. 
 He handed the papers to Cheever, who handed them to 
 Tessier, who hastily dictated an answer denying the 
 adultery, the alleged income, and the propriety of the 
 alimony claimed. 
 
 Tessier and Cheever visited McNiven in his office and 
 served him with this answer. The two lawyers then dic 
 tated an agreement to a reference, Tessier adding a 
 statement that he considered his client equipped with a 
 good defense and that he intended to oppose the suit in 
 good faith. 
 
 Their clerks took this to the County Court House in 
 City Hall Square and filed it with the clerk of the 
 Supreme Court, Special Term, Part II. 
 
 Justice Cardwell, before leaving his chambers, read the 
 papers and issued an order naming as referee the lawyer 
 Henry Firth. 
 
 Here for a moment the veil of secrecy was rent, for 
 this order could not be suppressed. It was published in 
 The Law Journal the next morning, and the eager reporters 
 reading therein that Mrs. Peter Cheever was suing her 
 husband for a divorce on statutory grounds, dashed to the 
 records and learned that she accused him of undue in 
 timacy with an unknown woman going by the name of 
 Sarah Tishler. 
 
 By selecting an obscure town this publicity might have 
 been deferred, but it would have meant delay in the case 
 as well. 
 
 A flock of reporters sped like hawks for Charity's home, 
 where they were denied admittance; for Cheever's office, 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 where they were told that he was out of town; and even 
 for Zada L'Etoile's apartment, where they were informed 
 that she had left the State, as indeed she had. Sarah 
 Tishler had a right, being named as co-respondent, to 
 enter the case and defend her name, but she waived the 
 privilege. 
 
 The evening papers made what they could of the sensa 
 tion, but nobody mentioned Zada, for nobody knew that 
 fate had tried to conceal her by naming her Tishler, 
 and nobody quite dared to mention her without legal 
 sanction. 
 
 On the next day Lawyer Firth held court in his office. 
 Reporters were excluded, and the lawyers and detectives 
 and Cheever and Charity, who had to be present, declined 
 to answer any of the questions rained upon them in the 
 corridors and the elevators. 
 
 Mr. Firth was empowered to swear in witnesses and take 
 testimony. The evidence of the detectives, corroborated 
 by the evidence of a hall-boy and a janitor and by proof 
 of the installation of the dictagraph, seemed conclusive to 
 Mr. Firth. 
 
 Cheever denied that he had committed the alleged 
 adultery and gave proof that his income was not as stated. 
 Attorney Tessier evaded the evidence of adultery, but 
 fought hard against the evidence of prosperity. Referee 
 Firth made his report rinding the defendant guilty of the 
 statutory offense, and ordered a decree of divorce, with a 
 diminished alimony. He appended a transcript of the 
 evidence and filed it with the Clerk of the County of New 
 York. The statutory fee for a referee was ten dollars 
 a day, but the lawyers had quietly agreed on the pay 
 ment of a thousand dollars for expediting the case. With 
 this recompense Mr. Firth ended his duties in the matter. 
 
 McNiven prepared a motion to confirm the report of 
 the referee and took it to Tessier, who accepted service 
 for his client. McNiven then went to the county clerk 
 and filed a notice that the motion would be called up the 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 next morning. The clerk put it on the calendar of Special 
 Term, Part III. 
 
 The next morning McNiven appeared before Justice 
 Palfrey, submitted his motion, and asked for an inter 
 locutory decree. He left his paper with the clerk. Dur 
 ing the afternoon Justice Palfrey looked over the referee's 
 report and decided to grant McNiven's motion. In view 
 of the prominence of the contestants and since he had 
 heard of Charity's good works, and felt sure that she had 
 suffered enough in the wreck of her home, he ordered the 
 evidence sealed. This harmed nobody but the hungry 
 reporters and the gossip-appetite of the public. 
 
 McNiven was waiting in the office of the clerk, and as 
 soon as he learned that the judge had granted the motion 
 he submitted the formal orders to be signed. The clerk 
 entered the interlocutory decree. And now the marriage 
 was ended except for three months of grace. 
 
 The first day after that period had passed McNiven 
 submitted an affidavit that there had been no change in 
 the feelings of the parties and there was no good reason 
 why the decree should not be granted. He made up the 
 final papers, gave Tessier notice, and deposited the record 
 with the clerk. Justice Cruden, then sitting in Special 
 Term, Part III., signed the judgment. And the deed was 
 done. Mrs. Cheever was permitted to resume her maiden 
 name, but that meant too much confusion; she needed 
 the "Mrs." for protection of a sort. 
 
 The divorce carried with it a clause forbidding the 
 guilty husband to marry any one else before five years 
 had passed. But while the divorce was legal all over the 
 world, this restriction ended at the State bounds. 
 
 So Peter Cheever and Zada L'Etoile went over into the 
 convenient realm of New Jersey the next morning, 
 secured a license, and on the following day were there made 
 man and wife before all the world. This entitled them to 
 a triumphant return to New York. And now Peter 
 Cheever had also done the honorable thing. This "honor- 
 
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 able thing" business will be one of the first burdens 
 dropped by the men when the women perfect their claim 
 to equality. 
 
 In about two weeks a daughter was born to the happy 
 twain. Thanks to Charity's obliging nature, it was 
 christened in church and accepted in law as a complete 
 Cheever. Mr. and Mrs. and Miss Cheever now began 
 to live (more or less) happily ever after (temporarily) . 
 
 Altogether it was a triumph of legal, social, and surgical 
 technic. It outraged many virtuous people. There was 
 a good deal of harsh criticism of everybody concerned. 
 The worthies who believe that divorce is the cause of 
 the present depraved state of the United States bewailed 
 one more instance of the vile condition of the lawless 
 Gomorrah. The eternal critics of the rich used the case 
 as another text in proof of the complete control that wealth 
 has over our courts, though seventy-five divorces to 
 obscure persons were granted at the same time without 
 difficulty, with little expense and no newspaper pun 
 ishment. 
 
 Dr. Mosely wrote Charity a letter of heartbroken con 
 demnation, and she slunk away to the mountains to 
 escape from the reproach of all good people and to re 
 cuperate for another try at the French war hospitals. 
 She had let her great moving-picture project lapse. She 
 felt hopelessly out of the world and she was afraid to face 
 her friends. Still, she had money and her "freedom," and 
 one really cannot expect everything.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 ninety days following Charity's encounter with 
 1 Jim Dyckman and his bride at Sherry's had been 
 busy times for her and epochal in their changes. From 
 being one of the loneliest and most approved women in 
 America she had become one of the loneliest and least 
 approved. Altruism is perhaps the most expensive of the 
 virtues. 
 
 No less epochal were those months for the Dyckmans, 
 bride and groom. Their problems began to bourgeon 
 immediately after they left New Jersey and went to 
 Kedzie's old apartment for further debate as to their 
 future lodgings. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Thropp were amazed by their sudden re 
 turn. Adna was a trifle sheepish. They found him sitting 
 in the parlor in his shirt-sleeves and stocking feet, and 
 staring out of the window at the neighbors opposite. In 
 Nimrim it was a luxury to be able to spy into the windows 
 of one neighbor at a time. Opposite Adna there were a 
 hundred and fifty neighbors whom it cost nothing to 
 watch. Some of them were very startling; some of them 
 were stupid old ladies who rocked, or children who 
 flattened their noses against the windows, or Pekingese 
 doglets who were born with their noses against a pane, 
 apparently. But some of the neighbors were fascinatingly 
 careless of inspection and they always promised to be 
 more careless than they were. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp came rushing in from the kitchen. She 
 had been trying in vain to make a friend of Kedzie's one 
 
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 servant. But this maid, like a self-respectful employee 
 or a good soldier, resented the familiarity of an official 
 superior as an indecency and an insult. She made up 
 her mind to quit. 
 
 After Mrs. Thropp had expressed her wonderment at 
 seeing her children return, she turned the full power of her 
 hospitality on poor Jim Dyckman. He could not give 
 notice and seek another job. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp's first problem was the proper style and 
 title of her son-in-law. 
 
 "What am I goin' to call you, anyhow?" she said. 
 " Jim sounds kind of familiar on short acquaintance, and 
 James is sort of distant. Son-in-law is hor'ble, and Son 
 is How would you like it if I was to call you 'Sori? 
 What does your own mother call you?" 
 
 " Jimsy," Jim admitted, shamefacedly. 
 
 " Jimsy is right nice," said Mrs. Thropp, and she 
 Jimsied him thenceforward, to his acute distress. He 
 found that he had married not Kedzie only but all the 
 Thropps there were. The father and mother were the 
 mere foreground of a vast backward and abyss of rela 
 tions, beginning with a number of Kedzie's brothers and 
 sisters and their wives and husbands. Jim was a trifle 
 stunned to learn what lowly jobs some of his brothers-in- 
 law were glad to hold. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp felt that it was only right to tell Jim as 
 much as she could about his new family. She told him for 
 hours and hours. She described people he had never 
 seen or heard of and would travel many a mile to avoid. 
 He had never cared for genealogy, and his own long and 
 brilliant ancestry did not interest him in the slightest. 
 He had hundreds of relations of all degrees of fame and 
 fortune, and he felt under no further obligation to them 
 than to let alone and be let alone. 
 
 His interest in his new horde of relations-m-law was 
 vastly less than nothing. But Mrs. Thropp gave him 
 their names, their ages, habits, diseases, vices, manner- 
 
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 isms, idiosyncrasies. She recounted doings and sayings 
 of infinite unimportance and uninterest. 
 
 With the fatuous, blindfolded enthusiasm of an after- 
 dinner speaker who rambles on and on and on while 
 the victims yawn, groan, or fold their napkins and 
 silently steal away, Mrs. Thropp poured out her lethal 
 anecdotes. 
 
 Jim went from weariness to restiveness, to amazement, 
 to wrath, to panic, to catalepsy, before Kedzie realized 
 that he was being suffocated by these reminiscences. 
 Then she intervened. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp's final cadence was a ghastly thought: 
 
 "Well, now, I've told you s'much about all our folks, 
 you must tell me all about yours." 
 
 "The Lord forbid!" said Jim. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp took this to mean that he did not dare 
 confess the scandals of his people. She knew, of course, 
 from reading, that rich people are very wicked, but she 
 did want to know some of the details. 
 
 Jim refused to make disclosures. He was wakened 
 from his coma by Mrs. Thropp's casual remark: 
 
 "Say, Jimsy, how do folks do, on East here? Will your 
 mother call on me and Kedzie, or will she look for us to 
 call on her first?" 
 
 "My God!" thought Jim. 
 
 "What say?" said Mrs. Thropp. 
 
 Jim floundered and threshed. He had never before 
 realized what his mother's famous pride might mean. 
 She had always been only mother to him, devoted, tender, 
 patient, forgiving, amusing, sympathetic, anxious, flat 
 tered by his least attention. Yet he had heard her spoken 
 of as a human glacier for freezing social climbers and 
 pushers of every sort. She was huge and slow; she could 
 be frightfully cold and crushing. 
 
 Now he understood what congelation the trembling 
 approachers to her majesty must have suffered. He was 
 afraid to think what she would do to the Thropps. Her 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 first glance would turn them to icicles and her first word 
 would snap them to bits. 
 
 It is hard ^nough for any mother to receive the news 
 that her son is in love with any woman and wants to marry 
 her. Mrs. Dyckman must learn that her adored child 
 had transferred his loyalty to a foreigner, a girl she had 
 never seen, could not conceivably have selected, and could 
 never approve. Even the Prodigal Son, when he went 
 home, did not bring a wife with him. Ten to one if he 
 had brought one she would have got no veal or if she 
 got it she would not have cared for it. 
 
 Jim could not be blind even now in his alarm to Kedzie's 
 intense prettiness, but seeing her as through his mother's 
 eyes coldly, he saw for the first time the plebeiance of her 
 grace. 
 
 If she had been strong and rugged her commonness 
 would have had a certain vigor; but to be nearly refined 
 without being quite refined is as harrowing as singing 
 just a little off the key. To be far off the key is to be in 
 another key, but to smite at a note and muff it is excrucia 
 tion. Better far to drone middle C than to aim at high 
 C and miss it by a comma. 
 
 Yet Jim understood that he could not long prevent the 
 encounter of his wife and her relatives with his mother 
 and her relatives. He could not be so boorishly insolent 
 as to forbid the meeting, and he could not be so blind as. 
 to expect success. He got away at length on the pretext 
 of making arrangements with his mother, who was a very 
 busy woman, he said. Mrs. Thropp could not imagine 
 why a rich woman should be busy, but she held her whist. 
 
 Jim was glad to escape, even on so gruesome an errand, 
 and now when he kissed Kedzie good-by he had to kiss 
 momma as well. He would almost rather have kissed 
 poppa. 
 
 He entered his home in the late afternoon with the 
 reluctance of boyhood days when he had slunk back after 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 some misdemeanor. He loathed his mission and himself 
 and felt that he had earned a trouncing and a disinheri 
 tance. * 
 
 He found his mother and father in the library playing, 
 or rather fighting, a game of double Canfield. In the 
 excitement of the finish they were like frantic children, 
 tied in knots of hurry, squealing with emulation. The 
 cards were coming out right, and the speedier of the two 
 to play the last would score two hundred and fifty to the 
 other's nothing. 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman was the more agile in snatching up her 
 cards and placing them. Her eyes darted along the 
 stacks with certainty, and she came in first by a lead of 
 three cards. 
 
 Dyckman was puffing with exhaustion and pop-eyed 
 from the effort to look in seven directions at once. It 
 rendered him scarlet to be outrun by his wife, who was no 
 Atalanta to look at. Besides, she always crowed over him 
 insufferably when she won, and that was worse than the 
 winning. When Jim entered the room she was laughing 
 uproariously, pointing the finger of derision at her husband 
 and crying: 
 
 "Where did you get a reputation as a man of brains? 
 There must be an awful crowd of simpletons in Wall 
 Street." Then she caught sight of her son and beckoned 
 to him. ' ' Come in and hold your father's head, Jimsy." 
 
 "Please don't call me Jimsy!" Jim exploded, prema 
 turely. 
 
 His mother did not hear him, because his father exploded 
 at the same moment: 
 
 "Come in and teach your mother how to be a sport. 
 She won't play fair. She cheats all the time and has no 
 shame when she gets caught. When she loses she won't 
 pay, and when she wins she wants cash on the nail." 
 
 "Of course I do!" 
 
 "Why, there isn't a club in the country that wouldn't 
 expel you twice a week," 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Well, pay me what you owe me, before you die of 
 apoplexy." 
 
 "How much do I owe you?" 
 
 "Eight dollars and thirty-two cents." 
 
 "I do not! That's robbery. Look here: you omitted 
 my score twice and added your own up wrong." 
 
 "Did I really?". 
 
 "Do five and two make nine?" 
 
 "Don't they?" 
 
 "They do not!" 
 
 "Well, must you have hydrophobia about it? What 
 difference does it make?" 
 
 " It makes the difference that I only owe you three dol 
 lars and twenty-six cents." 
 
 "All right, pay it and simmer down. Isn't he wonder 
 ful, Jimsy? He just sent a check for ten thousand dollars 
 to the fund for blind French soldiers and then begrudges 
 his poor wife five dollars." 
 
 "But that's charity and this is cards: and it's humiliat 
 ing to think that you haven't learned addition yet." 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman winked at Jim and motioned him to sit 
 beside her. He could not help thinking of the humiliating 
 addition he was about to announce to the family. While 
 his father counted out the change with a miserly accuracy 
 he winked his off eye at Jim and growled, with a one-sided 
 smile : 
 
 "Where have you been for the past few days, and what 
 mischief have you been up to? You have a guilty face." 
 
 But Mrs. Dyckman threw her great arm about his 
 great shoulders, stared at him as she kissed him, and 
 murmured: " You don't look happy. What's wrong?" 
 
 Jim scraped his feet along the floor gawkily and mum 
 bled: "Well, I suppose I'd better tell you. I was going 
 to break it to you gently, but I don't know how." 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman took alarm at once. "Break it 
 gently? Bad news? Oh, Jim, you haven't gone and got 
 yourself engaged to some fool girl, have you? Not that?" 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Worse than that, mother!" 
 
 "Oh dear! what could be worse? Only one thing, 
 Jim! You haven't you haven't married a circus-rider 
 or a settlement-worker or anything like that, have you?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Lord! what a relief! I breathe again." 
 
 Jim fired off his secret without further delay. "I've 
 been married, though." 
 
 "Married? Already? Married to what? Anybody I 
 ver heard of?" 
 
 His mother was gasping in a dangerous approach to 
 heart failure. Jim protested. 
 
 "You never saw her, but she's a very nice girl. You'll 
 love her when you meet her." 
 
 Jim's father sputtered as he pulled himself out of his 
 -chair : ' ' Wha-what ' s this ? You you damned young cub ! 
 You why what who oh, you jackass! You big, 
 lumbering, brainless, heartless bonehead! Oh whew! 
 Look at your poor mother!" 
 
 Jim was frightened. She was pounding at her huge 
 breast with one hand and clutching her big throat with 
 another. Her husband whirled to a siphon, filled a glass 
 with vichy, and gave it to Jim to hold to her lips while he 
 ran to throw open a window. 
 
 Jim knelt by his mother and felt like Cain bringing home 
 the news of the first crime. Her son's remorse was the 
 first thing that Eve felt, no doubt; at least, it was the first 
 that Mrs. Dyckman understood when the paroxysm left 
 her. She felt so sorry for her lad that she could not 
 blame him. She blamed the woman, of course. She 
 cried awhile before she spoke; then she caressed Jim's 
 cheeks and blubbered: 
 
 " But we mustn't make too much of a fuss about a little 
 thing like a wedding. It's his first offense of the kind. 
 I suppose he fell into the trap of some little devil with a 
 pretty face. Poor innocent child, with no mother to 
 protect him!" 
 
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 "Poor innocent scoundrel!" old Dyckman snarled- 
 "He probably got her into trouble, and she played on his. 
 sympathy." 
 
 This was what Jim sorely needed, some unjust accusa 
 tion to spur him out of his shame. He sprang to his feet, 
 and confronted his father. 
 
 " Don't you dare say a word against my wife." 
 
 "Oh, look at him!" his father smiled. "He's grown 
 30 big he can lick his old dad. Well, let me tell you, my 
 young jackanapes, that if anybody has said anything, 
 against your wife it was you." 
 
 "What have I said?" 
 
 "You've said that you married her secretly. You've 
 not dared to let us see her first. You've not dared to 
 announce your engagement and take her to the church like 
 a gentleman. Why? Why? Answer me that, before 
 you grow so tall. And who is she, anyway? I hear that 
 you had a prize-fight with Peter Cheever and got expelled 
 from the club." 
 
 "When did you hear that?" 
 
 "It's all over town. What was the fight about? 
 Was he interested in this lady, too?" 
 
 One set of Jim's muscles leaped to the attack; another 
 set held them in restraint. 
 
 "Be careful, dad!" he groaned. "Peter Cheever never 
 met my wife." 
 
 "Well, then, what were you fighting him about?" 
 
 "That's my business." 
 
 "Well, it's my business, too, when I find the name of 
 my son posted for expulsion on the board of my pet club. 
 You used to be sweet on Cheever's wife. You weren't 
 fighting about her, were you?" 
 
 This chance hit jolted the bridegroom so perceptibly 
 that his father regretted having made it. He gasped: 
 
 ' ' Great Lord, but you're the busy young man ! Solomon 
 in all his glory " 
 
 "Let him alone now," Mrs. Dyckman broke in, "or 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 you'll have me on your hands." She needed only her 
 husband's hostility to inflame her in defense of her son. 
 "If he's married, he's married, and words won't divorce 
 him. We might as well make the best of it. I've no 
 doubt the girl is a darling, or Jim wouldn't have cared for 
 her. Would you, Jimsy?" 
 
 "Naturally not," Jim agreed, with a rather sickly 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 "Is she nice-looking?" 
 
 "She is famous for her beauty." 
 
 "Famous! Oh, Heavens! That sounds ominous. You 
 mean she's well known?" 
 
 "Very in certain circles." 
 
 "In certain circles!" Mrs. Dyckman was like a ter 
 rified echo. She had known of such appalling misalliances 
 that there was no telling how far her son might have 
 descended. 
 
 Old Dyckman snarled, " Do you mean that you've gone 
 slumming for a wife?" 
 
 Jim dared not answer this. His mother ignored it, too. 
 But her thoughts were in a panic. 
 
 "What circles is she famous in, your wife, for her 
 beauty?" 
 
 Jim could not achieve the awful word "movies" at the 
 moment. He prowled round it. 
 
 "In professional circles." 
 
 "Oh, an actress, then?" 
 
 "Well, sort of." 
 
 "They call everything an actress nowadays. She isn't 
 a a chorus-girl or a show-girl?" 
 
 "Lord, no!" His indignation was reassuring to a de 
 gree. 
 
 His father broke in again, "It might save a few hours 
 of dodging and cross-examination if you'd tell us who and 
 what she is." 
 
 "She is known professionally as Anita Adair." 
 
 So parochial a thing is fame that the title which millions 
 
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 of people had learned to know and love meant absolutely 
 nothing to the Dyckmans. They were so ignorant of the 
 new arts that even Mary Pickford meant hardly more to 
 them than Picasse or Matisse. 
 
 Jim brought out a photograph of Kedzie, a small 
 one that he carried in his pocket-book for company. 
 The problem of what she looked like distracted atten 
 tion for the moment from the problem of what she 
 did and was. 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman took the picture and perused it anx 
 iously. Her husband leaned over her shoulder and studied 
 it, too. He was mollified and won by the big, gentle eyes 
 and that bee-stung upper lip. He grumbled: 
 
 "Well, you're a good chooser for looks, anyway. 
 Sweet little thing." 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman examined the face more knowingly. 
 She saw in those big, innocent eyes a serene selfishness 
 and a kind of sweet ruthlessness. In the pouting lips she 
 saw discontent and a gift for wheedling. But all she said 
 was, "She's a darling." 
 
 Jim caught the knell-tone in her praise and feared that 
 Kedzie was dead to her already. He saw more elegy in 
 her sigh of resignation to fate and her resolution to take 
 up her cross the mother's cross of a pretty, selfish 
 daughter-in-law. 
 
 "You haven't told us yet how she won her fame, you 
 said." 
 
 And now Jim had to tell it. 
 
 "She has had great success in the the er pictures." 
 
 "She's a painter an illustrator?" 
 
 "No, she well you know, the moving pictures have 
 become very important; they're the fifth largest industry 
 in the world, I believe, and " 
 
 The silence of the parents was deafening. Their eyes 
 rolled together and clashed, as it were, like cannon-balls 
 meeting. Dyckman senior dropped back into his chair 
 and whistled "Whew!" Then he laughed a little: 
 29 449
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Well, I'm sure we should be proud of our alliance with 
 the fifth largest industry. The Dyckmans are coming up 
 in the world." 
 
 "Hush!" said Mrs. Dyckman. She was thinking of the 
 laugh that rival mothers would have on her. She was 
 thinking of the bitterness of her other children, of her 
 daughter who was a duchess in England, and of the 
 squirming of her relatives-in-law. But she was too fond 
 of her boy to mention her dreads. She passed on to the 
 next topic. 
 
 "Where are you living?" 
 
 "Nowhere yet," Jim confessed. "We just got in from 
 our er honeymoon this morning. We haven't decided 
 what to do." 
 
 Then Mrs. Dyckman took one of those heroic steps she 
 was capable of. 
 
 "You'd better bring her here." 
 
 " Oh no; she'd be in your way. She'd put you out." 
 
 "I hope not, not so soon," Mrs. Dyckman laughed, 
 dismally. "She'll probably not like us at all, but we can 
 start her off right. ' ' 
 
 "That's mighty white of you, mother." 
 
 "Did you expect me to be yellow?" 
 
 "No, but I thought you might be a little blue." 
 
 "If she'll make you happy I'll thank Heaven for her 
 every day and night of my life. So let's give her every 
 chance we can, and I hope she'll give us a chance." 
 
 Jim's arms were long enough to encircle her and hug 
 her tight. He whispered to her, "I never needed you 
 more, you God-blessed mother!" 
 
 Her tears streamed down her cheeks upon his lips, and 
 lie had a little taste of the bitterness of maternal love. 
 She felt better after she had cried a little, and she said, 
 with courage: 
 
 "Now we mustn't keep you away from her. If you 
 want me to, I'll go along with you and call on her and 
 extend a formal invitation."
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Jim could not permit his revered mother to make so 
 complete a submission as that. He shook his head: 
 
 "That won't be necessary. I'll go get Kedzie." 
 
 "Kedzie? I thought her name was Anita." 
 
 " That was her stage name her film name." 
 
 "Oh! And her name wasn't Adair, either, perhaps?" 
 
 "No, it was er Thropp!" 
 
 "Oh!" She wanted to say "What a pretty name!" to 
 make it easier for him, but she could not arrange the words 
 on her tongue. She asked, instead, " Is she American?" 
 
 "American? I should say so! Born in Missouri." 
 
 Another "Oh!" from the mother. 
 
 Jim swallowed a bit more of quinine and made his 
 escape, saying: 
 
 "You're as fine as they make 'em, mother. I won't be 
 gone long." 
 
 The father was so disgusted with the whole affair that 
 he could only save himself from breaking the furniture 
 by a sardonic taunt: 
 
 "Tell our daughter-in-law that if she wants to bring 
 along her camera she can have the ballroom for a studio. 
 We never use it, anyway." 
 
 "Shame on you!" his wife cried. "Don't mind him, 
 Jimsy." 
 
 " Jimsy" reminded Jim of Mrs. Thropp and his promise 
 to ask his mother to call on her. But he had confessed 
 all that he could endure. He was glad to get away with 
 out letting slip the fact that "Thropp" had changed to 
 ' ' Dyckman "via" Gilf oyle. ' ' 
 
 His mother called him back for another embrace and 
 then let him go. She had nowhere to turn for support but 
 to her raging husband, and she found herself crying her 
 eyes out in his arms. He had his own heartbreak and 
 pridebreak, but he was only a man and no sympathy need 
 be wasted on him. He wasted none on himself. He 
 laughed ruefully. 
 
 "You were saying, mother, only awhile ago that you.
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 wished he'd marry some nice girl. Well, he's married, and 
 we'll have to take what he brings us. But, oh, these 
 children, these damned children!" 
 
 A little later he was trying to brace himself and his wife 
 against the future. 
 
 "After all, marriage is only an infernal gamble. We 
 might have scoured the world and picked out an angel 
 for him, and she might have run off with the chauffeur the 
 second week. I guess I got the only real angel that's been 
 captured in the last fifty years. The boy may have stum 
 bled on a prize unbeknownst. We'll give the kid the 
 benefit of the doubt, anyway. Won't we?" 
 
 "Of course, dear, if she'll give us the same." 
 
 "Well, Jim said she came from Missouri. We've got 
 to show her." 
 
 "Ring for Wotton, will you?" 
 
 "What are you going to tell him?" 
 
 "The truth." 
 
 "Good Lord! Do you dare do that?" 
 
 "I don't dare not to. They'll find it out down-stairs 
 quickly enough in their own way." 
 
 "I see. You want to beat 'em to it." 
 
 "Exactly." 
 
 For years the American world had been discussing the 
 duty of parents to teach their children the things they 
 must inevitably learn in uglier and more perilous ways. 
 There were editorials on it, stories, poems, novels, number 
 less volumes. It even reached the stage. Mrs. Dyck- 
 man had left her own children to find things out for them 
 selves. It occurred to her that she should not make the 
 same mistake with the eager servants who gave the walls 
 ears and the keyholes eyes. 
 
 It was a ferocious test of her courage, but she knew that 
 she would have all possible help from Wotton. He had 
 not only been the head steward of the family ship in 
 countless storms, but he had an inherited knowledge of 
 the sufferings of homes. He had learned his profession 
 
 452
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 as page to his father, who had been a butler and the son of 
 a butler. 
 
 Wotton came in like a sweet old earl and waited while 
 Mrs. Dyckman gathered strength to say as offhandedly 
 as if she were merely announcing that Jim was arrested 
 for murder: 
 
 "Oh, Wotton, I wanted to tell you that Mr. James 
 Dyckman has just brought us the news of his marriage." 
 
 Wot ton's eyebrows went up and his hands sought each 
 other and whispered together as he faltered : 
 
 " Indeed, ma'am! That is a surprise, isn't it?" 
 
 "He has married a very brilliant young lady who has 
 had great success in ah in the ah moving pictures." 
 
 The old man gulped a moment, but finally got it down. 
 "The moving pictures! Indeed, ma'am! My wife and 
 I are very fond of the the movies, as the saying is." 
 
 "Everybody is, isn't they aren't they? Perhaps you 
 have seen Miss Anita Adair in the er pictures." 
 
 "Miss Anita Adair? Oh, I should say we 'ave! And 
 is she the young lady?" 
 
 "Yes. They are coming to live with us for a time." 
 
 "Oh, that will be very pleasant! Quite an honor, you 
 might say That will make two extra at dinner, then?" 
 
 "Yes. No that is, we were expecting Mr. and Mrs. 
 Schuyler, but I wish you would telephone them that I am 
 quite ill not very, you understand a bad cold, I think, 
 would be best. Something to keep me to my room for the 
 day." 
 
 "Very good, ma'am. Was there anything else?" 
 
 "No oh yes ask Mrs. Abby to have the Louis Seize 
 room made ready, will you?" 
 
 "Very good and some flowers, per'aps, I suppose." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Thank you." 
 
 He shuffled out, bowed under the weight of the calamity, 
 as if he had an invisible trunk on his back. He gathered 
 the servants in solemn conclave in their sitting-room and 
 
 453
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 delivered a funeral oration over young Mr. Jim. There 
 were tears in the eyes of the women-servants and curses 
 in the throats of the men. They all adored Mr. Jim, 
 and their recent pride in his triumph over Peter Cheever 
 was turned to ashes. He had married into the movies! 
 They supposed that he must have been drinkin' very 'ard. 
 Jim's valet said: 
 
 "This is as good as handin* me my notice." 
 But, then, Dallam was a ratty soul and was for desert 
 ing a sinking ship. Wotton and the others felt that their 
 loyalty was only now to be put to the test. They must 
 help the old folks through it. There was one ray of hope : 
 such marriages did not last long in America.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 JIM hastened to Kedzie, and she greeted him with 
 anxiety. She saw by his radiant face that he brought 
 cheerful news. 
 
 "I've seen mother," he exclaimed, "and she's tickled to 
 death with your picture. She wants to see you right 
 away. She wouldn't listen to anything but your coming 
 right over to live at our house till we decide what we want 
 to do." 
 
 Kedzie's heart turned a somersault of joy; then it 
 flopped. 
 
 "I've got no clothes fit for your house." 
 
 "Oh, Lord!" Jim groaned. "What do you think we 
 are, a continual reception? You can go out to-morrow 
 and shop all you want to." 
 
 "We-ell, all ri-ight," Kedzie pondered. 
 
 Jim was taken aback at her failure to glow with his suc 
 cess; and when she said, "I hate to leave momma and 
 poppa," he writhed. 
 
 He had neither the courage nor the inclination to invite 
 them to come along and make a jolly house-party. There 
 was room enough for a dozen Thropps in the big house, 
 but he doubted if there were room in his mother's heart 
 for three Thropps at a time, or for the elder Thropps at 
 any time. After all, his mother had some rights. He 
 protected them by lying glibly. 
 
 "My mother sent you her compliments, Mrs. Thropp, 
 and said she would call on you as soon as she could. 
 She's very busy, you know as I told you. Well, come 
 
 455
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 along, Kedzie. I'd like to have you home in time for 
 dinner." 
 
 "You dress for dinner, I suppose." 
 
 "Well, usually yes." 
 
 ' 'But I haven't " 
 
 "If you dare say it, I'll murder you. What do they 
 Care what you've got on? They want to meet you, not 
 your clothes." 
 
 She saw that he was in no mood to be trifled with; so 
 she delayed only long enough to fling into a small trunk 
 a few of her best duds. She remembered with sudden 
 joy that Ferriday had made her a gift of one or two of the 
 gowns Lady Powell-Carewe had designed for her camera- 
 appearances, and she took them along for her debut into 
 the topmost world. Jim arranged by telephone for the 
 transportation of her luggage, and they set out on their 
 new and hazardous journey. 
 
 Kedzie bade her mother and father a farewell implying 
 a beautiful distress at parting. She thought it looked well, 
 and she felt that she owed to her mother her present 
 splendor. She was horribly afraid, too, of the ordeal 
 ahead of her. She was, indeed, approaching one of the 
 most terrifying of duels: the first meeting of a mother and 
 a wife. 
 
 Kedzie was not half so afraid as the elder Dyckmans 
 were; for she had her youth and her beauty, and they were 
 only a plain, fat old rich couple whose last remaining son 
 had been stolen from them by a stranger who might take 
 him from them altogether or fling him back at their feet 
 with a ruined heart. 
 
 In her moving pictures Kedzie had played the million 
 airess many a time, had driven up in state to mansions, 
 . and been admitted by moving-picture butlers with frozen 
 faces and only three or four working joints. She had 
 played the millionairess in boudoir and banquet -hall ; she 
 had been loved by nice princes and had foiled wicked 
 barons. She had known valets and grooms and footmen 
 
 456
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 familiarly; but they had all been moving-picture people, 
 actors like herself. 
 
 As the motor approached the Dyckman palace she 
 recalled what Ferriday had told her about how different 
 real life in millionairedom was from studio luxury, and 
 she almost wished she had stayed married to Tommie 
 Gilfoyle. 
 
 In her terror she seized the usual armor that terror 
 assumes bluff. It would have been far better for her and 
 everybody if she had entered meekly into the presence 
 of the very human old couple at her approach, and had 
 said to them, not in so many words, but at least by her 
 simple manner: 
 
 "I did not select my birthplace or my parents, my soul 
 or my body or my environment. I am not ashamed of 
 them, but I want to make the best of them. I am a new 
 comer in your world and I am only here because your son 
 happened to meet me and liked me and asked me to marry 
 him. So excuse me if I am frightened and ill at ease. I 
 don't want to take him away from you, but I want to love 
 you as he does and have you love me as he does. So help 
 me with your wisdom." 
 
 If she had brought such a message or implied it she 
 would have walked right into the living-room of the 
 parental hearts. But poor Kedzie lacked the genius and 
 the inspiration of simplicity and frankness, and she 
 marched up the steps in a panic which she disguised all 
 too well in a pretense of scorn that proclaimed: 
 
 "I am as good as you are. I have been in dozens of 
 finer homes than this. You can't teach me anything, you 
 old snobs. I've got your son, and you'd better mind your 
 p's and q's." 
 
 Wotton opened the door and put on as much of a 
 wedding face as he could. Jim saw that the old man was 
 informed, and he said: 
 
 "This is Wotton, my dear. He's the real head of the 
 house." 
 
 457
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie might better have shaken hands with him than 
 have given him the curt nod she begrudged him. She 
 looked past him to see Mrs. Dyckman, in whose arms she 
 found herself smothered. Mrs. Dyckman, in her bride- 
 fright, had rather rushed the situation. 
 
 Kedzie hardly knew what to do. She was overawed by 
 the very bulk as well as the prestige of her mother-in-law. 
 She did not quite dare to embrace Mrs. Dyckman, and 
 she could think of nothing at all to say. 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman was impressed with Kedzie's beauty 
 and paid it immediate tribute. 
 
 "Oh, but you are an exquisite thing! No wonder our 
 boy is mad about you." 
 
 Kedzie's heart pranced at this, and she barely checked 
 the giggle of triumph that bounded in her throat. But the 
 only thing she could think of was what she dared not say : 
 "So you're the famous Mrs. Dyckman! Why, you're 
 fatter than momma." She said nothing, but wore one of 
 her most popular smiles, that look of wistful sweetness 
 that had melted countless of her movie worshipers. 
 
 She was caught from Mrs. Dyckman's shadow by 
 Jim's father, who said, "Don't I get a kiss?" and took one. 
 Kedzie returned this kiss and found the old gentleman 
 very handsome, not in the least like her father. Brides 
 almost always get along beautifully with- fathers-in-law. 
 And so do sons-in-law. Women will learn how to get 
 along together better as soon as it ceases to be so im 
 portant to them how they get along together. 
 
 After the thrill of the first collision the four stood in 
 silenced embarrassment till Jim, eager to escape, said: 
 
 "What room do we get?" 
 
 "Cicely's, if you like," his mother answered. 
 
 Jim was pleased. Cicely was the duchess of the family, 
 and she and her duke had occupied that room before they 
 went to England. Cicely was a war nurse now, bedab 
 bled in gore, and her husband was a mud-daubed major 
 in the trenches along the Somme. Jim saw that his 
 
 458
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 mother was making no stint of her hospitality, and he was 
 grateful. 
 
 He dragged Kedzie away. She was trying to take in the 
 splendor of the house without seeming to, and she went 
 up the stairway with her eyes rolling frantically. 
 
 In the Academy at Venice is that famous picture of 
 Titian's representing the little Virgin climbing up the 
 steps of the Temple, a pathetic, frightened figure bearing 
 no trace of the supreme radiance that was to be hers. 
 There was something of the same religious awe in Kedzie's 
 heart as she mounted the steps of the house that was a 
 temple in her religion. She was going up to her heaven 
 already. It was perfection because it was the next thing. 
 
 When Kedzie reaches the scriptural heaven, if she does 
 (and it will be 'hard for Anybody to deny her anything 
 that she sets her heart on) , she will be happy till she gets 
 there and finds that she is only in the first of the seven 
 heavens. But what will the poor girl do when she goes 
 on up and up and up and learns at last that there is no 
 eighth? She will weep like another Alexander the Great, 
 because there are no more heavens to hope for. 
 
 Jim led her into the best room there was up-stairs, and 
 told her that a duke had slept there. At first she was 
 thrilled through. Later it would occur to her, not tragi 
 cally, yet a bit quellingly, that, after all, she had not 
 married a duke herself, but only a commoner. She had as 
 much right to a title as any other American girl. A 
 foreign title is part of a Yankee woman's birthright. 
 Hundreds of women had acquired theirs. Kedzie got only 
 a plain "Mr." 
 
 Still, she told herself that she must not be too critical, 
 and she let her enthusiasm fly. She did not have to pose 
 before Jim, and she ran about the suite as about a garden.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 smitten with two facts: the canopied bed 
 was raised on a platform, and the marble bath-tub 
 was sunk in the floor. She sat on the bed and bounced 
 up and down on the springs. She stared up at the tas- 
 seled baldachin with its furled draperies, and fingered the 
 lace covering and the silken comforter. 
 
 She sat in the best chairs, studied the dressing-table 
 with its royal equipment. She went to the window and 
 gazed out into Fifth Avenue, reviewing its slow-flowing 
 lava of humanity young royalty overlooking her subjects. 
 
 Mrs. Abby, the housekeeper, knocked and came in to be 
 presented to the new Princess of Wales, and to present 
 the personal maid who had been assigned to her. Even 
 Mrs. Dyckman was afraid of Mrs. Abby, who lacked the 
 suavities of Wotton. Mrs. Abby gave Kedzie the chill of 
 her life, and Kedzie responded with an ardent hatred. 
 
 The maid, a young Frenchwoman, found her black 
 dress with its black silk apron an appropriate uniform, 
 since her father, three brothers, a dozen cousins, and two 
 or three of her sweethearts were at the wars. Some of 
 them were dead, she knew, and the others were on their 
 way along the red stream that was bleeding France white, 
 according to German hopes. 
 
 Liliane, being a foreigner, saw in Kedzie the pathos of 
 the alien, and with the unequaled democracy of the French, 
 forgave her her plebeiance for that sake. She welcomed 
 Kedzie' s beauty, too, and regarded her as a doll of the 
 finest ware, whom it would be fascinating to dress up. 
 Kedzie and Liliane would prosper famously. 
 
 460
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Liliane resolved that when Kedzie appeared at dinner 
 she should reflect credit not only on "Monsieur Zheem, " 
 but on Liliane as well. When Kedzie's trunk arrived and 
 Liliane drew forth the confections of Lady Powell-Carewe 
 she knew that she had all the necessary weapons for a 
 sensation. 
 
 Kedzie felt more aristocracy in being fluttered over by 
 a French maid with an accent than in anything she had 
 encountered yet. Liliane's phrase "Eef madame pair- 
 meet" was a constant tribute to her distinction. 
 
 Jim retired to his own dressing-room and faced the 
 veiled contempt of his valet, leaving Kedzie to the minis 
 trations of Liliane, who drew the tub and saw that it 
 was just hot enough, sprinkled the aromatic bath-salts, 
 and laid out the towels and Kedzie's things. 
 
