Throughout the panic Kedzie had stood about in a kind of stupor. When her father tapped her on the shoulder and repeated his “C'm'on!” she turned to him eyes all tears glistening like bubbles, and she whimpered:
“Oh, daddy, the view! The nice things!”
Adna snapped: “View? Our next view will be the poorhouse if we don't hustle our stumps. We got to get out of here and find the cheapest place they is in town to live or go back home on the next train.”
Kedzie began to cry, to cry as she had cried when she wept in her cradle because candy had been taken from her, or a box of carpet-tacks, or the scissors that she had somehow got hold of.
Adna dropped his valises with a thud. He began to upbraid her. He had endured too much. He had still his bill to pay. He told her that she was a good-for-nothin' nuisance and he wished he had left her home. He'd never take her anywheres again, you bet. Kedzie lost her reason entirely. She was shattered with spasms of grief aggravated by her mother's ferocity and her father's. She could not give up this splendor. She would not go to a cheap place to live. She would never go back home. She would rather die.
Her mother boxed her ears and shook her and scolded with all her vim. But Kedzie only shook out more sobs till they wondered what the people next door would think. Adna was wan with wrath. Kedzie was afraid of her father's look. She had a kind of lockjaw of grief such as children suffer and suffer for.
All she would answer to her father's threats was: “I won't! I won't! I tell you I won't!”
Her cheeks were blubbered, her nose red, her mouth swollen, her hair wet and stringy. She gulped and swallowed and beat her hands together and stamped her feet.
Adna glared at her in hatred equal to her own for him. He said to his wife: “Ma, we got to go back to first principles with that girl. You got to give her a good beatin'.”
Mrs. Thropp had the will but not the power. She was palsied with rage. “I can't,” she faltered.