e bed, pitifully rubbed her cheek against the silk
comforter that was primly awaiting her commands at the foot of the bed,
and cried, "Oh, four-posters _are_ necessary! I can't give them up! I
won't! They---- No one has a right to ask me." She mentally stamped her
foot. "I simply won't live in a shack and take in washing. It isn't
worth it."

A bath, faintly scented, in a built-in tub in her own marble bathroom. A
preposterously and delightfully enormous Turkish towel. One of Eva
Gilson's foamy negligees. Slow exquisite dressing--not the scratchy
hopping over ingrown dirt, among ingrown smells, of a filthy
small-hotel bedroom, but luxurious wandering over rugs velvety to her
bare feet. A languid inspection of the frivolous colors and curves in
the drawings by Bakst and George Plank and Helen Dryden. A glance at the
richness of the toilet-table, at the velvet curtains that shut out the
common world.

Expanding to the comfort as an orchid to cloying tropic airs, she drew
on her sheerest chemise, her most frivolous silk stockings. In a
dreaming enervated joy she saw how smooth were her arms and legs; she
sleepily resented the redness of her wrists and the callouses of the
texture of corduroy that scored her palms from holding the steering
wheel.

Yes, she was glad that she had made the experiment--but gladder that she
was safely in from the long dust-whitened way, back in her own world of
beauty; and she couldn't imagine ever trying it again. To think of
clumping out into that world of deliberate and brawling crudeness----

Of one Milt Daggett she didn't think at all.

Gorgeously sleepy--and gorgeously certain that by and by she would go,
not to a stingy hotel bed, with hound-dog ribs to cut into her tired
back, but to a feathery softness of slumber--she wavered down to the
drawing-room, and on the davenport, by the fire, with Victoria
chocolates by her elbow, and pillows behind her shoulders, she gossiped
of her adventure, and asked for news of friends and kin back East.

Eugene and Eva Gilson asked with pyrotechnic merriness about the "funny
people she must have met along the road." With a subdued, hidden
unhappiness, Claire found that she could not mention Milt--that she was
afraid her father would mention Milt--to these people who took it for
granted that all persons who did not live in large houses and play good
games of bridge were either "queer" or "common"; who believed that their
West was desirable in propo