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.
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