entered a room, but she
suffered few liberties from them. She was absolutely indomitable in her
demands.

"Lord!" ventured Wheeler, upon occasion, across a Sunday-noon,
lace-spread breakfast table, when she was slim and cool fingered in
orchid-colored draperies, and his newest gift of a six-carat,
pear-shaped diamond blazing away on her right hand. "Say, aren't these
Yvette bills pretty steep?

"One midnight-blue-and-silver gown . . . . . . . . . $485.00
One blue-and-silver head bandeau . . . . . . . . . . 50.00
One serge-and-satin trotteur gown . . . . . . . . . 275.00
One ciel-blue tea gown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280.00

"Is that the cheapest you can drink tea? Whew!"

She put down her coffee cup, which she usually held with one little
finger poised elegantly outward as if for flight.

"You've got a nerve!" she said, rising and pushing back her chair. "Over
whose ticker are you getting quotations that I come cheap?"

He was immediately conciliatory, rising also to enfold her in an embrace
that easily held her slightness.

"Go on," he said. "You could work me for the Woolworth Building in
diamonds if you wanted it badly enough."

"Funny way of showing it! I may be a lot of things, Wheeler, but I'm not
cheap. You're darn lucky that the war is on and I'm not asking for a
French car."

He crushed his lips to hers.

"You devil!" he said.

There were frequent parties. Dancing at Broadway cabarets, all-night joy
rides, punctuated with road-house stop-overs, and not infrequently, in
groups of three or four couples, ten-day pilgrimages to showy American
spas.

"Getting boiled out," they called it. It was part of Hester's scheme for
keeping her sveltness.

Her friendships were necessarily rather confined to a definite
circle--within her own apartment house, in fact. On the floor above,
also in large, bright rooms of high rental, and so that they were
exchanging visits frequently during the day, often _en deshabille_,
using the stairway that wound up round the elevator shaft, lived a
certain Mrs. Kitty Drew, I believe she called herself. She was plump and
blond, and so very scented that her aroma lay on a hallway for an hour
after she had scurried through it. She was well known and chiefly
distinguished by a large court-plaster crescent which she wore on her
left shoulder blade. She enjoyed the bounty of a Wall Street broker
who for one day had attained the conspicuousness of cornering the