Charity laughed and went on away. She was deeply comforted by
a promise which she knew he would not keep.
Dyckman himself, as soon as his broken bones ceased to shake his soul,
groaned with loneliness and despaired of living without Charity--vowed
in his sick misery that nobody could ever come between them. He
could not, would not, live without her.
Still the gossip oozed along that he had not lived without her.
CHAPTER XVI
Kedzie had come to town with no social ambitions whatsoever beyond
a childish desire to be enormously rich and marry a beautiful prince.
Her ideal of heaven at first was an eternal movie show interrupted
at will by several meals a day, incessant soda-water and ice-cream
and a fellow or two to spoon with, and some up-to-date duds--most
of all, several pairs of those white-topped shoes all the girls
in town were wearing.
The time would shortly come when Kedzie would abhor the word
_swell_ and despise the people who used it, violently forgetting
that she had herself used it. She would soon be overheard saying
to a mixed girl of her mixed acquaintance: "Take it from me, chick,
when you find a dame calls herself a lady, she ain't. Nobody who
is it says it, and if you want to be right, lay off such words as
_swell_ and _classy_."
Later, she would be finding that it took something still more than
avoiding the word _lady_ to deserve it. She would writhe to
believe that she could never quite make herself exact with the term.
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