grew impudent enough to weary of her fame and prate of the comforts
of obscurity!

Kedzie Thropp was as plebeian as a ripe peach swung in the sun across
an old fence, almost and not quite within the grasp of any passer-by.
She also inspired appetite, but always somehow escaped plucking
and possession. It is doubtful whether anybody ever really tasted
her soul--if she had one. Her flavor was that very inaccessibility.
She was always just a little beyond. Her heart was forever fixed
on the next thing, just quitting the last thing. Eternal, delicious,
harrowing discontent was Kedzie's whole spirit.

Charity Coe's habit was self-denial; Kedzie's self-fostering,
all-demanding. She was what Napoleon would have been if the Little
Corporal had been a pretty girl with a passion for delicacies
instead of powers.

Thanks to Kedzie, two of the best people that could be were plunged
into miseries that their wealth only aggravated.

Thanks to Kedzie, Jim Dyckman, one of the richest men going and one
of the decentest fellows alive, learned what it means to lie in
shabby domicile and to salt dirty bread with tears; to be afraid
to face the public that had fawned on him, and to understand the
portion of the criminal and the pariah.

And sweet Charity Coe, who had no selfishness in any motive, who
ought to have been canonized as a saint in her smart Parisian robes
of martyrdom, found the clergy slamming their doors in her face
and bawling her name from their pulpits; she was, as it were, lynched