In the long reaches of what had become chronic insomnia John G. Rarick
found himself mentally mouthing to himself phrases such as this: I am a
rich man. I am a very rich man. Me, John G., rich!
It was his way of striving to grind into his overtaxed realizations the
fact that, as he lay there, wheels of industry, turning by now of their
own momentum, were pouring more and more gold into Rarick coffers.
Even in a land where such annals of achievement as textbooks and
success magazines were crowded with the names of those who had vaulted
from petty beginnings into high places, there was something about the
rapid phantasmagoria from obscurity to rapid success that never failed
to tax Rarick’s credulities.
Now, Jenny Rarick, lying there beside him in the elaborate marquetry
bed, the first piece of signed furniture, by the way, which they had
acquired, had less imagination to startle with the fecundity of events.
She had a capacity to take for granted many of the phenomena of the
world in which she lived.
A sunset was something to admire, but not to wonder about.
She had once remarked to a poet of no small repute, that she regretted
she had never found time to become a writer.
Yet it was obviously a nervous woman lying there asleep beside Rarick.
The face, always too angular for beauty, was constantly ridden across
with expressions, as if, while the body slept, the mind kept open shop.
Above the fine coverlet, her shoulders, narrow white ones, with firm
breasts that had not sagged from child-bearing, rose and fell to
irregular breathing. Here was someone asleep with much on her mind.
With Rarick, the difference lay in his not being able to sleep at all.
As a boy, back on his stepaunt’s farm, twenty miles out of Keokuk, he
had known the torments of insomnia, coming in, time after time, from a
long back-splitting day in the fields, to lie sleepless for hours after
he had sought his bed.
His room then had been an unfurnished attic with a window set into a
slanting roof. Stars had gleamed into his insomnia through that window.
Stars gleamed into his insomnia now. They were gilt, hand-wrought ones,
against a ceiling of billow, cherub, and streamer, done after the
manner of Tiepolo’s Labia Palace painting of “Antony and Cleopatra.”
Whimsically Rarick lay on the marquetry bed, ruminating on the
divergence of causes that had contributed to the years of his insomnia.
Everything, from a sick calf; the haunting lilt of “The Ancient
Mariner”; a harsh word from his stepaunt’s farmer husband; fear of
losing his clerkship in a hardware store, to one million dishpans;
Avery’s croup; a seven-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bank-loan; a
rare and exclusive obsidian mirror with native textile string which he
coveted for his Aztec collection, was fodder to his sleeplessness.
No subject was too casual to tempt his insomnia. He built empires and
warehouses by night. He dreamed into flooding darkness of achieving
his nine-hundred-and-sixty-first store, of possessing the Gutenberg
Bible, of tin tacks, of beholding with his own eyes, in his own
conservatories, the opening of a passion-flower. Into that darkness
he designed window displays, calculated floor space, inaugurated
Eskimo pie for his soda-fountains, and coveted a tode-stone ring from
Clusium, the ancient capital of the Etruscans.
Across his relentless insomnia there stalked contemplations of new
sites for new Five and Tens. Insolent sites within shadow of Hellenic
marble libraries and along boulevarded frontage; more and more Rarick
temples to tin tacks, paper napkins, hooks and eyes, sink-swabbers, and
paste jewelry mounted on pasteboard and sold in bins.
His way of sleeping over a matter was to lie sleepless over it. A
chain of six hundred and forty-two stores might virtually be said to
have crocheted itself out of these hours of enforced contemplations.
Problems of population of a given town, types and habits of the
people, study of main industries, bank deposits and clearings, number
of different industries, proportion of workers to clerks, of women
employees to men, prevailing local rental conditions, had been pondered
to their minutiæ from the flat of his back.
The problems of Jenny, now, or of his small son Avery, or his daughter
Jennifer, were another matter. They made him restless and unable to
concentrate. The fact that approximately eight per cent of all candy
sales in America are made to men was a reasonable hypothesis on which
to work out a system of extensive candy departments in those stores
which drew their business from the wholesale districts.
The fact, however, that Jenny’s nervous dissatisfactions with the
gratifications of today, in order that she might yearn for those
of tomorrow, seemed to increase in just such proportion as her
creature-cares decreased, was an unreasonable hypothesis upon which to
base nothing.
