We Can't Have Everything: A Novel

The ninety days following Charity's encounter with Jim Dyckman and his bride at Sherry's had been busy times for her and epochal in their changes. From being one of the lonelies...

Dyckman was at least half mad, and half inspired. Charity had been his lifelong religion. He had thought of her with ardor, but also with a kind of awe. He had wanted to be her...

He darted hither and yon in his racer, childishly happy in its paces, childishly lonely for somebody to show off before. As he ran along the almost deserted sea road he passed t...

The girl walked with her face high, staring at the loftily columned recesses with the bay-trees set between the huge square pillars, and above all the feigned blue sky and the m...

When a young man suddenly goes mad in a cab, grapples the young woman who has intrusted herself to his protection, pins her arms to her sides, squeezes her torso till her bones...

A few months ago she was hardly ashamed of sleeping under a park bench. And already here she was sliding through the street in a limousine. It was a shabby limousine, but she wa...

Charity Coe forgot her great moving-picture enterprise for a time in the agony of her discovery that her husband was disloyal and that the Church did not accept that as a cancel...

Jim Dyckman had many notes from Kedzie, gushing, all adjectives and adverbs, capitalized and underscored. He left them about carelessly, or locked them up and left the key. If h...

When the daylight whitened the black air it found Dyckman sprawled along his window-lounge and woke him to the disgust of another morning. He had to reach up and draw a curtain...

The investigations of Messrs. Hodshon & Hindley in the life of Zada and Cheever prospered exceedingly. In blissless ignorance of it, Zada had been inspired to set a firm of sleu...

The next morning that parrot, still unmurdered, woke Kedzie early. She buried one ear deep in the pillow and covered the other with her hair and her hand. The parrot's voice rec...

It was only a pleasant clubby discussion of the problem of Jim's and Charity's innocence that delayed the jury's verdict. One or two of the twelve had a sneaking suspicion that...

Since Kedzie, by the time her marriage had reached its first morning-after, had already found her brand-new husband odious, there was small hope of her learning to like him or t...

From the glory of the festivals of alliance Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe were absent. Both were so eager to be abroad in the battle that they did not miss the flag-waving. But th...

Kedzie had come to town with no social ambitions whatsoever beyond a childish desire to be enormously rich and marry a beautiful prince. Her ideal of heaven at first was an eter...

When Jim reached his office the next morning McNiven recommended the view to him, gave him a chair, refused a cigar, lighted his pipe instead, opened a drawer in his desk, put h...

Kedzie lay extended on her _chaise longue_, looking as much unlike Madame Recamier as one could look who was so pretty a woman. A Sunday supplement dropped from her hand and joi...

Jim slunk out and slunk down the marble steps and down the winding walk and through the monstrous gate into the highway along the sea, enraged at himself and at Charity and at P...

People who call a child in from All Outdoors and make it their infant owe it to their victim to be rich, brilliant, and generous. Kedzie Thropp's parents were poor, stupid, and...

Kedzie slept alone in a meadow, and slept well. Youth spread the sward with mattresses of eiderdown, and curtained out the stars with silken tapestry. If she dreamed at all, it...

In the good old idyllic days it had been possible for romantic youth to get married as easily as to get dinner--and as hard to get unmarried as to get wings. Couples who spooned...

Gilfoyle was startled. Already the money-snake was in their Eden. And she asked him how much he “wanted” to pay! It was only a form of speech, but it grated on him.

There was no visible horizon to her wealth. Her name was one of the oldest, richest, noblest in the republic. She was a Dyckman now, double-riveted to the name with a civil lice...

Kedzie was smitten with two facts: the canopied bed was raised on a platform, and the marble bath-tub was sunk in the floor. She sat on the bed and bounced up and down on the sp...

While Charity was resolving to tear down her life Kedzie Thropp was building herself a new one on the foundations that Charity had laid for her with a card of introduction to Mi...

It is a fierce and searching test of a woman's mettle when first she is confronted with temptation to rebel against the control of her preacher. Men are used to it, and women mu...

The scene was like one of the overcrowded tapestries of the Middle Ages. At the top was the Noxon palace, majestic, serene, self-confident in the correctness of its architecture...

Kedzie--to say it again--did not know enough about New York or the world to recognize Mrs. Cheever and Mr. Dyckman when she glanced at them and glanced away. They did not at all...

Charity pondered her whole history with Jim Dyckman, from their childhood flirtations on. He had had other flings, and she had flung herself into Peter Cheever's arms. Peter Che...

Charity let the receiver fall. She had had enough. She sank into a chair and would have slipped to the floor, but her swimming eyes made out the blurred face of Hodshon, terrifi...

