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WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING

By Rupert Hughes



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!

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