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But she needed a confidante and she told her mother the situation. Mrs. Thropp, like Kedzie, had an ambition that expanded as fast as opportunity allowed. She was dazzled by the thought of being elevated to the peerage. She supposed it made her a relative of royalty. She who had once dreamed of being neighborly with the great Mrs.
And now they've got a cheap and nasty old republic over there! And they're talking of having republics everywhere. What could be more stupid? As if everybody was born free and equal. Mixing all the aristocrats right up with the common herd!" Mrs. Thropp agreed that it was simply terrible. "Do you know what?" Kedzie gasped. "What?" her mother echoed. "I've just had a hunch.
Altruism is perhaps the most expensive of the virtues. No less epochal were those months for the Dyckmans, bride and groom. Their problems began to bourgeon immediately after they left New Jersey and went to Kedzie's old apartment for further debate as to their future lodgings. Mr. and Mrs. Thropp were amazed by their sudden return. Adna was a trifle sheepish.
"That's so," said Kedzie. "He's always begging me to name the day. But I don't know what he'd think if I was to tell him I'd been lying to him all this time. He thinks I'm an innocent little girl. I just haven't got the face to tell him I'm an old married woman with a mislaid husband." "You mean to give him up, then?" Mrs. Thropp sighed.
But a taxicab trying to pass the south-bound car was shooting south along the north-bound tracks. Connery saw it barely in time to jump back. He yanked Gilfoyle's arm, but Gilfoyle had plunged forward. He might have escaped if Connery had let him go. But the cab struck him, hurled him in air against an iron pillar, caught him on the rebound and ran him down. Kedzie Thropp was a widow.
She pushed past Dyckman, and silencing the stupefied Adna with a glare, swept him out through the dining-room into the kitchen. It amazed Mrs. Thropp to find a kitchen so many flights up-stairs. The ingenuity of the devices, the step-saving cupboard, the dry ice-box with its coils of cold-air pipes, the gas-stove, the electric appliances, were like wonderful new toys to her.
Dyckman was now imagining herself exchanging crocheting formulas with Queen Mary. She was saying she had always heard the Queen well spoke of. And Adna Thropp spoke very highly of "George." They agreed that it was their sacred duty to place the name of Thropp as high as it could go, cost what it would.
Adna saw the taxicab pass over the valise she had carried. It left no trace of Kedzie. Her annihilation was uncanny. He gaped. "Where's Kedzie?" Mrs. Thropp screamed. A policeman checked the traffic with uplifted hand. Adna ran to him. Mrs. Thropp told him what had happened. "I saw the goil drop the bag and beat it for the walk," said the officer. "Which way'd she go?"
Thropp he was as majestic as the Colossus of Rhodes would have been. Like the Colossus of Rhodes, he was a gilded giant. Kedzie was paralyzed. Mrs. Thropp was inspired. Unity of purpose guided her true. She had told her daughter to ignore Gilfoyle as an unimportant detail. She certainly did not intend to substitute a couple of crude parents as a new handicap. No one knew Mrs.
The pity of it is that these great purifying, equalizing, freedom-spreading revolutions are gaining more opposition than help from the religious and the conservative. In any case Kedzie Thropp, who slept under a park bench when first she came to town, found the city honorable, merciful, generous, as most girls do who have graces to sell and sense enough to set a high price on them.
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