Columbus was not angry at America because it had never
seen an explorer before.
It delighted Ferriday to think that he had discovered Kedzie. He
would say later that he invented her. And she wanted tremendously
to be discovered or invented or anything else, by anybody who could
find a gold-mine in her somewhere and pay her a royalty on her own
mineral wealth.
When her lips met the shell-edge of the champagne-glass and the
essence of all mischief flung its spray against the tip of her
cleverly whittled nose she winced at first. But she went boldly
back, and soon the sprites that rained upward in her glass were
sending tiny balloons of hope through her brain. They soared past
her small skull and her braided hair and the crown of her hat and
on up through the ceiling, and none of them broke--as yet.
Her soul was pleasantly a-simmer now and she could not tell whether
the wine made her exultant or she the wine. But she was sure that
she had at last discovered her life.
And with it all she was dreadfully canny. She was only a little
village girl unused to city ways, and the handsome city stranger
was plying her with wine; but she was none of your stencil figures
that blot romance.
Kedzie was thinking over the cold, hard precepts that women acquire
somehow. She was resolving that since she was to be as great as he
said she should be, she must not cheapen herself now.
Many of these little village girls have come to town since time
was and brought with them the level heads of icily wise women who
make love a business and not a folly.
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