This is Kedzie's history, and the history of the problem confronting
Jim Dyckman and Charity Coe Cheever: the problem that Kedzie was going
to seem to solve--as one solves any problem humanly, which is by
substituting one or more new problems in place of the old.

This girl Kedzie who had never had anything had one thing--a fetching
pout. Perhaps she had the pout because she had never had anything.
An Elizabethan poet would have said of her upper lip that a bee
in search of honey had stung it in anger at finding it not the rose
it seemed, but something fairer.

She had eyes full of appeal--appeal for something--what? Who knows?
She didn't. Her eyes said, "Have mercy on me; be kind to me."
The shoddy beaux in her home town said that Kedzie's eyes said,
"Kiss me quick!" They had obeyed her eyes, and yet the look of appeal
was not quenched. She came to New York with no plan to stay. But she
did stay, and she left her footprints in many lives, most deeply
in the life of Jim Dyckman.




CHAPTER II

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 Dyckman these things were commonplace.
What he wanted was simple, complex, cheap, priceless things--love,
home, repose, contentment.