How dissatisfiedly she slept, two perpendicular lines flashing in and
out between her eyes. Her strong hooked nose flashed slightly, too,
at the nostrils, and in the pale light from a transom, the triangular
planes of her cheeks, far too thin, rippled now and then. There was
something of a frail, pale Dante about the sleeping face of Jenny. A
face that walked in a hell.
Prop himself on an elbow, and gaze as he would across the mound of
delicate coverings between them, the pale splotch of the face of Jenny
had a habit of seeming to recede through the darkness.
What was it she wanted? Strange angular woman whom he called wife,
lying there sharing his bed, what is there that will ease your hunger,
slake your thirst, gratify your indomitable appetites. Appetites for
what? God knows! Love? Bah! she was as empty as a meal-sack of it for
him, yet she was not the woman to seek it elsewhere. Up to now, hers
had been the easy morality of the frigid.
Lying there beside him, in a house that already contained a sister
portrait to an “El Greco” that hung in the Prado; a pear-shaped pearl
said to have been given by Jérôme Bonaparte to Queen Hortense; and the
largest private collection of Stücks in the world, what was the secret
of the anguish that rippled beneath her cheeks?
Rarick owned, in his already considerable collection of precious stones
of religious uses, a small steatite cup said to have been found in a
Japanese grave of the Iron Age. There was a pinhead hole through the
bottom of the precious thing. It seemed to Rarick that Jenny’s cup of
happiness must be something like that. The contents ran out of the
wrong end when she tilted it to her thirsty lips.
And what thirsty lips! She was thirsty now in her sleep. And, as
always, that sense of her desire for what lay just beyond her present
transmitted itself to him.
What did she want? She had her children, as much as one seemed to have
one’s children nowadays.
What did she want? She had the security that goes with a
fifteen-year-old marriage that has borne the fruit of offspring
and material success. Indeed, a material success that taxed the
credulities. As to the underlying gratifications of the passions,
romance, oneness of purpose, sympathy, companionship, love--well, well,
what proportion of human beings _can_ hope to sustain those?
Rarick had once hoped. But the young clerk who had come to St. Louis
from Keokuk and had married, rather considerably above his station,
a Miss Jenny Avery, had cast off many a dead skin since then. It
seemed to him terribly certain that Jenny had. Where was that somewhat
caustic, but intellectual-faced girl of those eager, wooing days, who
had sat opposite him in a canoe that cut through the Meramac River
with the same lean swiftness of their dreams? Where was that girl,
a high-school graduate, from whom he could learn; who had talked to
him of life in terms of the grave, simple, beautiful things that had
somehow started so consistently to elude them, once they seemed to be
in a position to make some of those early yearnings come true?
Where was that eager, narrow, intelligent-faced Jenny? Why, he had
almost lost sight of her the first year of their marriage, when there
had been so little time for the old talks of those days when the mind
of each to the other had seemed an oyster-shell crammed with pearls!
Their marriage had routinized so quickly. Perhaps because of the
circumstance that it had been Jenny’s total capital of twenty-five
hundred dollars which had embarked him on the enterprise of the Nick
Nack Store on Olive Street.
After that, her face had immediately taken on some of the pinch and
strain from which it was never to recover. Jenny’s money had started
him. Had that had something to do with the immediate reversal of what
had been their pre-nuptial relationship of idealization of life and
love? Undoubtedly. Jenny had begun to fear terribly for her investment.
Naturally. The money represented the careful total of the tiny estate
that had been held in trust for her in the five years between the death
of her parents and her coming of age. And the first few years after,
the investment had been unbelievably precarious. Rarick never held it
against her judgment that she had resisted, with all her vehemence, his
determination to try and reëstablish the almost defunct business which
her money had launched, on the new basis of the five-and-ten-cent Nick
Nack Store.
As a matter of fact, it had been a maneuver of desperation rather than
of logic. No more than Jenny had he even remotely anticipated the
enormity of that move....
And now ... perhaps he had been the one to change. The desire for
passionate love with the Jenny Avery who had dreamed with him of
walking-trips through the Pyrenees, was by now nothing more than a
sense of frustration lying back in the dim reaches of his mind.
That walking-trip through the Pyrenees! She had been so bright! A
high-school girl, educated by rote, rather than by the desultory
reading of such books as his older sister Hildegarde in Keokuk had
sometimes sent him by mail. Jenny, at his very first mention, had known
at once of the Pyrenees, and their highest peak, the Maladetta. She had
leaned so sympathetically into the yearnings of his untutored mind and
spirit ... and now.... Something of that same frustration, mutual to
them both, must be what kept her face flickering so in her sleep.
