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 déshabillé_,
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