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 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