She was caught from Mrs. Dyckman's shadow by Jim's father, who said, “Don't I get a kiss?” and took one. Kedzie returned this kiss and found the old gentleman very handsome, not in the least like her father. Brides almost always get along beautifully with fathers-in-law. And so do sons-in-law. Women will learn how to get along together better as soon as it ceases to be so important to them how they get along together.
After the thrill of the first collision the four stood in silenced embarrassment till Jim, eager to escape, said:
“What room do we get?”
“Cicely's, if you like,” his mother answered.
Jim was pleased. Cicely was the duchess of the family, and she and her duke had occupied that room before they went to England. Cicely was a war nurse now, bedabbled in gore, and her husband was a mud-daubed major in the trenches along the Somme. Jim saw that his mother was making no stint of her hospitality, and he was grateful.
He dragged Kedzie away. She was trying to take in the splendor of the house without seeming to, and she went up the stairway with her eyes rolling frantically.
In the Academy at Venice is that famous picture of Titian's representing the little Virgin climbing up the steps of the Temple, a pathetic, frightened figure bearing no trace of the supreme radiance that was to be hers. There was something of the same religious awe in Kedzie's heart as she mounted the steps of the house that was a temple in her religion. She was going up to her heaven already. It was perfection because it was the next thing.
When Kedzie reaches the scriptural heaven, if she does (and it will be hard for Anybody to deny her anything that she sets her heart on), she will be happy till she gets there and finds that she is only in the first of the seven heavens. But what will the poor girl do when she goes on up and up and up and learns at last that there is no eighth? She will weep like another Alexander the Great, because there are no more heavens to hope for.
Jim led her into the best room there was up-stairs, and told her that a duke had slept there. At first she was thrilled through. Later it would occur to her, not tragically, yet a bit quellingly, that, after all, she had not married a duke herself, but only a commoner. She had as much right to a title as any other American girl. A foreign title is part of a Yankee woman's birthright. Hundreds of women had acquired theirs. Kedzie got only a plain “Mr.”
Still, she told herself that she must not be too critical, and she let her enthusiasm fly. She did not have to pose before Jim, and she ran about the suite as about a garden.