Well? Then what? How many times, leaning on his elbow, gazing at her
through the pale darkness, had that question of his dropped down into
the cistern of a silence from which there was no answer.
Presently the gilt stars, among the foliated stars, the festoons, and
the adumbrated cherubs on the ceiling, would begin to fade; and dawn, a
pale horse, would ride through the Corinthian archway that inclosed the
exclusive residential Westmoreland Place where the Raricks occupied the
most pretentious house of all the pretentious row.
It was about this time that John Rarick was due to drop off into brief
but resuscitative sleep.
* * * * *
It was about this same time that Jenny, an early waker against her
will, was due to open her eyes almost with a click, as it were, and
start to a sitting posture at once, as if she had been called. Called
she had been, by the pressure of the procession of her thoughts, which
were marching so closely beneath the surface of her sleep.
Ficke house! Cretonne covers for the sedan. Box for the San Carlo
Opera. Mermord and Jaccard’s about the twenty-ninth pearl for
Jennifer’s necklace. Wednesday Club. Wire Long Island Kennels to ship
Russian wolfhound to pose in the portrait Shandig was doing. Pour tea
at St. Louis Water-Colorists Exhibit. Toy electric motor-boat for
Avery. Meeting advisory board Garrison Avenue Home for Wayward Girls.
Bridge-tea St. Louis Club. Garden Swing. Sit for Shandig. Oh yes!
Mermord and Jaccard’s, too, about the gold bouillon-spoons. They could
also be used for grapefruit. Avery must be forced, if necessary, to
attend dancing-school. Avery’s riding-lesson. Rarick must telegraph bid
on the Ficke house.
All this on the instant of awakening. Jenny’s mind might have been a
memorandum-book, the leaves turning.
... Oh yes, and remind Rarick to indicate which plants in the
conservatory were to be sent to the Chrysanthemum Show, and then, the
Ficke house. FICKE HOUSE.
How he slept! Across the mound of the sheets that sprayed lace and
sometimes made him flick as if at a fly, she too had to raise herself
on an elbow, in order to find his face, which slept in the position of
staring upright through closed eyes.
A little man. In the beginning, his shortness of stature had been
merely something to regret and then adjust oneself to, with the
immemorial processes of a woman compromising between the Lothario of
her dreams and the stocky reality of her husband.
Subsequently, she had come almost to hate him for that shortness. A
stunted man. Curious, that to her he had always given the effect of a
hunchback. Not so much because his head, on a short neck, was so deeply
set into the valley of high shoulders, but because, even in the days
when he had wooed and fascinated her, the little hardware clerk from
Keokuk, who had first been brought to see Jenny by a poor relation
who boarded in the same house with him, had somehow had the face of a
hunchback. A bony, up-thrust, hurt face. Short sinews of rear neck,
rather than the slightest indication of an actual hunch, kept it thrust
upward. Rarick’s face was always cocked to a world slightly taller than
he. It was already upturned to his fourteen-year-old daughter Jennifer.
Fervently Jenny found herself hoping, as her son’s slight frame and
threat of short stature began to prove worrisome, that some day it
would be necessary for Rarick to look up to his son.
All this talk that men of brief stature had ruled the world--poppycock!
What about Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Bismarck, Lincoln? Jenny
was not sure about the heroic proportions of most of them. Lincoln,
of course, and Alexander, the vast-minded Macedonian, and Charlemagne,
must surely have matched up to the heroic proportions of their names.
On the other hand, Rarick, Jenny felt certain, had steeped himself in
the sugared legend of the magnificence of the small.
His collection of Napoleonana already included a desk from Versailles,
an inkstand flanked by onyx horses, and an enameled snuff-box worn
down by the Corsican’s own thumb. The entire north end of his library,
fourteen shelves of it behind copper grating, either pertained or
appertained to the small Emperor.
How much of his success, Jenny asked herself, leaning on her elbow
and gazing at him who slept there with his hunchback’s face washed in
dawn, was due to luck or power? Without the incalculable boon of her
patrimony of twenty-five hundred dollars which had first set him up in
the Nick Nack Store, might he not still be clerking in the Schwebbe
hardware establishment from which he had taken a day off for his
marriage to her?