 Women are born linen-lovers, and Kedzie was not 
 ashamed to have even a millionaire maid see the things 
 she wore next to her skin, and Liliane was delighted to 
 find "by this secret wardrobe that her new mistress was 
 beautifully equipped. 
 
 She waited outside the door till Kedzie had stepped from 
 the fragrant pool then came in to aid in the harness 
 ing. She saw nothing but the successive garments and 
 had those ready magically. She laced the stays and slid 
 the stockings on and locked the garters and set the 
 slippers in place. She was miraculously deft with Ked 
 zie's hair, and her suggestions were the last word in tact. 
 Then she fetched the dinner-gown, floated it about Kedzie 
 as delicately as if it were a ring of smoke, hooked it, 
 snapped it, and murmured little compliments that were 
 more tonic than cocktails. 
 
 When Jim came in he was struck aglow by Kedzie's 
 comeliness and by a certain authority she had. Liliane 
 pointed to her, as an artist might point to a canvas 
 with which he has had success, and demanded his ad 
 miration. His eyes paid the tribute his lips stammered 
 over. 
 
 461
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie was incandescent with her triumph, and she 
 went down the stairway to collect her dues. 
 
 Her parents-in-law were waiting, and she could see how 
 tremendously they were impressed and relieved by her 
 grace. What did it matter who she was or whence she 
 came? She was as irresistible as some haunting phrase 
 from a folk-song, its authorship unknown and unimportant, 
 its perfection inspired. 
 
 Kedzie floated into the dining-room and passed the 
 gantlet of the servants. Ignoring them haughtily, she 
 did not ignore the sudden change of their scorn to homage. 
 Nothing was said or done; yet the air was full of her vic 
 tory. Much was forgiven her for her beauty, and she for 
 gave the whole household much because of its surrender. 
 
 It was a family dinner and not elaborate. Mr. and 
 Mrs. Dyckman had arrived at the stage when nearly every 
 thing they liked to eat or drink was forbidden to them. 
 Jim had an athlete's appetite for simples, and Kedzie had 
 an actress' dread of fattening things and sweets. There 
 was a procession of dishes submitted to her inspection, but 
 seeing them refused first by Mrs. Dyckman, she declined 
 most of them in her turn. 
 
 Kedzie had been afraid that she would blunder in choice 
 among a long array of forks, but she escaped the test, since 
 each course was accompanied by the tools to eat it with. 
 There was a little champagne to toast the bride in. 
 
 She found the grandeur of the room belittling to the 
 small party at table. There were brave efforts to make 
 her feel at home and brief sallies of high spirits, but there 
 was no real gaiety. How could there be, when there was 
 no possible congeniality? The elder couple had lived in a 
 world unknown to Kedzie. Their son had dazed them by 
 his sudden return with a strange captive from beyond the 
 pale. She. was a pretty barbarian, but a barbarian she 
 was, and no mistake. She was not so barbaric as they had 
 feared, but they knew nothing of her past or of her. 
 
 It is not good manners to deal in personal questions; 
 
 462
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 yet how else could such strangers come to know one 
 another? The Dyckmans were afraid to quiz her about 
 herself, and she dared not cross-examine them. They had 
 no common acquaintances or experiences to talk over. 
 The presence of the servants was depressing, and when 
 the long meal was over and the four Dyckmans were alone 
 in the drawing-room, they were less at ease than before. 
 They had not even knives and forks to play with. 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman said at length, "Are you going to the 
 theater, do you think?" 
 
 Jim did not care or dare to take his bride abroad 
 just yet. He shook his head. Mrs. Dyckman tried 
 again: 
 
 "Does your wife play or sing, perhaps?" 
 
 "No, thank you," said Kedzie, and sank again. 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman was about to ask if she cared for cards, 
 but she was afraid that she might say yes. She grew so 
 desperate at last that she made a cowardly escape : 
 
 "I think we old people owe it to you youngsters to 
 leave you alone." She caught up her husband with a 
 glance like a clutching hand, and he made haste to follow 
 her into the library. 
 
 Jim and Kedzie looked at each other sheepishly. Ked 
 zie was taking her initiation into the appalling boredom 
 that can close down in a black fog on the homes and souls 
 of the very wealthy. She was astounded and terrified to 
 realize that there is no essential delight attending the 
 possession of vast means. Later she was to find herself 
 often one of large and glittering companies where nothing 
 imaginable was lacking to make one happy except the 
 power to be happy. She would go to dinners where an 
 acute melancholia seemed to poison the food, where people 
 of the widest travel and unfettered opportunities could 
 find nothing to say to one another. 
 
 If she had loved Jim more truly, or he her, they could 
 have been blissful in spite of their lack of hardships; 
 but the excitement of flirtation had gone out of their 
 
 463
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 lives. There seemed to be nothing more to be afraid of 
 except unhappiness. There seemed to be nothing to be 
 excited about at all. Time would soon provide them 
 with wild anxieties, but he withheld his hand for the 
 moment. 
 
 Jim saw that Kedzie was growing restless. He dragged 
 himself from his chair and clasped her in his arms, but the 
 element of pity in his deed took all the fire out of it. He 
 led her about the house and showed her the pictures in 
 the art gallery, but she knew nothing about painters or 
 paintings, and once around the gallery finished that room 
 for her forever. There were treasures in the library to 
 fascinate a bibliophile for years, but Kedzie knew nothing 
 and cared less about books as books: and a glance into 
 the somber chamber where the old people played cards 
 listlessly drove her from that door. 
 
 The dinner had begun at eight and finished at half 
 past nine. It was ten o'clock now, and too late to go to 
 the theater. The opera season was over. There would 
 be the dancing-places, but neither of the two felt vivacity 
 enough for dancing or watching others dance. 
 
 For lack of anything better, Jim proposed a drive. He 
 was mad for air and exercise. He would have preferred 
 a long walk, and so would Kedzie, but she could not have 
 walked far without changing her costume and her slippers. 
 
 She was glad of the chance to escape from the house. 
 Jim rang for Wotton and asked to have a car brought 
 round. They put on light wraps and went down the 
 steps to the limousine. 
 
 The A^fcenue was lonely and the Park was lonelier. 
 And, strangely, now that they were together in the dark 
 they felt happier; they drew more closely together. 
 They were common people now, and they had moonlight 
 and stars, a breeze and a shadowy landscape ; they shared 
 them with the multitude, and they were happy for a while. 
 
 Something in Kedzie's heart whispered: "What's the 
 use of being rich? What's the good of living in a palace 
 
 464
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 with a gang of servants hanging over your snoulder? 
 Happiness evidently doesn't come from ordering whatever 
 you want, for by the time somebody brings it to you 
 you don't want it any longer. Happiness must be the 
 going after something yourself and being anxious about 
 it." 
 
 If she had listened to that airy whisperer she might 
 have had an inkling of a truth. But she dismissed 
 philosophy as something stupid. She turned into Jim's 
 arms like a child afraid and clung to him, moaning : 
 
 "Jim, what do I want? Tell me. I'm bluer than 'blue, 
 and I don't know why." 
 
 This was sufficiently discouraging for Jim. He had 
 given the petulant child the half of his kingdom, and she 
 was blue. If anything could have made him bluer than 
 he was it would have been this proclamation of his failure. 
 He had done the honorable thing, and it had profited 
 nobody. 
 
 He petted her as one pets a spoiled and fretful child 
 at the end of a long, long rainy day, with a rainy to-morrow 
 ahead. 
 
 When they returned home the coziness of their hour 
 together was lost. The big mansion was as cozy as a 
 court-house. It no longer had even novelty. Climbing 
 the steps had no further mystery than the Louvre has to 
 an American tourist who has promenaded through it once. 
 
 Her room was brilliant and beautiful, but the things she 
 liked about it most were the homely, comfortable touches : 
 her bedroom slippers by her chair, her nightgown laid 
 across her pillow, and the turned-down covers of the bed. 
 
 Liliane knocked and came in, and Jim retreated. It 
 was pleasant for the indolent Kedzie to have the harness 
 taken from her. She yawned and stretched and rubbed 
 her sides when her corsets were off, and when her things 
 were whisked from sight and she was only Kedzie Thropp 
 alone in a nightgown she was more nearly glad than she 
 had been for ever so long. 
 
 465
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She flung her hair loose and ran about the room. She 
 sang grotesquely as she brushed her teeth and scumbled 
 her face with cold-cream, rubbed it in and rubbed it out 
 again. She was so glad to be a mere girl in her own flesh 
 and not much else that she went about the room crooning 
 to herself. She peeked out of the window at the Avenue, 
 as quiet as a country lane at this hour, save for the motors 
 that slid by as on skees and the jog-trot of an occasional 
 hansom-horse. 
 
 She was crooning when she turned to see her husband 
 come - in in a great bath-robe; he might have been a 
 solemn monk, save for the big cigar he smoked. 
 
 He was so dour that she laughed and ran to him and 
 flung him into a chair and clambered into his lap and 
 throttled him in her arms, crying: 
 
 "Oh, Jim, I am happy. I love you and you love me. 
 Don't we? Say we do!" 
 
 "Of course we do," he laughed, not quite convinced. 
 
 He could not resist her beauty, her warmth, her in- 
 gratiation. But somehow he could not love her soul. 
 
 He had refused to make her his mistress before they 
 were married. Now that they were married, that was all 
 he could make of her. Their life together was thence 
 forward the life of such a pair. He squandered money on 
 her and let her squander it on herself. They had ferocious 
 quarrels and ferocious reconciliations, periods of mutual 
 aversion and tempests of erotic extravagance, excursions 
 of hilarious good-fellowship, hours of appalling boredom. 
 
 But there was a curious dishonesty about their relation : 
 it was an intrigue, not a communion. They were never 
 closer to each other than a reckless flirtation. Some 
 times that seemed to be enough for Kedzie. Sometimes 
 she seemed to flounder in an abyss of gloomy discontent. 
 
 But sleep was sweet for her that first night in the bed 
 where the duchess had lain. She had an odd dream that 
 she also became a duchess. Her dreams had a way of 
 coming true. 
 
 466
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 SO there lay Kedzie Thropp of Nimrim, Missouri, 
 the Girl Who Had Never Had Anything. At her 
 side was the Man Who Had Always Had Everything. 
 Under this canopy a duke and duchess had lain. 
 
 There was an element of faery in it; yet far stranger 
 things have happened and will happen anew. 
 
 There was once a Catholic peasant of Lithuania who 
 died of the plague, leaving a baby named Martha Skov- 
 ronsky. A Protestant preacher adopted the waif, and 
 while she was yet a girl got rid of her by marrying her to 
 a common Swedish soldier, a sergeant. The Russians 
 bombarded the town; the Swedes fled; and a Russian 
 soldier captured the deserted wife in the ruins of the city. 
 He passed her on to his marshal. The marshal sold her 
 as a kind of white slave to a prince ; the prince took her to 
 Russia as his concubine. Being of a liberal disposition, 
 he shared her capacious heart with the young czar, who 
 happened to be married. Martha Skovronsky bore him a 
 daughter and won his heart for keeps. He had her 
 baptized in the Russian Church as Catherine. He 
 divorced his czaritza that he might marry the foundling. 
 He set on his bride's head the imperial crown studded with 
 twenty-five hundred gems. She became the Empress 
 Catherine I. of Russia and went to the wars with her 
 husband, Peter the Great, saved him from surrendering 
 to the Turks, and made a success of a great defeat for him. 
 
 He loved her so well that when she was accused of 
 flirting with another man he had the gentleman decapi 
 tated and his head preserved in a jar of alcohol as a mantel 
 
 467
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 ornament for Catherine's room. When he died she reigned 
 in his stead, recalling to her side as a favorite the prince 
 who had purchased her when she was a captive. 
 
 Alongside such a fantastic history, the rise of Kedzie 
 Thropp was petty enough. It did not even compare with 
 the rocket-flight of that Theodosia who danced naked 
 in a vile theater in Byzantium and later became the 
 empress of the great Justinian. 
 
 Kedzie had never done anything very immoral. She 
 had been a trifle immodest, according to strict standards, 
 when she danced the Grecian dances. She had been 
 selfish and hard-hearted, but she had never sold her body. 
 And there is no sillier lie, as there is no commoner lie, 
 than the trite old fallacy of the popular novels, sermons, 
 editorials, and other works of fiction that women suc 
 ceed by selling their bodies. It is one of the best ways 
 a girl can find for going bankrupt, and it leads oftener to 
 the dark streets than to the bright palaces. 
 
 The credit for Kedzie's staying virtuous, as the word is 
 used, was not entirely hers. Probably if all the truth were 
 known women are no oftener seduced than seducing. 
 Kedzie might have gone wrong half a dozen times at least 
 if she had not somehow inspired in the men she met a 
 livelier sense of protection than of spoliation. She hap 
 pened not to be a frenzied voluptuary, as are so many of 
 the lost, who are victims of their own physiological or 
 pathological estates before they make fellow-victims of 
 the men they encounter. 
 
 The trick of success for a woman who has no other 
 stock in trade than her charm is to awaken the chivalry 
 of men, to promise but not relinquish the last favors till 
 the last tributes are paid. 
 
 Meanwhile the old world is rolling into the daylight 
 when women will sell their wits instead of their embraces, 
 and when there will be no more compulsion for a woman to 
 rent her body to pay her house rent than for men to do the 
 same. The pity of it is that these great purifying, equaliz- 
 
 468
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 ing, freedom-spreading revolutions are gaining more oppo 
 sition than help from the religious and the conservative. 
 
 In any case Kedzie Thropp, who slept under a park 
 bench when first she came to town, found the city honor 
 able, merciful, generous, as most girls do who have graces 
 to sell and sense enough to set a high price on them. 
 
 And so Kedzie was sheltered and passed on upward 
 by Skip Magruder the lunch-room waiter, and by Mr. 
 Kalteyer the chewing-gum purveyor, by Eben E. Kiam 
 the commercial photographer, by Thomas Gilfoyle the 
 advertising bard, by Ferriday the motion-picture director, 
 on up and up to Jim Dyckman. Every man gave her the 
 best help he could. And even the women she met uncon 
 sciously assisted her skyward. 
 
 But there is always more sky above, and Kedzie's motto 
 was a relentless Excelsior! She spurned backward the 
 ladders she rose by, and it was her misfortune (which 
 made her fortune) that whatever rung she stood on hurt 
 her pretty, restless feet. It was inevitable that when at 
 last she was bedded in the best bed in one of America's 
 most splendid homes, she should fall a-dreaming of 
 foreign splendors beyond the Yankee sky. 
 
 On the second morning of her honeymoon, when Kedzie 
 woke to find that she was no duchess, but a plain American 
 " Mrs." that disappointment colored her second impression 
 of the Dyckman mansion. 
 
 She had her breakfast in bed. But she had enjoyed 
 that dubious luxury in her own flat. Many poor and 
 lazy and sick people had the same privilege. The things 
 she had to eat were exquisitely cooked and served, when 
 Liliane took them from the footman at the door and 
 brought them to the bedside. 
 
 But, after all, there is not much difference between the 
 breakfasts of the rich and of the poor. There cannot be : 
 one kind of fruit, a cereal, an egg or two, some coffee, 
 and some bread are about all that it is safe to put into the 
 morning stomach. Her plutocratic father-in-law was not 
 
 469
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 permitted to have even that much, and her mother-in-law, 
 who was one of the converts to Vance Thompson's Eat 
 and Grow Thin scriptures, had almost none at all. 
 
 Busy and anxious days followed that morning. There 
 was a great amount of shopping to do. There were the 
 wedding-announcement cards to order and the list of 
 recipients to go over with Mrs. Dyckman's secretary. 
 There was a secretary to hire for Kedzie, and it was no 
 easy matter for Kedzie to put herself into the woman's 
 hands without debasing her pride too utterly. 
 
 There was the problem of dinners to relatives, a recep 
 tion to guests for the proper exploitation of the new Mrs. 
 Dyckman. There was the embarrassment of meeting peo 
 ple who brought their prejudices with their visiting-cards 
 and did not leave their prejudices as they did their cards. 
 
 The newspapers had to have their say, and they did not 
 make pleasant reading to any of the Dyckmans. Kedzie 
 took a little comfort from reading what the papers had 
 to say about Mrs. Cheever's divorce, but she found that 
 Jim was unresponsive to her gibes. This did not sweeten 
 her heart toward Charity. 
 
 Kedzie was hungry for friends and playmates, but she 
 could not find them among the new acquaintances she 
 made. She saw curiosity in all their eyes, patronage in 
 those who were cordial, and insult in those who were not 
 effusive. She got along famously with the men, but their 
 manner was not quite satisfactory, either. There was a 
 corrosive something in their flattery, a menace in their 
 approach. 
 
 There were the horrible experiences when Mrs. Dyck 
 man called on Mrs. Thropp and the worse burlesque when 
 Mrs. Thropp called on Mrs. Dyckman. The servants had 
 a glorious time over it, and Kedzie overheard Mrs. Dyck 
 man's report of the ordeal to her husband. She was 
 angry at Mrs. Dyckman, but angrier still at her mother. 
 
 Kedzie' s father and mother were an increasing annoy 
 ance to Kedzie' s pride and her peace. They wanted to 
 
 470
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 get out to Nimrim and make a triumph through the vil 
 lage. And Jim and Kedzie were glad to pay the freight. 
 But once the Thropps had gloated they were anxious to 
 get back again to the flesh-pots of New York. 
 
 The financing of the old couple was embarrassing. It 
 did not look right to Kedzie to have the father and mother 
 of Mrs. Dyckman a couple of shabby, poor relations, and 
 Kedzie called it shameful that her father, who was a kind 
 of father-in-law-in-law to the duchess, should earn a 
 pittance as a claim-agent in the matter of damaged pigs 
 and things. 
 
 Jim, like all millionaires, had dozens of poor relations 
 and felt neither the right nor the obligation to enrich them 
 all. There is no gesture that grows tiresome quicker than 
 the gesture of shoving the hand into the cash-pocket, 
 bringing it up full and emptying it. There is no more 
 painful disease than money-spender's cramp. 
 
 Kedzie learned, too, that to assure her father and mother 
 even so poor an income as five thousand dollars a year 
 would require the setting aside of a hundred thousand 
 dollars at least in gilt-edged securities. She began to 
 have places where she could put a hundred thousand 
 dollars herself. On her neck was one place, for she saw a 
 woman with a dog-collar of that price, and it made 
 Kedzie feel absolutely nude in contrast. She met old 
 Mrs. Noxon with her infamously costly stomacher on, and 
 Kedzie cried that night because she could not have one 
 for her own midriff. 
 
 Jim growled, "When you get a stomach as big as 
 Mrs. Noxon's you can put a lamp-post on it." 
 
 She said he was indecent, and a miser besides. 
 
 Meanwhile her own brothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts 
 were calling her a miser, a snob, a brute. The whole 
 family wanted to move to New York and make a house- 
 party. They had every right to, too, for did not the 
 Declaration of Independence make all Americans equal? 
 
 Relatives whom Kedzie had never heard of and relatives
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 whom she knew all too well turned up in New York with 
 schemes for extracting money from the Dyckman hoard. 
 Kedzie grew nearly wroth enough to stand at the window 
 and empty things on them as they dared to climb the 
 noble steps with their ignoble impertinences. 
 
 When she was not repelling repulsive relatives Kedzie 
 was trying to dodge old acquaintances. It seemed that 
 everybody she had ever met had learned of her rise in the 
 world. Her old landladies wrote whining letters. Moving- 
 picture people out of a job asked her for temporary loans. 
 
 But the worst trial came one day when she was present 
 at a committee meeting for a war-relief benefit and that 
 fiend of a Pet Bettany proposed that one of the numbers 
 should be Miss Silsby's troupe of Greek dancers. She 
 asked if anybody had any objections, and when nobody 
 spoke she turned to Kedzie and dared to ask her if she had 
 ever seen the dancers. 
 
 "Not recently," Kedzie mumbled, while her very legs 
 blushed under their stockings, remembering how bare they 
 had been in the old days when she was one of the Silsby 
 slaves. 
 
 All the other women simmered pleasantly in the un 
 comfortable situation till Mrs. Charity Cheever, who 
 chanced to be there, came to the rescue amazingly by 
 turning the tables on the Bettany creature : 
 
 "Anybody who ever saw you in a bathing-suit, Pet, 
 would know that there were two good reasons why you 
 were never one of the Silsbies." 
 
 Charity could be cruel to be kind. Everybody roared 
 at Pet, whose crooked shanks had kept her modest from 
 the knees down, at least. Kedzie wanted to kiss Charity, 
 but she suffered too much from the reminder of her past. 
 
 She fiercely wanted to have been born of an aristocratic 
 family. Of all the vain wishes, the retroactive pluperfect 
 are the vainest, and an antenatal wish is sublimely ridicu 
 lous. But Kedzie wished it. This was one of the wishes 
 she did not get. 
 
 472
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 MRS. KEDZIE DYCKMAN received many jars of 
 ointment, but her pretty eyes found a fly in every 
 one. She that should have gone about boasting, " I came 
 from a village and slept under a park bench, and now look 
 at me!" was slinking about, wishing that she could rather 
 say: "Oh, see my wonderful ancestors! Without them 
 you could not see me at all." 
 
 Kedzie had her picture printed at last in the "Social 
 World" departments of the newspapers. She had full- 
 page portraits of herself by the mystic Dr. Arnold Genthe 
 and by other camera-masters printed in Town and Country 
 and The Spur, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper's Bazar. 
 But some cursed spite half the time led to the statement 
 under her picture that she had been in the movies. No 
 adjectives of praise could sweeten that. Small wonder she 
 pouted! 
 
 And she found the competition ' terrific. She had 
 thought that when she got into the upper world she would 
 be on a sparsely populated plateau. But she said to Jim : 
 
 " Good Lord! this is a merry-go-round! It's so crowded 
 everybody is falling off." 
 
 The most "exclusive" restaurants were packed like 
 "bargain-counters. She went to highly advertised balls 
 where there were so many people that the crowd simply 
 oozed and the effort to dance or to eat was a struggle 
 for life. 
 
 New York's four hundred families had swollen, it 
 seemed, to four hundred thousand, and the journals of 
 society published countless pictures of the aristocratic 
 
 473
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 sets of everywhere else. There were aristocrats of the 
 Long Island sets a dozen sets for one small island the 
 Berkshire set, the Back Bay set, the Rhode Island reds, 
 the Plymouth Rock fowl, the old Connecticut connections, 
 the Bar Harbor oligarchy, the Tuxedonians, the Morris- 
 town and Germantown noblesse, the pride of Philadelphia, 
 the Baltimorioles, the diplomatic cliques of Washington, 
 the Virginia patricians, the Piedmont Hunt set, the North 
 Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and all the 
 other State sets, the Cleveland coteries, the Chicagocracy, 
 the St. Louis and New Orleans and San Francisco 
 optimates. 
 
 Exclusiveness was a joke. And yet Kedzie felt lonely 
 and afraid. She had too many rivals. There were young 
 girls in myriads, beauties by the drove, sirens in herds, 
 millionaires in packs. The country was so prosperous 
 with the privilege of selling Europe the weapons of suicide 
 that the vast destructiveness of the German submarines 
 was a bagatelle. 
 
 There was a curious mixture of stupendous Samar- 
 itanism and tremendous indifference. Millions were 
 poured into charities and millions were squandered on 
 dissipation. 
 
 Kedzie' s funds were drawn away astoundingly faster 
 than even Dyckman could replenish them. Hideous ac 
 counts of starving legions were brandished before the eyes 
 of all Americans. Every day Kedzie' s mail contained cir 
 culars about blind soldiers, orphan-throngs, bread-lines in 
 every nation at war. There were hellish chronicles of 
 Armenian women and children driven like cattle from 
 desert to desert, outraged and flogged and starved by the 
 thousand. 
 
 The imagination gave up the task. The miseries of 
 the earth were more numerous than the sands, and the eyes 
 came to regard them as impassively as one looks at the 
 night sky without pausing to count the flakes in that snow 
 storm of stars. One says, "It is a nice night." One said, 
 
 474
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "These are terrible times." Then one said, " May I have 
 the next dance?" or, "Isn't supper ready yet?" 
 
 Kedzie tried for a while to lift herself from the common 
 ruck of the aristocracy by outshining the others in charities 1 
 and in splendors. She soon grew weary of the everlasting 
 appeals for money to send to Europe. She grew weary 
 of writing checks and putting on costumes for bazaars, 
 spectacles, parades, and carnivals. She found herself cir 
 cumscribed by so much altruism. Her benevolences left 
 her too little for her magnificences. 
 
 She grew frantic for more fun and more personal glory. 
 The extravagance of other women dazed her. Some of 
 them had inexhaustible resources. Some of them were 
 bankrupting their own boodle-bag husbands. Some of 
 them nourished ingeniously by running up bills and never 
 running them down. 
 
 The competition was merciless. She kept turning to 
 Jim for money. He grew less and less gracious, because 
 her extravagances were more and more selfish. He grew 
 lees and less superior to complaints. He started bank- 
 accounts to get rid of her, but she got rid of them with a 
 speed that frightened him. He hated to be used. 
 
 Kedzie took umbrage at Mrs. Dyckman's manner. 
 Mrs. Dyckman tried for a while to be good to the child, 
 strove to love her, forgave her for her youth and her 
 humble origin; but finally she tired of her, because Kedzie 
 was not making Jim's life happier, more useful, or more 
 distinguished. 
 
 Then one day Mrs. Dyckman asked Kedzie for a few 
 moments of her time. Kedzie was in a hurry to an ap 
 pointment at her hairdresser's, but she seated herself 
 patiently. Mrs. Dyckman said: 
 
 "My dear, I have just had a cable from my daughter 
 Cicely. She has broken down, and her physician has- 
 ordered her out of England for a rest. She is homesick,, 
 she says, and Heaven knows we are homesick for her. 
 
 "I am afraid she would not feel at home in any room 
 
 475
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 'but her old one, and I know you won't mind. You can 
 have your choice. Some of the other rooms are really 
 pleasanter. Will you look them over and let me know, so 
 that I can have your things moved?" 
 
 "Certainly, my dear m'mah!" said Kedzie. 
 
 She walked blindly down the Avenue, snubbing her most 
 precious acquaintances. She was being put out of her 
 room! She was being shoved back to the second place. 
 They'd ask her to eat at the second table next, or have her 
 meals in her room as the secretaries did. 
 
 Not much! Having slept in a duchess's bed, Kedzie 
 would not backslide. She would get a bed of her own. 
 She remembered a nice young man she had met, whose 
 people were in real estate. She telephoned to him from 
 the Biltmore. 
 
 "Is that you, Polly? This is Kedzie Dyckman. Say, 
 Polly, do you know of a decent house that is for sale or rent 
 right away quick? Oh, I don't care how much it costs, 
 so it's a crackerjack of a house. I suppose I've got to 
 take it furnished, being in such a hurry; or could you get 
 a gang of decorators in and do a rush job? All right, look 
 up your list right away and telephone me here at the 
 hairdresser's." 
 
 From under her cascade of hair she talked to him later 
 and arranged to be taken from place to place. She now 
 dismissed chateaux with contempt as too small, too old- 
 fashioned, lacking in servants' rooms, what not. She had 
 quite forgotten the poor little Mrs. Gilfoyle she had been, 
 and her footsore tramp from cheap flat to cheap flat, 
 ending in the place that cost three hundred dollars a year 
 furnished. 
 
 She finally decided not to attempt housekeeping yet 
 awhile, and selected a double-decked apartment of twenty- 
 four rooms and forty-eight baths. And she talked the 
 agent down to a rental of ten thousand dollars a year 
 unfurnished. She would show Jim that she could econ 
 omize. 
 
 476
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 When Kedzie told Mrs. Dyckman that she had decided 
 to move, Mrs. Dyckman was very much concerned lest 
 Kedzie feel put out. But she smiled to herself : she knew 
 her Kedzie. 
 
 Jim was not at all pleased with the arrangement, but he 
 yielded. In the American family the wife is the quarter 
 master, selects the camp and equips it. Jim spent more 
 of his time at his clubs than at his duplex home. So did 
 Kedzie. She had been railroaded into the Colony and 
 one or two other clubs before they knew her so well. 
 
 When the Duchess Cicely came back Kedzie was in 
 vited to the family dinner, of course. Cicely was Kedzie's 
 first duchess, and though Kedzie had met any number of 
 titled people by now, she approached this one with strange 
 apprehensions. She was horribly disappointed. Cicely 
 turned out to be a poor shred of a woman in black, worn 
 out, meager, forlorn, broken in heart and soul with what 
 she had been through. 
 
 She was plainly not much impressed with Kedzie, and she 
 said to her mother later: "Poor Jim, he always plays 
 in the rottenest luck, doesn't he? Still, he's got a pretty 
 doll, and what does anything matter nowadays?" 
 
 She tried to be polite about the family banquet. But 
 the food choked her. She had seen so many gaunt hands 
 pleading upward for a crust of bread. She had seen so 
 many shriveled lips guzzling over a bowl of soup. She 
 had seen so many once beautiful soldiers who had nothing 
 to eat anything with. 
 
 Cicely apologized for being such a death's head at the 
 feast, but she was ashamed of her people, ashamed of her 
 country for keeping out of the war and fattening on it. 
 All the motives of pacifism, of neutrality, of co-operation 
 by financing and munitioning the war, were foul in her 
 eyes. She knew only her side of the conflict, and she 
 cared for no other. She found America craven and 
 indifferent either to its own obligations or its own dangers. 
 She accused the United States of basking in the protection 
 
 477
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 of the British navy and the Allied armies. She felt that 
 the immortal crime of the Lusitania with its flotsam of 
 dead women and children was more disgraceful to the 
 nation that endured it than to the nation that committed 
 it. She was very, very bitter, and Kedzie found her most 
 depressing company, especially for a dinner-table. 
 
 But she excited Jim Dyckman tremendously. He broke 
 out into fierce diatribes against the Chinafying of the 
 United States with its Lilliputian army guarding its 
 gigantic interests. He began to toy with the idea of en 
 listing in the Canadian army or of joining the American 
 aviators flying for France. 
 
 "The national bird is an eagle," he said, with unwonted 
 poesy, "and the best place an American eagle can fly is 
 over France." 
 
 When Kedzie protested: "But you've got a family to 
 consider. Let the single men go," Jim laughed louder 
 and longer than he had laughed for weeks. 
 
 Cicely smiled her first smile and squeezed Jim's hand.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 L/^EDZIE went home early. It was depressing there, 
 1\. too. Now that she had a house of her own, she found 
 an extraordinary isolation in it. Almost nobody called. 
 
 When she lived under the Dyckman roof she was in 
 cluded in the cards left by all the callers ; she was invited 
 into the drawing-room to meet them; she was present at 
 all the big and little dinners, and breakfasts and teas and 
 suppers. 
 
 People who wanted to be asked to more of the Dyckman 
 meals and parties swapped meals and parties with them 
 and included Kedzie in their invitations, since she was 
 one of the family. She went about much in stately homes, 
 and her name was celebrated in what the newspapers 
 insist upon calling the "exclusive" circles. 
 
 Kedzie laughed at the extraordinary inclusiveness of 
 their High Exclusivenesses until she got her own home. 
 And then she learned its bitter meaning. It was not that 
 Mrs. Dyckman meant to freeze her out. She urged her 
 to "come in any time." But, as Kedzie told Jim, "an 
 invitation to come any time is an invitation to stay away 
 all the time." Kedzie's pride kept her aloof. She made 
 it so hard to get her to come that Mrs. Dyckman sin 
 cerely said to Cicely: 
 
 "We are too old and stupid for the child. She is glad 
 to be rid of us." 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman planned to call often, but she was an 
 extremely busy woman, doing many good works and 
 many foolish works that were just as hard. She said, 
 "I ought to call," and failed to call, just as one says, 
 
 479
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I ought to visit the sick," and leaves them to their 
 supine loneliness. 
 
 Thus Kedzie floated out of the swirling eddies where the 
 social driftwood jostled in eternal circles. She sulked and 
 considered the formalities of who should call on whom 
 and who owed whom a call. New York life had grown 
 too busy for anybody to pay much attention to the older 
 reciprocities of etiquette. 
 
 Almost nobody called on Kedzie. She took a pride in 
 smothering her complaints from Jim, who was not very 
 much alive to her hours. He was busy, too. He had 
 joined the Seventh Regiment of the New York National 
 Guard, and it absorbed a vast amount of his time. He had 
 gone to the Plattsburg encampment the summer before 
 and had kept up with the correspondence-school work in 
 map problems, and finally he had obtained a second 
 lieutenancy in the Seventh Regiment. It was his little 
 protest against the unpreparedness of the nation as it 
 toppled on the brink of the crater where the European war 
 boiled and smoked. 
 
 One midnight after a drill he found Kedzie crying bit 
 terly. He took her in his arms, and his tenderness softened 
 her pride so that she wept like a disconsolate baby and 
 told him how lonely she was. Nobody called; nobody 
 invited her out; nobody took her places. She had no 
 friends, and her husband had abandoned her for his old 
 regiment. 
 
 He was deeply touched by her woe and promised that 
 he would take better care of her. But his military en 
 gagements were not elastic. He dared not neglect them. 
 They took more and more of his evenings and invaded his 
 days. Besides, he was poor company for Kedzie's mood. 
 He had little of the humming-bird restlessness, and he 
 could not keep up with her flights. She had darted her 
 beak into a flower, and its nectar was finished for her be 
 fore she had realized that it was a flower. 
 
 He felt that what she needed was friends of her own sex. 
 
 480
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 There were women enough who would accept Kedzie's 
 company and gad with her, vie with her quivering speed. 
 But they were not the sort he wanted her to fly with. 
 He wanted her to make friends with the Charity Coe type. 
 
 The next day Jim grew desperate enough to call on 
 Charity. She was out, but expected in at any moment. 
 He sat down to wait for her. The room, the books, the 
 piano all spoke of her lovingly and lovably. He went 
 to the piano and found there the song she had played for 
 him once in Newport "Go, Lovely Rose!" 
 
 He thought it a marvelous coincidence that it should 
 be there on the rack. Like most coincidences, this was 
 not hard to explain. It chanced to be there because 
 Charity played it often. She was lonelier than Kedzie 
 and almost as helpless to amuse herself. She read vastly, 
 but the stories of other people's unhappy loves were a 
 poor anodyne for her own. She thought incessantly of 
 Jim Dyckman. Remembering the song she had played 
 for him, and his bitter comment on the verse, "Tell her 
 that wastes her time and me," she hunted it out, and the 
 plaintive chimes of Carpenter's music made a knelHor her 
 own hopes. 
 
 She had played it this very afternoon and wrought her 
 self to such sardonic regret that she forced herself into 
 the open air. She walked a mile or two, but slunk back 
 home again to be rid of the crowds. 
 
 She was thinking of Dyckman when she entered her 
 house. She let herself in with her own key, and, walking 
 into the drawing-room, surprised him at the piano, reading 
 the tender elegy of the rose. 
 
 "Jim!" she gasped. 
 
 "Charity!" he groaned. 
 
 Their souls seemed to rush from their bodies and em 
 brace. But their bodies stood fast before the abyss that 
 gaped between them. 
 
 She whipped off her glove before she gave him her hand. 
 That meeting of the flesh was so bitter-sweet that their 
 31 481
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 hands unclasped guiltily by a kind of honest instinct of 
 danger. 
 
 "What on earth brought you here?" Charity faltered. 
 
 "Why I Well, you see it's like this." He groped 
 for words, but, having no genius in invention, he blurted 
 the truth helplessly: " I came to ask you if you wouldn't 
 You see, my poor wife isn't making out very well with 
 people she's lonesome and blue and why can't you 
 lend a hand and make friends with her?" 
 
 Charity laughed aloud. "Oh, Jim, Jim, what a darling 
 old numskull you are!" 
 
 "In general, yes; but why just now?" 
 
 "Your wife will never make friends with me." 
 
 "Of course she will. She's lonely enough to take up 
 with anybody." 
 
 "Thanks!" 
 
 "Well, will you call?" 
 
 "Have you told her you were going to ask me to?" 
 
 " Not yet." 
 
 "Then I'll call, on one condition." 
 
 "What's that, Charity Coe?" 
 
 "That you don't tell her. You'd better not, or she'll 
 have my eyes and your scalp." 
 
 "But you'll call, won't you?" 
 
 "Of course. Anything you say always." 
 
 "You're the damnedest decentest woman in the world, 
 Charity Coe ; and if ' ' 
 
 He paused. It is just as well not to go iffing about such 
 matters. 
 
 Charity stopped short in her laughter. She and Jim 
 stared at each other again across that abyss. It was 
 terribly deep, but only a step over. 
 
 They heard the door-bell faintly, and a sense of guilt 
 confused them again. Jim rose and wished himself out 
 of it. 
 
 "It's only Prissy Atterbury," said Charity. 
 
 Prissy came in tugging at the ferocious mustaches that
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 only emphasized his lady-like carriage. He paused on the 
 door-sill to stare and gasp, " My Gawd, at it again !" 
 
 They did not know what he meant, and he would not 
 explain that he had seen them together ages ago and spread 
 the gossip that they were in intrigue. The coincidence of 
 his recurrence on their scene was not strange, for Charity 
 had been using him as a kind of messenger-boy. 
 
 Prissy was that sort. He looked the gentleman and 
 was, a somewhat too gentle gentleman, but very useful 
 to ladies who needed an uncompromising escort and were 
 no longer young enough to permit of chaperonage. He 
 was considered perfectly harmless, but he was a fiend of 
 gossip, and he rejoiced in the recrudescence of the Jim and 
 Charity affair. 
 
 Jim confirmed Prissy's eager suspicions by taking him 
 self off with a maximum of embarrassment. Charity 
 went to the door with him to kiss him good-by, as 
 Prissy gloatingly supposed, but actually to say: 
 
 "I'll call on your wife to-morrow." 
 
 "You're an angel," said Jim, and meant it. 
 
 He thought all the way home what an angel she was, 
 and Charity was thinking at the same time what a fool 
 she had been to let Peter Cheever dazzle her to the fact 
 that Jim Dyckman was the one man in the world that 
 she belonged to. She needed just him and he just her.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 SOMETIMES Jim Dyckman was foolish enough to 
 wish that he had been his wife's first lover. But a 
 man has to get up pretty early to be that to any woman. 
 The minxes begin to flirt with the milk-bottle, then with 
 the doctor, and then to cherish a precocious passion for 
 the first rag sailor-doll. 
 
 Jim had come as near as any man may to being a 
 woman's first love in the case of Charity, and what good 
 had it done him? He was the first boy Charity had ever 
 played with. Her nurse had bragged about her to his 
 nurse when Charity was just beginning to take notice of 
 other than alimentary things. By that time Jim was a 
 blase roue of five and his main interest in Charity was a 
 desire to poke his finger into the soft spot in her head. 
 
 The nurses restrained him in time, and his proud, young, 
 lithe mother of then, when she heard of it, decided that he 
 was destined to be a great explorer. His young father 
 sniffed that he was more likely to be a gynecologist. 
 They had a grand quarrel over their son's future. He 
 became none of the things they feared or hoped that he 
 would and he carried out none of his own early ambitions. 
 
 His first impressions of Charity had ranged from con 
 tempt, through curiosity, to protectiveness and affection. 
 She got his heart first by being helpless. He began by 
 picking up the things she let fall from her carriage or 
 threw overboard and immediately cried for again. She 
 had been human enough to do a good deal of that. 
 When things cumbered her crib or her perambulator she 
 brushed them into space and then repented after them. 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Following her marriage to Peter Cheever she did just 
 that with Jim Dyckman. His love cluttered up her do 
 mestic serenity and she chucked it overboard. And then 
 she wanted it again. Then her husband chucked her 
 overboard and she felt that it would not be so lonesome 
 out there since Jim would be out there, too. But she 
 found that he had picked himself up and toddled away 
 with Kedzie. And now he could not pick Charity up 
 any more. His wife wouldn't let him. 
 
 Jim did not know that he wanted to pick Charity up 
 again till he called on her to ask her to call on his wife 
 and pick Kedzie up out of her loneliness. It was a 
 terrific thought to the simple-minded Jim when it came 
 over him that the Charity Coe he had adored and given 
 up as beyond his reach on her high pedestal was now 
 lying at the foot of it with no worshiper at all. 
 
 Jim was the very reverse of a snob. Kedzie had won 
 his devotion by seeming to need it. She had lost it by 
 showing that she cared less for him than for the things 
 she thought he could get for her. And now Charity 
 needed his love. 
 
