We Can't Have Everything

or a butler or a glass of champagne or an ocean or

one girl comes to New York to make her lif

zie Thropp's

e same Pullman car never suspected her-never imagined that the tangle they were already in

h the crowd of fellow-gropers, guessing at our presents and g

e out Kedzie Thropp, a few seats removed. Charity Coe-most of Mrs. Cheever's friends still called her by her maiden name-sat

looked at either Jim or Charity Coe she gave them no heed, for she had n

ther facts that argued Kedzie Thropp unknown and unknowing. As she was forever saying, sh

ere, known everybody who was anybody. As for Charity Coe, she had given

n the lives of those two bigwigs topsy-turvy, and to get her picture into more papers than both of them put togeth

e had somebody's else picture published for her that time; but later she had her very own published by the thousand until the little co

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

anding. She was what Napoleon would have been if the Little Corporal

le that could be were plunged into mis

learned what it means to lie in shabby domicile and to salt dirty bread with tears; to be afraid to

int in her smart Parisian robes of martyrdom, found the clergy slamming their doors in her face and b

f sugar and spice and everything nice into a little candy allegory of selfishness with one pi

poverty to its highest tower of wealth. She would sleep one night alone under a public bench in a park, and another n

auses and effects that we call fa

apparently, some of them to fail undeniably, some of them to become fine, clean wives; some of them to flare, t

es and their fates had little to do with one another. Few of the girls, if any, got what they ca

arity Coe Cheever: the problem that Kedzie was going to seem to solve-as one solves any

because she had never had anything. An Elizabethan poet would have said of her upper lip that a bee

aux 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. Sh