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 stingy.

They were respectable enough, but not respectful at all. Children have more dignity than anybody else, because they have not lived long enough to have their natal dignity knocked out of them.

Kedzie's parents ought to have respected hers, but they subjected her to odious humiliation. When her father threatened to spank her—and did—and when her mother aided and abetted him, they forfeited all claim to her tolerance. The inspiration to run away was forced on Kedzie, though she would have said that her parents ran away from her first.

Kedzie had preferred her own life to the security of her valise. She dropped the bag without hesitation. When the taxicab parted her family in the middle, Kedzie ran to the opposite sidewalk. She saw a policeman dashing into the thick of the motors. Her eye caught his. He beckoned to her that he would ferry her across the torrent. He was a nice-looking man, but she shook her head at him. She smiled, however, and hastened away.

Freedom had been forced on her. Why should she relinquish the boon?

She lost herself in the crowd. She had no purpose or destination, for the whole city was a mystery to her. Soon she noted that part of the human stream flowed down into the yawning maw of a Subway kiosk as the water ran out of the bath-tub in the hotel. She floated down the steps and found herself in a big subterrene room with walls tiled like those of the hotel bathroom. Everybody was buying tickets from a man in a funny little cage.

Kedzie had a hand-bag slung at her wrist. In it was some small money. She fished out a nickel and slid it across the glass sill as the others did.

Beneath her eyes she saw a card that asked, “How many?” She said, “One.”

The doleful ticket-seller was annoyed at the tautology of passing him a nickel and saying, “One!” He shot out an angry glance with the ticket, but he melted at sight of Kedzie's lush beauty, recognized her unquestionable plebeiance, and hailed her with a “Here you are, Cutie.”

Kedzie was not at all insulted. She gave him smile for smile, took up her pasteboard and followed the crowd through the gate.

The ticket-chopper yelled at the back of her head, “Here, where you goin'?”

She turned to him, and his scowl relaxed. He pointed to the box and pleaded:

“Put her there, miss, if you please.”

She smiled at the ticket-chopper and dropped the flake into the box. She moved down the stairway as an express rolled in. People ran. Kedzie ran. They squeezed in at the side door, and so did Kedzie. The wicker seats were full, and so Kedzie stood. She could not reach the handles that looked like cruppers. Men and women saw how pretty she was. She was so pretty that one or two men nearly rose and offered her their seats. When the train whooped round the curve beneath Times Square Kedzie was spun into the lap of a man reading a prematurely born “Night Edition.”

She came through the paper like a circus-lady, and the man was indignant till he saw what he held. Then he laughed foolishly, helped the giggling Kedzie to her feet and rose to his own, gave her his place, and went blushing into the next car. For an hour after his arms felt as if they had clasped a fugitive nymph for a moment before she escaped.

This train chanced to be an express to 180th Street in the Bronx Borough. If any one had asked Kedzie if she knew the Bronx she would probably have answered that she did not know them. She did not even know what a borough was.

It was fascinating how much Kedzie did not know. She had an infinite fund of things to find out.

She was thrilled thoroughly by the glorious velocity through the tunnel. The train stopped at Seventy-second Street and at Ninety-sixth Street and at many other stations. People got on or off. But Kedzie was too well entertained to care to leave.

She did not know that the train ran under a corner of Central Park and beneath the Harlem River. She would have liked to know. To run under a river would tell well at home.

Suddenly the Subway shot out into midair and became a superway. The street which had been invisible above was suddenly visible below, with street-cars on it. Also there was a still higher track overhead. Three layers of tracks! It was heavenly, the noise they made! She enjoyed hearing the mounting numbers of the streets shouted antiphonally by the gentlemen at either door.

At 180th Street, however, the train stopped for good, and the handsome young man at the front door called, “All out!” He said it to Kedzie with a beautiful courtesy, adding, “This is as far as we go, lady.”

That was tremendous, to be called “lady.” Kedzie tried to get out like one. She smiled at the guard and left his protection with some reluctance. He studied her as she walked along the platform. She seemed to meet with his approval in general, and in particular. He sighed when she turned out of his sight.

