New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Adna's jaw fell. Perhaps he had ventured on dreams of being set free
in New York all by himself. She soon woke him. She said she wouldn't
no more allow him loose in that wicked place than she would--well,
she didn't know what! He could get a pass for self and wife as easy as
shootin'. Adna yielded to the inevitable with a sorry grace and told her
to come along if she'd a mind to.
And then came a still, small voice from daughter Kedzie. She spoke with
a menacing sweetness: “Goody, goody! Besides seeing New York, I won't
have to go to school for--How long we goin' to be gone, poppa?”
Both parents stared at her aghast and told her to hush her mouth. It was
a very pretty mouth even in anger, and Kedzie declined to hush it. She
said:
“Well, if you two think you're goin' to leave me home, you got another
think comin'--that's all I got to say.”
She betrayed an appalling stubbornness, a fiendish determination to
subdue her parents or talk them to death.
“I never get to go any place,” she wailed. “I never been anywhere or
seen anything or had anything; I might as well be a bump on a log. And
now you're goin' to New York. I'd sooner go there than to heaven. It's
my first chance to see a city, and I just tell you right here and
now, I'm not goin' to lose it! You take me or you'll be mighty sorry.
I'll--I'll--”
“You'll what?” her father sneered. What, after all, could a young girl
do?
“I'll run off, that's what I'll do! And disgrace you! I'll run away and
you'll never see me again. If you're mean enough to not take me, I'm
mean enough to do something desprut. You'll see!”
Her father realized that there were several things a young girl could
do to punish her parents. Kedzie frightened hers with her fanatic zeal.
They gave in at last from sheer terror. Immediately she became almost
intolerably rapturous. She shrieked and jumped; and she kissed and
hugged every member of the household, including the dogs and the cats.
She must go down-town and torment her girl friends with her superiority
and she could hardly live through the hours that intervened before the
train started.
The Thropps rode all day in the day-coach to Chicago, and Kedzie loved
every cinder that flew into her gorgeous eyes. Now and then she slept
curled up kittenwise on a seat, and the motion of the train lulled her
as with angelic pinions. She dreamed impossible glories in unheard-of
cities.
But her mother bulked large and had been too long accustomed to her own
rocking-chair to rest in a day-coach. She reached Chicago in a state of
collapse. She told Adna that she would have to travel the rest of the
way in a sleeper or in a baggage-car, for she just naturally had to lay
down. So Adna paid for two berths. It weakened him like a hemorrhage.
Kedzie's first sorrow was in leaving Chicago. They changed trains there,
bouncing across the town in a bus. That transit colored Kedzie's soul
like dragging a ribbon through a vat of dye. Henceforth she was of a
city hue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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