The childish old fates played one of their cheapest jokes on Jim Dyckman when, after they had dangled Charity Coe just out of his reach for a lifetime, they flung her at his hea...

Peter Cheever was going to dictagraph to his wife. The quaint charm of the dictagram is that the sender does not know he is sending it. It is a good deal like an astral somethin...

The Dyckman divorce farce might have been as politely performed as _l'affaire Cheever_--or even more so than that, since practice makes perfect. At least a temporary secrecy cou...

But now, as often happens in evil as in virtue, Kedzie had the willingness, but not the resolution. She threw her scruples into the waste-basket, accepted Pet's invitation, went...

To see into other people's hearts and homes and lives is one of the primeval instincts. In that curiosity all the sciences are rooted; and it is a scientific impulse that makes...

Jim Dyckman had always loved Charity Coe, but he let another man marry her--a handsomer, livelier, more entertaining man with whom Dyckman was afraid to compete. A mingling of l...

Kedzie was alone. She had sent her maid out to get some headache powders. She had had a good cry when she reached home. She had pondered her little brain into a kink, trying to...

When Prissy Atterbury started the gossip rolling that he had seen Jim Dyckman enter the Grand Central Terminal alone and wait for Charity Coe Cheever to come from the same train...

A freight submarine, the _Bremen_, had recently excited the wonderment of a world jaded with miracles by crossing from Helgoland to Norfolk with a cargo. But here was a war-ship...

So there lay Kedzie Thropp of Nimrim, Missouri, the Girl Who Had Never Had Anything. At her side was the Man Who Had Always Had Everything. Under this canopy a duke and duchess...

The town was monstrously lonely when Kedzie turned back to her widowhood. Jim's mother and father and sister were touched by her grief and begged her to make their home hers, bu...

They found their way to the Tudor Room, where a small number of men, mostly barricaded behind newspapers, ate briskly. A captain showed the Thropps to a table; three waiters pul...

During his long wait this evening Gilfoyle had grown almost uncontrollable with impatience to undertake the assault. His landlady had warned him not to return to his room until...

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 in...

First he went home to take his temper to Charity. On the way he worked up a splendid rage at her for giving such a woman as Zada grounds for gossip. He went straight to her room...

She had succeeded dizzily, tremendously, in her cinema career. The timid thing that had watched the moving-picture director to see how he held his wineglass, and accepted his sm...

We must fly fast and keep on flying if we would escape from our pasts. Ambition, adventure, or sheer luck may carry us forward out of them as in a cavalry-foray over strange fro...

Kedzie wore her new frock when she reached the studio on Monday morning. She greeted Mr. Garfinkel with an entreating smile, and was alarmed by the remoteness of his response. H...

The Thropps knew Kedzie well enough to be afraid of her. A parental intuition told them that if they wrote to her she would be a long while answering; if they telephoned her she...

Now, of course, Kedzie ought to have been happy. Millions of girls of her age were waking up that morning and calling themselves wretched because their parents or distance or so...

Jim reported to Charity his two defeats and the language he had heard and read. Charity's conscience was so clean that her reaction was one of wrath. She pondered her future and...

Jim thudded dismally along in her wake. Charity was in the drawing-room wearing her politest face. She could tell from Kedzie's very pose that she was as welcome as a submarine.

A quick temper is an excellent friend for bolstering up an ailing conscience, especially if itself is bolstered by an inability to see the point of view of the other party to a...

Charity Coe had been tormented by the spectacle of her friend's wife flirting recklessly with the young Marquess of Strathdene while her husband was at the Border with the troop...

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 unde...

Sometimes Jim Dyckman was foolish enough to wish that he had been his wife's first lover. But a man has to get up pretty early to be that to any woman. The minxes begin to flirt...

She told McNiven a story that agreed in the essentials with Jim's except that she made herself out the fool where he had blamed himself. McNiven had no success in trying to quie...

Kedzie had no sooner rejoiced in the fortunate absence of her husband than she began to worry because he was away. Where was he and with whom? She sat by the window and looked u...

Charity was lunching at the Ritz-Carlton with Mrs. Noxon when she saw Jim Dyckman come in with his mother. Mrs. Noxon left Charity and went over to speak to Mrs. Dyckman. So Cha...

“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 in...

Miss Kedzie Thropp had never seen Fifth Avenue or a yacht or a butler or a glass of champagne or an ocean or a person of social prominence. She wanted to see them. To Jim Dyckma...

“I've seen mother,” he exclaimed, “and she's tickled to death with your picture. She wants to see you right away. She wouldn't listen to anything but your coming right over to l...

