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 ingratiation. 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 thenceforward 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. Sometimes 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 d.u.c.h.ess had lain. She had an odd dream that she also became a d.u.c.h.ess.

Her dreams had a way of coming true.

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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 Skovronsky. 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 pa.s.sed 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 decapitated and his head preserved in a jar of alcohol as a mantel 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 Kedzia 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 succeed 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 happened 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, equalizing, freedom-spreading revolutions are gaining more opposition 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 honorable, 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 pa.s.sed 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 unconsciously a.s.sisted 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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 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 reception to guests for the proper exploitation of the new Mrs. Dyckman. There was the embarra.s.sment of meeting people 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. Dyckman 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.

Dyckman'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 annoyance to Kedzie's pride and her peace. They wanted to get out to Nimrim and make a triumph through the village. 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 embarra.s.sing. 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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 a.s.sure 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 sn.o.b, 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 whom she knew all too well turned up in New York with schemes for extracting money from the Dyckman h.o.a.rd. Kedzie grew nearly wroth enough to stand at the window and empty things on them as they dared to climb the n.o.ble steps with their ign.o.ble 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 n.o.body 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 uncomfortable 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 ridiculous. But Kedzie wished it. This was one of the wishes she did not get.