Jim, like all millionaires, had dozens of poor relations and felt neither the right nor the obligation to enrich them all. There is no gesture that grows tiresome quicker than the gesture of shoving the hand into the cash-pocket, bringing it up full and emptying it. There is no more painful disease than money-spender's cramp. Kedzie learned, too, that to assure her father and mother even so poor an income as five thousand dollars a year would require the setting aside of a hundred thousand dollars at least in gilt-edged securities. She began to have places where she could put a hundred thousand dollars herself. On her neck was one place, for she saw a woman with a dog-collar of that price, and it made Kedzie feel absolutely nude in contrast. She met old Mrs. Noxon with her infamously costly stomacher on, and Kedzie cried that night because she could not have one for her own midriff. Jim growled, “When you get a stomach as big as Mrs. Noxon's you can put a lamp-post on it.” She said he was indecent, and a miser besides. Meanwhile her own brothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts were calling her a miser, a snob, a brute. The whole family wanted to move to New York and make a house-party. They had every right to, too, for did not the Declaration of Independence make all Americans equal? Relatives whom Kedzie had never heard of and relatives whom she knew all too well turned up in New York with schemes for extracting money from the Dyckman hoard. Kedzie grew nearly wroth enough to stand at the window and empty things on them as they dared to climb the noble steps with their ignoble impertinences. When she was not repelling repulsive relatives Kedzie was trying to dodge old acquaintances. It seemed that everybody she had ever met had learned of her rise in the world. Her old landladies wrote whining letters. Moving-picture people out of a job asked her for temporary loans. But the worst trial came one day when she was present at a committee meeting for a war-relief benefit and that fiend of a Pet Bettany proposed that one of the numbers should be Miss Silsby's troupe of Greek dancers. She asked if anybody had any objections, and when nobody spoke she turned to Kedzie and dared to ask her if she had ever seen the dancers. “Not recently,” Kedzie mumbled, while her very legs blushed under their stockings, remembering how bare they had been in the old days when she was one of the Silsby slaves. All the other women simmered pleasantly in the uncomfortable situation till Mrs. Charity Cheever, who chanced to be there, came to the rescue amazingly by turning the tables on the Bettany creature: “Anybody who ever saw you in a bathing-suit, Pet, would know that there were two good reasons why you were never one of the Silsbies.” Charity could be cruel to be kind. Everybody roared at Pet, whose crooked shanks had kept her modest from the knees down, at least. Kedzie wanted to kiss Charity, but she suffered too much from the reminder of her past.