“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 egg market.

There were two or three others within this group.  A Mrs. Denison, half French, and a younger girl called Babe.  But Mrs. Drew and Hester were intimates.  They dwaddled daily in one or the other’s apartment, usually lazy and lacy with negligee, lounging about on the mounds of lingerie pillows over chocolates, cigarettes, novels, Pomeranians, and always the headache powders, nerve sedatives, or smelling salts, a running line of:  “Lord!  I’ve a head!” “I need a good cry for the blues!” “Talk about a dark-brown taste!” or, “There was some kick to those cocktails last night,” through their conversation.