The station here was very high up in the world. Kedzie counted seventy-seven steps on her way to the level. She was distressed to find herself in a shabby, noisy community where streets radiated in six directions. Her fears were true. She had left New York. She must get home to it again.

She walked back along the way she had come, on the sidewalk beneath the tracks. This meandering street was called Boston Road. Kedzie had no ideas as to the distance of Boston. She only knew that New York was good enough for her—the New York of Forty-second Street, of course. Kedzie did not know yet how many, many New Yorks there are in New York.

She was discouraged by her present surroundings. Along the rough and neglected streets were little rows of shanty shops, and there were stubby frame residences.

There was one two-story cottage snuggling against a hill; it had a little picket fence with a little picket gate leading to a little ragged yard with an old apple-tree in it; and there was a pair of steps up to the front door, and a rough trellis from there to the woodshed with a grapevine draped across it. It was of the James Whitcomb Riley school of architecture—a house with a woodshed.

Rich people who were tired of the city, and chanced that way, used to pause and look at that little nook and admire its meek attractiveness. It made them homesick.

But Kedzie was sick of home. This lowly cot was too much like her father's. It had a sign on it that said, “To Let.” It was a funny expression. Kedzie studied it a long time before she decided that it was New-Yorkese for “For Rent.”

She shuddered at the idea of renting or letting such a house—especially as it was so close to a church, a small, seedy, frame church nearly all roof, a narrow-chested, slope-shouldered churchlet with a frame cupola for a steeple. It looked abandoned, and an ivy flourished on it so impudently that it almost closed the unfrequented portal.

The bill-boards here made mighty interesting reading. There were magnificent works of an art on the grand scale of a people's gallery; one structure promulgated the glories of a notorious chewing-gum. There was a gorgeous proclamation of a fashionable glove with a picture of an extremely swell slim lady all dressed up—or rather all dressed down—for the opera.

Kedzie prayed the Lord to send her some day a pair of full-length white kid gloves like those. As for a box at the opera, she would take her chances on the sunniest cloud-sofa in heaven for an evening at the opera. And for a dress cut deckolett and an aigret in her hair, she would have swapped a halo and a set of wings.

There was no end to the big pages of this literature, and Kedzie read dozens of them from right to left in a southerly direction. Finally she abandoned the Boston Road and walked over to a better-groomed avenue with more of a city atmosphere.

But she saw a police signal-station at 175th Street, and she thought it better to abandon the Southern Boulevard. She was not sure of her police yet, and she had an uneasy feeling that her father and mother were at that moment telling their troubles to some policeman who would shortly be putting her description in the hands of detectives. She did not want to be arrested. Poppa might try to spank her again. She did not want to have to murder anybody, especially her parents. She liked them better when she was away from them.

She hated to waste five cents on a street-car, but finally she achieved the extravagance. The car went sliding and grinding through an amazing amount of paved street, with an inconceivable succession of apartment-houses and shops.

At length she reached a center of what she most desired—noise and mob and hurry. At 164th Street she came to a star of streets where the Third Avenue Elevated collaborated with the surface-cars and the loose traffic to create a delicious pandemonium. She loved those high numbers—a hundred and eighty streets! Beautiful! At home Main Street dissolved into pastures at Tenth Street.

She wanted to find Main Street in New York and see what First Street looked like. It was probably along the Atlantic Ocean. That also was one of the things she must see—her first ocean!

But while Kedzie was reveling in the splendors of 164th Street her eye was caught by the gaudy placards of a moving-picture emporium. There was a movie-palace at home. It was the town's one metropolitan charm.

There was a lithograph here that reached out and caught her like a bale-hook. It represented an impossibly large-eyed girl, cowering behind a door on whose other side stood a handsome devil in evening dress. He was tugging villainously at a wicked mustache, and his eyes were thrillingly leery. Behind a curtain stood a young man who held a revolver and waited. The title of the picture decided Kedzie. It was “The Vampire's Victim; a Scathing Exposure of High Society.”

Kedzie studied hard. For all her gipsy wildness, she had a trace of her father's parsimony, and she hated to spend money that was her very own. Some of the dimes and quarters in that little purse had been there for ages. Besides, her treasury would have to sustain her for an indefinite period.

