KITTY:  “Br-r-r!  I’m as nervous as a cat to-day.”

HESTER:  “Naughty, naughty bad doggie to bite muvver’s diamond ring.”

KITTY:  “Leave it to you to land a pear-shaped diamond on your hooks.”

HESTER:  “He fell for it, just like that!”

KITTY:  “You could milk a billiard ball.”

HESTER:  “I don’t see any ‘quality of mercy’ to spare around your flat.”

There were the two years of high school, you see.

“Ed’s going out to Geyser Springs next month for the cure.  I told him he could not go without me unless over my dead body, he could not.”

“Geyser Springs.  That’s thirty miles from my home town.”

“Your home town?  Nighty-night!  I thought you was born on the corner of Forty-second Street and Broadway with a lobster claw in your mouth.”

“Demopolis, Ohio.”

“What is that—­a skin disease?”

“My last relation in the world died out there two years ago.  An aunt.  Wouldn’t mind some Geyser Springs myself if I could get some of this stiffness out of my joints.”

“Come on!  I dare you!  May Denison and Chris will come in on it, and Babe can always find somebody.  Make it three or four cars full and let’s motor out.  We all need a good boiling, anyways.  Wheeler looks about ready for spontaneous combustion, and I got a twinge in my left little toe.  You on?”

“I am, if he is.”

“If he is!’ He’d fall for life in an Igorrote village with a ring in his nose if you wanted it.”

And truly enough, it did come about that on a height-of-the-season evening a highly cosmopolitan party of four couples trooped into the solid-marble foyer of the Geyser Springs Hotel, motor coated, goggled, veiled; a whole litter of pigskin and patent-leather bags, hampers, and hat boxes, two golf bags, two Pomeranians, a bull in spiked collar, furs, leather coats, monogrammed rugs, thermos bottles, air pillows, robes, and an ensemble of fourteen wardrobe trunks sent by express.

They took the “cure.”  Rode horseback, motored, played roulette at the casino for big stakes, and scorned the American plan of service for the smarter European idea, with a special a la carte menu for each meal.  Extraordinary-looking mixed drinks, strictly against the mandates of the “cure,” appeared at their table.  Strange midnight goings-on were reported by the more conservative hotel guests, and the privacy of their circle was allowed full integrity by the little veranda groups of gouty ladies or middle-aged husbands with liver spots on their faces.  The bath attendants reveled in the largest tips of the season.  When Hester walked down the large dining room evenings, she was a signal for the craning of necks for the newest shock of her newest extreme toilette.  The kinds of toilettes that shocked the women into envy and mental notes of how the underarm was cut, and the men into covert delight.  Wheeler liked to sit back and put her through her paces like a high-strung filly.