cales,
and overloaded medicine chest of cosmetic array in frosted bottles,
sleeping-, headache-, sedative powders, _et al_. There were also a negro
maid, two Pomeranian dogs, and last, but by no means least, a private
telephone inclosed in a hall closet and lighted by an electric bulb that
turned on automatically to the opening of the door.

There was nothing sinister about Wheeler. He was a rather fair exponent
of that amazing genus known as "typical New-Yorker," a roll of money in
his pocket, and a roll of fat at the back of his neck. He went in for
light checked suits, wore a platinum-and-Oriental-pearl chain across his
waistcoat, and slept at a Turkish bath once a week; was once named in a
large corporation scandal, escaping indictment only after violent and
expensive skirmishes; could be either savage or familiar with waiters;
wore highly manicured nails, which he regarded frequently in public,
white-silk socks only; and maintained, on a twenty-thousand-a-year
scale in the decorous suburb of Rosencranz, a decorous wife and three
children, and, like all men of his code, his ethics were strictly double
decked. He would not permit his nineteen-year-old daughter Marion so
much as a shopping tour to the city without the chaperonage of her
mother or a friend, forbade in his wife, a comely enough woman with a
white unmarcelled coiffure and upper arms a bit baggy with withering
flesh, even the slightest of shirtwaist V's unless filled in with
net, and kept up, at an expense of no less than fifteen thousand a
year--thirty the war year that tractors jumped into the war-industry
class--the very high-priced, -tempered, -handed, and -stepping Hester of
wild-gazelle charm.

Not that Hester stepped much. There were a long underslung roadster
and a great tan limousine with yellow-silk curtains at the call of her
private telephone.

The Wheeler family used, not without complaint, a large open car of very
early vintage, which in winter was shut in with flapping curtains with
isinglass peepers, and leaked cold air badly.

On more than one occasion they passed on the road--these cars. The
long tan limousine with the shock absorbers, foot warmers, two brown
Pomeranian dogs, little case of enamel-top bottles, fresh flowers, and
outside this little jewel-case interior, smartly exposed, so that the
blast hit him from all sides, a chauffeur in uniform that harmonized
nicely with the tans and yellows. And then the grotesque caravan of t