 There were two potent principles in Jim's nature, as in 
 many another man's and woman's; one was an instant 
 eagerness to help anybody in trouble; another was an 
 instant resentment of any coercion. Jim could endure 
 neither bossing nor being bossed; restraint of any sort 
 irked him. There may have been Irish blood in him, but 
 at any rate the saying was as true of him as of the typical 
 Irishman ' ' You can lead him to hell easier than you can 
 drive him an inch." 
 
 When Jim left Charity's house his heart ached to think 
 of her distressful with loneliness. When he realized that 
 somehow Kedzie was automatically preventing him from 
 helping Charity his marital bonds began to chafe. He 
 began to understand that matrimony was hampering his 
 freedom. He had something to resent on his own behalf, 
 
 He had been so troubled with the thought of his short- 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 -comings in devotion to Kedzie that he had not pondered 
 how much he had surrendered. He had repented his in 
 ability to give Kedzie his entire and fanatic love. He saw 
 that he had at least given his precious liberty of soul into 
 her little hands. 
 
 Galled as he was at this comprehension, he began to 
 think over the lessons of his honeymoon and to see that 
 Kedzie had not given him entirety of devotion -any more 
 than he her. Little selfishnesses, exactions, tyrannies, 
 petulances, began to recur to him. 
 
 He was in the dangerous frame of mind of a bridegroom 
 thinking things over. At that time it behooves the bride 
 to exert her fascinations and prove her devotion as never 
 before. 
 
 Kedzie, knowing nothing of Jim's call on Charity or of 
 his new mood, chanced to be in a most unfortunate humor. 
 'She criticized Jim; she declined to be amused or enter 
 tained; rebuffed his advances, ridiculed his pretensions of 
 love. She even chose to denounce his mother for her 
 heartlessness, his sister for her neglect, his father for his 
 snobbery. That is always bad business. It puts a hus 
 band at bay with his back against the foundation walls of 
 loyalty. They quarreled wonderfully and slept dos-a-dos. 
 They did not speak the next morning. 
 
 The next afternoon Jim saw to his dismay that Kedzie 
 was putting on her hat and gloves to go out on a shopping- 
 'Cruise. If she went she would miss Charity's call. 
 
 He knew that he ought not to tell her of Charity's visit 
 in advance. In fact, Charity had pledged him to a benevo 
 lent conspiracy in the matter. He put up a flag of truce 
 and resumed diplomatic relations. 
 
 With the diplomatic cunning of a hippopotamus he tried 
 to decoy Kedzie into staying at home awhile. His 
 ponderous subtlety aroused Kedzie's suspicions, and at 
 length he confirmed them by desperately confessing : 
 
 " Mrs. Cheever is going to call." 
 
 Kedzie's first thought was of Peter Cheever's new wife, 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 who had been taken up by a certain set of those whom one 
 may call loose-principled or divinely tolerant, as one's own 
 prejudices direct. Kedzie could not yet afford to be so 
 forgiving. She flared up. 
 
 " Mrs. Cheever! That Zada thing going to call on me? 
 How dare she!" 
 
 "Of course not." 
 
 "Oh, the other one, then?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "The abandoned one?" 
 
 "That's pretty rough. She's been very kind to you 
 and she wants to be again." 
 
 "Where did you learn so much?" 
 
 "We were talking about you." 
 
 "Oh, you were, were you? That's nice! And where 
 was all this?" 
 
 He indulged in a concessive lie for the sake 01 the peace. 
 "I met her in the street and walked along with her." 
 
 ' ' Fine ! And how did my name come to come up ? " 
 
 "It naturally would. I was saying that I wished she'd- 
 er I wished that you and she might be friends." 
 
 "So that you and she could see each other still oftener,. 
 I suppose." 
 
 " It's rotten of you to say that." 
 
 " And it's rottener of you to go talking to another woman 
 about your wife." 
 
 "But it was in the friendliest spirit, and she took 
 it so." 
 
 "I see! Her first name is Charity and I'm to be one of 
 her patients. Well, you can receive her yourself. I don't 
 want any of her old alms! I won't be here!" 
 
 "Oh yes, you will!" 
 
 "Oh no, I won't!" 
 
 "You can't be as ill-mannered as that!" 
 
 "You talk to me of manners! Why, I've seen manners 
 in your gang that would disgrace a brakeman and a lunch- 
 counter girl on one of dad's railroads. ' ' Her father already 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 had railroads! So many people had them in the crowd 
 she met that Kedzie was not strong enough to deny her 
 father one or two. 
 
 Kedzie had taken the most violent dislike to Charity 
 for a dozen reasons, all of them perfectly human and 
 natural, and nasty and unjustifiable, and therefore in 
 eradicable. The first one was that odious matter of 
 obligation. Gratitude has been wisely diagnosticated as 
 a lively sense of benefits to come. The deadly sense of 
 benefits gone by is known as ingratitude. 
 
 No one knows just what the divinely unpardonable sin 
 is, but the humanly or at least womanly unpardonable 
 sin is to have known one's husband well before the wife 
 met him, and then to try to be nice to the wife. To have 
 known the wife in her humble days and to have done her 
 a favor makes the sin unmentionable as well as unpardon 
 able. 
 
 Jim Dyckman had involved himself in Charity's crime 
 by trying to get Charity to help his wife again. It was 
 bad enough that Charity 'had got Kedzie a job in the past 
 and had sent Jim Dyckman to make sure that she got it. 
 But for Jim, after Kedzie and he had been married and 
 all, to ask Charity to rescue Kedzie from her social 
 failure was monstrous. 
 
 The fact that Jim had felt sorry for his lonely Kedzie 
 marooned on an iceberg in mid-society was humiliating 
 enough; but for Charity to dare to feel sorry for Kedzie, 
 too, and to come sailing after her Kedzie shuddered 
 when she thought of it. 
 
 She fought with her husband until it was too late for her 
 to get away. Charity's card came in while they were still 
 wrangling. Kedzie announced that she was not at home. 
 Jim told the servant, "Wait!" and gave Kedzie a look 
 that she rather enjoyed. It was what they call a cave- 
 man look. She felt that he already had his hands in her 
 hair and was dragging her across the floor bumpitty-bump. 
 It made her scalp creep deliciously. She was rather 
 
 488
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 tempted to goad him on to action. It would have a 
 movie thrill. 
 
 But the look faded from Jim's eye and the blaze of 
 wrath dulled to a gray contempt. She was afraid that he 
 might call her what she had once overheard Pet Bettany 
 call her "A common little mucker." That sort of con 
 tempt seared like a splash of vitriol. 
 
 Kedzie, like Zada, was a self-made lady and she wanted 
 to conceal the authorship from the great-grandmother- 
 built ladies she encountered. 
 
 She pouted a moment, then she said to the servant, 
 "We'll see her." She turned to Jim. "Come along. I'll 
 go and pet your old cat and get her off my chest."
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 JIM thudded dismally along in her wake. Charity 
 was in the drawing-room wearing her politest face. 
 She could tell from Kedzie's very pose that she was as 
 welcome as a submarine. 
 
 Kedzie said, "Awfully decent of you to come," and gave 
 her a handful of cold, limp fingers. 
 
 Charity politely pretended that she had called unex 
 pectedly and that she was in dire need of Kedzie's aid. 
 She made herself unwittingly ridiculous in the eyes of 
 Kedzie, who knew and despised her motive, not appreciat 
 ing at all the consideration Charity was trying to show. 
 
 "I'm sorry to bother you, Mrs. Dyckman," Charity 
 began, "but I've got to throw myself on your mercy. A 
 _few of us are getting up a new stunt for the settlement- 
 work fund. It is to be rather elaborate and ought to make 
 a lot of money. It is to represent a day in the life of a 
 New York Bud. You can have your choice of several 
 rdles, and I hope you will lend us a hand." 
 
 Kedzie had heard of this project and she had gnawed 
 her bitter heart in a chagrin of yearning to take part in it. 
 She had not been invited, and she had blenched every 
 time she thought of it. She was so much relieved at being 
 asked that she almost forgave Charity for her benevolence. 
 She stammered: "It's awfully decent of you to ask me. 
 I'll do my bit with the greatest of pleasure." 
 
 She rather regretted those last five words. They were 
 -a bit Nimrimmy. 
 
 Charity sketched the program for her. 
 
 "The Bud is discovered in bed. A street piano wakes 
 
 490
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 her. There is to be a dance to a hurdy-gurdy. Then the 
 Bud has breakfast. It is served by a dancing maid and 
 butler. Tom Duane is to be the butler. You could be 
 no, you wouldn't fancy the maid, I imagine." 
 
 Kedzie did not fancy the maid. 
 
 Charity went on: "The girl dresses and goes to a 
 rehearsal of the Junior League. That's to be a ballet of 
 harlequins and columbines. She goes from there to her 
 dressmaker's. I am to play the dressmaker. I have my 
 mannequins, and you might want to play one of those 
 and wear the latest thing or you could be one of the 
 customers. You can think it over. 
 
 "Then the girl is seen reading a magazine and there is 
 a dance of cover girls. If you have any favorite illus 
 trator you could be one of his types. 
 
 "Next the Bud goes to an art exhibition. This year 
 Zuloaga is the craze, and several of his canvases will come 
 to life. Do you care for Zuloaga?" 
 
 "Immensely, but " Kedzie said, wondering just what 
 Zuloaga did to his canvases. She had seen a cubist 
 exhibition that gave her a headache, and she thought 
 it might have something to do with Zulus. 
 
 Charity ran on: "After dinner the Bud goes to the 
 theater and sees a pantomime and a series of ballets, dolls 
 of the nations Chinese, Polish, also nursery characters. 
 You could select something in one of those dances, 
 perhaps. 
 
 "And last of all there is a chimney-sweeps' dance as 
 the worn-out Bud crawls into bed. If none of these suit 
 you we'd be glad to have any suggestion that occurs to 
 you. Of course, a girl of to-day does a thousand more 
 things than I've mentioned. But the main thing is, 
 we want you to help us out. 
 
 "You are if you'll forgive me for slapping you in the 
 face with a bouquet you are exquisitely beautiful and 
 I know that you dance exquisitely." 
 
 "How do you know that?" Kedzie asked, rashly. 
 
 491
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I saw you once as a " Charity paused, seeing the 
 red run across Kedzie's face. She had stumbled into 
 Kedzie's past again, and Kedzie's resentment braced her 
 hurt pride. 
 
 Charity tried to mend matters by a little advice: "You 
 mustn't blush, my dear Mrs. Dyckman. If I were in your 
 place I'd go around bragging about it. To have been 
 a Greek dancer, what a beautiful past!" 
 
 "Thanks!" said Kedzie, curtly, with basilisk eyes. "I 
 think I'd rather not dance any more. I'm an old married 
 woman now. If you don't mind, I'll be one of the cus 
 tomers at your shop. I'll come in in the rippingest gown 
 Jim can buy. I'll feel more comfortable, too, under your 
 protection, Mrs. Cheever." 
 
 Jim laughed and Kedzie grinned. But she was canny. 
 She was thinking that she would be safest among that 
 pack of wolves if she relied on her money to buy something 
 dazzling rather than on the beauty that Charity alleged. 
 She did not want to dance before those people again. 
 She would never forget how her foot had slipped at 
 Newport. 
 
 Thirdly, she felt that she would be sheltered a little 
 from persecution beneath the wing of Charity. It rather 
 pleased her to treat Charity as a motherly sort of person. 
 It is the most deliciously malicious compliment a woman 
 can pay another. 
 
 Charity did not fail to receive the stab. But it amused 
 her so far as she was concerned. She felt that Kedzie 
 was like one of those incorrigible gamines who throw 
 things at kindly visitors to the slums. She felt sorry for 
 Jim, and wondered again by what strange devices he had 
 been led to marry so incompatible a girl as Kedzie. 
 
 Jim wondered, too. He sat and watched the two 
 women, wondering as men do when they see women pain 
 fully courteous to each other; wondering as women must 
 when they see men polite to their enemies. 
 
 Charity and Kedzie prattled on in a kind of two-story 
 
 492
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 conversation, and Jim studied them with shameless ob 
 jectivity. He hardly heard what they said. He watched 
 the pantomime of their so different souls and bodies. 
 Charity, lean and smart and aristocratic, beautiful in a 
 peculiar mixture of sophistication and tenderness ; Kedzie, 
 small and nymph-like and plebeian, beautiful in a mixture 
 of innocence and hardness of heart. 
 
 Charity's body was like the work of a dashing painter 
 long lines drawn with brave force and direction. Kedzie's 
 body was a thing of dainty curves and timidities. Charity 
 was fashionable and wise, but her wisdom had lifted her 
 above pettiness. Kedzie was of the village, for all her 
 Parisian garb, and she had cunning, which is the lowest 
 form of wisdom. 
 
 When at length Charity left, Jim and Kedzie sat brood 
 ing. Kedzie wanted to say something nice about Charity 
 and was afraid to. The poor child always distrusted her 
 generous impulses. She thought it cleverer to withhold 
 trust from everybody, lest she misplace it in somebody. 
 At length an imp of perversity taught her how to get rid 
 of the credit she owed to Charity. She spoke after a long 
 silence. 
 
 "Mrs. Cheever must be horribly fond of you." 
 
 "Why do you say that?" said Jim, startled. 
 
 "Because she's so nice to me." 
 
 Jim groaned with disgust. Kedzie giggled, accepting 
 the groan as confession of a palpable hit. She sat musing 
 on various costumes she might wear. She had a woman's 
 memory for things she had caught a glimpse of in a shop- 
 window or in a fashion magazine; she had a woman's 
 imagination for dressing herself up mentally. 
 
 As a trained mathematician can do amazing sums in his 
 head, so Kedzie could juggle modes and combinations, 
 colors and stuffs, and wrap them about herself. While 
 Kedzie composed her new gown, her husband studied 
 her, still wondering at her and his inability to get past the 
 barriers of her flesh to her soul. Charity's flesh seemed 
 
 493
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 but the expression of herself. It was cordial and benevo 
 lent, warm and expressive in his eyes. Her hands were 
 for handclasp, her lips for good words, her eyes for honest 
 language. He had not embraced her except in dances 
 years before, and in that one quickly broken embrace at 
 Newport. He had not kissed her since they had been 
 boy and girl lovers, but the savor of her lips was still sweet 
 in his memory. He felt that he knew her soul utterly. 
 
 He had possessed all the advantages of Kedzie without 
 seeming to get acquainted with the ultimate interior 
 Kedzie at all. She was to him well-known flesh inhabited 
 by a total stranger, who fled from him mysteriously. 
 When she embraced him she held him aloof. When she 
 kissed him her lips pressed him back. He could not out 
 grow the feeling that their life together was rather a 
 reckless flirtation than a communion of merged souls. 
 
 He stared at her now and saw dark eyebrows and eye 
 lashes etched on a white skin, starred with irises of strange 
 hue, a nose deftly shaped, a mouth as pretty and as im 
 personal as a flower, a throat of some ineffably exquisite 
 petal material. She sat with one knee lifted a little and 
 clasped in her hands, and there was something miraculous 
 about the felicity of the lines, the arms penciled downward 
 from the shoulders and meeting in the delicately con 
 toured buckle of her ten fingers, the thigh springing in a 
 suave arc from the confluent planes of her torse, the 
 straight shin to the curve of instep and toe and heel. Her 
 hair was an altogether incredible extravagance of manu 
 facture. 
 
 George Meredith has described a woman's hair once for 
 all, and if Jim had ever read anything so important as 
 The Egoist he would have said that Kedzie's poll was 
 illustrated in that wonderfully coiffed hair-like sentence 
 picturing Clara Middleton and "the softly dusky nape of 
 her neck, where this way and that the little lighter- 
 colored irreclaimable curls running truant from the comb 
 and the knot curls, half-curls, root-curls, vine-ringlets, 
 
 494
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 wedding-rings, fledgling feathers, tufts of down, blown 
 wisps waved or fell, waved over or up to involutedly, or 
 strayed, loose and downward, in the form of small silken 
 paws, hardly any of them much thicker than a crayon 
 shading, cunninger than long, round locks of gold to trick 
 the heart." 
 
 Kedzie's hair was as fascinating as tnat, and she had 
 many graces and charms. For a while they had proved 
 fascinating, but a man does not want to have a cartoon, 
 however complexly beautiful, for a wife. Jim wanted a 
 congenial companion that is to say, he wanted Charity 
 Coe. 
 
 But he could not have her. If he had been one of the 
 patriarchs or a virtuous man of Mohammedan stock he 
 could have tried, by marrying a female quartet, to make 
 up one good, all-round wife. But he was doomed to a 
 single try, and he had picked the wrong one.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 WHAT is a man to do who realizes that he has 
 married the wrong woman? 
 
 The agonies of the woman who has been married to the 
 wrong man have been celebrated innumerably and vats 
 of tears spilled over them. She used to be consigned to a 
 husband by parental choice and compulsion. Those days 
 are part of the good old times. 
 
 For a man there never has been any sympathy, since 
 he has not usually been the victim of parental despotism 
 in the matter of selecting a spouse, or, when he has been, 
 he has had certain privileges of excursion. The excursion 
 is still a popular form of mitigating the severities of an 
 unsuccessful marriage. Some commit murder, some com 
 mit suicide, some commit other things. Marriage is the 
 one field in which instinct is least trustworthy and it is 
 the one field in which it is accounted immoral to repent 
 errors of judgments or to correct them. 
 
 The law has found it well to concede a good deal to the 
 criminals. After centuries of vain cruelty it was found 
 that certain people simply could not be made good by 
 any rigor of confinement or any heaping up of punish 
 ment. So the law has come down to the criminal with 
 results no worse at the worst than before, and sublimely 
 better at the best than before. The civil law is doing the 
 same slowly for the mal-married. 
 
 But Jim Dyckman was not even dreaming of seeking a 
 rescue from his mistake by way of a divorce. 
 
 Charity had entered the divorce court and she would 
 always bear the reproach of some of her most valued 
 
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 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 friends. She could not imaginably encourage Jim Dyck- 
 man to free himself by the same channel, and if he did, 
 how could Charity marry him? The marriage of two 
 divorced persons would provoke a tempest of horror from 
 part of the world, and gales of ridicule from the rest. 
 Besides, there was no sigfl that Kedzie would ever give 
 Jim cause for divorce, or that -he would make use of it 
 if she gave it him. 
 
 Charity could not help pondering the situation, for she 
 saw that Jim was hopelessly mismated. Jim could not 
 help pondering the situation, for he saw the same thing. 
 But he made no plans for release. Kedzie had given no 
 hint of an inclination to misconduct. She was certainly 
 not going to follow Gilfoyle into the beyond. Jim was 
 left helpless with an unanswerable riddle on his mind. 
 
 He could only curse himself for being fool enough to get 
 married, and join the vast club of the Repenters at 
 Leisure. He felt sorrier for Kedzie than ever, but he 
 also felt sorry for himself. 
 
 The better he came to know his wife the more he came 
 to know how alien she was to him in how many ways. 
 The things she wanted to be or seem were utterly foreign 
 to his own ideals, and if people's ambitions war what hope 
 have they of sympathy? 
 
 Jim could not help noticing how Kedzie was progressing 
 in^her snobology. She had had many languages to learn 
 in her brief day. She had had to change from Missouri 
 to flat New York, then upward through various strata of 
 diction. She had learned to speak with a certain ele 
 gance as a movie princess. But she had learned that 
 people of social position do not talk on stilts outside of 
 fiction. She had since been trying to acquire the rough 
 slang of her set. It was not easy to be glib in it. She had 
 attained only a careful carelessness as yet. But she was 
 learning! As soon as she had attained a careless care 
 lessness she would be qualified. 
 
 But there was another difficulty. She had not yet been 
 
 497
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 able to make up her mind as to what character she should 
 play in her new world. That had to be settled before she 
 could make her final choice of dialect, for dialect is 
 character, and she had found, to her surprise, that the 
 upper world contained as great a variety of characters 
 as any other level. 
 
 There were tomboys and hoydens and solemn students; 
 hard-working sculptresses and dreamy poetesses; girls 
 who wanted to be boys, and girls who wanted to be nuns ; 
 girls who were frantic to vote, and girls who loathed the 
 thought of independence; girls who ached to shock people, 
 and girls of the prunes-and-prismatic type, patricians and 
 precisians, anarchists and Bohemians. 
 
 She encountered girls who talked appallingly about 
 breeding dogs and babies, about Freudian erotics, and 
 new schools of art, Futurism, Vorticism. Their main in 
 terest was Ismism. There were others whose intellect 
 uality ran to new card-mathematics in pirate bridge, 
 gambling algebra. 
 
 Kedzie was in a chaos of sincere convictions and even 
 more sincere affectations. She could not select an atti 
 tude for herself. She could not recapture her own soul or 
 decide what she wanted to be. 
 
 Her life was busy. She had to learn French and 
 numberless intricacies of fashionable ethics. She had 
 already learned to ride a horse for her moving-picture 
 work, but Jim warned her that she must learn to jump 
 so that she could follow the hounds with him. She 
 watched pupils in hurdling and dreaded to add that to her 
 accomplishments. It made her seasick to witness the 
 race to the barrier, the gathering of the horse, the launch 
 into space, the clatter of the top bar as it came off some 
 times, the grunting thud of the big brute as he returned to 
 earth and galloped away, not always with the rider still 
 aboard. She imagined herself skirled along the tan- 
 bark and was afraid. 
 
 She had to summon all the courage of her movie days 
 
 498
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 before she could intrust herself to a riding-master. Soon 
 she grew to like the excitement; she learned to charge a 
 fence, hand the horse his head at the right moment, 
 and take him up at the exact second. And by and 
 by she was laughing at other beginners and talking 
 horsy talk with such assurance that she rather gave 
 the impression of tracing straight back to the Centaur 
 family. 
 
 Likewise now she watched other new-comers and rank 
 outsiders break into the sacred inclosure. She mocked 
 them and derided them. She regretted aloud the un 
 fortunate marriages of well-born fellows with actresses 
 and commoners from beyond the pale. Among the first 
 French words she learned to use was mesalliance. 
 
 She began to wonder if she had not made one herself. 
 She found inside the paddock so many men more brilliant 
 than her husband. There were as many types of man as 
 of woman the earnest, the ascetic, the socialistic, the 
 pious youth, wastrels, rakes, fops. There were richer 
 men than Jim and men of still older family, men of even 
 greater wealth. 
 
 She had been married only a few weeks and she was 
 already speculating in comparisons! It was a more 
 or less inescapable result of a marriage for ambition, 
 since each ambition achieved opens a horizon of further 
 ambitions. 
 
 She had a brief spell of delight in the rehearsals of the 
 "Day of the Bud." She met new people informally and 
 they were all so shy and self-conscious that they were not 
 inclined to resent Kedzie's intrusion. Kedzie would once 
 have ridiculed them as " amachoors " ; now she wished that 
 she, too, were only an "amaturr" instead of a reformed 
 professional. 
 
 If some of the ladies snubbed her she found others that 
 cultivated her; a few of the humbler women even toadied 
 to her position; a few of the men snuggled up to her 
 picturesque beauty. She snubbed them with vigor. She 
 
 499
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 hated them and felt smirched by their challenges. That 
 was splendid of her. 
 
 She was beginning to find herself and her party, but 
 outside the circle of Jim's immediate entourage. And 
 Jim was beginning to find himself a new ambition and a 
 new circle of friends.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 JIM was becoming quite the military man. His new 
 passion took him away from womankind, saved him 
 from temptation, and freed his thoughts from the obses 
 sion of either Kedzie or Charity. The whole nation was 
 turning again toward soldiering, drifting slowly and re- 
 sistingly, but helplessly, into the very things it had long 
 denounced as Prussianism and conscription. A universal 
 mobilization was brewing that should one day compel all 
 men and all women, even little boys and girls and the very 
 old, to become part of a giant machinery for warfare. 
 
 England, too, had railed at conscription, and when the 
 war smote her had seen her little army of a quarter of a 
 million almost annihilated under the first avalanche of the 
 German descent toward Paris. England had gathered 
 volunteers and trained them behind the bulwark of her 
 navy and the red wall of the bleeding French nation. 
 And England had given up volunteering and gone into the 
 business of making everybody, without distinction of sex, 
 age, or degree, contribute life and liberty and luxury to 
 the common cause. 
 
 Behind the bulwark of the British fleet and the Allied 
 armies the United States had debated, not for weeks or 
 months, but for years with academic sloth the enlargement 
 of its tiny army. It had accomplished only the debate, 
 a ludicrous haggle between those who turned their backs 
 on the world war and said that war was impossible and 
 those who declared that it was inevitable. 
 
 Some Americans asserted that it was none of America's 
 business what happened in Europe or how many American
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 citizens died on the free seas, and that the one way to 
 bring war into our country was to be prepared for it. 
 Other Americans grew angry enough to forswear their 
 allegiance to a nation of poltroons and dotards; they 
 went to France or Canada to fight or fly for the Allies. 
 Many of them died. Yet others tried to equip themselves 
 at home somewhat to meet the red flood when it should 
 break the dam and sweep across the American borders. 
 
 Of these last was Jim Dyckman. Since he had joined 
 the National Guard he gave it more and more of his en 
 thusiasm. Unhappily married men have always fled to 
 the barracks or the deck as ill-mated women fled to 
 convents. 
 
 Night after night Jim spent at the armory, drilling with 
 his company, conferring at headquarters, laboring for 
 recruits, toiling over the paper work. 
 
 Kedzie pouted awhile at his patriotism, ridiculed it 
 and hated it, and then accepted it as a matter of course. 
 She could either stay at home and read herself to sleep or 
 join the crowds. The rehearsals of the " Day of the Bud " 
 gave her some business, and she picked up a few new 
 friends. She made her appearance with the company in a 
 three-nights' performance that netted several thousands of 
 dollars. Jim saw her once. She was gorgeous, a little too 
 gorgeous. She did not belong. She felt it herself, and 
 overworked her carelessness. Her non-success hurt her 
 bitterly. People did not say of her, as in the movies, 
 "How sweet!" but, "Rather common!" 
 
 And now Kedzie was bewildered and lost. She found 
 no comfort in Jim. She had to seek companionship 
 somewhere. At first she made her engagements only on 
 Jim's drill nights. Soon she made them on nights when 
 he was free. 
 
 When they met, each found the other's experiences of 
 no importance. Her indifference to the portentous 
 meanings and campaigns of the European war dazed him. 
 He wondered how any human being could live in such 
 
 502
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 epochal weeks and take no thought of events. She was 
 not interested even in the accounts of the marvelous suf 
 ferings of women and their marvelous achievements in the 
 munition-plants, the fields, and hospitals. He watched 
 Kedzie skip the head-lines detailing some sublime feat of 
 endeavor like the defense of Verdun and turn to the page 
 where her name was included or not among the guests at a 
 dinner well advertised by the hostess. She would skip 
 the pages of photographs showing forth the daily epics 
 of Europe and ponder the illustrations of some new smock. 
 He shook his head over her as if she were a doll come to 
 life and nothing stirring within but a music-box and a 
 sawdust heart. He was disappointed in her abysmally. 
 He devoted himself to his military work as if he were a 
 bachelor. 
 
 For the third year now the Americans were still dis 
 cussing just what sort of army it should have, and mean 
 while getting none at all. 
 
 The opponents of preparedness grew so ferocious in their 
 attacks on the pleaders for troops that the word "pacifist" 
 became ironical. They seemed to think it a crime to 
 assault anybody but a fellow-countryman. 
 
 All the while the various factions of unhappy Mexico , 
 fought together and threatened the peace of the United 
 States. The Government that had helped drag President 
 Huerta from his chair with the help of Villa and Carranza 
 found itself in turn at odds with both its allies and its 
 allies at war with each other. 
 
 There were scenes of rapine and flights of refugees that 
 brought a little of Belgium to our frontier. And then 
 the sombreros came over the border at Columbus, New 
 Mexico, one night with massacre and escape, and the tiny 
 American army under Pershing went over the border to 
 get its erstwhile ally, Villa, dead or alive, and got him 
 neither way. 
 
 And still Congress pondered the question of the army 
 as if it were something as remote and patient as a problem 
 
 503
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 in sidereal arithmetic. Some asked for volunteers and 
 some for universal service and some for neither. The 
 National Guard was a bone of contention, and when the 
 hour struck it was the only bone there was. 
 
 In June Jim Dyckman went to the officers' school of 
 application at Peekskill for a week to get a smattering of 
 tuition under Regular Army instructors. He slept on a 
 cot in a tent and studied map-making and military book 
 keeping and mimic warfare, and was tremendously happy. 
 
 Kedzie made a bad week of it. She missed him sadly. 
 There was no one to quarrel with or make up with. When 
 he came back late Saturday night she was so glad to see 
 him that she cried blissfully upon his proud bosom. 
 
 They had a little imitation honeymoon and went 
 a-motoring on Sunday out into the lands where June was 
 embroidering the grass with flowers and shaking the petals 
 off the branches where young fruit was fashioning. 
 
 They discussed their summer schemes and she dreaded 
 the knowledge that in July he must go to the manceuvers 
 for three weeks. They agreed to get aboard his yacht for 
 a little cruise before that dreadful interlude. 
 
 And then, early the next morning, the morning of the 
 i gth of June, the knuckles of his valet on the door woke 
 Jim from his slumber and a voice through the panels 
 murmured: 
 
 "Very sorry, sir, but you are wanted on the telephone, 
 sir it's your regiment." 
 
 That was the way the Paul Reveres of 1916 summoned 
 the troops to arms. 
 
 Mr. Minute-Man Dyckman sat on the edge of his bed 
 in his silk pajamas with the telephone-receiver at his ear r 
 and yawned: "H'lo. . . . Who is it? ... What is it? 
 . . . Oh, it's you, sergeant. . . . Yes? . . . No!' . . . 
 For God's sake! ... I'll get out right away." 
 
 "What's the matter? Is the house on fire?" Kedzie 
 gasped from her pillow, half-awake and only half-afraid, 
 so prettily befuddled she was with sleep. She would have 
 
 54
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 made a picture if Jim had had eyes to see her as she 
 struggled to one elbow and thrust with her other hand her 
 curls back into her nightcap, all askew. Her gown was 
 sliding over one shoulder down to her elbow and up to 
 one out-thrust knee. 
 
 Jim put away the telephone and pondered a moment. 
 
 Kedzie caught at his arm. "What's the matter? Why 
 don't you tell me!" 
 
 He spoke with a boyish pride of war and a husbandly 
 solemnity: "The President has called out the National 
 Guard. We're to mobilize to-day and get to the border 
 as soon as we can. They hope that our regiment will be 
 the first to move."
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 "T/^EDZIE'S answer was a fierce seizure of him in her 
 1\. arms. She was palsied with fright for him. She 
 had seen more pictures of dead soldiers than he knew, and 
 now she saw her man shattered and tortured with wounds 
 and thirst. She felt in one swift shock what the wives of 
 Europe had felt by the million. She clung to Jim and 
 sobbed: 
 
 "You sha'n't go! I won't let them take you! You 
 belong to me!" 
 
 He gathered her awkwardly into his arms and they were 
 more nearly married then than they had ever been or 
 should ever be again. 
 
 The pity of it! that only their separation could bring 
 them together! Fate is the original Irish-bullster. 
 
 Jim tried hurriedly to console Kedzie. He found her 
 hard to make brave. The early-morningness of the shock, 
 the panic of scattered sleep, gave her added terror. He 
 had to be cruel at last. Without intention of humor he 
 said: 
 
 "Really, honey, you know you just can't keep the 
 President waiting." 
 
 He tore loose the tendrils of her fingers and ran to his 
 own dressing-room. She wept awhile, then rose to help 
 accoutre him. He had his uniform at home still. 
 
 In the Grecian simplicity of her nightgown, the very 
 cream of silk, she might have been Andromache harness 
 ing Hector. Only there was no baby for him to leave 
 with her, no baby to shrink in fright from the horse 
 hair crest of the helmet that he did not wear.
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 When he was all dressed in his olive-drab she still 
 could not let him go. She held him with her soft arms 
 and twiddled the gun-metal buttons of his blouse. And 
 when at length she must make an end of farewells she 
 hugged him with all her might and was glad that the hard 
 buttons hurt the delicate breast that he felt against him 
 smotheringly sweet and perilously yielding. 
 
 Not knowing how tame the event of all this war-like 
 circumstance was to prove, he suffered to the deeps of his 
 being the keen ache of separation that has wrung so many 
 hearts in this eternally battling world. War, the sunderer, 
 had reached them with his great divorce. 
 
 When he was free of her at last she followed him and 
 caught new kisses. She ran shamelessly barefoot to the 
 door to have the last of his lips, called good-by to him 
 when the elevator carried him into the pit, and flung 
 kisses downward after him. Then she stumbled back to 
 her room and cried aloud. Liliane, her maid, came to 
 help her and Liliane wept with her, knowing all too well 
 what war could do to love. 
 
 Later Kedzie went to the armory and slipped through 
 the massed crowds to see Jim again. He was gloriously 
 busy and it stirred her martially to see his men come 
 up, click heels, salute, report, ask questions, salute, and 
 retreat again. 
 
 A few excited days of recruiting and equipping and 
 then the ceremony of the muster-in. Jim spent his 
 nights at home, but his terrified mother and his none too 
 stoical father were there to rival Kedzie in devotion. 
 
 Importance was in the air. There was a stir of history 
 in the public mood. The flags rippled with a new twinkle 
 of stars and a fiercer writhing of stripes. The red had the 
 omen of blood. 
 
 On the third day there was a ruffle of drums and a 
 crying of brass on Fifth Avenue. People recalled the 
 great days when the boys in blue had paraded away to 
 the wars. Only this regiment marched up, not down, the
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Avenue. It was the Sixty-ninth, its flagstaff solid with 
 the silver rings of battle. It was moving north to the 
 mobilization-camp. 
 
 On the ninth day the Seventh went down the Avenue, 
 twelve hundred strong, to entrain for Texas. The bullets 
 of the foe were not the only dangers. It was midsummer 
 and these men were bound for the tropics and the cursed 
 fields of sand where the tarantula, the rattlesnake, and 
 the scorpion lurked under the cactus. 
 
 Jim's mother thought less of the Mexicans than of the 
 fact that there were no sleeping-cars even for the officers. 
 They would get them on the way, but it would be a fear 
 some journey ever southward into the heat, six days in the 
 troop-trains. 
 
 Kedzie was proud of her husband, quite conceited about 
 him, glad that he was marching instead of standing on the 
 curb. But her heart, doubled in bulk, pounded against 
 her side like the leaden clapper of a broken bell. 
 
 Jim caught sight of her where she stood on the steps of 
 his father's house, and her eyes, bright with tears, sad 
 dened him. The fond gaze of his mother touched another 
 well-spring of emotion, and the big, proud stare of his 
 father another. 
 
 But when by chance among the mosaic of faces he saw 
 Charity Coe there was a sorrow in her look that made him 
 stumble, and his heart lost step with the music. Some 
 how it seemed crudest of all to leave her there.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 town was monstrously lonely when Kedzie turned 
 I back to her widowhood. Jim's mother and father 
 and sister were touched by her grief and begged her to 
 make their home hers, but she shook her head. 
 
 For a while her grief and her pride sustained her. She 
 was the Spartan wife of the brave soldier. She even 
 took up knitting as an appropriate activity. She thought 
 in socks. 
 
 But the hateful hours kept coming, the nights would 
 not be brief, and the days would not curtail their length 
 nor quicken their pace. The loathsome inevitable result 
 arrived. 
 
 Even her grief began to bore her. Fidelity grew inane, 
 and her young heart shrieked aloud for diversion. 
 
 If battles had happened down there, if something stirring 
 had only appeared in the news, she could have taken some 
 refreshment of excitement from the situation. Heroic 
 demands breed heroes and heroines, but all that this crisis 
 demanded was the fidelity of torpor, the loyalty of a 
 mollusk. 
 
 Nothing happened except the stupid chronicles of heat 
 and monotony. The rattlesnakes did not bite; the 
 tarantulas scuttered away; the scorpions were no worse 
 than wasps. The Mexicans did not attack or raid or 
 attempt the assassinations which popular hostility ac 
 cepted as their favorite outdoor sport. Mexico continued 
 her siesta while the United States sentineled the bedroom. 
 
 Jim's letters told of scorching heat, of blinding dust- 
 
 509
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 storms, and cloudbursts that made lakes of the camps, but 
 nothing else happened except the welter of routine. 
 
 The regiments had only police work to do, and the 
 task grew irksome. Men began to think of their neglected 
 businesses. The men who stayed at home were sharing 
 bountifully in the prosperity of the times. The volunteers 
 at the Border were wasting their abilities for fifteen dollars 
 a month. 
 
 The officers began to resign by the score, by the hun 
 dred. As many enlisted men dropped out as could beg 
 off. Jim could afford to stay; he would not resign, 
 though Kedzie wrote appeals and finally demands that 
 he return to his wretched wife. 
 
 Resentment replaced sorrow in her heart. She began 
 to impute ugly motives to his absence. The tradition of 
 the alluring Mexican senorita obsessed her. She imagined 
 him engaged in wild romances with sullen beauties. She 
 was worried about guitar music and stilettoes. 
 
 If there were beautiful senoritas there in McAllen, 
 Jim did not see them. His dissipations were visits to the 
 movie shows and excursions for dinner to Mr. and Mrs. 
 Riley's hotel at Mission. Liquor was forbidden to officers 
 and men under dire penalties, and Jim's conviviality was 
 restricted to the soda-water fountains. He became as 
 rabid a consumer of ice-cream cones and sundaes as a 
 matinee girl. It was a burlesque of war to make the 
 angels hold their sides, if the angels could forget the 
 slaughter-house of Europe. 
 
 Jim felt that the Government had buncoed him into this 
 comic-opera chorus. He resented the service as an in 
 carceration. But he would not resign. For months he 
 plodded the doleful round of his duties, ate bad food, 
 poured out unbelievable quantities of sweat and easily 
 believable quantities of profanity. 
 
 On the big practice hike through the wilderness who 
 that saw him staggering along, choked with alkali dust, 
 knouted by the sun, stabbed by the cactus, carrying two 
 
 5*0
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 rifles belonging to worn-out soldiers in addition to his own 
 load, looking forward to the privilege of throwing him 
 self down by the roadside for ten minutes' respite, pray 
 ing for the arrival in camp with its paradise of a little 
 shelter tent and beans and bacon for dinner or for break 
 fast or supper who could have believed that he did not 
 have to do it? That he had indeed at home soft luxuries, a 
 rosy little wife, a yacht, and servants to lift his shoes from 
 the floor for him? 
 
 It was easier, however, for him to get along thus there 
 where everybody did the same than it was for Kedzie 
 to get along ascetically in New York where nearly every 
 body she knew was gay. 
 
 She might have gone down to Texas to see Jim, but when 
 he wrote her how meager the accommodations were and 
 how harsh the comforts, she pained him by taking his 
 advice. Like almost all the other wives, she stayed at 
 home and made the best of it. 
 
 The best was increasingly bad. Her lot, indeed, was 
 none too cheerful. After her clandestine marriage she had 
 confronted her husband's parents, and the result was not 
 satisfactory. She had had no honeymoon, and her hus 
 band's friends were chill toward her. Then he marched 
 away and left her for half a year. 
 
 She was young and pretty and restless. She had ac 
 quired a greed of praise. She had given 'up her public 
 glory to be her husband's private prima donna; and then 
 her audience had abandoned her. 
 
 Though her soul traveled far in a short time by the 
 calendar, every metamorphosis was slow and painful and 
 imperceptible. She wept her eyes dry; then moped until 
 her gloom grew intolerable. The first diversion she sought 
 was really an effort of her grief to renew itself by a little 
 repose. Her first amusement was for her grief's sake. 
 But before long her diversions were undertaken for 
 diversion's sake.
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She had to have" friends and she had to take what she 
 could get. The more earnest elements of society did not 
 interest her, nor she them. The fast crowd disgusted her 
 at first, but remained the only one that did not repulse 
 her advances. 
 
 Her first glimpses of the revelers filled her with re 
 pugnance and confirmed her in what she had heard and 
 read of the wickedness of the rich. The fact that she had 
 seen also the virtuous rich, solemn rich, religious rich, 
 miserly rich, was forgotten. The fact that in every stage 
 of means there are the same classes escaped her memory. 
 She had known of middle classes where libertinism flour 
 ished, had known of licentiousness among the poor shop 
 keepers, shoddy intriguers in the humble boarding-houses. 
 
 But now she felt that money made vice and forgot 
 that vice is one of the amusements accessible to the very 
 poorest, to all who inherit flesh and its appetites. 
 
