We Cant Have Everything

We Can't Have Everything

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Title: We Can't Have Everything
Author: Rupert Hughes
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WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING

BOOKS BY RUPERT HUGHES
We Can't Have Everything
In A Little Town
The Thirteenth Commandment
Clipped Wings
What Will People Say?
The Last Rose Of Summer
Empty Pockets

[Illustration: WAR, THE SUNDERER, HAD REACHED THEM
WITH HIS GREAT DIVORCE]

WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING
A NOVEL BY RUPERT HUGHES
AUTHOR OF What Will People Say?
ILLUSTRATED BY JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG

CONTENTS
THE FIRST BOOK MISS KEDZIE THROPP COMES TO TOWN
THE SECOND BOOK MRS. TOMMIE GILFOYLE HAS HER
PICTURE TAKEN
THE THIRD BOOK MRS. JIM DYCKMAN IS NOT SATISFIED
THE FOURTH BOOK THE MARCHIONESS HAS QUALMS

THE FIRST BOOK
MISS KEDZIE THROPP COMES TO TOWN

CHAPTER I
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.
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 presents 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.
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 consisted
of the fear or the favor of getting pictures in the papers.

It was Kedzie's unusual distinction to win into the headlines 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 impudent enough to
weary of her fame and prate of the comforts of obscurity!