She walked blindly down the Avenue, snubbing her most precious acquaintances. She was being put out of her room! She was being shoved back to the second place. They'd ask her to eat at the second table next, or have her meals in her room as the secretaries did.
Not much! Having slept in a duchess's bed, Kedzie would not backslide. She would get a bed of her own. She remembered a nice young man she had met, whose people were in real estate. She telephoned to him from the Biltmore.
“Is that you, Polly? This is Kedzie Dyckman. Say, Polly, do you know of a decent house that is for sale or rent right away quick? Oh, I don't care how much it costs, so it's a cracker jack of a house. I suppose I've got to take it furnished, being in such a hurry; or could you get a gang of decorators in and do a rush job? All right, look up your list right away and telephone me here at the hairdresser's.”
From under her cascade of hair she talked to him later and arranged to be taken from place to place. She now dismissed chateaux with contempt as too small, too old-fashioned, lacking in servants' rooms, what not. She had quite forgotten the poor little Mrs. Gilfoyle she had been, and her footsore tramp from cheap flat to cheap flat, ending in the place that cost three hundred dollars a year furnished.
She finally decided not to attempt housekeeping yet awhile, and selected a double-decked apartment of twenty-four rooms and forty-eight baths. And she talked the agent down to a rental of ten thousand dollars a year unfurnished. She would show Jim that she could economize.
When Kedzie told Mrs. Dyckman that she had decided to move, Mrs. Dyckman was very much concerned lest Kedzie feel put out. But she smiled to herself: she knew her Kedzie.
Jim was not at all pleased with the arrangement, but he yielded. In the American family the wife is the quartermaster, selects the camp and equips it. Jim spent more of his time at his clubs than at his duplex home. So did Kedzie. She had been railroaded into the Colony and one or two other clubs before they knew her so well.
When the Duchess Cicely came back Kedzie was invited to the family dinner, of course. Cicely was Kedzie's first duchess, and though Kedzie had met any number of titled people by now, she approached this one with strange apprehensions. She was horribly disappointed. Cicely turned out to be a poor shred of a woman in black, worn out, meager, forlorn, broken in heart and soul with what she had been through.
She was plainly not much impressed with Kedzie, and she said to her mother later: “Poor Jim, he always plays in the rottenest luck, doesn't he? Still, he's got a pretty doll, and what does anything matter nowadays?”
She tried to be polite about the family banquet. But the food choked her. She had seen so many gaunt hands pleading upward for a crust of bread. She had seen so many shriveled lips guzzling over a bowl of soup. She had seen so many once beautiful soldiers who had nothing to eat anything with.