 Gradually she forgot her horror of dissipation. The out- 
 swirling eddy of the gayer crowd began to gather and com 
 pel her feet. She lacked the wisdom to attract the in 
 tellectuals, the culture to run with the artistic and musical 
 sets, the lineage to satisfy that curious "few who find a 
 congeniality in the fact that their ancestors were respect 
 able and recorded persons. 
 
 In the fast gang she did not need to have or use her 
 brains. She did not need a genealogy. Her beauty was 
 her admission-fee. Her restlessness was her qualification. 
 
 Those who were careless of their own behavior were care 
 less of their accomplices. They accepted Kedzie without 
 scruple. They accepted especially the invitations she 
 could well afford. She ceased to be afraid of a compliment. 
 She grew addicted to flattery. She learned to take a joke 
 off -color and match it in shade. 
 
 She met women of malodorous reputation and found that 
 they were not so black as they had been painted. She 
 learned how warm-hearted and charitable a woman could 
 be for whom the world had a cold shoulder and no charity. 
 
 5"
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She extended her tolerance from men whose escapades 
 had been national topics to women who had been involved 
 in distinguished scandals and were busily involving them 
 selves anew. Being tolerant of them, she had to be 
 tolerant of their ways. Forgiving the sinner helps to 
 forgive the sin. There are few things more endearing 
 than forgiveness. One of the most appealing figures in 
 literature and art is the forgiven woman taken in adultery. 
 
 And thus by easy stages and generous concessions 
 Kedzie, who had begun her second marriage with the 
 strictest ideals of behavior, found herself surrounded by 
 people of a loose-reined life. Things once abhorred be 
 came familiar, amusing, charming. 
 
 It was increasingly difficult to resent advances toward 
 her own citadel which she had smiled at in others. She 
 grew more and more gracious toward a narrowing group 
 of men till the safety-in-numbers approached the peril- 
 in-fewness. She grew more and more gracious to a 
 widening group of women, and they brought along their 
 men. 
 
 Kedzie even forgave Pet Bettany and struck up a 
 friendship with her. Pet apologized to her other friends 
 for taking up with Kedzie, by the sufficient plea, "She 
 gives such good food and drink at her boarding-house." 
 
 Kedzie found Pet intensely comforting since Pet was 
 full of gossip and satirized with contempt the people 
 who had been treating Kedzie with contempt. It is 
 mighty pleasant to hear of the foibles of our superiors. 
 The illusion of rising is acquired by bringing things down 
 to us as well as by rising to them. When Pet told Kedzie 
 something belittling about somebody big Kedzie felt her 
 self enlarged. 
 
 Pet had another influence on Kedzie. Pet was no 
 more contemptuous of aristocrats than she was of people 
 who were good or tried to be, or, failing that, kept up a 
 decent pretense. 
 
 Pet made a snobbery of vice and had many an anecdote 
 33 513
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 of the lapses of the respectable and the circumspectable. 
 Her railing way brought virtue itself into disrepute and 
 Kedzie was frightened out of her last few senses. She fell 
 under the tyranny of the risque, which is as fell as the 
 tyranny of the prudish. 
 
 Prissy Atterbury had told Pet without delay of meeting 
 Jim Dyckman at Charity's home. Now that Pet was a 
 crony of Kedzie' s she recalled the story. Finding Kedzie 
 one day suffering from an attack of scruples, and de 
 clining to accept an invitation because "Jim might not 
 like it, "Pet laughed: 
 
 " Oh, Jim! What right has he got to kick? He didn't 
 lose much time getting back to his Charity Coe after he 
 married you." 
 
 "His Charity Coe!" Kedzie gasped. "What do you 
 mean by his Charity Coe?" 
 
 "Why, his old reliable sweetheart. He's been silly 
 
 about her since babyhood. When she married Pete 
 
 Cheever he moped like a sick hound. And didn't 
 
 , he beat up Pete in a club only a few days before he 
 
 married you?" 
 
 This was all news to Kedzie and it sickened her. She 
 demanded more poison, and Pet ladled it out joyously. 
 
 She told Kedzie how Prissy Atterbury found Jim at 
 Charity's home. But Kedzie remembered vividly that 
 Jim had said he met Charity on the street. And now she 
 had caught him in a lie, a woman-lie ! He was not there 
 to explain that he visited Charity in Kedzie's behalf, and 
 if he had explained it would only have embittered her the 
 more. 
 
 Being quite convinced now of Jim's perfidy, she denied 
 the possibility of it. 
 
 "Jim's square, I'm sure. There couldn't be anything 
 wrong with him. And Mrs. Cheever is an awful prig, 
 everybody says." 
 
 Pet whooped witn laughter: "They're the worst sort. 
 Why, only a couple of years ago Jim and Charity were up
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 in the Adirondacks alone together. Prissy Atterbury 
 caught them sneaking back." 
 
 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 Char 
 ity 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 police 
 men 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 un 
 witting husband. 
 
 There was another factor working toward her debase 
 ment 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 entertain 
 ments grew more lavish and more reckless. She had an 
 inspiration at last. She would put Jim's yacht into com 
 mission and take a party of friends on a cruise, well 
 chaperoned, of course.
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 She sent instructions to the master of the vessel to get 
 steam up. Kmidsen 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. 
 
 He regretted his anger when it was too late. Kedzie, 
 who had already made up her list of guests and received 
 their hilarious acceptances, was compelled to withdraw the 
 invitations. She would have bought a yacht of her own, 
 but she could not a,ff ord it ! She was not allowed so large 
 a fund. She, Mrs. Dyckman, wanted something and 
 could not afford it! What was the use of anything, any 
 how? 
 
 Times had changed for Kedzie indeed when the little 
 beggar from the candy-store who had cried once when 
 Skip Magruder, the bakery waiter, refused to take her to 
 the movies twice in one Sunday, was crying now because 
 her miser of a husband forbade her a turbine yacht as a 
 plaything. 
 
 She was crushed with chagrin and she felt completely 
 absolved of the last obligation. What kind of a brute 
 had she married who would go away on a military picnic 
 among his nice, warm cacti and deny his poor deserted 
 wife a little boat-ride and a breath of fresh air? 
 
 If she had had any lingering inclination to visit Jim 
 in Texas she gave it up now. She went to Newport in-
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 stead and took Pet Bettany along for a companion at 
 Kedzie's expense, of course. 
 
 Charity Coe Cheever was visiting Mrs. Noxon again 
 and Kedzie snubbed her haughtily when she met her at 
 the Casino or on Bailey's Beach. Kedzie was admitted 
 to that sacred surf of the Spouting Rock Association now 
 and she was as pretty a naiad as there was. 
 
 But now she encountered occasional rebuffs from cer 
 tain people, not only because she was common, but be 
 cause she was reputed to be fast. When the gossip- 
 peddlers brought her this fierce verdict she was hardened 
 enough to scorn the respectables as frumps. She grew a 
 little more impudent than ever and her pout began to take 
 the form of a sneer. 
 
 She lingered in and about Newport till the autumn 
 came. Occasional excursions on other people's yachts 
 or in her own cars or to house-parties broke the season, 
 but she loved Newport. Jim's name had given her entry 
 to places and sets whence nobody quite had the courage 
 or the authority to dismiss her. 
 
 At Newport there was a very handsome fool named 
 Jake Vanderveer, distantly related to the charming Van- 
 der Veers as well as the Van der Veers. He was even 
 more distantly related to his own wife at the time Kedzie 
 met him. 
 
 Pet Bettany had told Kedzie what a rotter Mrs. Jake 
 was, and Kedzie felt awfully sorry for Jakie. So did 
 Jakie. He was sophomoric enough to talk about his 
 broken heart and she was sophomoric enough to suffer for 
 him most enjoyably. 
 
 A little sympathy is a dangerous thing. Married people 
 run a great risk unless they keep theirs strictly mutual and 
 for home consumption. 
 
 Jakie said he believed in running away from his grief. 
 Kedzie ran with him for company. People's tongues ran 
 just as fast. Jakie was making a lot of money in Wall
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Street and trying to drown his sorrows there. Kedzie 
 was thrilled by his jargon of the market and he taught 
 her how to read the confetti streamers that pour out of the 
 ticker. Jakie confided to her a great scheme. 
 
 " The only way I can keep that wife of mine from spend 
 ing all my money is to spend it first." 
 
 "You're a genius!" Kedzie said. A woman usually ap 
 proves almost any scheme for keeping money away from 
 another woman. 
 
 "I'm going to make a killing next week," said Jakie, 
 "and I'm going just quietly to put a couple of thou. up 
 for my little pal Kedzie. You can't lose. If you win 
 you can buy yourself five thousand dollars' worth of 
 popcorn." 
 
 Kedzie was enraptured. She would have some money 
 at last that she didn't have to drag out of her husband. 
 She prayed the Lord for a rising market. 
 
 Then Mrs. Dyckman sent for her. When Kedzie called 
 the servants were extremely solemn. Kedzie had to wait 
 till the doctor left. He was very solemn, too. 
 
 Kedzie found her mother-in-law in bed. She looked like 
 a small mountain after a snow-storm. It was strange to 
 Kedzie to find one so mighty brought low and speaking 
 in so tiny a voice. Her husband was there and he was 
 haggard with sympathy and alarm, a very elephant in 
 terror. He was less courteous than usual to Kedzie and 
 he left the room at his wife's signal. Mrs. Dyckman was 
 more gentle than ever. 
 
 "Draw your chair up close, my child," she whispered. 
 "I want to have a little talk with you and my voice is 
 weak.". 
 
 Kedzie was alarmed enough to revert to a simple phrase: 
 "I'm awfully sorry you're sick. Are you very sick?" 
 
 "Very. There's such a lot of me, you know. It's dis 
 gusting. I've scared my poor husband to death. I'm 
 glad Jim isn't here to be worried. I hope I'll not have 
 to send for him. But I'd like to."
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie felt a little quiver of alarm. She did not quite 
 want Jim to come back just yet. She had grown used to 
 his absence. His return would deprive poor Jakie of 
 solace. 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman took Kedzie's hand and stared at her 
 sadly. 
 
 "You're looking a little tired, my dear, if you'll forgive 
 me for being frank. I'm very old and I very much want 
 you and Jim to win out. Lying here I take things too 
 anxiously, I suppose, but I'm frightened. I don't want 
 my boy and you to go the way so many other couples do. 
 He's left you because his country needed him, or thought 
 it did. It wouldn't look well to have him come back 
 and find that in his absence you had forgotten him. Now, 
 would it?" 
 
 "Why, Mrs. Dyckman!" Kedzie gasped, getting her 
 hand away. 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman groped for it and took it back. " Don't 
 be vexed. Or if you must be, pout as you used to. You 
 mustn't grow hard, my child. Your type of beauty 
 doesn't improve with cynicism. You must think sweet 
 thoughts or simply be petulant when you're angry. 
 Don't grow hard! If nothing else will move you let me 
 appeal to your pride. You are traveling with a hard 
 crowd, a cruel pack, Miss Bettany's pack, and a silly 
 lot of men like Jake Vanderveer. And you mustn't, my 
 child. You just mustn't get hard and brazen. Couldn't 
 you give up Miss Bettany? She's an absolutely unprin 
 cipled creature. She's bad, and you must know it. Don't 
 you?" 
 
 Kedzie could not answer, or would not. Mrs. Dyck- 
 man's voice grew poignant. 
 
 "I've lived so long and seen so much unhappiness. 
 There is so much tragedy across the water. My poor 
 daughter has had a cable that her husband's brother has 
 been killed in France. Her husband has been wounded; 
 she is sailing back. So many men, so many, many men are 
 
 520
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 dying. The machine-guns go like scythes all day long, 
 and the poor fellows lie out there in the shrapnel rain 
 Oh, it is unbelievable. And Europe's women are under 
 going such endless sorrow; every day over there the lists 
 contain so many names. So many of Cicely's friends 
 have perished. Life never was so full of sorrow, my dear, 
 but it is such a noble sorrow that it seems as if nobody 
 had any right to any other kind of sorrow. 
 
 "You are young, dear child. You are lonely and rest 
 less; but you don't realize how loathsome it is to other 
 people to see such recklessness going on over here while 
 such lofty souls are going to death in droves over there. 
 The sorrow you will bring on yourself and all of us, and 
 on poor Jim, will be such a hateful sorrow, my dear, such 
 an unworthy grief!" 
 
 Kedzie choked, and mumbled, "I don't think I know 
 what you mean." 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman petted her hand: " I don't think you do. 
 I hope not. But take an old woman's word for it, be be 
 Caesar's wife?" 
 
 "Caesar's wife?" Kedzie puzzled. "What did she do?" 
 
 "It was what she didn't do. Well, I haven't the 
 strength or the right, perhaps to tell you any more. 
 Yes, I will. I must say this much. You are the sub 
 ject of very widespread criticism, and Jim is being 
 pitied." 
 
 "Me criticized? Jim pitied? Why? For what?" 
 
 " For the things you do, my dear, the places you go, and 
 the hours you keep and the friends you keep." 
 
 "That's disgusting!" Kedzie snarled. "The long- 
 tongued gossips! They ought to be ashamed of them 
 selves." 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman's fever began to mount. She dropped 
 Kedzie's hand and tugged at the coverlet. 
 
 "You'd better go, my dear. I apologize. It's useless! 
 When did age ever gain anything by warning youth? 
 I'm an old fool, and you're a young one. And nothing 
 
 521
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 will stop your ambition to run through life to the end of 
 it and get all you can out of it." 
 
 Kedzie felt dismissed and rose in bewildered anger. 
 Mrs. Dyckman heaved herself to one elbow and pointed 
 her finger at Kedzie. 
 
 "But keep away from Jake Vanderveer! and Pet 
 Bettany! or or Send my nurse, please." 
 
 She fell back gasping and Kedzie flew, in a fear that 
 the old lady would die of a stroke and Kedzie be blamed 
 for it forever. Kedzie was so blue and terrified that she 
 had to send for Jake Vanderveer to keep from going crazy. 
 He told her that the market was still on the climb, and 
 that her sympathy had saved his life. He had been 
 desperate enough for suicide when he met her, and now he 
 was one of the rising little suns of finance. 
 
 Mrs. Dyckman did not die, but she did not get well, and 
 Jim's father wrote him that he'd better resign and come 
 home. It would do his mother a world of good, and he 
 was doing the country no good down there. 
 
 Jim was alarmed ; he wrote out his resignation and sub 
 mitted it to his colonel, who showed him a new order from 
 the War Department announcing that no more resigna 
 tions would be accepted except on the most urgent grounds. 
 Idleness was destroying the Guard faster than a campaign. 
 Jim returned to the doldrums with a new resentment. 
 He was a prisoner now. 
 
 He had gone to Texas to find war and his wife to 
 Newport to find gaiety. She found much more than that. 
 On October yth the old town was stirred by something 
 genuinely new in sensations the arrival of a German 
 war submarine, the U-53.
 
 THE FOURTH BOOK 
 THE MARCHIONESS HAS QUALMS
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 A FREIGHT submarine, the Bremen, had recently 
 /"\ excited the wonderment of a world jaded with 
 miracles by crossing from Helgoland to Norfolk with a 
 cargo. But here was a war-ship that dived underneath the 
 British blockade. 
 
 The dead of the Lusitania were still unrequited and 
 unburied, but the Germans had graciously promised 
 President Wilson to sink no more passenger-ships without 
 warning, and they had been received back into the in 
 dulgence of the super-patient neutrals. 
 
 And now came the under-sea boat to test American 
 hospitality. It was received with amazed politeness and 
 the news flew through Newport, bringing the people 
 flocking like children. An American submarine con 
 ducted its guest to anchorage. Mail for the ambassador 
 was put ashore and courtesy visits were exchanged with 
 the commandant of the Narragansett Bay Naval Station. 
 In three hours the vessel, not to overstay the bounds of 
 neutral hospitality, returned to the ocean. 
 
 A flotilla of American destroyers convoyed it outside 
 and calmly watched while the monster halted nine ships 
 off Nantucket, graciously permitted their crews and pas 
 sengers to take themselves, but no belongings, into open 
 boats; then torpedoed the vessels one after another. 
 
 The destroyers of the United States Navy stood by like 
 spectators on the bleachers, and when the submarine had 
 quite finished the supply of ships the obliging destroyers 
 picked up the fragments in the open boats and brought 
 
 525
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 them ashore. And the U-53 went on unchecked, after one 
 of the most astounding spectacles in the history of the sea. 
 
 Charity Coe and other women waited on the docks till 
 midnight arranging refuge for more than two hundred 
 victims. It was a novel method for getting into Newport 
 mansions. Even Kedzie took in an elderly couple. She 
 tried to get a few young men, but they were all taken. 
 
 The next morning there was a panic in Wall Street and 
 nearly two million shares were flung overboard, with a loss 
 of five hundred million dollars in market values. Marine 
 insurance-rates rose from a hundred to five hundred per 
 cent, and it seemed that our ocean trade would be driven 
 from the free seas. But everything had been done ac 
 cording to the approved etiquette for U-boats, and there 
 was not even an official protest. 
 
 Once more the Germans announced that they had 
 wrecked the British naval supremacy, as in the battle of 
 Jutland, after which glorious victory the German fleet 
 appeared no more in the North Sea. 
 
 Nor was there any check in the throngs of merchant- 
 vessels shuttling the ocean for the Allies. And that dis 
 gusted the Germans. Their promises to Mr. Wilson irked 
 them. They lusted again for their old policy of "ruth- 
 lessness"; "Schrecklichkeit" joined "Gott strafe" in familiar 
 speech, and Germany added America to her "Hymn of 
 Hate." Strange, that among all the warring peoples the 
 one nation that went to battle with the most fervent 
 religious spirit, even putting "Gott mit tins" on the uni 
 forms of its soldiers, that nation contributed to the slang 
 of the day no nobler phrases. than "Schrecklichkeit" and 
 "strafe" and the equivalents of "scrap of paper" and 
 "Hymn of Hate." 
 
 All this meant little to Kedzie except that Jakie Vander- 
 veer, who had been her devoted squire for some time, was 
 caught and ruined in the market slump. Otherwise he 
 might have ruined Kedzie, for he had been dazzling her 
 more and more with his lavish courtship. When he lost 
 
 526
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 his money he left Newport and Kedzie never knew how 
 narrow an escape she had. She only knew that she did 
 not make the money he promised to make for her. She 
 said that war was terrible. 
 
 A pious soul would have credited Providence with the 
 rescue. But Providence had other plans. One of the vic 
 tims of the U-53 was a young English aviator, the Mar 
 quess of Strathdene. If the U-53 had n t sunk the ship 
 that carried him Kedzie would have had an exceedingly 
 different future. 
 
 Strathdene had been a spendthrift, a libertine, and a 
 loafer till the war shook England. He had been well 
 shaken, too, and unsuspected emotions were aroused. He 
 had learned to fly and insulted the law of gravity with 
 the same impudence he had shown for the laws of morality. 
 
 In due time he was joined to an air squadron. He 
 risked his life every moment he was aloft, but the danger 
 became a negligible thing in the thrill of the liveliest form 
 of big-game hunting thus far known to man. In mid- 
 sky he stalked his prey and was stalked by it ; he chased 
 German Taubes or was chased by them into clouds and 
 ' out of them, up hill and down dale in ether-land amid 
 the showers from below of the raining aircraft guns. 
 Strathdene knew how to dodge and duck, turn somer 
 saults, volplane, spiral, coast downward on an invisible 
 toboggan-slide, or climb into heaven on an airy stair. 
 
 The sky was full of such flocks; the gallant American 
 gentlemen who made up the Escadrille Lafayette went 
 clouding with him, and Mr. Robert Lorraine, the excellent 
 actor, and Mr. Vernon Castle, the amiable revolutionist 
 of the dance, and many and many another eagle heart. 
 Strathdene scouted valuably during the first battle of the 
 Somme, his companion working the gun or the camera or 
 the bomb-dropping lever as the need might be. 
 
 And then one day a burst of shrapnel from the remote 
 earth shattered his plane and him. A slug of iron went 
 upward through his hip and another nicked off a bit 
 
 527
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 of his shoulder. But he brought his wounded machine 
 safely to earth and toppled into the arms of the hospital 
 aids ; went backward in a motor-ambulance to a receiving- 
 station, then back in a train, then across the Channel, 
 then across the ocean in a steamer to be sunk by a sub 
 marine and brought ashore in a lifeboat. Strathdene 
 had pretty well tested the modern systems of vehicular 
 transportation. 
 
 The surgeons mended his wounds, but his nerves had 
 felt the shrapnel. That was why the sea voyage had been 
 advised. Strathdene seemed to have a magnetic gift for 
 adventure. An aircraft gun brought him down from the 
 clouds and a submersible ship came up from the deeps to 
 have a try at him. Before long Kedzie would be saying 
 that fate had taken all this trouble just to bring him and 
 her together. 
 
 In the transfer from the ship to the lifeboat Strathdene's 
 wounds were wrenched and his sufferings renewed. He 
 was lucky enough to fall into the hands of Charity Coe 
 Cheever. She was a war nurse of experience, and he was 
 soon well enough to try to flirt with her. But she had 
 been experienced also in the amorous symptoms of con 
 valescent soldiers and she repressed his ardor skilfully. 
 She put an ice-cap on his heart and head. 
 
 As soon as he was up and about again he met Kedzie. 
 It seemed to be her business to take away from Charity 
 Coe all of Charity's conquests, and the young Marquess 
 found her hospitable to his hunger for friendship. 
 
 Before the first day's acquaintance was over Kedzie 
 was as fascinated by his chatter as Desdemona was by 
 Othello's anecdotes. 
 
 One night Kedzie dreamed that she was a Marquessess 
 or whatever the wife of a Marquess would be styled. 
 
 Kedzie was herself again. Kedzie was dreaming again. 
 She had an ambition for something higher than her 
 station. She made haste to encourage the infatuated 
 Marquess. Counting upon winning him somehow as her 
 
 528
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 husband, she gave him encouragement beyond any she had 
 given her other swains. 
 
 But Strathdene had no intention of marrying her or 
 any other woman. His heart was in the highlands, 
 the cloudlands; his heart was not there. 
 
 A purer patriot or a warrior more free of any taint of 
 caution than Strathdene could not be imagined, but other 
 wise he was as arrant a scamp as ever. While he waited 
 for strength to "carry on" in the brave, new, English 
 sense, it amused him to "cany on" in the mischievous 
 old American sense. 
 
 Kedzie was determined that he should live long enough 
 for her to free herself from Jim and make the marquisate 
 hers. She seemed to be succeeding. She found Strath 
 dene as easy of fascination as her old movie audiences had 
 been. He even tried to write poetry about her pout; 
 but he was a better rider on an aeroplane than on Pegasus. 
 
 Kedzie was soon wishing for Jim's return, since she 
 could not see how to divorce him till he appeared. She 
 tried to frame a letter asking for her release, but it was not 
 -easy writing. She felt that she would have a better chance 
 of success if Jim were within wheedling distance. But 
 Jim remained away, and Kedzie grew fonder and fonder 
 of her Marquess, and he of her. 
 
 Perhaps they were really mated, their pettinesses and 
 selfishnesses peculiarly complemental. In any case, they 
 were mutually bewitched. 
 
 Their dalliance became the talk of Newport. Every 
 body believed that what was bad enough at best was even 
 worse than it was. Charity Coe heard the couple dis 
 cussed everywhere. She was distressed on Jim's account. 
 And now she found herself in just the plight that had 
 tortured Jim when he knew that Peter Cheever was 
 disloyal to Charity and longed to tell her, but felt the duty 
 too odious. So Charity pondered her own obligation. 
 She was tempted to write Jim an anonymous letter, but 
 had not the cowardice. She was tempted to write to him 
 
 529
 
 frankly, but had not the courage. She did at last what 
 Jim had done nothing. 
 
 Jim's mother had heard of Vanderveer's disappearance 
 from Kedzie's entourage and she had improved with hope. 
 When she learned that Strathdene was apparently in 
 fatuated she grew worse and telegraphed Jim to ask for a 
 leave of absence. She did not tell Kedzie of her tele 
 gram or of Jim's answer. 
 
 Pet Bettany flatly accused Kedzie of being guilty, and 
 referred to the Marquess as her paramour. When 
 Kedzie furiously resented her insolence Pet laughed. 
 
 "The more fool you, if you carry the scandal and lose 
 the fun." 
 
 Kedzie was more afraid of Pet's contempt than of a 
 better woman's. She began to think herself a big fool for 
 not having been a bigger one. She fell into an altogether 
 dangerous mood and she could no longer save herself. 
 She almost prayed to be led into temptation. The un- 
 uttered prayer was speedily answered. 
 
 She went motoring with Strathdene late one night in a 
 car he had hired. When he ventured to plead with her 
 not to go back to her home where her servants provided 
 a kind of chaperonage, she made only a formal protest or 
 two. He stopped at a roadside inn, a secluded place well 
 known for its unquestioning hospitality. 
 
 Strathdene, tremulous with victory, led Kedzie to the 
 dining-room for a bit of sup and sip. The landlord es 
 corted them to a nook in a corner and beckoned a waiter. 
 Kedzie was studying the bill of fare with blurred and 
 frightened vision when she heard the footsteps of the 
 waiter plainly audible in the quiet room. They had a 
 curious rhythm. There was a hitch in the step, a skip. 
 
 Her heart stopped as if it had run into a tree. The 
 "skip" brought down on her soul a whole five-foot shelf 
 of remembrances of her first New York love-affair with 
 the lame waiter in the bakery. All her good fortune had 
 been set in motion by poor, old, shabby " Skip." She had 
 
 530
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 soared away like some rainbow-hued bubble gently re 
 leasing itself from the clay pipe that inflated it out of 
 the suds of its origin. 
 
 Kedzie had learned to be ashamed of Skip as long ago 
 as when she was a Greek dancer. She had not seen or 
 heard of him since she sent him the insulting answer to his 
 stage-door note. And now he had saved himself up for a 
 ruinous reappearance when she was in the company of a 
 Marquess and on such an errand! 
 
 What on earth was Skip doing so far from the Bronx 
 and in the environs of Newport, of all places? It occurred 
 to Kedzie that Skip might ask her the same question.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 '""PHE terror his footsteps inspired was confirmed by 
 1 the unforgetable voice that came across her icy 
 shoulder-blades. He slapped the china and silver down 
 with the familiar bravura of a quick-lunch waiter, and her 
 heart sank, remembering that she had once admired his 
 skill. 
 
 The Marquess looked up at him with a glare of rebuke 
 as Skip posed himself patiently with one hand, knuckles 
 down, on the table, the other on his hip, and demanded, 
 with misplaced enthusiasm: 
 
 "Well, folks, what's it goin' to be?" 
 
 The Marquess had been somewhat democratized by his 
 life in the army, and, being a true Briton, he always ex 
 pected the worst in America. He proceeded to order a 
 light supper that would not take too long. Skip crushed 
 him by saying: 
 
 "Ain't the little lady takin' nothin'?" 
 
 Kedzie was afraid to speak. She put her finger on the 
 menu at a chafing-dish version of chicken, and the Mar 
 quess added it to his order. Skip shuffled away without 
 recognizing Kedzie. She waited only for his exit to make 
 her own. 
 
 It was terrifying enough to realize that the moment 
 Skip caught a glimpse of her he would hail her noisily 
 and tell the Marquess all about her. There still lingered 
 in Kedzie a little more honesty than snobbery and she 
 felt even less dread of being "bawled out" by a waiter 
 in the presence of a Marquess than of having Skip Ma- 
 gruder know that she was in such a place even with a 
 
 532
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Marquess. Skip had been good to her and had counseled 
 her to go straight. 
 
 She felt no gratitude toward him now, but she could not 
 face his contempt. That would be degradation beneath 
 degradation. She was disgusted with everything and 
 everybody, including herself. The glamour of the es 
 capade was dissipated. The excitement of an illicit amour 
 so delicious in so many farces, so tenderly dramatic in 
 so many novels, had curdled. She saw what an ugly 
 business she was in and she was revolted. 
 
 Kedzie waited only to hear the swinging door whiff 
 after Skip's syncopated feet, then she whispered sharply 
 across the table to the Marquess : 
 
 "Take me out of this awful place. I don't know what 
 I'm doing here. I won't stay! not a moment!" 
 
 "But we've ordered " 
 
 "You stay and eat, then. I won't stop here another 
 minute!" 
 
 She rose. She smothered the Marquess's protests about 
 the awkwardness, the ludicrousness of such a flight. 
 
 "What will the waiter think?" he asked, being afraid 
 of a waiter, though of no one else. 
 
 Kedzie did not care what the waiter thought, so long as 
 he did not know whom he thought it of. Strathdene 
 gave the headwaiter a bill and followed Kedzie out. 
 He was hungry, angry, and puzzled. 
 
 Skip Magruder never knew what a chaperon he had 
 been. If Providence managed the affair it chose an odd 
 instrument, and intervened, as usual, at the last moment. 
 Providence would save itself a good deal of work if it 
 came round a little earlier in these cases. Perhaps it 
 does and finds nobody awake. 
 
 Strathdene demanded explanations. Kedzie told him 
 truth but not all of it. 
 
 " It suddenly swept over me," she gasped, "how horrible 
 it was for me to be there." 
 
 She wept with shame and when he wottfd have consoled 
 
 533
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 her she kept him aloof. The astonishing result of the 
 outing was that both came home better. It suddenly 
 swept over Strathdene that Kedzie was innocenter than 
 he had dreamed. She was good ! By gad ! she was good 
 enough to be the wife even of a Strathdene. He told 
 Kedzie that he wished to God he could marry her. She 
 answered fervently that she wished to God he could. 
 
 He asked her "You don't really love that Dyckman 
 fella, do you?" 
 
 "I don't really love anybody but you," said Kedzie. 
 "You are the first man I have really truly loved." 
 
 She meant it and it may have been true. She said it 
 with sincerity at least. One usually does. At any rate, 
 it sounded wonderful to Strathdene and he determined to 
 make her his. He would let England muddle along some 
 how till he made this alliance with the beautiful Missou- 
 rienne. But Kedzie's plight was again what it had been; 
 she had a husband extra. In some cases the husband is 
 busy enough with his own affairs to let the lover trot 
 alongside, like the third horse which the Greeks called 
 the par ear os. But neither Jim nor Strathdene would 
 be content with that sort of team-work, and Kedzie 
 least of all. 
 
 She and Strathdene agreed that love would find the 
 way, and Kedzie suggested that Jim would probably be 
 decent enough to arrange the whole matter. He had an 
 awfully clever lawyer, too. 
 
 Strathdene had braved nearly every peril in life except 
 marriage. He was determined to take a shy at that. 
 He and Kedzie talked their honeymoon plans with the 
 boyishness and girlishness of nineteen and sixteen. 
 
 Then Kedzie remembered Gilfoyle. She had thanked 
 her stars that she told Dyckman the truth about him in 
 time. And now she was confronted with the same situa 
 tion. Since her life was repeating its patterns, it would 
 be foolish to ignore the lessons. So after some hesitation 
 she told the Marquess that Jim Dyckman was not her 
 
 534
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 first, but her second. She told it very tragically, made 
 quite a good story of it. 
 
 But the Marquess had been intrepid enough to laugh 
 when, out of a large woolly cloud a mile aloft, a German 
 flying-machine had suddenly charged him at a hundred 
 miles an hour. He was calm enough now to laugh at the 
 menace of Kedzie's past rushing out of the pink cloud 
 about her. 
 
 "The more the merrier," he said. "The third time's 
 the charm." 
 
 He sighed when he was alone and thought it rather 
 shabby that Cupid should land him at last with a second- 
 handed, a third-hearted arrow. But, after all, these were 
 war times and Economy was the universal watchword. 
 The arrow felt very cozy.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 T TNSELFISHNESS is an acquired art. Children 
 V_J rarely have it. That is why the Greeks represented 
 love of a certain kind as a boy, selfish, treacherous, 
 ingratiating, blind to appearances, naif, gracefully ruthless. 
 
 Kedzie and Strathdene were enamoured of each other. 
 They were both zealots for experience, restless and reckless 
 in their zest of life. As soon as they were convinced of 
 their love, every restraint became an illegal restraint, 
 illegal because they felt that only the law of love had 
 jurisdiction over them. 
 
 When Kedzie received a telegram from Jim that he had 
 secured a leave of absence for thirty days and would be in 
 Newport in four she felt cruelly used. She forgot how 
 she had angled for Jim and hustled him into matrimony. 
 
 She was afraid of him now. She thought of him as many 
 women in captured cities once regarded and have recently 
 again regarded the triumphing enemy as one who would 
 count beauty the best part of the booty. 
 
 Her loyalty to Strathdene was compromised, her deli 
 cacy was horrified. She was distraught with her plight. 
 
 She had to tell the news to Strathdene and he went into 
 frenzies of jealousy. She had pledged herself to be his 
 as soon as she could lift the Dyckman mortgage. If a 
 man is ever going to be jealous he should certainly find 
 occasion for the passion when he is betrothed to the wife 
 of a returning soldier. Strathdene ought to have been on 
 his way back to the aviation-camp, but he had earned the 
 right to humor his nerves, and Kedzie was testing them 
 beyond endurance. 
 
 536
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 It was a tragical-comical dilemma for Kedzie. Even 
 she, with her gift for self-forgiveness, could not quite see 
 how she was to explain prettily to her husband that in his 
 absence she had fallen in love with another man. Wives 
 are not supposed to fall in love while their husbands are 
 at the wars. It has been done, but it is hard to prettify. 
 
 Kedzie beat her forehead in vain for a good-looking 
 explanation. She was still hunting one when Jim came 
 back. He telegraphed her that he would come right 
 through to Newport, and asked her to meet him at the 
 train. She dared not refuse. She simply could not keep 
 her glib promises to Strathdene. It seemed almost trea 
 son to the country for a wife to give her warrior a cold 
 welcome after his tropical service. She met him at the 
 Newport station. He was still in uniform. He had 
 taken no other clothes to Texas with him and had not 
 stopped to buy any. He was too anxious about his 
 mother to pause in New York. He had telegraphed his 
 tailor to fit him out and his valet to pack his things and 
 bring them to Newport. 
 
 Kedzie found him very brown and gaunt, far taller even 
 than she remembered. She was more afraid of him than 
 ever. Strathdene was only a little taller than she. She 
 was afraid to tell Jim that she was another's. 
 
 But sh i ade a poor mimicry of perfect bliss. Jim was 
 not critical. She was more beautiful than he remembered 
 her. He told her so, and she was nattered by his court 
 ship, miserably treacherous as she felt. 
 
 She was proud to be a soldier's wife. She was jealous 
 now of his concern for his mother. He had to go see her 
 first. He was surprised to learn that Kedzie was not 
 living with her. His mother had begun to improve from 
 the moment she had Jim's telegram. But her eyes on 
 Kedzie were terrible. 
 
 Jim did not notice the tension. He was too happy. 
 He was sick of soldiering. His old uniform was like a 
 convict's stripes. He was childishly ambitious to get 
 
 537
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 into long trousers again. For nearly half a year he had 
 buttoned his breeches at the knee and housed his calves 
 in puttees and his feet in army brogans. 
 
 It was like a Christmas morning among new toys for 
 him to put on mufti, and take it off. A bath-tub full 
 of hot water was a paradise regained. Evening clothes 
 with a big white shirt and a top-hat were robes of ascension. 
 But the clothes made to his old measurements were worlds 
 too wide for his shrunk shanks. He had lost tons, he said, 
 in Texas. 
 
 Before daybreak the first morning he terrified his cell 
 mate, Kedzie, by starting up in his sleep with a gasp: 
 "Was that reveille? My God, I'll be late!" 
 
 The joy of finding himself no longer in a tent and of 
 falling back on his pillow was worth the bad dream. Life 
 was one long bad dream to Kedzie. She was guilty which 
 ever way she turned, and afraid of both men. 
 
 Jim had a valet to wait on him. He had the problem 
 of selecting his scarf and his socks for the morning. Jim 
 had come into a lot of money. He had been earning a 
 bank clerk's salary, with no way of spending it. And now 
 he had a bank to spend and a plenty of places to throw it. 
 
 But it was hard for him to believe that he was a free 
 man again. He was amazed to find Newport without 
 cactus and without a scorpion. He kept looking for a 
 scorpion on his pillow. He found one there, but did not 
 recognize her. 
 
 Jim was as much of a parvenu in Newport as Kedzie 
 had ever been. He swept her away at times by his 
 juvenile enthusiasm and she neglected Strathdene atro 
 ciously for a week. 
 
 A large part of the colony had decamped for New York 
 and Boston and Chicago, but those that remained made a 
 throng for Jim. His mother was not well enough to be 
 moved back to New York, but his sister had reached 
 England safely and he was happy in his luxuries. 
 
 But he was the only one that was. His mother was 
 
 538
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 bitter against Kedzie for having fed the gossips. Kedzie 
 was assured that life with Jim had nothing new to offer 
 and she resented him as a barrier between herself and the 
 glory of her future with Strathdene and "the stately 
 homes of England." 
 
 Her mother and father arrived in Newport. Kedzie 
 tried to suppress them for fear that Strathdene might feel 
 that they were the last two back-breaking straws. But 
 she needed a confidante and she told her mother the 
 situation. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp, like Kedzie, had an ambition that ex 
 panded as fast as opportunity allowed. She was dazzled 
 by the thought of being elevated to the peerage. She 
 supposed it made her a relative of royalty. She who had 
 once dreamed of being neighborly with the great Mrs. 
 Dyckman was now imagining herself exchanging crochet 
 ing formulas with Queen Mary. She was saying she had 
 always heard the Queen well spoke of. And Adna Thropp 
 spoke very highly of "George." 
 
 They agreed that it was their sacred duty to place the 
 name of Thropp as high as it could go, cost what it would. 
 
 "After all," said Adna one day, looking up from an 
 article in a Sunday paper "after all, why ain't Thropp 
 as likely a name as Wettin? Or Hohenzollern? And 
 what was Romanoff but an ordinary family once?" 
 
 The only thing that seemed to stand in Kedzie's way 
 was the odious name of Dyckman. 
 
 "What's Dyckman, anyway?" said Mrs. Thropp. 
 "Nothin' but a common old Dutch name." 
 
 But how to shake it off was the problem. Kedzie had 
 to cling to Strathdene with one hand while she tried to 
 release herself from the Dyckmans with the other. 
 
 She had a dreadful feeling that she might lose them 
 both if she were not exceedingly careful and exceedingly 
 lucky. 
 
 Help came to her unexpectedly from Charity Coe, 
 unexpectedly, though Charity was always helping Kedzie. 
 
 539
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 CHARITY COE had been tormented by the spectacle 
 \^s of her friend's wife flirting recklessly with the young 
 Marquess of Strathdene while her husband was at the 
 Border with the troops. But she was far more sharply 
 wrung when she saw Kedzie flirting with her husband, 
 playing the devoted wife with all her might and getting 
 away with it to perfection. 
 
 There is hardly anything our eyes bring us that is more 
 hideous than known disloyalty successfully masquerading 
 as fidelity. The Judas kiss is not to be surpassed in 
 human detestation. 
 
 With almost all the world in uniform, Newport wel 
 comed the sight of one of her own men returned even 
 from what was rather a siesta than a campaign, and old 
 Mrs. Noxon insisted on giving a big party for Jim. She 
 insisted so strongly that Kedzie did not dare refuse, 
 though she had vowed never to step inside the grounds 
 where she had made her Newport debut as a hired nymph. 
 
 Charity tried to escape by alleging a journey to New 
 York, but Mrs. Noxon browbeat her into staying. Char 
 ity did not know that Strathdene was invited till she saw 
 him come in with the crowd. Neither did Kedzie. Old 
 Mrs. Noxon may have invited him for spite against 
 Kedzie or just as an international courtesy to the most dis 
 tinguished foreigner in town. 
 
 She introduced Jim and the Marquess, saying, "You 
 great warriors should know each other." 
 
 Jim felt sheepish because he had been to no war and 
 Strathdene felt sheepish because Jim was so much taller 
 
 540
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 than he. He looked up at him as Napoleon looked en 
 viously up at men who had no glory but their altitude.. 
 Strathdene was also sheepish because Jim said, very 
 simply : 
 
 "Do you know my wife?" 
 
 If he had not been so tall that he saw only the top of 
 Kedzie's coiffure he would have seen that her face was 
 splashed with red. She mumbled something while 
 Strathdene stammered, "Er yes I have had that 
 privilege." He felt a sinking sensation as deadly as 
 when he had his first fall at the aviation school. 
 
