New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
But would she have been? Peter Cheever was as handsome as a man dares
to be, awake or asleep; he had vast quantities of money, and he was
generous with it. But Zada L'Etoile was not happy. She dwelt in an
apartment that would have overwhelmed Kedzie by the depth of its velvets
and the height of its colors.
Yet Zada was crying this very morning--crying like mad because while she
had Cheever she had no marriage license. She tore her hair and bit it,
and peeled diamonds off her fingers and threw them at the mirror like
pebbles, and sopped up her tears with point-lace handkerchiefs and
hurled those to the floor--then hurled herself after them. She was a
tremendous weeper, Zada.
And in Newport there was a woman who had a marriage license but no
husband. She slept in a room too beautiful for Kedzie to have liked. She
did not know enough to like it. She would have found it cold. Charity
Cheever found it cold, but she slept at last, though the salt wind
blowing in from the sea tormented the light curtains and plucked at the
curls about Charity's face. There was salt in the air, and her eyelashes
were still wet with tears. She was crying in her sleep, for loneliness.
Kedzie thought her room was small, but it was nearly as big as the
bedroom where Jim Dyckman had slept. He had a bigger room, but he had
given it to his father and mother, who had come to Newport with him.
They were a stodgy old couple enough now, and snoring idyllically
in duet after a life of storms and tears and discontents in spite of
wealth.
Jim's room was big for a yacht, but the yacht was narrow, built for
speed. Thirty-six miles an hour its turbines could shoot it through
the sea. It had to be narrow. We can't have everything--especially on
yachts.
Jim was barefoot, standing in his pajamas at a port-hole and trying to
see the Noxon home, imagining Charity there. He was denied her presence
and was as miserable as any waif in a poor farm attic. Money seemed to
make no visible difference in his despair.
If he thought of Kedzie at all, he dismissed her as a trifling memory.
He wanted Charity, who did not want him. Charity had Cheever, who did
not want her. Kedzie had Gilfoyle, and did not want him. It looked as
if the old jingle ought to be changed from “Finders keepers, losers
weepers” to “Losers keepers, finders weepers.”
The day after Jim Dyckman pulled Kedzie out of the water he made a
desperate effort to convince himself that he could be happy without the
forbidden Charity Coe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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