McNiven, in the direct examination, asked only such questions as Charity easily answered with proud denials of guilt. Beattie began the cross-examination with a sneering scorn o...

Deaths from the wheeled torpedoes that shoot along the city streets are too monotonously numerous to make a stir in the newspapers unless the victims have some other claim on th...

Just about the hour of that historic day when Kedzie was running away from her father and mother Prissy Atterbury was springing his great story about Jim Dyckman and Charity.

Jim Dyckman's heart was so wrung with pity for Charity when she stepped down and sought her place in a haze of despair that he resolved to make a fight for her himself. He insis...

When she lived under the Dyckman roof she was included in the cards left by all the callers; she was invited into the drawing-room to meet them; she was present at all the big a...

Kedzie simmered in her own wrath a long while before she realized that she had let Gilfoyle escape. He was the very man she was looking for, and she had planned to go even to Ch...

In the good old days of Hester Prynne they published a faithless wife by sewing a scarlet “A” upon the bosom of her dress. Nowadays the word is pronounced “co-respondent,” and i...

She gleaned from his look and from the way he took her two hands in his that he had serious news to bring her. She had not been awake long enough to read the papers, and this wa...

Jim was becoming quite the military man. His new passion took him away from womankind, saved him from temptation, and freed his thoughts from the obsession of either Kedzie or C...

Kedzie made a bad night of it. She hated her loneliness. She hated her room. She hated her maid. She wanted to live in the Dyckman palace and have a dozen maids and a pair of bu...

Their son was a daughter, but she had run away from them to batten on the husks of city life, and had prospered exceedingly. It was her parents who heard of her fame and had jou...

The agonies of the woman who has been married to the wrong man have been celebrated innumerably and vats of tears spilled over them. She used to be consigned to a husband by par...

Unselfishness is an acquired art. Children rarely have it. That is why the Greeks represented love of a certain kind as a boy, selfish, treacherous, ingratiating, blind to appea...

When Kedzie was angry she called her father an “old country Jake.” Even she did not know how rural he was or how he had oppressed the sophisticated travelers in the smoking-room...

Ferriday did not know, of course, that Kedzie was married. She hardly knew it herself now. Gilfoyle had been three weeks late in sending her the thirty dollars' fare to Chicago....

In the history of nations sometimes a paragraph serves for a certain decade, while a volume is not enough for a certain day. It is so with the history of persons.

And now having felt sorry for everybody else, Charity began to feel pleasantly sorry for Jim Dyckman. Her own rebuke of him for assaulting Cheever had absolved him. In the retro...

Kedzie Thropp had never seen Fifth Avenue or a yacht or a butler or a glass of champagne or an ocean or a person of social prominence. She wanted to see them.

On Monday there was a meeting of one of the committees she had organized for the furtherance of what she called the movie stunt. The committee met at the Colony Club. Most of th...

The next morning proved to be a Sunday and she felt a need of spiritual help in her hour of affliction. Man had betrayed her; religion would sustain her grim determination to en...

Once the battle was joined, a fierce desire for haste impelled all of these people. Kedzie dreaded every hour's delay as a new risk of losing Strathdene, who was showing an incr...

At the first vision everything seemed to rise from what preceded; people did what was natural or noble. The second time it looked mechanical, rehearsed; the thrill was gone, too...

Kedzie's soul came back. It had made its decision. It gathered her body together and lifted it up to its knees and then erect, while the lips said, “All right, momma.”

The terror his footsteps inspired was confirmed by the unforgetable voice that came across her icy shoulder-blades. He slapped the china and silver down with the familiar bravur...

The villain in melodrama is as likely as not to be as decent a fellow as any. When he slinks from the stage in his final hissed exit he goes to his dressing-room, scours off his...

While Jim and Charity sat by the roadside the Marchioness of Strathdene, _nee_ Kedzie Thropp, of Nimrim, sat on a fine cushion and salted with her tears the toasted English crum...

Kedzie's answer was a fierce seizure of him in her arms. She was palsied with fright for him. She had seen more pictures of dead soldiers than he knew, and now she saw her man s...

The next day Kedzie was still cantankerous, as it was perfectly natural that she should be. She wanted to be a Marchioness and sail away to the peerful sky. And she could not cu...

Kedzie and Tommie enjoyed a cozy betrothal. He was busy at his shop, and she was busy at hers. They did not see much of each other, and that made for the prosperity of their lov...

Miss Anita Adair (_nee_ Kedzie Thropp) had dozed upon her cozy park bench for an uncertain while when her bedroom was invaded by visitors who did not know she was there.

Gilfoyle reached New York on the Twentieth Century. It was an hour late, and so the railroad company paid him a dollar. He wished it had been later. In his present plight time w...