 Kedzie dragged Jim away and paid violent attention 
 to him all through dinner. Her sympathy was entirely 
 for her poor Strathdene. She was afraid he would com 
 mit suicide or return to England without her, and she 
 could not imagine how to get rid of Jim. Then she caught 
 sight of Charity Coe, and greeted her with a smile of 
 sincere delight. 
 
 For once Kedzie loved Charity. Suddenly it came upon 
 her what a beautiful solution it would be for everybody if 
 Jim could take Charity and leave Kedzie free to take 
 Strathdene. She told herself that Jim would be ever 
 so much happier so, for the poor fellow would suffer 
 terribly when he found that his Kedzie really could not 
 pretend to love him any longer. Kedzie felt quite tear 
 ful over it. She was an awfully good-hearted little thing. 
 To turn him over to Charity would be a charming ar 
 rangement, perfectly decent, and no harm to anybody. 
 If only the hateful laws did not forbid the exchange 
 dog-on 'em, anyway! 
 
 The more Kedzie studied Charity the more suitable she 
 seemed as a successor. Her heart warmed to her and she 
 forced an opportunity to unload Jim on Charity immedi 
 ately after dinner. 
 
 There was music for the encouragement of conversation, 
 an expensively famous prima donna and a group of strings: 
 brought down from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. 
 
 54i
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 The prima donna sang Donna Elvira's ferocious aria fuU 
 of indignation at discovering Don Giovanni's Don Juanity. 
 
 Charity, noting that Kedzie had flitted straight to 
 Strathdene and was trying to appease his cold rage, felt 
 an envy of the prima donna, who was enabled to express 
 her feelings at full lung power with the fortissimo re 
 inforcement of several powerful musicians. The primeval 
 woman in Charity longed for just such a howling preroga 
 tive, but the actual Charity was so cravenly well-bred 
 that she dared not even say to her dearest friend, "Jim, 
 old man, you ought to go over and wring the neck of that 
 little cat of yours." 
 
 Jim sat beaming at Kedzie and Kedzie beamed back 
 while she murmured sweet everythings to her little 
 Marquess. Jim seemed to imagine that he had left her 
 in such a pumpkin shell as Mr. Peter P. Pumpkineater 
 left his wife in, and kept her so very well. But Kedzie was 
 not that kind of kept or keepable woman. 
 
 Jim would have expected that if Kedzie were guilty of 
 any spiritual corruption it would show on her face. 
 People will look for such things. But she was still young 
 and pretty and ingenuous and seemed incapable of 
 duplicity. And indeed such treachery was no more than 
 a childish turning from one toy to another. The traitors 
 and traitresses have no more sense of obligation than a 
 child feels for a discarded doll. 
 
 Jim paid Charity the uncomfortable compliment of 
 feeling enough at home with her to say, "Well, Charity, 
 that little wife of mine takes to the English nobility like 
 a duck seeing its first pond, eh?" 
 
 "She seems to be quite at her ease," was all that 
 Charity could say. Now she felt herself a sharer in the 
 wretched intrigue, as treacherous as Kedzie, no better 
 friend than Kedzie was wife, because with a word she 
 could have told Jim what he ought to have known, what 
 he was almost the only person in the room that did not 
 know. Yet her jaw locked and her tongue balked at the 
 
 542
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 mere thought of telling him. She protected Kedzie, and 
 not Jim; felt it abominable, but could not brave the 
 telling. 
 
 She resolved that she would rather brave the ocean and 
 get back to Europe where there were things she could do. 
 
 The support of all the French orphans she had adopted 
 had made deep inroads in her income, but her conscience 
 felt the deeper inroads of neglected duty. 
 
 It was like Charity to believe that she had sinned 
 heinously when she had simply neglected an opportunity 
 for self-sacrifice. When other people applauded their 
 own benevolence if they said, "How the soldiers must 
 suffer! Poor fellows!" Charity felt ashamed if her sym 
 pathy were not instantly mobilized for action. 
 
 A great impatience to be gone rendered her suddenly 
 frantic. While she encouraged Jim to talk of his ex 
 periences 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 tempta 
 tion 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 dis 
 grace 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 
 
 543
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 slander, seemed so odious that nothing could be more 
 odious, not even the actual crime. 
 
 Besides, Charity found it hard to assume that a woman 
 who held her good name cheap would hold her good self 
 less cheap, since reputation is usually cherished longer 
 than character. 
 
 In any case, Charity was smothering. Even Mrs. 
 Noxon's vast drawing-room was too small to hold her 
 and Jim and Kedzie and Strathdene. America was too 
 strait to accommodate that jangling quartet. 
 
 She rose abruptly, thrust her hand out to Jim and said: 
 
 "Good night, old man. I've got to begin packing." 
 
 "Packing for where? New York?" 
 
 "Yes, and then France." 
 
 "I've told you before, I won't let you go." 
 
 And then it came over him that he had no right even to 
 be dejected and alarmed at Charity's departure. Charity 
 felt in the sudden relaxing of his handclasp some such 
 sudden check. She smiled patiently and went to tell 
 Kedzie good night. 
 
 Kedzie broke out, "Oh, don't go yet!" then caught 
 herself. She also for quite a different reason must not 
 regret Charity's departure. Charity smiled a smile of 
 terrifying comprehension, shook her head, and weat her 
 ways. 
 
 And now Jim, released, wandered over and sat down by 
 Kedzie just as she was telling Strathdene the most im 
 portant things. 
 
 She could not shake Jim. He would not talk to any 
 body else. She wished that Charity had taken Jim with 
 her. Strathdene was as comfortable as a spy while Jim 
 talked. Jim seemed so suspiciously amiable that Strath 
 dene wondered how much he knew. 
 
 Jim did not look like the sort of man who would know 
 and be complacent, but even if he were ignorant Strath 
 dene was too outright a creature to relish the necessity 
 for casual chatter with the husband of his sweetheart. 
 
 544
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 He, too, made a resolution to take the first boat available. 
 He would rather see a submarine than be one. 
 
 Strathdene also suddenly bolted, saying: "Sorry, but 
 I've got to run myself into the hangar. My doctor says 
 I'm not to do any night flying." 
 
 And now Kedzie was marooned with Jim. She was in 
 a panic about Strathdene; a fantastic jealousy assailed 
 her. To the clandestine all things are clandestine ! What 
 if he were hurrying away to meet Charity? Charity 
 returned to Kedzie's black books, and Jim joined her there. 
 
 "Let's go home," said Kedzie, in the least honeymoony 
 of tones. 
 
 Jim said, "All right, but why the sudden vinegar?" 
 
 "I hate people," said Kedzie. 
 
 "Are husbands people?" said Jim. 
 
 "Yes!" snapped Kedzie. 
 
 She smiled beatifically as she wrung Mrs. Noxon's hand 
 and perjured herself like a parting guest. And that was 
 the last smile Jim saw on her fair face that night. 
 
 He wondered why women were so damned unreason 
 ably whimsical. They may be damned, but there is 
 usually a reason for their apparent whims. 
 
 35
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE next day Kedzie was still cantankerous, as it was 
 perfectly natural that she should be. She wanted 
 to be a Marchioness and sail away to the peerful sky. 
 And she could not cut free from her anchor. The Mar 
 quess was winding up his propeller to fly alone. 
 
 Jim, finding her the poorest of company, called on his 
 mother. She was well enough to be very peevish. So he 
 left her and wandered about the dull town. He had no 
 car with him and he saw a racer that caught his fancy. 
 It had the lean, fleet look of a thoroughbred horse, and the 
 dealer promised that it could triple the speed limit. He 
 went out with a demonstrator and the car made good the 
 dealer's word. It ran with such zeal that Jim was warned 
 by three different policemen on the Boston Post Road 
 that he would be arrested the next time he came by in 
 such haste. 
 
 He decided to try it out again at night on other 
 roads. He told the dealer to fill up the tank and see to 
 the lights. The dealer told the garage man and the 
 garage man said he would. 
 
 That evening at dinner Jim invited Kedzie to take a 
 spin. She said that she had to spend the evening with her 
 mother, who was miserable. Jim said, "Too bad!" and 
 supposed that he'd better run in and say "Howdy-do" 
 to the poor soul. Kedzie hastily said that she would be 
 unable to see him. She would not even let Jim ride her 
 over in his new buzz-wagon. 
 
 Again he made the profane comment to himself that 
 women are unreasonable. Again this statement was due 
 to ignorance of an excellent reason. 
 
 546
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Kedzie had tried all day to get in touch with Strath- 
 dene. When she ran him down at length' by telephone 
 he was dismally dignified and terrifyingly patriotic. His 
 poor country needed him and he must return. 
 
 This meant that Kedzie would lose her first and doubt 
 less her last chance at the marquisate. She pleaded for a 
 conference. He assented eagerly, but the problem was 
 where to confer. She dared not invite him to the house 
 she had rented, for Jim would be there. She could not go 
 to Strathdene's rooms at the Hilltop Inn. She thought 
 of the apartment she had stowed her mother in, and asked 
 him there. Then she telephoned her mother to suppress 
 dad and keep out of sight. 
 
 She was afraid to have Jim take her to her mother's 
 address lest her woeful luck should bring Strathdene 
 and Jim together at the door. That was her excellent 
 reason for rebuffing her husband's courtesy and setting 
 out alone. 
 
 Her mother was only too willing to abet Kedzie 's 
 forlorn hope. It was the forlornness of Kedzie that saved 
 her. When Strathdene saw her in her exquisite despair he 
 was helpless. He was no Hun to break the heart of so 
 sweet a being, and he believed her when she told him that 
 she would die if he tried to cross the perilous ocean with 
 out her. She told him that she would throw herself on 
 Jim's mercy the next day and implore her freedom. He 
 would not refuse her, she assured him, for Jim was really 
 awfully generous, whatever faults he might have. 
 
 Strathdene could well believe that she would have her 
 way with her husband since he found her absolutely irre 
 sistible himself. The conference lasted long, and they 
 parted at last as Romeo and Juliet would have parted if 
 Juliet had been married to the County Paris before Romeo 
 met her. 
 
 Kedzie even promised Strathdene that she would not 
 wait till the morning, but would at once demand her 
 husband's consent to the divorce. It was only on such an 
 
 547
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 understanding that Strathdene could endure to intrust his 
 delicate treasure to the big brute's keeping. 
 
 Kedzie entered her home with her oration all primed. 
 But Jim was not there. He did not come home that 
 night. Kedzie's anxiety was not exactly flattering, but 
 it was sincere. 
 
 She wondered if some accident had befallen him in his 
 new car. She really could not bear the thought of losing 
 another husband by a motor accident. Suppose he 
 should just be horribly crippled. Then she could never 
 divorce him. 
 
 She hated her thoughts, but she could not be responsible 
 for them. Her mind was like a lighthouse in a storm. 
 It was not to blame for what wild birds the winds brought 
 in from the black to dash against her soul. 
 
 But Jim was neither killed nor crippled. The cards 
 still ran for Kedzie.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 O PEAKING of cards, Jim was like a gambler with a new 
 O pack of them and nobody to play with. 
 
 He darted hither and yon in his racer, childishly happy 
 in its paces, childishly lonely for somebody to show off 
 before. As he ran along the almost deserted sea road he 
 passed the Noxon home. 
 
 He knew that Charity was visiting there. He won 
 dered which of the lighted windows was hers. After much 
 backing and filling he turned in and ran up to the steps. 
 He got out and was about to ring the bell when he heard 
 a piano. He went along the piazza to a window, and, 
 peering in, saw Charity playing. She was alone in the 
 music-room and very sadly beautiful. 
 
 He tapped on the window. She was startled, rose to 
 leave the room. He tapped again, remembering an old 
 signal they had had as boy and girl lovers. She paused. 
 He could see her smile tenderly. She came forward to the 
 window and stared out. He stared in. Only a pane of 
 glass parted the tips of their flattened noses. It was a 
 sort of sterilized Eskimo kiss. 
 
 The window was a door. Charity opened it and invited 
 Jim in, wondering but strangely comforted. He invited 
 her out. He explained about his gorgeous new car and 
 his loneliness and begged her to take the air. 
 
 She put back her hands to indicate her inappropriate 
 costume, a flimsy evening gown of brilliant color. 
 
 " Mrs. Noxon has gone out to dinner. I was to go with 
 her, but I begged off. I'm going to New York to-morrow, 
 and I was blue and " 
 
 549
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "And so am I. I've got an extra coat in my car, and 
 the night is mild." 
 
 "No, I'd better not." 
 
 "Aw, come along!" 
 
 "No-o " 
 
 "Yes!" 
 
 "All right. I'll get a veil for my hair." 
 
 She closed the French window and hurried away. She 
 reappeared at the front door and shut it stealthily after 
 her. 
 
 "Nobody saw me go. You must get me back before 
 Mrs. Noxon comes home, or there'll be a scandal." 
 
 "Depend on me!" said Jim. 
 
 Muffling their laughter like two runaways, they stole 
 down the steps. Her high-heeled slippers slipped and she 
 toppled against him. She caught him off his balance, and 
 his arrns went about her to save her and himself. If he 
 had been Irish, he would have said that he destroyed 
 himself, for she was so unexpectedly warm and silken 
 and lithe that she became instantly something other than 
 the Charity he had adored as a sad, sweet deity. 
 
 He realized that she was terribly a woman. 
 
 They were no longer boy and girl out on a gay little lark. 
 They were a man unhappily married and a woman unhap 
 pily unmarried, setting forth on a wild steed for a wild ride 
 through the reluctant autumn air. The neighboring sea 
 gave out the stored-up warmth of summer, and the moon 
 with the tilted face of a haloed nun yearned over them. 
 
 When Jim helped Charity into the car her arm seemed 
 to burn in his palm. He hesitated a moment, and a 
 thought fluttered through his mind that he ought not to 
 hazard the adventure. But another thought chased it 
 away, a thought of the idiocy of being afraid, and another 
 thought of how impossible it was to ask her to get out and 
 go back. 
 
 He found the coat, a heavy, short coat, and held it for 
 her, saw her ensconced comfortably, stepped in and closed
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 the door softly. The car went forward as smoothly as a 
 skiff on a swift, smooth water. 
 
 Charity was not so solemn as Jim. She was excited 
 and flattered by such an unforeseen diversion breaking in 
 on her doleful solitude. 
 
 "It's been so long since a man asked me to go buggy- 
 riding," she said, "that I've forgotten how to behave. 
 I'm getting to be a regular old maid, Jim." 
 
 "Huh!" was all that Jim could think of. 
 
 It was capable of many interpretations reproof, anger 
 at fate, polite disbelief, deprecation. 
 
 Jim tried to run away from his peculiar and most annoy 
 ing emotions. But Charity went with him. She looked 
 back and said : 
 
 "Funny how the moon rides after us in her white 
 limousine." 
 
 "Huh '."said Jim. 
 
 " Is that Mexican you're speaking?" she chided. 
 
 "I was just thinking," Jim growled. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "Oh, nothing much except what a ghastly shame it is. 
 that so so well, I don't know what to call you but 
 well, a woman like you that you should be living alone 
 with nothing better to do than run the gantlet of those 
 God-awful submarines and probably get blown up and 
 drowned, or, worse yet, spend your days breaking your 
 heart nursing a lot of poor mangled, groaning Frenchmen 
 that get shot to pieces or poisoned with gas or Oh, 
 it's rotten ! That's all it is : it's rotten !" 
 
 " Somebody has to take care of them." 
 
 "Oh, I know;, but it oughtn't to be you. If there 
 was any manhood in this country, you'd have Americans 
 to nurse." 
 
 "There are Americans over there, droves of them." 
 
 "Yes, but they're not wearing our uniform. We ought 
 to be over there under our own flag. I ought to be over 
 there." 
 
 5Si
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Maybe you will be. I'll go on ahead and be waiting 
 for you." 
 
 There is nothing more pitiful than sorrow that tries 
 to smile, and Jim groaned: 
 
 "Oh, Charity Coe! Charity Coe!" 
 
 He gripped the wheel to keep from putting his hand out 
 to hers. And they went in silence, thinking in the epic 
 elegy of their time. 
 
 Jim drove his car up to the end of Rhode Island and 
 across to Tiverton; then he left the highway for the lonelier 
 roads. The car charged the dark hills and galloped the 
 levels, a black stallion with silent hoofs and dreadful haste. 
 There was so much death, so much death in the world! 
 The youth and strength and genius of all Europe were 
 going over the brink eternally in a Niagara of blood. 
 
 And the sea that Charity was about to venture on, the 
 sea whose estuaries lapped this sidelong shore so innocently 
 with such tender luster under the gentle moon, was draw 
 ing down every day and every night ships and ships and 
 ships with their treasures of labor and their brave crews 
 till it seemed that the floor of the ocean must be populous 
 with the dead. 
 
 Charity felt quite close to death. A very solemn 
 tenderness of farewell endeared the beautiful world and all 
 its doomed creatures. But most dear of all was this big, 
 simple man at her side, the man she ought to have married. 
 It was all her fault that she had not. She owed him a 
 profound eternal apology, and she had not the right to pay 
 the debt that is, so long as she lived she had not the 
 right. But if they were never to meet again then she 
 was already dying to him. 
 
 It was important that she should not depart this life 
 without making restitution of what she owed. She had 
 owed Jim Dyckman the love he had pleaded for from her 
 and would not get from anyone else. 
 
 He had a right to love, and it was to be eternally denied 
 to him. He would go on bitterly grieved and shamed to 
 
 552
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 think that nobody could love him, for Charity had repulsed 
 him, and some day he would learn that Kedzie had de 
 ceived him. 
 
 Lacking the courage to warn him against his wife, 
 Charity felt that she must have at least the courage to 
 say: 
 
 "Good-by, Jim. I have been loving you of late with a 
 great love." 
 
 There would be no injury done to Kedzie thus, for 
 Charity would speak as a ghost, an impalpable departed 
 one. There would be no sin only a beautiful expiation 
 by confession. She was enfranchised of earthly restraints, 
 enfranchised as the dead are from mortal obligations. 
 
 But the moods that are so holy, so pure, and so vast 
 while they are moods resent words. Words are like tin 
 cups to carry the ocean in. It is no longer an ocean when 
 a bit of it is scooped up. It is only a little brackish water, 
 odious to drink and quenching no thirst. 
 
 Charity could not devise the first phrase of her huge and 
 oceanic emotion. It would have been only a proffer of 
 brine that Jim could not have relished from her. He 
 understood better her silence. They went blindly on and 
 on, letting the road lead them and the first whim decide 
 which turn to take and which to pass. 
 
 And so they were eventually lost in the land as they 
 were lost in their mood. 
 
 And after a time of wonderful enthusiasms in their 
 common grief the realities began to claim them back. A 
 loud report like a pistol-shot announced that the poetry 
 of motion had become prose. 
 
 Jim stopped the car and became a blacksmith while he 
 went through the tool-box, found a jack for the wheel, 
 laboriously unshipped the demountable rim, replaced it 
 with the extra wheel, and set forth again. 
 
 The job had not improved the cleanliness of his hands 
 nor spared the chastity of his shirt-bosom. But the car 
 had four wheels to go on, and they regained a main road 
 
 553
 
 at last and found a signboard announcing, "Tiverton, 
 18 miles." That meant thirty miles to Newport. 
 
 Charity looked at her watch. It brought her back 
 from the timelessness 'of her meditation to the world where 
 the clock had a great deal to say about what was respect 
 able and what not. 
 
 ' ' Good Lord !" she groaned. ' ' Mrs. Noxon is home long 
 ago and scared or shocked to death. We must fly!" 
 
 They flew, angry, both of them, at having to hurry back 
 to school and a withering reprimand, as if they were still 
 mere brats. Gradually the car began to refuse the call 
 for haste. Its speed sickened, gasped, died. 
 
 Jim swore quite informally, and raged: "I told that 
 infernal hound to fill the tank. He forgot! The gas. 
 is gone." 
 
 Charity shrugged her shoulders. "I deserved it," she 
 said. "I only hope I don't get you into trouble. What 
 will your wife say?" 
 
 "What won't she say? But I'm thinking about you." 
 
 "It doesn't matter about me. I've got nobody who 
 cares enough to scold me." 
 
 They were suddenly illumined by the headlights of an 
 approaching car. They shielded their faces from the glare 
 instinctively. They felt honest, but they did not look 
 honest out here together. 
 
 The car was checked and a voice called from the blur, 
 "Want any help?" 
 
 "No, thanks," Jim answered from his shadow. 
 
 The car rolled on. While Jim made a vain post 
 mortem examination of the car's machinery Charity 
 looked about for a guide-post. She found a large sign 
 board proclaiming "Viewcrest Inn, i mile." She told 
 Jim. 
 
 He said: "I know of it. It has a bad name, but so long 
 as the gasolene is good I'll go get some. Make yourself 
 at home." He paused. " I can't leave you alone here in 
 the wilderness at midnight." 
 
 554
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I'll go along." 
 
 "In those high-heeled shoes?" 
 
 "And these low-necked gown," sighed Charity. "Oh, 
 what a fool, what a stupid fool I've been!" 
 
 But she set forth. Jim offered his arm. She declined 
 it at first, but she was glad enough of it later. They made 
 an odd-looking couple, both in evening dress, promenading 
 a country road. All the wealth of both of them was in 
 sufficient to purchase them so much as a street-car ride. 
 They were paupers the slaves, not the captains, of their 
 fate. Charity stumbled and tottered, her ankles wrenched 
 by the ruts, her stilted slippers going to ruin. Jim offered 
 to carry her. She refused indignantly. She would have 
 accepted a lift from any other vehicle now, but none 
 appeared. The only lights were in the sky, where a sjprm 
 was practising with fireworks. 
 
 "Just our luck to get drenched," said Jim. 
 
 It was about the only bad luck they escaped, but the 
 threat of it lent Charity speed. They passed one farm, 
 whose dogs rushed out and bayed at them carnivorously. 
 
 "That's the way people will bark when they find out 
 about our innocent little picnic," said Charity. 
 
 "They're not going to find out," said Jim. 
 
 "Trying to keep it secret gives it a guilty look," said 
 Charity. 
 
 "What people don't know won't hurt 'em," said Jim. 
 
 "What they do imagine will hurt us," said Charity. 
 
 At the top of a knoll in a clandestine group of trees 
 they found "Viewcrest Inn." It was dark but for a dim.' 
 light in the office. The door of that was locked. 
 
 Trade was dull, now that the Newport season was over, 
 and only an occasional couple from Fall River, Providence, 
 or New Bedford tested the diminished hospitality. But 
 to-night there had been a concurrence of visitors. Jim 
 rattled at the door. A waiter appeared, yawning can 
 didly. He limped to the door with a gait that Kedzie 
 would have recognized. 
 
 555
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 He peered out and shook his head, waving the intruders 
 away. Jim shook the knob and glowered back. 
 
 The waiter, who, in the classic phrase, was "none other 
 than" Skip Magruder, unlocked the door. 
 
 " Nothin' doin', folks," said Skip. " Standin' room only. 
 Not a room left." 
 
 "I don't want any of your dirty rooms," said Jim. "I 
 want some gasolene." 
 
 "Bar's closed," said Skip, who had a nimble wit. 
 
 "I said gasolene!" said Jim, menacingly. 
 
 "Sorry, boss, but the last car out took the last drop we 
 had in the pump. We'll have some more to-morrow 
 mornin'." 
 
 "My God!" Jim whispered. 
 
 Then the storm broke. A thunder smash like the bolt 
 of an indignant Heaven. It turned on all the faucets 
 above. 
 
 "Where's the telephone?" Jim demanded. 
 
 "T. D.," said Skip. 
 
 "What's that?" 
 
 "Temporary discontinued." Skip grew confidential. 
 "The boss was a little slow on the pay and they shut him 
 off. We're takin' in a lot of dough to-night, though, and 
 he'll prob'ly get it goin' to-morrow all right." 
 
 To-morrow again! Jim snarled back at the pack of 
 wolfish circumstances closing in on him. He turned to 
 Charity. 
 
 "We've got to stay here." 
 
 Charity "went white," as the saying is. The rain 
 streamed down. 
 
 "We 'ain't a room left," said Skip. 
 
 "You've got to have," said Jim. 
 
 "Have to speak to the artshiteck," said Skip. Then 
 he rubbed his head, trying to get out an idea by massage. 
 "There's the poller. Big lounge there, but not made up. 
 Would you and your wife wish the poller?" 
 
 He dragged the "wife" with a tone that nearly got 
 
 556
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 him throttled. But Jim paused. A complicated thought 
 held him. To protest that Charity was not his wife 
 seemed hardly the most reassuring thing to do. He let 
 the word go and ignored Skip's cynical intonation. Jim's 
 knuckles ached to rebuke him, but he had not fought a 
 waiter since his wild young days. And Skip was protected 
 by his infirmity. 
 
 Charity was frightened and revolted, abject with re 
 morse for such a disgusting consequence of such a sweet, 
 harmless impulse. She was afraid of Jim's temper. She 
 said: 
 
 "Take the parlor by all means." 
 
 "All right," said Jim. 
 
 Skip fumbled about the desk for a big book, and, finding 
 it, opened it and handed Jim a pen. 
 
 "Register, please," said Skip. 
 
 "I will not." 
 
 "Rules of the house." 
 
 "What do I care about your rules!" 
 
 "Have to wake the boss, then." 
 
 "Give me the pen." 
 
 He started to write his own name; that left Charity's 
 designation in doubt. He glanced at the other names. 
 "Mr. and Mrs. George Washington" were there, "Mr. 
 and Mrs. John Smith" twice, as well as "William Jones 
 and wife." 
 
 Jim wondered if the waiter knew him. So many 
 waiters did. At length, with a flash of angry impulse, 
 he wrote: "James D ," paused, finished "Dysart," 
 hesitated again, then put "Mr. and Mrs." before it. 
 Skip read, and grinned. He did not know who Jim was, 
 but he knew he was no Dysart. 
 
 Skip led the way to the parlor up-stairs, lighted the 
 lights, and hastily disappeared, fearing that he might be 
 asked to fetch something to eat or drink. He was so 
 tired and sleepy that even the prospect of a tip did not 
 interest him so much as the prospect of his cot in the 
 
 557
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 attic, where he could dream that he was in New York 
 again. 
 
 Jim and Charity looked at each other. Jim munched 
 his own curses, and Charity laughed and cried together. 
 Jim's arms had an instinct for taking her to his heart, 
 but he felt that he must be more respectful than ever 
 since they were in so respectless a plight. She never 
 seemed purer and sadder to him than then. 
 
 She noted how haggard and dismal he looked, and said, 
 "Aren't you going to sit down?" 
 
 "No not here," he said. "You curl up on that plush 
 horror and get some rest." 
 
 "I will not!" said Charity. 
 
 "You will, too," said Jim. "You're a wreck, and I 
 ought to be shot. Get some sleep, for God's sake!" 
 
 "What becomes of you?" 
 
 " I'll scout round and find a place in the office. I think 
 there is a billiard-room. If worst comes to worst, I'll do 
 what Mrs. Leslie Carter did in a play I saw sleep on the 
 dining-room table. ' ' 
 
 "Not less than a table d'h6te will hold you," Charity 
 smiled, wanly. 
 
 "Don't worry about me. You go by-by and pray the 
 Lord to forgive me and help us both." 
 
 He waved his hand to her in a heartbreak of bemocked 
 and benighted tenderness and closed the door. He 
 prowled softly about the office and the adjacent rooms, but 
 found no place to sleep. He was in such a fever of wrath 
 at himself that he walked out in the rain to cool his head. 
 Then he sank into a chair, read an old Boston paper 
 twice, and fell asleep among the advertisements. 
 
 He woke at daybreak. The rain had ended and he 
 wandered out in the chill, wet grounds of the shabby inn. 
 The morning light was merciless on the buildings, the 
 leafless trees,, and on his own costume. The promised 
 view from the crest was swathed in haze so was his out 
 look on the future. 
 
 558
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 His fury at the situation grew as he pondered it. He 
 was like a tiger in a pit. He raged as much at himself as 
 at the people who would take advantage of him. The 
 ludicrousness of the situation added the ultimate torment. 
 He could not save Charity except by ingenious deceptions 
 which would be a proof of guilt if they did not succeed 
 miraculously. 
 
 The dress he was in and the dress she was in were the 
 very habiliments of guilt. Getting back to Newport in 
 evening clothes would be the advertisement of their 
 escapade. His expansive shirt-bosom might as well have 
 been a sandwich-board. His broadcloth trousers and his 
 patent-leather pumps would be worse than rags. 
 
 And Charity had no hat. There was an unmistakable 
 dressed-up eveningness about them both. 
 
 This struck him as the first evil to remedy.. As with 
 an escaped convict, his prime necessity was a change of 
 clothes. There was only one way to manage that. He 
 went back to the hotel and found a startled early-morning 
 waiter sweeping out the office. Jim asked where the 
 nearest telephone was, and learned that it was half a mile 
 away at a farm-house. 
 
 Jim turned up his collar, pulled down his motor-cap, 
 and struck out along the muddy road. He startled the 
 farmer's family and their large hands were not wide 
 enough to hide their wider smiles. 
 
 On the long hike thither Jim had worked out his 
 stratagem. He called up his house, or, rather, Kedzie's 
 house, in Newport, and after much delay got his yawning 
 valet to the telephone. He never had liked that valet 
 less than now. 
 
 "That you, Dallam? My car broke down out in the 
 country," he explained, every syllable a sugarless quinine 
 pill in his throat. "That is to say, the gasolene gave 
 out. I am in my evening clothes, so is er Mrs. er 
 the lady I was with. I want you to bring me at once 
 an outfit of day clothes, and a one of my wife's long 
 
 559
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 motor-coats a very long one and one of her small hats. 
 Then get out my wife's limousine and send the suit-case 
 and the coat and hat to me here at the Viewcrest Inn, and 
 tell the chauffeur to bring an extra can of gasolene." 
 
 A voice with an intolerable smile in it came back: 
 "Very good, sir. I presume I'd better not waken Mrs. 
 Dyckrnan?" 
 
 "Naturally not. I don't want to er alarm her." 
 
 " She was quite alarmed when you didn't come home, 
 sir, last night." 
 
 "Well, I'll explain when I see her. Do you understand 
 the situation?" 
 
 "Perfectly, sir." 
 
 Jim writhed at that. But he had done his best and he 
 would take the worst. 
 
 The farmer gave him a ride to the hotel in his milk- 
 wagon. When Jim rode up in a parody of state he saw 
 Charity peeping from the parlor window. The morning 
 light had made the situation plain to her. It did not 
 improve on inspection. It took very little imagination 
 to predict a disastrous event, though Jim explained the 
 felicity of his scheme. He had planned to have Charity 
 ride in in the limousine alone, while he took his own car 
 back with the gasolene that was on the way. 
 
 The twain were compelled by their costume to stay in 
 the parlor together. They were ferociously hungry and 
 ordered breakfast at last. It took forever to get it, for 
 guests of that hotel were not ordinarily early risers. 
 
 Skip Magruder, dragged from his slumbers to serve the 
 meal, found Charity and Jim in the room where he had 
 left them. He made such vigorous efforts to overlook 
 their appearance in bedraggled dinner clothes at a country 
 breakfast that Jim threatened to break his head. Skip 
 grew surly and was ordered out. 
 
 After breakfast Jim and Charity waited and waited, 
 keeping to the parlor lest the other guests see them. 
 
 At last the limousine arrived. As soon as he heard it 
 
 560
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 coming Jim hurried to the window to make sure that it was 
 his or, rather, his wife's. 
 
 It was so much his wife's that she stepped out of it. 
 Also her mother. Also her father. They advanced on 
 the hotel. 
 
 Jim and Charity were stupefied. There was a look on 
 Kedzie's face that frightened him. 
 
 "She means business," he groaned. 
 
 Charity sighed: "Divorce! And me to be named!" 
 
 "She won't do that. She owes you everything." 
 
 "What an ideal chance to pay off the debt!" 
 
 "Don't you worry. I'll protect you," Jim insisted. 
 
 "How?" said Charity. 
 
 "I'll fight the case to the limit." 
 
 "Are you so eager to keep your wife?" said Charity. 
 
 "No. I never did love her. I'll never forgive her for 
 this." 
 
 But he had not the courage to go and meet Kedzie and 
 her mother and her father. They were an unconscionable 
 time coming. 
 
 He did not know that Kedzie and Skip Magruder were 
 renewing old acquaintance. 
 
 While he waited the full horror of his dilemma came 
 over him. Kedzie would undoubtedly sue him for 
 divorce. If he lost, Charity would be publicly disgraced. 
 If he won, he would be tied to Kedzie for life.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 A QUICK temper is an excellent friend for bolstering 
 /i. up an ailing conscience, especially if itself is bolstered 
 by an inability to see the point of view of the other party 
 to a conflict. 
 
 Kedzie's wrath at Charity justified to Kedzie any 
 cruelty, especially as Kedzie was all harrowed up by the 
 fear of losing the Marquess of Strathdene. And Kedzie 
 loved Strathdene as much as she could ever love anybody. 
 
 For one thing Strathdene was fiercely jealous of her 
 and the poor child had been simply famished for a little 
 jealousy. Her first husband had hardly known what the 
 word meant. Before their marriage Gilfoyle had per 
 mitted her to dance the Greek dances without paying her 
 the compliment of a beating. After their marriage he had 
 gone to Chicago to earn a living and left her alone in 
 New York City where there were millions of rivals. 
 
 Her second husband had been very philosophical about 
 her career and had taken the news of her previous mar 
 riage with disgusting stoicism. Finally he had gone to 
 the Mexican Border for an indefinite stay, leaving her to 
 her own devices and the devices of any man who came 
 along. It was too much like leaving a diamond outdoors: 
 it cheapened the diamond. 
 
 But Strathdene ah, Strathdene! He turned blue at 
 the mention of Kedzie's husband. When Jim came back 
 from Texas and Kedzie had to be polite to him Strathdene 
 almost had hydrophobia. He accused Kedzie of act 
 ually welcoming Jim. He charged her with polyandry. 
 He threatened to shoot her and her husband and himself. 
 
 562
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 He comported himself unlike any traditional Englishman 
 of literature. He was, in fact, himself and what he did 
 was like him. He was a born aviator. His heart was 
 used to racing at unheard-of speeds. He could sustain 
 superhuman exaltations and depressions. 
 
 Being in love with him was like going up in an air 
 ship with him, which was one of Kedzie's ambitions 
 for the future. She dreamed of a third honeymoon 
 in excelsis. 
 
 Strathdene told her that if she ever looked at another 
 man after she married him he would take her up ten 
 thousand feet in the clouds, set his airship on fire, and drop 
 with her as one cinder into the ocean. What handsomer 
 tribute could any woman ask of a man? He was a lover 
 worth fighting for. 
 
 But she had felt uncertain of winning him till that 
 wonderful morning when Jim did not come back home. 
 She woke up early all by herself and heard the valet 
 answer Jim's call from Viewcrest. 
 
 She had made a friend of Dallam by her flirtation 
 with the nobility. The poor fellow had suffered tortures 
 from the degradation of his master's alliance with a 
 commoner like Kedzie until Kedzie developed her alli 
 ance with the Marquess. Then his valetic soul expanded 
 again. 
 
 He looked upon her as his salvation. 
 
 Over the telephone she heard him now promising Jim 
 that he would not tell Kedzie. If Jim's old valet, Jules, 
 had not gone to France and his death he would have saved 
 Jim from infernal distresses, but this substitute had a 
 malignant interest in his master's confusion. Dallam 
 proceeded forthwith to rap at Mrs. Dyckman's door and 
 spoke through it, deferentially: 
 
 "Beg pardon, ma'am, but could I have a word?" 
 
 Kedzie wrapped herself in a bath-robe and opened the 
 door a chink to hear the rest of what she had heard in 
 part. The valet had no collar on and his overnight 
 
 563
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 beard not off, and he, too, was in a bath-robe. Man and 
 mistress stood there like genius and madness, "and thin 
 partitions did their bounds divide." 
 
 "Very sorry to trouble you, ma'am," he said, "but I'm 
 compelled to. The master has just telephoned me that 
 his car broke down at the Viewcrest Inn out Tiverton 
 way, and he wants his morning clothes, and also if you'll 
 pardon me, ma'am he instructed me to send him a long 
 motor-coat of yours and a large hat and your limousine. 
 I was directed not to ahem to trouble you about it, 
 ma'am, but I 'ardly dared." 
 
 He helped her out so perfectly that she had no need to 
 say anything more than, "Quite right." 
 
 She was glad that the door screened her from observa 
 tion, for she went through a crisis of emotions, wrath 
 and disgust at Jim's perfidy versus ecstasy and gratitude 
 to him for it. 
 
 She beat her breast with her hand as if to keep her 
 trembling heart from turning a somersault into her 
 mouth. Then she spoke with a calm that showed how 
 far she had traveled in self-control. 
 
 ' ' Very good. You were quite right. Call the chauffeur 
 and tell him to bring round my closed car. Then send 
 me my maid and have the cook get me some coffee. Then 
 you may telephone my mother and father and ask them 
 to come over at once. Please send my car for them. 
 You might have coffee for them also. For we'll all be 
 riding out to did you say Viewcrest Inn?" 
 
 "Yes, ma'am. Very good, ma'am. Thank you!" 
 
 He went away thinking to himself. He thought in 
 cockney: "My Gawd! w'at a milit'ry genius! She dic- 
 tites a horder loike a Proosian general. I'm beginnin' to 
 fink she's gowing to do milord the mokkis prahd. There's 
 no daht abaht it. Stroike me, if there is." 
 
 By the time Kedzie was dressed and coffeed her panicky 
 father and mother were collected and fed, and she had 
 selected her best motor-coat for the shroud of whatever 
 
 564
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 woman it was at Viewcrest. She dared not dream it was 
 Charity. 
 
 She had time enough to tell her parents all there was 
 to tell on the voyage, but she had no idea that her limousine 
 was taking her to the very inn that Strathdene had lured 
 her to on that night when he tested her worthiness of 
 his respect. 
 
 It had been dark on that occasion and she had been 
 in such a chaos that she had paid no heed to the name of 
 the place or the dark roads leading thither. 
 
 She almost swooned when she reached the Viewcrest 
 Inn and found herself confronted by Skip Magruder. 
 And so did Skip. He had not recognized the back of her 
 head before, but her face smote him now. There was no 
 escaping him. Her beauty was enriched by her costume 
 and her mien was ripened by experience, but she was un- 
 forgetably herself. He was still a waiter, and the apron 
 he had on and the napkin he clutched might have been 
 the same one he had when she first saw him. 
 
 When he saw her now again he gasped the name he had 
 known her by: "Anitar! Anitar Adair! Well, I'll 
 be" 
 
 Then his face darkened with the memory of disprized 
 love. ' He recalled the cruel answer, "Nothing doing," 
 that she had indorsed on the stage-door letter he sent 
 her long ago. 
 
 But the military genius that had guided Kedzie this 
 morning inspired her still. She was not going to lose her 
 victory for any flank attack from an ally in ambush. 
 She sent out a flag of truce. 
 
 "Why, Skip!" she cried. "Dear old Skip! I want you 
 to meet my father and mother. Mr. Magruder was ter 
 ribly kind to me when I was alone and friendless in New 
 York." 
 
 Mrs. Thropp had outgrown waiters and even Adna 
 regretted the reversion to Nimrim that led him to shake 
 hands and say, "Please to meecher." 
 
 565
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 The stupefied proprietor of the inn was begging for 
 explanations of this unheard-of colloquy, but Skip flicked 
 him away with his napkin as if he were a bluebottle fly 
 and motioned Kedzie to a corner of the office. Kedzie 
 explained, breathlessly: 
 
 "Skip, I'm in terrible trouble, and I'm so glad to 
 find you here, for you never failed me. I was very rude 
 to you when you sent me that note, but I I was engaged 
 to be married at the time and I didn't think it proper 
 to see anybody. And well, I'm getting my punishment 
 now, for my husband is here with a strange woman 
 and oh, it's terrible, Skip! My heart is broken, but 
 you've got to help me. I know I can rely on you, can't I, 
 dear old Skip?" 
 
 The girl was so efficient that she almost deserved her 
 success. It cost her something, though, to beguile a 
 waiter with intimate appeals that she might earn a title. 
 But then in time of war no ally is to be scorned and the 
 lowliest recruit is worth enlisting. A Christian can 
 piously engage a Turk to help him whip another Christian. 
 
 When Kedzie pulled out the tremolo stop and looked up, 
 big-eyed, and pouted at him, Skip was hers. 
 
 "Your husband, Anitar? Your husband here? Why, 
 the low-life hound! I'll go up and kill him for you if you 
 want me to." 
 
