Produced by Earle Beach, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING By Rupert Hughes BOOKS BY RUPERT HUGHES We Can't Have Everything In A Little Town The Thirteenth Commandment Clipped Wings What Will People Say? The Last Rose Of Summer Empty Pockets [Illustration: WAR, THE SUNDERER, HAD REACHED THEM WITH HIS GREAT DIVORCE] WE CAN'T HAVE EVERYTHING A NOVEL BY RUPERT HUGHES AUTHOR OF _What Will People Say?_ ILLUSTRATED BY JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG CONTENTS THE FIRST BOOK MISS KEDZIE THROPP COMES TO TOWN THE SECOND BOOK MRS. TOMMIE GILFOYLE HAS HER PICTURE TAKEN THE THIRD BOOK MRS. JIM DYCKMAN IS NOT SATISFIED THE FOURTH BOOK THE MARCHIONESS HAS QUALMS THE FIRST BOOK MISS KEDZIE THROPP COMES TO TOWN CHAPTER I Kedzie Thropp had never seen Fifth Avenue or a yacht or a butler or a glass of champagne or an ocean or a person of social prominence. She wanted to see them. For each five minutes of the day and night, one girl comes to New York to make her life; or so the compilers of statistics claim. This was Kedzie Thropp's five minutes. She did not know it, and the two highly important, because extremely wealthy, beings in the same Pullman car never suspected her--never imagined that the tangle they were already in would be further knotted, then snipped, then snarled up again, by this little mediocrity. 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.