New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
“If you fall in love with that big thug, or if you play him for a
limousine like a chorus-girl on the make, your career is gone. But if
you use him for your future--well, I have a little scheme that might
bounce you up to the sky in a hurry. You could have your millionaire and
your fame as well.”
“What's the little scheme, Ferri darling?”
“I'll tell you later. We've got to go to the projection-room and see
your new film run off. It's assembled, cut, subtitled, ready for the
market. Come along.”
Kedzie went along and sat in the dark room watching the reel go by. Her
other selves came forth in troops to reveal themselves: Kedzie the poor
little shy girl, for she was that at times; Kedzie the petulant, the
revengeful, the forgiving; Kedzie on her knees in prayer--she prayed at
times, as everybody does, the most villainous no less ardently than
the most blameless; Kedzie dancing; Kedzie flirting, in love, tempted,
tipsy; Kedzie seduced, deserted, forgiven, converted, happily married;
Kedzie a mother with a little hired baby at her little breast. There was
even a picture of her in a vision as a sweet old lady with snowy hair
about her face, and she was surrounded by grown men who were her sons,
and young mothers who were her daughters. The unending magic of the
moving pictures had enabled her to see herself as others saw her, and as
she saw herself, and as nobody should ever see her.
Kedzie doted on the picture of herself as a dear old lady leaning on her
old husband among their children. She shed tears over that delightful,
most unusual, privilege of witnessing herself peacefully, blessedly
ancient.
Whether she ever reached old age and had a husband living then and
children grown is beyond the knowledge of this chronicle or its
prophecy, for this book goes only so far as 1917. But just for a
venture, assuming Kedzie to be about twenty in 1916, that would make
Kedzie born four years back in the last century. Now, adding sixty
to 1896 brings one to 1956; and what the world will be like then--and
who'll be in it or what they may be doing, how dressing, if at all, what
riding in, fighting about, agreeing upon--it were folly to guess at.
It is safe to say only that people will then be very much at heart what
they are to-day and were in the days when the Assyrian women and men
felt as we do about most things. Kedzie will be scolding her children or
her grandchildren and telling them that in her day little girls did
not speak disrespectfully to their parents or run away from them or do
immodest, forward things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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