 Kedzie explained that she didn't want to get her dear 
 Skip into any trouble, but she did want his help. Skip 
 found her a good boarding-place the first time he met her, 
 and now she had to dupe him into securing her furnished 
 rooms and board in a castle. She may have rather en 
 couraged him to imagine that once she was free from Jim 
 she would listen once more to Skip. But there is no 
 evidence on that point and he must have felt a certain 
 awe of her. His pretty duckling had become so gorgeous 
 a swan. 
 
 Her parley with Skip had delayed her march up-stairs 
 to the attack, but Jim and Charity could only wait in 
 
 566
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 befuddled suspense, unwilling and afraid to attempt a 
 flight 
 
 Kedzie went up-stairs at last, backed by her father 
 and mother and Skip and the chauffeur with the suit-case 
 of Jim's clothes. Kedzie was dazed at the sight of Charity. 
 
 But there was no need of any oration. 
 
 After a little sniffing and nodding of the head she spoke : 
 
 "Well, I thought as much! Jim, you telephoned for 
 some things of mine and of yours. Here they* are. 
 There's a can of gasolene down-stairs for you. Here's 
 your suit-case, and the coat and hat for Mrs. Cheever. 
 I presume you will go back in your own car." 
 
 Jim nodded. 
 
 "Then we needn't keep you any longer. Mr. McNiven 
 is your lawyer still, I suppose. I'll send my lawyer to 
 him. Come along, mother and father." 
 
 She led her little cohort down-stairs and bade Skip a 
 very cordial au revoir.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 HPHE Dyckman divorce farce might have been as 
 1 politely performed as I 1 affaire Cheever or even more 
 so than that, since practice makes perfect. At least a 
 temporary secrecy could have been secured with leisureli- 
 ness by a residence in another State. 
 
 But Kedzie felt as Zada did, that she simply could not 
 wait, though her reason was well to the opposite. Zada 
 had been afraid that a child would arrive before the 
 divorce, but Kedzie that a gentleman would depart. 
 
 Strathdene was straining at the anchor like one of his 
 own biplanes with the wind nudging its wings. In Europe 
 they were shooting down airships by the score nearly every 
 day and Strathdene wanted to go back. "It's not fair 
 to the Huns," he said. "They haven't had a pot-shot 
 at me for so long they'll forget I was ever over. And 
 some of those men that were corporals when I made my 
 Ace, are Aces now as well and they're crawling up on my 
 score! I'll have to fly all the time to catch up." 
 
 But he wanted to take with him his beauty. He was 
 jealous of Uncle Sam and afraid to trust Kedzie to him. 
 The more inconvenient she became to him the more 
 determined he grew to overcome the obstacles to her 
 possession. 
 
 He abominated the necessity of taking his bride through 
 the side door of the court-house to the altar, but he would 
 not give her up. It looked, however, as if he would have 
 to. And then he received mysteriously an assignment to 
 the inspection of flying-machines purchased in the Amer- 
 
 568
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 lean market. Kedzie told him that it was a Heaven-sent 
 answer to her prayers, and he believed it. 
 
 But it was his poor mother's work; she had written to a 
 friend in the British Embassy imploring him to keep her 
 precious boy out of France as long as possible. Hecatombs 
 of gallant young lords were being butchered and she had 
 lost a son, two brothers, a nephew, and unnumbered 
 friends. The whole nobility of Europe was as deep in 
 mourning as all the other grades of prestige. She wanted 
 a brief respite from terror. She did not know till later 
 to what further risks she was exposing her boy. 
 
 Kedzie was grimly resolute about getting her freedom 
 from Jim in order to transfer it to Strathdene. She 
 planned to manage it quietly for the sake of her own 
 future. But a sickening mess was made of it. For 
 Kedzie fell into the hands of a too, too conscientious 
 lawyer. It is impossible to be loyal in all directions, and 
 young Mr. Anson Beattie was loyal first to his wife and 
 children, whom he loved devotedly. They needed money 
 and clients came slowly to him. 
 
 His wife had relatives in Newport and they chanced to 
 be visiting there. The relatives were shopkeepers, to 
 whom Pet Bettany owed much money. That was how 
 Kedzie came to consult Mr. Beattie. Kedzie telephoned 
 Pet the moment she got back from the Viewcrest Inn, and 
 Pet told her of Beattie. 
 
 When Kedzie drifted into his ken with a word of intro 
 duction from Pet Bettany he hailed her as a Heaven-sent 
 messenger. She brought him advertisement, and big 
 fees on a platter. 
 
 The very name of Dyckman was incense and myrrh. 
 Mr. Beattie smelled gold. When Kedzie poured out her 
 story and explained that the famous Mrs. Charity Cheever 
 was the wreckress of her home Mr. Beattie saw head-lines 
 everywhere. 
 
 If the Dyckmans had been a humble couple be would 
 have tried to reconcile them, perhaps, or he would have 
 
 569
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 separated them with little noise. But it was noise he 
 wanted. The longer and louder the trial the more free 
 space Mr. Beattie would get. 
 
 "It Pays to Advertise" is a necessary motto for all 
 professions. The lawyer is advertised by his hating ene 
 mies, Beattie said to himself, and to his ecstatic wife 
 when he went to her room after Kedzie left. His wife 
 would never have taken a divorce if divorces were dis 
 tributed at every door like handbills. Mr. Beattie said 
 to Mrs. Beattie: 
 
 "Soul o' my soul, I'm going to handle this case in such 
 a way that it will stir up a smell from here to California. 
 I'll get that little woman an alimony that will break all 
 known records and I'll take a percentage of the gate 
 receipts as they come in. I wouldn't trust my little client 
 a foot away." 
 
 "Don't trust her too close, either," said his devoted 
 spouse, who was just jealous enough to be remembered in 
 time of stress. 
 
 Beattie was the sort of lawyer one reads about oftener 
 than one meets, and he wanted to be read about. He had 
 the almost necessary lawyer gift of beginning to hate the 
 opposition as soon as he learned what it was. If Jim 
 had engaged him he would have hated Kedzie with re 
 ligious ardor. Kedzie engaged him; so he abominated 
 Jim and everybody and everything associated with him 
 from his name to his scarf-pin. 
 
 He warned Kedzie not to spend an hour under Jim 
 Dyckman's roof, lest she seem to condone what she dis 
 covered. He advised her to disappear till Beattie was 
 ready to strike. 
 
 That was the reason why there was no compromise, no 
 concession, no politeness in the divorce. If collusion is 
 vicious this case was certainly pure of it. 
 
 Jim was not permitted a quiet talk with Kedzie from 
 the moment she found him at the Viewcrest Inn. Her 
 arrival there plus her family had thrown him into a 
 
 57
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 stupor. It was a situation for a genius to handle, since 
 the honester a man is the more he is confused at being; 
 found in a situation that looks dishonest. Jim was never 
 less a genius than then. Even Charity, who usually found, 
 a word when a word was needed, said not one. What 
 could she say ? Kedzie ignored her, accused her of nothing,, 
 and did not linger. 
 
 When Jim and Charity, left alone together again, looked 
 at each other they were too disgusted to regret that they 
 had not been as guilty as they looked. Life had the: 
 jaundice in their eyes. 
 
 But they had to get back to the world by way of ma 
 terial things. Jim had to change his evening clothes. 
 He asked Charity to wait in the office below. He pointed 
 to the motor-coat and hat that Kedzie had brought and 
 tossed on a lounge. 
 
 Charity recoiled from wearing Kedzie s cast-off clothes, 
 or from disguising as Jim's wife, but her downcast eyes, 
 revealed her bare shoulders and arms and her delicate 
 evening gown. They had been exquisitely appropriate 
 to night and night lights, but they were ghastly in the, 
 day. 
 
 She put on Kedzie's mantle; it blistered her like the 
 mantle Medea sent to her successor in her husband's love. 
 She sat in the office and some of the guests passed through.. 
 She could see that they took her to be one of their sort,, 
 and shocks of red and white alternated through her skin. 
 
 When Jim was ready he came down with his evening 
 clothes in the suit-case. The baggage was the final con 
 vincing touch. He picked up the gasolene-can and toted 
 it that weary mile. One of the hotel servants offered to 
 carry it, but Jim was in no mood for company. There are. 
 things that the wealthiest man does not want to have 
 done for him. 
 
 They found the car studded with pools of water from the 
 rain, and Charity shook out the cushions while Jim rilled 
 up the tank. 
 
 571
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Quite domestic," said Charity, in the last dregs of 
 bitterness. 
 
 Jim did not answer. He flung the can over into a field 
 and hopped into the car. He regretted that he had no 
 spurs to dig into its sides, no curb bit to jerk. He owed 
 his destruction to that car. For want of gasolene, the car 
 was lost; for want of the car, a reputation was lost. 
 
 He thought with frenzy as he drove. He had little 
 imagination, but it did not require an expert dreamer to 
 foresee dire possibilities ahead. He was so sorry for 
 Charity that he could have wept. He wanted to enfold 
 her in his arms and promise her security. He wanted to 
 stand in front of her and take in his own breast all the 
 arrows of scorn that might shower upon her. 
 
 But the nearest approach to protection in his power lay 
 along the lines of appearing to be indifferent to her. He 
 had not been told of Kedzie's infatuation for Strathdene 
 and he had not suspected it. 
 
 Charity was tempted to refer to it, but she felt that it 
 would be contemptibly petty at the moment. So Jim 
 was permitted to hope that he could find Kedzie, throw 
 himself on her mercy and implore her to believe in his 
 innocence. It was a sickly hope, and his heart filled with 
 gall and with hatred of Kedzie and all she had brought 
 on him. 
 
 He reached Newport with a terrific speed, and left 
 Charity at Mrs. Noxon's to make her own explanations. 
 Mrs. Noxon had defended Charity against gossip once 
 before, but to defend her against appearances was too 
 much to ask. 
 
 "Well-behaved people," she told Charity, "do not 
 have appearances." 
 
 She was so cold that Charity froze also, and set her 
 maid to packing. Mrs. Noxon's frigidity was a terrify 
 ing example of what she was to expect. She returned to 
 New York on the first train. Jim was on it, too. 
 
 He had sped home, expecting to find Kedzie. She was 
 
 572
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 gone and none of the servants knew where. If he had 
 found her in the ferocious humor he had arrived at he 
 might have given her the sort of divorce popular in divorce- 
 less countries, where they annul the wife instead of the 
 marriage. He might have sent Kedzie to the realm where 
 there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage which 
 should save a heap of trouble. 
 
 Jim fancied that Kedzie must have taken the train to 
 New York, since she spoke of sending her lawyer to 
 McNiven. It did not occur to him that she could find 
 a New York lawyer in Newport. 
 
 He met Charity, and not Kedzie, on the train. That 
 made bad look worse. But it gave Jim and Charity an 
 opportunity to face the calamity that was impending. 
 Jim tried to reassure Charity that he would keep her 
 from suffering any public harm. The mere thought of 
 her liability to notoriety, the realization that her long life 
 of decency and devotion were at the mercy of the whim 
 of a woman like Kedzie, drove her frantic. 
 
 She begged Jim to leave her to her thoughts and he 
 went away to the purgatory of his own. Reaching New 
 York, he returned to Charity to offer his escort to her 
 home. She broke out, petulantly: 
 
 "Don't take me any more places, Jim, I beg you!" 
 
 "Forgive me," he mumbled, and relieved her of his 
 compromising chivalry. 
 
 They went to their homes in separate taxicabs. Jim 
 made haste to his apartment. Kedzie was not there 
 and had not been heard from. 
 
 Late as it was, he set out on a telephone chase for 
 McNiven and dragged him to a conference. It was mid 
 night and Jim was haggard with excitement. 
 
 There are two people at least to whom a wise man tells 
 the truth his doctor and his lawyer. Neither of them 
 has many illusions left, but both usually know fact when 
 they get a chance to face it. 
 
 Jim had nothing to conceal from McNiven and his 
 
 573
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 innocence transpired through all his bewilderment. He 
 told just what had happened in its farcical-funeral details. 
 McNiven did not smile. Jim finished with all his energy : 
 
 "Sandy, you know that Charity is the whitest woman. 
 on earth, a saint if ever, there was a saint. She's the one 
 that's got to be protected. Not a breath of her name 
 must come out. If it takes the last cent I've got and dad's 
 got I want you to buy off that wife of mine. You warned 
 me against marrying her, and I wish to God I'd listened 
 to you. I'm not blaming her for being suspicious, but 
 I can't let her smash Charity. I'll protect Charity if I 
 have to build a wall of solid gold around her." 
 
 McNiven tried to quiet him. He saw no reason for 
 alarm. "You don't have to urge me to protect Charity," 
 he said. "She's an angel as well as my client. All you 
 need is a little sleep. Go to bed and don't worry. Re 
 member, there never was a storm so big that it didn't blow 
 over." 
 
 "Yes, but what does it blow over before it blows over?" 
 said Jim. 
 
 "You're talking in your sleep already. Good night," 
 said McNiven.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE next morning McNiven found Charity at his 
 office when he arrived. She had evidently been 
 awake all night. 
 
 She told McNiven a story that agreed in the essentials 
 with Jim's except that she made herself out the fool where 
 he had blamed himself. McNiven had no success in try 
 ing to quiet her with soothing promises of a tame con 
 clusion. She dreaded Kedzie. 
 
 "If it were just an outburst of jealousy," she said, 
 "you might talk to the woman. But she's not jealous of 
 her husband. She was as cool as a cucumber when she 
 found us together. She was glad of it, because she had 
 got a way to get her Marquess now. She's ambitious and 
 Lady Macbeth couldn't outdo her." 
 
 She told McNiven what she had not had the heart to 
 tell Jim about Strathdene. It worried him more than he 
 admitted. While he meditated on a measure to meet 
 this sort of attack, Charity suggested one. It was 
 drastic, but she was desperate. She proposed the threat 
 of a countercharge against Kedzie. 
 
 McNiven shook his head and made strange noises in his 
 pipe. He asked for evidence against Kedzie. Charity 
 could only quote the general opinion. 
 
 McNiven said: "No. You allege innocence on your 
 part in spite of appearances which you admit are almost 
 conclusive. You can hardly claim that more innocent 
 appearances on her part prove that she is guilty. Besides, 
 we don't want to stir up any more sediment. We'll do 
 everything on the Q. T. Money talks, and the little lady 
 
 575
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Is not deaf. My legal advice to you is, 'Don't fret,' and 
 tny medical advice is, ' Go to bed and stay there till I 
 send you word that it's all over.' Remember one 
 thing, there never was a storm so big that it didn't 
 blow over." 
 
 Charity was not in the least quieted. His sedative 
 only annoyed her ragged nerves. 
 
 "Keep my name clean," she whispered. 
 
 As she rode home in a taxicab that was like a refrigerator 
 she passed in the Fifth Avenue melee Zada L'Etoile, now 
 Mrs. Cheever, with the tiny little Cheever like a princelet 
 asleep at her breast, hiding with its pink head the letter 
 ''A" that had grown there. 
 
 People of cautious respectability spoke to Zada now 
 with amiable respect, and murmured: 
 
 "Funny thing! She's made a man of that good-for- 
 nothing Peter Cheever. They're as happy and as thick 
 as thieves." 
 
 Charity had heard this saying, and she dreaded to 
 realize that perhaps in a few days respectable people 
 would be turning from herself, not seeing her, or storing 
 up credit by snubbing her and muttering : 
 
 "No wonder poor Cheever couldn't get along with her. 
 He took the blame like a gentleman, and now she's found 
 out. She was a sly one, but you can't fool all the people 
 all the time." 
 
 Charity had not been gone from McNiven's office long 
 before a lawyer's clerk arrived bearing the papers for a 
 divorce on statutory grounds in the case of Dyckman 
 versus Dyckman, Mrs. Charity C. Cheever, co-respondent, 
 Anson Beattie counsel for plaintiff. 
 
 McNiven went after Beattie at once and proposed a 
 quiet treaty and a settlement out of court. Beattie 
 grinned so odiously that McNiven had to say: 
 
 " Oh, I remember you. You used to be an ambulance- 
 chaser. What are you after now a little dirty adver 
 tising?" 
 
 576
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "What are you after?" said Seattle. " A little collusive 
 juggling with the Seventh Commandment?" 
 
 "The one against false witness is the Ninth," said 
 McNiven. "But let's have a conference. This war in 
 Europe might have been avoided by a little heart-to-heart 
 talk beforehand. Let's profit by the lesson." 
 
 Beattie consented to this, and promised to arrange it 
 on condition that in the mean while McNiven would accept 
 service for his client. This was done, and Beattie left. 
 
 He saw his great publicity campaign being thwarted, 
 and changed his mind. He hankered for fame more than 
 gold. He filed the papers and meditated. He did not 
 know how much or how little Kedzie loved her husband, 
 and she had told him nothing of Strathdene. He feared 
 that a compromise might be patched up and perhaps a 
 reconciliation effected. He had had women come to him 
 imploring a divorce from their abominable husbands only 
 to see the couple link up again, kiss and make up, and call 
 him an abominable villain for trying to part them. 
 
 After some earnest consideration of the right of his own 
 career and his family to the full profit of this windfall, he 
 looked up a reporter and through him a group of reporters 
 and promised them a peep at something interesting. 
 
 He had the privilege of calling for the papers from the 
 clerk of the court, so he took them out and permitted the 
 reporters to glance within and make note of the contents. 
 
 Late editions of the evening papers gave the Dyckman 
 divorce a fanfare rivaling the evidence that the Germans 
 were about to resume their unrestricted submarine 
 Schrecklichkeit . 
 
 If the spoken word is impossible to recall, how much 
 more irretrievable the word that is printed in millions of 
 newspapers. The name of Dyckman was a household 
 word. It resounded now in every household throughout 
 the country, and across the sea, where the name had become 
 familiar in all the nations from the big financial dealings 
 of the elder Dyckman as a banker for the Allies. 
 37 577
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Reporters played about Jim Dyckman that night as if 
 they were banderilleros and he a raging bull. He fought 
 them with the same success. 
 
 They tried to find Charity, but she was in the doctor's 
 care actually. The doctor himself dismissed the re 
 porters. He called them "ghouls," which did not sweeten 
 their hearts toward his patient. 
 
 The next day there was probably not a morning paper 
 in the United States in any language that failed to star 
 the news that Mrs. Dyckman had found her husband's 
 relations with Mrs. Cheever intolerable. 
 
 That morning saw the conference in McNiven's office, 
 as promised by Beattie. But Kedzie did not appear; she 
 had vanished to some place where she could not be found 
 by anybody except the man who wrote her highly imagina 
 tive affidavits for her and the notary public who attested 
 her signature. 
 
 At the conference with Jim, Kedzie was represented by 
 counsel, also by father. Jim called the lawyer Beattie 
 some hard old Anglo-Saxon names, and told him that if 
 he were a little bigger he would give him the beating 
 that was coming to him. Then he turned to Kedzie's 
 father. 
 
 " Mr. Thropp," he pleaded, "you and I have always got 
 along all right. You know I've tried to do the right thing 
 by your daughter. I'm ready to now. She's too decent a 
 girl to have done this thing on her own. This is the work 
 of that rotten skunk of a lawyer I apologize to the other 
 skunks and the real lawyers. She has done a frightful 
 injustice to the best woman on earth. She can never undo 
 it, but surely she doesn't want to do any more. She's 
 through with me, I suppose, but we ought to be able to 
 clean up this affair respectably and quietly and not in the 
 front show-window of all the damned newspapers in the 
 world. 
 
 "Can't you and I make a little quiet gentleman's 
 agreement to withdraw the charge and let the divorce go 
 
 578 '
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 through decently? I'll make any settlement on your 
 daughter that she wants." 
 
 Adna pondered aloud, his claim-agent instincts alert: 
 "Settlement, eh? What might you call settlement?" 
 
 "Whatever you'd consider fair. How much would you 
 say was right?" 
 
 Adna filled his lungs and mouthed the deliciously liquid 
 word as if it were a veritable aurum potabile: 
 
 "Millions!" 
 
 "What!" Jim gasped. 
 
 Adna fairly gargled it again: 
 
 "Millillions!" 
 
 The greed in the old man's eyes shot Dyckman's eyes 
 with blood. He snarled: 
 
 " So it's the plain old blackmail, eh? Well, you can go 
 plumb to hell!" 
 
 "All right," said Adna, felicitously, "but we won't go 
 alone. I and daughter will have comp'ny. Come on, 
 Mr. Beattie." 
 
 After they had gone Jim realized that his hatred of 
 being gouged had involved Charity's priceless reputation. 
 He told McNiven to recall Beattie, but Charity herself 
 appeared in a new and militant humor. 
 
 The first realization that her good name was gone had 
 crushed her. She had built it up like a mansion, adding a 
 white stone day by day. When it fell about her in ruins 
 her soul had swooned with the disaster. 
 
 After a night and a day of groveling terror she had re 
 captured the valor that makes and keeps a woman good, 
 and she leaped from her sick bed and her sick soul into 
 an armor of rage. 
 
 She burst in on McNiven and Jim and demanded a 
 share in the battle. When Jim told her of his latest 
 blunder she spoke up, stoutly: 
 
 "You did the right thing. To try to buy them off 
 would be to confess guilt. The damage is done. The 
 whole world has read the lie. Now we'll make it read the 
 
 579
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 truth. There must be some way for me to defend my 
 name, and I want to know what it is." 
 
 McNiven told her that the law allowed her to enter the 
 case and seek vindication, but he advised her against it. 
 She thanked him for the information and rejected the 
 advice. She was gray with battle-ardor and her very nos 
 trils were fierce. 
 
 "I'm sorry to do anything to interfere with your 
 welfare, Jim, for if I win she wins you; but you can get 
 rid of her some other way. The little beast ! She thinks 
 she can make use of me as a bridge to cross over to her 
 Marquess, but she can't!" 
 
 "Her Marquess?" Jim mumbled. "What does that 
 mean?" 
 
 Charity regretted her impetuous speech, but McNiven 
 explained it. 
 
 Jim was pretty well deadened to shocks by this time, 
 but the news that his wife had been disloyal found an un 
 touched spot in his heart to stab. It gave him a needed 
 resentment, however, and a much-needed something to 
 feel wronged about. 
 
 He caught a spark of Charity's blazing anger, and they 
 resolved to fight the case to the limit. And that was 
 where it took them.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 ONCE the battle was joined, a fierce desire for haste 
 impelled all of these people. Kedzie dreaded every 
 hour's delay as a new risk of losing Strathdene, who was 
 showing an increasing rage at having the name of his 
 wife-to-be bandied about in the press, with her portraits 
 in formal pose or snapped by batteries of reporters. 
 
 Her lawyer emphasized the heartbreak it was to her to 
 learn that her adored husband had been led astray by her 
 trusted friend. This did not make pleasant reading for 
 the jealous Strathdene, and he wished himself jolly well 
 out of the whole affair. 
 
 It was not long before his own name began to slip into 
 the case by innuendo. Once he was in, he could not de 
 cently abandon his Kedzie, though he had to prove his 
 devotion by denying it and threatening to shoot anybody 
 who implied that his interest in Mrs. Dyckman was 
 anything more than formal. 
 
 Jim Dyckman was impatient to have done with the suit, 
 however it ended. He was tossed on both horns of the 
 dilemma. He was compelled to fight one woman to save 
 another. He could not defend Charity without striking 
 Kedzie and he could not spare Kedzie without destroying 
 Charity. 
 
 In a situation that would have overwhelmed the greatest 
 tacticians he floundered miserably. He vowed that what 
 ever the outcome of the case might be, he would never 
 look at a woman again. Men find it very easy to condemn 
 womankind en bloc, and they are forever forswearing the 
 sex as if it were a unit or a bad habit.
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 During the necessary delay in reaching trial Jim asked 
 and received an extension of his leave of absence; then his 
 regiment came home from the Border and was mustered 
 out of the Federal service and received again into the 
 State control. Jim felt almost as much ashamed of in 
 volving his regiment in his scandal as Charity. 
 
 He had suffered so greatly from the embarrassment of 
 the publicity that he could hardly endure to face his 
 regiment and drill with his company. He offered his 
 resignation again, but it was not accepted. 
 
 In fact, under the new condition of the National Guard 
 service, his immediate officers had nothing to do with his 
 resignation. 
 
 The probability of a call to arms, not against Mexico, 
 but against the almost almighty German Empire, was so 
 great that it looked like slackery or cowardice to ask to be 
 excused. His next dread was that the regiment would be 
 mustered in before the case was finished, compelling its 
 postponement and leaving Charity to languish unrevenged. 
 
 For his inclusive anger at Everywoman soon changed 
 back to deeper affection than ever. The first sight of her 
 on the witness-stand at the mercy of the inquisition of the 
 unscrupulous Beattie brought back all his old emotions 
 for her and unnumbered new. 
 
 He had seen a picture of one of the Christian martyrs 
 whose torture was inflicted on her by a man armed with 
 steel pincers to pluck off her flesh from her shuddering 
 soul bit by bit. It seemed to him that his sainted Charity 
 was condemned to like atrocity. Her hands were bound 
 by the thongs of the law, her body was stripped to the eyes 
 of the crowd, and the tormentor went here and there, 
 nipping at the quick with intolerable cruelty. 
 
 And Jim must not go to her rescue. He must not pro 
 test or lift a hand in her behalf. He must sit and suffer 
 with her while the anguish squeezed the big sweat out of 
 his knotted brows. 
 
 It had been hard enough to await the appearance of the 
 
 582
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 case on the docket, to sit through the selection of the 
 jury, and to study the gradual recruitment of that squad 
 of twelve sphinxes, all commonplace, yet mysterious, 
 lacking in all divinity of comprehension and eager to be 
 entertained with an exciting conflict. 
 
 The fact that a woman was the plaintiff was a tremen 
 dous handicap for Jim, even though a woman was allied 
 with him in the defense. The very name ' ' co-respondent ' ' 
 condemned her in advance in the public mind. And then 
 she was rich and therefore dissipated in the minds of those 
 who cannot imagine wealth as providing other fascinating 
 businesses besides vice. And Jim was wealthy and there 
 fore a proper object for punishment. If he had earned his 
 millions it must have been by tyrannous corruption; if 
 he had only inherited them that was worse yet. 
 
 Beattie lost no chance to play on the baser phases of 
 the noble and essential suspicions of the democratic soul 
 and also on Kedzie's humble origin, her child-like pretti- 
 ness proving absolutely a child-like innocence and trust, 
 and the homely simplicity of her parents, who, being poor 
 and ignorant, were therefore inevitably virtuous and 
 sincere. 
 
 Jim had realized from the first what a guilty aspect his 
 unfortunate excursion with Charity must wear in the eyes 
 of any one but her and him. Even the waiter who was on 
 the ground had unwittingly conspired with their delicacy 
 to put them in a most indelicate situation. Skip went on 
 the stand, reveling in his first experience of fame, basking 
 in the spot-light like a cheap actor, and acting very badly, 
 yet well enough for the groundlings he amused. 
 
 Jim and Charity underwent a martyrdom of ridicule 
 during his testimony. A man and woman riding backward 
 on a mule through a jeering mob might seem pathetic 
 enough if one had the heart to deny himself the laughter, 
 but Jim and Charity made their grotesque pilgrimage 
 without exciting sympathy. 
 
 Beattie had tried to get Mrs. Noxon on the stand to 
 
 583
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 confirm tne proof that Charity had spent the night away, 
 but the old lady showed her contempt of the court and of 
 the submarines by sailing for Europe to escape the ordeal. 
 The chauffeur, the valet, and the Viewcrest servants were 
 enough, however, to corroborate Skip Magruder's story 
 beyond any assailing, and handwriting experts had no 
 difficulty in convincing the jury that Jim's signature on 
 the hotel register was in his own handwriting. He had 
 made no effort to disguise it or even to change his name 
 till the last of it was well begun. 
 
 Mr. and Mrs. Thropp made splendid witnesses for their 
 child and the old mother's tears melted a jury that had 
 never seen her weep for meaner reasons. 
 
 When Charity reached the stand the case against her 
 was so complete that all her bravery was gone. She felt 
 herself a fool for having brought the ordeal on herself. 
 She took not even self-respect with her to the chair of 
 torture.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 IN the good old days of Hester Prynne they published a 
 faithless wife by sewing a scarlet "A" upon the bosom. 
 of her dress. Nowadays the word is pronounced "co 
 respondent," and it may be affixed to any woman's name 
 by any newspaper, or any plaintiff in a divorce case. 
 
 So fearful a power was so much abused that since 19 n 
 in New York the co-respondent has been permitted to 
 come into the court and oppose the label. It is in sort a 
 revival of the ancient right to trial by ordeal. This 
 hideous privilege of proving innocence by walking unshod 
 over hot plowshares is most frigidly set forth in the 
 statute where the lawyer's gift for putting terrible things 
 in desiccated phrases was never better shown than in 
 Section 1757. 
 
 In an action brought to obtain a divorce on the ground of 
 adultery, the plaintiff or defendant may serve a copy of his 
 pleading on the co-respondent named therein. At any time 
 within twenty days after such service on said co-respondent he 
 may appear to defend such action, so far as the issues affect 
 such co-respondent. If no such service be made, then at any 
 time before the entry of judgment any co-respondent named in 
 any of the pleadings shall have the right, at any time before the 
 entry of judgment, to appear either in person or by attorney 
 in said action and demand of plaintiff's attorney a copy of the 
 summons and complaint, which must be served within ten days 
 thereafter, and he may appear to defend such action, so far as 
 the issues affect such co-respondent. In case no one of the 
 allegations of adultery controverted by such co-respondent 
 shall be proved, such co-respondent shall be entitled to a bill of 
 costs against the person naming him as such co-respondent, 
 which bill of costs shall consist only of the sum now allowed by 
 
 585
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 law as a trial fee, and disbursements, and such co-respondent 
 shall be entitled to have an execution issue for the collection of 
 the same. 
 
 The exact amount of money was set forth in another 
 place, in Section 3251, where it is stated that the sums 
 obtainable are "for trial of an issue of fact, $30, and 
 when the trial necessarily occupies more than two days, 
 $10 in addition thereto." 
 
 In other words, Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever, finding her 
 life of good works and pure deeds crowned with the infamy 
 which Mrs. Kedzie Dyckman in her anger and her haste 
 pressed on her brow, had the full permission of the law 
 to come into the public court, face a vitriolic lawyer, and 
 deny her guilt. 
 
 If she survived the trip through hell she could collect 
 from her accuser forty dollars to pay her lawyer with. 
 The priceless boon of such a vindication she could keep 
 for herself. And that ended her. 
 
 This is only one of the numberless vicious and filthy 
 and merciless consequences of the things done in the name 
 of virtue by those who believe divorce to be so great an 
 evil that they will commit every other evil in order to 
 oppose it. 
 
 In no other realm of law and punishment has severity 
 had more need of hypocrisy to justify itself than in the 
 realm of wedlock. What grosser burlesque could there be 
 than the conflict between the theory and the practice? 
 The law and the Church, claiming what few people will 
 deny, that marriage is an immensely solemn, even a sacred, 
 condition, have made entrance into it as easy as possible 
 and the escape from it as difficult. It is as if one were to 
 say, "Revolvers are very dangerous weapons, therefore 
 they shall be placed within the reach of infants, but they 
 must on no account be taken away from them, and once 
 grasped they must never be laid down." 
 
 The most stringent rules have been formulated to 
 
 586
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 prevent those people from marrying each other who are 
 least likely to want to namely, blood relations. But 
 there is no law against total strangers meeting at the altar 
 for the first time, and the marriage by proxy of people who 
 have never seen each other has had the frequent blessing 
 of ecclesiastic pomp. 
 
 At a time when legal divorce was too horrible to con 
 template they made very pretty festivals of betrothing 
 little children who could not understand the ceremony or 
 even parrot the pledge. Who indeed can understand the 
 pledge before its meaning is made clear by life ? 
 
 And why should people be forced to make an eternal 
 pledge whose keeping is beyond their power or prophecy 
 and from which there is no release? What is it but a 
 subornation of perjury? 
 
 Those who so blithely scatter flowers before bridal 
 couples and old shoes after them are perfectly benevolent, 
 of course, in their abhorrence of 'separating the twain 
 if they begin to throw their old shoes at each other; for 
 they are sincerely convinced that if people were permitted 
 to do as they pleased, nothing on earth would please them 
 but vice. And so those who have the lawmaking itch 
 set about saving humanity from itself by making inhuman 
 laws, which the clever and the criminal evade or break 
 through, leaving the gentle and the -timid in the net. 
 
 For there was never no divorce. No amount of law 
 has ever availed to keep those together who had the 
 courage or the cruelty to break the bonds. By hook or by 
 crook, if not by book, they will be free. 
 
 The question of the children is often used to cloud the 
 issue, as if all that children needed for their welfare were 
 the formal alliance of their parents, and as if a home where 
 hatred rages or complacent vice is serene were the ideal 
 rearing-ground for the young. When love of their chil 
 dren is enough to keep two incompatible souls together 
 there is no need of the law. When that love is insufficient 
 what can the law accomplish? And what of the innumer- 
 
 587
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 able families where there have been no children, or where 
 they are dead or grown-up? 
 
 The experiment of forbidding what cannot be pre 
 vented and of refusing legal sanction to what human 
 nature demands has been given centuries of trial with no 
 success. 
 
 Marriage is among the last of the institutions to have 
 the daylight let in and the windows thrown open. For the 
 home is no more threatened by liberty than the State is, 
 and that pair which is kept together only by the shackles 
 of the law is already divorced; its cohabitation is a scan 
 dal. Free love in the promiscuous sense is no uglier than 
 coupled loathing. The social life of that community 
 where divorce is least free is no purer than that where 
 divorce is not difficult. Otherwise South Carolina, which 
 alone of the States permits no divorce on any ground, 
 should be an incomparable Eden of marital innocence. 
 Is it? And New York, which has only one ground, and 
 that the scriptural, should be the next most innocent. 
 Is it? 
 
 Meanwhile the mismated of our day who are struggling 
 through the transition period between the despotism of 
 matrimony and its republic can be sure that the righteous 
 will omit no abuse that they can inflict. Those who would 
 free Russias must face Siberias. 
 
 The worst phase of it is that some of those who are 
 determined to be free and cannot otherwise get free will 
 not hesitate to destroy innocent persons who may be use 
 ful to their escape. 
 
 Mrs. Kedzie Dyckman had her heart set on releasing 
 herself from the husband she had in order that she might 
 try another who promised her more happiness, more love, 
 and more prestige. The husband she had would have 
 been willing enough to set her free, both because he liked 
 to give her whatever she wanted and because he was not 
 in love with their marriage himself. 
 
 But the law of New York State says that married 
 
 588
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 couples shall not uncouple amicably and intelligently. 
 If they will part it must be with bitterness and laceration. 
 One of the two must be driven out through the ugly gate 
 of adultery. They must part as enemies and they must 
 sacrifice some third person as a blood-offering on the altar. 
 
 It is a strange thing that the lamb, which is the symbol 
 of innocence and harmlessness, should have always been 
 the favorite for sacrifice. 
 
 Charity Coe had happened along at the convenient 
 moment.
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 MRS. CHARITY COE CHEEVER, take the 
 stand. . . ." 
 
 " Ju swear tell tru thole tru noth buth tru thelpugod?" 
 
 "I do." 
 
 McNiven, in the direct examination, asked only such 
 questions as Charity easily answered with proud denials 
 of guilt. Beattie began the cross-examination with a 
 sneering scorn of her good faith. 
 
 "Mrs. Cheever, you are the co-respondent in this case 
 of Dyckman versus Dyckman?" 
 
 "I am." 
 
 "And on this night you went motoring with defendant?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Was his wife with you?" 
 
 "No; you see " 
 
 "Was any other person with you?" 
 
 "You see, it was a new car and it was only our intention 
 to" 
 
 "Was any other person with you?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "And you spent the night with the defendant in the 
 Viewcrest Inn?" 
 
 "That is hardly the way I should put it." 
 
 "Answer the question, please." 
 
 "I will not answer such an insulting question." 
 
 " I beg your pardon most humbly. Were you registered 
 as the defendant's wife?" 
 
 McNiven's voice: "I 'bject. There is no evidence 
 witness even saw the book." 
 
 59
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 The judge : ' ' Ob j ection s' tained. ' ' 
 
 "Well, then, Mrs. Cheever, did you see the defendant 
 write in the book?" 
 
 "I I perhaps I did" 
 
 "Perhaps you did. You heard the waiter Magruder 
 testify here awhile ago that he insisted on defendant 
 registering, and defendant reluctantly complied. Do you 
 remember that?" 
 
 " I I I believe I do. But I didn't see what he wrote." 
 
 "You didn't see what he wrote. Exhibit A shows that 
 he wrote 'Mr. and Mrs. James Dysart.' You heard the 
 handwriting experts testify that the writing was Dyck- 
 man's. But you did not see the writing. Did you not, 
 however, hear the waiter speak of you as the defendant's 
 wife?" 
 
 "Well I may have heard him." 
 
 "You didn't tell him that you were not the defendant's 
 wife?" 
 
 "I didn't speak to the waiter at all. It was a very 
 embarrassing situation . ' ' 
 
 "It must have been. So you did not deny that you 
 were the defendant's wife?" 
 
 "You see, it was like this. When Mr. Dyckman asked 
 me to try his new car " 
 
 " You did not deny that you were the defendant's wife?" 
 
 "I hadn't the faintest idea that we could have gone so 
 far" 
 
 "Answer the question!" 
 
 "But I'm coming to that " 
 
 The judge: "Witness will answer question." 
 
 "But, your Honor, can't I explain? Has he a right to 
 ask these horrible things in that horrible way?" 
 
 The lawyer: "We are trying to get at the horrible 
 truth. But if you prefer not to answer I will not press 
 the point. The waiter showed you to the parlor, saying 
 that the rest of the hotel was occupied?" 
 
 "Yes."
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "He left you there together, you and the defendant?" 
 
 "Well, he went away, but " 
 
 "And left you together. He so testified. He also tes 
 tified that he found you together the next morning. Is 
 that true?" 
 
 "Oh, that's outrageous. I refuse to answer." 
 
 Jim Dyckman rose from his chair in a frenzy of wrath. 
 His lawyer, McNiven, pressed him back and pleaded with 
 him in a whisper to remember the court. He yielded 
 helplessly, cursing himself for his disgraceful lack of 
 chivalry. 
 
 The judge spoke sternly. "Witness will answer ques 
 tions of counsel or " 
 
 "But, your Honor, he is trying to make me say that I 
 Oh, it's loathsome. I didn't. I didn't. He has no 
 right!" 
 
 When a woman's hair is caught in a traveling belt and 
 she is drawn backward, screaming, into the wheels of a 
 great machinery that will mangle her beauty if it does not 
 helplessly murder her there are not many people whose 
 hearts are hard enough to withhold pity until they learn 
 whether or not her plight was due to carelessness. 
 
 There are always a few, however, who will add their 
 blame to her burden, and they usually invoke the name of 
 justice for their lethargy of spirit. 
 
 Yet even the cruelty of that severity is a form of self- 
 protection against a shattering grief; and a perfect heart 
 would have pity even for the pitiless, since they, too, are 
 the victims of their own carelessness; they, too, are drawn 
 backward into the soul-crushing cogs of the world. 
 
 Mrs. Charity Coe Cheever, as good a woman as ever 
 was, was being dragged to the meeting-point of great 
 wheels, but she had turned about and was fighting to 
 escape, at least with what was dearer than her life. The 
 pain and the terror were supreme, and even if she wrenched 
 free from destruction it would be at the cost of lasting 
 scars. Yet she fought. 
 
 592
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 It had been all too easy for the infuriated Kedzie Dyck- 
 man to entangle Charity in the machinery. Kedzie was a 
 little terrified at the consequences of her own act, though 
 she would have said that she did it in self-defense and to 
 punish an outrage upon her rights. But when persons set 
 out to punish other persons, it is not often that their own 
 hands are altogether innocent. 
 
 If the Christly edict, "Let him that is without sin cast 
 the first stone," had been followed out there would never 
 have been another stone cast. And one might ask if the 
 world would have been, or could have been, the worse 
 for that abstention. For, whatever else may be true, the 
 venerable practices of justice have been false and futile. 
 
 And now, nearly two thousand years later, after two 
 thousand years more of heartbreaking history, an increas 
 ing few are asking bitterly if punishment has ever paid. 
 
