g train to talk over the
final arrangements. I'll meet you in the runabout and we can go
out to the Beach Inn for dinner. Bring me some brandied marrons, a
large bottle of rose oil and a stick of lip rouge from Celeste's.

Hurriedly,

VIOLET.

July fifth.

P. S. Of course you are to go on loving me just as usual. I
couldn't do without that. How much money have I in the
Knickerbocker Trust?

After Godfrey Vandeford had read the last violent purple line on violet,
he dropped the letter on his desk and looked out of his office window
with serious eyes that gazed without seeing, down the long canyon of
Broadway, up and down which rushed traffic composed of green cars shaped
like torpedoes, honking, darting motors, skulking trucks and jostling,
tangled people. Flamboyant signs, waving flags, and gilt-lettered window
panes made a Persian glow in a belt space up from the seething sidewalks
to the sky line, and above it all the roar and din rose to high heaven.
But Godfrey Vandeford was blind to it all and deaf, as he sat and
brooded above the furious landscape. His blue eyes, set deep back under
their black, gray-splashed brows, failed to take in the lurid spectacle,
and his narrow, lean face was flushed under the bronze it had acquired
for keeps from the suns of many climes. His lean, powerful body seemed
fairly crouched in thought. Once he shifted one leg across the other,
and as he settled back in his chair he tossed the violet letter over to
Mr. Meyers without seeming to know that he did so. Then he plunged back
into his absorption without seeing his henchman read rapidly through the
missive, look at him once with a gem-like keenness, and again begin to
read the purple-covered manuscript.

"And we picked her out of a vaudeville gutter over beyond Weehawken just
five years ago, Pop," Mr. Vandeford finally interrupted the flip of the
manuscript pages to say, with a deep musing in his flexible, sympathetic
voice.

"You taught her to eat with the knife and the fork," growled Mr. Meyers
from behind his violet barricade as he ripped over another page.
"Mick!"

"Oh, not as bad as that, Pop," laughed Mr. Vandeford, with a glance of
affection at the young Hebrew delving in the corner for a jewel for him.
"She's just--oh, well, they are all children--and have to be spanked.
She wants to sell me out to We