How much of this man’s success was due to an initial stroke of luck,
her patrimony, and her distaste for his petty rôle of selling wire
nails over Schwebbe’s hardware counter? Little as it seemed to matter,
this speculation was one of tireless interest to Jenny.
How much foresight had Rarick ever manifested in his business moves?
Precious little. Credited already in the industrial world with vision,
acumen, and imagination, was it not rather that every move he had made
had been a lucky gesture in the dark? The result of an imminent need
to jump this way or that; and Rarick had happened to jump right. How
well she could recall the move that had precipitated the change in
the policy of the Nick Nack Store to the five-and-ten-cent idea. It
had been nothing more or less than a clutch at a straw to avoid going
under. Mingling even with her sense of pride, as she had sat beside him
one day at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon and heard him referred to by
a speaker as “that far-sighted industrial peer right in our very own
midst--John Rarick (applause),” had been her merciless appraisal of
him. Without the incalculable boon of her patrimony ... where would he
be?
The chain-store idea, originating long before his time, had never
really entered Rarick’s head as a scheme of scope, insistent as his
biographers were to credit him with a canny and pioneer eye that had
anticipated the dawn of mass-production and quantity-buying.
It had all just happened. Of this much she felt powerfully certain.
Rarick had not foreseen his magnificent business maneuvers. They were
born out of circumstance and stress. She did not want the world to know
what she knew, but she wanted Rarick to know that she knew!
Without the initial patrimony that had been scrimped for her by
deceased parents, where would Rarick be now? She was so fairly sure
that she knew. Clerking at Schwebbe’s or possibly following up an
old dream of his to acquire a Missouri farm and a sufficient formal
education to divide his time between working it and teaching in some
rural school.
It had taken courage to hand over that sum to a young clerk with such
lofty ideals as this and who was constantly chafing under penny-wise
business methods of the old German firm that employed him. And
moreover, in the very first year of their marriage, when she was
already carrying Jennifer and the fear of childbirth was upon her! He
had rowed her on the Meramac those days, on Sundays and holidays, or
taken her across the river to Cahokia to see the Indian mounds; and
they had talked, not of big business, but of a dream which was to be
only deferred by this rather unanticipated coming of the child--that
walking-trip through the Pyrenees. The trip through the Pyrenees had
come true, twice over, in fact, in a Hispano-Suiza car; and some of the
most important of the excavations at Cahokia had subsequently been made
at Rarick’s expense. But what was the use pretending? A wife, peering
into the sleeping face of her husband as he lay beside her, need play
no rôle before her own soul....
In Jenny’s mind, Rarick had not even succeeded in being educated to
greatness. He was like a man who, at fifty, still spends most of his
time reliving his college days. He had not gone on in spirit. The
handsome house that contained him inclosed him as loosely as a gigantic
pod holds an ordinary-sized pea. He rattled about inside his setting.
And talk about penny-wise! He was still dreaming dreams the stature
of that walking-trip through the Pyrenees and the farm that was to be
worked as a sideline to teaching the young that Hannibal crossed the
Alps.
The pea had not grown with its pod. Jenny had, mark you that! Breeding
will tell. Her maternal forebears had been Piexottos who had settled
in St. Louis as early as Pierre Laclede. You could not come of that
kind of colonizing stock and not know how to meet success with the
same kind of indomitability with which they had met adversity. Jenny
spoke frequently of her colonizing ancestors. One grew to the demands
of circumstance. In other words, Jenny Avery was being educated to
greatness. After all, not even the Corsican upon whom Rarick doted, had
remained the Corsican.
What was it that this man, her husband, lay there wanting, even
in his sleep? What were the citadels behind those closed lids of
his, upon which shone some secret inner sun of his private own? Was
he inscrutable or just inadequate? The smallish young man who had
fascinated her, way back there, with his inchoate desires that had
never entered the heads of the sons of the St. Louis business men who
had milled about the wealthy-in-her-own-name Miss Avery, had remained a
sophomore on the campus of that youth.
One outgrew being a sophomore about life. One ceased desiring what one
had achieved ten times over. In many ways, Rarick was like a man whose
garages are filled with high-power motor-cars, but who, by the force
of fondness for old dreams, continues to tour on his velocipede. The
comparison was Jenny’s.
He had what he wanted ten times, forty times, over, but in the forty
times, had missed the once.