 Vaguely imagining on one side the infinite misery and 
 ugliness of the dungeons and tortures, the disgraces and 
 executions of the ages with their counter-punishment on 
 the inquisitors and the executioners, and setting against 
 them that uninterrupted stream of deeds we call crimes, 
 what is the picture but a ghastly vanity an eternal 
 process of trying to dam the floods of old Nile by flinging 
 in forever poor wretch after poor wretch to drown un 
 redeemed and unavailing? 
 
 , Charity was the latest sacrifice. If she had been 
 guilty of loving too wildly well, or of drifting uncon 
 sciously into a situation where opportunity made tempta 
 tion irresistible, there would be a certain reaction to pity 
 after she had been definitely condemned. There are at 
 times advantages in weakness, as women well know, 
 though Charity despised them now. 
 
 Kedzie's lawyer, however, felt it good tactics to as 
 sume now the pose of benevolent patience with an erring 
 one. Seeing that Charity was in danger of stirring the 
 hearts of the jurors by her suffering, he forestalled their 
 sympathy and murmured: 
 
 593
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "I will wait till Mrs. Cheever has regained control of 
 herself." 
 
 Instantly Charity's pride quickened in her. She 
 wanted none of that beast's pity. She responded to the 
 strange sense of discipline before fate that makes a man 
 walk soldierly to the electric chair; inspires a caught spy 
 to stand placidly before his own coffin and face the firing- 
 squad; led Joan of Arc after one panic of terror to wait 
 serene among the crackling fagots. 
 
 The lawyer was relieved. He had been afraid that 
 Charity would weep. He resumed the probe: 
 
 "And now, Mrs. Cheever, if you are quite calm I will 
 proceed. I regret the necessity of asking these questions, 
 but you were not compelled to come into court. You 
 came of your own volition, did you not?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Witnesses have testified and you have not denied that 
 you arrived at the Viewcrest Inn late at night; that 
 you saw the defendant register; that you and he went to 
 the only room left ; that the waiter left you together and 
 found you together the next morning. You have heard 
 that testimony, have you not?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Knowing all this, do you still claim that your conduct 
 was above reproach?" 
 
 "For discretion, no. I was foolish and indiscreet." 
 
 "And that was all?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "You are innocent of the charge, then?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Do you ask the jury to believe you?" 
 
 "I ask them to yes! Yes! I ask them to." 
 
 "Do you expect them to?" 
 
 "Oh, they ought to." 
 
 " If you had been guilty of misconduct would you admit 
 it?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 594
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Do you expect them to believe that?" 
 
 "If they knew me they would." 
 
 "Well, we haven't all the privilege of knowing you as 
 well as the defendant does. You may step down, Mrs. 
 Cheever, thank you." 
 
 McNiven rose. "One moment, Mrs. Cheever. You 
 testified on direct examination that the defendant left you 
 immediately after the waiter did?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And that he did not return till the next morning, just 
 before the waiter returned." 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "That is all, Mrs. Cheever." 
 
 McNiven would have done better to leave things alone. 
 The sturdy last answer of Charity and the unsportsman 
 like sneer of Kedzie's lawyer had inclined the jury her 
 way. McNiven's explanation awoke again the skeptic 
 spirit. 
 
 Charity descended from her pillory with a feeling that 
 she had said none of the things she had planned to say. 
 The eloquence of her thoughts had seemed incompatible 
 somehow with the witness-stand. At a time when she 
 needed to say so much she had said so little and all of it 
 wrong.
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 JIM DYCKMAN'S heart was so wrung with pity for 
 Charity when she stepped down and sought her place 
 in a haze of despair that he resolved to make a fight for 
 her himself. He insisted on McNiven's calling him 
 to the stand, though McNiven begged him to let ill 
 enough alone. 
 
 H took the oath with a fierce enthusiasm that woke 
 the jury a little, and he answered his own lawyer's ques 
 tions with a fervor that stirred a hope in the jury's heart, 
 a sorely wrung heart it was, for its pity for Charity was at 
 war with its pity for Kedzie, and its admiration for Jim 
 Dyckman, who was plainly a gentleman and a good sport 
 even if he had gone wrong, could only express itself by 
 punishing Kedzie, whose large eyes and sweet mouth the 
 jury could not ignore or resist. 
 
 When his own lawyer had elicited from Jim the story 
 as he wanted it told, which chanced to be the truth, 
 McNiven abandoned him to Beattie with the words: 
 
 "Your witness." 
 
 Beattie was in fine fettle. He had become a name talked 
 about transcontinental^ and now he was crossing swords 
 with the famous Dyckman. And Dyckman was at a 
 hideous disadvantage. He could only parry, he could not 
 counter- thrust. There was hardly a trick forbidden to 
 the cross-examiner and hardly a defense permitted to the 
 witness. 
 
 And yet that very helplessness gave the witness a cer 
 tain shadowy aide at his side. 
 
 Jim's heart was beating high with his fervor to defend 
 
 596
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Charity, but it stumbled when Beattie rose and faced 
 him. And Beattie faced him a long while before he spoke. 
 
 A slow smile crept over the lawyer's mien as he made 
 an excuse for silence out of the important task of scrubbing 
 his eye-glasses. 
 
 Before that alkaline grin Jim felt his faith in himself 
 wavering. He remembered unworthy thoughts he had 
 entertained, graceless things he had done; he felt that 
 his presence here as a knight of unassailable purity was 
 hypocritical. He winced at all points from the uncer 
 tainty as to the point to be attacked. His life was like a 
 long frontier and his enemy was mobilized for a sudden 
 offensive. He would know the point selected for the 
 assault when he felt the assault. The first gun was that 
 popular device, a supposititious question. 
 
 "Mr. Dyckman, you are accused of well, we'll say 
 co-respondence with the co-respondent. You have de 
 nied your guilt in sundry affidavits and on the witness- 
 stand here. Remembering the classic and royal ideal of 
 the man who 'perjured himself like a gentleman,' and 
 assuming I say 'assuming' what you deny that you 
 had been guilty, would you have admitted it?" 
 
 "I could not have been guilty." 
 
 "Could not? Really! you astonish me! And why 
 not, please?" 
 
 "Because Mrs. Cheever would never have consented. 
 She is a good woman." 
 
 This unexpected answer to the old trick question jolted 
 Beattie perceptibly and brought the jury forward a little. 
 The tears gushed to Charity's eyes and she felt herself 
 unworthy a champion so pious. 
 
 Beattie acknowledged the jolt with a wry smile and 
 returned : 
 
 "Very gallant, Mr. Dyckman; you want to be a gentle 
 man and avoid the perjury, too. But I must ask you to 
 answer the question. Suppose you had been guilty." 
 
 Silence. 
 
 597
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Answer the question!" 
 
 Silence. 
 
 "Will his Honor kindly instruct the witness to answer 
 the question?" 
 
 Jim broke in, "His Honor cannot compel me to suppose 
 something that is impossible." 
 
 The jury rejoiced unwillingly, like the crowd in the 
 bleachers when a man on the opposing team knocks a 
 home run. The jury liked Jim better. But what they 
 liked, after all, was what they falsely imagined. They 
 assumed that Jim had been out on a lark and got caught 
 and was putting up a good scrap for his lady friend. He 
 was a hum-dinger, and no wonder the lady fell for him. 
 Into such slang their souls translated the holiness of his 
 emotions, and they voted him guilty even in awarding 
 him their admiration for his defense. 
 
 Beattie paused again, then suddenly asked, "Mr. 
 Dyckman, how long have you loved Mrs. Cheever?" 
 
 "What do you mean by 'loved'?" 
 
 "It is a familiar word. Answer the question." 
 
 "I have admired Mrs. Cheever since she was a child. 
 We have always been friends." 
 
 "Your 'friendship' was considerably excited when she 
 married Mr. Cheever, wasn't it?" 
 
 "I I thought he was unworthy of her." 
 
 "Was that why you beat him up in a fist fight at your 
 club?" 
 
 This startled the entire court. Even reporters who 
 had missed the news were excited. McNiven sprang to 
 his feet, crying: 
 
 "I 'bject! There is no evidence before the court that 
 there ever was such a fight. The question is incompir- 
 relvimmaterial. ' ' 
 
 "S'tained!" said the judge. 
 
 Beattie was satisfied. The arrow had been pulled out, 
 but its poison remained. He made use of another of his 
 tantalizing pauses, then: 
 
 598
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "It was shortly afterward that Mrs. Cheever divorced 
 her husband, was it not?" 
 
 "I 'bject," McNiven barked. 
 
 "S'tained!" the judge growled. 
 
 " Let us get back to the night when you and Mrs. Chee 
 ver went a-motoring." Beattie smiled. "There was a 
 beautiful moon on that occasion, I believe." 
 
 The jury grinned. The word "moon" meant foolish 
 ness. Beattie took Jim through the story of that ride and 
 that sojourn at the tavern, and every question he asked 
 condemned Jim to a choice of answers, either alternative 
 making him out ridiculously virtuous or criminal. 
 
 Beattie rehearsed the undenied facts, but substituted for 
 the glamour of innocence in bad luck the sickly glare of 
 cynicism. He asked Jim if he had ever heard of the ex 
 pression, "The time, the place, and the girl. " He had the 
 jury snickering at the thought of a big rich youth like Jim 
 being such a ninny, such a milksop and mollycoddle, as to 
 defy an opportunity so perfect. 
 
 The public mind has its dirt as well as its grandeurs; 
 the pool that mirrors the sky is easily roiled and 
 muddied. It was possible for the same people to abhor 
 Jim and Charity for being guilty and to feel that if they 
 were not guilty with such an occasion they were still 
 more contemptible. 
 
 Thus ridicule, which shakes down the ancient wrongs 
 and the tyrants' pretenses, shakes down also the ancient 
 virtues and the struggling ideals. 
 
 Finally Beattie said, "You say you left the fair co 
 respondent alone in the hotel parlor?" 
 
 "I did." 
 
 "All alone?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "And you went out into the night, as the saying is?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " But you testified that it was raining." 
 
 "It was." 
 
 599
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "You went out into the rain?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "To cool your fevered brow?" 
 
 Silence from Jim; shrieks of laughter from the silly 
 spectators. The jury was shattered with amusement; 
 the judge wiped a grin from his lips. Beattie resumed : 
 
 "Where did you sleep?" 
 
 "In the office chair." 
 
 "You paid for the parlor! You registered! And you 
 slept in the chair!" [Gales of laughter. His Honor 
 threatens to clear the court.] "Who saw you asleep in 
 the chair?" 
 
 "I don't know I was asleep." 
 
 "Are you sure that you did not just dream about the 
 chair?" 
 
 "I am sure." 
 
 "That's all." 
 
 Jim stepped down, feeling idiotic. 
 
 There is a dignity that survives and is illumined by 
 flames of martyrdom, but there is no dignity that is im 
 proved by a bladder-buffeting. Jim slunk back to his 
 place and cowered, while the attorneys made their ha 
 rangues. 
 
 McNiven spoke with passion and he had the truth on his 
 side, but it lacked the convincing look. Beattie rocked the 
 jury-box with laughter and showed a gift for parodying 
 seriousness that would carry him far on his career. Then 
 he switched to an ardent defense of the purity of the Amer 
 ican home, and ennobled the jury to a knighthood of 
 chivalry and of democracy. As he pointed out, the well- 
 known vices of the rich make every household unsafe 
 unless they are sternly checked by the dread hand of the 
 law. 
 
 He called upon the jury to inflict on the Lothario a ver 
 dict that would not only insure comfort to the poor little 
 woman whose home had been destroyed, but would also be 
 severe enough to make even a multimillionaire realize and 
 
 600
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 remember that the despoiler of the American home cannot 
 continue on his nefarious path with impunity. 
 
 The judge gave a long and solemn charge to the jury. 
 It was fair according to the law and the evidence, but the 
 evidence had been juggled by the fates. 
 
 The jury retired and remained a hideous while.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 IT was only a pleasant clubby discussion of the prob 
 lem of Jim's and Charity's innocence that delayed the 
 jury's verdict. One or two of the twelve had a sneaking 
 suspicion that they had told the truth, but these were 
 laughed out of their wits by the wiser majority who were 
 not such fools as to believe in fairy-stories. 
 
 As one of the ten put it : " That Dyckman guy may have 
 gone out into the rain, but, believe me, he knew enough to 
 come in out of the wet. " 
 
 A very benevolent old gentleman who sympathized 
 with everybody concerned made a little speech: 
 
 " It seems to me, gentlemen, that when a man and wife 
 have quarreled as bitterly as those two and have taken 
 their troubles to court, there is no use trying to force them 
 together again. If we give a verdict of not guilty, that 
 will leave Mr. and Mrs. Dyckman married. But they 
 must hate each other by now and that would mean life 
 long misery and sin for both. So I think we will save valu 
 able time and satisfy everybody best by giving a verdict 
 of guilty. It won't hurt Dyckman any." 
 
 "What about Mrs. Cheever?" 
 
 " Oh, she's gotta lotta money." 
 
 None of the jury had ever had so much as that and it was 
 equivalent to a good time and the answer to all prayers, so 
 they did not fret about Charity's future. On the first bal 
 lot, after a proper reminiscence of the amusing incidents of 
 the trial they proceeded to a decision. The verdict was 
 unanimous that Jim was guilty as charged. Charity was 
 not to get her forty dollars nor her good name. 
 
 602
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 When the jurors filed back into the box the court came 
 to attention and listened to the verdict. 
 
 Jim and Charity were dazed as if some footpad had 
 struck them over the head with a slingshot. Kedzie was 
 hysterical with relief. She had suffered, too, throughout 
 the trial. And now she had been vindicated. 
 
 She went to the jury and she shook hands with each 
 member and thanked him. 
 
 "You know I accept the verdict as just one big beautiful 
 birthday present." It was not her birthday, but it sound 
 ed well, and she added, "I shall always remember your 
 kindly faces. Never can I forget one of you." 
 
 Two days later she met one of the unforgetable jurors 
 on the street and did not recognize him. He had been one- 
 twelfth of her knightly champions, but she cut him dead as 
 an impertinent stranger when he tried to speak to her. 
 She cut Skip Magruder still deader when he tried to ride 
 home with her. 
 
 He came to call and showed an inclination to settle down 
 as a member of Kedzie's intimate circle. He had speedily 
 recovered from his first awe at the sight of her splendor. 
 Finding himself necessary to her, he grew odiously pre 
 sumptuous. She had not dared to rebuke him. Now she 
 thought she would have to buy him off. Skip had had his 
 witness fees and his expenses, and nothing else for his 
 pains. Then Beattie warned Kedzie that it would look 
 bad to pay Skip any money; it might cast suspicion on his 
 testimony. Kedzie would not have done that for worlds. 
 Besides, when she learned what Mr. Beattie's fee was to be, 
 she felt too poor to pay anybody anything. 
 
 The only thing she could do, therefore, was to remind 
 Skip of the beautiful old song, " Lovers once, but strangers 
 now." 
 
 "Besides, Skippie dear, I'm engaged." 
 
 "Already?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "You woiked that excuse on me when you tried to 
 603
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 explain why you toined me down when I wrote you the 
 letter at the stage door." 
 
 "Yes, I did." 
 
 "Say, Anitar, you'd oughter git some new material. 
 Your act is growin' familiar." 
 
 "I don't know what you mean." 
 
 "Oh no! You wasn't never in vawdvul, was you, oh, 
 no! not a tall!" Kedzie played her pout on him, but Skip 
 glared at her, shook his head, kicked himself with his game 
 leg, and said, "I gotta give you credit, Anitar, you're the 
 real thing as a user." 
 
 "A what?" said Kedzie. 
 
 "A user," he explained in his elliptical style. "You're 
 one them dames uses a fella like he was a napkin, then 
 trows him down. You used me twice and used me good. I 
 desoived the second one, for I'm the kind o' guy gets his 
 once and comes back for more in the same place. I'd go 
 tell Jimmie Dyckman I was a liar but I ain't anxious to be 
 run up for poijury, and I ain't achin' to advertise what a 
 John I been. So long, Anitar, and Gaw delp the next guy 
 crosses your pat'." 
 
 That was the last Kedzie saw of Skip. She did not 
 miss him. She hated him for annoying her pride and she 
 hated the law that she used for her divorce, because it re 
 quired her to wait three months before the interlocutory 
 decree should become final. The time was hazardously 
 long yet short, in a sense, for her alimony was to end at 
 the end of three months if she married again, and marrying 
 again was her next ambition. The judge had fixed her 
 alimony at $30,000 a year, and an allowance for costs. 
 Beattie tried to make a huge cost settlement, but McNiven 
 knew of Kedzie's interest in the Marquess and he refused 
 the bait. So Kedzie got only $7,500. She found it a 
 ruinously small capital to begin life as a Marchioness on 
 she that had had only two dollars to begin life in New 
 York on! The Marquess was very nice about it, and said 
 he didn't want any of Dyckman's dirty money. But Ked- 
 
 604
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 zie thought of life in England with alarm, especially as she 
 had the American comic-opera idea that all foreign peers 
 are penniless. She dreaded to think what might happen 
 in that three months' interregnum between husband II 
 and husband III. Enough was happening in the rest of 
 the world. 
 
 The annus miserabiUs 1917 had begun with the deter 
 mination of the German Empire to render the seas im 
 passable and to withdraw the pledge to President Wilson 
 that merchant ships should not be sunk till the passengers 
 and crew had a chance to get into open boats. On Janu 
 ary 31, 1917, " Frightfulness " began anew, and the under 
 sea fleets, enormously increased, were set loose in shoals. 
 Having no commerce of her own afloat, it was safe for 
 Germany to sink any vessel anywhere. 
 
 Kedzie began to wonder if she would ever dare to sail 
 for her future ancestral home, and if she did how long her 
 ship would last. 
 
 On February 3d the U-53, which had sunk Strath- 
 dene's ship off Newport, sank an American freighter bound 
 from Galveston to Liverpool. Other American vessels 
 followed her into the depths. On February 27th the 
 Laconia, of 18,000 tons burden, was torpedoed and twelve 
 passengers died of exposure in the bitter weather. In one 
 of the open boats a Catholic priest administered the last 
 rites to seven persons. 
 
 Mrs. Hoy, of Chicago, died in the arms of her daughter 
 and her body slipped into the icy waves, to be followed by 
 her daughter's a few minutes later. 
 
 These seemed to make up a sufficient total of American 
 women drowned, and on the next day the President de 
 clared that the long-awaited "overt act" had been com 
 mitted. He asked Congress to declare that peace with 
 Germany was ended. Her ambassador was sent home 
 and ours called home. 
 
 In March the British captured Bagdad and the Ger 
 mans suddenly retreated along a sixty-mile front in 
 
 605
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 France; then the Russian revolution abruptly changed the 
 almighty Czar into a weeping prisoner digging snow. And 
 the vast burying-ground of Siberia gave up its living dead 
 in a sudden apocalypse of freedom. Fifty thousand 
 sledges sped across the steppes laden with returning exiles, 
 chains still dangling at many a wrist from the dearth of 
 blacksmiths to strike them off. 
 
 Kedzie did not value the privilege of living in times 
 when epochs of history were crowded into weeks and cycles 
 completed in days. The revolution in Russia disturbed 
 Kedzie as it did many a monarch, and she said to her 
 mother: 
 
 "What a shame to treat the poor Czar so badly! 
 Strathie and I were planning to visit Russia after the war, 
 too. The Czar was awfully nice to Strathie once and I 
 was sure we'd be invited to live right in the Duma or the 
 Kremlin or whatever they call the palace. And now 
 they've got a cheap and nasty old republic over there! 
 And they're talking of having republics everywhere. 
 What could be more stupid? As if everybody was born 
 free and equal. Mixing all the aristocrats right up with 
 the common herd!" 
 
 Mrs. Thropp agreed that it was simply tumble. 
 
 " Do you know what?" Kedzie gasped. 
 
 "What?" her mother echoed. 
 
 " I've just had a hunch. I'll bet that by the time I get 
 married to Strathie there'll be nothing left but republics, 
 and no titles at tall. His people came over with Henry the 
 Conqueror and his title will last just long enough for me to 
 reach for it, and then woof! Wouldn't it be just my 
 luck to become plain Mrs. Strathdene after all I've had to 
 go through ! Honestly, m'mah, don't I just have the dog- 
 on'dest luck!" 
 
 "It's perfectly awful," said Mrs. Thropp, "but bad luck 
 can't go on forever." 
 
 On April 2d the future Mrs. Strathdene was cheered by 
 an extraordinary spectacle newspapers in the Metro- 
 
 606
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 politan Opera House ! Kedzie was there with her waning 
 Marquess. The occasion was rare enough in itself, for 
 an American opera was being heard: "The Canterbury 
 Pilgrims," with Mr. Reginald De Koven's music to Mr. 
 Percy Mackaye's text. 
 
 Suddenly, in the entr'acte the unheard-of thing the 
 newspapers appeared in the boxes and about the house ! 
 People spread evening extras on the rails and read excited 
 ly that President Wilson had gone to Congress and asked 
 it to declare that a stete of war existed and had existed. 
 
 The Italian manager directed the Polish conductor to 
 play " The Star-Spangled Banner" and the three thousand 
 men and women of the audience made a chorus on the 
 obverse side of the curtain. 
 
 Mr. Gerard, lately returned from Germany, called for 
 "Three cheers for President Wilson," and there were loud 
 huzzahs for him and for the Allies. 
 
 "You and I are allies now," Kedzie murmured to the 
 Marquess. She thought a trifle better of her country. 
 
 The Austrian prima donna fainted and could not appear 
 in the last act, and everybody went home expecting to see 
 the vigor of Uncle Sam displayed in a swift and tremendous 
 delivery of a blow long, long withheld. 
 
 The vigor was displayed in a tremendous delivery of 
 words far better withheld. 
 
 It was a week before Congress agreed that war existed 
 and over a month passed before Congress agreed upon the 
 nature of the army to be raised. Nearly four months 
 passed before the draft was made. 
 
 Jim Dyckman was almost glad of the delay, for it gave 
 him hope of settling his spiritual affairs in time to be a 
 soldier. He was determined to marry Charity as soon as 
 the three months' probation term was over. But Charity 
 said no ! Cowering in seclusion from the eyes of her world, 
 she cherished a dream that when the war broke and the 
 dead began to topple and the wounded to bleed, she might 
 expiate the crime she had not committed, by devoting to 
 
 607
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 her own people her practised mercies. She was afraid to 
 offer them now, or even to make her appearance among the 
 multitudinous associations that sprang up everywhere in a 
 frantic effort to make America ready in two weeks for a 
 war that had been inevitable for two years. Not only a 
 war was to be fought, but a world famine. 
 
 Charity was ashamed to show her white face even at the 
 Red Cross. She busied herself with writing checks for 
 the snow-storm of appeals that choked her mail. Other 
 wise she pined in idleness, refusing more than ever the 
 devotion that Jim offered her now in a longing that in 
 creased with denial. 
 
 She suffered infinitely, yet mocked her own sufferings 
 as petty trifles. She contrasted them with what the mill 
 ions on millions of Europe's men were enduring as they 
 huddled in the snow-drenched, grenade-spattered trench 
 es, or agonized in all their wounds out in the No-Man's 
 Land between the trenches. She told herself that her own 
 heartaches were negligible, despicable against the in 
 numerable anguishes of the women who saw their men, 
 their old men, their young men, their lads, going into the 
 eternal mills of the war, while hunger and loneliness and 
 toil unknown to women before made up their daily por 
 tion. 
 
 She accused herself for still remaining apart from that 
 continental sisterhood of grief. All America seemed to be 
 playing Hamlet, debating, deferring, letting irresolution 
 inhibit every necessary duty. 
 
 Since her country had disowned her and refused her 
 justice or chivalry, she was tempted to disown her country 
 and claim citizenship among those who could fight and 
 could sacrifice and could endure. 
 
 It was not easy to persuade a captain to take a woman 
 passenger aboard his ship, now that the German ambition 
 was to sink a million tons a month, but she resolved again 
 to go if she had to stowaway; 
 
 First she would finish her affairs, make her will, and burn 
 
 608
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 her letters. She had neglected to change the testament 
 she had signed when she became Peter Cheever's wife, and 
 took a pride in making him her sole heir. It would 
 be ridiculous to make him such a post-mortem gift now, 
 now that he had not only money enough, but a wife that 
 satisfied him, and a child. 
 
 She wondered whom to leave her money to. Jim Dyck- 
 man's name kept recurring to her and she smiled at that, 
 for he had more money than he could use. Besides, the 
 mention of his name in her will would confirm the public 
 belief in their intrigue. She had nobody to inflict her in 
 heritance upon but a few relatives, mostly rich enough. 
 She decided to establish a fund for her own orphans, the 
 children of other women whom she had adopted. 
 
 Making a will is in sort a preliminary death. Making 
 hers, Charity felt herself already gone, and looked back at 
 life with a finality as from beyond the grave. It was a 
 frightful thing to review her journey from a lofty angers- 
 eye view. 
 
 Her existence looked very petty. Now that her hope 
 and her senses were ended, she felt a grudge against the 
 world that she had got so little out of. She had tried to be 
 a good woman, and her altruism had won her such a bad 
 name that if Dr. Mosely should preach her funeral ser 
 mon he would feel that he had revealed a wonderful spirit 
 of forbearance in leaving it unmentioned that she was an 
 abandoned divorcee. 
 
 If she had been actually guilty of an intrigue with Jim 
 Dyckman Dr. Mosely would have forgiven her even more 
 warmly, because it was a woman taken in actual adultery 
 who was forgiven, while Charity had tactlessly fought the 
 charge and demanded vindication instead of winsomely 
 appealing for pity. 
 
 By a roundabout road of self -surrender she had come to 
 
 the same destination that she might have reached by the 
 
 straight path of self-indulgence. She was perilously near 
 
 to resolving that she had been a fool not to have taken hap- 
 
 39 609
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 piness, physical happiness, first. A grand red passion 
 seemed so much more beautiful than a petty blue asceti 
 cism. 
 
 When she got home from the will-making session with 
 McNiven she began to go over her papers and close the 
 books of her years. She attacked old heaps of bundles of 
 her husband's letters and telegrams, and burned them 
 with difficulty in her fireplace. 
 
 She felt no temptation to glance over them, though her 
 lip curled in a grimace of sardonic disgust to consider how 
 much Peter Cheever had been to her and how little he was 
 to her now. The first parcels she burned were addressed 
 to "Miss Charity Coe." How far off it seemed since she 
 had been called " Miss" ! 
 
 She had been a girl when Cheever's written and spoken 
 words inflamed her. They blazed now as she had blazed. 
 Into that holocaust had gone her youth, her illusions, her 
 virginity, her bridehood, her wifely trust. And all that 
 was left was a black char. 
 
 She came upon letters from Jim Dyckman, also, a few. 
 She flung them into the fire with the rest. He had had 
 nothing from her except friendship and girlish romance and 
 a grass-widow's belated affection. Crimson thoughts 
 stole through her dark heart like the lithe blazes inter 
 lacing the letters; she wondered if she would have done 
 better to have followed desire and taken love instead of 
 solitude. 
 
 She knew that she could have made Jim hers long ago 
 with a little less severity, a less harsh rebuff. The Church 
 condemned her for openly divorcing her husband. She 
 might have kept him on the leash and carried on the affair 
 with Jim that Cheever accused her of if Jim had been com 
 placent and stealthy. Or, she might have kept Jim at her 
 heels till she was rid of Cheever and then have married 
 him. She would have saved him at least from floundering 
 through the marsh where that Kedzie-o'-the-wisp had led 
 him to ultimate disaster. 
 
 610
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 And now that she had taken stock of her past and put it 
 into the fire, she felt strangely exiled. She had no past, 
 no present, and a future all hazy. Her loneliness was 
 complete. She had to talk to some one, and she telephoned 
 to Jim Dyckman, making her good-bys an excuse. 
 
 It was the first time he had been permitted to hear her 
 voice for weeks, and the lonely joy that cried out in his 
 greeting brought warm tears to her dull, dry eyes. 
 
 He heard her weeping and he demanded the right to 
 come to see her. She refused him and cut off his plea, 
 hoping that he would come, anyway, and waiting tremu 
 lously till the door-bell rang with a forgotten thrill of a 
 caller, a lover calling. 
 
 Her maid, who brought her Jim's name, begged with her 
 eyes that he should not be turned away again. Charity 
 nodded and prinked a little and went down-stairs into 
 Jim's arms. 
 
 He took her there as if she belonged there and she felt 
 that she did, though she protested, feebly: 
 
 "You are not unmarried yet." 
 
 They were in that No-Man's-Land. She was neither 
 maid, wife, nor widow, but divorcee. He was neither 
 bachelor, husband, nor widower; he was not even a 
 divorce. He was a Nisi Prius.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 childish old fates played one of their cheapest 
 A jokes on Jim Dyckman when, after they had dangled 
 Charity Coe just out of his reach for a lifetime, they flung 
 her at his head. They do those things. They waken the 
 Juliets just a moment too late to save the Romeos and 
 themselves. 
 
 Jim had revered Charity as far too good for him, and now 
 everybody wondered if he would do the right thing by her. 
 Prissy Atterbury in a burst of chivalry said it when he said : 
 
 "Jim's no gentleman if he doesn't marry Charity." 
 
 Pet put it in a more womanly way : 
 
 ' ' Unless he's mighty spry she'll nab him. Trust her !" 
 
 Among the few people who had caught a glimpse of 
 Charity, no one had been quite cruel enough to say those 
 things to her face, but Charity imagined them. Housed 
 with her sick and terrified imagination for companion, she 
 had imagined nearly everything dismal. 
 
 And now, when, by the mere laws of gravitation, she 
 had floated into Jim Dyckman's arms for a moment, she 
 heard the popular doom of them both in the joke he 
 attempted : 
 
 "Charity, I've got to marry you to make you an honest 
 woman." 
 
 She wrenched free of his embrace with a violence that 
 staggered him. He saw that she was taking his effort at 
 playfulness seriously, even tragically. 
 
 " 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." 
 
 612
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "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 tear 
 ful, 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 free 
 dom, 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 un 
 earned increment of scandal in the verdict of divorce, but 
 also a marriage contrary to the laws of New York. 
 
 New York would respect the ceremonies of New Jersey, 
 but there would be a shadow on the title. Still, such mar 
 riages 'were recognized by the public with little question, 
 just as in the countries where divorce is almost or quite 
 impossible society of all grades has always countenanced 
 unions not too lightly entered into or continued. In such 
 
 613
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 countries words like "mistress," "concubine," and "mor 
 ganatic wife" take on a decided respectability with a 
 touch of pathos rather than reproach. 
 
 Jim had come to beg Charity to accept a marriage with 
 an impediment. He had expected a scene when he pro 
 posed a flight across the river and a return to Father 
 Knickerbocker with a request for pardon. But her light 
 .suggestion of a religious ceremony threw him into confu 
 sion. He mumbled: 
 
 "Is a parson absolutely necessary?" 
 
 Charity's lips set into a grim line. 
 
 " I'll be married by a parson or I'll not be married at all. 
 The Church has enough against me on account of my di 
 vorce and this last ghastly thing. To get married outside 
 the Church would cut me off entirely from everything 
 that's sacred. There won't be any difficulty about getting 
 a parson, will there?" 
 
 "Oh no, not at all!" Jim protested, "only oh no, not 
 .at all, except " 
 
 ' ' Only what ? Except what ? ' ' 
 
 "You'll have to go to New Jersey to be married." 
 
 "Why should I?" 
 
 "Entirely on my account, honey. It's because I'm in 
 disgrace." 
 
 This way of putting it brought her over that sill with a 
 rush. To be able to endure something for him was a pre 
 vious ability. She hugged him devoutly, then put his arms 
 away. 
 
 When he left her he had a brilliant inspiration. He 
 thought how soothing it would be to her bruised heart, 
 what carron-oil to her blistered reputation, if he got Doctor 
 Mosely to perform the ceremony. 
 
 Jim was so delighted with the stroke of genius that he 
 went immediately to the pastor's house. The dear old 
 man greeted him with a subdued warmth. 
 
 "This is an unusual privilege, dear boy. I haven't 
 seen you for oh, ever so long. Of course, I have read 
 
 614
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 of you er that is what to what am I indebted 
 for" 
 
 "You perform marriages, don't you?" 
 
 "That is one of my perilous prerogatives. But, of 
 course, I can't guarantee how well my marriages will wear 
 in these restless times." 
 
 Jim braved a flippancy: " Then, being an honest dealer, 
 you replace any damaged article, of course?" 
 
 " I am afraid I could hardly go so far as that." 
 
 "Could you go as far as New Jersey?" 
 
 "In my time I have ventured into Macedonia. But 
 why do you ask?" 
 
 "You see, in a day or two, I'll be free from my present 
 that is, my absent wife; and I wanted to know if you could 
 come over and marry me." 
 
 "But I thought I fear do you mean to say you are 
 marrying some young woman from over there?" 
 
 "I'm marrying Charity Coe." 
 
 "My dear, dear boy! Really! You can't, you know!- 
 She has been divorced and so have you." 
 
 "Yes, all quite legally." 
 
 "And you ask me to join your hands in holy matri 
 mony?" 
 
 "No, just plain legal matrimony. I was joined in holy 
 matrimony once, and I don't insist on that part of it. 
 again. But Charity wants a clergyman and I don't 
 mind." 
 
 "Really, my son, you know better than to assume this 
 tone to me. You've been away from church too long." 
 
 "Well, if you want to get me back, fasten me to Charity, 
 You know she's the best woman that ever lived." 
 
 "She is a trifle too rebellious to merit that tribute, I 
 fear." 
 
 "Well, give her another chance. She has had enough 
 hard knocks. You ought to go to her rescue." 
 
 " Do you think that to be the duty of the Church?" 
 
 "It used to be, didn't it? But don't get me into theol- 
 
 615
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 ogy. I can't swim. The point is, will you many Charity 
 to me?" 
 
 "No!" 
 
 "Wouldn't you marry her to any man?" 
 
 "Only to one." 
 
 "Who's that?" 
 
 " Her former husband." 
 
 " But he's married to another woman." 
 
 " I do not recognize that marriage." 
 
 "Good Lord!. Would you like to see Charity married 
 to Cheever again?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "To Peter Cheever?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Whew! Say, Doctor, that's going it pretty strong." 
 
 "I do not care to discuss the sacraments with you in 
 your present humor." 
 
 "Did you read the trial of that woman last week who 
 killed her husband and was acquitted? Mrs. What's-her- 
 name ? You must have read it ." 
 
 "I pay little attention to the newspaper scandals." 
 
 "You ought to they're what make life what it is. 
 Anyway, this woman had a husband who turned out bad. 
 He was a grafter and a gambler, a drunkard and a brute. 
 He beat her and their five children horribly, and finally she 
 divorced him. The law gave her her freedom in five 
 minutes and there was np fuss about it, because she was 
 poor, and the newspapers have no room for poor folks' 
 marriage troubles unless they up and kill somebody. 
 
 "Well, this woman was getting along all right when 
 some good religious people got at her about the sin of her 
 divorce and the broken sacrament, and they kept at her 
 till finally she consented to remarry her husband for the 
 children's sake! There was great rejoicing by everybody 
 except the poor woman. After the remarriage he re 
 turned to his old ways and began to beat her again, and 
 finally she emptied a revolver into him." 
 
 616
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "Horrible, horrible!" 
 
 "Wasn't it? The jury disagreed on the first trial. 
 But on the second the churchpeople who persuaded her to 
 remarry him went on the stand and confessed or per 
 haps you would say, boasted that they persuaded her to 
 remarry him. And then she was acquitted. And that's 
 why the civil law has always had to protect people from " 
 
 Doctor Mosely turned purple at the implication and the 
 insolence. He scolded Jim loftily, but Jim did not cower. 
 He was upheld by his own religion, which was Charity 
 Coe's right to vindication and happiness. 
 
 At length he realized that he was harming Charity and 
 not Doctor Mosely. Suddenly he was apologizing humbly : 
 
 "I'm very much ashamed of myself. You're an older 
 man and venerable, and I I oughtn't to have forgotten 
 that." 
 
 " You ought not." 
 
 "I'll do any penance you say, if you'll only marry 
 Charity and me." 
 
 " Don't speak of that again." 
 
 He thought of his old friend and attorney, money. He 
 put that forward. 
 
 "I'll pay anything." 
 
 "Mr. Dyckman!" 
 
 "I'll give the church a solid gold reredos or contribute 
 any sum to any alms " 
 
 "Please go. I cannot tolerate any more." 
 
 Jim left the old man in such agitation that a reporter 
 named Hallard, who shadowed him, feeling in his journalis 
 tic bones that a big story would break about him soon, 
 noted his condition and called on Doctor Mosely. He was 
 still shaken with the storm of defending his ideals 
 from profanation, and Hallard easily drew from him an 
 admission that Mr. Dyckman was bent upon matri 
 mony, also a scathing diatribe on the remarriage of 
 divorced persons as one of the signs of the increasing 
 degeneracy of public morals. 
 
 617
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Mallard's paper carried a lovely exclusive story the next 
 morning in noisy head-lines. The other newspapers 
 enviously plagiarized it and set their news-sleuths on 
 Jim's trail. The clergy of all denominations took up the 
 matter as a theme of vital timeliness. 
 
 Jim and Charity were beautifully suited to the purposes 
 of both sorts; the newspapers that pulpiteered the news 
 and wrote highly moral editorials for sensation's sake; and 
 the pulpiteers who shouted head-lines and yellow journal 
 ism from their rostrums, more for the purpose of self- 
 advertisement than for any devotion to Christly principles 
 of sympathy and gentle comprehension. 
 
 Jim was stupefied to find himself once more pilloried and 
 portraited and ballyhooed in the newspapers. But he 
 tightened his jaws and refused to be howled from his path 
 by any coyote pursuit. 
 
 His next thought was of the New Jersey clergyman who 
 had married him to Kedzie. He motored over to him. 
 
 Jim had told Dr. Mosely that clergymen ought to keep up 
 with the news. He found, to his regret, that the New 
 Jersey dominie did. 
 
 He remembered Jim well and heard him out, but shook 
 his head. He explained why, patiently. He had been 
 greatly impressed by the action of the House of Deputies of 
 the Protestant Episcopal Church convened at St. Louis in 
 October, 1916. A new canon had been proposed declaring 
 that "no marriage shall be solemnized in this Church be 
 tween parties, either of whom has a husband or wife still 
 living, who has been divorced for any cause arising after 
 marriage." 
 
 This meant that the innocent party, as well as the guilty, 
 should be denied another chance. The canon had been 
 hotly debated so hotly that one preacher referred to any 
 wedding of divorced persons as "filth marriage," and 
 others were heard insisting that even Christ's acceptance 
 of adultery as a cause for divorce was an interpolation in 
 the text, and that the whole passage concerning the woman 
 
 618
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 taken in adultery was absent from some ancient manu 
 scripts. A halt was called to this dangerous line of argu 
 ment, and one clergyman protested that "the question of 
 the integrity of the Scriptures is more important than the 
 question of marriage and divorce." Another clergyman 
 pleaded: "An indissoluble marriage is a fiction. What is 
 the use of tying the Church up to a fiction? It is our 
 business to teach and not to legislate." Eventually the 
 canon was defeated. But many of the clergy were de 
 termined to follow it, anyway. 
 
 In any case, not only was Charity divorced, but she had 
 been involved in Jim's divorce, and Jim, as the New Jersey 
 preacher pointed out to him, was denied remarriage even 
 by the civil law of New York. The appeal to New Jersey 
 was plainly a subterfuge, and he begged Jim to give 
 Charity up. 
 
 "You don't know what you ask," Jim cried. "I'll find 
 somebody with a heart!" And he stormed out.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 JIM reported to Charity his two defeats and the lan 
 guage he had heard and read. Charity's conscience 
 was so clean that her reaction was one of wrath. She pon 
 dered her future and Jim's. She could not see what 
 either of them had done so vile that they should be sen 
 tenced to celibacy for life, or more probably to an eventual 
 inevitable horror of outward conformity and secret in 
 trigue. 
 
 She knew too many people whose wedlock had been a 
 lifelong tolerance of infamy on the part of one or both. 
 Some of the bitterest enemies of divorce were persons who 
 had found it quite unnecessary. She felt that to forgive 
 and to forget became so anti-social a habit in matrimony 
 that no divorce could be worse. 
 
 She was afraid of herself, too. She dared not trust 
 herself with life alone. She was too human to be safe. 
 Marriage with Jim would protect him and her from each 
 other and from the numberless temptations awaiting them. 
 Finally, there were no children in the matter. 
 
 All arguments prove too much and too little, and in the 
 end become simply our own briefs for our own inclinations. 
 Charity's mood being what it was, she adopted the line of 
 reasoning that led to her own ambition. She spent much 
 time on her knees, but communed chiefly with herself, and 
 rose always confirmed in her belief that to marry Jim 
 Dyckman was the next great business of her existence. 
 