But she wanted to know about high society. She was not sure what scathing meant, or what the pronunciation of it was. She rather inclined to “scat-ting.” Anyway, it looked important.

She stumbled into the black theater and found a seat among mysterious persons dully silhouetted against the screen. This was none of the latter-day temples where moving pictures are run through with cathedral solemnity, soft lights, flowers, orchestral uplift, and nearly classic song. This was a dismal little tunnel with one end lighted by the twinkling pictures. Tired mothers came here to escape from their children, and children came here to escape from their tired mothers. The plots of the pictures were as trite and as rancid as spoiled meat, but they suited the market. This plot concerned a beautiful girl who came to the city from a small town. She was a good girl, because she came from a small town and had poor parents.

She was dazzled a little, however, by the attentions of a swell devil of great wealth, and she neglected her poor—therefore honest—lover temporarily. She learned the fearful joys of a limousined life, and was lured into a false marriage which nearly proved her ruin. The villain got a fellow-demon to pretend to be a minister, put on false hair, reversed his collar, and read the wedding ceremony; and the heroine was taken to the rich man's home.

The rooms were as full of furniture as a furniture-store, and so Kedzie knew it was a swell home. Also there was a butler who walked and acted like a wooden man.

The heroine was becomingly shy of her husband, but finally went to her room, where a swell maid put her to bed (with a proper omission of critical moments) in a bed that must have cost a million dollars. Some womanly, though welching, intuition led the bride to lock her door. Some manly intuition led the hero to enter the gardens and climb in through a window into the house. If he had not been a hero it would have been a rather reprehensible act. But to the heroes all things are pure. He prowled through the house heroically without attracting attention. Every step of his burglarious progress was applauded by the audience.

The hero hid behind one of those numberless portiÈres that hang everywhere in the homes of the moveaux riches, and waited with drawn revolver for the dastard bridegroom to attempt his hellish purpose.

The locked door thwarted the villain for the time, and he decided to wait till he got the girl aboard one of those yachts which rich people keep for evil purposes. Thus the villain unwittingly saved the hero from the painful necessity of committing murder, and added another reel to the picture.

It is not necessary and it might infringe a copyright to tell the rest of the story. It would be insulting to say that the false minister, repenting, told the hero, who told the heroine after he rescued her from the satanic yacht and various other temptations. Of course she married the plain-clothes man and lived happily ever after in a sin-proof cottage with a garden of virtuous roses.

Kedzie was so excited that she annoyed the people about her, but she learned again the invaluable lesson that rich men are unfit companions for nice girls. Kedzie resolved to prove this for herself. She prayed for a chance to be tempted so that she might rebuke some swell villain. But she intended to postpone the rebuke until she had seen a lot of high life. This would serve a double purpose: Kedzie would get to see more millionairishness, and the rebuke would be more—more “scatting.” It is hard even to think a word you cannot pronounce.

Kedzie gained one thing further from the pictures—a new name. She had been musing incessantly on choosing one. She had always hated both Thropp and Kedzie, and had counted on marriage to reform her surname. But she could not wait. She wanted an alias at once. The police were after her. The heroine of this picture was named Anita Adair, and the name just suited Kedzie. She intended to be known by it henceforth.

She had not settled on what town she had come from. Perhaps she would decide to have been born in New York. She rather fancied the notion of being a daughter of a terrible swell family who wanted to force her to marry a wicked old nobleman, but she ran away sooner than submit to the “imfany”—that was the way Kedzie pronounced it in her head. It was a word she had often seen but never heard.

Meanwhile she was sure of one thing: Kedzie Thropp was annihilated and Anita Adair was born full grown.

At the conclusion of the film Kedzie was saddened by a ballad sung by an adenoid tenor. The song was a scatting exposure of the wickedness of Broadway. The refrain touched Kedzie deeply, and alarmed her somewhat. It reiterated and reiterated:

“There's a browkin hawt for everee light ton Broadway-ee.”

Kedzie began to fear that she would furnish one more. And yet it would be rather nice to have a broken heart, Kedzie thought, especially on Broadway.