But was it desire behind those closed lids, or just a gnawing
frustration? As a matter of fact, their marriage had borne the fruits
of love, four times over. Two children between Jennifer and Avery
had died in infancy. She had submitted to Rarick’s bed with the same
unequivocal acceptance of marriage that she expected and received from
him.
She had seen the glance of this allegedly great little man, her
husband, follow many a time the living, flowing line of a beautiful
woman’s body, but with much the appraisement with which he was fond
of observing, in its glass case, a fine example of a wooden statuette
of the Virgin of San Domingo in his North American collection, one of
whose breasts was studded with a turquoise-incrusted marine clam-shell.
There was no telling....
Little man, you, I think I hate you. He must telegraph bid on the
Ficke house. He must! He must! He must! Cretonne covers for sedan. Box
for the San Carlo Opera. Mermord and Jaccard’s about the twenty-ninth
pearl for Jennifer’s necklace. Wednesday Club. Sealed bid on the Ficke
house....
If anyone had told Rarick on the morning of the day he wired the sealed
bid on the Ficke house that before his sun set on another afternoon
he would be owner of two million five hundred thousand dollars’ worth
of mortar-stone lace and Italian Renaissance façade, flanked by two
famous Grecian urns which guarded a pair of doors, superb copies of the
Campanile doors in Florence, he would have listened to it with that
polite third ear of his which enabled him to appear attentive to the
discourse of another while thinking of something entirely removed. A
quality, by the way, which was to win and sustain him the reputation of
being a canny and silent listener.
A maid entered on the seven-thirty chime of a hall clock, drew back
curtains and lowered spacious windows that looked out upon the
elaborately boulevarded, landscaped, and very private precincts of
Westmoreland Place, before he lifted back his eyelids from the deep
kind of sleep that invariably capped his insomnia.
From the depths of her pillow, where for an hour her open eyes had lain
upturned to the gilt stars, it was as if Jenny had heard the flicker of
his lids.
It was characteristic of her that she should resume conversation, upon
his awaking, at precisely the point where they had left off the night
before.
“Sooner or later, Rarick, the move is inevitable! Wire your bid today!”
The phrase beat against his brain as if it had been there all night,
and yet with his conscious mind he had forgotten it. That room in which
he slept was always beating with repetitious little phrases that were
Jenny’s. Do this. Do that.
Wire what bid? Of course, that had been her last phrase before dropping
off to sleep. Ding. Dong. Here it was again. “Sooner or later the move
is inevitable. It is Providence that the Ficke house should be on the
market just at this time.”
“Not necessarily inevitable, Jenny. The roots of our lives are down
here.”
“Nonsense! The roots of life are where one chooses they should be. You
wouldn’t have a Guatemala orchid in your conservatory if that were not
partially true.”
“Well, then, I choose that our roots should be here.”
“You choose. You choose. You choose. As usual, that closes the
controversy?”
His eyes, as he lifted them into quizzical peaks, made him look Asiatic
in a way she detested. Oh yes, that closes the controversy, he was
saying to himself. Oh yes. Oh yes. Rather, it kept it running in great
sluices of talk through all-too-brief silences which he craved.
“No, Jenny, but it is scarcely necessary to argue that my greatest
interests are here.”
“At the moment, yes. But your main office is practically now in the
East. You are on trains half your time.”
That was true. But the prospect of reiterating, as if it had never been
said before, this two-year-old argument between them, made him long to
close his eyes and sink back, at least on to the rim of the slumber
which had visited him so reluctantly.
“We have outgrown St. Louis, Rarick. Anyone can remain a big frog in a
small pond.”
“My home is here.”
“You have the opportunity to live in one of the most beautiful homes
in America. Do you realize that you are rich enough to buy the home of
the man who endowed the Metropolitan Gallery with the Ficke Collection?
I have been prophesying for the six months, ever since the death of
Emanie Ficke, that the house would come on the market. Don’t be all
kinds of a fool, Rarick. Wire your bid.”
“And what then?”
And what then? She sat up in bed at that, her nightgown, plain but
impeccably sheer, falling down off one shoulder, her brick-colored,
eccentric hair, which she wore brushed up perpendicularly off her ears
as if to accentuate the narrowness of her face, falling in thin spray
along her shoulders. A sort of tremor, faint as a blue flame, seemed to
burn along the pale wick of her lips, making them flicker.
And then what! The most beautiful house in the world, Rarick, built out
of damned little ugly things.