 Jim, too, had grown unwontedly earnest. The mar 
 riage denounced by the religious had taken on a religious 
 
 620
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 quality. He was inclined to battle for it as for a creed, as 
 the clergymen had battled vainly for the new canon. 
 
 He, too, felt a spirit of genuflexion and wanted to speak 
 to God personally; to appeal to Him by a private petition 
 as to a king whose ministers denied mercy. 
 
 By his bed he sank down and prayed. He was very 
 solemn, but too uncertain of the solemn voice to use it. 
 He half whispered, half thought: 
 
 "O God, I don't know how you want me to act. I 
 only know that my heart keeps on calling for Charity and a 
 home with her, and children some day. There'll never be 
 any children for either of us if we obey the Church. For 
 give me if I doubt what these preachers tell me, but I just 
 can't believe it to be your voice. If it is not your voice, 
 what is it that makes me feel it such a sin not to marry 
 Charity? I'm going to, God, unless you stop me. I may 
 be making a big mistake, but if I am you'll understand. 
 You will not be mad at me any more than I am mad at my 
 dog when he misunderstands me, for I know he is a good 
 dog and wants to do what I want him to if he can only 
 learn what it is. If it is not your will that I should 
 marry Charity tell me now so that I can't misunder 
 stand, for if you don't I'm going ahead. If I have to 
 take the punishment afterward, I'll take it rather than 
 leave that poor soul alone. Bless her, O God, and help 
 me. Amen." 
 
 And now both Charity and Jim were ready for battle. 
 She set her hand in Jim's and said that she would marry 
 him in spite of all, but that she would not give up her hope 
 of being married by one of her own faith until she had 
 canvassed the entire clergy. 
 
 And then began one of the strangest quests ever under 
 taken, even in this transitional period of matrimony as an 
 institution a quest so strange that it would seem impos 
 sible if it had not actually happened. Jim and Charity 
 hunted a preacher and the press hunted them. 
 
 While the journalists waited for the United States to 
 
 621
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 enter the war with soldiers, the reporters kept in practice 
 by scouting after Jim Dyckman and sniping him when 
 ever he showed his head. He succeeded only in getting 
 his resignation from his regiment accepted. He planned 
 to sail for France and fight for France as soon as he had 
 married Charity. 
 
 When he failed to secure a minister by letter or tele 
 gram he set forth to make personal visits. Sometimes 
 Charity went with him so that there should be no delay or 
 time for a change of mood. 
 
 From city to town they went, from village to city, 
 searching for an Episcopalian clergyman to say the desired 
 words. Jim offered any bribery that might suffice, but 
 ahead of him went his notoriety. 
 
 Many a warm-hearted clergyman felt sympathy for Jim 
 and Charity and longed to end their curious pilgrimage, 
 but dared not brave the wrath of his fellow-preachers or 
 accept the unwelcome fame that awaited his blessing, and 
 the discipline that would be meted out to him. 
 
 Jim's picture was so widely published that when he 
 eluded one crowd another posse sprang up wherever he re 
 appeared. His entrance into a town was a signal for the 
 clergy to scurry to cover. Some of them, to put themselves 
 on record and insure themselves against temptation, de 
 nounced Jim and his attachee as traveling fiends, emissa 
 ries of the devil. 
 
 The wealth that was their drag was proclaimed as their 
 weapon. 
 
 The storm grew fiercer and the language more unre 
 strained. Jim and Charity, reading in the papers the 
 terms applied to them, cowered and shuddered. 
 
 Charity grew haggard and peevish. Her obstinacy was 
 hardly more than a lockjaw of fright, the stubbornness of a 
 drowning child afraid to let go. 
 
 Jim was almost equally sick. The newspaper pursuit 
 covered him with chagrin. His good old name was pre 
 cious to him, and he knew how his mother and father were 
 
 622
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 suffering at its abuse, as well as for him in his fugitive 
 distress. 
 
 Jim's mother was very much mother. She took into 
 her breast every arrow shot at him. When she saw him 
 she held him fiercely in her arms, her big frame aching with 
 a Valkyrian ardor to lift the brave warrior on a winged 
 horse and carry him away from the earth. 
 
 It is hard for the best of mothers to love even the best of 
 daughters-in-law, for how can two fires prosper on the same 
 fuel? It had been a little too hard for Mrs. Dyckman to 
 love Kedzie. It was all too easy to hate her now and to 
 denounce her till even Jim winced. 
 
 "Don't think of her, mother," he pleaded. "Don't 
 let's speak of her any more. She's only one of my past 
 mistakes. You never mention those why not let her 
 drop?" 
 
 "All right, honey. You must forgive me. I'm only a 
 sour old woman and it breaks my heart to think of that 
 little, common " 
 
 "There you go again," her husband growled, sick with 
 grief, too. " Let the little cat go." 
 
 "What's killing me," Jim said, "is thinking of what I've 
 brought on Charity. It makes me want to die." 
 
 "But you'll have to live for her sake and your moth 
 er's," said his mother. "Charity's the only woman I 
 know that's worth fighting for. I've known her since she 
 was born and I never knew her to do or say one single 
 petty thing. She hasn't got one of those qualities that 
 women hate so much in women." 
 
 " Then why should she have to suffer such persecution?" 
 Jim cried. " My God! is chivalry dead in the world?" 
 
 His father flung his arm around him and hugged him 
 roughly. "Not while there's a man like you to fight for a 
 woman like her. I never was so proud of anything as I 
 am of being the father of a big fellow like you, who can 
 make a battle like yours for love of a woman." 
 
 "But why should I have to fight for her? Whose busi- 
 623
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 ness is it but ours that we want to get married decently 
 and live together quietly? Isn't this a free country?" 
 
 "Only the press is free," said his father. "And poor 
 Charity is getting nothing more than women have always 
 got who've dared to ask for their own way. They used to 
 throw 'em to the lions, or bowstring 'em in the harems. 
 And in the days of real chivalry they burned 'em at the 
 stake or locked 'em up in convents or castles. But don't 
 you worry, Jim, Charity has you for a champion and she's 
 mighty lucky. Go on and fight the muckers and the muck- 
 rakers, and don't let the reporters or the preachers scare 
 you away from doing the one right thing." 
 
 The newspapers kept within the almost boundless 
 limits of the libel law. Jim had publicity enough, and he 
 did not care to add to it by a libel suit, nor could he bring 
 himself to make a personal attack on any of his pursuers. 
 His discretion took on the look of poltroonery and he 
 groveled in shame. 
 
 One bitter day he motored with Charity to a village 
 where a clergyman lived who had wearied of the persecu 
 tion and volunteered his offices. When they arrived his 
 wife told Jim that he was stricken ill. He had fretted him 
 self into his bed. 
 
 Jim bundled Charity into his car and set forth again in 
 a storm. The car skidded and turned turtle in a ditch. 
 By some chance neither of them was more than bruised 
 and muddied. The hamper of food was spilled and 
 broken and they had hours to wait by the roadside while 
 a wrecking crew came from the nearest city to right 
 the car. 
 
 While they waited, forlorn and shivering, like two 
 tramps rather than like two malefactors of great wealth, 
 their hunger drove them to banquet on their little store. 
 
 Jim, gnawing at a crust of suspicious cleanliness, studied 
 Charity where she huddled in the shelter of a dripping 
 tree, like a queen driven forth into exile. And the tears 
 poured from his eyes and salted the bread. He had eaten 
 
 624
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 the food of his own tears. He had tasted life and found 
 it bitter. 
 
 When the men came with the ropes and the tackle neces 
 sary and slowly righted the car he found that its engine 
 ran again and he had speed and strength once more as his 
 servants. He tried to encourage Charity with a figure of 
 speech. 
 
 "They've got us ditched, honey, for a while, but we'll 
 get righted soon and then life will be as smooth as 
 smooth." 
 
 She tried to smile for his sake, but she had finished with 
 hope.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 WHILE Jim and Charity sat by the roadside the 
 Marchioness of Strathdene, nee Kedzie Thropp, of 
 Nimrim, sat on a fine cushion and salted with her tears 
 the toasted English crumpet she was having with her tea. 
 
 She had been married indeed, but the same ban that fell 
 upon Jim's remarriage had forbidden her the wedding of 
 her dreams. She was the innocent party to the divorce 
 and she was married in a church. But it was not of the 
 Episcopal creed, which she was now calling the Church of 
 England. Kedzie-like, she still wanted what she could not 
 get and grieved over what she got. It is usual to berate 
 people of her sort, but they are no more to be blamed than 
 other dyspeptics. Souls, like stomachs, cannot always co 
 ordinate appetite and digestion. 
 
 Kedzie had, however, found a husband who would be 
 permanently precious to her, since she would never be cer 
 tain of him. Like her, he was restless, volatile, and main 
 tained his equilibrium as a bicycle does only by keeping on 
 going. He was mad to be off to the clouds of France. 
 There was a delay because ships were sailing infrequently, 
 and their departure was kept secret. Passengers had to go 
 aboard and wait. 
 
 Bidding "bon voyage" was no longer the stupid dock- 
 party platitude it had been. It was bidding "good-by" 
 with faint hope of " au revoir." Ladies going abroad, even 
 brides, thought little of their deck costumes so long as they 
 included a well-tailored life-preserver. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp stared at Kedzie and breathed hard in her 
 creaking satin. And Adna looked out at her over the high 
 
 626
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 collar that took a nip at his Adam's apple every time he 
 swallowed it. 
 
 The old parents were sad with an unwonted sorrow. 
 They had money at last and they had even been hauled up 
 close to the aristocracy as the tail to Kite Kedzie. But 
 now they had time to realize that they were to lose this 
 pretty thing they had somehow been responsible for yet 
 unable to control. They had nearly everything else, so 
 their child was to be taken from them. 
 
 Suddenly they loved her with a grave-side ache. She 
 was their baby, their little girl, their youth, their beauty, 
 their romance, their daughter. And perhaps in a few days 
 she would be shattered and dead in a torpedoed ship. 
 Perhaps in some high-flung lifeboat she would be crouching 
 all drenched and stuttering with cold and dying with 
 terror. 
 
 Mrs. Thropp broke into big sobs that jolted her sides 
 and she fell over against Adna, who did not know how to 
 comfort her. He held 'her in arms like a bear's and patted 
 her with heavy paws, but she felt on her head the drip-drip 
 of his tears. And thus Kedzie by her departure brought 
 them together in a remarriage, a poor sort of honeymoon 
 wherein they had little but the bitter-sweet privilege of 
 helping each other suffer. 
 
 The picture of their welded misery brought Kedzie a re 
 turn, too, to her child hunger for parentage. She wanted 
 a mother and a father and she could not have them. She 
 went to put her exquisite arms about them and the three so 
 dissimilar heads were grotesquely united. 
 
 The Marquess of Strathdene pretended to be disgusted 
 and stormed out. But that was because he did not want 
 to be seen making an ass of himself, weeping as Bottom the 
 Weaver wept. He flung away his salted and extinguished 
 cigarette and wondered what was the matter with the 
 world where nothing ever came out right. 
 
 His own mother was weeping all the time and her letters 
 told always of new losses. The newspapers kept printing 
 
 627
 
 stories of Strathdene's chums being put away in a trench 
 or a hospital, or falling from the clouds dead. 
 
 And starvation was coming everywhere; in England 
 there was talk of famine, and all America had gone mad 
 with fear of it. But still the war went on in a universal 
 suicide which nobody could stop, and peace, the one thing 
 that everybody wanted, was wanted by nobody on any 
 terms that anybody else would even discuss. 
 
 As he agonized with his philosophy and lighted another 
 cigarette, the street roared like hurricane. Below the 
 windows the French Mission was proceeding up Fifth 
 Avenue. Marechal Joseph Joffre and Rene Viviani were 
 awakening tumult in the American heart and stirring it to 
 the rescue of France and of England and of Belgium and 
 Italy, with what outcome none could know. One could 
 only know that at last the great flood of war had encircled 
 the United States, reducing it to the old primeval problems 
 and emotions : how to get enough to eat, how to get weap 
 ons, how to find and beat down the enemy, how to endure 
 the farewells of fathers, mothers, sons, sisters, sweethearts, 
 wives. Everything was complex beyond understanding 
 for minds, but things were very simple for hearts ; they had 
 only to ache with sorrow or wrath. 
 
 The Marchioness of Strathdene and her airy husband 
 reached England without being submarined, and there, to 
 her great surprise, Kedzie found a whole new universe of 
 things not quite right. "If only it were otherwise!" was 
 still the perpetual alibi of contentment.
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 FROM the glory of the festivals of alliance Jim Dyck- 
 man and Charity Coe were absent. Both were so 
 eager to be abroad in the battle that they did not miss the 
 flag-waving. But they wanted to cross the sea together. 
 The importance of this ambition tempted Charity to a 
 desperate conclusion that the formalities of her union with 
 Jim did not matter so long as they were together. Yet the 
 risk of death was so inescapable and she was so imbued 
 with churchliness that her dreams were filled with visions 
 of herself dead and buried in unhallowed ground, of herself 
 and Jim standing at heaven's gate and turned away for 
 lack of a blessing on their union. 
 
 Her soul was about ready to break completely, but her 
 body gave out first. It was in a small town in New Jersey 
 that they found themselves weather-bound. 
 
 The sky seemed to rain ice-water and they took refuge 
 in the village's one hotel, a dismal place near the freight- 
 station. The entrance was up a narrow staircase, past a 
 bar-room door. 
 
 The rooms were ill furnished and ill kept, and the noise 
 of screaming locomotives and jangling freight-cars was 
 incessant. But there was no other hospitality to be had 
 in the town. 
 
 Jim left Charity at her door and begged her to sleep. 
 Her dull eyes and doddering head promised for her. 
 
 He went to his own room and laughed at the cheap 
 wretchedness of it: the cracked pitcher in the cracked 
 bowl, the washstand whose lower door would not stay 
 open, the two yellow towels in the rack, the bureau, the 
 
 629
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 cane chairs, and the iron bed with its thin mattress and 
 neglected drapery. 
 
 He lowered himself into a rickety rocker and looked out 
 through the dirtier window at the dirty town. The only 
 place to go was to sleep, and he tried to make the journey. 
 But a ferocious resentment at the idiocy of things drove 
 away repose. 
 
 He resolved that he had been a fool long enough. He 
 would give up the vain effort to conform, and would take 
 Charity without sanction. He was impatient to go to her 
 then and there, but he dared not approach her till she had 
 rested. 
 
 He remembered a book he had picked up at one of their 
 villages of denial. It was one of those numberless books 
 everybody is supposed to have read. For that reason he 
 had found it almost impossible to begin. But he was 
 desperate enough to read even a classic. He hoped that 
 it would be a soporific. That was his definition of a classic. 
 
 The book was the Reverend Charles Kingsley's Hypatia. 
 Jim was down on the Episcopal clergy one and all, and he 
 read with prejudice, skipping the preface, of course, which 
 set forth the unusual impulse of a churchman to help the 
 Church of his own day by pointing out the crimes and errors 
 of the Church of an earlier day; a too, too rare appeal to 
 truth for the sake of salvation by the way of truth. 
 
 As Jim glanced angrily through the early pages, the pict 
 ures of life in the fifth century caught and quickened his 
 gritty eyes. He skimmed the passages that did not hold 
 him, but as the hours went on he grew more unable to 
 let go. 
 
 The sacred lunch hour passed by ignored. The rain 
 beat down on the roof as the words rained up from the 
 page. The character of that eminently wise and beautiful 
 and good Hypatia seemed to be Charity in ancient cos 
 tume. The hostility of the grimy churchmen of that day 
 infuriated him. He cursed and growled as he read. 
 
 The persecution of Hypatia wrought him to such wrath 
 
 630
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 that he wanted to turn back the centuries and go to her 
 defense. He breathed hard as he came to the last of the 
 book and read of the lynching of Hypatia, the attack of the 
 Christians upon her chariot, the dragging of her exquisite 
 body through the streets, and even into the church, and up 
 to the altar, up to the foot of ''the colossal Christ watching 
 unmoved from off the wall, his right hand raised to give a 
 blessing or a curse?-" 
 
 Jim panted as Philammon did, tracing her through the 
 streets by the fragments of her torn robes and fighting 
 through the mob in vain to reach her and shield her. He 
 became Philammon and saw not words on a page, but a 
 tragedy that lived again. 
 
 She shook herself free from her tormentors, and, springing 
 back, rose for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white 
 against the dusky mass around shame and indignation in those 
 wide clear eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she 
 clasped her golden locks around her; the other long white arm 
 was stretched upward toward the great still Christ, appealing 
 and who dare say, in vain? from man to God. Her lips were 
 opened to speak; but the words that should have come from 
 them reached God's ear alone; for in an instant Peter struck her 
 down, the dark mass closed over her again . . . and then wail 
 on wail, long, wild, ear-piercing, rang along the vaulted roofs 
 and thrilled like the trumpet of avenging angels through Philam 
 mon 's ears. 
 
 Crushed against a pillar, unable to move in the dense mass, 
 he pressed his hands over his ears. He could not shut out those 
 shrieks! When would they end? What in the name of the God 
 of mercy were they doing? Tearing her piecemeal? Yes, and 
 worse than that. And still the shrieks rang on, and still the 
 great Christ looked down on Philammon with that calm, intol 
 erable eye, and would not turn away. And over His head was 
 written in the rainbow, " I am the same, yesterday, to-day, and 
 forever!" The same as He was in Judea of old, Philammon? 
 Then what are these, and in whose temple? And he covered 
 his face with his hands, and longed to die. 
 
 It was over. The shrieks had died away into moans; the 
 moans to silence. How long had he been there? An hour, or 
 an eternity? Thank God it was over! For her sake but for 
 theirs? 
 
 631
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 Startled by the vividness of the murder, Jim looked up 
 from the book, thinking that he had heard indeed the 
 shrieks of Charity in a death-agony. The walls seemed to 
 quiver still with their reverberation. 
 
 He put down the book in terror and saw where he was. 
 It was like waking from a nightmare. He was glad to find 
 that he was not in a temple of ancient Alexandria, but in 
 even that dingy New Jersey inn. 
 
 He wondered if Charity had not died. He hesitated to 
 go to her door and knock. She needed sleep so much that 
 he hardly dared to risk waking her, even to assure himself 
 that she was alive. 
 
 He went to the window and saw two men under umbrel 
 las talking in the yard between the hotel wings. They 
 would not have been laughing as they were if they had 
 heard shrieks. 
 
 His eye was caught by a window opposite his. There 
 sat Charity in a heavy bath-robe; her hair was down; she 
 had evidently dropped into the chair by the open window 
 and fallen asleep. 
 
 Jim stared at her and was reminded of how he had stared 
 at Kedzie on his other wedding journey. Only, Kedzie 
 had been his bride, and Charity was not yet, and might 
 never be. Kedzie was girlish against an auroral sky ; she 
 was rather illumined than dressed in silk. Charity was a 
 heart-sick woman, driven and fagged, and swaddled now in 
 a heavy woolen blanket of great bunches and wrinkles. 
 Kedzie was new and pink and fresh as any dew-dotted 
 morning-glory that ever sounded its little bugle-note of 
 fragrance. Charity was an old sweetheart, worn, drooping, 
 wilted as a broken rose left to parch with thirst. 
 
 Yet it was Charity that made his heart race with love 
 and desire and determination. She was Hypatia to him 
 and he vowed that the churchmen should not deny her nor 
 destroy her. He clenched his fists with resolution, then 
 went back to his book and finished it. He loved it so well 
 that he forgave the Church and the clergy somewhat for 
 
 632
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 the sake of this clergyman who had spoken so sturdily for 
 truth and beauty and mercy. He loved the book so well 
 that he even read the preface and learned that Hypatia 
 really lived once and was virtuous, though pagan, and was 
 stripped and slain at the Christian altar, chopped and mu 
 tilated with oyster shells in a literal ostracism, her bones 
 burned and her ashes flung into the sea. 
 
 The lesson Kingsley drew from her fate was that the 
 Church was fatally wrong to sanction ' ' those habits of do 
 ing evil that good may come, of pious intrigue, and at last 
 of open persecution, which are certain to creep in whereso 
 ever men attempt to set up a merely religious empire, 
 independent of human relationships and civil laws." The 
 preacher-novelist warned the Church of now that the 
 same old sins of then were still at work. 
 
 Jim closed the book and returned to the window to 
 study Charity. He vowed that he would protect her 
 from that ostracism. His wealth was but a broken sword, 
 but it should save her. 
 
 He felt it childish of her to be so set upon a wedding at 
 the hands of one of the clergymen who stoned her, but he 
 liked her better for finding something childish and stub 
 born in her. She was so good, so wise, so noble, so all-for- 
 others, that she needed a bit of obstinate foolishness to 
 keep her from being absolute marble. 
 
 He put on his hat and his raincoat and went out into 
 the town, hunting a clergyman, resolved to compel him at 
 all costs. The sudden shower became lyrical to his mood 
 as a railroad train clicks to the mood of the passenger. 
 
 There was but one Episcopal church in the village 
 and the parsonage was a doleful little cottage against a 
 shabby temple. The hotelkeeper had told him how to 
 find it, and the name of the parson. 
 
 Jim tapped piously on the door, then knocked, then 
 pounded. At length a voice came to him from somewhere, 
 calling : 
 
 "Come into the church!" 
 
 633
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 "That's what I've been trying to do for weeks," Jim 
 growled. He went into the church and found the parson 
 in his shirt-sleeves. He had been setting dishpans and 
 wash-tubs and pails under the various jets of water that 
 came in through the patched roof in unwelcome libations. 
 
 His sleeves were rolled up and he was rolling up pew 
 cushions. He gave Jim a wet hand and peered at him 
 curiously. It relieved Jim not to be recognized and re 
 garded as a visiting demon. 
 
 The clergyman's high black waistcoat was frayed and 
 shiny, as well as wet, and his reverted collar had an evident 
 edge from the way the preacher kept moistening his finger 
 and running it along the rim. In spite of this worse than a 
 hair-shirt martyrdom, the parson seemed to be a mild and 
 pitiful soul, and Jim felt hopeful of him as he began: 
 
 "I must apologize, Mr. Rutledge, for intruding on you, 
 but I well, I've got more money than I need and I imag 
 ine you've got less. I want to give you a little of mine for 
 your own use. Is there any place you could put ten thou 
 sand dollars where it would do some good?" 
 
 Young Mr. Rutledge felt for a moment that he was 
 dreaming or delirious. He made Jim repeat his speech; 
 then he stammered: 
 
 "Oh, my dear sir! The wants of this parish! and my 
 poor chapel! You can see the state of the roof, and the 
 broken windows. The people are too poor to pay for re 
 pairs. My own pittance is far in arrears, but I can't com 
 plain of that since so many of my dear flock are in need. I 
 was just about persuaded that we should have to abandon 
 the fight to keep the church alive. I had not counted on 
 miracles, but it seems that they do occur." 
 
 "Well, I'm not exactly a miracle-worker, but I've got 
 some money you can have if there's a string to it, of 
 course. But you could use ten thousand dollars, couldn't 
 you?" 
 
 " Indeed not," said Mr. Rutledge, feeling as Faust must 
 have felt when Mephisto began to promise things. A 
 
 634
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 spurt of water from a new leak brought him back from the 
 Middle Ages and he cried: "You might lend a hand with 
 this tub, sir, if you will." 
 
 When the new cascade was provided for, Jim renewed his 
 bids for the preacher's soul : 
 
 "If you can't use ten thousand, how much could you 
 use?" 
 
 "I don't know." 
 
 "Well, you could use a new roof at least. I'll give you a 
 new roof, and a real stained-glass window of Charity to re 
 place that broken imitation atrocity, and a new organ and 
 hymn-books, and new pew covers, and I'll pay your arrears 
 of salary and guarantee your future, and I'll give you an 
 unlimited drawing account for your poor, and any other 
 little things you may think of." 
 
 Mr. Rutledge protested: 
 
 " It's rather cruel of you, sir, to make such jokes at such 
 a time." 
 
 "God bless you, old man! I never was so much in 
 earnest. It's easy for me to do those little trifles. ' ' 
 
 "Then you must be an angel straight from heaven." 
 
 " I'm an angel, they tell me, but from the opposite direc 
 tion. It's plain you don't know who I am. Sit down and 
 I'll tell you the story of my life." 
 
 So the little clergyman in his shirt-sleeves sat shivering 
 with incipient pneumonia and beatitude, and by his side 
 in the damp pew in the dark chapel Jim sat in his rain 
 coat and unloaded his message. 
 
 The Reverend Mr. Rutledge had heard of Jim and of 
 Charity, and had regretted the assault of their moneyed 
 determination on the bulwarks of his faith. But somehow 
 as he heard Jim talk he found him simple, honest, forlorn, 
 despised and rejected, and in desperate necessity. 
 
 He looked at his miserable church and thought of his 
 flock. Jim's money would put shingles on the rafters and 
 music in the hymns and food in the hungry. It became a 
 largess from heaven. 
 
 635
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 He could see nothing, hear nothing, but a call to accept. 
 He asked for a moment to consider. He retired to pray. 
 
 His prayer was interrupted by one of his hungriest 
 parishioners, a Mrs. McGillicuddy, one of those poor old 
 washerwomen whose woes pile up till they are almost 
 laughable to a less humorous heart than the little preach 
 er's. He asked her to wait and returned to his prayers. 
 
 His sheep seemed to gather about their shepherd and 
 bleat for pasture and shelter. They answered his prayer 
 for him. He came back and said: 
 
 "I will." 
 
 "I do," was what Jim and Charity said a little later when 
 Jim had wrested Charity from her sleep by pounding at her 
 door. He waited, frantically, while she dressed. And he 
 had the town's one hack at the door below. He was afraid 
 that the parson would change his mind before they could 
 get the all-important words out of him. 
 
 They rode through the rain like Heine's couple in the 
 old stage-coach, with Cupid, the blind passenger, be 
 tween them. They ran into the church under the last 
 bucketfuls of shower. Jim produced the license he had 
 carried so long in vain. The washerwoman consented to 
 be one witness; the sexton -janitor made the other. 
 
 Jim had the ring ready, too. He had carried it long 
 enough. It made a little smoldering glimmer in the dusk 
 church. He knelt by Charity during the prayer, and 
 helped her to her feet, and the little clergyman kissed her 
 with fearsome lips. Jim nearly kissed him himself. 
 
 He did hug Mrs. McGillicuddy, and pressed into her 
 hand a bill that she thought was a dollar and blessed him 
 for. When she got home and found what it was she almost 
 fainted into one of her own tubs. 
 
 Jim left a signed check for the minister, with the sum- 
 lines blank, and begged him not to be a miser. They 
 left with him a great doubt as to what the Church would do 
 to him for doing what he had done for his chapel. But he 
 
 636
 
 WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING 
 
 was as near to a perfection of happiness as he was likely 
 ever to be. 
 
 His future woes were for him, as Charity's and Jim's 
 were for them. They would be sufficient to their several 
 days; but for this black rainy night there were no sorrows. 
 
 It was too late to get back to the city and luxury and 
 notoriety. They stayed where they were and were glad 
 enough. They expected to fare worse on the battle-front 
 in France where they would spend their honeymoon. 
 
 There was some hesitation as to which of their two 
 rooms at the hotel was the less incommodious, but the 
 furniture had been magically changed. Everything was 
 velvet and silk; what had been barrenness was a noble sim 
 plicity; what had been dingy was glamorous. 
 
 The ghastly dinner sent up from the dining-room was a 
 great banquet, and the locomotive whistles and the thun 
 derous freight-cars were epithalamial flutes and drums. 
 
 Outside, the world was a rainy, clamorous, benighted 
 place. And to-morrow they must go forth into it again. 
 But for the moment they would snatch a little rapture, 
 finding it the more fearfully beautiful because it was so 
 dearly bought and so fleeting, but chiefly beautiful because 
 they could share it together. 
 
 They were mated from the first, and all the people and 
 the trials that had kept them apart were but incidents in a 
 struggle toward each other. Henceforth they should win 
 on side by side as one completed being, doing their part 
 in war and peace, and compelling at last from the world, 
 along with the blame and the indifference that every one 
 has always had from the world, a certain praise and grati 
 tude which the world gives only to those who defy it for 
 the sake of what their own souls tell them is good and true 
 and honorable. 
 
 THE END
 
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 Gilbert Neal. By Will N. Harben. 
 
 Girl From His Town, The. By Marie Van Vorst. 
 
 Girl of the Blue Ridge, A. By Payne Erskine. 
 
 Girl Who Lived in the Woods, The. By Marjorie Benton 
 
 Cook. 
 
 Girl Who Won, The. By Beth Ellis. 
 Glory of Clementina, The. By Wm. J. Locke. 
 Glory of the Conquered, The. By Susan Glaspell. 
 God's Country and the Woman. By James Oliver Curwood. 
 God's Good Man. By Marie Corelli. 
 Going Some. By Rex Beach. 
 Gold Bag, The. By Carolyn Wells,
 
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 Golden Slipper, The. By Anna Katharine Green. 
 
 Golden Web, The. By Anthony Partridge. 
 
 Gordon Craig. By Randall Parrish. 
 
 Greater Love Hath No Man. By Frank L. Packard. 
 
 Greyfriars Bobby. By Eleanor Atkinson. 
 
 Guests of Hercules, The. By C. N. & A. M. Williamson. 
 
 Halcyone. By Elinor Glyn. 
 
 Happy Island (Sequel to Uncle William). By Jeannette Lee 
 
 Havoc. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 Heart of Philura, The. By Florence Kingsley. 
 
 Heart of the Desert, The. By Honore Willsie. 
 
 Heart of the Hills, The. By John Fox, Jr. 
 
 Heart of the Sunset. By Rex Beach. 
 
 Heart of Thunder Mountain, The. By Elfrid A. Bingham. 
 
 Heather-Moon, The. By C. N. and A. M. Williamson . 
 
 Her Weight in Gold. By Geo. B. McCutcheon. 
 
 Hidden Children, The. By Robert W. Chambers. 
 
 Hoosier Volunteer, The. By Kate and Virgil D. Boyles. 
 
 Hopalong Cassidy. By Clarence E. Mulford. 
 
 How Leslie Loved. By Anne Warner. 
 
 Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker. By S. Weir Mitchell, M.D. 
 
 Husbands of Edith, The. By George Barr McCutcheon. 
 
 I Conquered. By Harold Titus. 
 
 Illustrious Prince, The. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 Idols. By William J. Locke. 
 
 Indifference of Juliet, The. By Grace S. Richmond. 
 
 Inez. (111. Ed.) By Augusta J. Evans. 
 
 Infelice. By Augusta Evans Wilson. 
 
 In Her Own Right. By John Reed Scott. 
 
 Initials Only. By Anna Katharine Green. 
 
 In Another Girl's Shoes. By Berta Ruck. 
 
 Inner Law, The. By Will N. Harben. 
 
 Innocent. By Marie Corelli. 
 
 Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, The. By Sax Rohmer. 
 
 In the Brooding Wild. By Ridgwell Cullum. 
 
 Intrigues, The. By Harold Bindloss. 
 
 Iron Trail, The. By Rex Beach. 
 
 Iron Woman, The. By Margaret Deland. 
 
 Ishmael. (111.) By Mrs. Southworth.
 
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 Island of Regeneration, The. By Cyrus Townsend Brady. 
 Island of Surprise, The. By Cyrus Townsend Brady. 
 
 Japonette. By Robert W. Chambers. 
 
 Jean of the Lazy A. By B. M. Bower. 
 
 .[eanne of the Marshes. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 Jennie Gerhardt. By Theodore Dreiser. 
 
 Joyful Heatherby. By Payne Erskine. 
 
 Jude the Obscur*. By Thomas Hardy. 
 
 Judgment House, The. By Gilbert Parker. 
 
 Keeper of the Door, The. By Ethel M. Dell. 
 Keith of the Border. By Randall Parrish. 
 Kent Knowles: Quahaug. By Joseph C. Lincoln. 
 King Spruce. By Holman Day. 
 Kingdom of Earth, The. By Anthony Partridge. 
 Knave of Diamonds, The. By Ethel M. Dell. 
 Lady and the Pirate, The. By Emerson Hough. 
 Lady Merton, Colonist. By Mrs. Humphrey Ward- 
 Landloper, The. By Holman Day. 
 Land of Long Ago, The. By Eliza Calvert Hall. 
 Last Try, The. By John Reed Scott. 
 Last Shot, The. By Frederick N. Palmer. 
 Last Trail, The. By Zane Grey. 
 Laughing Cavalier, The. By Baroness Orczy. 
 Law Breakers, The. By Ridgwell Cullum. 
 Lighted Way, The. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 Lighting Conductor Discovers America, The. By C. N. & 
 
 A. N. Williamson. 
 Lin McLean. By Owen Wister. 
 
 Little Brown Jug at Kildare, The. By Meredith Nicholson. 
 Lone Wolf, The. By Louis Joseph Vance. 
 Long Roll, The. By Mary Johnson. 
 Lonesome Land. By B. M. Bower. 
 Lord Loveland Discovers America. By C. N. and A. M 
 
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 Lost Ambassador. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 Lost Prince, The. By Frances Hodgson Burnett. 
 Lost Road, The. By Richard Harding Davis. 
 Love Under Fire. By Randall Parrish.
 
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 Macaria. (111. Ed.) By Augusta J. Evans. 
 
 Maids of Paradise, The. By Robert W. Chambers. 
 
 Maid of the Forest, The. By Randall Parrish. 
 
 Maid of the Whispering Hills, The. By Vingie E. Roe. 
 
 Making of Bobby Burnit, The. By Randolph Chester. 
 
 Making Money. By Owen Johnson. 
 
 Mam' Linda. By Will N. Harben. 
 
 Man Outside, The. By Wyndham Martyn. 
 
 Man Trail, The. By Henry Oyen. 
 
 Marriage. By H. G. Wells. 
 
 Marriage of Theodora, The. By Mollie Elliott Seawell. 
 
 Mary Moreland. By Marie Van Vorst. 
 
 Master Mummer, The. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 Max. By Katherine Cecil Thurston. 
 
 Maxwell Mystery, The. -By Caroline Wells. 
 
 Mediator, The. By Roy Norton. 
 
 Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. By A. Conan Doyle. 
 
 Mischief Maker, The. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 Miss Gibbie Gault. By Kate Langley Bosher. 
 
 Miss Philura's Wedding Gown. By Florence Morse Kingsley. 
 
 Molly McDonald. By Randall Parrish. 
 
 Money Master, The. By Gilbert Parker. 
 
 Money Moon. The. By Jeffery Farnol. 
 
 Motor Maid, The. By C. N and A. M. Williamson. 
 
 Moth, The. By William Dana Orcutt. 
 
 Mountain Girl, The. By Payne Erskine. 
 
 Mr. Binigle. By George Barr McCutcheon. 
 
 Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 Mr. Pratt. By Joseph C. Lincoln. 
 
 Mr. Pratfs Patients. By Joseph C. Lincoln. 
 
 Mrs. Balfame. By Gertrude Atherton. 
 
 Mrs. Red Pepper. By Grace S. Richmond. 
 
 My Demon Motor Boat. By George Fitch. 
 
 My Friend the Chauffeur. By C. N. and A. M. Williamson, 
 
 My Lady Caprice. By Jeffery Farnol. 
 
 My Lady of Doubt. By Randall Parrish. 
 
 My Lady of the North, By Randall Parrish. 
 
 My Lady of the South. By Randall Parrish. 
 
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 Net, The. By Rex Beach,
 
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 New Clarion. By Will N. Harben. 
 Night Riders, The. By Ridgwell Cullum. 
 Night Watches. By W. W. Jacobs. 
 Nobody. By Louis Joseph Vance. 
 
 Once Upon a Time. By Richard Harding Davis. 
 One Braver Thing. By Richard Dehan. 
 One Way Trail, The. By Ridgwell Cullum. 
 Otherwise Phyllis. By Meredith Nicholson. 
 
 Pardners. By Rex Beach. 
 
 Parrott & Co. By Harold MacGrath. 
 
 Partners of the Tide. By Joseph C. Lincoln. 
 
 Passionate Friends, The. By H. G. Wells. 
 
 Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail, The. By Ralph Connor. 
 
 Paul Anthony, Christian. By Hiram W.- Hayes. 
 
 Perch of the Devil. By Gertrude Atherton. 
 
 Peter Ruff. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 People's Man, A. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 Phillip Steele. By James Oliver Curwood. 
 
 Pidgin Island. By Harold MacGrath. 
 
 Place of Honeymoon, The. By Harold MacGrath. 
 
 Plunderer, The. By Roy Norton. 
 
 Pole Baker. By Will N. Harben. 
 
 Pool of Flame, The. By Louis Joseph Vance. 
 
 Port of Adventure, The. By C. N. and A. M. Williamson. 
 
 Postmaster, The. By Joseph C. Lincoln. 
 
 Power and the Glory, The. By Grace McGowan Cooke. 
 
 Prairie Wife, The. By Arthur Stringer. 
 
 Price of Love, The. By Arnold Bennett. 
 
 Price of the Prairie, The. By Margaret Hill McCarter. 
 
 Prince of Sinners. By A. E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 Princes Passes, The. By C. N. and A. M. Williamson. 
 
 Princess Virginia, The. By C. N. and A. N. Williamson. 
 
 Promise, The. By J. B. Hendryx. 
 
 Purple Parasol, The. By Geo. B. McCutcheon. 
 
 Ranch at the Wolverine, The. By B. M. Bower. 
 Ranching for Sylvia. By Harold Bindloss. 
 Real Man, The. By Francis Lynde. 
 Reason Why, The. By Elinor Glyn.
 
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 Twenty-fourth of June, The. By Grace S. Richmond. 
 Twins of Suffering Creek, The. By Ridgwell Cullum. 
 Two-Gun Man, The. By Charles A. Seltzer. 
 
 Uncle William. By Jeannette Lee. 
 
 Under the Country Sky. By Grace S. Richmond. 
 
 Unknown Mr. Kent, The. By Roy Norton. 
 
 "Unto Caesar." By Baronett Orczy. 
 
 Up From Slavery. By Booker T. Washington. 
 
 Valiants of Virginia, The. By Hallie Erminie Rives. 
 
 Valley of Fear, The, By Sir A. Conan Doyle. 
 
 Vane of the Timberlands. By Harold Bindloss. 
 
 Vanished Messenger, The. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 Vashti. By Augusta Evans Wilson. 
 
 Village of Vagabonds, A. By F. Berkley Smith. 
 
 Visioning, The. By Susan Glaspell. 
 
 Wall of Men, A. By Margaret H. McCarter. 
 
 Wallingford in His Prime. By George Randolph Chester 
 
 Wanted A Chaperon. By Paul Leicester Ford. 
 
 Wanted A Matchmaker. By Paul Leicester Ford. 
 
 Watchers of the Plains, The. By Ridgwell Cullum. 
 
 Way Home, The. By Basil King. 
 
 Way of an Eagle, The. By E. M. Dell. 
 
 Way of a Man, The. By Emerson Hough. 
 
 Way of the Strong, The. By Ridgwell Cullum. 
 
 Way of These Women, The. By E. Phillips Oppenheim. 
 
 Weavers, The. By Gilbert Parker. 
 
 West Wind, The. By Cyrus T. Brady. 
 
 When Wilderness Was King. By Randolph Parrish. 
 
 Where the Trail Divides. By Will Lillibridge. 
 
 Where There's a Will. By Mary R. Rinehart. 
 
 White Sister, The. By Marion Crawford. 
 
 White Waterfall, The. By James Francis Dwyer. 
 
 Who Goes There? By Robert W. Chambers. 
 
 Window at the White Cat, The. By Mary Roberts Rinehart. 
 
 Winning of Barbara Worth, The. By Harold Bell Wright. 
 
 Winning the Wilderness. By Margaret Hill McCarter. 
 
 With Juliet in England. By Grace S. Richmond. 
 
 Witness for the Defense, The. By A. E. W. Mason.
 
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 Woman in Question, The. By John Reed S^ott. 
 Woman Haters, The. By Joseph C. Lincoln. 
 Woman Thou Gavest Me, The. By Hall Caine. 
 Woodcarver of 'Lympus, The. By Mary E. Waller. 
 Woodfire in No. 3, The. By F. Hopkinson Smith. 
 Wooing of Rosamond Fayre, The. By Berta Ruck 
 
 You Nevet Know Your Luck. By Gilbert Parker. 
 Younger Set, The. By Robert W. Chambers.
 
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