Charity dictated letters and committee
reports; she even dictated checks on her bank-account (which kept
filling up faster than she drew from it).
While Kedzie was trying to fit her limber frame among the little
hillocks and tussocks on the ground, Charity Coe was sitting at
her dressing-table, gazing into the mirror, but seeing beyond
her own image. Her lips moved, and her secretary wrote down what
she said aloud, and her maid was kneeling to take off Charity Coe's
ballroom slippers and slip on her bedroom ditto. The secretary was
so sleepy that she tried to keep her eyes open by agitating the lids
violently. The maid was trying to keep from falling forward across
her mistress's insteps and sleeping there.
But Charity was wide-awake--wild awake. Her soul was not in her
dictation, but in her features, which she studied in the mirror as
a rich man studies his bank-account. Charity was wondering if she
had wrecked her beauty beyond repair, or if she could fight it back.
Charity Coe, being very rich, had a hundred arms and hands and feet,
eyes and ears, while Kedzie had but two of each. Charity had some one
to make her clothes for her and cut up her bread and meat and fetch
the wood for her fire and put her shoes on and take them off. She
even had her face washed for her and her hair brushed, and somebody
trimmed her finger-nails and swept out her room, sewed on her buttons
and buttoned them up or unbuttoned them, as she pleased.
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