We Cant Have Everything | Page 2

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. 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 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
substituting 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 because 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 footprints 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
commonplace. 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 alongside
involves a risk