We Cant Have Everything | Page 6

dried them on her apron to fasten his sash
about him, she felt all the glory of a medieval 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:
"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 determination 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, including 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 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 weakened 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