Things. Things. Things and things. It was as if, so that he put
his hands over his eyes to squeeze back their pressure, there came
marching out of his insomnia the nightly procession of the million
dishpans, bins of hair-pins, carloads of coin-purses, glass beads,
curtain rods, rubber gloves, cotton stockings, eye-shades, flower-seed,
pink soaps, tooth-brushes, darning-cottons, water-tumblers, salted
peanuts, baby-dolls, lead-pencils, paper flowers, gimcrack vases, and
chewing-gums.
“Things.”
“Exactly, Rarick. Titians out of stewpans. Conservatories out of cotton
stockings. Pipe-organs out of gas tubing. Libraries out of tooth-paste.
Polo ponies out of Eskimo pies. Rarick, where is your imagination!”
She was not the one to cajole with any grace. Her thin face, in a
way that was no longer lovely to him, propped on its elbow, was all
covered over with an expression that, starting with her lips, had
burst like paper into flame. She desired with an intensity that was
embarrassing. It grated Rarick horribly to see her wanting anything. It
stretched her face so, drawing the tight skin back further still from
the bony outline, nakedly, like a person biting down pain.
Wherever his imagination was, it left him lying there with his tired
hand pressed against his eyes, and his lips lifted back slightly from
his teeth, as her voice grated:
“Do you realize that you’re a richer man than Cyrus Breckenridge,
Rarick?”
Trust Jenny to have heard, almost before the proposition had been
put into writing, this newest offer of the Breckenridge group of
Southwestern stores to buy in the Rarick chain. His reply to it had
been to add six new links to his own. Youngstown, Altoona, Akron, Fall
River, Lowell, and New Bedford. Her entire being was like a hateful
little antenna. Sensing. He wanted her not to be hateful to him, and
the knowledge that she was, kept him in a state of constant mental
retribution toward her. Through the lattice of his fingers he regarded
her, his lids half down to blur the eager, tight-skinned thrust of her
face.
“I suppose I am a richer man than Breckenridge.”
“Hellman figures you out about the thirteenth richest man in the world,
Rarick. Know that?”
As a matter of fact, he did. His confidential secretary, Harry Hellman,
an exceedingly stout young Jew, with excellent qualifications for his
position, had called his attention to that new fact only that week.
He had thought about it subsequently and with the sustained sort of
incredulity that had caused him to clutch toward reality by repeating
to himself such phrases as: I am a rich man. I am a very rich man.
Me, John Rarick, born Fancy Prairie, Iowa, October 7th, 1870, son of
Anna Masey Rarick and John Geoffrey Rarick. m. Jenny Avery, St. Louis,
1898. President Rarick Chain, Inc. Vice-president Dime Savings Bank.
Vice-president Ajoy Soap Company. Board directors Dime Savings Bank.
Board directors Corn Belt Traction Company. Vice-president Empire State
Trust Company. Vice-president Croton Mills. Trustee Guaranty Trust
Association. Director St. Louis Art Center; Municipal Opera Company;
Americana Association; Lapidarian Club Society; Hispano Association;
Society for Preservation of Indian Culture; Missouri Historical
Association; Member of.... Me, John G. ... all those ... me, John!
It was like Jenny to take this dazzling fact, rather indiscreetly
handed her by Hellman, for granted, and without wasting either analysis
or wonderment upon it, begin to cut her cloth accordingly. One became
the thirteenth richest man in the world and then set immediately about
adjusting one’s life to the requirements of being the thirteenth
richest man in the land. Hers not to reason why.
He was being constantly ashamed of the way she could grate on him.
Coming from Jenny, the selfsame statement that had caused him a rise of
goose-flesh when Hellman had called his attention to this new notch on
his hickory stick, filled him with a dull resentment.
What new desires and cravings and ambitions for herself, and, worst of
all, crazy plots for her children, were there left to set in motion?
What was it that being the wife of the thirteenth richest man in the
world could give her that she had not enjoyed as the wife of the
thirteenth hundredth richest man in the world?
It did not seem so long ago to Rarick when their first car, a Buick
sedan, had stood new and shiny one Sunday morning at the curbstone
of their seven-room house on Kensington Avenue, and Jenny, with
his overcoat thrown on over her kimono, had rushed out to try its
upholstery. There had been a small tag on the steering-wheel:
[Illustration: Good morning, Jenny. Your street car days are over