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 the Azoic motor age, with its flapping curtains and ununiformed youth in visored cap at the wheel.

There is undoubtedly an unsavory aspect to this story.  For purpose of fiction, it is neither fragrant nor easily digested.  But it is not so unsavory as the social scheme which made it possible for those two cars to pass thus on the road, and, at the same time, Charles G. Wheeler to remain the unchallenged member of the three lodges, the corporations, and the Rosencranz church, with a memorial window in his name on the left side as you enter, and again his name spelled out on a brass plate at the end of a front pew.

No one but God and Mrs. Wheeler knew what was in her heart.  It is possible that she did not know what the world knew, but hardly.  That she endured it is not admirable, but then there were the three children, and, besides, she lived in a world that let it go at that.  And so she continued to hold up her head in her rather poor, mute way, rode beside her husband to funerals, weddings, and to the college Commencement of their son at Yale.  Scrimped a little, cried a little, prayed a little in private, but outwardly lived the life of the smug in body and soul.

But the Wheelers’ is another story, also a running social sore; but it was Hester, you remember, who came sobbing and clamoring to be told.

As Wheeler once said of her, she was a darn fine clothes horse.  There was no pushed-up line of flesh across the middle of her back, as the corsets did it to Mrs. Wheeler.  She was honed to the ounce.  The white-enameled weighing scales, the sweet oils, the flexible fingers of her masseur, the dumb-bells, the cabinet, salt-water, needle-spray, and vapor baths saw to that.  Her skin, unlike Marion Wheeler’s, was unfreckled, and as heavily and tropically white as a magnolia leaf, and, of course, she reddened her lips, and the moonlike pallor came out more than ever.

As I said, she was frankly what she was.  No man looked at her more than once without knowing it.  To use an awkward metaphor, it was before her face like an overtone; it was an invisible caul.  The wells of her eyes were muddy with it.

But withal, she commanded something of a manner, even from Wheeler.  He had no key to the apartment.  He never entered her room without knocking.  There were certain of his friends she would not tolerate, from one or another aversion, to be party to their not infrequent carousals.  Men did not always rise from their chairs when she entered a room, but she suffered few liberties from them.  She was absolutely indomitable in her demands.