She fiercely wanted to have been born of an aristocratic family. Of all the vain wishes, the retroactive pluperfect are the vainest, and an antenatal wish is sublimely ridiculous. But Kedzie wished it. This was one of the wishes she did not get. CHAPTER X Mrs. Kedzie Dyckman received many jars of ointment, but her pretty eyes found a fly in every one. She that should have gone about boasting, “I came from a village and slept under a park bench, and now look at me!” was slinking about, wishing that she could rather say: “Oh, see my wonderful ancestors! Without them you could not see me at all.” Kedzie had her picture printed at last in the “Social World” departments of the newspapers. She had full-page portraits of herself by the mystic Dr. Arnold Genthe and by other camera-masters printed in _Town and Country_ and _The Spur, Vanity Fair, Vogue_ and _Harper's Bazar_. But some cursed spite half the time led to the statement under her picture that she had been in the movies. No adjectives of praise could sweeten that. Small wonder she pouted! And she found the competition terrific. She had thought that when she got into the upper world she would be on a sparsely populated plateau. But she said to Jim: “Good Lord! this is a merry-go-round! It's so crowded everybody is falling off.” The most “exclusive” restaurants were packed like bargain-counters. She went to highly advertised balls where there were so many people that the crowd simply oozed and the effort to dance or to eat was a struggle for life. New York's four hundred families had swollen, it seemed, to four hundred thousand, and the journals of society published countless pictures of the aristocratic sets of everywhere else. There were aristocrats of the Long Island sets--a dozen sets for one small island--the Berkshire set, the Back Bay set, the Rhode Island reds, the Plymouth Rock fowl, the old Connecticut connections, the Bar Harbor oligarchy, the Tuxedonians, the Morristown and Germantown noblesse, the pride of Philadelphia, the Baltimorioles, the diplomatic cliques of Washington, the Virginia patricians, the Piedmont Hunt set, the North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and all the other State sets, the Cleveland coteries, the Chicagocracy, the St. Louis and New Orleans and San Francisco optimates. Exclusiveness was a joke. And yet Kedzie felt lonely and afraid. She had too many rivals. There were young girls in myriads, beauties by the drove, sirens in herds, millionaires in packs. The country was so prosperous with the privilege of selling Europe the weapons of suicide that the vast destructiveness of the German submarines was a bagatelle. There was a curious mixture of stupendous Samaritanism and tremendous indifference. Millions were poured into charities and millions were squandered on dissipation.