New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Poor Kedzie had her own sorrows to mar her triumph. She was being driven
to believe that the world was as badly managed as the Hyperfilm Studio.
Providence seemed to provide tribulations for her like a scenario editor
pursuing a movie heroine. The second reel had begun well, the rich but
honest lover putting the poor but dishonest husband to flight. And now
Honeymoon Number Two! She had dreamed of a gorgeous church ceremony with
two pipe-organs, and an enlarged cast of clergymen, and wedding guests
composed of real millionaires instead of movie “extras.” But lo and
behold, her adorer whisks her off to a little town in New Jersey and
the great treaty is sealed in the shoddy parlor of a village parsonage!
Gilfoyle's Municipal Building was a cathedral compared to this.
Then with never a white ribbon fluttering, not an old shoe or a grain
of rice hurtling, the limousine of love rolled away to a neglected
roadhouse. It was attractive enough as a roadhouse, but it was wretched
as an imitation paradise.
In the face of this outrage everything else was a detail, a minor
humiliation. There was no parrot on an area fire-escape to mock her
next morning, but there was a still earlier rooster to banish sleep
and parody her triumph. She slipped out of bed and went barefoot to the
window-seat and gazed out into a garden.
She made a picture there that Ferriday would have loved in a “close-up.”
Her hair was tumbling down upon and around her shoulders, and her silken
nightgown shimmered blissfully about her, sketching her contours in
iridescent lines. She gazed, through an Elizabethan of small panes, into
a garden where sunrise bloomed rosily in petals of light. She was
the prettiest thing in the pretty picture; yet she was pouting at
Fate--Fate, the old scenario writer who never could seem to bring off a
happy ending.
Jim Dyckman, waking, saw her there and rubbed his eyes. Then he
remembered. He pondered her and saw a tear or two slip out of her eyes,
run along her cheek and pitch off into the tiny ravine of her bosom.
He felt that he was a contemptible fiend who had committed a lynchable
crime upon a tender and helpless victim. He closed his eyes in remorse,
pretending to sleep, tormented like the repentant purchaser of a “white
slave”--or rather a pink slave.
They breakfasted early and prettily. Kedzie was radiant now. She usually
was when she was dealing in futures. They took up the question of their
future residence. Jim proposed all the honeymoon haunts. Europe was out
of the question, so he suggested Bermuda, Jamaica, California, Atlantic
City, North Carolina, the Adirondacks. But Kedzie wanted to get back to
New York.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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